by Ada Calhoun
He had come to the North, land of his family’s enemies, with almost nothing, so we could make this life together and have this magical child. So we could take road trips and eat French fries. So we could fight and make up and listen to audiobooks and go to gift shops. So we could walk through this cemetery looking at the graves of men who died to keep the country together. I stared at him in wonder as he pointed out gravestones to Oliver, the setting sun surrounding him in a halo. Never in my life have I been more in love with anyone than I was with him at that moment.
* We didn’t speak of it at the time, because that poor mother, but a week later Neal said three words out of nowhere: “Remember that baby?”
“The one in Gettysburg who sounded like a pterodactyl?” I said.
“Yup.”
That was the whole conversation.
TOAST 6
Other People, Other Cities
O happy girls, discreet in joviality!
Decoy of fingers and appeal of eyes,
Summoning the soul to be sincere and wise,
And love not in the flesh, but in totality!
O loves forbidden, I’ll go home and start
My pipe and light my fire and break my heart,
And read a book on sexual morality.
—Gerald Gould, “Monogamy,” 1918
EVERY SPRING, I visit Philadelphia to speak to a friend’s journalism class. It’s a city I could imagine living in, and so I take any excuse to go there and play a version of “House”—to play “City.” I’ll probably never move away from my hometown, but sometimes it’s fun to pretend that I could live somewhere else.
The last time I lived outside of New York, fifteen years ago, I was studying Sanskrit at the University of Texas at Austin. Later, I tried to relive those days by sitting in on a weekly Advanced Sanskrit class at U. Penn. I walked around the campus carrying my old books and flashcards, pretending that I was a college student again, and that the ink on my faded grammar charts was still fresh.
This is where I’d eat lunch if I were really a student here, I would think. This is where my office would be if I were a grad student. I imagined a tree outside my window, coffee from the campus canteen, and academic meetings with the head of the Sanskrit program, who I met when I requested permission to audit the class there. We bonded when we realized we share a favorite author: Sriharsha, a profound and risqué court poet from the twelfth century. (In my literary cosmology, there is a direct line that starts with Sriharsha, detours through Shakespeare and Dawn Powell, and ends with Louis C.K. Perhaps they are the same person, reincarnated, like an urbane Dalai Lama.)
When I was studying Sanskrit as a flailing twenty-year-old, my main interests—sex and grammar—occasionally fused, as when I translated the verses of a dirty poem that nineteenth-century Sanskritists had left untranslated due to the work’s being “indelicate.” I tucked my smutty translations of these verses into the book and put it back on the library shelf.
Sriharsha was the dirtiest, most grammatically inventive writer I’d ever encountered. He excelled at an exquisite grammatical trick, slesha—basically, allegory on speed: multiple entendre. A prime example is the famous (to Sanskritists) section of Sriharsha’s Naishadiyacaritam called “The “Pancanaliya,” “The Episode of the Five Nalas.” In this passage, the goddess of wisdom introduces the princess Damayanti to five suitors, all of whom appear to be King Nala, the man she hopes to marry. But, in fact, four of them are gods pretending to be Nala. The goddess uses one line to describe all five suitors at once. You can’t translate this verse into English without doing it five different ways.
The chair of the Sanskrit department at U. Penn wrote a beautiful book about Sriharsha, for which I have written the only Amazon review to date (five stars).
The Five Nalas story ends with the princess staring at these five regal beings, trying to discern the king, whom she wants to marry, from the four pretenders, whom she does not. Meanwhile, King Nala, surrounded by this army of doppelgängers, questions his own existence.
“Despite the fact that the real Nala is standing right in front of her among four false Nalas,” the Sanskrit chairman writes, “Damayanti is having a crisis of faith and cannot recognize the true love of her life, while Nala doubts if Damayanti will ever choose him.”
Perhaps now is a good time to mention that I have always been attracted to the Sanskrit chairman. Long ago, he touched my arm and I took it for a question and moved my arm casually away. If it had been a question, he took that for an answer. Still, I look forward to our lunches more than I should.
Once we bought coffee and little pieces of chocolate from a newspaper shop and sat outside and he told me he was considering proposing to his girlfriend. He’d been married before and wondered if he could be ready to try again, to return to an institution that the first time around had proved difficult, to make a choice once and for all.
I told him that my childhood best friend, Asia, now a shrink, says you need to figure out how to build sway into a marriage, the way you do into the foundation of a building. She says that just as a tall building or bridge without room to expand or contract, to move in stiff winds, falls down, so a marriage that’s too rigid crumbles at the first tremor.
“That sounds like Sanskrit grammar,” the Sanskrit chairman said. “There are so many rules, but built into the rules are ways to break them. Sanskrit is all about creating potentialities—the linguistic word is ‘optionality.’ Wittgenstein talks about the limitations of language, though honestly there’s not much you can imagine but not say in Sanskrit if you truly understand the grammar.”
When my last book came out, I went on a little DIY book tour, doing events at bookstores, churches, festivals, rock clubs, journalism schools, and a bowling alley. At one reading, there were only a few people. At another, there were hundreds. People laughed at my jokes and asked me to sign their books to friends with strange names and took me out afterward for drinks, and I loved every second of it.
The trip reminded me of being a teenager, backpacking around the world on my accumulated babysitting riches and odd jobs, feeling an infinite sense of possibility. When I was eighteen, I had romances simmering on back burners everywhere—one in Ireland, one in Sardinia, one in the Midwest, one in New York. Now I had a home I loved that I knew I’d go back to, and also things to accomplish—books to sell, lectures to give—and this appealed to my Puritan work ethic.
Before I left, Neal said he hoped I would have a good time. He said I had accomplished something and should see the trip as a victory lap. He said he hoped I would be able to fend off any advances men made on me, and that he’d be mad if I “caught feelings” for someone else. But he also said that mainly I should have fun.
And so I did.
In Houston, I saw an ex-boyfriend for a long talk at a diner. He assuaged my enduring guilt over how I’d been a lousy girlfriend seventeen years earlier. We remembered what good friends we’d been and should be again.
In St. Louis, I spoke to the parishioners of a rector I’d written about who had died before the book came out. I saw the tiles behind which his and his wife’s ashes were stored, and someone said to me, “People in this congregation will never forget this, you being here today.”
In Austin, I went out drinking with some old friends. When I was hugging one of them good night by our cars, there was a sudden electricity. It took a little while for either of us to let go. “I should get back to my hotel,” I said, finally, and then did. The next morning, I woke up hungover and happy.
In Miami, a scandalous friend of mine suggested that we “double-team” a surprisingly muscular journalist we met at a party. I demurred. We settled for eating tater tots on a bench outside a fast-food restaurant by the hotel.
I was the poster child for optionality. I could have all the freedom in the world, and look how well I managed it. But my friends in AA quote a line about why you shouldn’t go to bars if you want to stay sober: “If you hang out in barbershops, eventu
ally you’ll get a haircut.”
One night at dinner after a reading, I showed a friend of mine a photo of a colleague I planned to see on another stop of the tour. Wry and roguish, he resembled something a 3-D printer would produce after scanning head shots of my favorite actors.
“Wow,” she said, looking at my phone. “Trouble.”
When I was a little girl, I heard the word “soul” and asked where mine was. “Around here somewhere,” my father told me, pointing at the center of my body. This image stuck in my head: the soul was invisible but present, like dark matter. It took up residence in the middle of your body, like a ghost in an old house. Today, that space just below my rib cage is where I feel lust.
I met up with this man in his town. Driving toward him, I felt a fluttering of anticipation. Butterflies are too delicate an image. The feeling of inconvenient, insistent desire was more like bats flying out from under a bridge—a black mass of beating wings.
The whole time we were sitting at the bar where we’d met up, I kept glancing at the place where his arms met his T-shirt. The impulse to touch him was barely controllable. I knew I should shake off the feeling, but I indulged it by staring, like a child impatiently waiting on line at an ice cream truck.
As I went to leave, our hands touched on the table. Soon after, in the amber parking-lot light of a strange city, we hugged good-bye.
“You’re pretty,” he said into my hair.*
The attention made me feel drunk, and prettier. It’s like how performer friends of mine carry themselves with greater physical self-assurance than other people, even offstage. The crowds’ desire gets inside them somehow, feeds a cycle of desirability, makes them feel desirable in proportion to how much they are desired.
The bats flapped violently. I wanted to pull this man into the backseat of my car. Instead, I said good night and drove back to my hotel alone, vibrating with energy. Once back in my room, full of adrenaline, I turned on the TV and stared at it for a full hour without registering anything. I felt guilty, and elated, and I hoped I would see him again.
The next night, I did see him again, this time with other people in a public place. But then, suddenly—and how naturally this seems to happen when you want it to—we were alone again, standing by our cars.
“Will you come over?” he said. “If you do, I promise I won’t try to make out with you too much.”
Wow, that’s a good line, I thought. He probably uses it all the time. But it still felt tailor-made for me, for that night.
“That’s not such a good idea,” said my brain. “You should just go back to the hotel and go to bed early.”
My body vehemently disagreed. The body is a rhetorical genius and a logistical magician—able to conjure dark corners and empty rooms, able to make insane plans seem reasonable, to make long treks effortless. That’s why my favorite euphemism for affairs is “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” because South Carolina governor Mark Sanford’s staff said that’s where he was when in fact he was in Argentina with a woman who wasn’t his wife.
“Just stop thinking,” my body said. “Tomorrow you can come back, the way people in Tornado Alley do after a storm. You can have all the other days forever. But for now, shhhhh . . .”
And because in that moment I failed to talk myself out of it, I went.
“The word is rasa,” the chairman once told me when we were discussing the translation of a particular Sanskrit poem. “It gets translated as spirit or life force, but what it really means is wetness—sexual wetness.”
In the troublesome man’s apartment, I touched his arm. And then we were kissing. He pressed me into the couch with the weight of his strong, unfamiliar body. Then we chatted about music, and books, and people we knew in common, as if we were associates having an innocent nightcap, as if what we were toying with, adultery, wasn’t against the law in twenty-one states. And then we were kissing again. And then it was late.
“It’s time for me to go,” I said.
We’d made out, but not too much—unless you think that anything when you’re married to someone else is too much, in which case it was definitely way too much.
“Don’t go,” he said.
I wanted to stop thinking completely. My brain still had some influence, though.
“I need to go,” I said.
“Just stay a little longer,” he said.
I began to think the line I was drawing was academic, that maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I slept with this man. I hadn’t had sex with anyone but my husband in fifteen years. That’s a long time. If ever there were a moment to cave, this was probably it: someone I knew, but not too well; someone I liked, but didn’t love. My body encouraged this train of thought. But then my brain started flashing through potential consequences—hurting Neal, getting pregnant, falling for this man . . .
I stood up.
“You could sleep here,” he said. “My bed is really comfortable. We could just sleep.”
I was so tired, and he was so cute, but I made my way to the door and drove back to my hotel through the late-night chill, feeling alternately giddy and horrible.
Early the next morning, I left town. On the road, I received a text from him saying he wished we’d had more time together.
“I have a little crush on you,” he said.
“Last night you said big crush,” I wrote back, delaying the inevitable conversation in which I’d have to say I probably shouldn’t see him again.
“Ha, okay,” he replied, “big crush.”
“My food!” a friend’s toddler said the other day, pointing to my nine-year-old son’s plate. My son was horrified. “Uh, no, that’s my food,” he said, appalled that this kid couldn’t understand something so basic as what belongs to whom. “That,” he said, pointing to the baby’s plate, “is your food.”
So simple, right? I don’t belong to this man in this other town. My husband is my husband, and other men are not. Monogamy: it’s what we promise in pretty much every religious or secular marriage: “I bind you to me and loose you from all others.” But like Damayanti, sometimes I look at other men and I get a little muddled. Lust creates meaning where there isn’t any, builds mountains of slesha, turns us into children who can’t tell mine and not-mine apart.
When I was a teenage babysitter, one of my charges called all women not his mother “Ada.” I was flattered, though I think having an easy-to-pronounce name was a lot of it, and also it was baby-brain logic: I was called Ada, and I was a woman, and not his mother; therefore, all women not his mother were Adas. It was a category error. And now here I was making such a basic mistake when it came to the strictly limited category of men it’s okay for me to kiss.
I think of all the men I’ve liked over the years, a new crush pretty much every month when I was single, and now every few years I’ve been married, and how each time I’ve thought, How novel! This is delightful and new!
When really it’s the same, over and over again. I look at old diaries and I see a pattern going back to sixth grade: attraction comes on like a flu. Then, eventually, the fever breaks. I try to remember that inevitable dissolution when in the thrall of desire, but it’s difficult—like, when you are sick, believing you will be well again, or trying, in the depths of slushy February, to remember the blazing sun of August. On second thought, rather than illness or the weather, maybe lust is more like hunger: even if you eat the best meal you’ve ever had, a few hours later you’re hungry again.
“Happily married women stray more often than unhappy ones,” a friend told me. “It’s because they don’t have enough to fret about at home. Their brain needs the extra stimulation and anxiety fodder, the distraction of Will he write me back?”
Something about what she said sounded right. For me, wanting other people isn’t about filling a deficit, the way it’s said affairs usually are. It’s about greed: having everything and wanting more.
“We can do whatever you want,” the man on tour had said to me, like some kind of
sexual genie. As if I had an erotic grocery list in my pocket waiting for just such an opportunity. (In fact, my desires are pedestrian. When I listen to music, too, I prefer greatest hits to deep cuts.)
Some people think that not getting what you want at home should serve as license to go elsewhere. To me, that seems ercenary. I imagine people placing orders at a busy deli counter: “My husband doesn’t like S&M, so I would like some light bondage.” “My wife doesn’t kiss me passionately, so I’ll need twenty minutes of necking.”
One man I know has had a few one-night stands because his wife is no longer interested in sex, and she has essentially given him permission to go elsewhere for that, the way I encourage Neal to go out dancing with other people because I’m a bad dancer.
A couple of bisexual women I know have permission from their husbands, tacit or otherwise, to sleep with other women. (I am persuaded by the Kinsey scale that most of us are at one end or the other of the straight-to-gay continuum but plenty are in the middle.)
It’s not like that for me, trying to get something I don’t have at home. Neal denies me nothing. He is great in bed and would just as soon we had sex every day. (“Write that I have a nice penis,” he says. He has a magnificent penis.) So what was I doing on that other man’s couch?
I think that these things, at least for me, are not about wanting more or different or better sex; it’s about wanting other people. And also, perhaps, it’s about wanting to shake everything up. The discombobulating excitement and jealousy when someone else enters the picture throws everything into a heightened state not unlike the sexual thrall Neal and I were in when we first met. In the halo of an extramarital crush, the sex we have with each other is more intense.
But this is not all about stoking the home fires. Some of it is about my own desire. When I saw that other man in that other town, I got to pretend that I could still be free, even though I belong to my husband until I die or he does. My interest in other men isn’t about trying to trade Neal in. It’s about simultaneously experiencing something new—and who do we have here?—and something old—my younger, freer, less responsibility-bound self.