by Laura Smith
In the spring, the air warmed and being outside was possible again. There were tulips in the nearby park and little green buds on the tree outside our window. People filled the sidewalks and restaurants opened their windows. The days became longer and people stayed out later, savoring the balmy weather.
I didn’t think much about our conversation until we went out to dinner with another friend and his new girlfriend. Sitting at a small table at the back of the dark restaurant, they told us they were in an open relationship. I tried not to look shocked, wanting to be more open minded than that. Their relationship was the only topic of discussion. Our friend’s girlfriend, whom I’ll call Julia, is tall and beautiful with an aura of calm that masks her blunt talk and pointed questions. As she talked, I admired her total lack of conversational prudishness. Our friend, whom I’ll call Ryan, seemed to be glowing in her presence. As one beer turned into four and P.J. and I continued to pepper them with questions, I had the impression that they were being very patient with us, rehashing well-trodden ground that they didn’t need to bother discussing with their more progressive friends.
“But what if you fall in love?” I asked Julia. “What if he decides to leave you for someone else?”
“If he finds someone else he thinks he would be better with, maybe he should be with that person,” she said.
I couldn’t argue with that logic, though I wasn’t sure I could muster the same magnanimity. I wanted P.J. to be with me no matter what—even if he would thrive more with someone else. Was there not something to be said for agreeing to stick with one relationship and trying to make that work? How could you really invest yourself in something if it seemed expendable? Julia and Ryan argued that they didn’t see their relationship as expendable, but they didn’t want to be constrained by the suppression of their real feelings. I found their ease in talking about a potential separation to be deeply unnerving. He’s sitting right there, I felt like reminding her.
While I admired their comfort with uncertainty, I was skeptical that their arrangement could possibly work for very long. I pictured them casually reviewing their calendars at breakfast. “Next Tuesday, I’ll be with Frank, so how about Wednesday for dinner?” I imagined her saying. “And on your way home from Jennifer, could you grab a couple of things at the store?” It made my stomach churn.
When I tried to isolate what I found so frightening about their arrangement, I settled on an imagined scene: I was alone in a quiet room at night, knowing P.J. was with someone else, waiting for him to come home. Perhaps I was trying to read or watch television to pass the time, but mostly I was just feeling abandoned.
I turned to Ryan, “So how does this work? She says, I have a date tonight, and she just goes off, and you’re sitting at home?”
“Well, I might have a date too,” he said.
“But how do you feel?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him.
“Usually jealous, but that can be hot.”
I told myself I had always tried to avoid jealousy and couldn’t imagine doing something to encourage that feeling. But then I realized this wasn’t entirely true. When another person found P.J. attractive, I felt proud. Someone could see what I saw in him. But there was something else too. Jealousy was a confusing tangle of emotions. Was one of the threads of that tangle arousal? There were times when I could recall relishing jealousy, when I had enjoyed looking across a room and seeing P.J. talking to some beautiful girl. It was a strangely satisfying burn.
My questions were endless. Did they tell each other everything? How did they make plans? What if one person got upset? How did the other person react? Were there rules and if so, what were they? But with each answer I was less satisfied than before. It seemed like some crucial piece of information that allowed me to envision their lives was missing. Maybe I’m just a monogamist, I thought. We finished our drinks and said goodnight. As I watched them walk down the darkened street, I was left standing on the curb feeling very old fashioned. And something was nagging at me.
A few weeks later, an entirely different friend suggested to his girlfriend that they have an open relationship. She said no. He broke up with her. Their situation seemed different. They weren’t well matched for a host of reasons that were obvious to everyone except them. When the boyfriend proposed the open relationship, he wasn’t ready to break up, but he wanted to start the leaving process. The suggestion was the antechamber to splitting up. Their situation revealed something that I had always believed about relationships—that if you truly loved someone, if your relationship was strong and you were with “the right person,” then you wouldn’t want anyone else. Your desires would be magically replaced by eternal satisfaction. Now this struck me as a fairy tale.
—
Suddenly, I wanted to talk about the possibility of sex with others all the time and I was the one initiating the conversation. I felt our discussions unexpectedly drawing us closer, as though now I truly had access to P.J.’s deepest fears and desires. All of the erotic talk flared our imaginations and desire for one another. We were coconspirators, endlessly plotting together. Imagining giving him his freedom was liberating for me. We had never been very jealous or controlling, but now I could see all the subtle ways I had occasionally played the role of jailer or punisher or parent, and I was relieved not to feel that way. I enjoyed my imagined freedom too. It gave me a brisk joyful feeling, like a kid on summer break.
We talked about the people we were attracted to, about the scenarios we could imagine, and potential rules if we were to do it. I was afraid P.J. would fall in love with someone else. He had a very visceral reaction to the idea of my having sex with someone else. My body was my own, he told himself. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that my body was also his. I enjoyed this possessiveness and the feelings of belonging it inspired, but I also wondered: was he not, on some level, trying to tuck me away from the world? I found the idea of his having sex with another woman surprisingly untroubling. It’s just bodies, I thought. The power we had previously attributed to sex suddenly seemed overblown and puritanical. I was much more worried about the fact that we were creating the exact circumstances in which he might fall in love with someone else. He’s thinking about sex and I’m thinking about love, I realized. How predictable.
I considered that our marriage was perhaps the only frontier I had been unwilling to explore. What was I afraid of finding? Three years before, in an airplane somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, I had told myself that my relationship with P.J. was the only thing I would not risk, but now I realized that I had said that out of fear, that I needed one thing—one person—to pin me down to the world. I had always envisioned adventure as traveling somewhere, but now I wondered if an interpersonal adventure could be as, if not more, exciting.
Simone de Beauvoir argued that her greatest accomplishment of all—never mind that staple of Second Wave feminism, The Second Sex—was her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, which had famously bucked monogamy. Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister, had lived in an old East Sussex farmhouse with her husband, Clive Bell, with whom she had two children; a former paramour, Roger Fry; and Duncan Grant, the dashing artist she was desperately in love with but who was rather inconveniently gay. Duncan’s lover, David Garnett, who would later marry Vanessa’s daughter with Duncan, could often be found at the farmhouse too. It was, at first glance, a household pregnant with disaster, love triangles heaped upon love triangles. But in this often painful, sometimes downright disorienting domestic tangle, Vanessa had reimagined what it meant to be family. No one could say that her life was not brimming with love, that she was not living intensely. Amelia Earhart had written to her fiancé, George Putnam, “I shall not hold you to any midaeval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. . . . Please let us not interfere with each others’ work or play.” They would be bound, but not bound. It reminded me of Barbara’s “the first requisite of a happy marriage is not
to be married.” Were there ways to be bound, but free?
I admired these women’s willingness to tinker and experiment, to find lives and relationships that better suited them. In an institution where the prevailing measure of success is longevity, merely surviving, slogging through together across the grueling decades to arrive at a finish line which is in theory marked by death, these women were searching for other metrics. They brought the relentless probing and creative vigor that they applied to their work to their lives. Their bravery befitted the brevity of life. I wanted to be that radical, that pioneering, that willing to view my life as a work in progress, not a fait accompli. Having an open marriage suddenly seemed a more authentic arrangement. It acknowledged attraction rather than trying to stuff it away in the back drawer of your consciousness. We knew there would be pain. But avoiding pain at all cost seemed like a dull way to live.
I found myself thinking about Barbara on the Appalachian Trail. How much of her adventure was about the trail and how much of it was about Nick? The more intoxicating adventure was probably that of falling in love, of letting yourself be vulnerable to someone new. Nick was the true undiscovered country. It was his “unsuspected depths” that had drawn her. To her mind, it wasn’t a real adventure if you knew exactly where you would turn up. A real adventure was a little dangerous. It might upend your life.
To Barbara, life afforded few opportunities for “high adventure,” as she called it. “I’ve had one or two fairly high adventures, and am convinced that they are worth all kinds of sweat and pain and other troubles; in fact, they are the only things really worth suffering for.” When the moment arose, you had to seize it. “If you fully realize what a messy world it is,” she had written to Alice, “and are reconciled to certain facts, such as continual change and permanence in nothing, why then you can have a surprisingly good time.”
A friend once joked that we all have a little Victorian lady living inside of us who wags her finger at any suggestion of deviance, especially of the sexual variety. I was enjoying shocking the little Victorian lady who lived inside of me. In fact, I wanted to cast her out.
I was twenty-nine and married, well on my way to having 2.4 children before my ovaries wore out, and it was all a little too home-catalogue-inspired for my taste. As P.J. and I talked about the possibility of opening our marriage, I thought, yes, I want to be the type of person who is not too chickenshit to try this.
“If there’s a problem, we’ll just talk about it,” we assured one another. I worried that there might be something you could not talk your way out of—say, for example, feelings—but I told myself that willpower could, if necessary, prevail. It was P.J. I was worried about. What if he lost control?
We developed a new language to discuss the possibility of sex with other people. It was not, should we fuck other people? It was, should we be open? “Being open” had a nice sound to it, as if we would just open a jar and lovely things would come fluttering out. Other times it was “the arrangement,” like a friendly business deal struck up over lunch. Our endless hours discussing and wondering in coffee shops, at dinner tables, or walking down the sidewalks of our neighborhood were an attempt to intellectualize the rawest parts of ourselves and study them with scientific zeal, and in so doing assure ourselves that we were in control. I hoped that dressing our desires in finer clothing—the clothing of intellectual inquiry—might elevate them to something worthy of pursuit.
Historical examples hardly suggested it was a path to unalloyed bliss, though. Many people have wondered about the happiness of Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre was a far more prolific philanderer. Did this create a power imbalance? Was parity ever possible? Amelia Earhart didn’t live long enough to find out if her arrangement could work. Vanessa Bell’s daughter with Duncan, Angelica, wrote a pained and critical memoir about growing up in such an unconventional household. And what of Vanessa Bell’s husband, Clive? Was his life so brimming with love? Had she, in filling her cup, drained his?
I left for Germany and Poland with these issues unresolved. On return, as my departure for Canada loomed, the question became more pressing. I was, after all, going to Banff to write about Barbara’s marriage; it seemed an ideal time to think deeply about our own. P.J. and I would be spending several weeks apart, a less problematic time to experiment. And we both had the sense that if we didn’t do it then, we probably never would. We felt closer than ever. All the excitement we had built up over the last few weeks would drain suddenly from our lives, and that idea was extremely unappealing.
It would be an understatement to say that P.J. struggles with decisions. He is constitutionally indecisive, feeling compelled to talk about the pros and cons of every decision ad nauseam. I am constitutionally decisive, often impulsive, preferring swift action to endless consideration. One afternoon, we were on the telephone while he was traveling for a few days for work. “Let’s do it,” I said, feeling a flush of excitement. I wanted to be the one who said it first, not the one who agreed or lagged behind. “I give you my blessing,” I said in my best approximation of a papal dispensation.
I was joking but also not. I knew he would need an official pardon because he was raised Catholic and though his Catholic days were long past, a scrupulousness remained. There would be times when he would need, for the sake of his conscience, to recall that I had given him permission. The legalese of that conversation allowed me not to think too directly about what I was saying. I was giving my husband permission to sleep with other people. I was giving myself permission.
“Okay, great!” P.J. joked, having not yet given me his blessing. Of course the joke contained a kernel of truth—that really he didn’t want me to sleep with other people, that he wished there were some way he could sleep with other people and I would not. I knew it because I felt the same way. But we were striving not just for freedom but also for fairness. Still I hoped that whatever he did, he would always choose me in the end.
There was another long pause.
“I give you my blessing,” he said.
—
I looked at men differently after that. Sitting in a coffeehouse, I saw a man reading a book. I wondered about him. How did he take his coffee? Did he have a sister?
On a train after a night of drinking with friends, I saw a dark-haired man a few seats farther down the car. He was alone and lost in thought. What did he look like when he was sleeping? How would he touch me? Did he prefer sex gentle or rough?
I knew that I was lucky to have found love at all, that I was lucky to have P.J., and it was perhaps ungrateful and greedy to want more. And yet to dismiss my blossoming desire seemed a tragic amputation. I felt as though I had stumbled upon a whole new wing of my house. My world suddenly expanded.
One night shortly before leaving, I put on a long black dress that I knew P.J. liked, and we went out to dinner at a cozy Italian restaurant near our apartment. We sat close together at the bar, drinking white wine. We kept grabbing each other’s hands. P.J. looked at me. Was he trying to imagine what it might be like to see me for the first time—to be a stranger? The danger of a dalliance had piqued our awareness of each other. Did he look a little sad? His face shifted suddenly, now looking excited.
As I leaned across to him in the low-lit bar, I had the sense that we were partners in crime. P.J. whispered in my ear, “I want you all for myself,” and then he laughed a strange, truncated laugh. “Oh, man, what am I doing?” he groaned and laughed again. In his tone, I heard desperation. He didn’t really have me anymore, and he knew it. He gripped my hand.
“We don’t have to do this, you know,” I heard myself say.
“Yeah, cancel the whole thing,” he said. He kissed my hand again.
I told myself we couldn’t turn back. If we called it off, we would always wonder, and the wondering would torment us. We looked at each other, blinking almost wistfully, shaking our heads and occasionally laughing because it was all so absurd.
Two weeks later, I boarded a plane to Canada.
FOURTEEN
I was told that in Banff people lose their minds. It may have something to do with the altitude—Banff is a small ski town in western Canada that sits at around 4,500 feet above sea level. Or perhaps it’s the dizzying views of sharp, rock-faced mountains protruding above the tree line reminding people of their mortality and inspiring them to do things they normally wouldn’t. I had been warned that people couldn’t sleep there and was told to arm myself with eye masks, earplugs, melatonin, or something stronger. Marriages end here, a man told me. I thought I detected a note of satisfaction in his voice. A woman told me that when First Nations people had come to the hill overlooking what would become the town of Banff, it had given them an ominous feeling and they had moved on. “Bad mojo,” she said. People seemed to love Banff perhaps precisely because of the chaos it brought into their lives.
At the Calgary airport tall men in Stetson hats, chaps, and tight-fitting jeans were performing a country song in the lobby and cowboy memorabilia was everywhere: lassos, boots, large hats. My arrival coincided with Stampede, a ten-day rodeo with events such as calf roping and ladies’ barrel racing. I heaved my large bag off the belt. A lone traveler. The thought gave me a prickle of satisfaction. P.J. would pick me up from Banff to go camping for two weeks at the end of the summer, but until then, we would essentially be leading separate lives.
I took the shuttle into Banff with Taylor, a writer friend from New York, who would also be attending the residency. As he and I talked, the flat plains of Calgary gradually rose up into the Canadian Rockies. Surrounding the town were dense alpine woods with hiking trails that ran along steep rock faces, glacial rivers, and thin spires that protruded skyward like misshapen fingers, known as hoodoos. The shuttle pulled into the arts center. The sounds of stringed instruments being tuned and opera singers rehearsing filled the air. A greeter showed us to the welcome center and told us that elk and mule deer with fuzzy antlers occasionally wandered through people’s front yards and that we should stay away from them during mating season. Solitary trail jogging was discouraged on account of the grizzlies, cougars, and wolves. We were assigned to studio cabins nestled in the woods, where we would work, and hotel rooms, where we would sleep. I took a deep breath of the mountain air and thought of New York with its car fumes and grimy sidewalks. Suddenly I couldn’t remember why I lived there.