"Your husband is right, Mrs. Perez," said Dr. Simpson. "The distance between your clitoris and vagina is three centimeters, over an inch. He'd have great difficulty in contacting your clitoris while you're having sex."
"What else can I do?" I stared up at the bright light over the examining table.
"You can get up and get dressed," she said. I lifted my legs from the stirrups and climbed down from the table.
She dropped her speculum and other tools in a metal tray. "For what it's worth, about a hundred years ago, Princess Marie Bonaparte of France had the same condition. But she was the great-grand-niece of Napoleon the dictator. She had medical training and influence, and could do things that others couldn't. She measured that distance in a number of women. She thought it was a major cause of frigidity in women."
"What would the Princess say about three centimeters?"
"She'd say it'd be all but impossible for you to reach orgasm from a man's penis alone. A few lucky women have a clitoris so close to the vagina that they have no trouble. But most women are like you. The Princess would have pronounced you 'frigid'."
"Frigid? How can that be? I enjoy sex a lot."
She laughed. "We don't use that term in the 1960s. It's an old term that lumped a lot of conditions together, psychological and physical. Unfortunately, there's no corrective surgery for your problem."
I finished pulling my clothes on. "So what do I do?"
"Well, your husband has fingers, doesn't he? A drop of baby oil? If you can talk him into cooperating, you don't have to go without."
"Oh, he's very cooperative. But he has a nice tongue, too."
Dr. Simpson turned beet red, which puzzled me. A strange reaction from an experienced gynecologist.
"I don't like to advise oral sex," she said. "There's not enough information on diseases that might be transmitted that way. In any case, oral sex is illegal in Illinois and most other states. You don't want to talk about it too much around people you don't trust."
I laughed. "Well, you're not going to report me to the sex police, are you?"
"No, of course not, but I do have a duty to warn you."
"Well, if I have to go to jail over it, it's worth it. I've been getting the most powerful orgasms ever since my husband started using his tongue. He's like a different man." I kept the meaning of this last to myself.
She wrote a prescription for more birth control pills, so I wouldn't have to find my way out to Morris every time I needed them. On the way out, I paid my bill to Dr. Simpson's secretary. It was thirty dollars, but since I was now the sole signer on Craig's bank account, I was able to simply write a check. No more counting out dollars and quarters or arranging payments.
On my way out of the office, I removed the wedding ring again and put it back in its hiding place in my purse.
