Slow Hand Read online

  SLOW

  HAND

  Women Writing

  Erotica

  Edited by

  MICHELE SLUNG

  Dedication

  This one is Trin’s, with love

  Epigraph

  And therewithal Criseyde a noon be kistè;

  Of which, certeyn, she feltè no dis-easè.

  And thus seyde he: ’Nov woldè God I wistè,

  Mine hertè sweetè, how I yow might pleasè.

  FROM TROILUS AND CRISEYDE, BY GEOFFREY CHAUCER

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  INTRODUCTION

  IN THE PRICK OF TIME

  by Susan Dooley

  LEAPER

  by Jenny Diski

  DROUGHT

  by Wendy Law-Yone

  OH, BROTHER

  by Bea Wilder

  NINETY-THREE MILLION MILES AWAY

  by Barbara Gowdy

  THE SHAME GIRL

  by Carolyn Banks

  THE FOOTPATH OF PINK ROSES

  by Carol Lazare

  THE WAGER

  by Sara Davidson

  THE STORY OF NO

  by Lisa Tuttle

  REASONS NOT TO GO TO FORT LAUDERDALE

  by Liz Clarke

  BLESSED IMMORTAL SELF: HOW THE JEWELS SHONE ON YOUR SKIN!

  by Susan Swan

  BLUE FEATHERS

  by Anne Rhyd

  THE AMERICAN WOMAN IN THE CHINESE HAT

  by Carole Maso

  WINDOWS

  by Idious Buguise

  THE MANGO TREE

  by Sabina Faye

  EROS IN OVERTIME

  by Kay Kemp

  ANECDOTE

  by Catherine S.

  TREATS

  by Rebecca Battle

  TOO TALL FOR GRACE

  by Susan J. Leonardi

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ALSO BY MICHELE SLUNG

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  It seems worthwhile to me to establish from the start that prior to beginning this project I had not previously considered myself an expert on sex or sexy stories, any more than is any average, curious reader holding what is now the finished book. However, as with art, I do know, unequivocally, what doesn’t work for me and so, trusting my experience and judgment as a skilled editor, I set about fashioning a collection of erotic imaginings that does.

  More than anything else, I have wanted, in choosing the very varied selections you will encounter here, to elicit the same kind of recognition that all women I know felt when a decade ago they first heard the Pointer Sisters song—female anthem, really—that inspired this book’s tide. The idea, in case you missed it back then and aren’t still humming along, was to find a lover willing to “spend some time,” one with “an easy touch” who’d put a higher value on teasing anticipation and gradual sensation than on mechanically grinding body parts. Frankly, even hearing a few bars of “Slow Hand” on the car radio, while stalled in traffic, was enough to induce a pleasant shiver or two, and I don’t for a single moment think I’m alone in this reaction.

  Naturally, then, I confess it was a surprise and a fairly severe disappointment when recently I learned that a pair of male songwriters had actually written this brilliant answer to Freud’s famous question, “What does a woman want?” But, taking stock of what’s positive (as is my frequent habit), I’ll just point out that it was the Pointer Sisters, bless their hearts, who did, after all, sing those amazing lyrics with such fabulously convincing oomph. And, thankfully, it is their identification with it that stays with us—even if they’re not collecting all the royalties.

  At any rate, “Foreplay, and lots of it” was the musical message the father of analysis didn’t live to hear, and it came at the start of a decade when quick, easy self-gratification seemed, for just a while there, to be every person’s right. Mind you, we’re not talking about the sixties, which was the (actually, only partly) permissive era of my own youth and sexual coming-of-age, but about the eighties, when, at the same time, the unyielding and ghastly nature of the AIDS virus began to make itself known. In many ways, then, this was a hostile climate for romance—or perhaps not, it’s hard to say. On the one hand, there was the need to consider more carefully one’s sexual partners and what one chose to do with them, perhaps, indeed, to spend more time in sensual play and touch. And on the other, there was the specter of sexually associated disease and death, along with grim predictions of the widening spread of AIDS, to act as an anaphrodisiac for generations of men and women well into the twenty-first century.

  Still, it seems to me that at the moment when the Pointer Sisters sang this song and put it into the ears of women young and old—then and now, now as then—a line was drawn and many of us crossed it. To make sex sexy is surely one fine goal; to make it sensual is, I believe, an even finer one. And to be erotically aware is to understand that there is knowable human reality behind that fateful moment in Greek mythology when the sage Tiresias, truthfully replying and blinded for his pains, told the disputatious gods that women are capable of receiving nine times more pleasure than men from the act of love.

  Thus, I think it’s no coincidence that erotic writing by women writers for woman readers seemed to come into its own in the 1980s, following that seductive affirmation of our own perceptions about our need for seduction delivered in “Slow Hand.” (Male readers, to be sure, are welcome in these precincts, although one man of my acquaintance, given an early glimpse of a story I’d accepted, commented carefully, “Well, it doesn’t turn me on, but it’s certainly instructive.” In fact, what more can I hope for?) Building upon the success of earlier books by Nancy Friday and Erica Jong and the phenomenon of Anaï’s Nin’s posthumously published Delta of Venus, Lonnie Barbach, herself author of the influential self-pleasuring manual For Yourself and other works in the field of sexuality, led the way with her collections, Pleasures and Erotic Interludes. But she was not alone: there was also the Kensington Ladies Erotica Society of San Francisco, as well as the writers/editors Susie Bright, Tee Corinne, Terry Woodrow, Laura Chester, and others still.

  These books were eagerly bought by women, perhaps first as novelties and later as necessities. What seemed crucial about them, simply stated, was their opening up to women an area of human experience heretofore dominated—like nearly everything else—by male principles. As with the consciousness-raising evenings of an earlier epoch and the myriad support groups now so ubiquitous, this new wave of women’s erotic writing offered the embrace of acceptance: we are like you, you are like us—and self-consciousness at least be damned, if not wholly dispelled.

  When it was initially suggested to me that I attempt to edit such a collection of original erotic writing myself, I wasn’t at all sure what I thought—or what I felt. I was not, you see, in any sense, a student of the literature; my own personal mental library of erotic writing was no more and no less than the stock repository of a person of my generation: mainly the naughty bits in Harold Robbins and Grace Metalious, Jacqueline Susann and J. P. Donleavy. Molly Bloom’s soliloquy worked best when read aloud by that ardent English professor whose mission was to try and make us amateur Joyceans, and a copy of Fanny Hill, of course, was generously circulated by its owner around my dormitory. I also discovered The Story of O on a bookshelf one late-sixties night while babysitting for some faculty brats, and I will now confess to having utterly forgotten the little tykes’ existence by the time their parents returned home, so engrossed was I.

  Yet, upon examining the memories of erotica’s impact on those tender sensibilitie
s that once were mine, I did have a surprising moment when I realized that, in fact, the sexiest reading experience I could recall was one I’d all but forgotten: Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. And in Middle English, no less. It was the same spring that everyone, myself included, was devouring Portnoy’s Complaint. But, to tell you the truth, Philip Roth is no Chaucer, and the melting sensation between my legs as I formed each difficult archaic word aloud, stanza by slow stanza, and awaited the eponymous lovers’ much-delayed consummation, was a splendid antidote to Roth’s haut-contemporary neurotic carnality.

  Anyway, back in the present, at my editor’s suggestion, in order to make up my mind about taking on the project, I began to browse in the more recent compilations of women’s erotica. Quite soon, not surprisingly, my own synapses of personal recognition were firing madly: I was hooked. But, intrigued as I was by my own strong skin responses to many of the stories I read, what affected me more was my delight at how these works broke free of the tyranny of physical beauty and the desirability of youth which figured, crushingly, as elements in most of the sexy writing I’d previously known. That is to say, whether these new stories functioned as teasing turn-ons, or as evocations of tenderness, or as explorations of the boundaries of passion, or whether they ventured into the adjoining territories of betrayal, jealousy, loneliness, rejection, insecurity, they always kept clearly in the foreground real women—not nymphets or sex goddesses, not unblemished starlets or virginal misses, but women with both bodies and histories that were not free of imperfections.

  Remembering all those times when unwashed hair, or a recalcitrant pimple, or an unwished-for five pounds seemed to stand between me and the enjoyment I might take from a kiss, and always sensing the unfairness of it, but accepting it, nonetheless, as the set of rules from which to operate, I appreciated at once the sea change these stories represented. To see beyond the envelope—the flesh—that contains us, to the message inside (“my sexual self may not be exactly who I look like”) is what, in an ideal world, we’d naturally expect from our lovers, or potential lovers, yet gaining such intuitive sympathy, such tolerance, is still an elusive goal for most of us.

  Erotica being written by women today (and including all the stories in this book) distinguishes itself not only by its equal-opportunity treatment of the issues of age or physical attractiveness, of course. But that was the first thing that struck me about it, and I sensed it as one of the more important elements of the greater power being returned to women: not to have our sexuality be about things that are (often) beyond our control and not to have our sexual selves dictated or defined by others. In the male-female sexual relationship, at any rate, the mutuality of acceptance has until now been almost as rarely observed in theory, even, as it has been in practice. (For most of history, for example, women’s bellies were admired as beauteous symbols of fecundity, yet today paunchy guys are given society’s carte blanche to nag voluptuous girlfriends who rarely find it a two-way street. And how many women are allowed, or are willing, to turn their gray hairs into a sexual asset, as so-called distinguished gents may do?)

  In this collection there are stories by many sorts of women; I know what very few of them look like. There are contributions by women barely out of their teens and those by women past their half-century mark. Quite a few of the pieces are about seductions of one sort or another, but others are about love, and there are some about lust. A few deal with the secrets we keep, as well as those we don’t. Some of the stories are about characters who are strangers to each other, while others feature familiar lovers known all too well. One or two selections are angry, and a couple are startling. What they have in common, though, is the impression of honesty they leave, whether the mood is realism or fantasy or some area in between. And, for me, what’s so truly wonderful is that all I had to do was ask, in order to summon most of these stories into being.

  The contributors selected also represent a fairly good cross section of women: American, Canadian, English, Asian, straight, gay, bisexual, urban and rural, teachers and journalists, novelists and poets, actresses and athletes, students and mothers, women divorced, separated, and single. But I did not start out with a pretested recipe that called for including a teaspoon of this kind of person or a half-cup of that kind. There were, however, some very general guidelines with which I approached individual women, and also networks of women, both here and abroad asking them to give it a try. What I said was this:

  “The stories can be long or short. They can be about heterosexual or lesbian sex, about old women or young, middle-, or teenaged, about couples, groups, or solitary pleasure. They can also be true, or based upon true-to-life experience, or even upon such experience as you might have preferred it, with a few adjustments for fantasy. The main goal, as I see it, is that the stories, each and every one, tickle my senses, make me feel sensuous or sensual, sexier, in fact, for having read them.”

  If my mailman had only known! But once the stacks he left at my door started getting higher, it was hard not to notice with what alacrity many women—most of them strangers to me—took to the task. Even more rewarding was the way a great number of my correspondents warmly thanked me for allowing them the opportunity to try this New Thing: being given an invitation, that is, unexpected license, to examine their sexual attitudes or express their sexual preferences or fantasies or to explore an erotic memory long stored away. “I don’t know if it’s any good, but I’m having fun,” one woman wrote me back. (Her story was later accepted.) Said another, “I send it to show I tried, but I also had fun doing it so you needn’t feel bad about sending it back.” (This one made it into the finished book, too.)

  Similar sentiments, with “fun” the word most frequently used, were echoed by women thousands of miles apart, and quite a few, as well, stated their belief that such a project was an all-too-needed antidote to the “fearful, conservative” mood with which we were closing the century. “A lot of us have been writing, or dying to write, more erotically for some time now,” another contributor informed me, and, indeed, of the nineteen selections, half are by women for whom this was not their “first time.”

  Anyway, drawing upon the enveloping camaraderie I soon began to feel, I’d like to point out once again that women, by and large, do know what they want in the way of erotic stimulation and satisfaction; it’s only feeling strong and confident enough to express it and then getting someone to pay attention that’s the problem! For my part, I’ve tried to keep all earnestness and moralizing at bay, for to listen is to learn, and to hear these disparate voices is to realize that there is not—that there cannot be—one politically or aesthetically correct single way to inhabit fully our female sexual selves. Ever. But, with more and more women revealing what they want, be it a slower hand or a quicker one, we will increasingly be able to check our own instincts against those of other women and gain strength in the process… and, perhaps, better orgasms, as well.

  In this book, as I’ve intimated, I gave the writers no formulas to follow, no party line to adhere to; at the same time, I recognize a very real responsibility to acknowledge that the need for “safe sex” exists at every level throughout our society today. (Make that civilization: there is nowhere to run.) But I could not bring myself, even in the face of this appalling knowledge, to edit a cautionary safe-sex passage into each and every story. I am not the surgeon-general, and while fiction can indeed be influential as well as be a type of drug, its effect cannot be monitored nor should its content be regulated. While it is potentially informative, it is also a place of refuge, and I firmly believe it simply need not be connected to absolute reality at every juncture. Perhaps I can ask you, then, to consider the erotica you find here to be “interactive” and to imagine a condom in every relevant scene.

  In conclusion, I want to quote the late Bruce Chatwin, English novelist, essayist, and adventurer extraordinaire, who once wrote the following: “Descriptions of the sexual act are as boring as descriptions of landscape seen from the air—and as
flat: whereas Flaubert’s description of Emma Bovary’s room in a hôtel de passe in Rouen before and after, but not during the sexual act is surely the most erotic passage in modern literature.” There is room for disagreement here, naturally, but if you believe you yourself to be of a similarly inclined disposition and prefer the fade-to-black school of erotic entertainment, be aware that the stories in this collection—which you surely must already suspect—are frankly carnal, full of explicit language, deeds, and thoughts of the sort that some people may term “pornographic” (“intended primarily to arouse sexual desire,” according to my Webster’s) and others dismiss as “dirty.”

  This may please some and offend others, but my main hope is that readers new to the audacious genre of women’s erotica—readers both female and male—who pick up slow hand out of curiosity will enjoy and appreciate the sensual/sexual explorations they encounter here. All responses are legitimate, backgrounds and natures differing as they do, yet I can’t help but hope that the book I’ve assembled will turn out to be the best kind of seducer. Whether for those who step forward eagerly to embrace it, knowing already that they will like what they find, or for those less certain but willing to allow themselves be caught up in its compelling rhythm and its surprises, slow hand exists to reflect the needs and desires of its audience.

  IN THE PRICK OF TIME

  By Susan Dooley

  We admire dome stories for the dazzle of their artifice; others, however, may win our hearts with their naturalness, Susan Dooley’s “In the Prick of Time” embodies, I think, everything that is splendid about being a Grown-Up Woman, yet it reminds us also that we are the sum of our experienced, that our sensuality can grow and flourish only if we accept and nurture it.

  “Too fat.”

  The mirror was an old one, its oak frame holding glass that was wavy and dappled with dark spots. It could distort image, she thought, just as earlier she had muttered about how her jeans had shrunk in the wash.