You're Married to Her?

by Ira Wood

  In the beginning I was spending about a hundred dollars a week on coke, not much more than a weekly restaurant tab or chain-smoking habit; an amount I could reasonably extract from my checking account. But coke made writing feel so good, so effortless, that I began to snort a bit for other unpleasant activities, like cleaning the bathroom, like figuring the taxes, like doing anything that was a pain in the ass to do. One hundred a week was suddenly three hundred a week and my personal savings were suddenly gone.

  I found a freelance job writing software content for a toy company that had made its mark selling leather hobby kits and plastic backyard pools, and some decades later a doll so wildly popular that at Christmas there were shortages causing parents to fight it out in the toy store aisles to get one. The heirs of the company then went hi-tech and developed what might have been the world’s slowest personal computer. I was called upon to write amusing content for educational word games and was paid to come up with funny word searches, quizzes and acrostics. I wasn’t writing literature but who cared? I was on coke! I was harnessed to a project, making good money. I was part of the silicon revolution, a tech writer with a well-known company and best of all allowed to work at home. Most days I wrote from early morning till late afternoon happily surrounded by a dictionary, a thesaurus, encyclopedias, children’s books, and legal pads, stacks of legal pads densely filled with puzzles and puns, until about four, when my eyes began to burn and my heart raced, when my hands shook and my temples ached, when the euphoria turned into anxiety and I had a secret to face. The money I was making simply did not exist. After eight months I had spent every dime I’d made on coke.

  I was as low as I had ever been in my life and pondering any number of desperate measures. Once, years before, at the encouragement of a friend who convinced me that a third glass of wine at dinner was a warning sign for the early onset of alcoholism, I attended a 12 step program and discovered a bizarre universe in which the people with the most messed up lives had the most status. While I sat in the back row, unacknowledged and alone, the guy who backed over his dog with a station wagon got a round of applause. The mother-of-three who became a prostitute had so many offers from men volunteering to be her sponsor that she took names and numbers on a napkin. It felt like a talent show for addicts. I thought I might return now that I had become as desperate as the other contestants but I convinced myself that I had my wife’s reputation to protect. She was a famous writer. I had already deceived her and drained my savings. What would be the consequences if I went public with my need for help, if people discovered she was married to a coke addict? We lived in a small town where your secrets are only as safe as where you’re parked: anywhere you go, anything you do, people are aware of it because they see your car. Proving the perfect logic of the syllogism once again, I took another long snort of cocaine and reasoned that I could not seek help because I needed to protect the person I was hurting most and therein stumbled upon the greatest rationalization known to man: blame the victim.

  This was a finding of far-reaching personal import, rivaling such formative developmental breakthroughs as discovering that playing with your genitals makes you feel really good, or that mixing mayonnaise and ketchup makes Russian dressing. Armed with this discovery, I could blame my wife for getting hooked on cocaine in the first place. Didn’t I want to write a great novel that would earn us lots of money? Didn’t I want her to stop working so hard and traveling so much to support us? Blaming the victim had real possibilities. Everything could be her fault. I suddenly had a worldview. It all made sense. I wasn’t personally responsible for anything. Nothing was my fault. For instance, there was a reason I wasn’t successful. Study after study showed that tall men had more reproductive success, made more in the marketplace, got promoted faster. But I am only five-feet-eight inches tall. And whose fault was that? My mother’s, of course! Why didn’t she marry a taller guy? The bitch! I had always been delusional but coke took it to another level.

  One night, however, the unthinkable happened. One night everything changed. It began as casually as any ordinary night. After a day of snorting coke and fruitlessly scribbling in my legal pad, I induced the requisite charm to convince my wife to go to bed with me. But as we began to kiss, as we left articles of clothing on pieces of furniture and made our way to bed, as we lay face to face, I realized that something horrible was happening: actually, not happening. With the awesome power of a spiritual conversion I understood the implications of taking this drug: the implications to my body, to my circulatory system, to my marriage, to my future. For the first time in my life, I could not get it up. I had coke dick, and, with the insight available to the catastrophic imagination jacked to a flaming paranoid frenzy, I had a vision of my future.

  I would never make love again. I would be a useless husband. I would be asked to leave. I would wander the streets a toothless, homeless vagabond, sleeping on subway grates, dying an unclaimed corpse under a highway bridge.

  At that moment, I looked deep into the eyes of my partner, who was stifling a yawn and checking the clock radio over my shoulder and asking me if I didn’t want to maybe try again later when I felt more like making love because she actually had things to do, and I understood that if I couldn’t control this addiction, couldn’t get a grip on my life, that my wife’s life, too, would be ruined. Would she ever again find love? Would she become bitter? Would she suffer the mockery of friends? Would she fill the house with stray cats in lieu of real emotional connection, start padding around in slippers and babbling as lonely people do, unable to continue her work, to fulfill her life’s mission?

  Was it really possible that coke could make you impotent? I made a pledge at that moment to give up cocaine. Cold turkey. Forever.

  And I did it, for her.

  THE ONE WHO DIES WITH THE MOST SEX WINS

  Every traveler has a ritual. I once knew a painter who worked as a visiting artist to support herself. Half the year she was on the road, put up by various colleges in grad student high-rise housing or bleak off-campus motels. She told me she never felt comfortable in new spaces until she rendered them in paint, and immediately upon arrival set up her easel to capture the afternoon shadow on a garish polyester bed spread or the dolor of an empty closet with three wire hangers. A musician friend travels with a bottle of bourbon and drinks away his homesickness. My wife unpacks her suitcase and fills the drawers, for a one-night or five-night stay. I never felt comfortable in a strange place until I had sex.

  We’d been offered the use of a fabulous house just outside Boston from Wednesday through the weekend. They kept a spare key above the lintel of the kitchen door. The owner was a friend of many years whom we’d known from the beginning of his skyrocketing career, from unknown literary novelist to Hollywood screenwriter and New York Times bestseller. In fact, he had said, he and his family would be leaving early Wednesday morning for a meeting in New York with the director of his next feature film. Three times the size of our own house on the Cape, it was one of those ornate Victorians in the Queen Anne style built for a family of ten, with projecting bay windows, a wrap-around porch, two round turrets, and a balcony with a view of the city skyline.

  It was a warm and humid afternoon infused with that buttery yellow light characteristic of early September in New England, our first day back in the city since late May. The master bedroom had arched Palladian windows dappled by a cluster of lush Norway Maples and a freestanding antique mirror that could easily be tilted for a view of the bed. Why wait till tonight, why not make love right now? It seemed to me the right thing to do, as simple and impulsive an act as chasing a ball into the street or grabbing the handle of a sizzling fry pan.

  My wife preferred love late in the day, after work; evening was usually best. For me it was always the earlier the better. In fact I like sex best in the morning, so we usually compromised, any time after noon. Indeed I thought about sex until we had it and until then my mind was clear for little else. For me there was a kind of anxiety attac
hed: if we hadn’t yet had sex how would I know that we’d ever have it again? No day was complete until we did. I could not think straight until we did. My body seemed to itch from the inside out and my writing, or I should say those hours consigned to writing, were suffused with a kind of wild and promiscuous imagery I was unable to harness on the page.

  It was nothing we would not have done at home. We put fresh sheets on the bed, we washed and burrowed under the covers. I brought my face to my wife’s warm magnificent breasts. She lifted my mouth to hers and it went fairly predictably after that. I believe I was beneath her, murmuring something endearing like “Oh, god I love this pussy!” when I saw the little boy at the door. He was wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap and holding a large plastic action toy. “Mommy,” he said. “There are people in your bed and they’re neked.”

  “Naked,” she said, correcting him, and after steering him into the hall, strode up to the bed. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  This was totally unfair. “You were leaving this morning for New York. Your husband told me. He said we could have the house.”

  “He said Thursday!”

  “He said Wednesday!” And if she had had the decency to turn her back I would have retrieved my date book to prove it. No matter. They didn’t speak to us again for eleven years.

  In a Village Voice article on male body builders, I read about the side effects of taking HCG and Clomid, female fertility drugs, to enhance muscular development. According to a former Mr. Universe, before his testicles shriveled to walnuts and he grew sizeable breasts, he was driven by insatiable sexual need. He had five girlfriends and one night he drove the entire length of Long Island in a preter-human frenzy to fuck every one. Likewise a one-time Mr. America on tour was so horny he used to bang soda machines, lifting them in a bear hug and stuffing his junk inside the coin return slot. I had never taken a hormone pill in my life but I lived with a similar sexual urgency. Relationships with most women my own age were wired for disappointment. Until I met my wife I had yet to find someone whose sexual desire, or at least her willingness, had peaked at the same time as my own.

  Maybe sex proved my worst fears false: I was not too hideous a creature to love. Or maybe fucking was just an ego rush, who knows? But sex was my singular accomplishment, my one positive definition of myself. If my friends were better educated, or had more books to their credit; if they were as buff as Greek warriors or born to privilege, at least I had sex every day. Sex was the calculus by which I measured my worth. Orgasm was a given, my partner’s and my own. But the real test was numbers. Six days out of seven was satisfactory. Five days, tolerable. For years I kept abreast of national statistics to make sure I stayed well above the national mean.

  We’d arrived at their summer cottage late in the afternoon. The location was a well kept secret from her fans; the directions near impossible to follow: somewhere halfway up a cliff overlooking the Atlantic. She was one of America’s favorite short story writers, of an older generation, an eminence among literary figures. Although I had brought along a galley of my new book—a comment from her would be invaluable—it was a coup simply to have been invited. Even an overnight visit secured you a moment in literary history, the kind you see in black and white photographs in the biographies of legendary writers.

  She and her husband showed us to our room, a back porch, actually, with large screen panels overlooking the white pine forest. They told us we’d have to excuse them, at their age they were used to a nap at this time of day. They’d see us in a few hours, at dinner. As the shadows gathered, the mosquitoes followed suit. A walk in the woods or on the path leading down to the cove was impossible in Maine at this time of day. The rest of the house, we were given to believe, was off-limits until this evening. So we unpacked the car. We read. I had not forgotten the embarrassing situation with our friend in Boston, but really, what was to stop us? For all I knew our hosts were making love at this moment. How often had we excused ourselves, telling our guests we were taking a little “nap”? We discussed it. We weighed the pros and cons. I begged. We kissed tentatively, listening for voices. We scuttled beneath the sheets. We peeled off our clothing with caution. We barely uttered a word. We were ready for each other in moments. I moved easily inside my wife, pressing my face into the pillow to stifle all sound.

  My wife heard it first and gasped, throwing me off, pulling the blanket up to cover herself. I turned to see the blur of a red plaid shirt brushing past the screen window. We dressed. We returned to our reading. We sat at opposite ends of the porch. Only when we heard voices in the house, running water, the radio, did we join them for drinks in the living room. Not a word was mentioned about it.

  That night we were woken by a thrashing under the floorboards of the porch accompanied by high pitched chirps and growling, and finally full-throated squeals. Whatever was under there was at war. Unable to fall asleep until dawn, we woke up to a hot sun on the corrugated roof and the overpowering smell of rotten eggs. “Quite a racket last night,” I said to the writer’s husband as I entered the kitchen for breakfast. “I think you might have skunks.”

  “Yup. Stinks pretty bad.” He was washing dishes and did not turn to face me. “I assumed it was you people.” Never did get a blurb from his wife.

  Maybe it was a purely chemical reaction, the dopamine rush, the squirt of pleasure-inducing chemicals into the reward system of the brain, the exquisite sense of well-being, the high. Attention activates it for actors. Power does it for politicians. Gambling, even for 80-year-olds wearing fanny-packs full of quarters who turn up in Atlantic City by the busload. A neuroscientist named Wolfram Schultz at Cambridge University performed an experiment on monkeys, held their heads in a vice and squirted apple juice in their mouths while scanning their brains. Every time they got the apple juice their dopamine neurons exploded in pyrotechnic displays of white-hot pleasure. But when he withheld the juice the monkeys freaked, became disoriented, made loud screeching cries for help, tore at their restraints, beat their fists in despair. I could relate. Without the promise of sex, I was a monkey with a jones for apple juice.

  I could make the case that our society was a victim of the same compulsion. What sold cars, beer, clothing? Is pornography not a thirteen-billion-dollar industry? If the entire society was consumed with sex, and I was having more sex than anyone in my age group, did it not follow that I was the most successful person I knew?

  I laughed at guys who drove hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar Mercedes. I viewed fitness fetishists as lumpy bags of rock. Mansions, advanced degrees, academic prizes, were as foolish a way to prove oneself as a trophy room full of rhinoceros heads. Were any of these outward signs of success connected to the life force itself? Of course not. It was obvious to me that the one who dies with the most sex wins.

  But this was my contest, my rules, and it had to be the right sex, faithful sex, monogamous partner sex. That was the key. I wasn’t competing with teen movie actors or porn stars or insecure jocks like Wilt Chamberlain whose boast that he had slept with 20,000 different women was so pitifully obvious that the very need for novelty put his virility in doubt. What did it prove? A sex offender in prison can masturbate twenty times a day. Who couldn’t get off with a different partner every night?

  She was a world famous memoirist, a flamboyant hostess who served champagne with the venison stew. The first flakes had begun stirring in mid-morning, hours before we arrived for lunch. As the meal lingered and daylight grew dim, we agreed to spend the night. It only made sense. The snow by now lay in drifts obscuring the barn door and the drive back to Cape Cod would take eight hours in the best of conditions. The one motel we had passed on the highway looked like the set of a chainsaw massacre film and the better hotels were booked with skiers. When my wife and I discussed our options, I assured her I had no intention of having sex tonight, not in this, not in anyone else’s house ever again.

  After a light dinner we gathered in front of the fire for desert. The conversation was
good and we talked about living in old farmhouses, well drilling, eccentric neighbors, gardens, small town politics as they applied to Vermont versus Cape Cod, and the modest pleasures of country life in general for we were all four of us transplants from the city. She and her husband were generous people. I emerged from an impromptu tour of their root cellar with gifts, jars of bread and butter pickles and a six-pack of homemade beer. When the subject turned to bad backs, a problem common among serious gardeners, Marge mentioned that I gave her a deep muscle massage every morning and the woman gave her husband a look so cold I turned away from the poor man. She then asked if I wouldn’t show him what it was I did for Marge. Sure. I figured I’d give her a brief shoulder rub and be done with it. She spread a blanket in front of the fire and pulled her sweater off. “Is this a good position?” she asked, unhooking her bra.

  Her husband sat squarely in his rocking chair, knuckles white, feet pasted to the floor, breathing imperceptibly and staring into space as his wife purred with more pleasure than I could possibly be giving her. “Ooh, there.... Oh, good, that’s so good. Lower now,” she said, as she tugged her pants to the small of her back. “Oh, right there.”