heat
WHEN WE WERE teenagers, he was the one who awakened my sexuality. Now we are middle-aged, and I have been given his virginity. It’s as if thirty years of sexual exploration have been wiped clean.
Long after the brain injury, when I’m sure he has forgotten all that transpired in those early erotic days, he dredges up his first memory of pleasing me.
“I remember that look you gave me the first time,” he says, soon after we move back to Seattle. We’re nestled in our bed, in an alcove with a window angled above us. We watch the birds momentarily come into view as clouds swirl past the rectangle.
“You do?” I say.
“When I asked if I could explore . . .”
“Everywhere. Oh my God. You remember?”
“You said, ‘Please!’” he says, like he’s won the jackpot.
In my mind I see the way that I looked at him then: keen, ardent, craving.
“Why did you remember that now?” I ask.
“It was the sweetest thing I ever heard,” he answers.
I am not erased.
I realize I could respond with irony, some joke about Richard not usually remembering things sweet or sad, yesterday or forever ago. I have become accustomed to his memories that come and go, memories that aren’t ensnared in a belief. I don’t want to hold on to the romance of his words, words so very few these days, words that are pure and true, words based on a fleeting memory. There’s a part of me that wishes to defend my heart, to make sure I don’t allow this small miracle to open me. But that woman of dry wit and caustic mockery died en route from the cancer hospital.
In that moment, even though he has mostly forgotten our sexual history, I decide I can risk wanting him as a complex, intimate partner. I want a companion who relishes play, a lecherous husband who strips off social correctness like underthings to be cast off. Our sex was once a creative commons, a place for libre learning, freewheeling, edupunk, DIY, no-rights-reserved action. It doesn’t matter that we’re not that couple anymore. In the here and now, there’s innocence and impartiality and spaciousness and silence and emptiness.
On one of our first Saturdays in our new home, Richard eats cereal at the table and looks out the window, which overlooks giant evergreens.
“Do you like me?” he says.
“You’re a late start on Monday and Wednesday, right?” I say, not looking up from the calendar on the computer.
He pours himself another bowl of raisin bran.
“If you eat like you’re twenty, your body is going to show it,” I snark.
He chews. Keeps looking at me. “I like how you go after what you want,” he says.
“Even when I hurt you?”
“Yes. I like everything about you,” he says.
“No you don’t.”
“I do.”
“My need to control? The insane obsessions?”
He nods.
“The freak who yells at a man with a brain injury because he forgot something?”
“Especially her.”
“Why?”
“You’re not giving up on me,” he says.
His honesty makes me breathe as if I’ve been living on half-air.
“I’m trying to get to know you,” I say.
“Me too. I’m trying to get to know me.”
“Do you mean you can’t remember . . .”
“That guy,” he says, with a nod backward.
“The man I want you to be,” I say in a near whisper. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me that Richard would have to develop a relationship with the one he was before in order to begin enacting that man. For the first time, I wonder what he’d be like if I never asked him to become that man again. And then the thought is so terrifying in its essential emptiness that I push it away, where it will stay sequestered for years.
“I was a good lover once,” he says.
“More than once.”
“Teach me.”
The first time we told the story of forgetting sex to a neurologist, he said he’d never heard of such a thing.
“Does the equipment work?” the doctor asked.
We nodded.
“Well, you’ll figure it out then.”
We’d been happily libidinous through our entire marriage and rarely skipped sex, with short breaks after the births of our children and when we traveled apart. Unlike so many couples we knew, we’d stayed adventurous, made sex a priority, and challenged each other to move out of our comfort zones. But also, sex had been a way of relating to each other when we really hadn’t understood each other intellectually or emotionally. Sex had kept us together.
Years ago, in therapy, we’d learned new strategies for connecting through conflict. We had since become, in marital strategist John Gottman’s parlance, masters at repairing our relationship, moving quickly through discord to forgiveness. Sex was a way of celebrating our fondness and admiration for each other. We stopped holding resentments. We became motivated to please one another. We were, as sex columnist Dan Savage says, “good, giving, and game.” After our early marital conflicts, we’d become close again, and we found new ways to turn on, explore, indulge, conduct post-coitums, fantasize, fetishize, freakify, relish, practice, appreciate. We made concessions for each other’s sexual wishes and found ourselves enjoying aspects of ourselves that were beyond our familial and cultural understanding. Before cancer arrived, we’d hit our groove; we were kids who’d discovered the delicious treats at the adult candy store.
Finding out that some ruthless god had hit the reset button on my husband’s sexual history was a cruel joke. I haven’t shared my despair over what I’ve lost with Richard, because I’m worried that my grief will harm him. I cry on daily walks. I talk to my therapist friend. I’ve asked Dr. L what he thinks about Richard losing his sexual history.
“Memories tied to primitive areas of the brain, such as sexuality, can be selectively damaged,” Dr. L said.
When I’ve risked telling a few women friends, they’ve tended to react nonchalantly—they laugh. (“That’s like riding a bike, right?” or “So, did you tell him how much he just loooooved tipping the velvet?”) The men I’ve told have mostly been stunned.
I’m not laughing. I’m not standing around waiting. I’m going to become a one-woman sex-education crash course. Or die trying.
“What do you want to try first?” he asks, all innocence and excitement.
“Field trip,” I say.
“Where?”
“Babeland.”
We go to Seattle’s egalitarian erotic emporium, the same place I took my daughter when she wanted to buy her first sex toy. I watch him wade wide-eyed through dildos, double dildos, vibrators, cock rings, condoms, lubricants, handcuffs, collars, blindfolds, harnesses, slings, rope, strap-ons, edible body paint, massage oil, sex games, instructional books, porn movies, and the orgasm-in-a-box. We scoop up toys to take home. Sexual exploration becomes like summer vacation. There are few rules. The children are in college. We stay up late, playing.
At first I think the teenage sex will dissipate, that the fast intercourse, few words, and all-boy appetite will be replaced by the experienced sexuality the two of us shared before the cancer treatment. But it still isn’t possible for him to ask for what he wants, or conduct a conversation, or remember the ways my body responds. And that’s not even critical, because we’re still in survival mode, trying to help him relearn his career, and settle into a new house, and help our children negotiate adulthood. Because Richard experiences both long-term and short-term memory loss, remembering sex is arduous, even when he is motivated to learn. The brain changes have made his desire immense. He artlessly reaches for me, his man-hands grasp my breasts before an exchange of words, glances, clinches. Even though I’m angry at what’s happened to us, I cannot ignore his longing.
I show him simple things—kissing, touching, the mechanics of moving the body. Flirting will come much later, when he has grown a sense of self-awareness. I demonstrate affection: compliments, rapport, embraces, caresses, calls, catcalls, the French kiss. Every suggestion, forgotten. Every action, forgotten. In order to adopt the behavior, he must be reminded. Not dozens of times. Thousands of times. I must learn to respond with compassion rather than anger. This one lesson—to deliver the sweetness that is now his favorite name for me—takes me five years to learn. Two thousand days. So whose brain is injured?
Sex is paradoxically the most frustrating and the most meaningful way for me to learn how to detach from the desire for results. I’m constantly reminding myself—there’s nowhere to go. This is it. But Richard seems to be able to focus on learning sex with all kinds of patience.
“How’s it going?” I ask him, after an unsatisfying session.
“Being a good sex partner is challenging.”
“Right?”
“I could please you before. Most of the time.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“It isn’t for lack of effort,” he says, reporting.
“I know, baby. But you last more than a minute these days. That’s good, right?”
“I’m horned up all the time,” he says. “But I don’t ask for more because you like to talk first, and I can’t.”
“Jeez, it’s like you hit the reset button on the whole aging thing. So, what’s the deal with doing the same motions over and over?”
“You say, ‘This doesn’t feel good.’”
“Like when you used to stare at people without blinking.”
He reflects. I’ve learned enough of his process to be patient with the time it takes him to go from thinking to speaking. “I’m only able to think of myself. I can’t remember to think about what you feel at all.”
“If we slow down, you’ll get it.”
And we slow down every gesture, we stop and start again, we practice asking for what we want. For the first five years after the brain injury, he doesn’t even think of seduction. To seduce means that you have available the skills of humor, teasing, tension, flirtation. But allurement isn’t necessary for me anymore, because I’m reacting in ways I could never have imagined.
My body starts to respond differently than it ever has. My entire core heats up. I become a furnace. Even when my hands and feet are cool to the touch, I’m burning. My sexual appetite becomes ravenous. I covet every male between the ages of sixteen and sixty-six, and quite a few women too. When my friend Judith calls to ask how it’s going, I say, “Well, I didn’t lick the barista today.” I flirt with my male friends. I notice what men I am attracted to, what men I avoid. I gaze longingly at the surfer dudes and businessmen and construction workers. This is serious. My body is eroticizing itself at the exact time that I have been least sexually fulfilled.
Some friends say it is a midlife crisis. Some say it is an expression of grief. A few spiritual friends say it’s kundalini energy. I’ve heard of this energy expressing spontaneously in yogis and others who “awaken,” and I even experienced it in a meditation room years ago, a moment that manifested as a bodily tremor, an aspen in a mountain gust. But there’s nothing enlightened about this feeling. I wonder if Richard’s horny teenager mojo is contagious.
Turning up the heat on my sexuality at the same time that he’s more desirous—and less adept—is a strange brew. We’re fleshly fools. I have what many women would enjoy—a new man, a fresh man, an unencumbered man. What I learn from teaching Richard about intimacy is that I only think him to be absent. His touch and gaze and presence are with me. Every time we are together.
Our first year back in Seattle, Richard and I go on dates again. This has been our tradition, Saturday night out, just the two of us, which we have done since we found our way back to each other. In the past, we’ve had exquisitely simple dates, like the time we bought ice-cream cones and sat by the river, telling each other our dreams. And we’ve had outrageously fun dates at concerts, at the theater, and on backpacking trips. Now, post brain injury, our identity as the couple who can pull off those kinds of easy conversations is over.
Richard prepares questions for each date, so he has something to talk about. Without the preparation, conversation is impossible. One evening we pick a fancy Tom Douglas restaurant and make reservations. I wear a beautiful dress and take time with my hair. I help him pick out a sweater and jeans. We sit in silence through most of the main course. He orders their famous doughnuts for dessert, and they come in a white paper bag, warm from the oven, ready to toss in the sugar. He spills their powder over the table. Then he licks his fingers and slides them across the sugar. Licking, sliding, into the mouth. I glare at him. He’s too shameless to notice.
He isn’t deliberately ignoring me. Part of what I’m learning is how the brain-injured can be unresponsive to emotions. Weeks later, when my father nearly dies of a stroke and the doctors find a brain tumor, I sit on the stairs, sobbing. I raise my head.
“Dad had a stroke! They found a brain tumor! They don’t know if he’s going to recover!”
“Oh,” Richard responds.
I know that I must change some of my ways to accommodate my new man’s artlessness, and sometimes I fall short.
At dinner, I grind my teeth and spit my words through a frozen jaw: “If you lick your fingers in the restaurant, I’m not going out with you.”
In the wake of Richard’s passivity, I have become assertive and in control. I manage our financial affairs, parental decisions, medical services, family relationships, and everything that was previously shared by the two of us. I’m one tenacious bitch, not unlike my paternal grandmother, Frances, who had ten children and kept intact her marriage, family, and a large farm. But who I have become in Richard’s silence surprises me. I’m increasingly uninterested in what others think. If a medical professional is unresponsive to our concerns, I fire that person and move Richard to another provider. I drive aggressively on the highways. I take my place. I learn to reject what isn’t true. I leave friendships that aren’t meaningful. I become more adept in examining my flaws, asking mentors and my children to help me see my shortcomings. I’m leaving behind a persona, the “nice girl,” who was, once upon a time, a useful inner chick who allowed me to slide unscathed past a raging father, offensive bosses, and misogynist teachers, all while looking pretty in pink.
Once I was shy, compliant, and in the shadow of my tall, brilliant, authoritative husband. I remember a visit to a book festival long before the cancer arrived, an event that nearly cost us our marriage when Richard, despite my objections, confronted a respected author in front of an audience of a few hundred people, on a subject Richard knew nothing about: contemporary poetry. I ran from that room ashamed and furious, and straight to the therapist’s office, where I spent months trying to get clear about the kind of woman I wanted to be: feminist and forgiving. Post brain injury, Richard remembers nothing of the incident, and sits silent in audiences, and has not one thing in his nature that causes him to be combative or commanding. He’s opinionless.
Because Richard is an entirely new man, I realize that I don’t have to bring our shared history to our experiment. I don’t even have to presume that I know anything about his satiation. In truth, what astounds me about my new man is that he doesn’t have many preferences. What is the experience of pleasure when we are not habituated to a certain response? What do I have to learn from reconsidering my favorites and prejudices?
As part of Richard having no preferences, he’s not sure about his sexual identity. Does he like certain acts and not others? What kinds of sex make him feel pleasure? What are his limits? Is he attracted to both women and men? (He likes women, he finds.) Is he getting enough sex? (Usually, not.)
“Tonight’s date-night subject is sex,” I say.
And later over Pagliacci pizza and then at Cupcake Royale, the conversation continues.
“What kinds of experiences are sexual anyway? Why is intercourse considered sex and not punching down the yeasty dough of this pizza?” I ask.
“What do people mean when they talk about sex?” he says, really curious.
“What are your erotic desires?” I volley back.
“I get to be with you. That you accept me as I am. And you?”
“This is our marriage. We get to do it the way we want.”
Later, I write what we say about our sex life in my journal.
TWENTY WAYS SEX HELPS OUR RELATIONSHIP:
1. Burns enough calories to rationalize cupcakes or pie or ice cream.
2. Reunites us after a time away from each other.
3. During vacation, fits perfectly between museum-going and a late dinner.
4. When the children were young, relieved the stress of parenting.
5. Solves disputes. Do over!
6. An orgasm keeps me from killing him when I have to clean the toilet again. (It keeps him from killing me when the dishwasher isn’t loaded uniformly.)
7. When we are very good, we feel sexy for days afterward.
8. Communicates the unknown.
9. Hides the unknown. At least until the pillow talk.
10. Dirty, taboo-busting, throw-me-against-the-wall sex erases our tired old ideas about marriage, aging, and retirement planning.
11. Helps us be vulnerable enough to share (or fear) that fantasy, and how much we are willing to do (or hide) to make sure it is realized (or never happens).
12. Let’s face it, sex after babies, surgeries, failed exercise programs, and eating your way through Italy is the best arrogance-buster you can find.
13. Cultivates a sense of humor. Especially when you break the bed trying that new position. [That’s the moment I knew I would marry him, when he was as graceful in calamity as he was in the thrall.]
14. Better than coffee or Tylenol for relieving a headache.
15. Induces a good nap.
16. Shows us that we belong together.
17. Keeps us curious about the ways we can become better lovers as we change minds, bodies, cultures, commitments. Even about what we mean when we say “better” at loving.
18. Allows us to forgive each other for all the ways we ignore, defend, withhold, criticize, stonewall, insult, and make wrong.
19. Makes visible to the other the joy of our love and marriage.
And as Richard says, after the brain injury:
20. Sex allows me to express myself nonverbally with passion in a way that I would like to be able to express verbally but can’t.
Amen, man.
Even after a few decent dates, I’m still so attached to the return of my husband’s definitive self. I miss the Richard who knew what he wanted to eat, how he wanted to exercise, where he wanted to go, when he wanted to arrive, who he’d be when he got there. Even when we were young, he was a man with a persuasive magnetism. As he matured, he asserted a strong sense of what he wanted to create. After his brain injury, even though he’s working his way into new relationships, he isn’t sure about much.
“What movie do you want to see?” I ask.
“What do you want to see, sweetness?” he responds.
He returns the question to me on matters related to our social, intellectual, emotional, financial, and spiritual lives. He’s even more open-minded about food, trying things he refused to eat most of our marriage. He’s emotionally calm (especially when I became frustrated) and seems to have few desires other than simple physical ones: food, sex, and warmth. I see his new, unattached self as young. I yearn for the forceful, masculine one I remember. It seems like we’ve traded places, like I have become the decision maker. I’m slow to find acceptance of the new man. Very slow.
When I tell my therapist friend about these changes she says, “The Great Way is not difficult for the man without attachment to preferences.” I’ve read this line in the Tao Te Ching and admired the idea there, but I do not appreciate the newfound lack of attachment in my husband. I want to be married to one who is defined.
For years after the injury, Richard is without the ability to express a “no,” even if he has a preference. And I enjoy the excessive control I hold in our relationship. Getting things done is so much more streamlined when there isn’t anyone to fight. But the belief in productivity is slipping in me too. I used to check things off a list as a primary route to happiness. Now, I stare at the ceiling with a book open on my lap, pretending I’m reading. I’m silent, and raging against silence. If Richard is to become a companion, I think, he has to learn to say “no” to me.
I realize how easy it would be to get my way with Richard. This new husband would be so easy to manipulate. I try altering my history a couple of times, to see what I can get away with. When some story about my drinking comes up, I minimize how devastating my alcoholism was on our family. But the feeling I’m left with makes me want to hurt my body again. Then, I understand one of the values of his lack of preferences, his boylike innocence, his ongoing forgetting. He’s not invested in representing me or us in any particular manner. He has no unfinished business. I wonder: What would it be like to live life that cleanly?
One Saturday, he’s asked to hike with two doctors, men who refer patients to him in his physical therapy practice, men who also share an interest in the mountains. I’m overjoyed that Richard is choosing a social connection instead of sitting alone reading and watching television, which is his usual weekend. We agree to meet for our date at twilight. When the agreed-upon time arrives, there is no message by phone or text. When he finally walks in the door, hours past our reservation for dinner, I bombard him with my anger. He’s apologetic, sweet, and devastated by my reaction. Five minutes into my tirade, I start screaming, “I’m not angry with you! I’m angry with the brain injury!” This thought has never occurred to me before, that I am allowed to be furious with his condition—not him, but what happened to us. And why not be angry at this incident? Richard didn’t do anything to bring the brain injury upon himself, any more than he willed himself to get cancer. I shout like a crazy woman. He joins in. Then we’re both standing in the kitchen, screaming and stomping and shaking our pissed-off selves until we’re depleted. Later, I make grilled cheese sandwiches while he showers, and we sit talking about what happened out there on the mountain. Turns out the men made plans to take a more arduous route, and even though Richard knew the hike would take much more time than he’d allotted, he couldn’t negotiate his way out of the deal.
“You can’t say ‘no,’ still,” I say.
“Not really.”
“Would you be willing to try an experiment?” I ask.
He raises his shoulders. The big Whatever.
“Let me find someone who can show you how to say ‘no.’ Obviously I’m failing at it, but there’ve got to be some resources out there. Right?”
“Okay?”
He nods.
“I want the word,” I say.
“Yes, I’ll try,” he says.
In a week, we are in the office of therapist and boundary teacher Jovanna Casey, a redheaded pixie with bright eyes and an adventuresome appetite for life.
“Say ‘no.’ And push me across the room,” she says. “Go on, I can take it.”
Richard puts his soft palm, the size of a grizzly paw, on Jovanna’s shoulder and gives her a paltry shove.
“No.”
“I’m keeping you from something you want!” Jovanna yells. “Push me!”
Richard tries again, this time with two palms and a voice slightly louder. Jovanna doesn’t move an inch.
Jovanna takes his hands, looks into his eyes, and says, “You can’t hurt me. I’m a strong woman. Push!”
Richard closes his eyes and moves Jovanna a foot across the carpet.
“Think of something you really want,” Jovanna says.
Richard has his desire in about ten seconds. He opens his eyes, looks at Jovanna’s scowl as she snarls: “That thing you want. You can’t have it. I’m keeping you from having it. How about that?”
Richard lays his hands against her shoulders and pushes her across the room, shouting, “Nooooooo!” He’s not faking it. He’s mowing this woman down. Crazily, a zing goes into my belly at the sight of him taking charge. Some memory of the physical attraction that drew me to him when he slammed a basketball, killed a tennis serve, threw me down on the bed. How post-feminist of me, I think.
Despite my desire to be more evolved, there’s a wave of grief that rises up after I see him get his wild man on. The two of them mistake my tears for happiness. I’m thrilled for Richard, and for me. Now that he can declare what he wants and what he doesn’t want, I have a chance to leave the caregiver role that I have assigned myself. But getting even a taste of the guy I fell in love with, the competitive, strong warrior, makes me miss that one with all my heart. I decide I have to hide my despair from him, or risk hurting his recovery.
From my girlhood, I have imagined myself powerful. At thirteen, I fought with my father on the steps of the Catholic church my family attended for the right to make my own religious choices. I paid for my education, managed our joint finances after marriage, took jobs so beyond my skill level that they were frightening. If you’d asked me how I defined myself, I would have told you I was a feminist. I celebrated my sexuality as a means to empowerment. I gave up the phallocentric writing that was the mainstay of my literature degree, and instead read what I missed: women’s stories. My women friends expressed themselves however they damn well pleased, in being mamas, matriarchs, and, sometimes, in taking apart the patriarchal-industrial complex. The guy friends I hung out with treated me like an artist who mostly made up her mind about things and then did them. Before the departure of my formerly assertive, definitive, and physically and mentally strong husband, if you’d asked me whether I had an egalitarian marriage, I would have assured you that we treated each other as equals, and that our marriage was generous and thoughtful, a meeting of matched minds. When the qualities that I identified in my husband as masculine left, autonomy was thrust upon me. Beauty, power, strength, decisiveness, and even freedom had been situated not within myself, but in who I thought he was. Those projections came flying back, like Huginn and Muninn, those trickster ravens of thought and memory. As much as I’m aware of the deficits in Richard’s brain, I’m also increasingly aware of my own shortfalls. In my young marriage and long relationship, I wasn’t as self-reliant as I imagined myself to be.
Soon after we arrive back in Seattle, our college-graduate children uproot. Our son makes his home all the way across the country and our daughter chooses to live in Europe. We stay where we are for a change, and regard another new year, not from the perspective of mother and father, just as ourselves. We work, eat, and sit at home in silence. Silence that I’m not one bit grateful for. But it’s the kind of silence that leads me to ask questions of myself: What are you? When did you begin? Where are you going? How do you define your values, beliefs, truths?
In Richard, now years after the brain injury, I have a chance to observe someone who has no answers to these questions. He does not exist in memory, even to himself. He constantly forgets information, narrative, instructions, agreements, history, attachments, associations, requests, niceties, traditions, experiences. He doesn’t always forget and he doesn’t never remember. He is habitual and he is random. There is no method to understanding how the forgetting works. Even without a steady self, he has no issues related to lack of self-esteem. There is very little self to require esteem.
I begin to notice all the times that I am not awake to a solid notion of myself: when I’m driving, while my mind is on a problem, when I’m immersed in a deep sleep, when I become lost to the world during orgasm, when I stop seeing the room around me while I am writing this text. In these moments, my own life vanishes. Even my assured stories about our past are only shots in the dark, a way to bring a family tale to life. I think of birthday photographs from my childhood, and, of course, I cannot register my history in its entirety. Prompted by a specific photograph, I tell my story about what happened on that day—how I loved chocolate cake, for example—and I may not reveal that my sister was crying, my mother was pregnant, or that way back when, chocolate was not my favorite cake, I only wish it were so. I fill in the details of the narrative with a sense of how my family was then, or my sister adds her anecdote, or my joke about the event lightens the original mood. Then this story becomes “mine.”
When Richard begins to make his memories, I realize I’m constructing them through a collective rather than an individual reference, that the stories I’m telling him are an amalgamation of my memories and the ones he shared with me before the brain injury. When his mind begins to hold on to a story, he delights in telling “his” version of things to friends, colleagues, and his patients. As I listen to his tales, I can identify the elements that came from a variety of people. I can hear when a sentence comes from the recordings that Richard made with his sister and brother so his children would have their paternal history. The humorous ending to one of his stories comes from my attempt to make him laugh when I shared what he had done to amuse me, oh so long ago. He even picks up our language cues and voice pacing and punch lines.
The collective recollecting becomes a way by which Richard remembers himself. His posture, ungainly and awkward following the surgery, becomes more conscious and graceful as he learns his story. His gaze softens and responds like a sensitive human’s rather than a scared animal’s. He isn’t “coming back,” as people often like to say. That former Richard no longer exists. But I see that Richard is building a container of a narrative to help him move about the world. And with these memories come fear, regret, and the desire for forgiveness.
Richard isn’t experiencing grief for a lost self; grief pours only from us who knew him before. Richard sees himself as helpless to find that former being. He forgives his helplessness. He learns the stories because to form a history is to make us happy. He cares not for the worst or the best moments of his life—they are the same to him. I learn that the specific narrative does not matter. The genuineness of him, the presence of him as he is—what some people call awareness—is unadulterated. For the first time in my life, I begin to love someone for his essence, not for what he can offer me, or reflect onto me, or leave with me. It occurs to me that I might have watched my husband become himself, my desires for him notwithstanding. By waiting in the silence these circumstances have made for us, I’ve come to see him not as mine but as something altogether curious and wonderful. Sometimes it’s sweet. Sometimes it’s sexy. Other times, it’s just damn hard work. In this way, as it turns out, ours is not much different from any other marriage.