GOOD IN BED: How it Started

As with any slippery slope, it began with innuendo, and nobody was better at Innuendo than Michael Cunningham

Good in Bed Inscription #1

Back in 1983, still an undergrad, I had a working scholarship to attend Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, or “B’Loaf”, and my job was “waitroid”, a proto “they/them” pronoun to put all wait staff in their place. But we got tips! And if we entertained the lunch and dinner crowds, we got bigger tips. So, among other things, I once stripped in the middle of the dining hall. To get bigger tips. Michael Cunningham, who had not yet denied the existence of his first novel, was very pleased with my performance and put a lot of money into the waitroid bowl.

Eight years later, his marvelous novel A Home at the End of the World was published. I had read that wild and awful first chapter as a standalone story in the New Yorker, the part where the main character’s brother walks through a sliding glass door at a cocktail party and passes away before our very eyes. I had to have a signed edition, and when it was my turn in line for an inscription at the bookstore, I reminded Michael of my striptease at B’Loaf and he had no memory of it. In other words, I was unmemorably naked. He was also very sorry for it, and signed my book like this.

That’s okay, Michael. I remember you. You were good in bed. Well, your books were good reading in bed. I remember many of your amazing scenes—you’re the king of scenes. That drag queen in Flesh and Blood doing her makeup sitting on a stool stolen from Bonwit Teller—it is so strange what you remember—what I remember—from books….

What do you remember from books? A pocket watch in an Isaac Bashevis Singer story; Kiowa’s Bible in “The Things they Carried”; the rotten onion in Dostoyevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” scene; the big dead snake in Cather’s My Antonia; a stolen cufflink in Lev Raphael’s Winter Eyes—little things that lead to the bigger things.

But if I can remember all that weird little stuff, why can’t Michael remember all my weird little stuff from my striptease? Why? Why?