Consent: A Memoir

by Jill Ciment

The story of how a couple meets, who kisses whom first, who declares their love first, is as instrumental to a couple’s mythology as a creation myth is to a society’s ideology.

I was the only sugar baby I knew who lived with a sugar daddy without sugar.

He not only wrote a solicitation to an underage girl; when he didn’t hear back from the girl, he called her.

I no longer believe in withholding something just because it is obvious. Clichés become clichés because they are true.

Having a secret that someone else wants is powerful. I began to see how I could control his attention not just with my body but with my mind. I could not have imagined anything more erotic.

I didn’t yet know how to explain to the group that his age was my aphrodisiac, that I needed to be desired by someone older and important so that I could feel special.

My mother had warned me never to become reliant on a man, never to allow myself to get trapped in marriage and have to chew off my own leg to escape, as she had.

A story stops when the writer doesn’t know what to say next; it ends when there is nothing more to be said.

It finally sank in: To love wasn’t just to feel love, but to act lovingly.

“After so many years, it’s not losing the man that matters,” they had all agreed, “it’s losing the life.” I had taken another woman’s life and I knew it.

The taller of the two gave her the name of a counselor who specialized in sexually abused children. “You’re lucky Pete is a boy,” he told my mother as he was leaving. “Boys are always believed. Not that the girls aren’t, it just takes longer.”

How do you comfort someone when the source of their anguish is inconceivable to you?

Isn’t that what happily ever after means? A love that lasts long enough that one lover is there to close the other lover’s eyelids?

What I really wanted to say but couldn’t because it sounded to me then, as it sounds to me now, callow and sour and selfish, was: You are old and I am young and it should be my turn. Instead, I said, “I hope no one comes to your opening.”

“He is getting a second chance at sixty-two, have some compassion,” my mother said. “He may be old enough to be your father, but remember, he isn’t your parent. He does not love you unconditionally.”

Does a story’s ending excuse its beginning? Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later? Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?

I had intended to write the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but I could not find it, or else I found it everywhere.

Were my acts selfless, or was this the price I was willing to pay for my own eternal youth—to always be the younger woman? After all, I suspected that my Shangri-la would vanish upon his death and I would become old overnight.

“Do you know what worries me most,” she told Arnold. “That for the remainder of my life, my only thoughts will be about death, that I will no longer be able to wonder what I want for dinner without the death bell tolling.” “I hear that bell all the time. I thought it was the dinner bell,” Arnold said. My mother laughed. They would have made an interesting couple.