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I told him I’d left the magazine two years before, that I was trying to work on a coming-of-age novel about my youth. What I didn’t say was that it never held my attention long enough for there to be progress. I kept the document up on my computer, but minimized, and I only turned to it every few weeks before feeling overwhelmed about what it was that I was trying to do with it. A book should convey your suffering; a book should speak to what is roiling within you. I thought maybe I could do this through a good young-adult novel, but YA novels were all fantastical things these days, with werewolves and sea creatures and half-bloods and hybrids. My story was small and dumb. Nothing even really happened in it.
[...] The waitress came to our table. Toby ordered a chicken Caesar salad with no cheese and no dressing.
“So like a piece of chicken and lettuce?” she asked.
“I guess so, yes.”
“Do you maybe have any diet lettuce for him?” Seth asked. The waitress looked confused and Seth laughed, which made her even more confused, so she gave up and walked away.
i like this running gag
When they first married, Rachel made sure that whenever she got home from work on Fridays, sometimes earlier and sometimes later, they would do the thing Toby had grown up doing: lighting the candles, blessing the wine and challah. By the time the kids were born, though, she was already on what she called her “trajectory,” and Fridays became the nights that Toby played a game of chicken with Rachel. She’d miraculously become available when the Rothbergs or the Leffers or the Hertzes invited them over for a Friday night dinner. But otherwise, she’d call and say that she “needed” to stay at work because she “needed” to get things done, knowing (she had to know) that she was being outright dishonest in her use of this word—that it was actually her resistance to spending time with her children and to some notion of a traditional role as a mother that made her want to work that much. Rachel knew how to work. She liked working. It made sense to her. It bent to her will and her sense of logic. Motherhood was too hard. The kids were not deferential to her like her employees. They didn’t brook her temper with the desperation and co-dependence that, say, Simone, her assistant, did. That was the big difference between them, Rachel. He didn’t see their children as a burden, Rachel. He didn’t see them as endless pits of need, Rachel. He liked them, Rachel.
[...] If he was honest, he didn’t even know that Rachel would ever date again, so disgusted was she by the confines of marriage, so ruined had she been by the compromises of another person trying to have an equal say or even just an opinion in her life.
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He wondered if he sounded like this from his parallax view. He wondered if there was a version of this story in which he was the villain. He wondered if Rachel was sitting in some ashram somewhere telling anyone who would listen what a victim she was. A victim. Yes, of a husband who put his own career aside and raised the children and gave them consistency—the children they’d both wanted! A husband who rooted for her at her every milestone of success. What could she possibly say about him? That he was “unambitious”? He was as ambitious as he was allowed to be. There isn’t room in one marriage for two people who are hogging all the oxygen. One of them has to answer the phone when the school calls. One of them has to know where the vaccine record is. One of them has to do the fucking dishes. It was entirely possible that the only version of a story like this you ever heard was from the aggrieved party, the one who made the sacrifices and thought that the sacrifice gave you one up on your spouse, but it didn’t. It only made the spouse feel more entitled to take. Trust me, Tess’s husband was somewhere right now, one woman sitting on his face while another sucked him off, and he was certainly not talking about the ways Tess let him down.
or they both feel like the aggrieved party in some way
Keisha was a twenty-seven-year-old occupational therapist who strutted into the Murray Hill bar where they were meeting, ordered two Kamikazes, despite him saying, “Actually, no, I’m not really into—” and so drank both herself, then yelped a “Whoo!” and later, after four more drinks, wrapped her arm around his neck and a leg around his waist and told him to take her home. He couldn’t. “Come on, what’s wrong with this?” The this, she made clear, looking down, was her body on his, and he ached so badly for her but how could he? How could he take advantage of this young girl who was positively soaked in alcohol? He went home and masturbated, but he couldn’t come.
lol
[...] The magazine used to send me on trips to nice hotels in foreign cities that I was probably never going to visit on my own, and once, in London, I stayed two extra days just because I couldn’t bear to get back on a plane after my two-hour interview. I changed my ticket (never once did I book the trip for longer, I merely extended the stay) so that I could stay two days extra. My daughter was eight months old at the time. But it wasn’t just that I was tired, and it wasn’t just that it was unreasonable to ask me to go to Europe from New York for two days. It was because I felt like the hotel, the city, the aloneness, these were times where I could feel my skin again; I could feel my body again. I existed again without context—without a stroller, without a man holding my hand. I wouldn’t wear my ring on these trips. It wasn’t because I wanted to fuck around. It was because when I was on airplanes my fingers got cold and skinny and so my ring would drop off and I couldn’t take the panic of worrying that I’d lost it. But also maybe it was the other thing, the context thing, I don’t know. Put it this way: You can feel your body for the first time in a long time, you can feel your skin, then suddenly you can also feel this ring around your finger and the weight of it is suddenly unbearable.
Glenn was not really a predator. It was more like he was powerless against the attention I, a young person, was giving him. The first time I met him, he was standing in a doorway, backlit, holding a magazine proof that I had to read for an edit test. Something happened in that innocent exchange—the simple placing down of a piece of paper on my desk with a kind word. Something electric, something addicting. I sought him out at every turn. I asked for help where I didn’t need it. I swiveled around his desk, obvious to everyone around me, unable to stop myself. He walked past me and my breath caught. He was not that handsome or interesting. I’m telling you, it made no sense.
But then, too, I could feel my body. I could feel it opening to him, and I saw just how it all worked: evolution, attraction, procreative imperatives. I saw for the first time that I was powerless to these forces. I’d had crushes—I’d even been in love. But nothing as, I don’t know, full-body as this. This was why people wrote poetry. This was why all the songs were about love. I get it now, I thought. I get it. One night, in an elevator, he told me he found me distracting. I told him we should talk about it over dinner. He called his wife in front of me from a pay phone to say he was stuck in the city for a few hours. And that was that.
When Glenn was in my bed, I would light up a cigarette and blow it toward him so that he would smell like cigarettes when he got home, hoping it would tip off his wife and move some sort of needle. I’d spend my days imagining that something happened to her or them—usually it was a tragedy, not just a divorce—that would necessitate me moving into his house and taking care of his kids. I thought of that time now, how I imagined wanting someone else’s life instead of doing the work of imagining my own. God, what a fucking idiot I was. My dreams were so small. My desires were so basic and showed such a lack of imagination. In my life, I’d go to weddings where the bride wore a red dress. I’d meet people in open relationships. I’d wonder why I was so unoriginal. I had been so creative in every other aspect of my life; how I’d turned out so conventional and so very establishment was bewildering.
While I was on the story—I was at the men’s magazine by now— we’d have lunch, and I’d try to squeeze information out of him, and he wouldn’t give me any, but he remained steady and cheerful, never annoyed. What a strange thing, a lack of darkness. What a strange thing, for your job to not stress you out, for good things to make you happy and bad things to make you sad. Simplicity is a cool shower after a hot bath. My emotions never tracked quite so logically. Maybe that was what I was drawn to in the first place with him, that his peacefulness was a necessary correction for me. It did not occur to me how I would have to spend my life explaining my darkness and dissatisfaction to someone who didn’t even understand the concept of it.
We had a great sex life, and then we had a regular one, and then (as in now) we were in the wilderness. We had sex once a week, then not once a week, then every other week, but then twice in that next week so it must be okay, right? Here is the problem: You can only desire something you don’t have—that’s how desire works. And we had each other. Resolutely. Neither of us with a stray glance at another. After Adam and I were married, when I’d go out into the world, I’d see that the men I found myself drawn to were almost replicas of Adam, just like that guy in Lisbon. I wanted nothing different. I just missed the longing. We are not supposed to want the longing, but there it is. So what do you do with that? Forget it, there’s no use talking about this. Talking about this doesn’t make it better.
ah!!!!