Thy Neighbor's Wife (64 page)

“
Locals
?”

“Hand jobs,” she explained.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll have a local.”

“That will be extra.”

“How
much
extra?”

“Fifteen dollars.”

Too much, he thought. But in his aroused condition he was in no mood for bargaining, and so he nodded and watched with cu
riosity and anticipation as she sprinkled his groin with puffs of powder and adroitly proceeded to stroke him to orgasm—expertly sensing, not a second too soon, the moment to whish a Kleenex from the nearby box.

While some people might have found the experience degrading or demeaning, Talese enjoyed the strangeness and impersonal nature of such contact; and after his first visit he returned often, taking sessions not only with June but with several other masseuses, and through them he learned that similar places existed throughout New York City.

During the remainder of that year and in 1972, he visited dozens of parlors on such a regular basis that he became socially acquainted not only with the masseuses but also with the young managers and owners. A few of them, having majored in English or studied journalism in college, were familiar with Talese’s work and they thought it “groovy” that he was both a customer and an aficionado of their service; and they accepted his invitations to dine with him in restaurants, submitted to his interviews, and allowed the use of their names in his possible forthcoming book—and two of them finally permitted him to work in their parlors as a nonsalaried manager.

Talese’s first job was at the Secret Life Studio, a third-floor walkup at 132 East Twenty-sixth Street, on the corner of Lexington Avenue; and for many weeks during the spring and summer of 1972 he worked behind the desk from noon to six, being responsible for collecting the money and checking the linen supply, conversing with the waiting customers and watching the clock after the masseuse had escorted a man into a private room. When the customer left, if there was a lull in the business activity, Talese would question the masseuse about the session, asking her what the man had talked about, what he had revealed of his personal and business life, his frustrations, aspirations, and fantasies. Talese soon convinced the masseuses to keep journals for him—documents that would describe daily each customer, recount what had been said and done behind closed doors, and reveal what the masseuse herself had been tinkling as she catered to
her customer’s desires. It was Talese’s intention, though he had yet to organize the scenes and story line, to write about a relationship between two real-life characters in a massage parlor—a middle-aged conservative businessman and a hippie co-ed who services his erotic needs, capitalizes on his inhibitions, and eventually befriends him and helps to extricate much of the shame and guilt that he usually brought with him into the massage parlor. From meeting and chatting with hundreds of male customers, and later reading about them in the journals, the author knew he had little difficulty in identifying with them—he
was
them in many ways, and as he read the masseuses’ writings he recognized observations that could have accurately described himself.

Like a majority of the men, Talese was emotionally committed to a long-term marriage that he wanted to continue. While he had had affairs, he had never wanted to leave his wife for these other women, although he continued to admire them and maintain close friendships with many of them. Prostitutes had never appealed to him, especially since the contemporary streetwalker was invariably a poorly educated young woman from the ghetto with a drug problem who was rarely even attractive. But he hurl responded very much to the college-educated masseuse—a different type of “prostitute,” one that a “John” could relate to in ways not merely sexual.

Many male habitués of massage parlors, like Talese, did not like solitary masturbation; in the parlance of the younger generation, it was a “downer.” And yet to be masturbated by an appealing masseuse, to be in the physical presence of a woman with whom there was some communication and understanding, if not love, was gratifying and fun. As the months went by, Talese began to see the masseuse as a kind of unlicensed therapist. Just as thousands of people each day paid psychiatrists money to be heard, so these massage men paid money to be touched.

And if the majority of massage customers were anything like Talese—and his conversations with the men and his reading of the journals convinced him that they were—their sexual activities
with masseuses did not diminish their passions for their wives at home; in fact, most men told him that they desired their wives even more on nights that followed an afternoon session in a parlor—the masseuses apparently activated the sex drives of the older men, made them feel better about themselves, more contented at home, more eager to please their wives in bed and out of it.

But as Talese listened to the men and talked with the young masseuses during his months behind the desk at the Secret Life Studio, and during his subsequent job as manager of the Middle Earth parlor on East Fifty-first Street, he gradually became aware that the telephone had never once rung with a call from a woman asking if there were young masseurs available for the pleasure of females. It was not that women were unaware of massage parlors: There were ads in the backs of taxicabs, on the wall posters of buildings, and in newspapers such as the New York
Post
and
The Village Voice
announcing sensual satisfaction for men and women. And Talese was sure that throughout New York there must be numerous women—aging widows, spinsters, liberated middle-aged female executives—who might welcome a midday massage with erotic delicacies, including oral sex or intercourse, in a balmy and bountiful East Side ambience that would offer some of the pampering features of an Elizabeth Arden salon or a ladies’ luxurious health club. But the parlor owners and masseuses that Talese spoke with assured him that there was no such market. One highly advertised establishment had been started within a good East Side hotel, but, failing to lure female customers to its young masseurs, it was soon forced out of business. Women, it was concluded, were unwilling to pay for such personal servicing. Women would pay men to shampoo their hair, to design their clothing, to soothe their psyches, to flatten their stomachs in exercise classes—but they would not pay men money for manual masturbation, cunnilingus, or credit-card coitus.

Even the role of the gigolo was largely misunderstood, Talese was told by men who were well qualified to comment; while there were wealthy women who did support gigolos, these young
men mainly functioned as escorts and sons rather than as lovers. Most gigolos were homosexual, it was explained, and the matrons who mothered them were often privately referred to, even by their subsidized suitors, as “fag hags.” It seemed that the penis per Se, except to male homosexuals, was not a very salable commodity in the sexual marketplace of America. Few women could be aroused by the sight of an erect penis
unless
they were warmly disposed to the man who was attached to it. Quite apart from the potential danger involved in picking up stray men in public places, the average heterosexual woman did not enjoy intercourse without a feeling of familiarity or personal interest in her partner. If it was merely an orgasm that she sought, she would prefer masturbating in her bedroom with a penis-shaped vibrator to engaging the genuine article of a male stranger. “It is just as natural for a woman to reject the sexual apparatus of a male stranger as it is for the human body to try to reject any other foreign object, be it a microscopic virus or an incompatible organ transplant,” a marriage therapist once told Talese. “The key word is foreign; if a man is a stranger to a woman, his penis is foreign to her, and she is not likely to want it inside of her, because then her person would be invaded. But if it is not alien to her, if it is a part of somebody she knows, trusts, desires a relationship with, then she can take it into her, embrace it and feel in harmony with it.”

It was therefore logical, the therapist continued, that women did not respond to photographs of nude men in magazines in the way that men reacted to pinups—an opinion that many women themselves later confirmed in interviews with Talese; it was a rare woman who said she masturbated to pictures of unknown nude men, no matter how handsome or endowed was the male model. While the newsstands were stacked with endless “skin” magazines for men, there was only one slick periodical,
Playgirl
, that exposed males for an allegedly female audience; another publication,
Viva
, had earlier tried to interest women in such pictures but had abandoned its effort, and later failed entirely as a publication.

In 1973 Talese visited major cities in Europe to see if Continental women, unaffected by the vestiges of American Puritanism, might be more responsive to mercenary sex in massage parlors (sometimes called “sauna clubs”), and more interested in depictions of male nudity in magazines; but he discovered that European women seemed no different from their New York sisters. In London, in Paris, and even in the very permissive city of Copenhagen, Talese found no women who patronized massage parlors, very few women who enjoyed live sex shows or hard-core films, and he infrequently saw photos of nude men in women’s magazines. During his wanderings at night in European streets, Talese saw what he had seen in New York: solitary men walking in and out of parlors, men negotiating with prostitutes in doorways, men staring silently at performing women in topless or bottomless bars. Men admitted to being endlessly fascinated with the naked female form; they appreciated women in a detached, impersonal way that women, even those women who were flattered by such attention, rarely understood. Men were natural voyeurs, women were exhibitors. Women sold sexual pleasure; men bought it. In social situations at cocktail parties, or in quest of an office affair or romance, the initiators were nearly always men and the inhibitors were nearly always women. A recently divorced husband of a famous European actress told Talese: “Men and women are natural enemies. Women begin as teenaged girls, often unconsciously, to arouse men—they wear tight sweaters, they paint their lips, they scent themselves with perfume, they swing their hips—and when they have made men hungry for them, they become suddenly coy and proper.” Men want what women have to give, he conceded, but women withhold it until certain conditions are met or promises are made. Women can give a powerless man a temporary sense of strength, or at least the reassurance that he is not entirely impotent; and for a man, he elaborated, there is no substitute for the warm, welcoming place between a woman’s legs, the birthplace to which men continuously try to return. But there is nearly always a price for readmission, he added, and sometimes the price is high. The church and the law try to “so
cialize the penis,” he said, to restrict its use to worthy occasions such as monogamous marriage. “Marriage is a form of arms control over the penis,” but it is unable to entirely contain the excess male sexual energy, and it is much of this energy that is spent in the pornographic industry and the red-light districts of cities—the areas that the vice squads, the celibate priests, and some man-hating feminists want to eliminate. “These ‘clean-up’ campaigns,” he concluded, “are really a battle against male biology, and they have been going on, in one form or another, since the Middle Ages.”

After returning from Europe, Talese continued his survey of America by traveling into the interior, interviewing ordinary men and women as well as civic leaders and local celebrities; he spoke with admittedly monogamous couples and acknowledged swingers, with prosecutors and defense attorneys, theologians and marriage counselors. He spent weeks in West Virginia and Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and then down into the Bible Belt, where he attended church sermons and town meetings, eavesdropped in cocktail bars, visited precinct houses as well as the tenderloin areas. During the day he strolled through the business districts, noting the close proximity of Woolworth’s and J. C. Penney to the local massage parlor and X-rated theater. At night he lingered in the lobbies of the Holiday Inns, the Ramadas, and other motels watching as the gray-suited men with attaché cases purchased at the newsstand a copy of
Playboy
or
Penthouse
before heading up to their rooms.

He also observed young couples with children and station wagons driving into shopping centers; solid Rotarians and Kiwanians wearing flamboyant satin shirts, hurling bowling balls down narrow glistening lanes; freckled country women in curlers checking Gothic novels out of high school libraries; suntanned suburbanites playing mixed doubles on tennis courts; members of the Pepsi Generation singing in the church choir on Sundays. In such places, and after lengthy conversations with such people, Talese sensed that normal American family life and traditions were enduring on the surface but in private were being pondered and
reappraised. Constantly throughout his travels he reminded himself that, despite the social and scientific changes relevant to the Sexual Revolution—the Pill, abortion reform, and the legal restraints against censorship—there were millions of Americans whose favorite book remained the Bible, whose marriages were unadulterous, whose daughters in college were still virgins. The
Reader’s Digest
was unquestionably thriving in America; and though the national divorce rate was higher than ever, so was the rate of remarriage.

Still, Talese was more impressed by the vast changes that had altered the consciousness of the American middle class since his graduation from college; and while there were many people in the 1970s who were hopefully predicting a return to the more conservative 1950s, Talese doubted that such was possible. It would necessitate the outlawing of abortion and contraceptives, the imprisonment of adulterers, the censuring not only of
Playboy
but also of
Vogue
and the Maidenform advertisers in the New York
Times
Sunday magazine. Although the Supreme Court’s
Miller
ruling in 1973 appeared at the time to be an ominous pronouncement, and would victimize such men as William Hamling, the attorneys that Talese subsequently spoke with, and accompanied to obscenity trials, predicted that
Miller
would not sustain the trend that had at first alarmed civil libertarians. Most contemporary juries were more liberal than the nation’s aging judges, it was said; and even in the conservative city of Wichita, the New York publisher of
Screw
triumphed over the federal prosecutors in an obscenity trial. On the national newsstands, a year after the
Miller
ruling,
Hustler
magazine appeared in print to extend the limits of explicitness—and its staff remained editorially unintimidated by the fact that its publisher would be permanently crippled from bullets fired outside a Georgia courthouse by an unidentified assailant. And in various parts of the country, surprisingly attractive actresses agreed to perform in hard-core sex films—one of which, in the secluded hills of Pennsylvania, Talese watched as it was being made.