In 1970, when novelist Jill Ciment was a precocious 17-year-old living in Los Angeles with her three siblings and their struggling single mother, she began a relationship with her art teacher, a married man 30 years her senior. Improbably, their love affair became a marriage that lasted until her husband’s death in 2016. Ciment wrote about their early romance in her 1996 memoir, Half a Life. In a new book, Consent, Ciment reconsiders their story in the light of 21st-century sexual mores and her own altered perspective.
Although Consent depicts in detail the couple’s first sexual encounter and compares the 1996 account with a more bluntly honest one informed by the era of #MeToo, Ciment is not interested in labeling herself a victim. She’s more concerned with the larger question of how to make sense of a long partnership built from such a questionable beginning: “Was my marriage — the half century of intimacy, the shifting power, the artistic collaborations, the sex, the shared meals, the friends, the travels, the illnesses, the money worries, the houses, the dogs — fruit from the poisonous tree?”
As she describes him in Consent, the man who would become Ciment’s husband — the painter Arnold Mesches, referred to simply as “Arnold” throughout the book — is not so much predatory toward teenage Jill as he is selfish and vaguely desperate. He’s a man floundering in middle age, disappointed in his career and somewhat detached from his wife, children, and age-appropriate girlfriend. When a headstrong, emotionally needy girl returns his sexual interest, he knows it’s wrong to act on his impulses, but denying himself the pleasure of her body requires more willpower than he’s got — and then he falls hard, abandoning home, family, and mistress to be with her.
Arnold’s choices are so clearly out of bounds by today’s standards that it’s easy to forget how such behavior was seen 50 years ago. Ciment does a great job of conveying the sexual attitudes that prevailed in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, especially in the leftwing, arty, academic circles that Arnold was part of and she longed to join. A few months after she begins the relationship with Arnold, she submits a portfolio to California Institute of the Arts consisting of “charcoal drawings of explicit sexual acts from the vantage point of the woman,” meant to serve as the basis for an animated film. At her interview for a scholarship, the dean of the film school invites several faculty members — all men — to join in poring over the drawings, with some of them taking the opportunity to put a “fatherly” hand on Ciment’s shoulder or back. It’s a cringe-inducing scene, made more so by Ciment’s naïve belief that the men respect her art: “I assumed their curiosity about me was an affirmation of my talent, not the fact that I had submitted the San Fernando Valley version of the Kama Sutra.”
Of course, actually sleeping with an underage girl, much less leaving your wife for one, was slightly scandalous even in the freewheeling ‘70s, but not so much so that Arnold wasn’t invited to brunch with Ciment’s family. His only brush with the police comes when Ciment’s 7-year-old brother is abused by a scheming pedophile, and the detectives investigating the case give the side-eye to the older man who introduces himself as “a friend of the family” but appears to be attached to the victim’s teenage sister, not the mother. Ciment suppressed her own doubts about their relationship at the time and was even unfazed by Arnold’s prior infidelity, of which she was fully aware. “I accepted his Gordian sex life,” she writes, “as the birthright of the male artist.”
Her questions seem to have arrived in full force later, after the marriage and especially through Arnold’s declining years and her widowhood. They are deeply personal questions she frames as a writerly dilemma. How can the narrative of this relationship be reconciled with itself? How did that beginning lead to this ending? She struggles to make the progression work even in fiction:
Lolita and Humbert Humbert marry and live happily ever after? Who would believe such a story? Who would believe a scene in which Lolita takes Humbert Humbert for cataract surgery? Or worries about his prostate? How would I compose the scene where Lolita arranges hospice care for the man who supposedly stole her childhood?
Consent is more exploration than confession, and though Ciment is a clear-eyed reporter committed to not softening the edges of her account, her memoir finally lands in a place of tenderness and love, questions unresolved but not unanswered: “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.”
Maria Browning is a fifth-generation Tennessean who grew up in Erin and Nashville. Her work has appeared in Guernica, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, and The New York Times. She’s the editor of Chapter 16.
Tagged: Book Reviews
