Man to Man by Michael Korda

Author:Michael Korda [Korda, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80587-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

THAT NIGHT MARGARET and I ordered room service, the usual Maryland crab cakes for her, a bottle of mineral water for me. We sat and chatted until the table had been taken away, then went to bed, and lay there, side by side, reading our books and holding hands. Margaret and I have always found hotel rooms sexy, perhaps because so much of our relationship was spent in them when we were having an affair and still married to other people. Or maybe everybody finds hotel rooms sexy, who knows?

Anyway, we stuffed ourselves with sleeping pills (there was no preoperative prohibition against them), turned the lights off, and made love, in a strange, almost passionless way, for the truth was that neither one of us was much aroused—the anxiety level was simply too high for that. I could not help wondering if this was going to be the last time I ever performed this familiar act which had played so large a part in my life since adolescence, and which indeed had often seemed like the center of life, the only part of it that made sense. At the very least it would never feel like this again, I knew, feeling the familiar excitement of ejaculation, the spurt of semen, the deep peace that comes with orgasm and the feel of one’s own body liquids.

Whatever was going to happen to me, the discharge of semen and seminal fluids would never be a part of my life again. Perhaps that wasn’t such a big deal, I told myself. Worse things could surely happen, and probably would, in time. But somehow the reality of sex is fluid, liquid, wet, as every pornographer knows—it is no accident that an ability to ejaculate copiously is almost as important a qualification for porn movie stardom as penis size, as we learn from Richard Rhodes’s Making Love. Intercourse is a messy business—that is part of its pleasure, after all.

I felt like crying, but I knew that would do no good and would simply upset Margaret, whose control over herself was fragile at that moment, so we did what we could, then held hands under the sheets and waited for the sleeping pills to work. “Thank you,” I said, kissing Margaret’s shoulder, but she was already dozing uneasily, so I set aside her book and closed my eyes.

But I had much to thank her for, not the least of which was that I would remember this night as vividly as the most passionate nights of our lives, when we were still lovers new to each other, weaving complicated and unlikely scenarios that would enable us to spend a rare night together.

The night in Baltimore lacked that kind of excitement, to be sure, but I will remember every detail of it with profound emotion for the rest of my life—though, of course, I didn’t know that at the time, which was probably just as well.

I went to sleep at last, and woke up in the early morning, as afraid of my epidural as I had ever been.

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