Covet The Oven

Book summary

In Covet The Oven, Jerome Mandel weaves together a collection of short stories that explore the complexities of life, love, and the human condition. With a blend of wit, irony, and heartfelt insight, these tales capture the unexpected moments and choices that define us, revealing truths that characters themselves may never fully grasp.

Excerpt from Covet The Oven

Nice Man, Sexually Impotent

In the second week of their living together, Andrew Palmer announced to the group.

“I’m writing a short story about a man who places an ad in the Personals Column of the local newspaper. It goes like this: “Nice Man, Sexually Impotent, seeks woman with whom to be intimate. Size and age not as important as openness to new experience. Let’s meet and talk.”

They were drinking pre-dinner wine on the screened porch, looking out over the shadows stippling the long lawn and the late afternoon sun bright on the mountain tops across the road.

“What happens in the story?” asked Heather.

“I’m not quite sure yet.”

“Not very promising,” said the novelist.

“Why do I get the feeling,” said Fred, “that something else is going on here?”

“Well,” said Andrew, “I don’t know how much you know about the disease, but one of the results of long-term diabetes is impotence. No matter what I do, folks, I can’t get it up. Not a moral failing but a physical one.”

“Was that the cause of the divorce?” Barbara asked.

“One of the straws. Judy is thirty-nine, still a young woman. She’s not ready to abandon her body, nor should she. Ours had become a sexless marriage. We thought it better to divorce before it became a loveless marriage.”

“A writer’s distinction,” said Barbara. “Much too intellectual.”

“We’re still good friends, but we’re not sexual partners any more. Haven’t been for a while. And that’s the source of the problem. If I’m going to write this story—turn loss into art—I need to resurrect the details of intimacy. Of course I can imagine them all from memory, but I want to experience once again what it’s like to touch a woman’s body. So I thought I would make the same offer to this group that my character makes in the story.”

“I knew it!” said Fred. “A stud service!”

“Without the stud!”

“Let me get this straight,” said Deborah in the general laughter. “You want to grope some woman.”

“My word is ‘caress,’ actually,” said Andrew. “Look, Deb, you test the quality of the clay you work with. I want to recapture the details of a woman’s body, the language of it.”

Andrew Palmer leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his arms open to the community.

“I like women,” he said. “In many ways, I prefer women. I like the touch and texture of them, the skin, the hair, and the bone beneath. I’m looking for intimacy, not fornication.”

“Sex for the sake of art,” said Fred.

“For the sake of Andy, rather. Why didn’t I think of this?” said Jack.

“And it doesn’t make any difference to you who it is? Any woman will do?”

“That’s right, Deb. This is not personal, don’t you see? I don’t want a passionate love affair. I’m not capable of it. But I am interested in caressing a woman’s body. Intimacy as an aesthetic, not sexual, experience. I’m physically impotent, not intellectually.”

“I don’t get writers,” said Barbara. “Why would any woman want to do this?”

“I don’t know,” said Andrew. “I hope she’ll tell me.”

“Give a better answer,” said Heather.

“Okay,” said Andrew, setting his blood-dark wine on the table beside him. “I believe we all like to feel good about ourselves. That’s why we read reviews of our work. We want people to think well of us and what we do and who we are. We like to be stroked. So I think that a woman might welcome the opportunity to be intimate without being involved, to have someone touch her body with tenderness and appreciation without commitment, without the emotional turbulence of a love affair.”

“This whole thing strikes me as an arid experience,” said Barbara.

“Not at all,” said Andrew. “We’re all artists here. We look for new experience; we all live lives in the imagination—you with paint, Deb with clay, Heather in words. And that’s why I don’t expect this to be barren, for me or for the woman. Her imagination will be as active and alive in this as mine is, and as enriched. Anyway, that’s the basis of my offer.”

“With clothes or without?” said Fred.

“That’s up to her, isn’t it?”

“Sort of sex without sex,” said Jack.

“Is it possible?” said Heather.

“Wait a minute,” said Jack. “If there’s no attempt to arouse or gratify, is it sex at all?”

“God bless Bill Clinton!” said Fred amid laughter.

“So what’s the process here?” sneered Jack.

“Everybody knows where everyone’s cabin is. My door is always open.”

“Do the girls have to make an appointment? Pay attention, Heather, this may be important for you.”

“Perhaps it would be better to talk to me about it first, if for no other reason than to avoid embarrassment.”

“And long lines,” said Fred.

“I could kick myself,” said Jack.

“A good idea in general,” said Heather, “but why now?”

“Why didn’t I think of this first? This is great.”

The cook appeared in the doorway and said, “Dinner is ready.”

“Let the feast begin!”

“Yes,” said Andrew, getting up.

***

“Sorry I’m late,” said Deborah, “the feldspar glaze wouldn’t fuse with the stoneware I’m working on. Couldn’t get the temperature hot enough. It’s an old kiln.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“Ha-ha, that’s good. Are you hot enough or do you need stoking?”

“I’m about as stoked as I get these days.”

“Okay, then, here’s the deal. My hands extend my mind. They do to clay just about everything I can imagine. After a day in the pottery shed, my hands are tired, my arms ache, and my mind is numb. I’ve tried shiatsu, yoga, everything. I want to see what an impotent writer can do.”

She held out her hands to me, clay beneath the nails.

“It never comes out,” she said, “unless I clean my nails to the wrist.”

I held her fierce hands in mine.

“I’ll take my shirt off, if you think it will be inspirational. Or intimate.”

First I did her back, working the muscles around the wings of the shoulder blades and up and down the bony spinal column. Then I did her arms, knotty as twisted cord. Then, her hands, rolling the muscles and the pads at the base of the fingers and working the long lump where the thumb comes to the palm, loosening the sinews between the round bones where the fingers start, working the fingers and the joints and the nails.

“You’re good,” she said, buttoning her shirt. “You got strong hands. Relaxed my body and cleared my head. I like that. A good experience. I got strong hands, too. Listen, I think I could pull a hard-on if you’d like, sort of pay you back in kind for the job you just did on me. It’s not too different from milking a cow.”

The tactile art of the potter is not the tactile art of the writer.

***

The painter came when it was dark. She walked around the cabin turning off lights and then sat in my reading chair in the dark corner between windows. The moonlight lay in tatters on the floor around her.

“I live in light,” said Barbara. “It’s what I paint and how I paint. There is no life without it. I can’t escape.”

“And this darkness?”

“Is this darkness?” she said. I could tell in her voice that she was smiling. “All my nights are bright. Even here, now, my mind is alive with the color and composition of this room. I can’t stop shaping it.”

“It’s what we do, isn’t it? We shape the world we live in and the worlds we create.”

“It’s not something I choose to do. I have to create space in light.”

“We’re all victims—I mean, we’re all victims of the imagination,” I said. “We’re helpless.”

“Isn’t that what ‘impotent’ means—helpless?”

“Yes, of course. But it also means without power or potency, unable to create.”

Barbara sat still for a moment, silent in the dark chair in the dark corner.

“Have you tried Viagra?”

“I’ve always thought Viagra was sort of masturbatory: it privileges erection and penetration. These are male concerns and focus on male pleasure. Viagra doesn’t have anything to do with intimacy. And nothing at all to do with women. I suppose if a woman were interested, she could replace a man taking Viagra with a warm vibrator and be a lot happier.”

“I’ll never understand writers,” said Barbara.

After a while, she asked me to move the mattress from the bed to the floor by the window. She left her clothes on the chair and lay down in moonlight. She turned toward me, her ear moon-white beneath the camber of her hair.

“Was it difficult for you to say what you said that night?”

“No. I’m dysfunctional. To pretend otherwise misrepresents who I am. I’m interested in the truth of detail and the validity of experience, both mine and, if you will tell me, yours.”

“I could paint it easier than I could tell it.”

“What would you paint?”

“Touch me, and then I’ll know,” she said, turning her face to the window and the sky alive with light beyond the moving trees.

Later I said, “What are you looking at?”

“The light in the woods.”

“What are you feeling?”

“Nothing. Comfortable. Loved without love.”

“Sounds like a rather muted experience.”

“Anything without passion is muted. The difference between being and living.”

“What would you paint, then?”

“Pastel watercolors.”

“Doesn’t sound very intense,” I said.

“Oh, but it is. There’s more light in this than I imagined.”

I looked.

A painter’s light does not illuminate a writer’s loneliness.

***

“How’s the fiction coming?” said Heather.

“I’m almost done.”

“Well, then tell me: does art imitate life or does life imitate art?”

“Sure,” I said.

“So what do we do now,” said Heather, laughing, “trade metaphors?”

“If you like,” I laughed.

“I don’t know whether I should be here at all. I’m in a good relationship right now and I don’t want to jeopardize that.”

“This is not a relationship. We’re not involved. We’re two writers who happen to be at an artist’s colony in Rabun Gap for a month—a brief intersection of separate worlds slip-sliding off in different directions.”

“That’s what I decided, so I slotted it under ‘experience.’ I want to know what you know. I want to feel what it’s like to be touched by a man who doesn’t know who I am, who hasn’t the slightest idea about me personally, and so who’s touching my body without touching me.”

“We’re all imagined constructs,” I said. “Both who we think we are and who other people think we are.”

“In literature as in life,” she said.

“If we get on with this, I’ll become an imagined construct, too,” I said. “The person who is here touching you is someone who is not here touching you. One of me will become someone who exists only in your mind.”

“It’s our strength and our weakness,” she said. “This life in the imagination.”

“We’re all damaged or flawed.”

“Or improved.” She smiled at me. “It depends on what we see, what the imagination constructs, what the mind makes beyond emotion. That’s why I think this might be interesting.”

“May I take your clothes off?”

“Thank you for asking, sir,” she said demurely.

And then later she said, “There’s more here than I thought. The physical. Oh, it’s like being handled, treated as an object—nothing personal. The form of intimacy without the substance. But then the ‘what’ of sex is rather limited, isn’t it? Its constant sameness leads to tedium.”

The curve of her neck, and her shoulder, and her breast, the nipples rising, the skin stretched on the curve of her hip, the smooth silk behind her knee, within her elbow and thigh. The touch of her and the taste and the damp.

“I wouldn’t know.”

“And the effect of the imagination is interesting, too. Your touch calls up his presence. It’s not the ‘what’ of sex but the ‘who.’ And the ‘who’ is always imagined—even when he’s inside my body. A construct. We’re all … All lovers are metaphors. Part wish, part memory, part hope. I’ll have to remember that.”

“You’re taking notes?”

“No need,” she said. “What’s written on my flesh is written in my mind.”

Writers see more than is there.