Playing House (4 page)

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m not going to grow it back,” he said. “Not right now.”

“I don’t think I can adjust,” I said. “If I got really, really fat, like, two hundred pounds, I think you would have the right to tell me you weren’t comfortable with that.” Even as I said this, I was not sure it was so true.

“Maybe I would have that right,” he said. “But I wouldn’t exercise it. Besides, I like a little real estate on a woman.”

I asked my friend C. about it. Her husband, V., was a carpenter, trim, muscular, dark. Then he took time off to be home with his kids and before long his stomach was lapping over his belt, and a few months after that, plain and simple, he was obese. “Are you still attracted to him?” I asked.

“No, not really,” she said.

“Does that bother you?” I asked.

C. paused. We were sitting in her kitchen, sipping coffee. “You know,” she said, “we have two kids. I work full time. I’m tired at the end of the day. He’s tired too, more so because now he’s out of shape. We’ve stopped having sex. I get a lot more sleep. And if I had to choose between sex and sleep, I’d pick sleep.”

I asked my friend D. She had once had a boyfriend who got nose cancer, and they had to take off his nose. He was lucky, in that that stopped the cancer, but now he was maimed and had to wear a prosthetic nose held on by a band.

“What did you do?” I said.

“We broke up,” she said.

“Because he had no nose?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” she said. “The cancer illuminated a lot of things for us, ways in which we were not compatible.”

“So it had nothing to do with the nose,” I said.

“That’s what I like to tell myself,” she said, and then she touched her own nose, as though it might be growing.

I’m quite sure that I could not love a beautiful dummy, a stocky blond jock who watched football while tossing peanuts in his mouth. However, during the beardless crisis, I learned that I could not feel eros towards a man I found odd looking. And the old saying “To know him is to love him” just holds no water for me. Obviously, I knew my husband when he shaved off his beard or let it grow too long, and, sad to say, whatever inner beauty he had was temporarily blocked by his surface sheen, at least when it came to sex. Lunch, dinner, chess, hanging out, talking, none of that was affected, but sex is about bodies, it is about skin, surface touching surface; sex is superficial, and, as it turns out, the superficial is pretty profound.

After my husband went baby-faced, I started doing some research into evolutionary psychology, specifically as it relates to sex. I spoke with anthropologists Helen Fisher and Elaine Hatfield, each of whom told me that beauty—our perception of it, that is—plays a crucial role in the survival of our species. According to these experts, we love/are attracted to beautiful people, those with symmetrical faces, proportioned bodies, and so on because these people are frequently the healthiest, and although we do not know it, we select our mates based on their ability to perpetuate our little packet of genes.

This explanation comforted me. It did not bring the beard back to my husband’s face, but it did let me off the hook, at least a little bit. All right, so I was not a corrupt product of advertising culture, at least not totally. I was responding to an ancient limbic drive, protecting the babies that would one day be mine, yearning for symmetry, a chin, sanguinity to pass on down the line. “Beards,” Helen Fisher told me, “signify a man with a lot of testosterone, and that’s why women find them attractive.”

One would think, then, that the bigger the beard, the hotter the guy. But somehow it doesn’t work that way.

“Did you know, honey,” I said to my husband over dinner that night, “a beard signifies a good supply of testosterone?”

“Really?” he said. He smiled at me. “So if you shave your beard does your testosterone level drop?”

“I don’t know why you wouldn’t grow the beard back for me,” I said.

“Maybe if you stopped asking I would,” he snapped.

So I stopped. Weeks passed. I ceased being shocked, but in shock’s place was a sort of dullness, a certain reserve.

Then a friend of Benjamin’s from college came to visit. “Hey, Benjamin,” he shouted as he came in. “You finally shaved off that beard. God, you look so much better without it.”

“You think so?” I said.

“If there is one thing I’ve learned over years of shaving and growing facial hair,” said Benjamin, “it’s that people always, always prefer you how they met you originally. No one who met me without a beard has ever really liked my beard, and no one who met me with a beard has ever really thought I look good without one.”

“I met you with a beard,” I said.

“That’s obvious,” he said.

What exactly is the beauty we pursue to protect our progeny? Some studies have shown that people find symmetrical faces the most beautiful, but I wonder if beauty is best defined by familiarity. It’s not that there is some objective standard out there; we love what we know, and what we call lovely is really solace, home. In the 1950s, one of psychology’s greatest scientists, Harry Harlow, did a series of fascinating experiments with baby monkeys. These experiments were, in their own way, horrible, but like a horror movie, they revealed something essential about what it means to love and to be loved. Harlow removed baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers and raised them in isolated cages with mannequin mothers who were wired up to deliver milk. Some of these mannequin monkey mothers were not quite finished by the time the batch of babies were born, so some babies had mannequin mothers with just a plain wooden ball for a head—no face, no monkey mouth, no simian eyes, no features, nothing. And because this was the only mother these monkeys had, they each came to love their faceless mannequin, and to cling to her, and to drink from her wired milk supply. A few weeks later, Harlow and colleagues painted faces on their incomplete monkey mannequins. They painted beautiful simian faces with eyes of gentleness and color. But when the baby monkeys saw these faces, they screamed, and with their little hands, reached out and turned the wooden ball of the head so the face faced backwards, and they were again in the embrace of the flat, featureless nothingness that for them was home, was whom they loved.

The first face may always be the most beautiful face. When we find a partner attractive to us perhaps we are not really thinking
take me with you
so much as
bring me back
. Six years later my husband was bearded again, and I noticed his strawberry-blond beard was going gray, flecked here and there, and his eyes seemed tired. One night, he pointed out to me his bald spot, a circle widening slowly on the crown of his head, the exposed scalp pink as a salmon, too vulnerable looking to touch. “Will you love me when I’m old and bald?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. I somehow knew I would. Which, of course, contradicts everything I have just said. I know how an evolutionary psychologist would explain this contradiction: no longer in reproductive mode, I will no longer need his beauty. And he will no longer need any of mine. In other words, I will love him without eros. Of course this explanation falls prey to the assumption that the elderly do not need beauty because they do not have sex. I can’t comment on this right now, although I’m sure I will when my time comes, if I should be so lucky. When I am old and toothless, when he is gray and wrinkled . . . I think, if I get there, I will just be happy to have him near me—I will think,
This is Benjamin—
someone to sleep with in the truest, most literal sense, side by side as our days begin to darken.

My husband caught on fire smack-dab in the middle of our marriage, right around that inevitable but destabilizing romantic dip when all that had once waxed now suddenly waned, even the actual moon seeming to be—night in, night out, never changing—just a sliver of stone, or maybe my spouse’s fingernail cutting found on the back of our bathroom floor, signaling for sure a careless man whose spontaneity had somehow turned to sloppiness. His droppings, it seemed, were everywhere.

At night during this time, I would lie awake and listen to the sound of my mate snoring, alarms going off in my body. What would bring us back? Little did I know that in just a matter of months those inner alarms would turn outer, the whole house going off as white smoke, almost creamy in its consistency, filled the rooms and the detectors shrieked, a sound so particular, so piercing, it caused our dog to go deaf in one ear even as it signaled, for us, the return of our senses—sound as well as sight, smell, taste, and, for a wonderful while, touch.

But I’m ahead of myself here, because the fire came in mid-May, a beautiful, balmy month, while for the time being I was still stuck in the sliver-stone of my moon and marriage in the New England winter when the snow was starch white as it fell but turned tattered, gritty, almost the instant it touched down on the urban ground, strewn with broken glass, dented tin cans, candy wrappers crackling in the wind.

It was a cold, cold time, that winter. Snow piled higher than our porch windows, and when the melt finally came, it oozed through the pores of the screens and rotted the painted porch floor. We’d been together, my husband and I, the proverbial seven years, each year before the seventh year, an A- or B+, in no particular order, seesawing grades we could do more than accept; grades we could celebrate, for we were mature and understood no union is as perfect as it once was, as it was the day, the moment, the second you first fell in love.

We hadn’t had children yet. We hunted for mushrooms around the banks of the city’s polluted pond, parting the rotting grasses to find the enormous ears of fungi that Benjamin, my husband, a scientist, identified for me. We ordered every book Frank L. Baum, author of the
Wizard of Oz
, had ever written and read the volumes out loud before bed, ferreted into magical worlds where fruit trees grew tiny plum-colored people, their umbilical cords the stem attaching head to tree, until the sun finally finished its ripening and the miniature people dropped to the ground and began their bipedal lives. My husband and I had sex and fruit and fairytales, and for dinner we grilled steak-sized portobellos sautéed in thick pats of butter, the smell everywhere.

And then that seventh winter came, carrying with it cloud sacks stuffed with snow and some mean man who lived right over the horizon weaving a wind whose edges he honed on a grinding stone as sharp as a shark’s smile. By January most everyone in Boston looked faintly anemic and wind-bitten; by February there was widespread talk of light therapy. Storm followed storm followed storm, and while I wouldn’t blame the demise of my marriage entirely on the weather, I would not hesitate to say it helped us down in a hefty way. Traits that had once seemed charming were now serious irritants. My husband’s skin, which had been a beautiful Scandinavian fair, had somehow, somewhere, in some way, turned faintly pinkish, and sometimes this phrase leapt into my mind: “
I have married a pink man
.” For his part, he became critical of my thickening waistline and my less-than-perfect flossing habits. We began to bicker, and then we began to be bitter.

In general, people refer to this phase in monogamy as the “seven-year itch,” a term I dislike, implying, as it does, that a tube of cortisone cream or, in a very bad case, perhaps a titrating dose of prednisone would do the trick. But anyone who has ever been through this, this marital or relational
itch
, can tell you the phenomenon to which we are here referring cannot be solved with a scratch. And why not? Because it is not an itch to begin with. Itch is an itchy word, its
ch-ch
sound suggests some perseverative, compulsive yearning, some . . . some . . .
urge
for an
answer
that would, in this case, come not with words but with someone scratching . . . skin. Your skin. His skin. My skin. In my own case, I didn’t want my husband touching my skin, because he had begun to bother me in too many minor mundane ways. This was in no way an itch. It lacked any quality of intense neural focus. What we had was more like a lesion, essential cords cut, and the result: numbness.

Researchers have found that in healthy pair-bonded relationships, there are in general five positive interactions for every negative one. Switch it around and you can catch the powerful punch of this measurement tool more easily. It’s called “the five to one rule.” In bad relationships, in fact in reliably
doomed
relationships, there are always two or more insults for every six interactions the couples have. It’s good I didn’t know this at the time or I might have thrown in the towel, perhaps even all our towels, so that, when the fire was eating my husband’s body alive, he would not have had anything to beat back the flames with.

As it turns out, I hadn’t tossed in the towel the night my husband combusted, but neither did I have one handy, and even if I had, shock would probably have prevented me from offering it to him as I stood there, on the threshold of his study, and watched and heard (how horrible to hear; the hearing is what still, to this day, ignites my mind with terror) his raw human screams as the crazy flames, propelled by a chemical he’d spilled, made a crackling orange halo out of what had once been his beautiful hair.