“So, what’s his name, honey? Where does he work?”
“Um . . . yeah . . . I . . . uh . . . I didn’t get his name. Or the name of his company.”
An exasperated, distinctly un–southern belle snort came over the phone line.
“You are kidding, right? This is Dating 101. Get the goddamn name.” She sounded as southern, and as tough, as Johnny Cash. “Why do you think guys used to ask six times, ‘You’re Leslie, right?’ back when you were at bars in college? You cannot track someone down without a name.”
I passed an old Toyota pickup truck with jacked-up monster wheels. Montauk Highway narrowed to two lanes curving between potato fields. Only another twenty minutes to go.
KC paused to collect herself, like a boss frustrated by a wayward intern, digging deep for the patience to deal with my inept dating skills.
“Hey, look, there cannot be that many men”—she pronounced it mayhhn—“who work in that specialized a field. I bet you could find him.”
KC made it sound like a threat, as if her next step were putting me in the pokey. Like if I tracked him down, she’d let it slide that I’d been too insecure to exchange names with a man I found attractive. She knew exactly how to push my buttons.
“All right, KC. I’ll try. Stay tuned.”
I got to the beach house shortly before nine o’clock. I closed my eyes in bliss, even though I was driving, at the sound of the tires crunching on the gravel drive under the canopy of beech trees overhead. I pulled into the parking cutout, and my heels crushed the wild mint as I carried my bag to the slate steps, filling the night with a sweet tang. I headed to the blue front door, which matched the hydrangeas in bloom so heavy their stems bent toward the ground. I found the spare key hidden on a nail under a loose shingle.
Inside, the place still smelled like spray-on sunblock from last summer. On the screened-in sun porch I used as an office, I unzipped my computer from its case and plugged the cord into the electrical outlet under the scratchy jute carpet. And then I began my online search, per KC’s directive, relishing the quiet, dark house normally overrun by kids in wet bathing suits and sandy feet, clamoring for a bonfire and s’mores.
First, I found the company. KC was right, there was only one excavation company with Long Island and Richmond, Virginia, offices. But how to find one specific employee? I was looking for a needle in a haystack.
Then my brain kicked in: He had to be a senior executive in management, or sales and marketing at the very least, although he didn’t look like a slick sales guy. From the executives section on the company website, I wrote down six names. (There was only one woman, Helaine something—the director of human resources, of course.)
Listening to the sound of crickets outside, I went on Facebook and Google to check pictures against the names I’d found. A few were easy to eliminate. Overweight. Old. Bearded. Finally, I discarded all but one name: Dylan Smyth. It seemed to fit him.
Then I turned to Facebook. I found Dylan Smyth immediately. I was so excited, I clicked “Add Friend” before looking. This guy lived in Detroit. His arms, which were crossed in front of his massive chest, were covered in violent tattoos. He was missing his front right tooth.
As quickly as I could, I canceled the request, hitting the keyboard frantically.
This quest was ridiculous. I was never going to find the real Dylan Smyth.
I took a break to unpack and brush my teeth. As my toothbrush whirred, I could hear a lone deer outside the bathroom window, crunching on the hydrangea blooms. I kept thinking about how to find him. He’s an executive. How do executives track each other down? Not through Facebook. Not through pictures on social media sites.
I spit out my toothpaste and ran back to my office. I clicked onto the blue and white LinkedIn icon and typed “Dylan Smyth.”
A fuzzy picture came up of a man wearing a tie. I recognized those blue eyes. It was the man from the airport. Definitely. The pen wobbly in my hand, I grabbed a torn envelope and scribbled down the mailing address in Virginia and the division’s main switchboard number.
Now that I knew the town where he worked, I ran a tighter search. A picture of his college lacrosse roster came up. A jolt spiked through me as I looked at the screen. Even as a college senior, Dylan Smyth had been spectacular. An athlete with cobalt-blue eyes and a sweet smile and that one crooked lower tooth. I looked for the year he graduated. It was six years after Bella was born. Which meant he was twenty-nine. Then I collapsed back into my black swivel chair and screamed loudly into the night.
* * *
For years, sex with Marty had been . . .
How can I put this?
Soul-crushing.
I’m not trying to be vindictive. I admit that, like most exes, at times I have imagined stabbing my wasband with a carbon steel chef’s knife. But right now, I’m simply being honest. Acknowledging the truth about our sex life still takes me by surprise: it was never that good, and it wasn’t Marty’s fault. He was a sensational kisser. I was wildly attracted to him, and even in his late forties his body was thin and toned, with less than 10 percent body fat, on par with a triathlete twenty years younger. But something was always off between us physically, and I was too much of a hope junkie to realize it could destroy us over time.
The grim reality is that Marty never seemed to enjoy sex with me. This is still hard to wrap my head around. I’ve always had such a sweet tooth for sex, even sex with him, that I truly didn’t notice he wasn’t there with me emotionally. Not our first time, not on our wedding night, not on the balcony during our honeymoon in Amalfi. I still feel a queasy regret that I overlooked something so crucial to both of us, and to our marriage.
Marty and I met in our late twenties, at a conference I’d been sent to by a now-defunct financial magazine. I’d left my abusive first husband a year before, and I was still finding my sea legs. Marty and I were seated next to each other at dinner. We became friends first, two very different people occasionally grabbing a meal or going to a concert together when we happened to be in the same city for work. He lived in Philly, and I was in Chicago. After I’d known him for about a year, a voice in my head began whispering, You should date someone like Marty, which to me meant someone easygoing, gentle, and stable, the polar opposite of my brilliant, volatile, self-destructive first husband. That man had told me I’d make a great writer one day, and indeed, he gave me unbeatable material for my memoir Crazy Love when he held loaded guns to my head and pulled the keys out of the car ignition as I drove our Volkswagen down the highway at fifty-five miles per hour. It’s tough to discuss husband number one without getting sidetracked. Which is why, eventually, I left the Star and wrote Crazy Love about our relationship, and turned my experience into advocacy for abuse victims.
My past may have been messy, but Marty seemed like the key to the happy, secure future I craved. After a few months, that voice in my head replaced You should date someone like Marty with the more insistent, Why don’t you date Marty? The voice was kind enough not to add, You numb-nut.
At the same time, Marty went on vacation to Anguilla with a woman he was dating. He looked down from his beach chair one afternoon to discover he’d written my name in the sand. As soon as he got home, he called me and confessed that story. After I hung up the phone, I dialed my childhood friend Winnie and announced, “I’m going to marry that man.” Things moved quickly after that, and we exchanged vows in Hawaii sixteen months later.
But even when we initially dated, Marty limited sex to once every seven days. In my experience, most men seemed to interpret “early dating” to mean three-orgasm-a-day sexathons, making it hard to bend over to pull on socks without getting grabbed from behind. But Marty treated making love like medicine he had to take. The first night we slept together, I tried for a second round by climbing on top of him in the middle of the night. He had an erection, so I thought he liked it.
“What are you doing?” he asked groggily, sounding genuinely confused. “Stop. It’s two a.m.�
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The next morning in his bed in his Philly apartment, I tried to wake him up with my mouth. What guy refuses that? But Marty did. At first, I thought he was simply shy. But over time I noticed that Marty never responded to my touch, or indicated that he liked anything I’d done to him sexually. What disturbed me the most was that he didn’t, or maybe even couldn’t, look me in the eye when we made love.
But here’s the thing: Marty was stable and reliable, and tender in countless other ways that mattered far more to me than sex. For my thirtieth birthday, he took me for a carriage ride in Central Park because I’d told him I loved horses as a child. When Marty proposed (in Prague, at midnight, next to the Jan Hus fountain), he wept fat tears as he vowed to take care of me forever. I thought I was being mature by choosing reliability over passion. Maybe I was.
After our wedding, we settled into a routine that included making love often enough to have Timmy and Bella. Periodically, I tried to spice up our sex life, but eventually I gave up. I masturbated during the late mornings when he was at work and the kids were at school. I thought this acceptance was another sign of our maturity, of a happy union, of the sleeping-with-socks comfort of a long, mellow marriage. How important was good sex, anyway? Or any kind of sex? Maybe I could live without it. A married friend told me once, as we walked home from yoga, that when her husband was on top of her, to get through it, she imagined eating a tootsie roll. Very, very slowly. So I figured muted lovemaking, doled out a few times a month, was typical for most marriages, and a small price to pay for a stable family life with a kind, reserved man. Or so I thought for a long, long time.
However, once I backed off, Marty reacted as if thrown off by my no longer pursuing him for intimacy. For the first time in our relationship, he was the one initiating conversations about improving our sex life. Alas, his words were like 7-Eleven coffee, scalding and bitter.
“You need to be more spontaneous,” he told me sternly, looking over his horn-rimmed reading glasses one Saturday night in our bedroom, after we’d made love for the first time in four weeks. “I want more frequent sex. Experiments.”
“What kind of experiments?” I asked him. I’d do anything—read bad Playboy fiction out loud, wear a French maid’s uniform, hang naked from our living room chandelier—if it would help us. “Give me a list of three things you’d like to try.”
Marty looked as if I’d asked a question in Kiswahili, unable to answer me with specifics. I had no clue what he wanted, any more than he did. God, did I try, though. I booked an expensive overnight babysitter and an even more expensive suite at the Four Seasons and fucked him in the middle of the night. I bought new lingerie. I ordered a book from Amazon about what women like in bed, which he kept on his bed stand, the pristine spine forever uncracked. I screwed him in the daylight in our own bed for the first time since the kids had been born. I tried getting into the shower with him, but he told me he was in a hurry to get to a meeting at work and then ducked his soapy bald head back under the faucet.
One night, after another awkward tryst in our bedroom, he stared in frustration at my favorite painting of the ocean, hanging across from our bed. We’d been married for fifteen years. I wasn’t sure I could take another fifteen minutes of feeling so badly about myself sexually.
“I think you may be frigid,” he announced. Marty sounded like a surgeon delivering a diagnosis. For a second, I nodded, thinking of course that his erotic reticence was my fault, looking at those hazel eyes I’d trusted for years. I allowed him to blame me because he seemed so sure of himself. But me, frigid? I started having sex at fifteen. I first tried anal in the 1980s, when putting your tongue in someone’s ear had passed for adventurousness.
“Marty, do you want me to pretend that I like what we’re doing in bed, even if I don’t? That everything between us is perfect?”
He nodded, as if to say Of course, that would work fine. But he hesitated before speaking, as if he couldn’t bring himself to say the words aloud. Instead, he told me something that made me feel just as empty inside.
“We have different needs,” Marty explained. “You’re not meeting mine.”
From then on, he repeated this every single time we had sex.
Stupidly, I kept trying to revive our sex life with myriad, inventive attempts to please him. This got harder as he added rules about what I could and couldn’t do. I couldn’t rub his leg when we sat next to each other on the couch, or put my arm around him in a movie theater, because it “tickled.” He asked me not to leave the bathroom without a robe because my nude body made him “edgy.” He wouldn’t kiss me on the lips or let me know what sexual position was his favorite. He acted like a coach disappointed in my performance on the field after every blow job and orgasm. How could someone who supposedly loved me be so unkind? Eventually, being naked in front of my husband felt as warm and fuzzy as spooning a coat hanger. But I stayed married to him.
* * *
I’m one of those people who believe everything in one’s life, including sex, starts with your mother. My mom passed away two years before Marty and I split, from breast cancer caught too late. She was having such a terrific time winning golf tournaments in Florida, she couldn’t bother to see her doctor. By the time she did, the cancer had spread ferociously, to her brain, hipbones, and lungs. She died after being bedridden for only ten weeks in our guest room. But when she was alive, Mom was a brilliant, beautiful goddess.
Unfortunately, it was sometimes in the snake-haired medusa kind of way, especially after five or six rum and cokes.
Mom grew up in New York City in the 1950s, in my wealthy grandparents’ emotionally frigid, folded-linen-napkin Upper East Side world with its vague but strictly enforced WASPy etiquette strictures. Especially confusing to me were the taboo subjects refined women of all ages avoid mentioning, as if they simply don’t exist: money, sex, and any form of failure. Throughout my childhood, I never once heard Mom say, “Gee, I’m sorry I got shitfaced again last night,” or “Gee, I love you,” or “Gee, that’s okay, no one is perfect.” That would have been weakness, God forbid.
It was clear that the subject Mom least enjoyed was female sexual biology. Not me. Starting when I was eight, during Mom’s weekly set-and-curl hair appointment, I scrutinized women’s magazines while I sat next to her under an unplugged hair dryer as big as a Flyers hockey helmet. Forget about Cosmopolitan’s taped up breasts and raccoon eye makeup. Instead, I combed the dog-eared salon magazines for the names of the products the frighteningly exotic models used. Foraging for fungible items to help puberty along seemed more achievable, and realistic, for a fourth grader than did cleavage and orgasm, whatever those things were.
One day, swinging my bare legs and waiting for Mom to finish beautifying, I saw an ad for Tampax. The swirly seventies-era font read “The Carefree Girl!” followed by a photo montage of a laughing blonde teenager in tight white hip huggers on a rowboat, splashing in a lake in an orange macramé bikini, and hiking athletically in terry-cloth shorts that were shorter than the cotton underpants I wore.
On the drive home in our white Cadillac, which was the approximate size of a houseboat, I mustered the courage to speak. My body felt as tense as a stretched-out bungee cord.
“Mom, what’s a tampoon?”
I pronounced the word, memorably, as if it rhymed with harpoon.
Mom laughed with a clenched jaw and without taking her eyes off the road, fixating on the massive tusk-and-flag chrome hood ornament as if she were an addict eyeing a bag of meth. She said I was pronouncing the word incorrectly. She did not tell me the correct pronunciation.
“Leslie,” she said instead, dismissively, as if she had ice cubes in her mouth.
Her tone implied: Jesus H. Christ, how could such an imbecile have come out of my body?
“Leslie.” She said my name again, to make sure she had my full attention, which, I promise you, she did. “Only prostitutes use such . . . unmentionables.”
Her tone made it clear I’d asked
a horrific question, but not only had I no idea what a tampon was, I didn’t know what a prostitute was, either. I shrank into the Caddie’s velvet upholstery, wanting to disappear. Needless to say, Mom did not explain.
A few weeks later, I heard two boys talking on the playground about something called a blow job. Whatever it was, they made it sound kind of fun. That night, Mom was wearing black calfskin heels and a sleeveless Jackie Kennedy sheath as she peeled carrots over the sink for dinner. I stood next to her, holding out my palm to collect each carefully skinned vegetable and pat it dry with a strip of paper towel.
It seemed like the ideal private moment to ask her about the boys on the playground. I thought they were talking about water balloons, a new kind of hair spray, or a technological advancement in bubble gum. If I’d known the answer involved sex, I never would have asked.
“Mom, ah, have you ever heard of a blow job?”
She whirled toward me. The shiny metal vegetable peeler gleamed in her wet hand like a weapon. A few floppy orange strands flew toward my chin like miniature Frisbees.
Apparently, I’d made Mom extremely angry. God, not again!
“It’s a disgusting sex term, Leslie.” She emphasized key words with her teeth clenched. Her gold wedding band and diamond engagement ring glistened with tap water. “Where a girl drinks from a boy’s penis. Only prostitutes do it.”
I stared back at her, so taken aback I could breathe only through my mouth. I tried to digest (sorry) two unfathomables: (1) Mom was talking about sex; and (2) the concept that anyone—obviously not Mom!—chose to swallow urine directly from a boy’s penis.
I still didn’t know what prostitutes were either, but both times she’d mentioned them it had sounded pretty bad. I decided not to ask Mom any more questions. Instead I looked words up in the dictionary and tried to piece together the mechanics myself. I got as far as understanding that a prostitute was someone who got paid a lot of money to drink pee.
The Naked Truth Page 3