Revised plan (9:00 p.m. PST):
Just sit on the floor, okay? Just sit down on the fucking floor and try to think. Think small. Don’t think about, say, how much America must hate women to let this happen. Don’t think about your parents and how happy they must be. Definitely don’t google any of the words you want to google right now. Instead, make a list of reasons you will be safe. White. West Coast. Money. Mobility. Do everything you can to separate yourself from Them, the people who are in harm’s way. You can think this clinically because you’re sober, which is different from being brave or kind.
Revised plan (10:00 p.m. PST):
Stay on the floor. It’s the best place for you now. Know that the advice your brain is giving you—buy a gun, pull all your money out of the stock market, move into a women’s separatist commune—is not helpful. Don’t act on any of it right now. Try to stop crying. Know that while you feel crazy right now, may in fact be crazy right now, you are sober. If you find yourself saying, I’m only sober because there’s no alcohol in the house, stop. You’ve driven through snowstorms, power outages, with fevers or tear-swollen eyes to buy booze, and you could have done it tonight. Nothing stopped you from drinking tonight but you. Because whenever you thought about it—and how could you not?—a voice inside said, Sure, you could drink. But he will still be president.
Fascination
John and I were hiking in Ohio’s Hocking Hills when I tried to sell him on the upside of AIDS.
“In a weird way, our generation was lucky for getting scared out of casual sex,” I began. “We learned to see sex as personal and meaningful. Don’t you think?”
“What?” John said. “No. I think we got cheated.”
“Really? You would rather have slept with tons of people?”
“I would have at least liked the option,” he said.
I tilted my head. “Why does that surprise me so much?”
“Beats me,” John said, and we walked on. Ten years passed before the topic of sexual freedom came up between us again, and by then so much had changed.
* * *
In reality, terror of AIDS didn’t stop College Kristi from sleeping around. It just subtracted fun and added worry at an age when sex was already more worrisome than fun. In theory, AIDS could have expanded Generation X’s formative sexual landscape, given all those PSAs about “other things” we could do that didn’t involve penises in vaginas. But the boys in my life had apparently missed those PSAs, because they were deeply, fundamentally obsessed with putting their penises in my vagina. I guess I can’t blame them; if I’d had such a direct route to an orgasm, I would have taken it, too.
I went to college not only in the age of AIDS but in the era of “sex-positive feminism,” which was a reaction to the idea that pornography and sex work and heterosexual intercourse itself were inherently harmful to women. Being sex positive seemed like a good idea to me. I wanted to be able to fuck guys and shave my legs and wear lipstick without hearing that I was a tool of the patriarchy. And I was all in for taking ownership of my sexual pleasure. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to actually do that. At least not with another person in the room. With other skills, like speaking up in class or dancing in public, a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach had worked well for me. I thought maybe that would work for sex, too, so I set out to rack up some notches on my belt in the diligent, can-do way I’d approached the other stuff. And, because I was newly obsessed with The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I took the libertine, garter-belted, no-strings Sabina as my role model.
It was in this way that I had a bunch of sexual experiences that were variously friendly and sweet and weird and creepy and fun but never actually hot. I was so busy performing the role of a cool, sex-positive chick that I forgot it was supposed to be about what got me off, too. I suppose I thought if I just kept at it, the things boys liked would become the things I liked. In the meantime, I had sex as an out-of-body experience (and not in a good way) and told myself that just meant I was focused on the right stuff: the heart, the soul.
I tried hard to be a Sabina but inevitably backslid into my true nature as her gentler, more traditional counterpart, Tereza. That’s how I ended up with a boyfriend—and not just any boyfriend but one who had also read Kundera and was (unfortunately) striving to live as Tomas, the distant, womanizing protagonist. We met midway through my freshman year in college. “It’s you,” Ben said when a friend introduced us. “I’ve been looking for you.” A sultry poem of mine had been published in the college literary quarterly, and he’d set his sights on its author. I could feel him sizing me up from where he lay sprawled on our friend’s couch. He had a sharp nose and light eyes that didn’t seem to blink a lot, or give much away. I couldn’t tell from the way he looked at me if he liked what he saw. Even when he was inside me three days later, I wasn’t sure.
The friend who’d introduced us sighed when I told her I’d slept with him. “I don’t know if Ben likes women or just women’s bodies,” she said.
“He said he finds me fascinating,” I told her. “Absolutely fascinating” were the exact words he’d used as we lay in his bed afterward, but I didn’t want to brag.
She just shook her head and smiled. “Well, I hope at least the sex is good.”
It wasn’t, at least not for me. Ben was a self-styled sophisticate, always giving me Marguerite Duras books to read and red wine to drink. But in bed, the twenty-year-old boy held sway. Whether he liked me was still somewhat mysterious, but he definitely liked my body, or at least pieces of it. He would play with my nipples long enough to drive me half out of my mind with rapture and then leave me at that halfway point as he thudded away inside me, came silently, and rolled off. We seemed to have a tacit understanding that my pleasure came from enabling his—that I came through his orgasms, like a sexual stage mom.
I say it seemed like a tacit understanding because as a sex-positive young miss, I did not agree. I knew my orgasms mattered, too. I’d been having them on my own since middle school and had even managed them on occasion in the company of men. But the men who had made me come (simply by caring enough to give it a real shot, not out of some special wizardry) tended to be kind of … not what I considered boyfriend material. One of them had run away from home and was living in an abandoned moving van; one was rumored to be AWOL from the army; one liked to do it in parked cars in broad daylight. Now that I had a boyfriend, I knew I deserved to be having orgasms, and I knew it was partly up to me to make it happen.
What I needed was for Ben to go down on me. But even though I spent a lot of time with his cock in my mouth, he had never shown the slightest indication that he knew cunnilingus was a thing. For a while I assumed it was bound to happen eventually. Maybe he just needed to get to know me better. But a year into our relationship, his mouth had barely gotten to belly-button level. I was vaguely paranoid that my nether regions might be somehow gross, but I was also self-aware enough to know that was a run-of-the-mill girl worry, not reality. (And anyway, it’s not as if semen were such a delight to taste, either.) Maybe I just need to somehow be sexier, I thought. But how? I was already on a constant diet to try to be more like the waifish girls he openly preferred. I was already up for fucking him anytime, anywhere. I couldn’t understand how my sheer willingness wasn’t doing the trick.
And I also really, really didn’t want to talk about it. Not with him. But I did mention it to my friend Nina one day. She was seeing a new guy, and they’d had “an oral sex fiesta” earlier that week. “After the third time I practically had to kick him in the head to get him off me,” she said.
“Ben doesn’t do that,” I told her.
“Do you want him to?” she asked. Well, yeah. “Then you’d better find out what his problem is.”
The next time Ben seemed nice and relaxed after a blow job, I brought it up. “I guess I’m just curious about why. It’s not a big deal or anything,” I lied. “It’s just something I’ve enjoyed when other guys have done it.”
I used the “other guys” line because Ben did take an interest in what I’d done in the past. For instance, a few months into our relationship he was fucking me on my dorm room floor and suddenly pinned both my wrists above my head. “Do you like it when other guys do this?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, because no one had ever done it before. I could tell from the little throb it gave me that I didn’t dislike it, and maybe I should have just said yes, yes, I like it. Maybe I missed my chance to bust things wide open. But I wasn’t so great at thinking on my feet (or my back) in those days. He took my “I don’t know” as a no, or just a lack of interest, and never tried it again.
This time I really did have data from other guys to fall back on, but it didn’t help. Ben thought for a minute and then said, “I just don’t like doing it.”
“So you’ve tried it before?” I said.
“Yeah. I just don’t like it.”
This was more or less what I said whenever Ben presented me with the perfect oyster that he swore would make me love the slimy, salty things. I just don’t like them. But he kept trying. Maybe I should have kept trying, too, or at least probed further. But you haven’t tried with me, I could have said. Or, You could learn to like it.
Instead, I said, “Oh. Okay.” And that was the end of it.
Well, almost. A year later, we were still together but living five hundred miles apart. The first night he visited me from grad school, Ben pulled my jeans down and then licked me twice, sort of near my clit. He came back up beaming. “I love you so much,” he said. And my body and brain shut right down. First, because I already knew he was a chronic cheater, and this was proof that some other woman had talked him into what I could not. Second, because he never used modifiers like “so much,” which made me suspect he’d been cheating even more than normal. And third, because I didn’t want him to lick me as an act of loving self-sacrifice. I wanted him to lick me because he wanted to watch me implode.
But my expectations of both Ben and myself were pretty low by that point, and I didn’t want to ruin the visit with a fight. So I acted pleased, and our relationship staggered on another six months. A few weeks after we finally split up, I got up the nerve to make a play for John, who’d been on my radar at our small college for years. We’d met my first night on campus but had never been more than friendly acquaintances. I’d kept tabs on him, though: on his artwork and his much-mythologized wild streak and his gorgeous girlfriend, who did things like smash plates on the floor if she thought he was looking at another woman. John had graduated a year ahead of me and now lived in his painting studio in a sketchy neighborhood. He drank a lot and generally smelled like turpentine. He wasn’t boyfriend material. But he was the right level of scary to make him a fun rebound man. I chatted him up at a party one night and then drove him home. We made out in his painting studio, and then he was kneeling on the floor between my legs. “Kristi,” he said quietly. “If I give you head, will you come?”
“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t, and because I was already too wobbly with desire to lie.
“Well, can I try?”
Five years later we were married. And not only because he made me come often and hard. Also because John had turned out to be spectacular boyfriend material. Yes, he drank. Yes, he had a temper that left at least one hole in our walls before he went to therapy and got a handle on it. But he treated me like a superhero princess and was also warm, responsible, hilarious, and kind to children and animals. All his exes still talked to him. He loved his mother but saw the real person inside her. His worst habit (besides the drinking, which was a plus at the time) was falling in love with and buying decrepit old trucks.
When we married, I breezed right through the “forsaking all others” vow because of course I was forsaking all others. Why would I—why would any woman—ever need anyone but John in her bed/shower/kitchen/yard? We exchanged rings, and I settled in for a lifetime of happy, orgasmic monogamy.
And that’s what I got: the kind of marriage I’d never seen growing up and had barely realized was available to me. The kind with sex and laughter and travel and generally enough money and gifts for no reason and also breathing space. Sure, I was attracted to other men and vice versa from time to time, but that was barely a blip on the radar. You’ve still got it, I’d think when I felt a man’s attention on me. But I wasn’t going to use it on anyone but John. Drinking gets a lot of people into extramarital trouble, but not me. The more I drank, the more I clung to him: my safe space, my non-judgment zone, my, what’s the word—enabler.
It was all so simple. And then, seventeen years into marriage, I stopped drinking.
It went something like this:
1. I got sober.
2. Getting sober made me like myself.
3. Liking myself made me feel powerful.
4. Feeling powerful made me feel sexy.
5. Really sexy.
6. And I wanted to share it with the world.
I didn’t actually run around seducing all and sundry; most of the action took place in my head. But there was still a lot of it. For instance, I started to evaluate the men I interacted with on a daily basis as potential sex partners. Not in a hot-or-not sense. I didn’t sort them into Yes and No columns. I just … wondered. In meetings or bookstores or restaurants: What would he be like? Or him? What’s he into? (This is also when I realized just how far on the heterosexual side of the spectrum I fall, because my thoughts almost never landed on women, and at the time I was open to everyone.) I also developed a mild fixation on penises. I’d be chatting with someone about his vacation plans or a work project while simultaneously wondering what his dick looked like.
I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I had a couple of theories. Knowing that people in recovery commonly transfer their old addiction to a new one (cigarettes for alcohol, candy for cigarettes, marathons for candy), I thought maybe my mental sluttiness was just a new source of dopamine, an upgraded addiction. But mostly, I think I was just learning how to want. I’d spent so much youthful energy turning myself into a sexual blank slate who could transform under any man’s gaze. Sober, I started gazing back, and I saw that my desire for a man could match or even topple his for me. I saw that men weren’t the only ones who wanted to possess what they knew deep down they could never own. That I, too, longed to kiss and bite and fuck myself as close to it as possible.
I tried to pour most of what I termed my Newfound Rapacity back into my marriage. My happy marriage. Somehow we’d grown from broke, hard-drinking young bohemians into settled, teetotaling forty-somethings without losing the seeds of ourselves or our coupledom. Sure, we drifted apart from time to time in the way that any two people with big jobs and individual passions will do, but we always drifted back together. “Marriage is wide,” we said, meaning it should be able to accommodate our separateness—his surf trips on the coast, my solo nights at rock shows, each of our consuming careers the other couldn’t fully understand—as well as our two-ness. Sex had always been a big thing for us, and sobriety had amped things up in both quality and variety. My Newfound Rapacity bumped it up one more notch. But I held something back. I didn’t want John to know about the 24-7 gleam in my eye; he might wonder where it had come from, and I didn’t know how to explain. And I really didn’t want him to know that I was tempted to get out there and enjoy some of the casual sex we’d been, in his words, cheated out of as young adults. So I (mostly) behaved myself without trying to suppress what I’d uncovered. And I kept it a secret from John. Secrets were nothing new to me; I’d been keeping them since childhood, in part to protect myself from parents who thought my feelings belonged to them. When I was a teenager, my mother read my diary and used the details against me, so I started keeping a shadow diary in my head. Now I started a new shadow diary for my sexual self in hope that eventually my feelings for other men would seem so natural that I could overlook them, or at least redirect them toward my husband.
My plan worked great. I gazed, and fantasized, and (mostly) stayed on the right side of the line I was toeing. Until I met someone I didn’t even contemplate fucking, because I couldn’t get past the more immediate urge to kiss him for a hundred hours.
His name was Noah and he was just a guy from work. Smart and cute and fun, qualities I registered without the ding-ding-ding that means I’m in trouble—maybe because he was married, maybe because he was in his early thirties and I tended to gravitate to older men. Noah and I worked on a project together and hit it off in that work-friend way. We had hallway chats about movies and running, which gradually turned into hallway chats about how movies and running made us feel, which turned into longer conversations about how travel and solitude and meditation made us feel. At a company mixer we leaned against the wall for an hour talking about people close to us who had died. Co-workers would drift by, beers in hand. Hi! we’d say. We’re talking about death. The co-worker would move on, and we’d get right back to it. Our shared project had ended, and now it seemed we had picked up a new project of learning each other.
One day in late fall we hugged in the lobby of our building, and my body lit up. Not just the sex parts, or even primarily the sex parts. The whole thing: elbows, hair. A whole circuit of light. It was far from our first hug, and after we parted I stared at the floor wondering why this one had been different. I still don’t know. But I decided it was fine. After all, I gazed back now. I was allowed to notice the ding-ding-ding when it occurred.
Noah and I had started going out for coffee now and then, which turned into every other week, and then every week. We always met at the same café and sat in side-by-side armchairs in the front window. We made small talk about work for thirty seconds, and then one of us would say, “So do you believe in God?” Or, “Do you feel like there’s enough art in your life?” And we’d just get lost—in each other, in the world of ideas, in whatever we weren’t talking about with our spouses, because who doesn’t already know if his or her own spouse believes in God? The armchairs were low-slung, and as our conversation deepened, we’d slump down in them so that to make eye contact, we had to turn our heads to the side, like two people lying in bed.
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