Chapter 21 #2
“Okay, so I’m warm.” Henry pulls at his pretty lower lip. Thinks. Starts to say something, then thinks some more. “He doesn’t like that you’re a little bit gay, but he also doesn’t cheat on you,” he repeats back to himself. He frowns. “He’s too vanilla for you?”
“I would take vanilla. God. I would take vanilla.”
Henry stares at me. “But it’s your sex life?”
I swirl my wine in my glass. Do not dispute it.
“Faye.” Henry draws out my name, the way you do the word ohhhh. Ohhhh, this is bad. “Is he impotent?”
“Sometimes that would happen, before we stopped trying. But that was a long time ago now.”
“How long?”
I scoff. That is the question married people who have normal sex lives ask, because normal sex ebbs and flows.
The answer, for those married people who have normal sex lives, is somewhere in the vicinity of three weeks and a year, and then these married people with normal sex lives assume this is the range in which we are operating and assure me that I am normal too, that dry spells are a normal part of normal marriages.
Shimmy into a pair of crotchless panties, and have I ever tried role play?
I give them a trouper’s smile and thank them for the advice, as though I have not been rejected in all manner of confounding and vulnerable positions: in slutty nurse costumes, in private Jacuzzis, at night and in the morning, on his birthday and mine.
“A better question,” I say, “would be how many times in the near seven years we’ve been married.”
Henry openly gapes at me. “Is it that low that you actually know?”
“Three times a year before I finally gave up? I could easily calculate it.”
“Faye,” Henry says with one of those gasp-laughs that empties your diaphragm. “How does that happen? Why would you marry someone like that?”
“My therapist tells me that I got into this relationship for a reason,” I say, “that there is something about my husband that soothed me and felt familiar and safe to me. I didn’t know he had all these hang-ups when we got married.
We had sex when we first started dating.
Not like you and I had, but it felt taboo in its own way because we worked together and we were hiding it from everyone.
But once that was gone, once we started our own thing and got so busy, I just couldn’t seem to get him interested anymore. ”
“What is his problem?” Henry asks, and his quiet indignation is indeed the balm I’ve been looking for all this time.
“Well, to start, he won’t admit there is a problem.
I’ve been asking him for years to go to therapy, to figure out why sex makes him so uncomfortable.
And he looks at me like I have three heads and insists sex doesn’t make him uncomfortable.
He’s so convincing I believe him. But then we go on vacation and I come out of the bathroom in the most ridiculous underwear they make and he’s too full from dinner to do anything but cuddle.
Role play is for weirdos, sex toys are for masturbation, which should always be done in private.
The girls in porn aren’t hot enough. Sex at night is for people who don’t get up at five a.m. to take a Barry’s class before work, and sex in the morning is for people who don’t get up at five a.m. for a Barry’s class as well.
“He does not cheat,” I continue, “and I’m the one with the addiction to porn.
He does not see a gorgeous woman on the street and stretch his arms over his head with a yawn and a clandestine glance.
I stopped initiating because he can’t always get hard, or he can’t last long enough for me to get off, and he gets so down on himself that I end up having to comfort and reassure him that it’s okay and I still love him, all the while feeling like the loneliest soul in the world.
I’ve heard women who struggle with infertility talk about this, how it feels like everyone around them just breathes and gets pregnant, and it’s how I feel about this.
Everywhere, all around me, are women complaining about how much sex their husbands want or the acts that their Tinder dates expect them to do because of all the dehumanizing porn they watch.
You have no idea how scary it is out there, they tell me, but I do, because I watch all that porn too.
And then I get these pop-up messages in my inbox all day long about horny sluts looking to fuck five miles away from me, and I want to cry because even my computer thinks I am a man who is not getting any from his wife, and of course it does.
That is the way the world works for everyone but me.
” I gulp my water. My throat is dry, and there is still so much more to say.
“I can’t cheat, obviously. Not in Los Angeles, not with anyone on set in any of the places we go.
It would get out. A few months ago, I told him that I can’t live the rest of my life like this.
I gave him a deadline to get into therapy.
Six months to find someone and book his first session.
He didn’t even have to go! Just have proof he sent an email to set it up.
He missed it; of course he missed it, and yet I still cannot bring myself to divorce him, because divorce is for people who married assholes.
I wish he was an asshole. I wish he cheated on me.
I wish he was like you and wanted to control and isolate and punish me, and I wanted to resist him, because then we’d finally have some friction. ”
Henry regards me, stunned. “That’s not where our friction came from. Is that seriously what you’ve told yourself all this time?”
I study the dumbfounded part of his lovely lips, his wide eyes that are both light and dark, all blinking and disbelieving that I’ve misunderstood what transpired between us an eternity ago.
His cheeks are pinkish from the sun—the term high health flashes in my mind—and he’s wearing a chambray button-down that he owned in college that is now splattered with bleach spots, the collar flimsy with wear.
He looks like a college lacrosse player, and not the one who would so obviously roofie you.
He’s the one parents love, teachers and small children too. Completely, utterly harmless.
“Where did it come from, then?” I ask, deciding to take him in good faith. “What is it you tell yourself?”
“I gave you what you needed, but you refused to give it back to me. Same shit that happened with my mother.”
I gape right back at him. “Are you in therapy?”
Henry sips his wine and he winks at me. I am speechless. My West Coast–wellness-chasing husband does not have a therapist but Henry does. “For how long? What made you go?”
“I just… noticed some patterns.”
“Patterns.”
“Will you please stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m some kind of hashtag men’s rights dickhead.”
“You are a dickhead. That’s why I liked you.”
“You ever talk to your therapist about that?”
“All the time.”
“And?”
I stare at the table contemplatively. I cleaned my plate; what’s left on Henry’s has gone cold.
We finished our wine and our water. In the far corner, the fire is down to embers.
I know what happens next, and it is almost too much to bear.
I thread my fingers together and twist them back at painful angles, trying to centrally focus my discomfort, to somehow contain it.
I shrug. Answer broadly, cowardly, “From an evolutionary standpoint—”
“An evolutionary standpoint?” Henry is jiggling his knee, grinning at me like I’ve got to be kidding him.
He’s reclined comfortably in his chair, legs spread in that way that spawned ragey Instagram accounts featuring men on the subway in the 2010s.
He is once again barefoot, the bottoms of his pants rolled just above his ankles.
His heels bounce in the thick old carpet.
Most people think of money and they think of the private choppers landing on an East River pier to return the cast of Succession to their earth-toned penthouses, but Henry sitting there in his father’s hideous windbreaker from the eighties, in his fusty summer home to which he will never have to earn the deed, to which he will never feel pressure to update, that is money to me.
That is a power that makes me want to crawl on hot coals.
I roll my eyes. “Yes. From an evolutionary standpoint, being on good terms with a dominant person increases your chances of keeping the resources you need to survive.”
“And I’m the dominant person in this situation?”
“You know you are. Most men are.”
Henry raises his chin and narrows his eyes, staring at me down the bridge of his nose. Ahhh. He gets it now. “I’m picturing little twenty-two-year-old Faye, thinking she would shatter my heart and she would be fine. That she’d have her pick of the litter.”
“I did think that, yes.”
“And now you know how good you had it?” That cocky grin again, the one that makes my skin feel too tight for my body.
“Ha-ha,” I say. “I’ll take my licks.”
“Oh, I know you will.”
Warmth surges through me, as much a cardiac shock to the system as jumping into the half-frozen lake in the wintertime.
Henry drops his head, scratches the back of his neck, his face all screwed up from thinking. “But if that’s what you like, then why marry your husband?”
“Because in a weird way, this is control. This is how he wants things, for reasons neither of us understand, because he doesn’t want to go there, and I’m the one who is falling in line.”
“Last night,” Henry says. “How long had it been?”
“Since someone else got me off? I don’t actually know.”
“Ballpark.”
“Eight.”
“Eight months?”
“Don’t be obtuse.”
“Faye,” Henry says sternly, like I’ve told him an outlandish lie.
“I mean we’ve had some sex in that time. But me getting off with him?”
“Eight fucking years, Faye?”
“Please stop. I’m mortified.”
“What do you have to be mortified about? He’s the one who should be mortified.”