I.
Of all the things to write about! My sex life! My innermost innermost. My early experience; my later affair; my typical-white-woman AIDS scare; my first orgasm with a partner, how it surprised me, how the sensation just slipped over me and suddenly I was rippling. How afterwards I hated that man (that boy, really; we could not have been much more than eighteen); I turned my face away. The intimacy was too much, too wrenching, too sizzling, shameful crumpled crying coming Lauren. We were lying in his room in a boarding house, the boy just recently thrown out of a college in a far-away state for a spectacular and hard-to-achieve row of F’s on his report card, which he showed me—FFFFFF—and I could not help but think the F’s stood not for failure but for fuck, because he was waiting on me, I, eighteen, maybe nineteen, and still a virgin. Shame on me. Especially because we’d gone out all summer before the start of our freshman years, his in the Midwest, mine in Boston, writing letters back and forth once September started. Not once did he ask me for intercourse, even on our last night together, but I could hear him waiting, all wrapped up in the clothing of a question: When? When? The very lack of his question only underscored its implicit presence.
I remember confiding to my roommate that we had not yet done the deed, even though we’d spent all summer together. Hers was a pause of shock. “You haven’t gone past third?” she said. We were teenagers! And this is how teenagers talked back in the Reagan days, when you said no to drugs and yes to sex, back before AIDS, when (and probably still now) girls tossed their cherries out car windows or dropped them in the dirt like they were nothing, those fruits, that single stretch of skin. Snap. I didn’t want to snap. Bright blood on a white sheet. I didn’t want to bleed. Sheer fear of that plunging pain is what held me back; I couldn’t insert a tampon, never mind imagine a member, its pale, smooth head with that single squinting eye, accusing, asking, pushing. FFFFFFFFFF. Instead of telling him the truth—that I was a mere maiden, pure as snow or cool milk in a cup—I made an elaborate lie. I was raped. Too traumatized. I needed time. Writing this now, remembering this now, for the first time in a long time, I do not judge myself. I consider it a lot to ask of a newly minted woman that she offer up her intact body for this frankly difficult deed. I also find it interesting that shame, an emotion supposedly lying deep in our limbic system, untouched by time or class, is in fact a product of time, and of class and culture, too. In the nineteenth century, to be raped was to be shamed, forever. In the late twentieth century, to be a virgin was to be shamed, while to be raped was to be saved, because you’d survived. After all, we not only venerate survivors; we even make them famous. But I wasn’t after fame; I wanted only to escape the shame. So I lied, to save my skin. And then, during Christmas vacation, the boy brought home from the Midwest six deep, dark capital FFFFFF’s along with a letter from the dean saying don’t come back here. Flunked out. Which is why my first orgasm happened in this rooming house in Wellesley, a mile or so from where his parents would no longer let him live. Outside, by the curb, was his slicker-yellow taxi, inside the dingy room a warming plate, a two-slot toaster, a bed with squealing springs. He was a moody, broody bad boy with a muscular chest and head roiling with glossy curls. He did downers and uppers and acid, none of which I did, but we both loved the Grateful Dead, and when I slept over (sex, but no score), we’d wake in the mornings and listen to “Ripple,” the clearness of that music, the pure simplicity of it, affirming for me again and again that I was part of a people, a species, capable of creating great beauty. Such a song it was! And it was May. And the man in the room next door drank his life away. Ripple in clear wa-ha-ter. And through the open window, warm liquid breezes poured over our naked bodies, and then one time he touched me just so and I tipped into the orgasm and was grasped. This was different from whatever I’d achieved on my own. This was softer, gentler, full of a wide-open love, a deep falling-down love. Which is why, when it was over, I hated him. And turned my face away.
And that’s all I’m going to say. I’m going to stop right here. I have discovered, in the writing of these prior paragraphs, that, while I am no longer a maiden, I am still a lady. And this is a discovery I don’t know what to do with. It seems impossible, and yet, ’tis true. I find this, this assignment . . . burdensome, if not in bad taste. Am I alone in my response? Or do many women have little ladies inside? Surely I am not the only one. But it feels especially ironic that I, the teller-all of tell-alls, the four-memoir madam, should have such a teacup attitude when it comes to a task like the one I am presently engaged in. You would never guess the presence of this teacup by looking at me. From a pure looks perspective, I am as far from a lady as a mule is from a mare. Today I am wearing gray sweats, my pockets full of stones. Right this minute, as I sit here typing, I am literally weighed down by dozens of stones crammed in the capacious pockets of my tattered sweats. The stones I found this morning in a streambed by our house.
For the past three weeks, I have spent most of my mornings in this streambed, with a shovel, occasionally on my hands and knees, scraping madly to expose the pearly surface of a solid piece of past. Stones. Where did they come from? Is it possible they landed here by way of an asteroid that broke free from its planet billions of years ago, so I am finding not only stone but space? Is it possible we will someday run out of stones just as we are running out of oil, or trees? Could we survive without stones? Would we miss them, and in missing them, retrospectively discover their value? After all, think of what you can do with stones. I could build a house, a hearth, a road, a fire. Some stones you can crack open and discover, inside of them, a perfect crystallized geode. Stones are secret. Stones whisper. I am a little lady who is also a stoner, the second part of this statement cancelling out the first. Late at night, when I am through with everything else, I boil my stones, just to see what will happen. I polish my stones with olive oil, just to see what subtle shifts in shading I might get. Today was incredible. I discovered that I could use my stained-glass grinder wheel to actually sculpt a stone. The stone’s strength was no match for the bite of the diamond bit. I held the stone to the wet bit and felt it give way, felt it melt in my palms gone slick with stone silt as the wheel spun in water and the solid, stolid rock acquired waist and curve, acquired an impossible smoothness. When I was finished, I had a small body in my hands. This was a speckled stone body, at once utterly impenetrable and yet totally yielding. This was my body. This was my orgasm. This was my shame, my turning away, my turning to stone, my no-speak. This was my lady, here, so shapely and pursed. This was my wildness, my insanity, my boundary-breaking body and multi-memoir madam, hands slick with stone silt and yipping with glee as I discovered all I could do, one Monday in November, in my forty-fourth year around the sun, which sets so early now.
II.
I could chalk it up to age, the fact that sex interests me these days about as much as playing checkers. After all, at the unripe age of forty-four, my estrogen is probably plunging, and my periods, although still regular, are brief and bright, more like a wink than a flow.
But the fact is, I’ve never much liked sex, even though it has, on occasion, captivated me. I see no inconsistency here, because in general I associate captivity with guns and danger. So, yes, I have been gripped by sex the same as the trap grips the ferret’s leg and he has to bite off his limb to set himself free. What kind of fun is this? Says the proverbial therapist: Sex threatens you, Lauren. You feel overcome.
Another definite, though altogether less sexy, possibility rather than feeling overcome is that I have never much liked sex because, when all’s said and done, there’s not much to like. I mean, really: what is the big deal? The stretch and snap and blood on the sheet is a big deal, but after that? Especially when it’s with the same person, over and over again; that just couldn’t be right, from an evolutionary standpoint. I, for one, have always become bored with sex within the first six months of meeting a man, assuming the man is not psychologically torturing me. Leaving those unfortunate instances aside, the fact is that sex has always paled for me just like the sun is paling these November days, and as predictably, too.
I met and fell in love with my husband for his grand good looks, his beautifully colored hair, his gentle ways, his humor, etc. We were together many years before we married and, so, sex faded. Then we decided to get married. Predictably, almost as soon as the engagement ring slid onto my finger, I fell in love with someone else. I fell madly, insanely, obsessively in love with a conservative Christian man who believed that I, as a Jew, was going to hell. We fought long and hard about that, and then had sex. This is so stupid it pains me to write about it. This man . . . he played golf. He went to church on Sundays. He wore shirts with those nasty little alligators on them. What are those shirts called—Lamaze? Or is that the name of a childbirth technique? This was not a man who cared one whit for birth-control techniques; he wanted his women barefoot and pregnant, and I fucking FELL IN LOVE WITH HIM.
I made him a beautiful chest. I worked on it for weeks. I painted the under layer white, over which I sponged a deep marine turquoise. I then shellacked twenty times, so the wood looked wrapped in glass. I painted the inside of the chest a Chinese red and decoupaged it with cut-up phrases from the New Testament. I snipped a huge and beautiful Jesus from a religious book, and then I cut the Jesus in half. I put Jesus’s top half on the top half of the inside lid, his bottom half on the bottom half of the inside lid. I then shellacked Jesus until he too turned to glass. I gave my lover the box. “Open it up,” I said. It was Christmastime. He did. What a spectacular gift. When you opened the lid, you saw Jesus slowly rise, resurrected, until, when the lid was raised completely, he stood solid and tall. It was a gorgeous gift that reflected a gorgeous sex life in the midst of a crazy relationship filled with clashing values and shredded bits of Bible.
And, of course, I was engaged during this whole time. A terrible thing, I know. And yet, this affair I sensed was absolutely necessary in order for me to move forward with my marriage. The affair was a test. Sex had somewhat cooled between my husband-to-be and me. I thought, but could not be sure, that that was to be my fate no matter what, no matter who, in which case my fiancé was the man I wanted to marry. But suppose I was wrong? Suppose there was someone out there with whom I could have passionate, slick sex my whole long life, a sex life like one endless Christmas morning? Wouldn’t that be wonderful, especially because I’d never celebrated Christmas, so it had all the more magic and mystery to me. Thus, I fell wildly, passionately in love with a conservative Christian, very smart, very handsome, very short-sighted, and we had fantastic, obsessive sex while, the whole time, I had one eye on the clock. I was just waiting to see when, or if, this affair would run out of fuel. I prayed to Jesus and anyone else who might be up there that it would, so I could marry the man I loved. And yet night after night I left the man I loved to be with the man I was in love with. I could not wait, I was like one of those primates, what are they, bonobos, with the scarlet vaginas—yuck.
Actually, I just recalled a small detail. I don’t know if it makes a difference or not. I never actually had intercourse with this man. He did not believe in sex before marriage. Therefore, when my fiancé asked me if I was “having sex” with someone else (why was I coming home at 3 a.m.?), I could answer no. On the Christian man’s end, when his god asked him if he was having sex with someone else, he too could answer no, and so we both lived highly honest, righteous lives filled with perpetual sex.
But because I am not a bonobo, the inevitable started to happen. It happened the night the man took me to church and asked me to eat Jesus. Enough is enough! I am a lady, am I not? Ladies do not eat deities, and they also do not understand complicated, nonsensical theories like transubstantiation, which allows you to at once eat but not eat the deity or its stand-in, a saltine. Enough is enough and was enough. I never have and never will put the godhead in my mouth. As for the mere mortal, as for the man, after that request and all those gospel songs, after, I’d say, the twenty-third or fifty-fifth nasty little reptile appeared on his stiffly ironed shirts, he lost his appeal. Sex turned tepid, and then revolting. While the revolting part was particular to this crazy relationship, the tepid part was wholly within my experience and proved, for me, that there is no god of monogamous passion. It ain’t gonna happen. Thus, freed from the tethers of this Christian affair, I returned to the gentle arms of my pagan husband, who, on occasion, also calls himself a druid. We are going on our tenth anniversary, and despite the fact that, like all good druids, he dances amongst trees real and imagined, things are tough in our fairy land. He wants hot sex. I turned tepid long, long ago.
There are treatments for this sort of thing. A 1999 University of Chicago study found that about 40 percent of all women have some sort of sexual dysfunction, usually low libido.
The real issue for me is that I’m not sure I have a dysfunction. On the one hand, I am miserable about our lack of a sex life. I am miserable about the fact that sex interests me about as much as checkers. I am miserable about it because it makes my husband miserable and cold and withdrawn, and it is so unhappy living this way. “Have sex with someone else,” I tell him, and then look down at my open hands. My palms are still pinkish, but they are cracked from wear and weather. “The problem with that,” my husband says, “is falling in love. If you have sex with someone else, you just might fall in love with them.”
“I’d fucking kill you,” I’d say.
Of course I wouldn’t. But I just might kill myself.
I have no answers for how one lives without a sex drive, or with a sex drive that is equal to one’s passion for checkers. The rift it creates is terribly painful, and a gulf of loneliness enters the marriage. You could fake, but fake rhymes with hate. You could get treatment, but I’ve had so much treatment, I take so many pills, and in this one area, just in this one small area of my life, can I claim, if not health, then at least the absence of pathology? Please? Because when I say I don’t have an interest in sex, that might be a misstatement. Maybe I do have an interest in sex. But it’s just that, comparatively speaking, I have so many other competing and stronger interests, and these interests are crammed into a life that is already overloaded. A life I nevertheless love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love. There are so many things I love.
Once I get past the daily dread that accompanies waking up each morning and that I cannot seem to shake no matter how blissful my state the night before, once I move past that and manage to throw my feet over the edge of the bed, then I am off, launched, singing through space, captivated by the thousands of solar systems I see everywhere. I see stones and stars. I see glass, which I cut and solder, silver liquid lines bringing scraps together in purposeful patterns. I love my wheeled mosaic nippers, how they take tiny bites out of solid opalescent or cats’ paw prints and how these pieces assemble into quilts of glass, into table tops, into garden balls of deep cobalt blue. I love my garden; I love finding wild echinacea, coneflower, black-eyed Susan, even loosestrife, finding these flowers in fields or growing between bricks and then pulling them up as gently as I can and bringing them back to where I live, nursing them along, hoping through the cold winters that they will pull their perennial magic and reappear again. And half the time they do! They do! I love seed catalogues, especially in the winter, when the pictures of the glowing globes of red-hot tomatoes remind you to have faith in warmer weather. I love horses and riding them. I love my dogs, of course, and my children I love so much it hurts; they pull on me painfully, and I love them. I have recently acquired a love of stones and am making a new floor for our bathroom entirely out of pebbles the streambed has polished. I love my router, my planer, my circular saw, the wood, especially salvaged wood I can pull off of old rotting barns and restore until it’s gleaming. I love clay. I like to sew and cook. I love words and writing, although that love is complex and fraught, a tense, toothy love that has made its marks on me forever.
I spent a significant portion of my life battling with significant mental illness, and my Grim Reaper, which is not death but mental illness, still visits me from time to time, drawing me down with his sword. And each time this happens I never know if I will return to love. And each time that I do, I am more grateful than the time before, and so I see my life, my large unwieldy disorganized life, as though it was a banquet full of peach and blueberry cobblers stewing in their juices, all these antioxidants, all this flesh and mineral, so much! So rich!
In our living room hangs a huge canvas sign that I, of course, made. It spells out my simple mandate, all in buttons. Make Things, my sign says. This is the mandate by which I live my life. As a Homo sapiens, the discovery of tools is embedded in my DNA as deeply, more deeply, perhaps, than anything else. I am quite sure that I am related to whatever ape first discovered that he or she could catch ants with a stick—oh, glory be! Make Things, my sign says, hung up there where my children can see, the buttons vintage and collected over many years. My sign does not say Make Love. I wish it did, as love is so much nicer to make, at least in sound, than things. But I am a person captivated by things, by solid, actual, concrete things that can be assembled, be they books or babies. Sex just does not equal or even come close to the thrill of scoring gorgeous glass for a window you will use, hearing the grit as the grains separate and the cut comes clean and perfect. Sex cannot compete with the massive yet slender body of granite I excavated out of the ground last week, six feet long this igneous stone, packed with time and stories if only it could speak. My stone. I’m going to spend months carving it with a silver chisel. I am going to figure out a way to make this stone into an enormous mantel under which, in the home I share with my husband and the babies we made, our fire will flicker. The stone will give off waves of warmth in the winter, and it will keep the night-coolness captive all through the summer days. I imagine and imagine my mantel, my windows, my glass, my gardens. I cannot believe how lucky I am. I have so very much to do, such wide and persistent passions, so little time in which to explore their many nooks and curves. Here. Now here. Don’t bother me. I’m busy.
III.
And then there is the issue of sounds.
People make sounds during sex, or they try not to, if children or guests are near. The sounds you make in sex are deeply private, as are the expressions on your face, how you clench your fists, or feet, how you seize and separate. In sex—good sex, bad sex, consensual sex, or rape—you are split open and looked at. You are viewer and viewed. I find it extremely odd that on a Tuesday night you might go about this bizarre bodily act with another human being and then, the next morning, amidst a chattering group of children, eat Cheerios. It seems to me that if sex were separated out from the daily wheel of life, it might survive monogamy more intact.
For these reasons, I think deeply religious groups like the Hasidim might be on to something, whether they know it or not. I think I could be more sexual if I had a mikveh, a sacred space into which no men were allowed. In our culture, sex has lost its sacred quality. There is no withholding, no separation, no ache. I would opt for a prohibition or two—no touching allowed until Tuesday—because longing springs from distance. It is odd, ironic, but also absolutely understandable that proximity can kill sex. Devout Muslims are not even allowed to touch one another until marriage. Ooh la la. Imagine that. Imagine the long courtship in which every gesture is watched, just to be sure that not even the slightest flick of a finger lands on your lover’s skin. Imagine the buildup of tension as time passes, as the wedding day draws near, as the woman is sheathed and wrapped for the pure and only purpose of being later unwrapped, after months of imagining. I know it hardly ever happens this way. But maybe sometimes it does.
The sexiest story I ever read was about a couple who never had sex. It was in a book of erotica I have recently looked for but could not find. My retelling of the story will fall flat on its face, so I’d rather not try. Suffice it to say that each day the couple, a giant and a fairy, came just millimeters closer to consummation, always leaving the bed unfinished, their days gone heavy with a ripe ache.
I have tried to tell my husband about this story, this extended extreme foreplay; he does not seem to understand. This is a problem, a classic problem that falls along gender lines. If I were mayor or president, I think I would institute some rules, some sanctions, for the good of the American Marriage.
But even with all the right rules and sanctions, we still come back to the issue of sound. Stones don’t make sounds, which is maybe why I love them. They suggest sound but never utter any. And then there are the sounds of sex, which are deeply private, and which, once made in the presence of a person, can never be unmade. In the right situation, with the right sanctions, these nighttime sounds would be preserved, bottled, so they did not wash away with the laundry, the toothpaste foaming down the drain, the nine-at-night-home-from-work nights, you angry, me angry, because . . . Because.
“If you want sex,” I say to my husband, “you need to have time. Sex is dependent upon time. You can’t expect me to spread my legs for a man I never see, a man who is so immersed in his work he talks computer code in his sleep.”
I mean what I am saying, but I also mean what I am not saying, and never have said, because it is too sad to say it. The sounds of sex are a shared secret between lovers, part of the glue that binds the couple together. They are considered, perhaps, the most private sounds we will ever utter in any relationship, trumping language so completely that words themselves are squashed beneath the primitive weight of the sound of sex. We have our regular speaking voices, and then we have our sexual voices, and while these voices may be odd, disturbing, even disorienting, especially if overheard by someone outside the dyad, they serve a special purpose. It is weird to me that I can have a best best friend, a friend I feel I know so completely, inside and out, but if I’ve never slept with her, then I don’t know her sound. I need not be my best friend’s lover to know her smell, her touch, how her fingers feel when they lightly land on my shoulder, but there is, locked away from me, a continent of her soul, and that is her sound.
Sounds have a powerful impact on me and always have. One of the most entrenched and disturbing memories of my childhood is of hearing my brother getting beaten by my mother. My mother beating her children, while not commonplace, was also not entirely out of the ordinary, so I was familiar with her fists, familiar with seeing her violence, directed mostly towards me. But there was one day when she directed herself towards my younger brother, and I did not see it. I heard it. I heard the sound of her punch, the soft, revolting smack it made in his little-boy belly, the swooshing sound of his breath, in-sucked, and then the little grunts of pain and she came down on him. Those little intermittent grunts, those disembodied cries of his, made the fact of his body all the more real, and I don’t know why. I couldn’t see a thing but god, good god, I could hear my brother’s body; his flesh had entered my ear and lodged itself there, a song that can’t be unsung, an insane, repetitive ditty that still today makes me gasp with horror.
The sounds of sex draw me close to my husband, when he allows himself to have them—what he says, what he does not say. But I have learned, the hard way, that while the sounds of sex are private, they are not in fact the most private sounds a human being is capable of uttering. I have heard sounds, from my husband, that have taken me an octave below sex, straight into annihilation, and these are sounds, like the beating of my brother, that I cannot forget, and that haunt me, and that have showed me that more private than the spasm of sex is the spasm of death. And once you have heard another human being make death sounds, you have gone too deeply down and will forever feel haunted in this person’s presence.
I would prefer not to linger very long in this space of fire. It happened a long time ago, a decade ago perhaps, and late at night, midnight, I remember in fact, for the church bells had just gone off, striking twelve resonant peals that echoed in the spring air. I’ve told this story before, but as I retell it now, it’s somehow changed.
We had married. I was finished with my affair, committed to the course ahead. My husband, who has always had a long-standing interest in chemistry, was downstairs in the basement, in a room we had built just for him, a study of sorts, lined with bookshelves upon which there were no books but bottles, and bottles, and bottles, mostly glass, some tin, all full of chemical concoctions tightly corked. His desk held Bunsen burners and glass pipettes, and a huge exhaust fan overhung the whole show, sucking out the toxic air.
And I was upstairs in the kitchen washing pots, and he was downstairs finishing some experiment—I knew not what—when all of a sudden I heard, from deep in the bowels of our house, this, this . . . sound, this ugly, twisted, inhumanely human, stripped, screaming sound I had never heard before but recognized immediately as pure primal terror, the sound a man makes and has made for the millions of years he’s been on this planet, his body trapped in the jaws of a giant beast that is shredding him to bits. The Sound. I remember thinking that someone had climbed through the basement window and was murdering my husband—what else could account for that sound, as we lived no longer on the Pleistocene plains and our beasts were mostly men now.
I remember running, running as fast, so fast, as fast as I could, which was not fast enough, down the interminably long (twelve) steps to our basement floor and running across the miles of concrete (ten feet?) between the landing and the closed door to his study, behind which the screams were coming, and coming, and coming, each one rawer than the next, only “screams” in the plural is not right, because this was one solid, unrelenting scream that comes from a place deep, deep down in a person and that we usually only make in dreams we can’t recall, or at the final threshold, so far gone into the darkness or light that no person can hear us, and our echo is gathered by angels or nothing.
And here I now stood, at the door that separated me from the scream. I flung it open and saw him, saw what had happened to him, my man, my lover, my husband: he had caught on fire. A spontaneous chemical combustion. His long, lovely red hair had turned to a pure rivulet of flame, and he stood there engulfed and simply screaming. I saw his hair turn to writhing snakes of fire, and then I saw the fire clasp his entire perimeter, so he stood in the center, his margins fringed with angry flames, his mouth untouched and open and the singular solid deeply private scream a man makes when faced with eternity—coming and coming and coming.
And I thought: Five seconds ago I was a woman who had a certain story about falling in love with a red-haired man, sidestepping into a stupid, embarrassing brief affair that freed me to marry the man I loved, and now the man I love is burning up in a fire right in front of my eyes. And forever and ever this will be my story. I will be, forever and ever, a woman who watched her lover burn to death in a fire.
This is not an essay about how my husband caught on fire. No, this is a story about sex. And sound. And stones. And snap. Don’t look for the links between each position, because there may not be any, because sex is real; it is not art. It is shape-shifting and discontinuous. It has no beginning or end. Orgasms have beginnings and ends; affairs have beginnings and ends; marriages have beginnings and ends. But sex goes on and on and on for as long as this turquoise planet spins in its spot, in its particular, magical, miraculous, perfect distance from this sustaining star: our sun.
Sex is private, and the little lady in me, with her teacup on a shelf, suggests it may not be in good taste to write too, too much about it. Nevertheless, because I also have stones in the pockets of my pants, I have kicked through the lady’s Do Not Enter sign and entered this essay here, only to find that though sex is indeed private, more private still is death, and that if you think you’ve seen your lover naked, if you think you’ve heard him sing his deepest self, you haven’t unless, god forbid, you have witnessed what he looks like in the maw of a beast so much bigger than he. And once you have seen that, once you have heard his sounds, once you know the body of your lover as it burns away, your sex will forever be infused with fear, and rage, and smell, and echo, and you will want to push that away while, at the same time, you will want to cling all the more tightly to this friable, tender, vulnerable body of his, and yours, and yours, and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours. And you will come to realize that there are so many yourses, so many bodies, and that they are all on fire or about to be, and so sometimes it seems that the entire world is his singular scream and the terrible dangle between the stuck lever and the ejaculated mist of white.
The result of which is this: me, sitting here, pockets full of silent stones. I am a woman in love, but I am not in love with sex. I am in love with the opposite of the sound of the scream. I am in love with glass and sand and skin. I am in love with my children, my animals, my bodies, my banquet. I am in love with making but not the reverse, making (minus the with) love. Someday, I hope to build not only a hearth, but a house. And inside this house I want to have with me my family—my children and my animals and my husband, whom I love so imperfectly, with so many gaps and hesitations. I hope he does not leave me for a woman who likes to make love, as opposed to a woman who loves to make . . . what? What is it I love to make? Oh, I’ve told you that already, and besides, the list is always changing. Here I sit, pocketful of stones. Remember a long time ago, those mornings in the room in the rooming house of the boy with all his F’s? Remember “Ripple”? I am in love with grateful, but I am not in love with dead. The music washes over us. The orgasm is over. I remember this.
I’m at the end now. Not my end or his end, thank god. The end. The naked too-much truth, right here. My husband will not forgive me for my words when he reads them later on and hurt creases his whole face. I’m sorry. I am so, so very sorry. I love you, you know. With my whole heart. You and only you. But it is not enough. This will all come later. Right now, he hasn’t seen this yet. A little bit of peace? Some unusual serenity? Sun falls across my hands, hovering over the keyboard. Nothing more can come. The computer whirs and hums; it has so many memories. So do I. And the sun falls across my hands. Everything is quiet now, except the echoes: on and on and on.