Playing House (18 page)

I made him a beautiful chest. I worked on it for weeks. I painted the under layer white, over which I sponged a deep marine turquoise. I then shellacked twenty times, so the wood looked wrapped in glass. I painted the inside of the chest a Chinese red and decoupaged it with cut-up phrases from the New Testament. I snipped a huge and beautiful Jesus from a religious book, and then I cut the Jesus in half. I put Jesus’s top half on the top half of the inside lid, his bottom half on the bottom half of the inside lid. I then shellacked Jesus until he too turned to glass. I gave my lover the box. “Open it up,” I said. It was Christmastime. He did. What a spectacular gift. When you opened the lid, you saw Jesus slowly rise, resurrected, until, when the lid was raised completely, he stood solid and tall. It was a gorgeous gift that reflected a gorgeous sex life in the midst of a crazy relationship filled with clashing values and shredded bits of Bible.

And, of course, I was engaged during this whole time. A terrible thing, I know. And yet, this affair I sensed was absolutely necessary in order for me to move forward with my marriage. The affair was a test. Sex had somewhat cooled between my husband-to-be and me. I thought, but could not be sure, that that was to be my fate no matter what, no matter who, in which case my fiancé was the man I wanted to marry. But suppose I was wrong? Suppose there was someone out there with whom I could have passionate, slick sex my whole long life, a sex life like one endless Christmas morning? Wouldn’t that be wonderful, especially because I’d never celebrated Christmas, so it had all the more magic and mystery to me. Thus, I fell wildly, passionately in love with a conservative Christian, very smart, very handsome, very short-sighted, and we had fantastic, obsessive sex while, the whole time, I had one eye on the clock. I was just waiting to see when, or
if
, this affair would run out of fuel. I prayed to Jesus and anyone else who might be up there that it would, so I could marry the man I loved. And yet night after night I left the man I loved to be with the man I was
in
love with. I could not wait, I was like one of those primates, what are they, bonobos, with the scarlet vaginas—yuck.

Actually, I just recalled a small detail. I don’t know if it makes a difference or not. I never actually had intercourse with this man. He did not believe in sex before marriage. Therefore, when my fiancé asked me if I was “having sex” with someone else (why was I coming home at 3 a.m.?), I could answer no. On the Christian man’s end, when his god asked him if he was having sex with someone else, he too could answer no, and so we both lived highly honest, righteous lives filled with perpetual sex.

But because I am not a bonobo, the inevitable started to happen. It happened the night the man took me to church and asked me to eat Jesus. Enough is enough! I am a lady, am I not? Ladies do not eat deities, and they also do not understand complicated, nonsensical theories like transubstantiation, which allows you to at once eat but not eat the deity or its stand-in, a saltine. Enough is enough and was enough. I never have and never will put the godhead in my mouth. As for the mere mortal, as for the man, after that request and all those gospel songs, after, I’d say, the twenty-third or fifty-fifth nasty little reptile appeared on his stiffly ironed shirts, he lost his appeal. Sex turned tepid, and then revolting. While the revolting part was particular to this crazy relationship, the tepid part was wholly within my experience and proved, for me, that there is no god of monogamous passion. It ain’t gonna happen. Thus, freed from the tethers of this Christian affair, I returned to the gentle arms of my pagan husband, who, on occasion, also calls himself a druid. We are going on our tenth anniversary, and despite the fact that, like all good druids, he dances amongst trees real and imagined, things are tough in our fairy land. He wants hot sex. I turned tepid long, long ago.

There are treatments for this sort of thing. A 1999 University of Chicago study found that about 40 percent of all women have some sort of sexual dysfunction, usually low libido.

The real issue for me is that I’m not sure I have a dysfunction. On the one hand, I am miserable about our lack of a sex life. I am miserable about the fact that sex interests me about as much as checkers. I am miserable about it because it makes my husband miserable and cold and withdrawn, and it is so unhappy living this way. “Have sex with someone else,” I tell him, and then look down at my open hands. My palms are still pinkish, but they are cracked from wear and weather. “The problem with that,” my husband says, “is falling in love. If you have sex with someone else, you just might fall in love with them.”

“I’d fucking kill you,” I’d say.

Of course I wouldn’t. But I just might kill myself.

I have no answers for how one lives without a sex drive, or with a sex drive that is equal to one’s passion for checkers. The rift it creates is terribly painful, and a gulf of loneliness enters the marriage. You could fake, but fake rhymes with hate. You could get treatment, but I’ve had so
much
treatment, I take so
many
pills, and in this one area, just in this one small area of my life, can I claim, if not health, then at least the absence of pathology? Please? Because when I say I don’t have an interest in sex, that might be a misstatement. Maybe I
do
have an interest in sex. But it’s just that, comparatively speaking, I have so many other competing and stronger interests, and these interests are crammed into a life that is already overloaded. A life I nevertheless love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love. There are so many things I love.

Once I get past the daily dread that accompanies waking up each morning and that I cannot seem to shake no matter how blissful my state the night before, once I move past that and manage to throw my feet over the edge of the bed, then I am off, launched, singing through space, captivated by the thousands of solar systems I see everywhere. I see stones and stars. I see glass, which I cut and solder, silver liquid lines bringing scraps together in purposeful patterns. I love my wheeled mosaic nippers, how they take tiny bites out of solid opalescent or cats’ paw prints and how these pieces assemble into quilts of glass, into table tops, into garden balls of deep cobalt blue. I love my garden; I love finding wild echinacea, coneflower, black-eyed Susan, even loosestrife, finding these flowers in fields or growing between bricks and then pulling them up as gently as I can and bringing them back to where I live, nursing them along, hoping through the cold winters that they will pull their perennial magic and reappear again. And half the time they do! They do! I love seed catalogues, especially in the winter, when the pictures of the glowing globes of red-hot tomatoes remind you to have faith in warmer weather. I love horses and riding them. I love my dogs, of course, and my children I love so much it hurts; they pull on me painfully, and I love them. I have recently acquired a love of stones and am making a new floor for our bathroom entirely out of pebbles the streambed has polished. I love my router, my planer, my circular saw, the wood, especially salvaged wood I can pull off of old rotting barns and restore until it’s gleaming. I love clay. I like to sew and cook. I love words and writing, although that love is complex and fraught, a tense, toothy love that has made its marks on me forever.

I spent a significant portion of my life battling with significant mental illness, and my Grim Reaper, which is not death but mental illness, still visits me from time to time, drawing me down with his sword. And each time this happens I never know if I will return to love. And each time that I do, I am more grateful than the time before, and so I see my life, my large unwieldy disorganized life, as though it was a banquet full of peach and blueberry cobblers stewing in their juices, all these antioxidants, all this flesh and mineral, so much! So rich!

In our living room hangs a huge canvas sign that I, of course, made. It spells out my simple mandate, all in buttons.
Make Things
, my sign says. This is the mandate by which I live my life. As a Homo sapiens, the discovery of tools is embedded in my DNA as deeply, more deeply, perhaps, than anything else. I am quite sure that I am related to whatever ape first discovered that he or she could catch ants with a stick—oh, glory be!
Make Things
, my sign says, hung up there where my children can see, the buttons vintage and collected over many years. My sign does not say
Make Love
. I wish it did, as love is so much nicer to make, at least in sound, than
things
. But I am a person captivated by things, by solid, actual, concrete things that can be assembled, be they books or babies. Sex just does not equal or even come close to the thrill of scoring gorgeous glass for a window you will use, hearing the grit as the grains separate and the cut comes clean and perfect. Sex cannot compete with the massive yet slender body of granite I excavated out of the ground last week, six feet long this igneous stone, packed with time and stories if only it could speak. My stone. I’m going to spend months carving it with a silver chisel. I am going to figure out a way to make this stone into an enormous mantel under which, in the home I share with my husband and the babies we made, our fire will flicker. The stone will give off waves of warmth in the winter, and it will keep the night-coolness captive all through the summer days. I imagine and imagine my mantel, my windows, my glass, my gardens. I cannot believe how lucky I am. I have so very much to do, such wide and persistent passions, so little time in which to explore their many nooks and curves. Here. Now here. Don’t bother me. I’m busy.

III.

And then there is the issue of sounds.

People make sounds during sex, or they try not to, if children or guests are near. The sounds you make in sex are deeply private, as are the expressions on your face, how you clench your fists, or feet, how you seize and separate. In sex—good sex, bad sex, consensual sex, or rape—you are split open and looked at. You are viewer and viewed. I find it extremely odd that on a Tuesday night you might go about this bizarre bodily act with another human being and then, the next morning, amidst a chattering group of children, eat Cheerios. It seems to me that if sex were separated out from the daily wheel of life, it might survive monogamy more intact.

For these reasons, I think deeply religious groups like the Hasidim might be on to something, whether they know it or not. I think I could be more sexual if I had a mikveh, a sacred space into which no men were allowed. In our culture, sex has lost its sacred quality. There is no withholding, no separation, no ache. I would opt for a prohibition or two—no touching allowed until Tuesday—because longing springs from distance. It is odd, ironic, but also absolutely understandable that proximity can kill sex. Devout Muslims are not even allowed to touch one another until marriage. Ooh la la. Imagine that. Imagine the long courtship in which every gesture is watched, just to be sure that not even the slightest flick of a finger lands on your lover’s skin. Imagine the buildup of tension as time passes, as the wedding day draws near, as the woman is sheathed and wrapped for the pure and only purpose of being later unwrapped, after months of imagining. I know it hardly ever happens this way. But maybe sometimes it does.

The sexiest story I ever read was about a couple who never had sex. It was in a book of erotica I have recently looked for but could not find. My retelling of the story will fall flat on its face, so I’d rather not try. Suffice it to say that each day the couple, a giant and a fairy, came just millimeters closer to consummation, always leaving the bed unfinished, their days gone heavy with a ripe ache.

I have tried to tell my husband about this story, this extended extreme foreplay; he does not seem to understand. This is a problem, a classic problem that falls along gender lines. If I were mayor or president, I think I would institute some rules, some sanctions, for the good of the American Marriage.

But even with all the right rules and sanctions, we still come back to the issue of sound. Stones don’t make sounds, which is maybe why I love them. They suggest sound but never utter any. And then there are the sounds of sex, which are deeply private, and which, once made in the presence of a person, can never be unmade. In the right situation, with the right sanctions, these nighttime sounds would be preserved, bottled, so they did not wash away with the laundry, the toothpaste foaming down the drain, the nine-at-night-home-from-work nights, you angry, me angry, because . . . Because.

“If you want sex,” I say to my husband, “you need to have time. Sex is dependent upon time. You can’t expect me to spread my legs for a man I never see, a man who is so immersed in his work he talks computer code in his sleep.”

I mean what I am saying, but I also mean what I am
not
saying, and never have said, because it is too sad to say it. The sounds of sex are a shared secret between lovers, part of the glue that binds the couple together. They are considered, perhaps, the most private sounds we will ever utter in any relationship, trumping language so completely that words themselves are squashed beneath the primitive weight of the sound of sex. We have our regular speaking voices, and then we have our sexual voices, and while these voices may be odd, disturbing, even disorienting, especially if overheard by someone outside the dyad, they serve a special purpose. It is weird to me that I can have a best best friend, a friend I feel I know so completely, inside and out, but if I’ve never slept with her, then I don’t know her sound. I need not be my best friend’s lover to know her smell, her touch, how her fingers feel when they lightly land on my shoulder, but there is, locked away from me, a continent of her soul, and that is her sound.

Sounds have a powerful impact on me and always have. One of the most entrenched and disturbing memories of my childhood is of hearing my brother getting beaten by my mother. My mother beating her children, while not commonplace, was also not entirely out of the ordinary, so I was familiar with her fists, familiar with
seeing
her violence, directed mostly towards me. But there was one day when she directed herself towards my younger brother, and I did not see it. I heard it. I heard the sound of her punch, the soft, revolting smack it made in his little-boy belly, the swooshing sound of his breath, in-sucked, and then the little grunts of pain and she came down on him. Those little intermittent grunts, those disembodied cries of his, made the fact of his body all the more real, and I don’t know why. I couldn’t see a thing but god, good god, I could
hear
my brother’s body; his flesh had entered my ear and lodged itself there, a song that can’t be unsung, an insane, repetitive ditty that still today makes me gasp with horror.