365 Nights Page 20
He was smitten by this girl—a friend of a friend—who was sweet and smart and pretty. They began dating, and as things do, they got serious in a hurry. Soon they were living together then, shortly thereafter, engaged. And like so many of us, he got caught up in the idea of something. He was young, living in the nation’s capital, working with and for powerful people. There were receptions on the Hill, happy hours at the Fox and Hound or the Hawk and Dove, and late nights at the Spy Club. He was having the time of his life. Except that he never stopped to think about what he was doing with his life.
Brad and his fiancée were very different. He was a Midwestern conservative and she was a West Coast liberal. He was raised an Episcopalian; she wanted to raise their children Jewish. His brother was an electrical engineer; her brother was a rock star— literally. As the plans for the wedding were laid out and the details coming together, Brad began having doubts about their long-term compatibility, and his decision to marry her. Nagging doubts gave way to full-fledged panic. Just cold feet, everyone has cold feet, he reassured himself. “This feeling is normal,” he pleaded with himself. “It happens to everyone—right?”
One day he asked a mentor he frequently lunched with—how did you know your husband was the one? “I just did,” she said. Aha. And that’s when he knew that his fiancée wasn’t. But how does one undo the kind of thing he’d done? How does one who can’t return cold soup to the kitchen, or demand a nonsmoking hotel room, tell a wonderful woman and her great family that he can’t go through with it? How do you let people who are sending you wedding gifts and making flight arrangements know that the gifts will have to be returned and travel plans canceled? How do you crush someone you truly care for? Well, you do it because you realize that it won’t be better a year from now, or when you have kids, or after you’ve been married ten years.
People are always intrigued that Brad was engaged before, and they want to know the salacious details—don’t all aborted weddings make a good story? Brad has always firmly declined to elaborate. “Why don’t you want to talk about it?” I’ve asked him, as I was as guilty a rubbernecker as the next person. “Why?” he’d replied. “Why would you want to hear a story about how much I hurt someone? Why would you find fun or interest in that? I certainly didn’t.” Aha. Why indeed.
So there are some aha moments that demand action and there are some that demand silent respect. My aha moment when it comes to marriage? Oh, where to begin, friends, where to begin? Don’t we all have a list of aha’s lodged, just for kicks, somewhere in our memories next to the lovely photos of our wedding day?
But the most important aha moment from this marital experiment is this: Sometimes you gotta do it when you just don’t want to. Just like you have to spend holidays with your in-laws, or a Sunday afternoon cheering on a team you could care less about. And that you need to do it with a happy heart . . . or as happy a heart as you can conjure up at the moment.
Because you know when you go to the dentist and you’re sitting in the chair and you have that silly little bib pinned on you and the chronically cheerful hygienist with freaky long eyelashes (I know this because what other health practitioner gets that close to your face) asks you weird questions like if your health history has changed at all over the past year—as if that UTI last month can really impact your plaque buildup? And you’re all tensed up before the hygienist even gets near your teeth with that weirdly long electronic plaque scraper that sounds like it will rupture your eardrums?
Well, that’s the feeling I get these days when I have sex every day with Brad.
Right now, I so loathe the idea of having sex that I’m tense before I even change into my pajamas. It’s by no means his fault, but we’re nearing the end of this agreement, and all I really want to do is just crawl under the covers for once and go to sleep. But I can’t, so I try, I really do. I think happy thoughts and sing happy songs in my head, but the fact remains: I am tired of doing it!
It seems that in the final stretch of sex there is this inverse correlation. The more unbearable it becomes for me, the more wonderful it becomes for Brad. Seriously, minus his pass earlier this month, on some days he couldn’t be randier. I, on the other hand, am dragging myself to bed, sighing heavily, and falling dramatically into the pillows. “Let’s get on with it,” I mutter. And here he comes, bounding onto the bed, teeth freshly brushed and wearing a big grin—like your favorite golden retriever. How could we, nearing the end of our sex-every-day arrangement, have such incredibly different feelings about this?
“Could you stop grimacing?” Brad asked me one night.
“I’m not grimacing,” I said between clenched teeth.
“Yes, you are. Could you pretend you’re enjoying it?”
“How ’bout you just close your eyes,” I suggested. He sighed huffily and did just that.
So this idea of us bonding, growing closer together, and connecting in new and more meaningful ways? Well, on that special evening in May all I could say to that was: “Whatever.”
Because even on a bad day (and all told, there really haven’t been that many), I can’t even get credit. I can’t go into a store and dramatically throw my hand to my brow and exclaim, “Wait on me this instant, can’t you see I’m on the verge of collapse? I’ve been having sex with my husband every day for nearly a year !”
I can’t go into work and say to a persnickety client, “Well, I’m sorry you’re not happy with this program, but I had the worst evening ever, because I had to have sex for the two hundred and fifty-eighth time this year! So stop your yammering, and fetch me a can of Diet Coke!”
You can’t contribute this major nugget of information to your cocktail party conversations: “Yes, well, while you all were skiing in Vail this winter break, I was having sex every day with Brad. But enough of that, how was the base this year?”
You can’t confide in your mother, “I’m sorry your ninety-year -old mother is so unbearably cranky. But if you really want to know what’s unbearable, try having sex with your husband for ten straight months.”
People cannot know my angst, not that they would feel much sympathy for me. It was my stupid idea, after all, to have this unending sex with my husband. Nope, daily sex with your spouse is a hidden cross to bear. Which is a new thing for me, really. All the burdens I usually bear are pretty obvious and hard to hide. Like managing my weight. Or rather mismanaging my weight. Or drinking too much at a cocktail party—now that’s hard to camouflage. Even when I beg Brad to help me. “I told you to take me home instantly if I was overserved at the Barneses’ cocktail party. What happened?”
“Sweetie, you were having such a good time doing your impersonation of your mother that I hated to spoil the fun.”
“Well, next time, please feel free to spoil my fun and save some perfectly nice people from the need to avoid me the next time they see me at the dry cleaners.”
So it was hard to complain about having sex with Brad. And in reality I shouldn’t complain at all. Yes, I made my bed, and now I must get laid in it.
So whenever I’m down in the dumps or stressed out—like I was nearly this entire month of May—I embark on one of my favorite stress relievers. I buy lipstick. Chanel lipstick. It always, always makes me feel better. I head to the mall and go straight to the Chanel counter, assessing all the well-coifed Chanel women in their chic black Chanel smocks. I don’t need them, though, I have my Chanel therapy down to a science. I step up to the counter and look at all those gorgeous perfectly arranged tubes on the cosmetics counter and I immediately feel calm and centered. I am in wonder over the brilliant geniuses who created these colors and carefully numbered and named them. I admire the sleek, high-gloss black tube with the gold band that is the exact width of Brad’s wedding ring. I roll the tubes around in my hand and I conjure up images of my life, Chanel-style—sleek, sophisticated, and mysterious (in other words, the polar opposite of my slobby, very average sex-every-day real life). I channel Coco herself as I try on shade after shade of
reds, pinks, and corals, cocking my head from side to side in the mirror to see the brilliant colors from all angles. And I try to convince myself that while Coco and I look nothing alike, we do have similar coloring, and that her signature red would look just as timeless and chic on me (or maybe not). Coco said, “A girl must be two things—classy and fabulous,” and after I leave the Chanel counter, I feel both for a bit. No. 17: Allure. No. 18: Vamp. Red No. 5. No. 81: Marilyn. No. 79: Rose Paradise. To name a few of my favorites. Ah, they sound so lovely, don’t they?
Coco is to me a hero of sorts—incredibly fashion forward in her stubborn refusal to bow to fashion trends (à la how the Little Black Dress was born). She lied about her age, by ten years, if you can believe it. She dabbled in art, fashion, and cosmetics and generally did whatever she wanted, which was quite scandalous at the time. And she had those fabulous gi-normous sunglasses that I just love.
It’s hard to feel classy and fabulous when you’re forty and fatigued, but I did like to fantasize about what my life could be like if all I needed was an LBD, a tube of No. 18: Vamp, and some cab fare outta this life. Instead, I sighed, put on my sunglasses, pursed my Chanel lipstick-drenched mouth, tried to remember where I’d parked my big honkin’ SUV, and drove home to have sex with my husband.
JUNE
Wedding Season
It was June twenty-fourth, and the last night of a family vacation at the beach. Only ten more days and our sex-every-day agreement would officially conclude. I was in bed, reading. Brad came to our room. I sighed, put down my book, and got ready, which really meant I just continued lying there.
Then I realized I had a wedgie, so I worked through that.
“Wow, that was really romantic, sweetie. I’m really attracted to you right now.”
I looked at him with utter disbelief. “I’m sorry?”
“Geez, do you think you could try a little bit more?” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He sighed. “Could you pretend you’re interested in this? I mean, could you woo me a bit?”
Try? Woo? What does he think I’ve been doing the last eleven months of my life? Intimacy every day is trying: It requires stamina, patience, personal grooming, and a work ethic I did not know I possessed. At least he never discovered that three-inch hair behind my knee that my razor has missed— the romance would be dead for sure. But 354 days of offering intimacy and all of a sudden he wants romance? I burst out laughing. I was giggling so hard that I had to turn away. But he was serious. I knew this because he said, “Honey, I’m serious.”
I laughed harder. I mean, the irony of it all. I curled up into a ball, held my stomach, and screamed with laughter. After a minute, Brad cracked a smile.
“Are you telling me that after eleven months and twenty days of offering you no-strings-attached sex every day that you want something more?”
“I don’t want more, I want better.” Well, wasn’t that dramatic.
“Excuse me, but could you clarify? What is better than having sex every day with your wife for an entire year?”
“Well, does it really count if you’re just lying there, not that into it?”
Wait a darn minute, buster. We reviewed all this at the beginning of the agreement, and there was no discussion that “just lying there” was not in the spirit of The Gift. Besides, before this arrangement, there were plenty of times I was just “lying there” and I would venture to say that most married women across America have been just “lying there” for many, many years, perhaps decades. I would venture further to say that the term “just lying around” has its roots in the marital bed. In fact, I’m surprised it’s not a piece of common marital advice. “When all else fails, just lie there.”
Nevertheless, I tried harder. While wooing was out of the question, I did try to have an eventful little roll in which I was an active participant. It wasn’t anything great, but it certainly wasn’t the worst. Good enough would have to be good enough on this 354th day with my husband.
If marital advice was in scant supply when our mothers were starting out, it’s certainly everywhere now. Talk shows, book-stores, girlfriends—everybody has an opinion on how to make a marriage work. But people are still getting divorced—is the advice lost on some of us, or is it just not enough?
Getting married is big business. Today, 2.4 million couples get married every year in the United States and it has become a $72 billion industry, according to www.theknot.com. Of course, June is the most popular month for getting married, and sure enough, this year rightly shouldn’t have passed without receiving yet another gilded invitation. I have been to my share of weddings, starting way back in college. In fact, I have been a bridesmaid in ten weddings, not counting my friend Marcie’s second and third trips to the altar. For a while there, I was indeed the perpetual bridesmaid.
Brad and I got engaged in the mountains. The elevated backdrop made up for the proposal—which was borderline pitiful. For some reason, all of Brad’s experience in high school drama failed him and he simply froze. We were at a quaint bed-and-breakfast and we both knew it was coming (please, don’t most women know when the proposal is coming?), but he literally couldn’t get out the words. I guess it’s sweet and a bit romantic when the love of your life says, “Uh, so you wanna get married?” while blushing a bright crimson color. No words about how this last year has been the most wonderful one of his life. No sentiments about our incredible future together. No mention of his dreams to have a family with me. No love notions about how incredibly fantastic and special I am. Just “Uh, so you wanna get married?” Well, the man has always been a straight shooter and indeed I did want to get married. We drank an entire bottle of champagne and I called my mother, who squealed with delight and set the entire wedding machine in motion that very second.
This year, another wedding announcement and invitation made their way through the family. While I vaguely thought that the whole of my generation had gotten married, in came the announcement that my first cousin was going to get hitched.
I adore my first cousin—she’s young, smart, and vibrant and will make her very nice groom a terrific wife. My mom and I went to her wedding with my kids, and made a short weekend out of it. My brother and dad had long-standing plans and couldn’t attend the wedding, so I gave Brad a pass on having to go, which he grabbed like a starving cat. It’s funny—women love weddings and men just don’t. In fact, my dad has been known to conveniently skip the actual wedding and strategically show up at the reception. When people comment on the ceremony, he nods along knowingly. “I know! Wasn’t the music wonderful?” he chimes in as he heads to the buffet table. For men, weddings are boring unless it’s a family member or best friend and even then the wedding is still boring, but there is an open bar to offset the serious stuff.
My cousin walked down the aisle, and I cried. I cry even if I’m sitting on the groom’s side in the way back and I don’t know the bride from Eve. I cry at how beautiful she looks. Even if she doesn’t look that beautiful (and let’s face it, some don’t), she probably looks as good as she’ll ever look. And I assume that she’ll never look that wonderful again, so I cry a little tear of regret on her behalf. I cry as the music swells and the soloist crescendos and I think that this will be the last time this woman will ever, ever be the center of attention, and that the rest of her life will be spent negotiating happiness with another person. And I cry another little tear of regret on her behalf. (I hope someone did for me.) Then I cry at the sight of her dad walking her down the aisle and the overwhelming mix of emotions he must have. And I hope that the groom exceeds all that her dad wishes for her and I cry another tear, of regret, because I know somewhere along the way someone is going to be disappointed. And I cry, because as beautiful as she looks and as happy as she appears, she has no idea what’s ahead. If she did, she might be crying along with me.
Instead, my cousin looked marvelously happy. After the ceremony, we walked from the church to the reception at a nearby muse
um. At that point, my cousin tucked a hot pink Gerbera daisy into her pretty chignon, and danced the night away in her bare feet. As my mother wrangled my children out onto the dance floor, I mused about just how long these sweet newlyweds would enjoy each other. I hoped it would be for a long, long time.
We all bring our “stuff” to marriage, and growing up in the seventies and eighties was not without its challenges. The feminist movement was gaining momentum and many of my childhood notions of marriage and relationships were changing at breakneck speed. Barbie and Cinderella were still around, but Barbie was a doctor now, and Cinderella could march on Washington. Women were pursuing careers dressed in ugly imitations of men’s business attire—dark, masculine suits and floppy bow scarves.
I was encouraged to be a successful businessperson, and achieve high marks in every part of my life academically (which I did, on occasion). And while it was expected that I would marry—and marry well, whatever the heck that meant—I was not offered such stewardship in that area.
My father issued me one rule: If I got married before I turned twenty-seven, he would not pay for the wedding. It was a gift, really. First of all, I felt off the hook in a way. I graduated from college, moved to New York, and never gave a thought to having a boyfriend or finding one. I did not have a boyfriend or find one in college or in New York, but I did have a ball and never felt any pressure to seriously date, much less settle down. A regular date now and then would have been nice, but overall I was able to experience a bit of independence and a life on my own. That was a good thing. And while my parents were secretly terrified that I would meet someone in New York and stay there forever, perhaps they knew that I needed a bit of seasoning before I could make a mature decision about whom to marry.