I have since come to realize how lust, love and pleasure work. (I got two years of probation, and Bryce went to jail on weekends for two years.) I found out about seven years later, when I divorced him: My father had made me marry this man nobody liked, whom I was not in love with, because he didn’t want anybody to know I was living with a guy, and it looked better in court if you were married. He went down to see Bryce, who was also in jail, and paid his bail with the understanding that he would marry me. , my father just turned into this Middle Eastern menace. I had been living with my friend from high school, Bryce. They hit me with, I don’t know, 97 counts. It was a good way to make money! I ended up getting busted a year later for what was, at the time, the biggest federal bust for LSD. It was by accident - I didn’t set out to be that way, I just knew somebody who knew somebody else. I began working at Brentano’s, which was a bookstore downtown. I didn’t apply to college even though I should have. But I still feel like I’m coasting on the battery of the ’60s and ’70s. It was something that we could do all the time and we had great drugs that enhanced it. Maybe we should just get it out of the way so that it doesn’t interfere with our personal relationship!” We slept with hundreds of people. You’d be talking to your friends and you’d say, “Oh, I just read so and so, and there was this great sex scene.” Then your friend would say, “Oh, you know, we’ve never had sex. And I was lucky - I came of age after the arrival of the pill and before the arrival of AIDs - so we had a lot of time to really screw our brains out. And we decided that we were not, after all, meant to be. Something has come up.” I hopped on a plane and spent two weeks traveling down the coast with this guy. I got a letter from him saying, “I’m going to be in California, we should meet.” I was already married, but I turned around to my husband and said, “Bryce - I’m going to California. We got back together years later to figure out if it was meant to be. We’re still in touch, still see each other. When I was in seventh grade, I fell madly in love, more than I have been in my whole life. Fast-forward to four years later when my shrink asked me if I ever caught my parents in “the primal act” - I said “yes.” The next week, my mother arrived at the shrink’s office and said, “We pay all this money for you to get well, and you’re telling lies to the doctor!” Afterwards, my mother said, “You must never tell anybody what you have seen!” She put the fear of God into my life. One time, actually, I caught my parents having sex. Sylvia is a writer living in West Harlem. But after speaking with Sylvia, Barbara and Michele - all women 70 or older - about their relationships to pleasure, I now realize that some women only grow more comfortable in their sexualities and in their bodies as they age.īelow, their stories as told to me - accounts that capture life’s daily pleasures with so much grace and tenacity that you might just understand why people say a work of art only gains value with perspective, over time. It was once bewildering to me that my mother could be so candid about sex. As it turns out, that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s a convoluted concept, and one that goes hand in hand with the belief that women can only reach a certain sexual peak before hitting a steady decline and returning to a state of childlike innocence. Society has a tendency to perpetuate this idea that the older a woman grows, the more she yearns for the beauty of her youth. “And art isn’t an act: It’s a process, an experience.” She turned off my bedside lamp stood up to leave the room. “Sex is art,” she told me, as I anxiously played with the hair above my lip. She spoke about the importance of passion: pursuing it, asking for it and finding it within yourself. Instead of focusing on the anatomy of sex - the biological prophecies by which, some say, our bodies were made to meld into one - my mother chose to emphasize pleasure. Under the cover of midnight, she sat cross-legged at the end of my bed and proceeded to give me The Talk, although it was more of a whisper. When I was 11 years old, my mother silently snuck into my bedroom.
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