The Bidet

One of my four sisters has been exceptionally kind in the last sixty or seventy years in introducing me to everything that matters in life.  She was the first and for many many years the only member of my family to meet head-on my obvious desire for sexual relations with males; I was probably fifteen at the time and she nineteen.  A year later she taught me to jitterbug, for which I have been forever grateful since I so love to dance, and learning to do that made me the envy of all my high school classmates at a time when I could have easily been dismissed as a creep and a queer.  When I was eighteen we were both living in New York, and she took me in hand and down to MacDougal Street, in those days lined with what we would now call gay bars, took me in and sat there to the side for a while until I overcame my shyness.  A half decade went by until we reconnected; it was on the occasion of my marriage and she sent us a crate for a wedding present containing what she called a "bidet."  This was 1956, and I don't think either I or my wife knew what the word meant, just that my sister now married to a wealthy man in Palm Beach obviously would think up something extraordinary and glamorous for a wedding gift.  The object remained in its crate and in our attic, and went with us as we moved to New Haven and Palo Alto and back to Massachusetts, forever a mystery.  Still and all when we began traveling to Europe I did indeed discover what a bidet was and that it was for something other than washing out one's underthings in the hotel room, as so many Americans naively believed was its primary function.  When we were divorced, the bidet went with me to my new house in Cambridge and I hired a carpenter and plumber to build me a second bathroom on the top floor and install the bidet.  As I now knew from living in Rome a bidet is a very handy device far beyond the cleansing of a woman's private parts following intercourse.  Europeans all knew about the possibility of washing up one's bum in a bidet without having recourse to taking a daily shower.  Oh, the joy of it all, not to have to get one's hair wet, not to have to wet the entire body, just to be able to smell sweet again after the morning's dump.  Time passed and I moved away from this house and my beloved bidet to a place much more American and, alas, without a bidet.  Then it was, at age seventy or so, after I had had prostate cancer, and a treatment with radioactive pellets shot into that organ, I began to notice a definite new and not terribly pleasant aroma arising from the crotch.  On my follow up visit to the oncologist I complained of this, and he shook his head mystified, but it so happened that he had invited a medical student who was specializing to be a urologist to sit in on the appointment who immediately said: "Oh, that's 'old man's smell.'  We were just studying it yesterday."  I thought to myself that this kid would fail Bedside Manner 101 if I were handing out the grades.  But there it was: Old Man's Smell.  And I no longer had a bidet.  One of life's great inventions, I recommend it to my readers, one and all.