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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
When my first marriage ended, I thought I'd figured one thing out: Don't ever get married. Not if you enjoy sex. And then I met Janet.
Oct 14, 2003 | I've been married for 21 years now, and so the moment Salon approached me about an essay on sex and marriage, I rushed downstairs from my office and told my wife. She was making the bed. "I guess you know how to act," I said, "if you want to come out well in this."
"I hope you're not going to do that weary old take-my-wife routine," she said.
"It's traditional," I said, "to do that weary old take-my-wife routine. If a man alone in the wilderness says something, and there's no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?"
"It's also traditional," she said, "for the wife to not like it."
Twenty-one years is a long time. You'd think I might have something wise to say. Wisdom and sex, though -- they don't often go together.
God to Adam: I've got good news and I've got bad news.
Adam: The good news first, then.
God: I'm going to give you a brain and also a penis. The brain is capable of great intellectual feats. With the brain you can overcome many obstacles, plan a useful, joyful life. The penis, on the other hand, can provide the most extraordinary physical pleasure.
Adam: So what's the bad news?
God: You only get enough blood to use one of them at a time.
Advice I can't give you, but history I can. Everyone Janet and I knew assumed that our history would be a short one -- nasty, brutish and short. After we first got together, we made a pact: Tell no one. We were afraid that the news might unsettle our other and more important connections. The carrying on carried on, the word leaked out, and our friends were impatient with us. When I told my brother we'd picked up a puppy together, he was not sanguine about the dog's prospects.
"She rolls over on her back, and you see the cutest pink belly," I said.
"I know all about those cute bellies," he said. "The puppy will outlive the relationship. Our mother will get custody."
Janet and I hadn't even liked each other at first. She worked with my sister at Newsweek and had come out to my parents' house for Christmas dinner. We were seated side by side. I didn't say a word to her. She didn't say a word to me. My father was at the head of the table and wearing his red vest. When he was funny, Janet would let out a little laugh. Not a big laugh, mind you, but a little laugh. Clearly audible if you were sitting right beside her, which I happened to be.
I told my father that I'd used my bonus money to buy a Smith Corona electric typewriter. "The ribbons come in cartridges. If you want to write in blue, you use the blue cartridge. If you want to write in red, you use the red cartridge. If you want to make a mistake, you use the mistake cartridge."
This got a laugh, but not from Janet.
"I hope it will make me a better writer," I said, and laughed. Nobody else laughed.
Janet broke the silence. "I have a Smith Corona," she said.
"And?" I said.
"And," she said, "you have to change the ribbon a lot."
I was married to somebody else at the time and Janet had a boyfriend. In any case, no sparks flew.
When my first union broke up, I moved into a room off my parents' kitchen. My father was lonely then and glad to have me around. "I love the sound of your foot on the stair," he used to say. He felt compelled, though, to give me a fatherly grilling. He called me into his bedroom for a conference. His bedroom was my sister's old bedroom.
When he asked me what had been wrong with my marriage, I told him first that she hadn't liked him. This might have been enough to inflame his sense of outrage, but I went on and told him that my first wife and I rarely had sex. "We'll go a year at a time," I said. "She never wants to."
"Well, that's ridiculous," my father told me. "Of course you had to leave her." This was said in my sister's old bedroom. We were in my sister's old bedroom because that's where my father slept. He claimed to have been ejected from the master bedroom. Had he been? Who knows? Sexual roles are endlessly complicated, aren't they? What actually goes on in a bedroom often has nothing to do with what is supposed to go on. My father was a wonderful/horrible father. He seems also to have been a wonderful/horrible husband. Sometimes he'd shower my mother with gifts. Other times with insults. I remember him sitting at the dining room table singing:
I love my wife
I love my baby
I love my biscuits dipped in gravy
Oh, pretty little black-eyed Susie.
He was always falling in love. My mother tells me now that he never went on a plane trip without thinking that he might meet the person who would change his life.
My first wife and I traveled with him to Bulgaria. She was beautiful and highly flirtatious. The other men on the trip made cracks about how I should be burning calories with her, instead of taking the long runs with which I started every day. They thought -- and who can blame them? -- that I should be bedding my wife. But I was ahead of my time. I knew even then that there was such a thing as rape within the marriage. This was one crime of which I remained innocent. In the meantime my father was bedding the translator.
