365 Nights Page 19

  The sex drive discrepancy causes many women to do a lot of subtle dodging. I present Exhibit A: Charla Muller prior to July third. One woman I know stays up until midnight so her husband will be fast asleep when she tiptoes in for bed. Another friend told me, “My husband wants me to go to bed at the same time, because he doesn’t want me to wake him up when I come to bed, and he always wants to think there might be some lovin’ on tap. I always take longer in the bathroom. And I found out by accident that he often will fall asleep while I’m still in the bathroom. Now I might take a little longer flossing my teeth, and applying moisturizer, to get out of having sex.”

  But those hubbies still give it the old college try. My friend Wendy told me at a cocktail party, “If I don’t have sex with him, he’s going to start rubbing my back and rubbing my back, and pretty soon there’s going to be a hole in my back, because he is just not going to stop trying. The very few times that I have said no, it’s become a bit competitive and I know he’ll just come right back at me the next night.” I asked Wendy what she did when he kept trying to have a romp with her. “Who was that woman, was it Dr. Ruth?, who said, ‘How hard is it to give just two minutes, just two to five minutes, for the life of your marriage? ’ So I’ll be like: ‘Okay, let’s just do this, it’ll be a relief for you, and then we can just go to bed, and I won’t be lying there with you rubbing a hole in my back.’ ”

  My sister-in-law, the investment banker, has a more pragmatic approach to intimacy. Like any good business school graduate, she compares intimacy to the concept of the time value of money. The idea is that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow, because of the beauty of compound interest. So if we invest a dollar today, we make interest on it, and then make interest on the interest, and that dollar will be worth much more than a dollar saved next year. She has brilliantly correlated this idea with time value of intimacy. Namely that having sex today is always worth more than having sex tomorrow. We reap the benefits of having sex plus all the goodwill it generates for our marriage and in the eyes of our spouse. In turn, this accrues (like compound intimacy interest) and we now have a “bank account” of intimacy that can be reflected in less stress between partners, less anxiety, a closer relationship, and so on. An added kicker is the assumption that sex today is going to be better than sex tomorrow . . . and God forbid, if there’s ever an accident, you know?

  And as I mentioned earlier, there is no better time than the present to hop into some good old-fashioned intimacy, because none of us are getting any younger and we should go ahead and carpe diem. But the correlation to money does have a flaw. Unlike the financial world, where you can invest a big chunk of change early in the game and reap the rewards, I have learned the hard way that I have to continually make deposits into my intimacy account to keep it earning anything. I can’t have a ton of sex in January and then expect it to sustain Brad until Memorial Day. The more deposits, the better, for sure. But the deposits need to be regular and thoughtfully timed to really experience any payoff. So it seems I’ll get the best bang for my buck (I know, I’m giggling, too) if I invest early and often, and just plain make it a habit.

  I’m not alone in having to manage this sexual dichotomy. Many of my friends agree with me that, for the most part, women don’t have the same sexual frequency preferences as our spouses, and we have to work to make deposits into the bank of intimacy. One exception to the rule is my friend Sofia, who has always matched—or possibly exceeded—her spouse in terms of sexual appetite. In fact, when she and her husband married, they signed a Life Agreement, which I think is similar to a prenup, only it’s not valid in a court of law (to which I say, then why do it?). Anyway, this Life Agreement outlined that each expected a fair amount of intimacy . . . or else. Or else what? I asked, dying to know. “Well, one of us can call the other to ‘council’ and they are required to address the ‘we didn’t have sex last night, so whassup with that?’ question.” And then what, I wonder . . . a flogging with wet noodles?

  So we can all say we want it, we can all agree “intellectually, ” as my friend says, that it’s the right thing to do, and we can still bob and weave around having it. But the age-old problem still exists in this modern twenty-first century: How do you manage expectations, needs, rejections, and disappointments without making yourself and your partner miserable, or filing for divorce, or contemplating an affair? With Brad and me, we finally discovered what Sofia has probably known all along— discussing sex, keeping it on the radar, and making it a priority are all worthy endeavors.

  When I was twenty, I embarked on a different endeavor. I moved to New York City for the summer. I was in love with the city before I arrived. I loved her from afar, kind of like how I loved Parker Stevenson from afar during his Hardy Boys years. I had visited the city twice, including once with my parents. The trip with my parents was a high school graduation gift. I bought a Louis Vuitton handbag at Saks Fifth Avenue, and I thought I would die from the thrill of it all. While I saw the typical parts of Manhattan during that short forty-eight hours, there was nothing I saw that I didn’t love. Who wouldn’t want to live in a city with so much energy and action? She had put her best foot forward during my visit, and I was desperate to return.

  So I did. I went to live in Manhattan the summer before my senior year of college. My home that summer was in NYU medical student housing. The apartment was a two-bedroom efficiency that I sublet from the nephew of a business associate of my father’s. I had a grossly underpaid internship at a PR agency that had nothing to do with NYU or medical students, but I found the place quickly, and it was cheap. Accompanying me to New York were two suitcases of clothes, my dad’s worn blanket from college (emblazoned with a university crest), and my hair dryer. One bedroom was crammed full of stuff and the other bedroom had a single bed and a desk. Later, I would close the door to the second bedroom because I had seen mice and had no device to manage them other than to slam the door and shove several towels at the bottom. I was hoping to starve them, or send them to another equally seedy neighboring apartment. The second day I was there, I claimed a small television set from the garbage room in the building.

  Fortunately, I had a very genial and helpful cabbie from the airport, who gave me a much-needed lesson in New York geography. He told me that Manhattan is eight miles long and two miles wide. Fifth Avenue bisects the city so all streets west are labeled West and all streets east of Fifth Avenue are labeled East. All street numbers emanate from magical Fifth. That means that 40 West Fifty-seventh Street is close to Fifth Avenue. Don’t go past Ninety-eighth Street on either side (this was 1988, remember). If you can, take the bus instead of the subway. It’s simply more pleasant. That advice, and a few hundred-dollar bills from my dad, was all I had going for me.

  I knew no one in New York except one girl from college, who was a year older and fully employed. Actually, there was another girl I knew from Long Island who would be a college roommate the following fall semester. But since my geography of New York was laughably poor, I had no idea she was so close. For all I knew, Long Island was near Syracuse. So I never called her and missed a grand opportunity to know two people in the greater New York City area that summer. I was quite embarrassed and sad on move-in day that fall when I discovered that a real friend had been only a forty-minute train ride away. But I digress. I did keep calling the older girl who had already settled into the city. She could not have been less interested, but I kept calling her and calling her before I arrived and she must have noted the desperation in my voice because, finally—finally!—I snagged an invite to go out with her my first weekend in the city. Great, only ten more weekends for me to fill.

  Our outing was a party on the Upper West Side. I barely knew where the Upper West Side was, but I was thrilled. I could have cared less how or if I was going to fit into what I thought was a hip New York City party scene, I was just desperate for the company, even the company of six snooty investment bank trainees, also newbies to the New York City party scene
. So there I was, slightly out of place but beaming from ear to ear, thrilled to be traveling in a pack of young urban professionals. I was twenty years old.

  After arriving at my friend’s apartment, we met up with her other friends and started out on foot. It was a pretty June night, the kind of night that makes you pause and really appreciate that everything is perfect—the temperature, the air—not too hot, not too cold—just right. We turned the corner onto West Eighty-fourth Street looking for the walk-up with the purported party, when suddenly the guy walking in front of me grabbed his ankle. “Crap, something hit me in the ankle.” We all bent over for inspection and heard a ping here and a ping there. Metal bouncing off concrete. A cracked windowpane. It took only a second (or perhaps two, as we had had some cocktails) to realize that someone was shooting at something—or us.

  Before I could think about the novelty (or horror, depending on how you look at it) of being in New York City in the middle of gunfire, I was hit in the face. I grabbed my right cheek and my eyes stung with tears. I turned away in pain. Crap, I couldn’t cry in front of six snooty investment bank trainees whom I hardly knew!

  I crouched over and held my breath as I examined the wound. Well, at least it didn’t go all the way through, I thought to myself. Isn’t the twenty-year-old mind an amazing thing? Had I been my current forty-year-old self, I would have been absolutely freaking out and waiting for another bullet to pierce my carotid artery and bleed out right there on West Eighty-Fourth Street. But no, my twenty-year-old self was still standing, possibly in the line of fire, looking on the bright side of things and thanking her lucky stars that the bullet didn’t go all the way through.

  The group huddled around me with enough concern to make me feel a bit better. Once they were comfortable that I wasn’t going to die, they stayed on course, not to be deterred by a little ole thing like a bullet. My friend, who had a rare moment of decency, waved them ahead and took me to nearest deli for a look-see.

  We walked a few blocks past the neon lights of a dry cleaner, a pizzeria, a Tasti D-Lite, Pinky Nail, and several bars. My friend pulled me into the deli, where fluorescent lights cast a weird green light on everything. “Let me see,” she said.

  I pulled my hand away and blood was everywhere. The owner of the deli, a small Indian man, started screaming. “No blood in de store! No blood in de store! Get out! Get out!” I looked at my friend, as I was totally out of my league on this one. It was the first time I’d been out in New York City with a group of people (I can’t call them friends, now can I?). The first time I’d ever been shot in the face. And the first time (but not the last) that I’d ever been screamed at by a small, irate Indian deli man.

  “She got shot, for Pete’s sake, don’t you have some ice or something?” So the hospitable proprietor grabbed some napkins and a cup of ice, put his hand on my shoulder, and quickly steered us out of the store, down the steps, and in front of a liquor store, a much more appropriate backdrop for a shooting.

  My friend patched me up a bit and, with my approval, put me in a cab and hurried off to her friends. I went straight back to my NYU medical student housing, took the elevator, let myself into a very dank, dark, mice-infested apartment, and sat on the bed.

  We deduced that I had been shot with a pump or a BB gun as we called them growing up. This conclusion was arrived at because my face had not been blown to smithereens like it might have had it been a real gun. Likewise, it was a deeper injury than, say, a slingshot could commit. No wonder it didn’t go through my cheek (and straight into my brain and blind me for life!). It made a perfectly round hole the size of a pencil eraser. In fact, if you didn’t know better, you might have thought someone had simply ground a pencil eraser into my right cheek, albeit with crushing force. The next morning I had a giant, hard black bruise the size of a nickel with that eraser-sized hole smack dab in the middle. My right eye, while not black, had dark circles under it. I looked like a freak.

  As I sat there in the room that night, I wrapped myself in my dad’s college blanket. I stared straight ahead into the full-length mirror mounted on the wall. I held my hand to my cheek. My whole head was throbbing and I was all alone. I didn’t cry. Not that I am opposed to crying—I cry a lot, for the record. I just sat there and thought to myself, “Wow, this is not what I expected living in New York would be like.” It was an “aha” moment of epic proportions.

  Later the next day, I went to the drugstore and stocked up on concealer. Concealer in a stick. Concealer in a bottle. Concealer in a tube. You name it, I bought it. I went home that night and practiced concealing my wound. It looked like a giant, oozing zit with a knot underneath. Which was better than it looking like a gunshot wound, I guess.

  I didn’t call my parents. If I had, they would have demanded I return home—that’s how they would have rescued me and I definitely did not want to be rescued. And besides a short-lived, scabby, bruised cheek and later a small vague scar, it simply wasn’t that big of a deal at the time. When Mom and Dad saw me later that summer, I concocted some tale about smog and pollution plugging my delicate pores. I turned my real-life, big-city horror story into a teenaged skirmish with a pimple.

  But that “aha moment” stayed with me. It didn’t change my desire to be in New York City or all I felt for the city. I had a resume to build, a city to explore, and an itch to scratch when it came to being on my own. But it was a pivotal instant for me, like at eighth-grade basketball tryouts when I realized not everyone would make the team, and I would probably be part of the “not everyone.” Over the next two decades, there would be more “aha moments”:

  Sometimes undeserving people will get promoted before you get promoted, and there is nothing you can do except silently seethe and be really snotty to them during staff meetings.

  Everyone can’t be invited to everything and sometimes you won’t be included. As someone with high social needs, that one really hurt. I don’t always want to go, but I always want to be invited.

  Guys who tell you that they could never be married to someone so complex and interesting don’t really love you . . . not at all. And you’re probably not that complex and interesting, but rather high maintenance and whiny.

  Barfing on the shoes of someone you like is hard to overlook, and no matter how hard you will him to call you, he won’t. Because you did puke on his brown suede bucks, after all.

  Try as you might, you can’t be friends with a woman who swears that her farm animals speak to her. I mean, come on.

  But I would have to say that the most compelling “aha moments” are when it comes to marriage. Ask any married couple, old or new, about an “aha moment” and they can reel them off quicker than they can recall their anniversary date. By “aha moment,” I mean your own personal gunshot moment where perhaps you hold your face—or some other wound—and say to yourself, “Wow, this isn’t what I thought it was going to be.” And that moment is a crossroads of sorts. You realize that it’s either going to be better than you thought, worse than you imagined, or most likely, just different than you ever dreamed. Like New York.

  It can be startling. Like when my sister-in-law, who grew up in Saudi Arabia, realized my brother’s incredible and deep repertoire of wit and observation was simply a constant riff on pop culture. He was ripping off music, books, television, and more, and she grew up in such a cultural vacuum that she thought it was all zany new content and that he was a riot. “I thought he was an original!” she said. “Are things different now that you know?” I asked. “In a way, but he’s quick and he’s funny and he still makes me laugh. And I love him. So I guess it doesn’t matter.”

  My girlfriend Julia realized that the whole package of managing her cute guy included her husband’s siblings, and that she would have to spend time with his family a lot of the time instead of her own. In fact, she had to miss a wonderful wedding party for her brother and his new wife because she had to entertain her hubby’s family for Easter. “The resentment I felt at having to miss my family gat
hering to host my sister-in-law was enormous. And this had less to do with dealing with his family than with realizing that, although I prefer to always get my way, that just wasn’t going to happen all the time anymore.” So true, friends, so true.

  There are some things that just don’t matter, like a tiny little scar that doesn’t really show anymore, because you’re still in it for the long haul even when you realize that the person you love doesn’t love the things you love—like sex, or your extended family. But what happens if your aha is of such a magnitude that you can’t look away?

  Like Brad, whose aha moment didn’t involve me, but his first fiancée. Brad moved to DC after getting his political science degree. In a weird twist of fate he actually got a job in his major—which is less common than you might think. In fact, his biology major sister became a basketball coach. Like the thousands of true believers who go to Washington to change the world, Brad reveled in his Republicanism. He helped elect a Republican president, traveled overseas with the U.S. State Department, and of course, searched like the rest of us for that special someone.