The Summer Without Men

her head to look at me, she said to the ceiling, “I can’t go back.”
    Not telling is as interesting as telling, I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside, can be so excruciating under certain circumstances is fascinating. I pressed her, kindly, but I pressed. All Alice did was shake her head back and forth. I mentioned “the joke” then, and her face broke into an expression of pain. Her lips disappeared as she curled them inward, and I saw a tear dribble from each duct, and because she was supine neither fell. Rather, they sank into the skin of her cheeks.
    We are going to leave Alice lying there on her cloudy bedspread with her shiny cheeks. We are going to take a respite, because, although I remained sitting there in person, I left myself for at least half an hour. I took a mind walk. It is not easy talking to a thirteen-year-old who does not want to talk to you or, if she does want to talk to you, must nevertheless be coddled and coaxed and wheedled for the few precious utterances that will resolve the mystery of the crime. To be frank, it’s a bit boring, so we shall dispense with the long and tortured job of getting the words out of the child and return to her once she has produced them.
    *   *   *
     
    Why I thought of that erotic explosion I can’t say. The clouds, the bed, the light that shone through the girl’s window that afternoon, a thick haze of summer illumination—any or all may have done it. Boris had accompanied me to a poetry festival, where I had read to a crowd of twenty (quite good, I thought) and we had wandered about San Francisco in the foggy air. A fellow poet had recommended a massage therapist, a man of sterling quality who altered human bodies with his hands. This was an attractive idea for someone whose crammed and speeding head occasionally lost sight of her body far below. The man’s name was Bedgood. Archibald Bedgood. I am not a liar. It may have been his name that started the whole enterprise. Nothing is certain. Anyway, while Boris waited in the wings (a restful room with New Age music designed to turn all human beings into somnambulists), I lay myself down naked but for a towel covering my rump on Bedgood’s massage bed, with some anxiety, if the truth be told, and the man began to rub. He was methodical, decorous—by some magic the towel never lost its purpose as modest covering. He took each body part individually, all four limbs, feet and hands, back and head, even my face at the end. I had no sexual feelings whatsoever, no erotic leaps or fantasies. I had no thoughts that I recall, but after an hour and a half, Bedgood had reduced me to jelly. Mia was missing, missing in action, so to speak. The person who emerged from the massage room to find Boris snoring on a soft pink sofa had been transformed, just as advertised. She had been remade into a limp, empty-headed, but altogether euphoric being. After rousing Izcovich from his pastel divan, this redone personage (who deserved a new name: FiFi or Didi or Dollface or just Doll) sauntered arm in arm with Husband toward Poetry Hotel, and that is where on the somewhat too soft bed I (or she) was split open, broken into flaming pieces, and transported to Paradise four times in quick succession.
    The experience deserves commentary, not a word of which forwards any conventional notion of Romance. Post Bedgood ministrations, any person—no, I amend that—any person, bird, beast, or even inanimate object (provided it wasn’t cold) could have sent me flying into the higher regions of erotic experience. The lesson here is that extreme relaxation promotes pleasure and extreme relaxation is a state of nearly complete openness to whatever comes along. It is also thoughtlessness. I began to wonder whether there were people who lived their lives loose, easy, and fairly blank much of the time, whether there were Dollfaces out there in a kind of permanent sensual transport. I once read about a woman who had regular orgasms brushing her teeth, a report that astonished me, but which after Bedgood began to make some sense. A toothbrush might hae done it.
    Only a couple of years ago at a discussion group on sex and the brain, I was SHOCKED when a colleague of Boris’s assured me that in the animal kingdom—or, rather, in the female side of the animal kingdom, in other words, in the whole animal queendom—only human women experience orgasm. When I expressed my amazement, Boris and five other