A meditation on... male orgasm. The tenth installment of "Boardinghouse Reach." And the only recipe you'll ever need for chocolate chip cookies.

I want to dedicate this post to the memory of a great friend and one of the most generous men I've ever known, George Coleman Bulterman (February 23, 1960 - October 6, 2021).

For men, words are like coins, which they spend freely at their times of greatest need. A man of this type who says “I love you!” on the verge of an orgasm is like a very thirsty man feeding money into a drinks machine. He’ll put in as many coins as need be to quench his thirst; he’ll spend all the coins in his pocket. Then he’ll think no more about them.

How and why we lie about love is to some degree a matter of gender. Women tend much more toward literary scrutiny and close textual analysis than men. Words show women where they stand in a relationship. They gather and hoard those words and phrases that are most redolent of romantic commitment.

The woman—who, in this analogy, is the drinks machine—is collecting each of these coins as they drop down. For her, each of them is shiny and beautiful. Each of them is a promise. These coins, spent so guilelessly and without any thought of the future, are the woman’s evidence of the love this man bears her, and the promise of his continued devotion.

And yet the man was only thirsty.

What the woman fails to recollect is that each of these expressions was made right before or while the two of them were making love, or else in the euphoric glow immediately afterwards. No one has ever told her that anything said in a bedroom should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.

The great majority of men just before, during and after orgasm completely believe what they’re saying—indeed, every grateful cell of their body confirms the truth of their words. It is no more than a happy coincidence that these words turn out to be the coins best designed to make the drink drop out of the machine and quench what has become a raging thirst.

Later, if it becomes clear through the man’s action or lack thereof that he has no intention of following through with the implicit promise of his words, the woman may be left feeling both devastated and disillusioned. “I thought you meant what you said!” she reproaches him. He looks at her with innocent eyes and answers with utter and wounded sincerity, “I meant what I said when I said it.”

Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash

***

A couple of times I came home to find Allison, looking for all the world like Cinderella, sweeping the stairs. Once I walked into the boarders’ bathroom to stock it with toilet paper I’d just bought from Cost-Co and surprised Allison there, stark naked on her hands and knees, scrubbing the bathroom floor—a flash of white and yellow suffused with Northern light from the window—before I quickly, murmuring an apology, shut the door. I have to admit, despite my prejudices against housework, that Renoir or Vermeer might have created a beautiful canvas from that vision of Allison cleaning the bathroom.

Allison’s enthusiasm at my table—her hand-clapping exclamations of “Yum-yum!” her brilliant smile, her dance of joy if I’d baked cookies or scones—drove me on to ever better menus and presentations of the food. I drank in her praise and gratitude, her hugs and the wonderful shoulder rubs she gave me in passing if she saw me laboring over a manuscript. Her acts of kindness fed me more than they should have, in a way, and I wondered if Allison wasn’t a cosmic stand-in for the daughter I’d never had, a manifestation of one of the babies I’d unwittingly begun and given up, in anguish and sorrow, to an abortion.

In fact, Allison was exactly the age that the middle one of those falsely started babies would have been if he or she had been able allowed to live. At that time I was with a man who was a ticking time-bomb of self-destruction, one of the string of creative, brilliant and badly wired men in my Purgatorio years. He forced me to have the abortion; I cried throughout and was depressed for months afterwards. But I was grateful later. It would have been horrific to have been tied to him forever by a child, and to have had a child that was half his.

Allison was the golden child that almost any parent would dream of having, of an almost otherworldly loveliness, smart, talented and strong. Sure, her room was a shambles and she had a habit of leaving dirty dishes down there for weeks at a time; and there was that jump-for-joy thing—but she was overall a wonderful presence in the household. Kyle loved her, and she had a way from the start of breaking right through his natural reserve, surrounding him with hugs, flirting with him, having sneak-up tickle contests that would go on all evening long. She treated me like a big sister or aunt, appreciative of my nurturing ways but vividly interested in me as a person, too.

There was a touch of something between her and Colby, what seemed like a slight resentment on Allison’s part, as if she wondered just what his place was in the household, and whether it competed with hers. Colby was his usual bluff and kind self with her, but kept his distance, too. I suppose it was enough for him to feel responsive to my every mood and need: he didn’t want to fall sway to yet another woman who usually got what she wanted by smiling.

While Allison was doing yogic meditation down by the creek early in the morning before leaving for school, Rafael would be out on the driveway chewing his first cigarette of the day and drinking black coffee. I’d gotten in trouble with the language academy for boarding another South American with Paco. I had to promise up and down that I would enforce an English-only rule in the household.

Paco was still speaking in awkward half-sentences, with a kindergartner’s vocabulary. Having Rafael there was irresistible to him. They spoke Spanish together. He and Colby spoke Spanish together. Simply through osmosis, I was picking up a fair amount of Spanish myself—although I only used it with Paco if there was something I couldn’t manage, after multiple tries, to convey to him in English. I gave the guys a half-hearted scolding now and then when I caught them rattling away in Spanish. But what could I do? They were adults. Paco had to make his own decisions about how much he was or wasn’t going to learn in Gringolandia. And, who knows? Maybe he learned more from his rapid-fire dialogues with the worldly Rafael out on the driveway than he would have from hours and hours of English 1 conversations.

Paco, by this time, really was like a member of the family. He would sit side-by-side on the couch with Kyle, watching something from Kyle’s carefully selected library of videos. I’ll never forget the sight, coming into the living room from the kitchen, of the two of them fast asleep, my little boy nestled in Paco’s arms.

Rafael, with his air of the visiting dignitary, amused us at dinner with his polite, self-parodying inquiries about the identity of particular components of the food on his plate. He would let me know through various discreet but half-horrified expressions, and tiny sorting and separating motions with his cutlery, how exotic and suspect he found my fare. Like Paco, he was used to eating meat and rice, or meat and potatoes. All these vegetables alarmed him. Unlike Paco—perhaps because he was fourteen years older and more set in his ways—Rafael continued to look askance at food that was too colorful or various, although I was gratified to see him eating more and more of what I set on the table, even taking seconds sometimes.

Oddly enough, Rafael rather than Allison proved to be competition for Colby’s attention. Before we’d hooked up together, after he’d broken up with Sue Ellen, Colby used to spend many of his evenings sipping tea at a local pub and playing chess with the various eccentrics there. Once he found out that Rafael knew how to play, the two of them took to playing chess together whenever they were in the house at the same time during waking hours. At first, Colby, being the more experienced player, won all the time. But Rafael was intensely competitive and determined, and had a knack for the game. They would play obsessively, neither one of them willing to concede defeat to the other. Rafael kept a running tally of their score: it was an ongoing tournament. On more than a few evenings, I sat up in bed in a sexy nightgown, freshly showered, smooth and moisturized, reading and waiting and finally, with a sigh, giving up and going to sleep.

Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash

***

Being in love is a state of psychosis that renders one’s perceptions completely unreliable. One sees not what is but what one wants to see.

When you first meet someone, you see them clearly. You see them in their entirety. But after you fall in love—usually after you go to bed together for the first time, sealing your romantic bond—your power of perception goes to hell. There are certain parts of the picture that you begin to put into soft focus. There’s suddenly Vaseline on the lens of your camera.

The fact that Colby didn’t have any decent clothes struck me as a mark of character. I discounted the fact that he periodically didn’t have a nickel to his name—each time, I felt quite sure, was merely a fluke. The times when he had money and spent it on Kyle and me were the real times.

His historical lack of long-term commitment in love relationships had no relevance to his relationship to me. Clearly he adored me, and he was crazy about my son. I told myself that he would be devoted to us for the rest of our lives. He would become more responsible—he would, in due time, grow up.

I noted how he had already begun to lose that belly he acquired before giving up beer: he was looking better, he was slimming down. It’s my good cooking, he tells me. He’s no longer eating those deadly burritos every day, as was his wont. He’s not living on his boat any more—in fact, his boat is in dry dock, awaiting an imprecisely scheduled overhaul. Meanwhile, he’s staying at my house, sleeping in my bed every night. Which is not a bad thing, as cuddling with him has become one of my favorite things in life.

Having him live with me, rather than the other way around, lends me a certain degree of power that is pleasing. After all, I have definite opinions about my environment; I like things just so. It’s my house to decorate with flowers and keep sweet-smelling and clean. It’s within my purview to ask him (sweetly) to take a shower before coming to bed, even if he doesn’t feel like taking one at that hour—because it’s my bed, and I’ve just laundered the sheets. I have the right to ban any work-grimy bodies from my bedclothes.

However sweetly I’ve asked, this may elicit a stream of barely audible swearing from the bathroom that becomes more audible as he stands under the shower surrounded by noise. And yet he puts on a face of good cheer when he comes to bed, and I have to ask myself, “How must it feel to be him, in this position, in his girlfriend’s house, without a house of his own to go home to, or to huff off to, when he feels mad?”

Colby, Colby, as delicious, as softly rounded as a cheese, as warm as a loaf of bread just out of the oven and as fragrant and comforting. I knew I would be foolish ever to push away such wonderful, soul-nurturing, heart-warming food; I couldn’t at the time even imagine a better relationship. But I was determined not to fall in love with you, because I knew it would be our downfall.

There were so many moments when I felt perilously close, especially when you were laughing or smiling, looking so handsome or saying something that endeared every part of you to me. But it was my lack of need for you (or anyone, but Kyle) that made you feel comfortable loving me in closer proximity than you’d ever come to any woman before (at least I flatter myself that this is true). It was because I didn’t want to get married yet another time; it was because I already had a child.

We played it dangerously. No matter what anyone says, there’s an erotic charge to the risk of conceiving a child. No matter how soberly our minds say, “There’s no way I’d want to make a baby now,” our very cells cry out, “Yes, do it! Do it now, do it well, there’s no danger at all this time of the month. Fuck freely—it feels marvelous, doesn’t it? Oh, break, you stupid condom!”

As one approaches menopause, the allure of holding another baby in your arms—your baby—is wondrous, forbidden, and irrational. You know there’s a door slowly but steadily closing behind your back. Behind that door there’s a swirl of protoplasmic potential that would sneak through, if you let it, like a puff of steam through a closed pot lid; that would magically coalesce into a human being containing a stew pot of your DNA mixed with the DNA of your beloved. You listen at the door, as if you could discern, by listening, who this child might be.

When the door closes completely—when it clicks shut and locks—you will never again have the chance to know this child and shower it with your love. Biologically, you are its incubator and you are its food. You long to feed it. On some dark level that never sees the intellectual light of day, you can think of no greater fate, no greater honor.

And so I fed the people in my boardinghouse, because I knew I would never have another baby (and also because it made it possible for me to pay the rent on that wonderful but amazingly expensive house).

Chocolate Chip Cookies

The chocolate chip cookie is one of the greatest innovations of North American cuisine, symbolic of all that makes this nation so meltingly seductive to peoples around the world. I’ve been working on this recipe since I was a teenager.

Anyone who walks through my door when I’m baking becomes mine. The charm works equally well on preschool children and twenty-something Brazilians. Silent adolescents from Thailand sigh expressively as they wait for the cookies to come out of the oven. Straight-laced Swiss get a mischievous glint in their eyes. Warm from the oven, the melting chocolate can delight your tongue even as it burns it. Use with caution.

Sift together 2 cups of whole wheat pastry flour (don’t use regular whole wheat flour or you’ll be sorry) with one teaspoon baking soda and a scant teaspoon of salt. In a separate large bowl, cream together a stick of unsalted butter and 3/4 of a cup of white sugar. Add one-half cup of canola oil and 1 cup of brown sugar. Add two large brown eggs and one teaspoon of good-quality vanilla extract.

Sift the dry ingredients a second time into the wet ones. Stir well, scraping the sides of the bowl, until all the flour is well mixed in. Then add a package of bittersweet chocolate chips.

Bake at 325 degrees on a lightly buttered cookie sheet for around eight minutes, until they’re just barely golden brown. Let them cool for a minute or two on the baking sheet, then remove them to a wire rack. Don’t worry about eating too many—just take an extra dance class. Either remember your mother or the mother you never had. Savor the sweetness of feeling loved. Pass it on.

Photo by Joshua Bedford on Unsplash