What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (13 page)

Then one day at nursing school, shortly after that relationship came to a cataclysmic end, Paul traded his light blue scrubs for a navy blue suit and delivered an assigned presentation. He was supposed to discuss an ethical dilemma that a nurse might confront, and he turned his task into a game of
Jeopardy!
, with himself as host and his fellow students earning points for posing the right questions to analyze and address the problem. He was animated; he came alive for her. She adored his ingenuity and eagerness; there was nothing nonchalant about him. Her memories of being rendered, in luxuriant brushstrokes, as a woman ready for burial started to fade. . . .

At the beginning of their first date—following the game of telephone—Paul steered over to the side of the road, stopped, bolted out, opened the trunk, and returned with a bouquet of roses, saying that he’d decided not to bring the flowers to her front door because she lived with her parents and the moment might be awkward. She was charmed by this hint of shyness and by the deliberateness of his buying the bouquet in the first place. They were deliberate together. Their dates lasted through entire nights, yet they postponed sex for two months and then made sure they weren’t at her house or his—he lived with his parents, too. They planned the event. He booked a room at a nearby resort. When they finished making love for the first time—sex that was about as brief as she’d expected, given how long they’d waited—her eyes welled up.

He asked if she was hurt. She assured him she was not. He asked if she was disappointed. She told him that she was tearing up because she knew she would never have sex with a new lover again, and he, understanding that she was grateful, told her that the same was true for him. She did feel a level of regret that she kept to herself, an undertow of loss, but soon they were enmeshed again, and this time the lovemaking lasted, and over the next two years, until they married and moved in together, they conspired to find hours when they could have sex in their parents’ houses without causing their parents discomfort, and the conscious intent involved in this collaboration, the plain acknowledgment of their desire for each other, the absence of all coyness about their feelings, taught them that a particular kind of magic could be created through simplicity and candor.

Boredom did not creep in behind this habit of transparency. Eros, for them, did not depend on suspense, on worrying if wanting was reciprocated. Some things weren’t possible with three young children. The likelihood of the children’s needs interrupting her and Paul’s nights meant that she no longer slept naked, no longer had the radiating pleasure of feeling her nudity as a constant provocation. The eruption of the children’s energy on Saturday mornings meant that those hours were no longer a time when her and Paul’s desires could sprawl. And lately his training had cut their evenings apart. But distraction and fatigue didn’t drain away lust. Their lack of guile somehow kept the attraction between them taut.

“We’re really not subtle at all,” she said. “My line is, ‘Are you going to pay attention to me tonight?’ Or he’ll say, ‘Am I going to get any action tonight?’ And I’ll tell him, ‘Well, if you get off your study call and come upstairs before I go to sleep.’ Or we’ll agree to wake up at three in the morning.”

She went on: “We never stop admiring each other. I’ll say, ‘You got your hair cut; it looks great.’ And he still tells me all the time how good I look, even after the kids. ‘Oooo’—this is one of his subtlest lines—‘I love you in those jeans; can I get in them?’ We make out in the kitchen. While we watch TV I’m touching him, or he’s touching my breasts—even if there’s almost no way it’s going to lead to sex. I love that he loves to see me in these tight gray yoga pants I used to wear in nursing school.”

Then, abruptly, she mentioned something hidden. She was a baseball fan, and when she had trouble reaching orgasm, or wanted to make love with Paul but felt that arousal was remote and needed beckoning, she tended to think about the Yankee’s shortstop Derek Jeter. She smiled at the comedy of this confession. It was only sometimes that this extra help was required, she explained. “Jeter is the ultimate Yankee. Tall, all-American, everyone loves him—he’s it. He comes home to me after winning the World Series. He’s still in his uniform, and he throws me onto the bed and kisses me in a frenzy all over and thrusts right into me without me being really prepared for it. He just ravages me.”

Yet even when she enlisted another man, she said, she felt little distance from her husband. It wasn’t something they had ever talked about. “We’ve never asked each other. I don’t think your partner needs to know. The fantasy is only a device. When you’re with the same person for a long time, it’s fine to use your mind to escape. I’m still with him, I’m still touching him. It’s still
him
.”

4

The woman in the zebra-striped cowboy hat lay on a blue blow-up raft at the shallow end of the swimming pool. Passie, watching her, was in her late fifties. The woman was on her back, one leg draped over either side of the raft and dangling in the water. Long, dark hair fell from beneath the black-and-white hat, a thin chain adorned one ankle, and, in between, her body was padded without being obese. “There were about twelve guys around her,” Passie said. “She was nude. Big breasts. And vocal, because these men were playing with every existing part of her.”

Four decades earlier, when the worshipfully maintained mansions of her hometown were opened to the public, as was the tradition for one spring week each year, Passie had been selected to be a hostess. Once, great quantities of cotton had been shipped through this hub of the South. More than a century later, in the late nineteen fifties and early sixties, when Passie was in high school and college, the town poured its fragile pride into this annual display. She sat on one of the porticos. The crepe myrtle was in bloom: blossoms of purple and white and watermelon clouded the lawns and cascaded along the walkways. Her hoop skirt—pale pink—billowed. Her long gloves were dyed to match. “It feels surreal,” she said now, “to have grown up in that time, in that place.”

At twelve, in the Southern Baptist church where her father taught Sunday school and where she sang in the choir, she had stepped to the front of the sanctuary to have the minister press his hand to her head and lay her backward in the baptismal tank, to be saved. In her late teens, she pledged to meet the standards of the Little Southern Debutantes: to “at all times bring honor to herself” and to “be representative of the wholesome American girl.” At the area’s best women’s college, she was taught how to swivel modestly in and out of an automobile, how to pause for a gentleman to guide her by the arm down a set of stairs, and how to pose in a group photograph if she was in the front row, with feet turned and hands folded and positioned to one side, so that the body suggested an elegant and demure S-shape below a straight, poised neck. “To this day I look at pictures and think that if women would just sit properly they would look so much better.”

And during college, she was pinned. This was the pulse of those four years. First, she would begin to date a boy from the state university nearby. Then he would give her a lavaliere with his fraternity letters to wear proudly around her neck. “Will you be pinned to me?” he would ask in the next step, and if she said yes, he would affix his fraternity’s embossed shield to her blouse above her heart. About a week later he and all of his brothers would appear at the foot of her dormitory porch. She would come outside, and they would serenade her with their fraternity song: “And the moonlight beams on the girl of my dreams.”

“I had a traditional vision of life, a fairy princess vision. My desire was for a Prince Charming who lived in a palace to sweep me off my feet. As a child, desire meant the wish for a new dress. As a teenager, it was wanting the right date for parties. At college, it was collecting the right fraternity pin and falling in love. You have your song and you dance at the parties on football weekends and you think he’s going to be your husband. Lust didn’t factor into it that much; it wasn’t the driving force.”

Nelson arrived as a blind date for her roommate, when, after her graduation, Passie was teaching French at a college a few states away. She had broken with convention in this way, choosing a career rather than marrying quickly, just as she had pushed against convention earlier: winning public speaking contests as an undergraduate and getting herself elected president of her state’s Youth Congress, the first woman ever to hold the office. When the date with the roommate didn’t work out, Nelson and Passie discovered, over Cokes, a little of what they had in common: loving theater (he sold silos for a living and acted with the town’s amateur theater company) and classical music. “I found him an appealing person. And he was nice-looking. Not terribly handsome. But appealing. By that time I’d dated my share of men who were self-absorbed. He did things to make me feel special. I traveled with the foreign languages team, and if I was coming home late, he would have brought over food and left it for me in the refrigerator. He liked to leave my radio tuned to an Indianapolis station that drifted in from three hundred miles away.”

As she recalled this, we were in their kitchen, Passie, Nelson, and I. Nelson sat in a leather wing chair, while she, on the other side of the counter, made a brisket for dinner and brownies for desert. Their home, near the college where she continued to teach and a few miles from the silo company from which he’d retired, was a single-story brick house on a leafy, trim cul-de-sac. The street might have run through a thousand American neighborhoods in a hundred towns and cities, the trees young, the smooth blacktop driveways outfitted with basketball hoops. Inside, Passie and Nelson’s walls were decorated with landscapes: a nearby lake with a fisherman casting his line from a dinghy; a picket fence and horses bending to the grass of a field. Nelson wore a green golfing shirt tucked in tight over a loose middle and had a face and neck at once soft and strong, broad, generous. She wore a bright floral blouse and jeans that were slightly roomy over her slender, nimble frame.

About seven years ago, and thirty years after they were married, they were on vacation with their children and grandchildren, and while the rest of the family wandered through a fairgrounds one evening, the two of them went out to dinner at a favorite chain restaurant and had one of the few brutal fights of their decades together. She had already left their bed at home. At first, she had begun to sleep in the den sometimes because she had trouble with insomnia, but the separate sleeping arrangement had become permanent. Once, in the years before children, they had spent entire weekend days in bed. Later, after they’d started their family, if they were in the car together, just the two of them, she liked to read him the letters from his
Penthouse
magazines, turning herself on. But by the time they were in their fifties, she joined him in what had become his bed once per week, on Friday nights, joined him for what might be only a few minutes. He tried to thrill her, tried in all the ways they had, years before, learned together, tending to each other’s bodies, listening to each other’s skin. But the surface of her flesh seemed far off to her, let alone to him, and even a perfunctory orgasm had grown impossible. He came; they cuddled; she left.

And on vacation, her endurance disintegrated. All week she had felt entrapped by his wanting. With their children and grandchildren around them in their rented condo, she felt less than nothing in return. “This is not working,” she erupted at the restaurant. “I know you’re angry.
I’m
angry. If you come home one more week and say, ‘Oooo, it’s Friday night, you know what that means,’ I’m going to leave the house. I’m not going to have sex with you anymore. I can’t. I’m just not going to.”

“I don’t think I said too much,” Nelson remembered. “I had felt this level of frustration in her for a good while, but we never talked about it. I knew something was going wrong, but I didn’t know what to do.”

Back home, they bought and read books of marital advice. Defeat followed determination. When Nelson heard an acquaintance say that he’d visited a clothing-optional hotel in the Caribbean, he mentioned the resort to Passie, half-jokingly, as a far-fetched idea that might rescue their marriage. “When he brought it up, I realized that I was interested—interested but very, very uncertain. I wasn’t sure I could bare my body. I didn’t know if I had the courage. No woman is ever convinced that she looks good enough to do that—definitely no woman of fifty-something. We thought it was just nudity, but they have lifestyle weeks when it isn’t.”

A month later, they were checking in for a weekend—in the front lobby, nudity was not allowed—and stepping tentatively from their room in bathing suits and, for her, a wrap.

“But even before I reached the pool, I threw caution to the wind. My bathing suit came off. I buried it in my tote bag. The guests were every age from twenty-five to eighty. There were women I tried never to stand next to, because they looked so good, and there were women who didn’t look good at all. There were cesarean scars and hysterectomy scars and women who were totally out of shape, and I thought, If they can stand there and expose themselves, why shouldn’t I? Bodies aren’t perfect. The pool was up on a platform; you went up five or six steps to get to it. Every chaise lounge was filled with someone naked. There was a gal fondling someone’s erection while she was having a conversation with someone else. There was a gal going down on another woman. And these men were rotating the float with the zebra-hat woman on the water, stroking her arms, kissing her breasts, stroking her legs, licking her clit. I spent thirty minutes watching her.”

“I used to bemoan the fact that I’d never have sex with another woman in my life,” Nelson said from his leather chair. As Passie cooked dinner on the other side of the counter, he listed two or three of the sessions he’d had with women at the events they’d been attending, at hotels in surrounding states, every few months over the last seven years. His tone sounded vaguely rote, bewildered. It wasn’t celebratory.