We also seem to be missing a foundation upon which to build. In my other relationships, this foundation is shared memory. Craig and I don’t have a shared memory because Craig seems to forget what I reveal to him about myself and my past. One night I sit on the couch, cruise the television channels, and settle on The Newlywed Game. The host asks the husbands, “What is your wife’s favorite color?” “What was the name of your wife’s childhood pet?” The TV husbands know these things about their wives and I know these things about Craig, but I’m certain Craig doesn’t know these things about me. Craig wouldn’t be able to smile and tell the host that his wife’s favorite color is sky blue or that her first pet was a calico cat named Coco. He couldn’t reach into his heart and pull out the story I told him once, about how Coco abandoned her kittens in my closet and how I nursed them all through the long nights with an eyedropper and how only one survived. He would not be able to explain that I named that kitten Miracle and that Miracle thought I was his mother. When I told Craig that story, I knew it was important, but he didn’t. He smiled and nodded and then let it slip away. When I mentioned Miracle months later, Craig said, “Who is Miracle?” His forgetfulness feels like carelessness, and his carelessness feels like rejection. What do I do? Tell Miracle’s story again? Do I say, The story I’m about to tell is important to me. Please pay attention and remember it. Please keep this piece of me somewhere safe so we can build upon it? Each day, we’re making sandcastles I know will be washed away. I long for something solid, lasting, strong between us.
As an act of mercy, I decide to keep conversation with Craig at an operational level. I quit asking, “Are you sure you’re really listening to what I’m saying?” Continuing to request something he can’t offer feels unkind, like handing him a puzzle I know he can’t solve. So I try to adjust my expectations. I stop bringing up world issues, friendships, the book I’m reading, my confusions about the past, and my dreams for the future. Instead, we talk about logistics—what time Chase ate or slept; what we’ll eat for dinner; when my parents are planning to come visit; the weather; work. We are polite and gentle with each other, like two people having coffee for the first time. This feels like a significant and dangerous adjustment. It seems like we’ve stopped working to build a shared life and simply retreated back into the safety of ourselves. Instead of making peace, we are keeping the peace. We are avoiding conflict, but I’m getting lonelier and more afraid. Having something to say and no one to hear it is so lonely. Expecting less than true friendship in my most important relationship is so depressing. Every day when Craig gets home from work, I want to grab him and say, I’m in here—I’m offering myself to you—do you hear me? Instead, when he asks me how I am, I say, “I’m fine, just fine.”
Conversation is my building material; Craig’s is sex. To know someone, to love and feel loved by her, he needs to touch her and be touched by her. Craig uses his body exclusively and desperately, like I use words. He is like a blind man grasping to make sense of his world with his hands—he is constantly grabbing for me, rubbing me, pulling me close to him. When he reaches for me, I stiffen reflexively and then try to relax, to be receptive, to seem grateful for his attention like I’m supposed to be. I want to be a good wife. But my body’s already revealed the truth. I don’t feel grateful; I feel resentful. Every time Craig stops me for the affection he needs, I’m doing something. I’m taking care of Chase, the house, the meals. I resent the constant interruptions, and Craig’s affection seems like a means to an end. It doesn’t feel like he’s pulling me toward him because he loves me, but because he needs sex to relieve his stress, and affection is the first step toward sex. I wonder how Craig would feel if people walked into his office every few hours requesting shoulder rubs to take the edge off. I want to say, Leave me alone! I’m done doing favors today! I’m used up, overwhelmed by touch and needs already—why must you be needy, too? You’re a grown man! Can’t you help take care of business around here instead of creating more business for me to take care of? There is a child to be cared for, papers to be graded, laundry to be folded. Help me, I want to yell. Don’t require more from me! I say none of this, because I’m ashamed of my coldness and selfishness. I deflect his advances like he deflects my words, my stories. He is handing me bricks and I am dropping them. I know he’s hurt by it. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says. “I’m fine, just fine.”
We know we need help, so we attend a marriage retreat where we’re told that date night is the answer. I quickly realize that date nights require three things: conversational skills, sexual chemistry, and money. Since we have none of these, date nights highlight our problems instead of fix them. We sit across from each other at dinner and Craig scrambles for conversation topics while I anticipate the inevitability that he’ll want sex later. I resent the transactional nature of this phenomenon—dinner for sex—and I annoy myself with all my resentment. Why can’t I feel desire instead of duty? The answer doesn’t matter. This is part of the deal. I have come to understand that sex is an inconvenient but important favor wives do for husbands to keep things running smoothly. I find the whole system strange but doable, like making sure the oil in the car is changed so we can get where we need to go. When we return from our date, Craig sends home the sitter and I prepare for duty.
I undress in the bathroom and then slide underneath the covers to wait. Craig joins me, and as things move along, I try to stay present and feel something. But instead of love, I feel apathy. I’m as lonely with Craig on top of me making love as I am with him beside me making conversation. Craig seems to be getting a job done and I am just lying there, waiting it out, making whatever noises seem to help speed up the process. I can’t tolerate the acting, so I slip out. Now I’m hovering above my body, detached, separate, absent, watching sex happen to me. Craig continues on. He is not bothered by my apathy or absence, which makes me angry. Is he failing to notice that I’ve slipped out or is he failing to care? Now I don’t just feel used up, I feel used. And so, from above, my mind begs my body to push him off, to curl up into a ball, and reclaim itself. My mind is silently screaming to Craig, Get off get off get OFF. But my body delivers a different message. My body is committed to keeping the peace. My body knows that we just have a few minutes left here, and we’ll buy ourselves another week. So it sacrifices itself once again by pretending. By making movements and noises that communicate: Yes, I’m enjoying this. Sex feels like a betrayal of myself. Sex feels like a lie.
When it’s over, we lie in bed together. I am lonely, afraid, and ashamed. I’m lonely because Craig has no idea what has just happened inside of me even though he was inside of me when it happened. I’m ashamed and afraid because I feel incapable of offering or accepting love. Every once in a while, we try to talk about it. I tell Craig that I’m struggling, that something feels off about our sex, that I know it’s me but I don’t know how to fix it. Craig is sympathetic but he has no answers. I can tell that he feels rejected. He wants to be inside my body like I want to be inside his mind. But he can’t find me inside my body because that’s not where I live, and I can’t find him inside his mind, because that’s not where he lives. He looks at me with sad eyes that say, Look. I’m here. I’m offering myself to you; do you see me, do you feel me?
* * *
One night, Craig passes by the couch and heads into our bedroom. “Come here,” he says. My heart sinks and I stiffen. I can tell by his voice that he wants sex. I don’t want sex; I want my bowl of ice cream and my corner of the couch. I’m so tired, but I stand up and follow Craig. I need to be a good wife so we can all be happy. Ten minutes. I promise the couch I’ll be back in ten minutes.
But when I get to the bedroom, Craig is not grinning at me with the covers pulled up to his chin like he usually is. He’s on a step stool, reaching into the closet. I sit down and wait while Craig pulls down a black plastic box filled with old VHS tapes. He carries it over and places it on the bed next to me. I know this special box because I
carried it from the moving van into our apartment. These are the tapes that document the earliest part of Craig’s lifelong soccer career. He keeps them because before Chase and me, soccer was the most precious thing to him. Craig seems nervous and I’m confused. Then he starts speaking quickly. He tells me that half of these are soccer footage from when he was a child, but the other half are porn. My eyes widen and I suddenly feel very awake. I look down at the box and I don’t like the idea that all these childhood tapes are mixed with pornography. My first thought is, These should be in separate boxes. Craig asks if I want to watch something. “Soccer or porn?” I ask.
“Porn,” he says.
“Together?”
“Yes.”
“Do couples do that?”
“I think so.”
I desperately want to say, No, thank you. I tell myself that I cannot always have what I want. Marriage is a compromise. “Okay,” I say. I lie down on the bed and stare at our tiny TV while Craig gets the video ready. I’m wearing glasses and I suddenly feel self-conscious about them. People watching porn should not be wearing glasses unless they are sexy librarians. I look down at my flannel pants and hoodie and fuzzy heart socks and I cannot imagine that anyone could look less like a sexy librarian than I do. I wonder if it would be weird to ask if I can go get my ice cream first. I cannot imagine that rocky road and porn go well together, so I decide against it with great resentment. Why can’t Craig just be happy with food like I am? Food is the reward; sex is just more work. I do my best to smile.
Craig lies down next to me and props himself up with a pillow. He decides that there is still too much light in the room so he gets back up and hits the switch. He comes back, and the video begins. Two women are making some kind of delivery to a man’s apartment. These two women have bleached-blond, frizzy hair and they are climbing stairs while wearing stiletto heels. I feel immediate camaraderie with these women because climbing stairs in those things is harder than it looks. First there is some dialogue that feels exactly as forced and awkward as the dialogue Craig and I try to have before making out. Then the sex starts. My eyes widen and I try very, very hard to be serious about this. I do not try hard enough. I burst out laughing, but it’s not because I think any of this is funny. It’s just that my fuzzy socks are between me and the screen so I have to see both the socks and the sex at the same time. These two things together feel absurd. Craig looks over at me and he laughs, too, but it is a fake laugh. I can tell he’s trying to figure out whether I’m laughing at the people on the screen or at him. I stop laughing. As soon as I stop laughing, I feel sick to my stomach. The man on the screen is telling the women in the stiletto heels exactly what to do and they are doing it, but they look very tired to me. And the faces they are making look angry. I wonder if Craig notices how tired and angry they look. Maybe not, because it is clear that the angry faces they are making are also supposed to be sexy faces. For a moment, I am relieved to see that anger and sex and exhaustion and duty are all mixed up here, too. I feel like I understand these porn stars.
At some point, the porn does to me whatever porn is supposed to do. I am transformed from a tired mom into someone who really, really wants sex. Now we are having sex. It is frantic. I notice that during this sex I am more engaged than usual. It is sort of animalistic. I notice that I am not thinking about Craig. I am thinking about the people in the video. This baffles me. Why am I thinking about the repulsive, sad, angry, frizzy sex instead of being present in this sex with my own gorgeous husband? I consider the strangeness of using one body to have an experience with another. The saying “neither here nor there” enters my mind. Then I wonder if Craig is thinking about the frizzy sex, too. Is this why his eyes are closed and he seems so distant? Is he neither here nor there? Is he with me or them? I think, Why does he need them? Why does he need those angry, tired women? He’s got one right here.
Afterward Craig and I lie next to each other and stare at the ceiling. We are trying to figure out what to say next. Craig leans over and makes a face that is sort of a smile and leans in for a kiss. It feels awkward. Kissing seems too tender, too personal to follow what just happened between us and the TV. This kiss feels like an apology or a request to start over. After the kiss a mixture of fear, loneliness, shame, and darkness fills me. This familiar combination yanks me backward.
I am back in college. It’s Friday night and there’s a party raging. I’m in the basement with my boyfriend and eight of his frat brothers. My boyfriend has one arm around me and he is showing me a bag of cocaine. He’s kissing my cheek and whispering in my ear. He is being gentle and attentive and his friends are all smiling at me, which is not how any of them usually behave. Now I’m leaning over the mirror on the coffee table and I’m doing my first line. My eyes are widening and my boyfriend is laughing and squeezing my leg. The rush starts at my head and goes all the way to my toes. The guys’ faces light up and they cheer. They look at me with adoration. It is thrilling and half the thrill is from the coke and the other half is from the approval of these men around me. I can see that I’m one of them now. I’m a girl, but I’m cool. I’m so cool. Thank God. Before the coke I felt lost, but afterward I’m found. By these guys. By my boyfriend. By the coke.
For years, doing lines with them turns out to be the perfect fast track to their love. And when there is no coke, there’s pot, so we get stoned and sit together with nowhere else to be. And if there’s no pot, there’s booze, so we drink and become witty and brave together. And if there’s no coke, pot, or booze—there’s food. If I’m ever left alone with no one to fold into, I can always eat. Bingeing keeps me numb until the night falls and I can ingest my love and belonging and courage again.
It’s an effective but unsustainable system, because the higher I get each night, the lower I sink each day. In the early hours of the morning, the fraternity basement empties. People pair off to go home together and they take their drugs and love with them. Eventually, it’s just me and my boyfriend in bed and he starts to fall asleep. This means aloneness is near. I cannot allow that to happen so I suggest sex, which buys me a few more minutes of love. But then he passes out and I’m left alone after all. So I lay my head on his chest, wrap my arms around myself, and settle in for my punishment: being wired, alone, in the damning quiet for hours—until the light slips in. Every morning, I watch the light from the merciless sun fill the room. My eyes dart from the blinking TV to beer cans to mirrors to razors to bongs to girlie posters to all the other remnants of debauchery. How did all of this seem glamorous a few hours ago? How did this ever look like love? The light breaks the spell, and it all looks like hell. My breathing shallows and panic sets in. I don’t belong here. How did I get here? How do I get out? How do I get back to my family? I don’t want to be cool anymore. I want to be good. I want to be good. Every single morning, I am a little girl who has woken up and discovered that she is alone and freezing in the dark woods. Every single morning, my terror is fresh and immediate and total. This is how I lived until Chase came. The dark of night was for blissful forgetting, the light of morning was for terrible remembering.
Now, for the first time since I became sober, I feel like that girl lost in the woods again. I’m lying in bed with my head on my husband’s chest, but he’s disappeared already. He’s fallen asleep and taken his love with him. I’m alone now. The effects of the porn have left me wide awake and my eyes are darting from the blinking TV to the box of tapes on the floor. Suddenly our bedroom seems dark and dangerous. I am trying to figure out what just happened to us. What do we want that we think porn will get us? Coke had been a fast track to love. Pot, a fast track to belonging. Booze to courage. Food to comfort. Porn to what? Other people’s bodies to what? What were we using porn for that we couldn’t find in ourselves or each other?
The next morning I wait for Craig to wake up and I say, “I can’t do that anymore.”
He looks surprised and says, “Okay. I thought you enjoyed it. I thought it turned you on.” My stomach c
lenches at the phrase: turned you on.
I say, “No, yes. I guess it did, sort of, but not in a good way. It felt dangerous, dark. I can’t get those women’s faces out of my head. They just—their faces reminded me of my face too many times. Last night the porn was the coke and you were my ex-boyfriend and I was the girl I used to be. I can’t be that girl anymore. I have a baby now. I want to be a mom and a wife. I just want to be good. I need real. I need to stay in the light. I just want it out. Can we get it out of our house? Can we not have this stuff in our house again? Just, please. Get it out of here.”
Craig looks alarmed and tender. I can tell he has no idea what I’m talking about, but I can also tell that it doesn’t matter. He says, “Yes, yes, of course. Don’t worry. I’m sorry, baby.”
And I say, “Promise me, no more.”
“I promise. Consider them gone,” he says. I am grateful. He wants me to be okay more than he wants what he wants. I know this. I love this man. But I still feel afraid. It’s something about how the tapes were all mixed together in that black box and how it was animal sex and how Craig is now holding me so tight but won’t look me in the eye. I sense danger. And I’m surprised and ashamed by this thought that arises: I love you but I can’t go back into the woods for you. I am on a path now and I have to keep walking forward. Chase needs someone to follow, and I can’t carry you, too. So much depends on me.
Love Warrior Page 8