Chapter Seven
Foreplay
“ … and nothing explained the fact that the men all liked the conversation and participated happily.
They talked in particular about how much they would like to fuck her in the ass.”
--- from Andrea Dworkin’s Chapter 27, entitled “My Last Leftist Meeting,”
of her Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant.
Christmas Eve 1988, was a Saturday making Sunday Christmas Day, of course. Herry met me on a
sidewalk on the corner of Ninth and Ridgeway the previous October. “Neutral positioning” there his
posturing lawyer had called it. We were both bundled up, the cold already well upon us that winter.
Herry’s purpose was to declare that while the Boys lived with me since the actual physical separation in
early June, they were to continue to go stay with him at his 24 th Street, one – bedroom apartment every
single weekend. As the Boys had already been doing.
For six months now Mirzah, Jesse, Zane and I had dwelled in the husbandless and the fatherless house at
the edge of Brookside Forest, the $112,500 house that the husband and the father had purchased sight
unseen by the Boys and me July 1987, the second one in our histories together as a family that he had
bought without me or the Boys seeing it or inputting anything at all. The first one, back in Kansas, had
been purchased just 14 months earlier by way of a size 40DD realtor who’d had hair that Jayne Mansfield –
yellow and after Dr. Edinsmaier had hunted housing there for our family less than a complete total of four
hours from his first meeting her to his signing the purchase agreement and putting down $1,000 of our
University of Mizzou graduate student funds in earnest money in May 1986. The understanding I had had
with my husband before buying anything in Ames, an understanding that he and I had made in a telephone
conversation with each other just a few days before the time of his Brookside house purchase then, had
been that our absolute topmost buying price which was not to be surpassed … whatsoever, was $90,000.
And, of course, this Brookside Forest – in – Ames house was now itself up for sale because of the pending
divorce proceedings. The Boys should be coming to stay with him, he’d ordered me on that nearby street
corner, every single weekend so this, being Christmas now, was just another such weekend. So. They were
gone. Christmas or not, they were gone: it was the weekend.
My thoughts were not on sugar plums, snow fairies, elves, angels. Not even on my angels, my Boys.
Instead, I was pondering on lawyers and the very odd, very surreal business it is of retaining some total
stranger to conduct for you what will be - - - but, of course, the magnitude of it hasn’t nearly sunk in yet
like it will later on - - - , the most massive undertaking in your entire lifetime: the saving of your sons from
… Mr. – Dr. Wonderful.
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Two years into our marriage, 1978 it would have been, the year of the birth of my second child, Jesse, so
I was most probably either pregnant at the time growing Jesse, or lactating for Jesse and again pregnant
growing Mirzah, Herry Edinsmaier made the extremely grave mistake many, many men do. He had
recounted – in bed one night, no less, while “messing around,” he called it, – or “screwing.” Sex was
never, never, “Do you want to make love?” Only, “Do ya’ wanna screw?” “Do ya’ wanna mess around?”
“How ‘bout some pussy?” “How ‘bout some strange?” The grammatical question even when the answer
was already understood. Or, he just took it and didn’t bother to query first. That night in bed, Herry
recounted about all the women that there’d been in his life before me. By that time. Two years into the
marriage.
‘Course I was believing him then. That the ones he had talked about had, indeed, comprised all of the
women there had been. Note the past tense. Well, hell. Who’s to say now just how many there’d really
been? Or weren’t? Or were … currently?
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And how was it that somehow I just didn’t feel that Herry would want to hear all about any of the men that
there had been in my life before him? As a matter of fact, that there had been quite literally … in me.
For that matter. It was Herry’s foreplay for me to be told about his scores, but I couldn’t do the telling to
him about mine. Somehow that was different, somehow that was ugly, wrong, disgusting.
John, Anton, Anton’s twin brother August, David, Etienne, the three roommates from the far - out
electrically silver – decorated brownstone flat across from mine on West 85 th Street, Eric, Steve and Stony
– short for Winston, Ivy League Will, Ian, Ole who decades after our parting thought he’d … well, maybe,
impregnated me at one time, had he? he had written long – distance from Oregon (with Zane by then
loooong – grown!) to put his now! – somehow – bothering – him conscience at ease, Simon, Julio, Irish
Tom who’d wanted to officially make me his fifth wife, Jackson, Angus, ad infinitum. Not infinitum
exactly. Exactly 17. That I could remember. And was pretty certain all that there’d been.
From the New York City Civil Rights and Viet Nam / Woodstock good ol’ protestin’ days. Then from
those days, too, of that year of preparatory course requirements at Iowa State before I’d received the
acceptance letter to veterinary medical school. The 1960s and the 1970s: before teenage girls could –
legally – buy condoms of any kind, gem – studded or otherwise, before birth control pills’ death – by –
thrombus dosages had scientifically become … somewhat … more fine – tuned. When the concept of baby
human beings being thought of at all, let alone, being thought of always as … ‘illegitimate’ … still forcibly
visited itself daily into every young, unwed American woman’s vernacular. And most especially, before
some wee thing termed Human Immunodeficiency Virus is found to elaborate itself and erupt into some not
– so – wee thing now known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.
But, hey, not only was it okay but even supposedly exciting me, arousing me, turning me way on, Herry
imagined, for me to have to hear his lays’ names raspberried out of his mouth and onto my chest, my belly,
my legs, onto and into all of me. That is --- lays, and not ladys: it’s not a typo.
Fannie Issicran McLive had been one such person on Dr. Herod Edinsmaier’s list. About her then that
night in his foreplay where he’d quickly brushed over her in his litany of more exploited females, Herry
muttered, “She was just a very plain, really fat girl who used to talk to me between classes at the lockers
at school.”
Some ten – plus years later, to his family and acquaintances, Herod Edinsmaier was announcing Fannie
McLive as having been his “high – school sweetheart” with whom he, now freed of me, had been reunited
at the 25th year, Class of ’64 reunion in 1989, she having pined away for him, her long – lost, in – her –
head love, some 20+ years. Yeah. Right. Pined, she may have done. Lived life lovingly in the interim?
Or pathetically? Pathetic.
As for she and he sweethearts? Not the genre at all that I remember being in high school. I wore his class
ring with miles of yellow angora yarn – rope wrapped around its back so’s it would fit the fourth finger, no
matter that it looked like I was displaying a fuzzy buttery boulder on my left hand. He wore mine on a big
– link, silver chain around his neck with his black leather jacket that sported the matching silver studs –
‘cuz I was wearing his warm, flannel – lined barn coat. He came over to Sunday chicken dinner with the
family and hung out on the porch for a couple o’ hours afterwards while I pretended to be studying and
then we left in his beater sky blue and rusty pickup for the bowling alley for sodas where we’d fight and
break up ‘cuz I wouldn’t put out and Angie would; Larry was gettin’ it and my Ricky wasn’t. But then
we’d be back together again by study hall the next day on Monday afternoon. Actually at certain times,
as especially during the planting and harvest seasons – hormonal it might have been – there seemed to be
our breaking up every three, four days for weeks at a time; then there’d be smooth sailin’ for just as many
weeks. Then there was senior year when I was off to becoming a pre – med freshman at State and he
wasn’t goin’ off to college anywhere at all, and then the final bust – up had been for good. For the better,
really. But so hard on both of us we thought we’d die of heartbreak.
That’s what being high school sweethearts was all about. As I recalled.
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Not nodding at the person whose overhead locker was near mine one year while I exchanged books and
assignments for different ones waiting on its shelves. Every so often exchanging views of the wintry Iowa
weather that day with that other person as I jammed on my parka from its hook, grabbed my boots and ran
to catch the bus.
It was 1987, just months before the June separation and this particular 1988 Christmas, and Herry was still
telling me such things. Always at night, always as part of foreplay, a prelude to banging me. One such
night in the Brookside Forest bedroom with its teal carpeting and the king – sized bed overlain by a lovely
canary yellow bedspread, both the bed and the spread given us by my folks, I couldn’t believe what I was
hearing.
What I was hearing from out of the mouth, and therefore from first biochemically formed inside the
neuronal tissue of a physician fully fledged and done with his residency at least an entire two years’ worth
of time by now. Knots in my stomach balled up nearly immediately. I wanted to puke, but Herry hadn’t
concluded yet … his husbandly ‘business’.
On that bed, Herry smirked out onto me and all of my body parts just how it was that he had, as a third –
year student at the University of Iowa’s medical school and, therefore, required to complete obstetrics and
gynecology coursework, – just how it was that he had wanted to have sexual intercourse with the guinea
pig models. These alleged pigs were university coeds, female humans, hired and paid quite well by the
school’s departmental administration to serve as, and quite literally be used in, laboratory. The women are
practice individuals on whom the medical students learn to do vaginal examinations. Nothing virtual about
these laboratory sessions, these lab practicals.
Dr. Herod Edinsmaier purred, between thrusts that night beside Ames’ urban Forest, that he’d gotten out of
bed every morning that spring semester in that same rundown, coral trailer where I, then pregnant and
growing Mirzah, those same mornings had bundled up Jesse and Zane, strapped the two into their
respective carseats and driven 13 miles along narrow State Highway #1 dropping them off at their
respective babysitter and pre – school folks before getting on to my veterinary practice, – that he had gotten
out of bed every morning just absolutely delighted to be going to his class. He couldn’t wait to get to
school, he spewed there in bed to me, because, “I wanted to drop my pants and pop ‘em right there on the
spot. Ya’ know, fuck ‘em. But I couldn’t, ‘course. There was no way to do it discreetly. But I would’ve
if there had been!” Splattering this out as though the flow of his story thread must be turning me on, wasn’t
it? Saying it as though I would have thought him manly or irresistible. Like a stud. Like the ‘true’
physician that various diplomas and other similarly pillared men also sworn to, “First, do no harm,” had so
thoroughly documented Dr. Herod Edinsmaier as now … being. And flinging it out there as though he had
no clue that it was really killing me inside to hear such putrescence penetrating forth from Mr. Wonderful,
from Dr. Wonderful!
But I knew deep, deep down in my gut of guts, he did, too, know. He knew it was killing me. That was
precisely why he was fouling me with his flaying fetor. That was the express purpose for Herod’s horrid
revelation. Now Herry’s ‘business’, his ejaculatory mother – fucking? – Fin.
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