Chapter Three Bad Now
Three
Bad Now
Transitioning from vacation, you have to pay the credit card bill. The car you took to the beach is full of sand. Your sunburn starts to peel. I anticipated fallout from my adventuring, but there was almost none.
“I kissed Ryan,” I told Paul as soon as we were alone.
“What? Really?” he said. “I was wondering why you seemed so cheerful.”
“You’re not mad?”
“No, I think it’s great! I love the new you! Tell me everything.”
To Paul, my kissing Ryan was just a more intense version of the flirtation with other men that he liked. He enjoyed being with someone who other men desired, to see his wife flush with aliveness. He said he felt like I’d lost my sparkle. He’d feared it was gone for good, but now it was back.
When he and I met in college, we’d fallen in love fast. And then we’d never once seriously considered breaking up. He always said that he knew early on that he wanted to be with me forever, in part because he knew he’d never get bored. He praised me for being good company. I helped reconcile him to his family. His father had died a year before I went to London; when I went to clean out his apartment I was touched by all the photos of me he’d hung on his wall.
“You’d never gotten attention like that before you met Paul,” Veronica said. “He’s always been so into you. You knew he wasn’t going anywhere.”
I liked being married. I marveled at how that ceremony cast a spell, turned me into a new person, a wife . Then we had a child! Even more to bind us. I had holiday cards on the fridge and a ring on my finger. And having Nate had made me more ambitious. I wanted to make my family rich and strong and healthy, just as I’d fattened my baby by nursing him until he lolled back, milk dribbling down his chin as he slept.
With that baby now practically an adult, Paul and I often went out for a nice dinner and then had what we agreed was quite good sex for people our age.
I still liked him so much. I was sure I’d been hard to be around plenty of times for many reasons, but he kindly did not talk much about that, an omission more to his credit than mine. Yes, we had other problems, and they boiled down—as they do in so many marriages—to sex and money.
The sex part: he’d had an affair with a friend of his named Sarah when Nate was little. Well, not a real affair. They’d fallen for each other, which was rough enough. But Paul had told me before anything physical happened between them, and said he would give her up for me. They’d stopped hanging out. He felt a lot of guilt, but I’d reassured him that it was okay. He’d behaved well. I was proud of us for being open and honest with each other even about the hardest things.
The money part: I’d been asking him for almost as long as we’d been together to find some way to earn money aside from occasional gigs. I found supporting us stressful. But for whatever reason, I had a talent for hustling that he lacked.
The issue would come up every six months, and we’d have a long, hard conversation.
“You knew I wasn’t a stockbroker when you married me,” he would say. “You liked that I was this way.”
“Yes,” I’d reply, “but now we have a child. We need more money coming in.”
“I’d be happy to live on less,” he would say. “And the only way I’ll ever make money from my art is if I fully devote myself to it. Or have you lost faith in me?”
That would be the end of it. If I wanted to live on more than an artist’s income, that was for me to figure out. And so I’d compromised on that the same way I’d given in on not having more children even though I’d always wanted three.
I’d complain to Veronica on the phone, talk about the pressure of debt and how it meant I had to suspend my own creative work. Often I wished I was constitutionally able to live more like Paul did, with a low-stakes part-time day job. She’d say that I had two choices: I could leave him or suck it up. I chose the latter, year after year, because it seemed like a small price to pay for a companionable marriage. We were on the same team, and each other’s biggest fan. When I traveled, Paul took care of Nate, fed the cat, cleaned.
My mother was impressed, she said, that I’d built a life where I could have so much, with a man who even cooked. She had been undermined at many points in her life, given up on various dreams because she lacked support. When she was young she studied ballet. She was so good that one of the best ballerinas in the world wanted my mother to be the little girl opposite her in The Nutcracker . But her parents said no; they didn’t want to take her to that many rehearsals and give up their Christmas vacation. She begged to be allowed to fulfill what she saw as her destiny. They still said no.
In my estimation, my father didn’t properly respect her dreams either. She’d tried to travel for work when I was little, but when she was away he didn’t watch me closely. Before and after school I walked alone through lower Manhattan, even though a little boy three years older than me had vanished nearby not long before and was presumed dead. My father said he couldn’t do more; he had writing to do. My mother stopped traveling so much. At parties with her husband’s intellectual colleagues my mother held her own but felt, in her high heels and thick mascara, like Gone with the Wind ’s brothel madam Belle Watling flouncing into a Roz Chast cartoon.
He said she didn’t have creative ambition in the same way he did, and so it made sense that more space was made for his work. He doubted my seriousness too.
Drowning in my day job and freelance work when Nate was a tiny baby, I told him that Veronica had given me good advice: “Three words: Lower. The. Bar.”
“Well, I could never do that,” he said. “I have standards.”
He looked down on me for ghostwriting, and for agreeing to publicity when my books came out. When I told him about interviews I was doing, thinking he’d be proud, he said, “Promotion uber alles , huh?”
I was already living a life my mother and grandmother never could. And now on top of all that I was being allowed—encouraged even—to kiss people. As one relationship after another had imploded around us and many had ended over affairs, Paul and I had endured. We felt sorry for other people who didn’t have what we did.
One night as I folded clothes in the living room, I told Paul that maybe he’d been right: I could be a bit more like Ado Annie in Oklahoma , for which I’d served on the tech crew in middle school. She sang the promiscuity anthem “I Cain’t Say No.” What an inspiration! Where was the harm in Ado Annie’s failure to say “nix” to farmhands making passes at her?
I said I was feeling weirdly alive since London.
“You’re bad now!” Paul said, sounding proud. “I think this feels mystical because it’s your identity. You’re feeling free and seen and embodied the way young people do when they come out. This is who you are and you’re finally admitting it.”
He wondered if this could be the start of something even more ambitious. He thought perhaps we could start by reading the polyamory book Polysecure . He thought being more open might help us lead more exciting and more actualized lives, both as individuals and as a couple. And he thought it would be hot.
The idea didn’t particularly turn me on. Still, I did like how I felt in London, and there had been no negative fallout from the trip. If the question was should I stay married to Paul or kiss a friend every once in a while, then obviously I’d choose marriage. But if the question was if I’d like to do both with no consequences other than radiating this new sexual energy, the answer was equally obvious.
“Men like that give themselves a lot of permission ,” my mother once said of someone we knew who had affairs.
Yes, that’s right—permission is gross , I’d thought at the time. Asking for what you wanted, doing what you pleased—in spite of the indulgent language around self-care, a surprising amount of shame and resistance still showed up when we started to ask, even a little, No, really, what do I want and why don’t I do it?
Now, though, I wondered why permission was so bad. There were a number of well-written, thoughtful articles just then swirling around online about negotiating open marriages. They didn’t make it sound ideal; in some cases, it seemed transactional. I couldn’t help thinking that it meant getting out in front of one potential problem—the danger of illicit extramarital sex—by creating a new problem: the emotional and logistical complexity of licit extramarital sex.
Was the idea of an open marriage traditionally more appealing to men than women because of some kind of back-brain insecurity women had by virtue of facing more consequences from pregnancy than men? Indoctrination into fairy-tale fantasies about exclusive soulmate romance? Or could it be that, even in the age of reliable birth control, we hadn’t let ourselves desire more? Postpandemic, the time felt right for radical thinking: Did we want to go back to an office? Was living in a city still important? If all the usual rules had gone out the window, what if sexually, too, we just…did what we wanted?
I’d always liked books by drunk older male writers, and I finally realized why: By eight thirty in the morning I’d fed my child and gotten him off to school, listened to the news, done a load of laundry, answered a dozen emails, edited a stack of pages—and by two p.m. a Harry Crews character had drunk two beers and checked on his captured bird of prey. Who needed fantasy novels when there existed such exotic tales of dissipation?
Nate saw me reading Harry Crews’s The Hawk Is Dying while drinking coffee one morning.
“I just saw a falconry demonstration online,” he said. “Want to see?”
I did.
He brought his phone over. On his screen, a beautiful bird launched off his keeper’s gauntlet. The announcer said, “The bird will hunt now and bring back its catch.” The people watched as the bird flew away from the falconer’s hand, up, up into the clouds. It snatched a pigeon out of the sky…and kept on flying. For an uncomfortably long period of time the crowd stared into the sky waiting for the bird to bring the pigeon back to his fleece-wearing handler.
Eventually, they stopped looking up and turned quizzically toward one another as the trainer continued to squint at the clouds.
I burst out laughing. “It just kept going?” I said.
“Yes!” said Nate with glee. We watched several more times, trying to pinpoint the exact second that the falconer realized the falcon wouldn’t be coming back.