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illustrates. I mean the radical disturbance of sex in its aggression and need. Of how violent, gross and hateful sex can seem, or needs to be, if one is to be abandoned in it.
    For me this initiation was not only into my own sexuality, but a move away from adolescent solitude and narcissism – towards a woman, women, and more interesting dangers. This is one of the most difficult and important questions for a young man: how do you engage with or understand female sexuality? My parents’ relationship never seemed sensual; it didn’t appear to be that kind of love: they were companions who cared for one another. Appearance, yearning, or the game of love, didn’t seem important to them, even in their speech.
    Where do you learn how to desire, then? How do you allow a woman to teach you about their pleasure? At least I grasped that I would have to make a space for desire to occur. Then, I suppose, one just had to pay attention. Living more authentically, and being more politicised and aware of their situation and who they were – women becoming subjects in their own right, as it would have been put then – the women I knew were far ahead in the way they considered their identity and what they wanted to be.
    I was afraid of excitement, of women, of sex, of losing my bearings and my mind. I must have been seventeen when a woman gave me acid, pulled up her top and invited me to lie down so she could masturbate me. She did it slowly, almost as an exercise, to show me what was possible, how she might control me and how I could learn to synthesise pleasure. Lying there, I witnessed her concentration, and then I let go and tripped in my head. At theend I felt paralysed, and it took me a few minutes to learn to walk again. A little older than me and more knowledgeable about everything, she was experienced enough to say – when I came round – that that wasn’t all.
    There was something else. It was, she explained, difficult for her to masturbate in front of a man; she felt exposed and embarrassed. But if she could get over that, I might see something essential or even useful for the future. After all, it took a man to know a woman, to understand her needs and passion, to look at her as she wanted to be seen. So she pulled down her clothes and showed herself. You have to admire the nerve of someone who could do that. She came quickly, and a few times more. I held and kissed her, amazed and fascinated by the beauty and intensity of this form of education, and I wondered what she needed me for, and what I could be for her, if anything. She said, well, you can’t hold your own hand, and you can’t desire or make love to yourself, can you?
    *
    My father and I would walk in the park on the weekends. Dad always had the immigrant’s optimism. He believed we ought to succeed in the new country; that was why he wanted to be here. Yet I still don’t know how his conversations were so inspiring. It was a great thing he had, knowing how to make you excited aboutthe future, about what could be achieved and the pleasures which were possible. Not, of course, that you were allowed to leave him behind. My father, neglected by his own father, indeed by both his parents, broke and re-established the trans-generational inheritance, and became a good father himself. Yet he required his children as friends and accomplices. Now I am like him, and much different. He’s long dead but every day I am in conversation with him. I’d like him to be here so I could kiss him or kill him.
    *
    My youngest son and I, on our run, slow down. My legs are tired; we walk together. I like to walk slowly. This is how we can talk about schools, sports, magic tricks, concentration, his friends, and how he’d never read anything I’d written. It’s a lovely long moment between conflicts. From the parent’s perspective, it is not hard to frighten or control young children, even when they are maddening. But – difficult to intimidate and almost impossible to charm