Scott Spencer, Endless Love

invitations to embarrassment & acts of nature

“Immobile, we would have looked like the victims of a savage crime.”

My usual policy regarding sex scenes in books is: don’t.

When an author, with a well-placed line break, steps out of the bedroom at the critical moment, I inwardly give thanks. The fact of sex is narratively indispensable — it binds Anna to Vronsky, it’s the volatile fuel in the engine of many an Alice Munro story. The act of sex, on the other hand, tends to be a narrative dud — familiar acts, familiarly described; an otherwise respectable author’s invitation to embarrassment (e.g., from Presumed Innocent: “Barbara rolled around with my pin driven deep inside her.”)

The impulse not to cut away — to test out the size and flexibility of one’s thesaurus — is, however, understandable. An author’s most reliable indicator that the writing is going well is when he feels something. If, while writing a death scene, you find yourself tearing up, you can rest assured that what you’re writing isn’t absolute drivel. It therefore seems reasonable to assume that if, while writing a sex scene, you find yourself breathing heavily, you must be moving in the right direction.

But you aren’t. Why the difference? Most of our emotional wiring — the bits that touch sadness and joy and regret — are difficult to access; they lay buried in walls, connected to panels of mislabeled switches. To reliably activate one of these feelings, with only the alphabet in your toolbox, requires considerable expertise.

Lust isn’t like that. Its wiring is idiotically available — a knot of sparking wires dangling out of someone’s open kitchen window. Lust takes hardly anything to activate; it barely takes literacy. The internet is not littered with forums in which people hastily provoke each other into fits of reflectiveness.

All of which is to say: when an author does write sex well — when he makes the familiar equipment seem dazzling and strange; when he traces the wires of lust all the way to the reader’s home circuit breaker — it deserves note. No one writes sex better than Scott Spencer, and nowhere is Spencer better than in Endless Love. 

Endless Love, published in 1979, has I think been mis-shelved by the culture. Due to the Brooke Shields movie, or maybe just the subject matter (teen romance), most thoughtful readers assume that it belongs in the giveaway box with Erich Segal’s Love Story — an overwrought, faintly embarrassing bit of period trash. 

Go grab it from the curb. It’s a serious, and seriously affecting, novel that can stand beside the best and most anguished things by Harold Brodkey and Norman Rush. I kept dipping into it, to write this, and I kept finding myself losing half-hours. Reading it feels like swimming underwater: nothing else in the environment quite registers.

The book is about the love affair (illicit, ecstatic, agonizing) between two Chicago teenagers, David and Jade. David narrates the book from a point well into adulthood — he and Jade haven’t spoken in years — but the relationship doesn’t just continue to live in him; it seems ready at any moment to burst, a la Alien , directly out of his chest.

Here’s David, remembering peering in the window at Jade, during one of the stretches when they were forbidden to see each other: 

“And then there was Jade. Curled into an armchair, wearing a loose, old-fashioned blouse and a pair of unflattering shorts that reached almost to the knee. She looked chaste, sleepy, and had the disenfranchised air of a sixteen-year-old girl at home with her family on a Saturday night.”

Early in the book he sets a fire, but his use of matches and newspaper seems superfluous. He could ignite wood with the intensity of his gaze.

The best thing in the book — the thing you’ll remember long after you read it — is the thirty-page sex scene toward the end. I’ve had conversations with friends about this scene that resemble the conversations between witnesses of some wild and merciless act of nature. Oh my God, did you see that?

David and Jade have, by this point, broken up, but circumstances — operatic, heartrending circumstances — have brought them back together in a hotel room, where they intend to sleep chastely through the night. They do not.

Instead they have sex that is so vividly described that you’ll feel guilty, afterward, meeting your partner’s eyes.

“I carefully touched my erection. It felt as if its root spanned my entire body, ganglia down through my thighs, the backs of my legs, clinging to the soles of my feet and up through my belly, shooting straight up into my throat.” 

…

“’I want to come,’ she whispered. ‘Help me. Please.’ There was something wild and a little cruel in her voice, like an escaped prisoner asking for water.”

…

“I moved my hand back and forth. At one point I became aware I was losing the sensation in my right arm — the arm that supported all my weight as I leaned over Jade — but this awareness passed, along with the feeling.”

I’m blushing, typing these excerpts up, but notice the quality of the writing — the wonderfully apt word ganglia; the fineness of the hearing in that escaped prisoner asking for water; the unsexy authenticity of that numb right arm. This is not the sound of an author trying to arouse the reader or himself; this is the sound of an author experiencing a fit of hallucinogenic clarity.

And here’s another thing I’d just as soon not type: Jade happens to be, on this particular night, menstruating. Which means that blood is among the bodily fluids present.

“She brought our faces together, not in a kiss — our mouths were slippery inches apart — but in an indiscriminate crush.”

I tell you this not because of prurience but because my favorite bit comes in the aftermath, when David and Jade have finally — finally — fallen asleep, and are awoken by the attempted intrusion of housekeeping. 

“A few hours later, a chambermaid unlocked the door and opened it as far as the safety chain would allow. The sharp metal bang awakened us both and we sat up in bed.”

Jade calls out that they’re still sleeping, and then: 

“Jade sank back down into the bed. The room was filled with dull white light now and I looked us over. We were both covered in dried blood. The sheets were stiff with it. If we hadn’t put the chain on, the poor cleaning woman would have walked in on us and perhaps fainted. Immobile, we would have looked like the victims of a savage crime.”

This is sex with the brutality, the stickiness, the shame and fear and wonder, left in. Immobile: a formal and respectful word that conveys the full emotional flavor of morning-after stupefaction. A savage crime: that word savage carving a path between this Manhattan hotel room and the animal kingdom.

You have just witnessed a wild and merciless act of nature. You have reckoned with the glories and limitations of our bodies, with their phenomenal expressiveness and maddening disobedience. Arousal is the least of it.