Margot Magowan
According to Dr. Mayfield, six weeks after the birth, Henry and I were allowed to have sex. I was so excited, I calculated the exact day, which felt at the time, to my mush brain, like doing calculus. When the moment arrived, I practically tore off his clothing. It wasn’t sexual desire. I just wanted to feel like a woman instead of a cow. For a few minutes. Also, and maybe this was the same thing, I wanted to connect with Henry again, feel as if we were something more than co-caretakers of an eating, defecating mini-creature. The no-sex thing kind of stressed me out, because it was so different for us. Since we’d been together, we’d always had a lot of sex.
It was early morning. Our room was full of blue light. Ivy was asleep in the cradle next to the bed. I turned toward Henry, smiling, kissing him, pulling off his shirt and pushing off his boxers with my foot. But while that was all happening, I had a strange, disconnected feeling, like how people describe near-death experiences, as if I were floating up somewhere above my body. When we were naked, I pulled him tight against me, trying to wake my body up.
“You’re ready?” he said, misunderstanding, and then went inside of me.
“Ow!” I yelled, pushing him off, my elbow jabbing into his chest. I felt as if my vagina were on fire.
“What’s wrong?” he said, reaching his arm out toward the headboard, trying to regain his balance.
“It hurts. I don’t know. “
Henry lay back on his side, looking down at me, one arm across my breasts. Just that was painful, his arm lying there, when I’d always adored the weight of it, of him.
“I had a C-section— why would it hurt down there?”
He shook his head.
“I thought that’s why movie stars scheduled them—they don’t want anything messing with their vaginas.” I smiled at my reference to my Us Weekly obsession, which drove him crazy. But I was scared. I felt as if my body had closed up, gotten hostile. “Do you think something happened to me?” I said. “Do you think they cut a nerve?”
“No, Juliet, hypochondriac. Your body’s gone through a lot.”
“But Mayfield said six weeks. It’s been six weeks.”
He brushed my hair across my forehead with his fingers, tucking it behind my ear. “How much did it hurt?”
“So much. And it’s not just that it hurt. Before that, I wasn’t into it. It felt like something was happening to my body, but not to me.”
He looked sad and confused.
“It’s not about you,” I said, touching his arm, my favorite part of his body. “ It’s not your fault.”
“Okay,” he said, sounding unsure.
“I don’t know what’s going on. My body doesn’t feel like my body. I can’t explain it.”
We attempted sex a few more times over the next month, and it always felt horrible. I tried to calm myself— maybe I had a yeast infection. But I had no other symptoms.
I’d been counting on sex to make me feel better, the way it always had, my whole life, just by relaxing me, making my body feel good, just that at least. It wasn’t only the pain that alarmed me. It was the lack of feeling, nothing where something used to be, coming home to a robbed house. Henry’s touch seemed invasive, aggressive. Not just his dick. Wherever he touched me. My whole body felt hypersensitive. I wanted the gentlest contact. The kind of feather touch I thought I hated, that tickled me and made my skin crawl. Usually, I liked to be pressed hard or grabbed tight. But now I craved cuddling, no dirty sex talk, but a paternal or maybe a maternal kind of love.
There were other differences I noticed in myself. Sex, or even just blatant sexuality, on TV disgusted me—watching reality shows’ horny drunks or all those women shaking their asses in videos. Previously, even when I didn’t like something that was on, I often got sucked in, fascinated, curious, analyzing, trying to figure it all out. Now it was just gross.
If I came across a porn channel while flipping through the remote, I actually got nauseated. My reaction to it was so extreme, so physical, I worried I might team up with an army of right-wing suburban housewives from the Bible belt to launch an antiporn crusade.
Sex was becoming something I just didn’t get, like looking at food after you’ve had a big meal and you can’t imagine ever being hungry again. I didn’t pick up sexual innuendos or imagery. Once, while Ivy was sleeping, and I was looking at a magazine, I saw a photo of a woman licking an ice cream and I got my queasy, porno reaction. When I saw her giant tongue on a red, wet Popsicle and made the obvious sexual connection, I realized I hadn’t been aware of that kind of stuff for a long time.
That was weird, because I’d made a whole career out of picking all that up, highlighting semidisguised, accepted, ubiquitous misogyny. I was an assistant professor of cultural studies at UC Berkeley, and one of my skills, exploited in both my dissertation and my book (if I ever finished it) was my ability to spot phallic symbols and “vaginal” ones too. I even won kudos from my dissertation panel for pointing out that the latter had never been assigned a literary term. The sexual semiotics were so obvious to me, I didn’t understand how people could miss them. The very first time I saw the Joe Camel ad, when I was twelve, I couldn’t believe they’d created a cartoon face out of a penis and two fat, droopy testicles. Of course, a lot of people caught on eventually, but when they finally banned that pervy camel, they said it was because he was an animated character, appealing to kids. None of those congressmen seemed bothered that his face was a penis.
Having no sexual desire anymore confused me about Henry. I didn’t know what he was for. I knew that sounded awful. It was awful. I couldn’t believe I was thinking such mean, horrible thoughts—a new mom. But it wasn’t just that he couldn’t give me orgasms. He couldn’t breast-feed either. He didn’t make much money. He’d forget to pick up diapers. He didn’t buy the vibrating chair or the baby monitor, or any of that endless baby paraphernalia you need, until I asked him to about a hundred times. He’d forget to pay his cell phone bill, which was huge, never dealing with signing up for a cheaper plan, so my calls would go straight to voice mail. I saw his flaws everywhere, the way I used to see phallic symbols. Maybe I’d made a horrible mistake getting into this marriage thing. How had my life changed so fast anyway? Was it lust that got me here? A broken condom?
The first time I saw Henry, about two years prior, I wandered into his lamp store in the Mission. He made these crazy, beautiful lamps, and he was so intense about them, bent over them with a million tools that looked exactly the same to me, but later, he explained, were all slightly different; it’s all about how they’re angled. I’d never been attracted to a blond guy before, but it was his gray eyes that hooked me, the furrow between them shaped like a backward K. I wanted him to study me the way he did those lamps, with that kind of focused attention, as if I were that fascinating and complicated, unusual and beautiful; make him figure out how to light me up.
He didn’t even notice me when I walked into his store, and I have to admit, that was part of the initial attraction. Bored in bars from New York City to Austin, I’d make seduction a game: could I make the guy totally absorbed in something else become absorbed in me? Could I make him have sex with me again and again and be late for work? Miss work altogether? Miss a plane?
“This is so pretty,” I said, pointing to the lampshade Henry was working on. He was weaving together copper strands in loose, wiry braids over an exposed yellow bulb, all of which cast sharp, black shadows across the walls like giant spiderwebs. “How much is it?”
“It’s not finished yet,” he said, twisting some copper so it hooked over the wrought-iron, pentagon-shaped shade.
“Isn’t it almost done though?” I said. “I could wait.”
He looked over at me, shook his hair out of his face, and smiled.
At some point, watching him all hunched over, I said something like, “Are you OK? Don’t you want to sit up?” I walked over to him. “That position looks so uncomfortable. Let me rub your head for a while.” I reached out and touched his neck and then his hair. I gave him the most incredible neck/head/hair massage, intended to relax and arouse him all at once. I was successful.
I hit on Henry that day, it’s true. But it was Henry who fell in love first, who came to adore me and told me so all the time, who wanted to be exclusive just three weeks later and then wanted to marry me. By the time he officially proposed with his grandmother’s ring, a daisy chain of pavé and yellow diamonds, seven months later, I was in love with him too.
Marriage had never been in my life plan or dream or whatever. Nor had kids. My parents had a bitter divorce, I loved my work, and I wasn’t into the whole commitment thing. But I was so infatuated with Henry that I’d started to wonder what it would be like to make a baby with him. He came from a huge Catholic family; he loved kids, and kids loved him back. So I told him I’d think it over. Then the condom broke. He agreed to get married in Vegas, after the morning sickness had passed, just him and me. That plan won me over.
For our honeymoon, my mom gave us a gift certificate for two nights at a five-star hotel in Santa Barbara. But we decided to save the trip for when I wasn’t pregnant and the baby was old enough to leave with a sitter. I wanted to go when I could feel sexy in my bikini and drink margaritas by the pool, worry free.
But now, six months after my wedding, up at 3:00 A.M. nursing Ivy, I was starting to obsess about that hotel. A place like that could be just what Henry and I needed, a change of scene and some real romance. How could you not have great sex at a place like that? I got up and went to my desk, digging out the brochure. My mouth dropped open as I looked at the glossy photos, fantasizing about the clean towels, the room service, and the giant TV. The resort seemed to offer everything I craved. I was breast-feeding 24/7, why not do it with an ocean view? When Henry woke up the next day, I told him I wanted to go as soon as possible, convincing him it would be good for us.
When we arrived, the concierge gave us flutes of champagne and then we got a ride on a golf cart to our room. The suite had billowing curtains opening onto a balcony overlooking the ocean. There was a giant bed with a white comforter on a shiny, blue tile floor, like a puffy cloud in a perfect sky. There was another room with panoramic windows, a huge fruit bowl on a glass coffee table, and a crib for Ivy. While she slept there, we used the two-headed shower and then got in the sunken tub together. Henry stretched out across the whole bath, his arms and legs spilling over the sides like an overgrown plant.
We put on bathrobes and opened the doors to the patio so we could look out at the sea right from the bed. I started playing with his penis. When it got hard, he pulled me on top of him so his mouth was in between my legs and I was facing the headboard. That position annoyed me. It was the only way he ever went down on me. I couldn’t concentrate on coming, because I was so worried I’d smother him. He always told me it was okay, he had been a competitive swimmer and could hold his breath. I knew that was part of the turn-on, too, being smothered by pussy and all, and I was all for that every now and then, especially after years of choking on cock. But now, my breasts dribbling milk, him gasping for air, it just didn’t feel sexy. I knew that after fifteen minutes of it, Henry would get pissed I wasn’t coming. Then he would ask what was wrong with me. We were headed to a bad place, so instead of trying to struggle through, I aborted, getting up and off of him. It was the first time I’d ever stopped oral sex in the middle like that.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Nothing, I’m just not into this right now.”
“What?”
“I don’t feel like having sex.”
“Why? Did I do something wrong?”
I sighed. He was going to make me say it. “I hate that position. It’s the only way you go down on me. Once in a while it’s okay, but that’s the only way you do it.”
Henry got up, pulled on his terry cloth bathrobe, and stomped out onto the balcony. I couldn’t believe he was acting like such a baby. I got up and went out after him, naked, saying, “This is my honeymoon! It’s supposed to be romantic. Why can’t you just go down on me like a normal person?”
“It sounds like you don’t like having sex with me,” he said.
“I just don’t like how you’re so passive. I don’t like how I always have to initiate sex. I don’t like how I’m always sucking your dick and doing everything you want sexually, except anal sex and I even do that, and you never go down on me unless it’s a special occasion and then you want me to sit on your face!”
“It sounds like you have a lot of problems with me,” he said, looking as furious and mean as he could in his fuzzy robe.
“I wish I liked it,” I said. “I hate how you make me feel like a prude or like there’s something wrong with me. I don’t get why you don’t put some effort into having sex with me the way I like it.”
“You’re crazy if you don’t think I put effort into pleasing you. All I do is try to please you.”
“I Googled face-sitting,” I said.
“You what?”
“The last time. I was just trying to figure stuff out. I typed that in. I didn’t even know it was a word. I thought I made it up.”
“Jesus.”
“Hundreds of sites came up. Mostly dominatrix ones. Women stabbing shoes into men’s faces. I know you’re not into that, so it just confirmed for me—it’s the most passive way for you to go down on me.”
“You’re insane.”
“But can you just tell me why you don’t try to figure out what I like? Is it that you’re too good-looking? You never had to try that hard? God, I just had a baby, I’m breast-feeding all night long! And then you want me to sit on your face!”
“Oh my God,” he said, “I want a lactating woman to sit on my face? That is fucked up.” He smiled. “That wasn’t exactly my fantasy growing up.”
He made me laugh. I couldn’t help it. I stood there on the patio, naked and laughing.
That night we ordered room service and watched a Lauren Ba-call movie on our TV. There were a few candles in the room, and we lit them all, leaving the doors open all night and listening to the sea.
In the morning Henry woke up with a hard-on and wanted sex again, but I was too sleepy, so he masturbated on my ass. Henry loved my ass. He said it was my fault, that I made him act that way, all sex crazy about my ass. It took him a long time to come, maybe because I wasn’t paying attention to him at all. He never used lubricant, he thought it was cold and slimy, but he rubbed so hard and long that when he was done, there was a sore on his dick. It hurt him so badly, he wouldn’t let me touch him for days.
Our sex life pretty much ground to a halt after that weekend, though there were a few more lame attempts. Some nights, when tiny Ivy was asleep, I’d be the one to go find Henry. Seek him out while he’d was working on a lamp downstairs to see if that former turn-on would do it for me now. I started kissing him. I was going to seduce him again, fuck my way back to my true identity. I’d sit on his lap, wrap my legs around him. But his mouth seemed so wet, his tongue heavy and gross, reminding me of the Popsicle ad that had turned my stomach. He reached out to hold me closer to him, his fingers pressing hard into my arm, which hurt. I pushed him off of me. “What’s going on?” he said, seeming frustrated and confused and angry with me too.
“I don’t know.”
“If you don’t want to have sex, fine. But this starting-stopping drives me crazy.”
“I want to and then I don’t.” I started to cry. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“It’s okay,” he said, stroking my hair. “That’s what lionesses do during sex, you know—they throw the lion off of them.”
“I feel defective,” I said. “Imagine if all of a sudden you were impotent.”
He nodded. “That would be hard. I mean difficult.”
I smiled, in spite of myself.
“Let’s just try to be patient,” he said.
“But how? What are you doing? Are you masturbating? In the shower or something?”
“Please stop worrying so much,” he said. “This will pass.”
Part of what was so mystifying to both of us about my alien body was that it looked just like my body. I’d lost all the baby weight immediately, just like my star friends in Us Weekly who waxed poetic, in cover story after cover story, about their victorious postbaby weight losses. Yet they had nothing at all to share about any lack of sex drive, postpartum, with their Sexiest Man Alive husbands.
In fact, no one had much to say about it. I read over all my pregnancy books, searching for information. In the Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy, which was supposed to be so candid and frank, there was this glib advice: “inebriate and lubricate.” Of course, now I knew what that meant. But the pregnancy expert only gave some lame, vague explanation for those recommended accoutrements, like feeling fat or unattractive.
Nothing I read described my problem, exactly. The books referred to exhaustion, or physical healing of vaginal tears. There was nothing about disliking his touch or disliking him. There was quite a lot of information about postpartum depression. That seemed closer to how I felt than anything I read about sex. But I didn’t really fit that either. I wasn’t depressed about my baby. I thanked God for my baby, otherwise I really would’ve felt as if I took a wrong turn. I wasn’t indifferent about Ivy or having any thoughts about hurting her or feeling like I couldn’t care for her.
When my friend Sheila called me, I finally told her what was going on with Henry and me. Just a few years ago, confiding in her would’ve been no big deal. But I’d resisted for a couple of reasons. Sheila wanted a baby so badly, I felt like I couldn’t complain to her about any negative side effects of the whole birth miracle. She had a miscarriage right around the time I got pregnant.
Another reason I avoided talking to Sheila was because of something she’d said that haunted me. She had told me once, crying, that her husband, Stephen, didn’t seem to care whether or not they had kids. That shocked me, because I knew Sheila was desperate to be a mom. When I asked her why she had never told me about how Stephen felt, she rolled her eyes and said: Married people don’t talk about their relationships.
It wasn’t just that my best friend said that to me. Now I felt it. To speak about my unhappiness or confusion seemed disloyal, a betrayal of Henry. It also scared me, because I needed him. But then I wondered: Was never speaking of it really so great for the relationship? That idea reminded me of not swearing in front of a lady or being careful not to upset an old man on the verge of a heart attack; it implied my marriage was too fragile to withstand words. So I talked.
“You weren’t into it,” Sheila said. “What’s the big deal? Jesus, calm down. It’s not the end of the world. Haven’t you ever had bad sex before?”
“No,” I said. “Not like that. I mean, I’ve been with inept guys. I’ve had frustrated moments. And I’ve been not satisfied.”
“Well . . .”
“But this is different. This isn’t like not getting something I want. It’s not wanting.”
“Welcome to married life.”
“Are you serious? Don’t joke about this.”
“Look, I don’t know how babies factor in. It probably takes a while to get your sex drive back. Call Alicia or Jennifer. Ask them.”
Alicia or Jennifer would have been good choices if my friends still talked about their relationships. Like me, they’d met their husbands and got pregnant quickly. I actually knew a lot of women my age who’d done that, maternity wedding dresses and all. Vera Wang should’ve designed a line just for my slutty generation of thirty-something women, careless brides who got knocked up and tied the knot like it was something that was meant to go together in one sitting, a well-balanced meal, meat and potatoes. Of those paired events, having a baby was supposed to be the big deal, the life-altering event. Getting married wasn’t really supposed to change anything.
“I can’t just call people up and ask if their vaginas hurt. You basically said that yourself. Wives don’t talk.”
“Listen, Juliet, don’t make such a big deal out of this. Just fake it, act like you’re having a good time.”
“What?”
“Just fake it. Everyone’s happier that way. Trust me.”
I felt so separate from her; she didn’t get me at all. It was like when I was in labor and felt all alone.
“They’re lots of things you can do,” Sheila went on. “Try fantasizing about someone else. It’s no big deal.”
“But I got married because I was in love with Henry. Not to fake orgasms.”
“Oh, come on Pollyanna. Lust fades. Everyone knows that. Baby or no baby.”
“But I don’t believe lust has to fade. I think it’s more complicated than that. I don’t think that’s a given.”
“Okay, so you guys are the exception,” Sheila said. “I don’t want to be a downer. Call your doctor about the pain.”
I called the advice nurse at Mayfield’s office. “Sex hurts.”
“It’s hormones,” she said. “Thinned vaginal walls. That will get better when you stop breast-feeding. Use lubricant.”
So I went out to buy a couple of kinds. I went to a sex store called Good Vibrations in the same neighborhood where Henry worked. I’d been there a few times before, but it all repulsed me now, the purple dildos stacked on counters and black leather harnesses and chains hanging off the walls. It occurred to me that maybe my sex disgust was a form of birth control, making sure you spaced babies apart in a healthy way. I thought I’d even heard something like that before, though attributed to not menstruating while breast-feeding. But if that were true, it seemed so harsh of God. And limited, linear thinking, confining sex to reproduction. I’d just given birth after ten months of pregnancy. Didn’t I deserve an orgasm?
So I bought three different kinds and even picked up some free samples. But Henry hated lubricant. When he groaned at the sight of my purchases, I thought back to the sore on his dick and felt hopeless. He finally gave in, but I felt like a controlling, nagging wife when I wanted to be a sex goddess.
And the thing is, when he did use the lubricant, it still didn’t feel good. Nothing felt good. I stared to wonder if I should fake orgasms like Sheila had said, just to get it over with. But that idea felt so bad and against everything I believed in. Lying about something so intimate was unthinkable. Except that I had thought it. And even if I didn’t do it, I understood doing it. That was new.
But if it were true that great sex was something you grew out of, not into, I honestly couldn’t believe no one had warned me. Or maybe the whole world had, with all those impersonal, ubiquitous clichés like “infatuation fades.” But hadn’t we also been sold true love? Didn’t that include passion? And if it didn’t, why had no friend sat me down and let me in on all this before I’d gone and married my sexy husband whom I had planned on fucking and maybe supporting for the rest of my life?
In an attempt to get my mind off my troubled sex life and disconnected marriage, I often took long walks or focused on potentially distracting and mundane tasks like paying bills. Henry still hadn’t made it to the AT&T wireless place to get a cheaper plan, so I decided to combine distractions: go for a walk with Ivy and get a new plan.
There was no line in front of the Asian guy with spiky hair who sat behind the counter. He had a cell phone in parts laid out in front of him, and his furrowed brow and row of tools made me think of the first time I met Henry.
“I’m late on my bill,” I said, sitting down in the swivel chair across from him, “which is really high. Can you take a look at the charges? Maybe I could get on another plan.”
“How high is it?”
“It was over three hundred dollars last month.”
He looked at me, tilting his head. “That’s high.”
“It’s two phones, my husband’s and mine. I could’ve missed a payment, too.”
“Still,” he said, shaking his head, spinning around in his own chair to face his computer. “Have you been buying anything on it?”
“Buying anything?” I repeated.
“You can get stuff off the Web and charge your phone,” he said.
“I didn’t even know that,” I said, thinking—so, that’s how Henry bought the vibrating chair. The baby monitor. All that stuff I was so grateful he finally purchased. “Maybe my husband . . .”
“You have no extra charges on your bill.” He shrugged. “What’s your husband’s number?”
I rested my elbows on the counter, looking at the tiny, dissected phone parts while he tapped keys.
“There’s something on your husband’s account,” he said. He turned the screen to me.
I saw rows and rows of the same five-digit sequence and across from each of those $9.99 going down his screen into infinity. “What is that?” I said. “I don’t understand.”
He pointed to a third column. “It says mobile dating.”
I leaned close to the screen, shielding my eyes, as if it were a sunny day; I was so near that my pinky was touching the computer, making a color swirl. “Mobile dating,” I read. “Oh my God. Mobile dating!” My mouth felt sticky when I tried to speak again. “Phone sex? Is this phone sex?”
“I don’t really know,” he said. “It says ‘dating.’ It looks like he’s been using a dating service.”
“A dating service? Oh my God.” I rested my head in my hands, so I was looking down at Ivy, who was half awake in her sling. I ran my finger down the curve of her cheek, checking the rolls in her neck, the places where milk and dirt sometimes collected in gray pellets. Ivy looked back at me, blinking patiently. Her eyes were still that newborn navy blue color but getting lighter all the time. I just sat there, looking down at her, my eyes fixed on hers.
Finally the guy said to me, “I can look up that service for you if you’d like. Maybe we can figure out what it is.”
“Would you mind?” I said, disappointed that in the silence he hadn’t just disappeared, along with his computer and all the information it contained. “That would be really helpful. Thank you.”
“Okay, sure.” He typed, paused, typed. “Yeah—it looks like a dating service.” He pointed to the screen that was still facing me. There was an image of a girl wearing a black beret and black tank top, red lipstick, smiling. She was holding a cell phone. Next to her the words, which he read out loud, “Meet local singles in your town.” Then a new photo came on the screen, a girl lying down, also in a tank top, that one pink, her arms stretched out in front of her, in her hands a white cell phone. “Real singles, just a phone call away.”
“Oh my God,” I said again.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you want me to print out the bill?”
“Can you do that? Could you check the other months?”
“It’s on last month’s too,” he said. “I already checked. I’ll look at April.” After a minute he said, “April too. We only keep records three months back.”
He printed it all for me, and when I left the store, my fingers were shaking so much that I could barely dial Henry’s number on the stupid, fucking cell phone. “I need to talk to you. Can you meet me at Noah’s on Chestnut Street?”
“What’s up?” he said.
“I’ll wait for twenty minutes. After that, I’m leaving.”
“Leaving? What do you mean leaving?” he said.
I turned the phone off and went across the street into Noah’s. I sat on the patio at a wrought-iron table in the cold and the fog, hugging warm and sleeping Ivy to me. I kept thinking how stupid I was and how every woman probably thinks the same thing. I never thought he would be with someone else. I had no fucking idea. How could I miss something like this? At least now things were clear. Get away from this loser, idiot, lamp maker. Lamp maker, seriously. He was hot, but I married him? I had a baby with him?
I recognized him by his walk, which was more of a lope, his torso hanging back, and his legs striding ahead, like an R. Crumb cartoon. I knew he could see my face even from the sidewalk, through two sets of glass doors, because he had eagle eyes. He was always pointing out things to me I never would have seen or noticed, like the dot of a hawk in the sky or a silver rectangle across the bay that was the hospital where he was born. And it wasn’t just his vision. All his senses were heightened. He heard things and smelled things seconds before I did. And watching him walk through Noah’s, past the line of people ordering their lunch, to get to me, I couldn’t breathe, because somehow I knew I loved him. Still. I knew it all again, just like that.
He sat down next to me and looked at the bill, three sheets of white paper that I’d laid out on the table. The phone numbers were circled, “mobile dating” underlined several times. He looked across the patio, his arms crossed on his chest. Then he wove his fingers together, pressed them outward so his knuckles cracked, crossed his arms again. “I was masturbating,” he said.
“You’re such a fucking liar.”
“You didn’t want to have sex with me,” he said.
“So this is why you were so calm about our shitty sex life.” I turned to him, my face so close to his that I could see the light stubble on his cheek. “Now I get it. Just be patient—ha!”
“You seemed like you lost all desire for me.”
“Do you realize I just had a fucking baby? Something happened to my body!”
“That’s why I didn’t want to bother you,” he said.
“I tried to talk to you about it. Oh my God.” I hit my elbow hard onto the table, my funny bone throbbing. I was grateful for the physical pain, the jolt of it helping me to stay angry, which was better than experiencing how scared I was. I could feel sadness, just below the skin of my face, a body under water, about to surface.
“I felt like you wanted nothing to do with me. Except to feel better about yourself.”
“How do you think I felt? You did nothing to inspire sexual feelings in me. You came to me with your sexual needs but there was no romance. I asked you about masturbating and you didn’t say anything!”
“I was ashamed.”
“Ashamed of what exactly? Were you with someone else?”
“No.”
“You weren’t with anyone else? I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you were ‘just masturbating’ or whatever. How do I know what the fuck you were doing? Why would you go to a dating service to masturbate? Even the AT&T wireless guy didn’t think it was just phone sex.”
“The AT&T wireless guy?” he said.
“He looked it up for me on the Internet.”
“I wasn’t trying to meet anyone.”
“Then why that service?”
“Because it was free.”
“Because it was free? Oh my God. Are you insane? Do you see this bill?” I picked up the papers and held them right in front of his face. “Hundreds of dollars! I was complaining to you about this bill for weeks!” I stood up.
“I saw an ad in SF Weekly. It said the first call was free.”
“Look how many calls you made, asshole,” I said.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “Each call wasn’t . . .” He trailed off.
“What?”
“I wasn’t talking to anyone.”
“Right, you were having an affair.”
“No.”
“Fuck you, Henry.” I got up out of my chair, my arm underneath the sling, keeping Ivy still.
“Wait,” he said, grabbing my arm. “Let me explain. Please.”
I stood there, looking through the glass doors, through the restaurant, out onto the street where I could see people walking.
“It was a message exchange. People record messages, and I listened to them. There was no connection.”
“What did the messages say?”
“Sexual things, stupid things. Like ‘I just got out of the shower, I’m horny.’ ”
“What did your messages say?”
“My messages?” he sounded surprised. “I didn’t record any. Well, I recorded one. You have to record one to do it.”
“What did it say?”
He was quiet.
“Tell me.”
“This is Michael. I’m six one. I have gray eyes.”
“Oh God. That’s so real. That makes me feel sick.”
“I’m sorry, Juliet. I felt so rejected by you. I felt like you didn’t want me. You seemed so angry and so unsatisfied.”
“I tried to talk to you about how I felt. I needed you to be there for me. But you were never there for me and this whole thing is a lie. I’ll never be able to trust you again.”
I walked out of Noah’s without looking back, pressing bundled Ivy close against me, moving faster and faster until I was practically running. The cold fog felt so good on my burning face. I went straight to Sheila’s house. I didn’t call her to let her know I was coming, because I couldn’t bring myself to turn on my cell phone.
Sheila opened her door, looking beautiful as always, in a white turtleneck and white pants. I couldn’t remember the last time I wore white. “Hey, this is a nice surprise,” she said. And then, “What’s wrong?”
I collapsed against her, bawling like a child, which woke Ivy up and made her cry too.
Sheila put her arms around me, holding me, all of us staying in her doorway until I pushed her away to take a deep breath, wiping my nose on my sleeve.
“Come get a Kleenex,” she said, taking Ivy from me.
“I am a Kleenex,” I said. “I’m covered in spit-up and snot. It makes no difference. Really.”
Sheila smiled and reached out to touch Ivy’s cheek. “Hey, precious,” she said. Keeping her arm around me, she guided us inside. “I’ll make you some tea.”
She handed Ivy down to me as I sat on her white couch and looked through her giant rectangular window at the two bridges, the Golden Gate on one side and the Bay Bridge on the other, Alcatraz Island in the middle, the view from Pacific Heights that everyone in San Francisco wanted. I could hear Sheila moving things around in her kitchen.
“My cell phone bill has been really high,” I said, unclipping my bra so I could nurse Ivy. “So I went to the wireless place, and it turns out . . .” I cupped my hand under Ivy’s tiny, bald head, marveling at how she curved perfectly into my palm. “It turns out Henry’s been calling a mobile dating service. Hundreds of dollars of calls. Over months. As far back as the records go.”
Sheila came out of the kitchen, holding a metallic purple teakettle, the kind that makes a two-toned harmonica sound instead of a whistle. “Oh God, Juliet.” She stood in front of me, the kettle in midair. “Was he having sex with these women?”
“He told me he was masturbating. No face-to-face encounters with anyone. He said he didn’t want to meet anybody. It’s some kind of message exchange.”
“What?”
“He told me, I don’t know if it’s true, but he told me he listened to messages.”
“That’s not such a big deal,” Sheila said. “Everybody masturbates.”
I was having a déjà vu of our earlier conversation, about faking orgasms and other lies Sheila had supported for the sake of the relationship. How stupid and smug I’d been then, thinking Henry and I were so honest, so open with each other, above all that.
“But he never told me about it.”
“He was probably ashamed.”
“That’s exactly what he said.” I twisted my hair around in my hand. “But ashamed of what?”
“Phone sex is OK as long as it’s not one of those, you know, meet real people places.”
“That’s exactly what it was,” I said.
Sheila put the teakettle down on the ottoman. She plucked a pink Kleenex from the box next to it, handing it to me. I took it from her and blew my nose, then pulled a folded square of paper from my diaper bag, holding it toward her. “Go look up mobile dating and this number on your computer. You’ll see what I saw.”
She unfolded the bill, and Ivy turned toward her, because she loved the sound of paper.
“This doesn’t say anything,” Sheila said, squinting at the numbers. “Except that he was being compulsive with the calls. He was calling a lot. Look, every day that week.”
“Yeah, I thought he had a low sex drive. Ha!”
She went across the room, sat down, and typed. “Okay, it’s real women, which is bad,” she said, looking at me over the monitor. “But if he wasn’t a member, it doesn’t look like he could do much. According to these charges, nine dollars and ninety-nine cents a pop, it doesn’t look like he was a member. Where’s he now?” she asked.
I reached in the diaper bag again, turned my phone back on, and right then it rang. I had twelve missed calls from him. I turned it off again. “Can I lie down with Ivy? I just feel like going to sleep.”
She put me in her guest room with its cream-colored comforter and silky pillows. I changed Ivy’s diaper and cuddled next to her warm little body. I fell asleep right away, because crying a lot exhausts me; just like a little kid, I pass out. When I woke up, it was dark. I pushed Ivy to the middle of the bed, put a blanket over her lower half, and went into the living room.
“Henry called here,” she said. “That’s probably what woke you. I told him you were sleeping. He said he was coming by.”
“Please don’t let him in.”
About fifteen minutes later, the doorbell rang. Sheila changed the channel to Entertainment Tonight, then CNN. The bell rang a couple more times. Then Sheila’s phone. It rang again.
Sheila turned to me. “This can’t go on. I’ve got to get it. This is ridiculous.” She reached up behind her, over the back of the couch, grabbing the phone from the table. “Henry, if you don’t go away, I’m going to call the police.” She listened and then hung up. “He says he loves you and he’s sorry.”
I shrugged.
“He says he won’t call or ring the doorbell, but he’ll wait outside my house until you talk to him.”
“Fuck him,” I said.
“He said he’ll wait all night.”
Ivy started crying, and I went in the guest room to get her. I brought her to the couch and nursed her. Sheila opened some wine, but I didn’t feel like any. About an hour later, she made pasta, but neither of us ate it. After a while, she left out a plate for Stephen on the dining room table, and we all went to bed.
I stayed with Sheila for four days before I saw Henry again. Sometimes, I tried hard to see things from his point of view. I realized I hadn’t really done that at all, the whole time. I didn’t think he deserved that effort, since I’d gone through so much with the pregnancy, birth, breast-feeding, etcetera. But I saw how I’d mostly used sex with him just to feel okay about myself. Maybe I’d always used sex for that.
Sheila said she’d watch Ivy when I went to meet him. She was so excited to have the baby all to herself, I ended up leaving her place twenty minutes early. When I got home, I went upstairs to wash my face. Henry’s shirt was on the floor, and I picked it up to throw it in the laundry basket. Then I just sat with it on the bed until he came home.
“Hey,” he said. “Nice to see you.” He sat down next to me and took my hand. “Juliet, I love you. I’ve missed you. I’m sorry about all this. I understand what you must be feeling.”
“I don’t feel like you understand,” I said. “If I did this to you, you’d leave me.” I started to cry. “I feel so betrayed and lied to.”
“I don’t feel like I betrayed you. I just felt like you didn’t want me.”
“So that made you go off with another person?”
“There was no other person. It was a fantasy world.”
“Why can’t you explore your fantasies with me?”
“I want to, but you’re so in your head, Juliet. Every second. Everything has to be analyzed and processed. I just wanted to fuck you. Look”—he took my hands—“you’re my wife. I don’t want my wife saying things to me like why can’t I have ‘normal’ sex.”
“I asked you why you couldn’t go down on me like a normal person! I felt ugly!” I took a breath and said, “I’m sorry I ever said that.”
“You say shit like that to me all the time. It hurts my feelings. Maybe I thought you were incredibly sexy right then.”
“I didn’t feel sexy.”
“But you were sexy, and you’re sexy right now.”
I looked at his gray eyes looking back into me, the darker gray outline around his iris, his furrowed brow.
“It was nice walking in the house and seeing you here.”
He kept looking at me, studying me, all his attention on me. Time slowed, each of his movements a separated frame of an old film.
“I always had a fantasy of walking in on a girl. A girl that looks just like you. She doesn’t know I’m there. Skirt hiked up. Silky panties. She’s touching herself. By the time you notice me, you’re too horny to stop. “
I couldn’t help smiling. ”Makes me wonder where this is leading.”
“Let me rub your head for a while.” He undid my hair from my ponytail, dropping the elastic on the floor, pushing his fingers down past my ear to my neck. “I’m really happy you’re home.”