Sex and Death

…wasn’t that truly enough?

About a dozen years ago, I flew out to San Francisco to attend a memoir-writing workshop at a place called Esalen on the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean in the area known as Big Sur, a bus ride and then a shuttle bus ride south of the city. Anne C said I had to. John had died that spring, and now it was October, and I should write a widow’s memoir, she had said.

‘All right,” I said. “I’ll go."

I’m still writing, and it isn’t a widow’s memoir any more. So what follows is not included in the version I want to publish, but the memories are still fierce. It shows how I started out.

Among the attendees at the workshop, mostly grieving single men and women of all ages and from as far away as England and the Netherlands, there was a married couple from New Jersey. Maybe because they were the only married couple, and slightly older, and not grieving, they seemed to feel a certain odd sense of authority, which they mostly kept under control. But the husband, Marty, did take me aside one day to tell me I needed to write more about sex and less about death.

He pulled me aside to have our little private conversation in a big, unused kitchen of the type you find in sorority houses back East, giant pots and pans hanging everywhere. It was a bit odd-seeming, and I told Marty I would think about his suggestion.

And then I wrote what follows, which is page 103 in an earlier manuscript.

Here’s how it goes:

Before we get to the sex, Marty, can I tell you just a little bit more about the death part?

Since you still have your wife, since you have never had to be in the room where she died, you may not know that there is some belief in the industry of death that a crowd will make things better. Your husband (or in your case, it would be your wife) will have just died, and the few hospice workers in the bedroom will be joined by others and then before you know it, Stan, Ollie and Bart (I gave them their names) will suddenly arrive in matching, awful funeral parlor suits. There will be more people in the house than you imagined possible. The funeral suits will be more awful than you imagined possible.

The funeral suit guys are from Muehlig’s (it’ll be a different funeral parlor in your town) and they are there to move John fast from his bed to their hearse in the driveway to their funeral home downtown, there at the corner of William and Fourth, where it’s been forever. The young hospice clerk who had gotten the OK to administer the morphine to John had told me a dead body could last for days, as they did in people’s living rooms in the old days. But this, for sure, was not the old days.

What Stan and Bart and Ollie did is they swiftly began wrapping the body in a white, cotton shroud and they asked, “Do you want his face covered or not?” Since the man of whom they are speaking had been dead only minutes, I tried to think what he would want. Who could have anticipated such a question? How would be the answer? A newspaper reporter for many years, full of curiosity, John would surely have wanted to know what was going on; he would not have wanted his face covered.

“Uncovered,” I said.

I wanted John to be able to see what Stan and Bart and Ollie were doing as they wheeled “the cot,” as they call it, out the back door and bumped it down the hill over the mulch and stones. It was a nice, sunny, warm May Day — at least John got nice weather — and they eased the cot into the back of their hearse, and they were gone.

Yes, uncovered was definitely the right answer.

That was the last time I saw John’s face.

Marty, you would have loved the white shroud. It was so Jesus-like. They left one behind by mistake, and it was so soft, as though it’d been washed a hundred times. You and Dody could maybe have found other uses for it; you might have liked the feel of it on your naked body.

I’m not sure why you felt more sex in my writing would be a good idea. What about Elke? Hadn’t her story been enough for us all? Tragic enough? There she was in her gorgeous, expensive Belgian lingerie, pink-nude, lacy, standing there in her Amsterdam bedroom, tall, lithe, we could all see what a great body she had, and her husband, she read aloud to us, had just stared right through her, as though she and her new lingerie did not exist. Thank God, she had divorced him and was visiting Esalen with her new boyfriend and her seven-year-old son. Her writing was so good that we had all learned to despise her former unfeeling husband in an instant.

So that was a sex memory, Marty, even if a sad sex memory. Wasn’t that enough?

I didn’t get the feeling that you were coming on to me, Marty; that would have been really inappropriate and Cody would not have been happy surely. But what was your agenda exactly?  What about Cal and his nudist camp? What about Stephan and his fifteen mistresses, all of whom were no longer among the living? They’d all died natural deaths — he hadn’t murdered them — and by the end we were all laughing. Remember? The absurdity of so many affairs and so many deaths. That was about sex. It made us laugh, and then we felt bad. Stephan, the classic academic, a cultural anthropologist, said it was all right, he understood. He had to know that we had truly admired his writing, too.

Maybe you were picking up on the sex vibe among the staff — all those virile young men back there in the kitchen in their Spandex-infused Levis making those truly extraordinary apple pies, pies with those mountainous crusts that happen when you pile the apples high. Apples from an orchard two mountains over. And the young women in their cotton camisoles and short-shorts doing the salads.

Really, though, the pounding surf and all our writing assignments, and the massages you could book that took place over the huge rocks where the entire Pacific Ocean was pounding, and the hot tubs where you had to be naked if you wanted to seem ordinary with no hang-ups, and the wine in the paper cups you could buy for $5 at cocktail time, I mean, really, wasn’t that enough, Marty?

Wasn’t that truly enough?