What's wrong with American men and women?

My skillful Turkish bed mate told me, in vivid detail.

By Ann Marlowe

Jul 29, 2003 | "Fuck Allah. Fuck Mohammed." A smile played on Kemal's handsome, hard face, but his body was tense. Five minutes ago, he'd introduced himself and urged me to try an hors d'oeuvre at his friend's birthday party. Somehow we'd gotten onto Islam, and now this outburst. Most upper-class Turks I'd met were unsympathetic to religion, but Kemal's vehemence was unusual. Perhaps you had to have once really, really believed in your God to come to this point.

Kemal continued in his perfect, nuanced American School English, speaking of a loss of faith that had been spurred by reading Omar Khayyam, and I almost laughed. This reminded me of the last man I'd cared about, the only Muslim I'd ever dated. Amir had said he was a believer, but the two men shared a bedrock gravity and naiveté about religion I'd never found in a Christian or Jew I had dated. Here was also a seriousness about the written word I could only envy as a writer. Oh, I could imagine a fundamentalist Christian turning against his upbringing and cursing Jesus, but I couldn't imagine it happening because of a poet. In Anglo-Saxon culture, poetry has not had such power for hundreds of years. But Muslims are people of the book, and as a student of Farsi I knew the centrality of poetry to Islam.

I let the topic of Allah drop, sensing that the cursing was part of a flirtation. And to my delight, for I was very attracted to him, Kemal turned the conversation to sex. At home in Istanbul he had a girlfriend, and he was convinced she was cheating on him during his three-week vacation in New York.

"Listen, this year in Istanbul I slept with one Italian woman who was on her honeymoon and another, Turkish, who was married for only one month. What does that tell you? "

"That you're cute." What it really told me was that Kemal was preoccupied with female fidelity and was sending out signals that attracted women who were promiscuous, or wanted to be.

"And you, do you sleep around when you have a boyfriend?"

"It depends. Anyway, I don't have a boyfriend."

We soon came to the topic I'd dreaded, my age. Kemal wanted to know the year of the first of my five trips to Turkey, but it had been in 1978 so I didn't want to say. It turned out he was just 32, 12 years my junior, the same age as Amir. Fate was laughing at me; though I'd sometimes found our age difference intriguing or moving, more often I'd been disappointed by Amir's immaturity. I was telling myself that it would be perfectly understandable if Kemal walked away, but instead he asked if we could go somewhere for a drink.

I suggested my house, a little nervous because we hadn't so much as touched. But when we got home things moved very quickly. Kemal was everything I was looking for in bed, or almost everything. He was intense but without the slightest flicker of warmth, not even the reflexes of a man used to caressing a girlfriend. There was no love to be made here. We had cold and breathtaking sex for a couple of hours, and then Kemal moved very far away, as the queen-size mattress allowed, and began to speak. I was disappointed that the sex was finished; Kemal was a skilled and satisfying lover. Perhaps his mind had drifted to his girlfriend; I missed what I had felt for Amir.

"If you get too close the sex isn't exciting anymore. That's the problem with most marriages. Couples should have separate bedrooms, the way my parents and grandparents did. They shouldn't sleep together like lovers, holding each other. And you don't need to talk so much to your girlfriend. You talk to your friends. When you meet a woman you want to fuck, you don't talk to her. You see if you like touching her, you smell each other. Then you go to bed together."

I sat up straight, all languor gone. These were the same questions that obsessed me. Perhaps Kemal was right, though he'd never been married. Some of the marriages I knew that worked best were those where husband and wife spent a lot of time apart. My own longest relationship -- seven years -- might have owed its longevity to two months-long stretches we spent living in different cities. And I'd grown to feel that Americans were too quick to make friends of their lovers, or to think that what they needed in a lover or a spouse was another friend. If I could satisfy my curiosity about a man by talking with him, I didn't need to go to bed with him. The ones I wanted, now, were those whose hearts I learned through their bodies, those I got to know by making love.

I wanted to put feeling first, and sometimes it seemed the only way I could do that was to date men who didn't see a relationship as mainly conversational. Perhaps this was why there had been a lot of musicians in my love life years ago. And it could be that men from some of the Muslim countries shared this style. Amir had spoken more to me, and much more eloquently, when we were friends than he ever did in the hours and hours we spent making love. Physical intimacy made American men voluble and open, but it had quieted Amir.

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