“What’s going on, Kittykat?”
At least I’ve made her laugh, even though I know she hates the nickname. “Nothing. Just thinking about things, like what I’m going to do when I’m finished with school. Life stuff.”
“Ah. Life stuff.” Silence for a few breaths. “Anything you need to talk about?”
“Not really.” She sighs. “I’m okay, Mom. Just a lot to think about.”
“And you’re my thinker.” We both laugh. She starts to tell me about a video link Jac sent her, and the conversation leaves serious behind.
We disconnect and I spend another hour or so going from link to link on the internet, laughing at the Wrong Number Texts and Damn You Autocorrect blogs until my stomach hurts. It’s been a while since I spent the day doing nothing of importance, and it feels lazy and indulgent, but also somehow necessary. Relaxed, humming, I sort the piles of magazines and mail that never seem to be filed.
I find the envelope Will sent me, and the song I was singing lightly under my breath eases into a sigh. I let my fingers trace the letters of my name in the address, seeing the soft shades of gold and brown and orange my name has always evoked. The picture needs a frame, and it will need a place to hang, and right now I have neither, so the envelope gets wrapped up carefully and tucked into the basket I’ll fill with clean clothes and carry upstairs.
I’ve left the laundry go too long in the dryer. Most of our clothes get hung, but there are a few things, T-shirts and pajamas mostly, that get folded. In our bedroom, I press my face to the still-warm and wrinkled clothes I’ve tossed onto the bed. They smell fresh, they smell clean, but it’s nothing like clothes that have been hung on a line to dry in the sunshine. When I was growing up, my mother always hung the laundry in the backyard. All the neighbors did. The worst trouble we kids ever got in was when we played “maze” in the back-and-forth lines of hanging sheets on laundry day, marking the clean fabric with streaks from our Popsicle-stained fingers. The smell of sun-dried laundry is irrevocably tied to the sound of my mother’s muffled voice singing her favorite Simon and Garfunkel or Bob Dylan songs around the clothespins in her mouth.
Will’s envelope rests on my plum-colored bedspread until I pick it up and think of where to put it until I can frame it. Or to keep it safe if I decide never to look at it again. I can’t stop myself from opening it once more, sliding the photo out carefully, with the tips of my fingers against the thin white border.
It’s not the heart-shaped rock or the black-and-white scheme or even the touches of swirling color that make me smell the ocean. It’s the thought of Will. His name. His eyes. I close mine, rocked suddenly by the rush and whoosh of waves and the spray of foam on my cheeks. Tactile, sensual memory that has become somehow irrevocably linked to no longer just the sound of his voice, but the thought of him.
“I’m home,” Ross says from the doorway.
Embarrassed, still touching the picture, I turn as I slide it back into its manila prison.
“What’s that?”
“Oh. Something one of Naveen’s artists sent me.” I hold up the envelope as though I’m offering to show him, because I know my husband. He doesn’t care. Won’t look. Mention art to him and his eyes glaze over. I put the envelope carefully into the top drawer of my dresser, where I keep other important papers I never look at. “How was golf?”
I don’t care about golf any more than he wants to talk about art, but he talks anyway, rattling off something about par and birdies, details I’m not paying attention to. Still talking, he heads for the shower. Minutes later he’s out, towel around his waist, hair dripping. Still talking.
I am overcome with the need to touch him, to somehow anchor myself to this man. We have made children together. We have spent years building a life, a very good life, and I do not want to lose it.
“Come here,” I say in a voice not much like my own. “Kiss me.”
Ross looks faintly surprised and doesn’t move from his place at the dresser, where he’s rooting around for a pair of briefs. “What?”
“Come and kiss me.” I crook my finger and walk backward toward the bed. A little hair toss, a bit of a grin, a sparkle. I make myself shiny for him.
I remember when we’d spend an hour kissing and touching before we got down to fucking, but that doesn’t happen today. My husband kisses me roughly, too much tongue, his hands groping and squeezing too hard. His cock rises while water still beads on his skin.
I want him to undress me, spend some time. I want him to kiss my mouth and throat and work his fingers between my legs until I can’t stand it anymore. That doesn’t happen, either.
Ross gestures. “Take your clothes off.”
It’s easy enough to do, though not very sexy, since I’m wearing comfy around-the-house clothes. Naked, I lie back on the bed next to the pile of unfolded laundry as he crawls toward me. I think he’s going to kiss me, but instead he reaches over me to pull open the drawer on my nightstand.
“Use your toy.” He presses my vibrator into my hand. “It’s faster.”
It’s small and smooth and curved to fit my palm. It could be exciting and erotic to use my vibrator while we fuck—because let’s be honest, I think, as Ross kneels in front of me, jerking his cock to get it hard enough to fit inside me, we’re not about to make anything like love. It could be sexy, but he wants me to use it so he doesn’t have to work as hard to get me off.
I’ve been feeding myself sex thoughts all day long, so it wouldn’t be that hard for me to come. But of course, Ross doesn’t know that. I press the button on the vibe and slide it against my clit. The buzz is almost too strong; it makes my hips buck. When Ross moves over me, ready to push inside, I put a hand on his chest to hold him back.
“Wait.” I was ready before, ready all day long, thinking about another man, but now I need more time.
I can remember how watching Ross stroke himself used to turn me on, but it’s not working now. He’s paying attention to his dick, not to me. He keeps looking at the clock.
I get on my knees, cheek pressed to the mattress so I can hold the vibe on my clit as Ross pushes inside me from behind. I’m wet, and yet he still sticks and stretches before he’s all the way in. I don’t complain. I push back against him, wanting him to fuck harder. A little faster. I want to be in sync with him the way we used to be, when we spent hours making love, and it didn’t have to be a gymnastics show.
My orgasm is fragile and elusive, slipping away. I’m not going to come, not even with the vibrator, and while there have been plenty of times Ross and I have had sex that I didn’t have an orgasm, I’ve never felt this desperate about it. He thrusts faster. He’s getting closer; I know him so well I can hear it in the shift of his breathing and the way he groans, by how tight his fingers are gripping my hips. Usually these signs trigger my own pleasure, but not today. Nothing is working today.
“Wait,” I breathe again.
He slows, but it’s not enough for me, and I guess it’s too much for him, because he lasts at that pace only for a few seconds before moving faster again. The vibe slides against me, and it feels good, but not good enough. I turn it off and push up on my hands, relieved to get the pressure off my neck from my face pressing into the mattress.
I thought he was going to finish, but he keeps going. We move together. And finally, gradually, the pleasure builds again. I relax into it, both of us working toward the finish.
And then Ross presses his thumb on my asshole.
It could be a mistake, except that he does it again a second later, this time pushing harder. No more orgasm for me, not even close. I jerk at the intrusion, breaking the rhythm.
Surely he should know better, right? Certainly he should remember all the other times he’s tried to shove something up my ass, and I said I didn’t like it? He couldn’t possibly have forgotten the times—more than once, beca
use I wanted to be a good sport—that I let him try to fuck me in the back door and how much I hated it?
“Jesus fucking Christ, Ross!” I cry when he pushes against my asshole again. “What the fuck?”
My writhing and protests send him off. He grunts and thrusts and pounds me so hard I lose my balance and fall forward onto my face. Graceless. Irritated. And definitely not aroused.
“Some women,” he says when we’re disentangling ourselves and I’m reaching for a handful of tissues to clean up with, “like that.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I thought you might,” he says.
“What the hell gave you that idea? All the other times you’ve tried it and I’ve said no way? Stay the hell out of my ass, Ross.” I’d laugh, but I’m too annoyed. “Christ.”
“Sorry for trying to please you,” Ross says in that pouty, put-out tone that tastes to me like pickle juice.
“Pay attention to me for once!” I shout. “Just...listen when I tell you something.”
“I listen to you all the time.”
“Well, apparently, you don’t hear me.” I get out of bed on knees gone weak not with passion, but anger. In the bathroom, I pee, I wash my hands, I splash my face with water to relieve the burning in my eyes.
In the bedroom, Ross has put on briefs, while I have to find my scattered clothes, somehow lost although I didn’t toss them aside in anything like wild abandon. He’s in my way, digging through the pile of laundry on the bed. He doesn’t fold any of it, just tosses it aside while he looks for what he wants. Instead of waiting for him to move out of the way, I go instead to my dresser to pull on a clean pair of panties and a T-shirt.
“Did you wash all this stuff together?”
I turn to see him holding up a white dress shirt and a fleecy pullover, one in each hand. “Yes.”
There’s nothing on the white shirt but a few strands of fuzz from the fleece, but Ross stares at it as if it’s full of holes. “It’ll have to go through the wash again.”
“What?” I take it from his hand, look it over. I pluck the fuzz from the sleeve and a bit from the collar and shove it back toward him. “There. All fine.”
“I thought I asked you to wash my whites separately,” Ross says. His voice isn’t pickle juice now, it’s that softer, wrinkly tone, that patronizing and falsely calm voice he uses when he’s angry and trying to act as if he’s above that sort of thing.
“And I told you that I’d be happy to, so long as you separated them from everything else.”
He stares at me as if I’m speaking a foreign language. “I don’t understand what the big deal is.”
“The big deal,” I tell him, “is that if you’re going to ask me to do something for you, and I ask you to make it easy for me to do it, it would be great if you actually did.”
“Why can’t you just do it for me?” Ross asks.
There are always choices. Peace we keep with words we don’t say. Things we don’t do. But losing my fury just then isn’t a choice, it’s not something I decide. It simply leaks away from me, replaced by a bone-deep despair and utter exhaustion. I have no words. I have no actions. I have nothing left for him, and I push him gently to the side to get at the laundry on the bed. I sort through it, pulling the whites and tossing them into an empty basket while he watches. They fill barely a quarter of the space, and washing them again will be a waste of resources and my time, but I can’t fight with him about it again. If I do, I will say things I don’t want to say and do things I don’t want to do.
If marriage is compromise and working together, sometimes it’s also just biting the fuck out of your tongue to keep yourself from ending it all over a basket of laundry.
Chapter Seventeen
“It could’ve been worse,” Andrea says. She’s been my best friend for so long I think I know what she’s going to say, but she surprises me. “At least he was having some kind of sex with you, even if it was shitty.”
I pluck at the bread stick in the basket between us and give her a look. “Really? You think shitty sex is better than none? I don’t know about that.”
“Jonathan hasn’t had sex with me in four months,” my friend says flatly.
I don’t know what to say. Andrea shrugs and punches her salad with her fork until it submits to being eaten. She chews and swallows, washing it down with iced tea.
“He can’t keep it up,” she adds.
“Ouch. I’m sorry.” I ordered a half sandwich, but have no appetite for it or the soup that came with it. Will hasn’t called back since the day I deleted his voice mail. I was an idiot for not listening to it. I can’t stop thinking about what it might’ve said. But I focus on my friend now. “Wow. Can he take something for it?”
“He won’t.” Andrea lifts her chin, though her bottom lip wobbles. “He says it’s just a passing thing, stress from work, or that he’s tired. Or that I need to lose a few pounds. If I worked out more, he’d be more turned on.”
“What?” Outraged, I slap the table. She’s thinner than I’ve ever seen her. It also explains the salad. “What a dick!”
She shrugs again, not meeting my eyes. “I put on some weight. It happens. Everything gets harder when you’re over forty.”
“Except Jonathan’s dick, apparently,” I say before I can stop myself, and feel instantly terrible about making fun of what is obviously not a humorous situation.
We didn’t get to be best friends because we don’t understand each other, though. Andrea looks first surprised, then begins to laugh. In another minute we’re both cackling like grackles, turning heads at the other tables, but we don’t care. It feels good to laugh like this, so hard we both end up in tears.
“I tried to be understanding.” She wipes her eyes. “But it makes me feel like crap, Elisabeth. I mean...I’ve tried everything except wrapping myself in plastic wrap and greeting him at the door with a bacon sandwich.”
I twirl my spoon through the soup I don’t want to eat. “You shouldn’t have to. Have you at least tried to get him to the doctor? Maybe there’s something else going on?”
She shrugs. “He won’t go. He’s a stubborn asshole. His dad died of a heart attack when he was just a few years older than Jon is now. I think he’s just trying to ignore anything that could be bad.”
“Like that ever works.” Impulsively, I reach for her hand to squeeze it. “I’m sorry, honey, that sucks. A lot.”
“Yeah. It does. I haven’t had an orgasm in, like, a year. Even when he was still sleeping with me, it wasn’t very good.” She stabs her salad again, and I can’t blame her. I’d murder more than lettuce if I hadn’t come in that long.
I’m surprised enough to blurt, “You don’t take care of yourself?”
I’ve known this woman since we were virgins who thought French kissing was going to be gross. (Sometimes, it totally is.) We’ve shared stories about our periods, childbirth, boyfriends, husbands, our hopes and dreams and fears. There isn’t much I could think of that Andrea and I haven’t dissected and torn apart over the years, but all at once I realize that we haven’t ever talked about masturbation. I assumed she does it, but the look on her face tells me I’m way off base.
“Andrea!”
She shakes her head, looking embarrassed. “I...just...no. I just don’t do that.”
“Why?” As far as I know, she’s not religious or ashamed of sex or anything like that. She’s certainly had orgasms.
“It just doesn’t work for me. I mean, I’ve tried it, but it’s just not the same when I do it myself.” She makes a familiar face, the same one she’d make if I tried to get her to drink straight tequila.
It’s not nice to laugh at her, but her expression tips me into a giggle. “That’s terrible!”
“Right?” It’s good to see her smile. Better than the way she
looked when we first got here. “I’m going crazy!”
“Don’t you have a vibrator?”
Another embarrassed grin. “No.”
“Andrea. You have to get one.” I lean forward to keep the conversation between us.
She gives me a raised brow. “Yours didn’t make it any better with Ross that last time, did it?”
“Ugh. No. But when I use it alone, it’s great.” I use it alone a lot more than I do with my husband.
“I like...you know. I need something—” she makes a discreet hand motion “—inside.”
Just like that, we’re laughing again. Snort-laughing this time, hard enough to turn heads. We laugh so hard the waiter comes over to ask us if we need anything, and all either of us can do is shake our heads and wave him away.
“You can get something for that!” I whisper through my guffaws. “Check Google!”
Andrea’s laughter fades. She wipes her eyes with her napkin, but they still glisten. “It still wouldn’t be the same, Elisabeth.”
My heart breaks for her a little, and new words slip out before I can really think about what I’m saying. “So, find yourself a man.”
Neither of us is laughing now. Andrea is quiet for a moment, toying with her fork but no longer eating. I cover the silence by taking a long, long drink of water.
“I could never,” she says finally. “I mean...first of all, who’d have me?”
I’ve never had much of an opinion about Jonathan one way or another, but right now I hate him for making my best friend feel she’s not fuckable. “You would have no trouble finding someone. None.”
She sighs. “Sure. Right. But even if I did, I could never cheat on Jonathan. It would be wrong. I’d feel too bad.”
What can I say to that? It’s not as if I disagree with her. Just a few months ago, if we’d been sitting across from each other like this and she’d been the one to suggest such a thing to me, I’d have responded the same way.
This time when the waiter comes back, to ask if he can bring me a box for the lunch I haven’t touched, I shake my head. “No, thanks. But we’ll take a dessert menu.”