Lynda Schor
Sex
Manual for the Lower Classes
"Their
ideas were intolerable, but their penises were silky, she thought."
----Erica Jong
1. A
queen walking along a glass surface deposits an oily, colorless trail at a rate
of 0.8 mg of material an hour.
This material evidently originates in the tarsal Amhard glands. Studies show that queen-produced substances
prevent worker ovary development and egg-laying. Queen substances are important in worker recognition of and
attraction to their queens.
There’s little doubt that these pheromones probably attract workers and
allow them to differentiate between fellow workers and queens.
Honey
bees have three types of colony members: queens, drones and workers. The queen reigns over the nest
surrounded by attendants and fed the rich food she requires to perform her few
but crucial tasks. Her slim lines
hide her huge ovaries, which make her an extraordinary egg-laying machine, and
her calm behavior masks her powerful pheromones. The drones are tended and fed by the workers, although they
perform only one function, the all-important one of mating the queen. With their large eyes, flight muscles
and powerful mating urge, drones are beautifully constructed for this
task. The worker performs endless
and diverse tasks in the nest. At
any time a worker might be found walking the comb surface, perhaps tending the
brood, cleaning debris from the nest, capping cells, ripening or storing honey,
organizing pollen for storage, feeding or grooming the queen, guard duty,
polishing cells, or food handling.
A
worker leaving the nest on a foraging trip can face an overwhelming array of
flowers to choose from, some of more value than others. Foragers show great versatility in
their methods of working flowers:
Open
flowers—The worker bites the antlers with her mandibles and uses forelegs to
pull them toward her body.
Tubular
flowers—Workers insert the proboscis into the corolla searching for
nectar. Pollen is collected
incidentally when it adheres to the mouthparts or forelegs.
Closed
flowers—The bee forces the petals apart with her forelegs and then gathers
pollen on the mouthparts.
Spike
or catkin flowers—The bee runs along the spikes shaking off pollen onto her body
hairs.
Presentation
flowers—The pollen is collected by workers pressing their abdomens against the
inflorescence, causing a pollen mass to be pushed out of the flowers.
Mounting
and copulation are rapid and spectacular, with the drones literally exploding
their semen into the genital orifice of the queen. Once contact has been made between drone and queen actual
mating generally lasts less than five seconds.
As the drone approaches the queen from below, his hind legs hang
downward, and in their initial contact the thorax is above the queen’s abdomen
and the first and second pair of legs straddle the queen. Within a split second the drone grasps
the queen with all six legs and everts the endophallus into the queen’s open
sting chamber. At this point the
drone becomes paralyzed and flips backward, and ejaculation results from the
pressure of the drone’s hemoglymph as the abdomen contracts. The explosive and sometimes audible
ejaculation ruptures the everted endophallus and propels the semen through the
queen’s sting chamber and into her oviduct. The ejaculation separates the drone from the queen and he
dies within hours of mating.
2. My
curiosity, I rationalized, was not so much prurient as literary. Graham Greene’s affair with Catherine
Walston began when he was working on his novel, The Heart of the Matter. Green’s biographers have written about
their letters and I wanted to see them for myself. They might, I thought, illuminate the osmotic border between
his fiction and his life. They are
kept in dozens of stiff slender cardboard boxes, each the pale color of a
London sky. Inside each box are
about thirty green folders and in each folder is a letter or a postcard,
perhaps a photo.
Catherine
Walston was the American-born wife of a wealthy British landowner. At the age of thirty, inspired by
Greene’s work she decided to convert to Catholicism. Though she’d never met Greene she asked him to be her
godfather. He accepted but
couldn’t attend the ceremony—he sent his wife Vivien in his place. A polite friendship between families
developed but within a few folders it becomes increasingly clear that the
friendship led to an affair. In
one letter Greene refers to the precise instant this transformation happened
for him. In a small plane
chartered by Mrs. Walston to take him home to Oxford after a visit to her
estate, he thought, “A lock of hair touches one’s eyes in a plane with East
Anglia under snow, and one is in love.”
“I
woke up this morning very calm and quiet after an odd dream of being dead, but
even dead there were women and bedrooms.”
In
one photo in the collection C is dressed in a linen pantsuit. She has short, slightly curly hair,
full lips, fine features, elegantly manicured hands with painted nails. She’s smoking a cigarette, which today
might convey a strain of self-destructiveness, but in those days suggested only
sophistication.
The
combination of her carnality and her Catholicism fascinated Greene. She seemed to live with one foot in the
sacred world and one in the profane.
The
affair reached its apogee in the late 1940s. By 1950 Greene was begging Walston to leave her husband and
marry him. She declined, for
reasons the letters only hint at.
Perhaps she was afraid she’d lose her children. Perhaps she opted for the security of
life with a rich and indulgent man.
Perhaps she realized that Greene’s habits and temperament were better
suited to a lover than a husband.
“I
love onion sandwiches,” G wrote in a postcard from Amsterdam. Onions was one of their code words for
making love.
3. A
few days after hatching in an incubator on a huge farm, it has its upper beak
and toenails snipped off. A turkey
is normally a very discriminating eater, but the farmers have clipped the beak,
transforming it into a kind of shovel.
With its altered beak it can no longer pick and choose what it wants to
eat. Instead it will do nothing
but gorge on the highly fortified corn-based mash that it is offered, even
though that is far removed from the insects, grass and seeds Turkeys
prefer. After the beaks are
clipped mass-produced turkeys spend the fist three weeks of their lives
confined with hundreds of other birds in what is know as a brooder, a heated
room where they are kept warm, dry and safe from disease and predators. Their toenails are removed so that they
won’t do harm later on as in the crowded conditions of industrial production,
mature turkeys are prone to picking at the feathers of their neighbors and even
cannibalizing them. The next rite
of passage comes in the fourth week, when turkeys reach puberty and grow
feathers. Then they are herded
from brooders into a giant barn.
These windowless barns are illuminated by bright lights twenty-four
hours a day, keeping the turkeys awake and eating. They stand, not on grass, but on wood shavings, laid down to
absorb the overwhelming amount of waste that the flock produces. Still, the ammonia fumes rising from
the floor are enough to burn the eyes.
Not only do these turkeys have no room to move around in the barn they
don’t have any way to indulge their instinct to roost (clutching onto something
with their claws when they sleep).
Instead the turkeys are forced to rest in an unnatural position
analogous to what sleeping sitting up is for humans. These turkeys are all the same age and all of the same
variety, the appropriately named Broad Breasted White. By their eighth week they are severely
overweight. Their breasts are so
large that they are unable to walk or to have sex. Instead, turkeys today are the product of artificial
insemination. After twelve to
fourteen weeks the whole flock is ready for the slaughterhouse.
4. Dr.
Jim stretched, flexing one leg and pulling the sheet downward with his
foot. Ellie’s eyes widened but she
didn’t look away. He’d been aching
for her since she’d leaned against him and given him that first tentative kiss;
he was throbbing with arousal now but he acted as though having this woman
stare at him didn’t make him want to flip her on her back and bury himself
inside her. That was exactly what
he wanted to do, but even more than that he wanted her to learn she could trust
him and that neither he nor his body was anything to be feared.
Her
expression showed more wonder than fear, but he asked, “Are you thinking I could
hurt you?” he asked.
“It
does seem . . . that way.”
“It
only hurts some the first time,” he told her. “Because a woman has a tiny piece of flesh that is
torn. But after that it shouldn’t
hurt again . . .unless the woman is forced. That would hurt no matter how many times she’s done it
before. When she’s ready to accept
the man into her body, it doesn’t hurt.”
“So
it wouldn’t hurt this time?”
“I
don’t think so. Maybe a little bit
uncomfortable since it’s been a long time, but nothing like what you knew
then. I promise.”
“Did
they teach you this stuff at school?”
“Some.”
“How
would I know if I was ready?”
“I
could show you how to know.”
She
lowered herself to his chest again, bringing her legs to twine with his.
He
explained the arousal of both sexes to her, finding it the most erotic thing
he’d ever done. He didn’t know how
he’d survive if this was just a warm-up and she wasn’t ready to move
forward. But she seemed eager to
experience all he’d just explained.
“Did
anyone at school ask questions?”
“Not
as many as you do.”
Her
sweet innocence touched him anew.
She ran her hand down his neck, across his chest, and her touch set him
on fire. With great restraint, he
kept his own hands curled in loose fists, one at his side, the other at her
back.
She
ended the intimate kiss, but her lips lingered, almost touching his.
“Did
you like it?” he asked.
“Yes,
did you?”
“Oh,
yes.” It came out as a half laugh, half groan.
She
leaned back and ran her palm over his chest, down his stomach, studying him in
the golden glow of the lamp.
She
seemed eager to experience all he’d just explained. She sat up and unbuttoned the tiny buttons at her throat and
slipped her nightgown off over her head, watching his eyes, gauging his
reaction.
Her
breasts were full and lovely, with darkened nipples that stiffened when he
feasted his gaze upon them. Her
waist was narrow and her hips flared becomingly.
“Do
you want me to touch you?”
She
nodded.
“Show
me where.”
She
took his hands and brought them to her breasts. Her eyelids drifted closed as he ran his fingers over her
budded nipples. She was lost to
the magical sensations and the reactions of her body.
Dr.
Jim forced himself to wait for her spoken or implied demands before he did the
things he ached to do. And slowly
but surely, she showed him what she liked. He held himself in rigid control, her enflaming touches
setting him on fire.
With
him Ellie felt so beautiful, so good and so right. Love made the difference. And knowing he loved her. She wanted to consume him. She wanted to envelop him.
“Now,
Dr. Jim,” she pleaded, “Take me now.”
5. As
for yellow dung flies, claims have been made that the female’s decision to use
one male’s sperm rather than another’s depends on whether she lays her eggs on
a cowpat in the shade, or one in the sun.
If a male yellow dung fly copulates for long enough, he can displace the
sperm of previous males. To
achieve this effect, small males have to copulate for longer than big males
because small males transfer sperm more slowly. The male would then, after having replaced the sperm of his
predecessors with his own, do well to then guard the female until she has laid
her eggs. That way his sperm would
be the only sperm available.
6. There
were what was called three rooms, but since it was already winter, and the
landlord wasn’t fixing the boiler, I began living in what I called the living
room, off the combination kitchen and bathroom, which was almost as large, or
maybe larger, but was home to a bathtub,
large cylindrical hot water heater, and a sink next to a large gas stove. The toilet sat in a tiny wc
adjacent. The floor had been
painted black, but wasn’t smooth, as if layers of paper had been scraped, but
the job had remained unfinished.
There were no sharp, clean corners anywhere, as if thousands of years of
dust had been impressed where the floors met the walls, and where the walls
met, layer upon layer of paint created rounded edges. The kitchen/bath had a dirty window overlooking a gray
airshaft that had some irretrievable garbage at the bottom. But the living room had two large
windows that faced a small concrete yard.
Beyond that yard were the gardens of some brownstones, and I could see
the trees, now looking like charcoal scribbles. Strangely, the ceiling had a
band of ornamented woodwork, possibly oak, and there were huge sliding doors
between that room and the kitchen/bath.
“But
what am I telling you this for?
I’m keeping you up.” He
made a move as if to rise, but because of his age, and his potbelly, it was so
clumsy it seemed like a gesture.
Like most young, poor writers I had lots of furniture retrieved from the
garbage, and the chair he was in was a butterfly, with ancient canvas, stained,
though clean, that sagged nearly to the floor.
“Don’t
go,” I said. I was as excited as
if he’d suddenly stripped himself naked.
“War,” I said,
“makes everything so serious.”
“If
you had seen the boys come back,” he said. “It would have been better had they been killed outright.”
“It
must have been awful,” I said.
Awful. The childish, meaningless word hung in
the air, drawing a line between us.
He
slumped again in the chair. “Why,”
he said. “What’s it all for?”
For
life. For art, I thought. For ideas. I wanted him to undress me, to inject his poetry right into
me. The prospect of change, the prospect of love.
Unaccountably,
I was so full of joy I couldn’t breathe.
I thought I might explode.
