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That afternoon in the small bedroom the light was blue. The curtains were cream and blew softly in the wind. There was a cry, far off, almost out of earshot. There was a man in my bed and I did not know how he got there. A woman, on the eve of her 50th birthday, reflects on 100 moments from a lifetime's sensual adventures. After the love, hatred, and despair are done with, the great and trivial acts of her bodily life reveal an imperfect, yet whole self. By turns humorous, sharp, haunting, and wise, this is an original and exhilarating novel. Lyrical and exquisite, it captures the sheer wonder of life, desire, and love.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781741766547 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 276 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
My Hundred Lovers
By Susan Johnson
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2012 Susan JohnsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74176-654-7
CHAPTER 1
Gods
ROMANCE BETWEEN THE AVERAGE COUPLE dies two years, six months and twenty-five days into marriage.
This regrettable statistic is based on a 2009 survey into the hearts of three thousand English couples.
Romance was alive and well one night in 1959 in Sydney, Australia, when my father's penis first slipped inside my mother. In the back seat of his blue Humber my mother was losing her bra, her girdle, her girlish breath and it was not yet clear what she was gaining.
Romance between this average couple died on a bright winter's morning some eight months, two days and ten hours into their marriage, when my mother caught my father kissing the prettiest of his secretaries while simultaneously attempting to unhook her underwire bra. My mother had thought to surprise my father with an unannounced visit to his office but it was she who got the surprise.
She was eight months pregnant, no good at forgiveness, and she was trapped. Trapped in a marriage, trapped in her body, trapped, trapped, trapped.
My father, David, was fatal to women. Technically he should not have been handsome, in that he possessed somewhat large crooked teeth and a lopsided smile, yet somehow his hooded grey eyes and his slow easy grace made you think he was good-looking. He was tall and bigshouldered, with a kind of drawling sensuality about his person which more properly belonged to the bedroom. He had very sensual lips.
My father was what is called a seductive father.
My father was a suburban sex god.
CHAPTER 2Incarnation
HERE IS THE WARMTH, NO, the heat, the pulse of blood. Here is the collision — of circumstances, of DNA, of myriad impossible, unutterable hopes.
Everything is coming together: the past, the future, memory, forgetting. A circumstantial joining, a burst, a throb.
Created.
Soon the glistening chambers of the heart, the ductless glands, the nuchal membrane, as transparent as vapour. The coiled ear getting ready to hear, the pearly eye to see.
Soon the first sound: the beats of my mother's heart.
All the world's wonders, arriving!
Some time later, I am born.
I feel the embrace of arms, of hands, of soft materials against my skin. For the first time I feel the roll of the nipple against my tongue. Sweet milk floods my mouth, a trace of salt. My eyes are closed and there is the smell of the first woman, my mother, a musky animal smell that comes from under my mother's arms, from her breath, from between her legs. My first love.
Can a body, confined to the modest compass of an ordinary skin, tell you everything? In the fifty years between my birth and now I have experienced no wars or plagues. I was born into the western world in a rare, safe moment of history. I stand here unembroidered by historical grandeur or incident.
I am an ordinary citizen of the sated world and nothing exceptional has ever happened to me, save the commonplace and extraordinary fact that, like you, I was born, I was born, I was born.
In the last few years I have felt myself to be increasingly laden with memories, as if the past is more weighted, more densely textured, than the present.
On certain days I feel as if I might walk straight from the present into the past, so near does it feel to me. I remember the smell of rooms, and the way my legs looked on a summer morning long ago when Nina Payne and I lay on our backs and put our legs up against the wall of our house. I remember the feel of the hot wall against my heels and noticing for the first time that my legs were hairy. There was the rattle and hiss of cicadas in the trees above us and the sickly smell of frangipani mixed with fragrant clouds of jasmine. The jasmine ran up the wall, spilling above our legs in white frothy profusion.
The topography of this long-ago moment is readily available to me, the exact shape of it, the colour and taste: it is the present moment which is dissolving.
In the months leading up to my fiftieth birthday I observed the first tentative signs of life's waning. The blood which had flowed from me month after month for almost forty years began to flow fitfully. At the same time the face I had worn all my adult life began to change into the face of someone else. I was forced to understand that there was a direct link between the body's hormonal succulence and the succulence of youth.
I was drying up.
My body was in the thrilling first flush of its death throes.
I have witnessed my grandmother's waning, and my mother's, both reduced to pure body in the end. In their last years and months each became a body without a mind to comprehend it, fleshy vessels for ingesting and excreting, since everything their once-teeming brains knew had vanished. They lived without cognitive maps, living on in their bodies without memories. As I watched the departure of my mother, I began to consider exactly what is essential in a human being. It seemed to me that once a person forgets the music she has heard, the places she has seen and the faces she has known, she becomes like a person in a photograph, resembling herself but locked in a moment that has passed. And once a person loses the memory of desire, the ability to understand the difference between want and its absence, between happiness and unhappiness, the most fundamental apprehension of existence is lost.
I understood then that a person estranged from the body's meaning has slipped the bonds of herself. Disembodied from the memory of touch and want, from the remembered breaths of lovers and children and friends, a self is vanished. If it is true that we are more than our bodies, it is also true that without an apprehension of our bodies we disappear. Who was that person shuffling along a nursing-home corridor to the table and then back to the bed? It was my mother's body, but was it my mother?
Half a century has passed since I entered the world through that now-perished body.
A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long.
I find myself gripped by an urge to tidy up, to sort through my body's memories, a curator arranging artefacts in a museum. I have lived my way into a time in which my body has its own archaeology.
I am in a fever to outrun myself, to be first to reach the ribbon, before my body forgets what it means to run.
I look behind me and remember a prickle upon the skin, a swoop of pain, the rush of blood to the face when I saw a man with whom I was newly in love. I remember the way my stomach lurched whenever I saw him, as if I were travelling too fast in a car over an unexpected hill. My heart has a memory.
I recall the sensation of love in the rhythm my grandmother, Nana Elsie, tapped out upon my back when she was cradling me, long after I was a child, when I was a big, ungainly adolescent girl with hormonal pimples. Her love singled me out, filled me with a swelling feeling of joy, as if inoculating me against the grief and pain to come.
I remember a peach I once ate in a garden in France, sitting next to my new husband. The sweetness of the peach seemed to match the sweetness at the heart of the world. At that moment I believed I would never again feel contingent, or estranged from sweetness.
I remember the hot swell of newborn flesh against my breast as I suckled my son, and how there was nothing but repletion in his fresh eyes.
And who but me will remember these things? Who but me experienced them with her ten fingers and ten toes, with her plain body with its particular scars, the story of a life made manifest?
So, as I begin my sure withering, I pluck the humble stories from my body, knowing that as I do I am not eminent or lofty or exceptional. I am but one of many, one of the hundreds, thousands, millions of bodies that have passed this way. I am one of the shabby crowd, nameless, singular.
Here's another thing: one day not long before she lost possession of her body, Nana Elsie told me that she could no longer find her lips. 'Someone's taken them,' she said, running manic fingers across her face.
I took her fingers and placed them on her lips. 'Look,' I said.
'Here they are.'
She ran her fingers across her lips, thin, feathered at the edges, lipstick-free (she, who always wore lipstick!). 'These aren't the ones,' she said.
I want to record the lips, the fingers, the belly, the tongue, before I forget they are mine.
CHAPTER 3Sunshine
IN SPRING THE TRAPPED MOTHER put the baby in the pram in the garden. She parked the pram under a graceful purply-blue Sydney jacaranda, because she wanted a nutmeg-brown baby.
In this manner, the baby in the pram looked up to see a tenuous, flickering world. She saw the sky, the swaying trees, the blossoms rippling. The sun! Sunshine sparkled across her eyes and when she closed them, the sun was still visible, a tentacled light exploding outwards, a dance of warmth and brilliance, weightless.
This was the feeling of the loving sun on her newborn skin, as warm as a hand.
CHAPTER 4My fingers
THE NIGHT I WAS BORN my mother cried. I was coated in fine dark hair and had a faint moustache and sideburns. My father's first remark when he saw me is recorded thus: 'I think she's the one who should be smoking the cigar.' The hair would soon fall out but my horrified mother did not know that. She was a famous beauty and I was not so much a disappointment as a disgrace.
While my mother was in labour my father was off screwing an old girlfriend. This is sad but true (just because something is a cliché does not mean — unfortunately — that it did not happen). When my father arrived at the hospital to make the crack about the cigar he had not bothered to shower. He leant over to kiss my mother and she smelt the unmistakeable scent of the female sex part.
She told me this story only once, when she was drunk. I do not know if she cried that night because of the ugliness of the baby, physical exhaustion following childbirth, or the unmistakeable scent of the female sex part.
My mother liked babies but she did not like the children My mother liked babies but she did not like the children they grew into. I was the eldest of three, with a younger brother and sister, and we recognised early that our mother did not want us. She was narcissistically self-absorbed, given to great howling speeches about how our father had wrecked her life.
Once, in winter, we came home from school to find the door locked. We could see our mother through the curtains, slumped in front of the television, drunk, dressed in a cocktail dress. She was wearing a turban.
Soon I found the comfort of my fingers. If a lover might be defined as one who loves, then I fell in love with my fingers, or perhaps my fingers fell in love with me.
My fingers are not beautiful. My hands are small like my mother's and even now that I am fully grown they are no larger than a child's. They have a certain fine-boned quality to them. My fingers are not long and elegant like a pianist's fingers but somewhat short with knobbly knuckles.
These same unlovely fingers led me to the rosy-tipped clitoris hidden in the folds of those other lips. Many times since I have witnessed the fat seeking fingers of baby girls, as unschooled as grubs, chance upon that rosy pulse.
The main incident you need to know about my childhood happened when I was nine. My mother had been drinking and my father had disappeared, as usual, to take a girl out for a drink or a fuck.
I surmise that when my mother finally heard my father's car tyres crunching over the newly laid red gravel of the driveway she raced into the kitchen and took the biggest knife she could find from the drawer. She then ran upstairs and dragged me from my dreaming bed to the top of the stairs so that when my father opened the front door he was confronted by the sight of my mother holding the tip of the knife against my throat.
'If you take another step I'll slit her throat,' she said.
'Ah ... sweetheart,' my father replied. 'Listen ...'
'Don't you sweetheart me,' said my mother.
My father tiptoed backwards out the door, leaving me at the mercy of the knife in my mother's trembling fingers. Fortunately for me, the moment my father closed the door my mother collapsed on the stairs, the knife falling.
When the knife was at my throat I left my body. That is to say, some part of me detached itself from my own skin. You might suppose that at the moment I left my body, I began my long quest to reunite myself with it.
CHAPTER 5Grass
SOON THE BABY MOVES FROM the pram to a blanket spread on the grass, and then rolls off the blanket and learns to stand upright.
The feel of grass beneath her feet is one of her earliest bodily memories. The baby does not weigh much and her feet are soft and unused, as silky and slippery as the ears of a freshly washed dog. The grass feels light beneath her feet, springy.
When the baby sits down, naked, because it is summer and the day is hot and she is not wearing a nappy, she feels for the first time the delicious half-ticklish, half-spiky feel of grass against her bottom, and smells the cut-open scent of it.
Grass smells like earth, like summer, like joy, and she tries to catch tiny blades of it in her fist, and to stuff it into her mouth. She longs to eat it, to have it inside herself, to be the grass, the blade, the smell of ripeness.
Once, grown, the woman is walking in a field near her house in Fanjeaux, France. It is a polished autumn morning and she notices that the tip of every single blade of grass holds a perfect dewdrop.
She gets down on her haunches to look more closely: everywhere she looks there are hundreds of shining, translucent orbs, spectral fruit, delicate, trembling.
She remembers too the feel of the wild, unnamed grasses she once lay on outside a stone house in the village of Soisy-sur-École, in the woods near Fontainebleau. It was early spring, and the winter had been harsh, and on this particular morning the sun came out with such violence she was shocked to discover that she had lived for so long behind the moon.
She did not walk out into the loving sun so much as rush into it and fall upon the grass in a swoon.
She lay on her back in a starfish shape, her wintery feet freed from shoes, her hands outstretched into the rhapsody of grass. Blades curled up between her fingers and weaved about her earlobes. It seemed to have grown overnight.
Turning her head her eyes were level with it so that the grass and the woman were as one, and she saw for the first time intricate white flowers, no bigger than her smallest fingernail, growing from the grass. She understood that the flowers, the racing grass, the root-world beneath, the whole of the natural world existed because of the nourishment of sunshine, falling leaves and water.
The world cracked open, in her eyes, in her ears, in her lungs: down on the ground, amid the sprouting grass and the earth's iceberg depths, she heard shackled nature growing, trying to revert to what it wanted to be.
CHAPTER 6The seventh lover
IT IS OFTEN TRUE THAT the prettiest of children grow into the plainest of adults, and the plainest of children emerge beautiful. In time I shed my freakish newborn hirsuteness, but kept a fine down on my arms and legs, in the manner of certain Greek or Turkish women. I have never needed to wax or bleach my moustache but now, occasionally, I pluck a stray wiry black hair from my chin. take after my father. Sadly, I have never been beautiful.
What I am instead is what the French call jolie laide; that is, pretty and ugly, or unconventionally attractive. For a long time the thing that saved my face from obscurity was my mouth. It is my father's mouth, sensuous and plump, the upper lip full and well drawn. My front teeth are slightly prominent and once a lover, intending to compliment me, said my mouth frequently appeared enticingly open, ready, like a porn star's.
I grew into my adult face early. For years I looked older than I was, so that at sixteen I could pass for twenty, at twenty I could pass for twenty-six or twenty-seven. Fortuitously, sometime around my early thirties, I began to look younger than my age. This was a genetic fluke: after I lost my husband, when I was thirty-five, I took lovers ten years younger than myself and not one of them thought to ask how old I was.
Now the succulence of my pornographic mouth has left me. My lips, like my grandmother's, have left me. I am shameless about the violence of my physical ruin.
I have always had a well-developed musculature, an accident of birth, inherited from my mother. Before she took to drinking, my mother had been a swimming champion, at a national level, one of those doomed athletes who are good but not good enough. She did not make the team to represent her country at the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games and so failed to reach international ranking.
I am no swimmer but I have my mother's aquatic limbs. At seven years of age my calves were honed like a diver's, and my thighs naturally sculpted. When I was dressed in a bathing costume or a pink ballet leotard, adults remarked that I had the physique of a gymnast. In ballet class, standing in front of the mirror practising my pliés at the barre, I first noticed the graceful scoop of my back and the plump rise of my buttocks.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from My Hundred Lovers by Susan Johnson. Copyright © 2012 Susan Johnson. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
One, Two Gods,Three Incarnation,
Four Sunshine,
Five My fingers,
Six Grass,
Seven The seventh lover,
Eight The first girl I loved,
Nine Object-sexualist,
Ten, Eleven, Twelve Cheese — Chocolate — Croissants,
Thirteen The smell of love,
Fourteen Mother's red fingernails,
Fifteen Giggling,
Sixteen The dog who loved me,
Seventeen Flight,
Eighteen The perfect lover,
Nineteen Cigarettes,
Twenty Her father,
Twenty-One I slept with the man who slept with the girl who slept with the man who slept with the girl who slept with Bob Dylan,
Twenty-Two A lover's kiss,
Twenty-Three The beery-mouthed lover,
Twenty-Four A horse,
Twenty-Five The first lover who entered my body,
Twenty-Six The knee-trembler,
Twenty-Seven Nana Elsie,
Twenty-Eight The music lover,
Twenty-Nine A cat,
Thirty Jonathan Jamieson,
Thirty-One The flowered bud, wrestled,
Thirty-Two The shadow lover,
Thirty-Three Claudette,
Thirty-Four Feet,
Thirty-Five Kiss me, Steph,
Thirty-Six Justine Gervais,
Thirty-Seven A bridge,
Thirty-Eight Even dead husbands must be counted,
Thirty-Nine France,
Forty Words,
Forty-One Words in her fingers,
Forty-Two Heavenly sleep,
Forty-Three Coffee,
Forty-Four, Forty-Five, Forty-Six Three men in one day,
Forty-Seven Skin,
Forty-Eight The lover who fell in love with desire,
Forty-Nine A dress,
Fifty The lover oblivion,
Fifty-One The hairdresser,
Fifty-Two The blind lover,
Fifty-Three The boss lover,
Fifty-Four History,
Fifty-Five The dissolute lover,
Fifty-Six The impotent lover,
Fifty-Seven Nana Elsie, encore — épater le bourgeois!,
Fifty-Eight My son,
Fifty-Nine The romantic lover,
Sixty The bottom lover,
Sixty-One The deflowerer, again,
Sixty-Two Super Nan,
Sixty-Three The wine lover,
Sixty-Four Paris,
Sixty-Five The beach lover,
Sixty-Six The beautiful lover,
Sixty-Seven Breasts,
Sixty-Eight The house she fell in love with,
Sixty-Nine The love of hands,
Seventy The worried lover,
Seventy-One Roses,
Seventy-Two The bird lover,
Seventy-Three Marché aux puces,
Seventy-Four Song of Songs,
Seventy-Five Celestine,
Seventy-Six The legs pumping,
Seventy-Seven A pencil,
Seventy-Eight Brasserie Balzar,
Seventy-Nine The bath lover,
Eighty That delicious equation,
Eighty-One Coup de foudre — The princely lover,
Eighty-Two Prince,
Eighty-Three The tree lover,
Eighty-Four Toes,
Eighty-Five A black pearl,
Eighty-Six David, David, David,
Eighty-Seven The unrequited lover,
Eighty-Eight Horatia,
Eighty-Nine Gelato,
Ninety Breath,
Ninety-One Australia,
Ninety-Two Duck,
Ninety-Three The first lover I slept with after I lost my husband,
Ninety-Four Hotel sheets,
Ninety-Five Another house as object lover,
Ninety-Six The deathly lover,
Ninety-Seven Rain,
Ninety-Eight Scheherazade,
Ninety-Nine The second-last lover,
The Hundredth Lover,
Acknowledgements,