Cream & Sugar is a novel about sex. Middle-aged people and their sex.
Oh, let’s not kid ourselves. They’re middle-aged. There is no sex. There used to be sex. And it was good sex. But things have changed. There’s Elton Pierce, white, middle-class, a disillusioned ad executive who’s gone as far as he can go in the business without throwing himself out a window. And there’s Giselle, black, modestly successful author of young adult gothic novels, burned out but unsure what to do next. Together, they have two teenaged children who crave attention from indifferent parents.
On a whim, the irreligious Elton goes to church. There, he meets an environmental activist, Liane, young, white, beautiful. Liane stirs in Elton things he hasn’t felt in years. Elton is prepared to give it all up—wife, kids, job—to reclaim those dwindling feelings. He lobs an emotional bomb into his home. Sifting through the wreckage, he discovers the remains of pat assumptions about race, belief, family, the environment, and, above all, desire.
Oh, let’s not kid ourselves. Desire is too high-minded a word. The problem has more to do with Elton’s testicles. The challenge is to rein them in before they ruin everything. Otherwise, he risks turning himself into a sad imitation of celebrity asshole tabloid fodder.
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I spend the morning trying to write but it isn’t working for me because the events of last night are still clattering around inside my head. I stand. I sit. I boil a pot of tea. I change a light bulb above the kitchen sink. I write a shopping list for the grocery store. I try to teach the dog to roll over, but she’s too stupid to learn. I search for a metaphorical lesson in the failure of my stupid dog tricks, but nothing comes to mind. The discovery of a metaphorical lesson would give me something of substance to write about. That way I could justify time otherwise wasted. By eleven o’clock, I’ve popped open a bag of potato chips, but as I return to the living room where my laptop waits for me, I pass my reflection in the French doors and decide instead to dump all the potato chips into the garbage can under the kitchen sink. I contemplate masturbating but Giselle is in her office at the back of the house and I may not be able to accomplish the deed without her knowing—not that her knowing has ever stopped me before. What I don’t want her to know is that I find it so difficult to write. If I’ve quit my job to write, then I should write, not masturbate. If Giselle catches me masturbating when I should be writing, then she’ll pounce on me with all the reasons why this is the most ill-conceived plan that ever entered a man’s head.
I’ve never told Giselle this, but I admire her—maybe even envy her. From my seat in the living room I can hear her at work: sometimes an efficient tap-tap-tap on her keyboard, sometimes a muffled voice on the telephone, then back to her keyboard. She has always impressed me with the discipline she applies to everything she undertakes. I know I shouldn’t make comparisons (we are, after all, different people with different personalities), but comparisons seem inevitable now that I’ve decided to write. It doesn’t help that I have no office of my own and will have to float from room to room. Each day, as I search for a place to settle myself, I’ll have to pass the door to her office and glance in at the orderly world she has made for herself. It’s a world of boundaries like dawn and dusk, good and evil, and it’s a world of inviolable rules which govern the use of rosebuds and garlic, crosses and holy water, reflections and silver bullets. In Giselle’s world, the vampires are sympathetic. They are the outcasts. They are the hunted. Sometimes, not even the bonds of love are strong enough to overcome the revulsion and fear people hold for vampires.
I can hear the roar and grind of a garbage truck approaching. From my place on the couch, I reach up to the louvered slats of the window shades and tilt them so I can see out to the street. Here comes the truck, blue with a yellow cab, and spilling a stream of stinky liquid that glistens on the pavement and refracts the sunlight in shades of mauve and orange. If I squint until the scene blurs, the liquid looks beautiful like the abstract background for an ad. It used to be that two men worked a garbage truck: one would drive and the other would swing off the back even before the truck had pulled to a halt and would hoist cans and green garbage bags, then throw back the empty cans before moving on to the next driveway. If I was home when they drove past, I would nod and wave or say hello, and if they had to pause to compact the trash, I might chat for a minute with the man on the back. But now, they’ve automated even our waste collection. Automation came first to production when Henry Ford built his assembly line. Now the circle is complete. Automation has embraced the whole life-cycle of our products even unto death, or at least unto landfill. Now the man in the cab does everything. He pulls up to the driveway, then engages an arm which extends its claws and grabs hold of the plastic garbage container, tipping it up and dumping its contents, shaking the container up and down—bang, bang, bang—to make sure every last drop of our biweekly excrescence has fallen into the belly of the beast. Now there’s no human contact in the process. The man stays in his cab and looks out only when he needs to be sure that he’s lined up the claws with the container.
More than a loss of human contact, what I notice is that a measure of violence has seeped into the process. The machinery is noisier. Parts bang and clang and wheeze and moan. And when it’s done, the plastic container lies on its side with lid wide open, looking for all the world like a dog that’s been struck by a car and left to die on the lawn.
Note: on my future planet Earth, waste collection will be wholly automated. There won’t even be trucks and drivers. Instead, all garbage will disappear the way our sewage does now—through an infrastructure below the ground that no one sees and no one thinks about. But all of it has to go somewhere. What will happen to it? Where will it go? Landfill? The ocean? Incineration? Catapults flinging it into Québec?
The phone rings and a few seconds later Giselle’s feet come padding through the kitchen and into the living room: It’s that priest of yours.
I take the phone from her and say hello. Pastor Rick’s voice returns to me in a polished baritone and it sets me to wondering whether, once upon a time, he sang as a professional. He says he’s just gotten word. He says I’m quite a character. Really something else. Liane called him this morning and told him all about my escapade last night. At first I worry that he’s going to yell at me for interfering with something I don’t understand. I shouldn’t be helping homeless schizophrenics when the issues are so complex that they stymie even the most seasoned mental health advocates. What arrogance, then, for me to intervene. But that’s not what Pastor Rick has called to say. Instead, he’s called to gush. He thinks it’s wonderful, just wonderful, that someone from the church should stand up for George. The poor man has so few friends in the world, etc., etc., etc. Meanwhile another voice is chattering inside my head and it gets so loud I wonder if maybe I’ve caught some of George’s schizophrenia: so Liane called; she must have been impressed; I hope nobody gets the wrong idea and thinks I’m nice; I hope people realize that my motives are as banal as the plastic baggies for picking up dog shit; I bet when Martin Luther King Jr. was giving his I-have-a-dream speech he was thinking: I’m so gonna get laid after this one.