Do This For Me

by Eliza Kennedy

“There’s no question that women are equal to men in every way that matters, right? But if we want men to accept us as equals—if we don’t want to be interrupted and excluded and called ‘dear’—we shouldn’t go around defining ourselves by our gender. Woman lawyer. Woman therapist. Woman anything. That should take a backseat. Especially in the professional world.”

  “It sounds like you’re suggesting women shouldn’t complain about the problems you’ve identified.”

  “They shouldn’t,” I said. “There’s no point.”

  The good doctor was perplexed. “You obviously care about these issues. Look at the case you won against that restaurant chain.”

  “What, Gaia Café?”

  “Yes. Was that type of harm more serious in your view, and therefore worthy of pushback?”

  “More serious?” I repeated. “It was certainly more harmful than anything I’ve experienced. The same goes for the abuse women have been suffering for decades in Hollywood, and in politics, and in the media, and which we’re finally talking about. Still, it all stems from the same mind-set. One that perceives women as other, as lesser, as object. A mind-set held by many men—and some women too, I might add. Lawyers and judges might—on average—behave better than creepy restaurant managers and hideous movie producers, but many of them don’t think about women any differently. Not really.”

  “Yet the lawyers and judges,” Bogard persisted, “the subtle offenders—they don’t deserve to be challenged?”

  “Deserve? I don’t know what they deserve. What I do know is that discrimination and harassment have legal remedies. I went to court. I presented evidence and won damages. What court is going to rectify mansplaining, Doctor? Who’s going to issue an injunction against the ‘dears’ and the ‘darlings’ and the ‘honeys’? Nobody. Because the root problem—the attitude—is fixed in place, and unless you can point to a specific harm, all the complaining in the world isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

  “People can’t be persuaded? You can’t change minds?”

  “People don’t change. Not down deep.”

  Bogard was, unaccountably, not willing to let the subject drop. “Your associate may be looking to you as a role model. Doesn’t that endow you with a responsibility to stand up to wrong attitudes, even if you’re skeptical about the outcome?”

  “I know what Amanda wanted me to do,” I said. “She wanted me to call the guy out. To make a full-throated, rah-rah, how-dare-you-sir speech about what a pig he was being. Would that have made us feel better? Sure. Would it have shamed him, enlightened him, altered his beliefs in any way? No. To harp on the fact that we’re being treated unfairly won’t magically create fairness in the world. It will only distract us from what’s important.”

  “Winning,” Bogard said.

  “Exactly. The answer is not to complain, but to ignore it. To work harder. The way to succeed,” I said, “is to succeed.”

  Bogard chewed that over for a moment. Then he settled back into his chair.

  “So you noticed what your opponent was doing, it annoyed you, and you suppressed your annoyance. You locked it up.”

  Clever Bogard. He’d managed to worm his way into my least-favorite subject. I raised my hands in surrender. “You got me. But I’m not the only person who puts on a game face at work.”

  “We’re not talking about other people,” he reminded me. “We’re talking about you.”

  “What does any of this have to do with my marriage?”

  “You suppress your emotions to be successful at work,” he said. “Perhaps it’s a mode you found harder and harder to switch off when you got home. That’s consistent with Aaron’s claim that you withdrew.”

  “I’m perfectly capable of distinguishing between my personal life and my work one.”

  “Are you?” he countered. “Look at your response when you learned about Aaron’s infidelity. You reacted not like a hurt spouse, but like a litigator. And you attacked his professional reputation with particular ferocity.”

  “You can’t say I wasn’t expressing my feelings,” I pointed out.

  “You channeled them into action. That’s not the same as acknowledging them.”

  I threw my hands in the air. “Fine, but I get it now! I accept what Aaron was saying. I shut down. I stopped sharing my inner life. Which gets you and me back to where we started—isn’t that progress?”

  “Not if you refuse to explore why it happened in the first place.”

  “Can we please talk about something else?”

  Bogard gazed at me steadily for a moment. Finally:

  “Why don’t you drink?”

  The tension broke, and I burst out laughing. What a game therapy is! Or maybe that’s just how it was between Bogard and me. I’d change the subject when it didn’t suit me, and sometimes he’d follow, sometimes not. He’d shift topics, trying to catch me out. Cat and mouse. No, two cats, batting around a ball of string: my convoluted, evasive psyche.

  “I don’t like the taste,” I replied. “Or how it makes me feel.”

  “Or the loss of control, I expect.”

  I gave him a big smile. “We know how much I love control.”

  “You mentioned once that you don’t swear, either. Why is that?”

  “My grandmother disapproved. She was old-fashioned. Hated crude language of any kind. I didn’t want to disappoint her, so I kept it clean. Later, profanity seemed unnecessary. There’s always a better way to express anger or enthusiasm.”

  “Your life is filled with prohibitions,” Bogard remarked. “Things you can’t do.”

  “Don’t do,” I corrected him. “Won’t do. It’s a matter of choice.”

  “Conscious decisions,” he noted. “Deliberate action. And most often, the decision seems to be no.”

  “I say yes,” I said. “I say yes all the time.”

  * * *

  —

  “No,” I said to Singer, three days later, when he asked me out.

  We’d run into each other at the gym of all places. I was coming out of the women’s locker room. He was coming out of the men’s.

  “You!” I said.

  “And you!” He smiled. “How are things?”

  “Decent. Yourself?”

  “Can’t complain.” He was wearing jeans and a black jacket. His hair was damp. He looked even less like a lawyer than usual.

  “So you exist outside the office,” he said. “I was beginning to wonder.”

  “Wonder no longer!” I said.

  It came out way too loud. Dork.

  Singer didn’t seem to notice. We moved toward the exit. He shifted his bag so he could open the door. We stepped out into the chilly night.

  “This weather,” I said, and cringed again. Weather? That’s really all you have to talk about?

  “November’s the worst,” he agreed.

  We walked down Sixth Avenue toward Forty-Fifth. I felt so awkward, painfully conscious of the movement of my body. I needed to say something. Anything. But what?

  We stopped at the corner. “That suit you wore the other day,” I said. “Is there a name for that color blue?”

  “Do you want to get a drink?” he said.

  What?

  What?

  “I—”

  “Wait.” He grinned. “Let’s have chai!”

  “No,” I said.

  Trying to soften it, I added: “I’m sorry. I…don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Is it because I’m a client?”

  It was because I was married. But how could I say that now, when I hadn’t said so before?

  Why was everything so tangled? Why was he even asking?

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  He looked at me searchingly. Then he smiled, and everything was easy again. “Don’t be. And I d
on’t mean to give you a hard time. I just have this feeling that…” He shook it off. “Never mind.”

  The light changed. He nodded uptown. “I’m heading this way. Talk to you soon.”

  Then he was gone.

  SIXTEEN

  “Let’s talk about your sex life,” Bogard said, a week later.

  I pulled my phone out of my bag. Seven e-mails, two missed calls.

  “Raney?”

  “Haven’t we covered that already?”

  “Not yet. How many partners have you had?”

  “Three. One in high school, more or less to dispense with the virginity thing, one freshman year of college, and then Aaron.” I began typing a reply to a client.

  “The first two were also men?”

  “No, Doctor. One was a woman and one was a zebra. I dumped the zebra because it was lousy at spooning.”

  “The phone, Raney.”

  I sighed and dropped it. “Both were men. Boys, rather.”

  “How would you describe your sex life with Aaron?”

  “It was good. We had sex twice a week, at a minimum. You have to admit that’s not bad for a couple married almost sixteen years.”

  “It was good,” he said. “Tell me what that means.”

  What was so hard to understand? “Good is…good. Our sex life was everything it should have been. Intimate. Satisfying. I made sure of that.”

  He looked interested. “What does that mean?”

  I spread my hands. “Look at me, Doctor Bogard. I’m no sex goddess. I don’t look that way, I don’t feel that way. Do I enjoy sex? Of course. And I know it’s important. So I was always careful to make time for it.”

  “You’re no sex goddess,” Bogard repeated.

  I really wished he’d stop repeating what I said with that intrigued look on his face. “All I’m saying is, I may come off as a little…whatever. Cerebral. Uptight. But I’m not. I like sex plenty. Even though…”

  “Yes?”

  I thought about how best to phrase it. “I guess sometimes I feel at a disadvantage. Sex is all everyone ever talks about. It seems to be all people ever do. I want people to have as much sex as they want, with whomever they want, in whatever configurations they want. But…don’t we have better things to do with our time? I mean,” I shrugged, “is sex all that?”

  “You make it sound like we’re a nation of sex addicts,” Bogard said. “Popular culture is saturated with it, but there are plenty of opposing forces—religious, political—that condemn the kind of overt sexuality that’s troubling you.”

  “It comes to the same thing,” I replied. “The social conservatives who inveigh against transgender rights and pornography and suggestive dancing during the Super Bowl? They’re as obsessed with sex as the people out there frantically humping in public.”

  “Again you’re talking about other people,” he pointed out.

  “I’m sorry,” I said testily, “but to explain what I’m thinking I occasionally have to refer to the rest of humanity. You want to know about Aaron and me? Fine. Sex was more important to him than it was to me. No big surprise there—he is a man, after all.”

  Bogard pondered that with a few slow, gray nods. Then: “You said you enjoy sex. What do you mean?”

  “I mean that sex is fun. I don’t have any hidden neuroses or buried traumas. I don’t feel shame, I was never abused. Sex is—was—an enjoyable activity with my husband. A way to be close. It’s a little ridiculous, but I—”

  “Sorry,” he said, “what’s ridiculous?”

  “Sex. Isn’t it? I mean, the act itself. Aaron…” I hesitated, thinking how best to phrase it. “He took sex very seriously. He was always very focused, very intent. Yet it’s such a bizarre enterprise. The thrusting, the moaning. And the facial expressions.” I smiled. “Aaron did this thing sometimes, he would furrow his brow and bite his lower lip, as he was, you know…and sometimes I would have to look away so that I wouldn’t smile. Then there was this circular thing he did, with his hips. It felt nice, but it was so deliberate. It made me think of Broadway musicals.”

  Bogard was staring at me blankly.

  “I don’t like musicals,” I explained. “With a play, you can suspend your disbelief. But musicals are so artificial. Nobody belts out a tune during a crisis. Nobody breaks into a jig. The music interferes with the story. It’s the same with sex. Certain movements and positions are so elaborate. They break the mood. I like sex that’s loving and intimate. What do they call that? Vanilla. I’m a vanilla kind of woman. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Do it, and get it—” I stopped myself. “Not ‘get it over with,’ of course, that’s not what I was going to say. I mean…get it done. Keep it uncomplicated. Simple and straightforward.”

  “Simple and straightforward,” Bogard said. “Uncomplicated.”

  “Right.”

  “But…you enjoy it,” he said. “You enjoy sex.”

  “Sure,” I replied. “Who doesn’t?”

  * * *

  —

  “Let’s talk about our sex life,” I said to Aaron.

  “Okay,” he said warily.

  It was the next night, a Friday. The girls had disappeared into their room after destroying us at Monopoly.

  “You’ve been telling me about the problems you saw in our marriage,” I said. “Was sex one of them?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  I leaned back against the sofa cushions. “Wow.”

  “Raney, don’t—”

  “It’s fine.” I put my hands up. “I just didn’t expect you to be so quick on the trigger.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Did you have sex with her because,” I swallowed hard, “you didn’t enjoy having sex with me?”

  He reached for me. “We’ve been over this. I’m still attracted to you. I still want—”

  “Was it better with her?”

  “It was different.”

  I pulled away. “Which means it was better.”

  “Which means it was different. You and I weren’t trying anymore. Our sex life had become a little predictable. Always the same. Which was good, and intimate, and I loved it,” he added quickly. “I may have felt the staleness more than you did because sex isn’t as important to you. But that doesn’t excuse—”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “Sex is important to me.”

  He hesitated. “Wouldn’t you agree our libidos are a little mismatched?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Of course I agreed. I’d told Bogard exactly that. But now, here with Aaron, I felt compelled to dispute it.

  He took my hands again. “You and I talk about everything, Raney. Except sex. You never tell me what to do. You never tell me what you want. More and more, I felt like sex was a chore to you.”

  “I don’t have to tell you! You always know. And okay, maybe we weren’t wild and crazy in bed, but at least we were doing it. We didn’t have a sexless marriage, like some couples our age. We had sex twice a week, like clockwork.”

  “Exactly,” Aaron said. “It was like clockwork.”

  I stared at him.

  “I’m saying it shouldn’t be so routine. It should be…I don’t know. Fresh. Surprising. At least some of the time.”

  Twice a week. Like clockwork.

  I’d been filling a quota.

  I’d been doing everything wrong.

  “We didn’t make an effort to keep it interesting,” he said. “Sometimes it felt like we were checking one more thing off a to-do list.”

  It took all my willpower to stay seated, to look into his eyes and listen to the things he was saying. They were like little knives, stabbing me in my most vulnerable places.

  A chore. A to-do list. Like clockwork.

  I finally found my voice. “Why didn’t you a
sk me to change? Why didn’t you ask for more?”

  His look was so loving—which made this conversation all the more devastating. “You were obviously happy with the way things were. It’s hard to be the one who asks for more. And you might not realize this, but your excitement feeds mine. I love nothing more than making you feel good. When you’re not into it, my own interest flags.”

  I felt lost. “You want me to be, what? Wilder? More unpredictable?”

  “This is my problem, too. And instead of doing the hard work of fixing this, I strayed. I don’t want that. I want you, Raney. And I don’t want you to be someone you’re not. But maybe we could make an effort to reignite our passion. Try new things. Figure out what you really like. But only when you’re ready.”

  * * *

  —

  At seven on Monday morning, I emerged from the elevator onto the thirty-second floor. I surveyed a vast warren of cramped cubicles hemmed in by banker’s boxes, stacks of binders and cartons of paper. Photocopiers lined one wall, printers and scanners another. I heard shouting, laughter, ringing telephones. Distant music.

  Lawyers rarely visit the paralegal floor. Partners never do. This is for the paralegals’ benefit, believe it or not. They toil for us unceasingly, all hours of the day and most of the night. So we give them their own space, a sanctuary in which they can do things their own way.

  Usually.

  A small, balding man walked through the elevator bank, texting.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Where does Cameron Utter sit?”

  He saw me, and his eyes became impossibly large. “Uh…”

  “Never mind. I’ll find him.”

  I plunged between two rows of cubicles. Voices fell silent. The music stopped. Heads emerged from cubicle doorways, then shot back inside. You’d think I was the FBI, coming to raid a jihadi cell.

  I found Cameron’s workspace. He was sitting with his back to me, wearing headphones and dancing in his seat. I tapped him on his shoulder.

  He turned, saw me and pulled off his headphones.

  “You’re firing me,” he said.

  “What? Of course not.”

  “Is this about the postage meter thing? That was all Hugo’s idea.”