by Rich Horton
He told her, “I think you should see a psychiatrist.”
I’m not the one who appears to be afraid, wrote his wife.
• • •
When Michael and his wife first met, and all through their engagement, they had sex every night. He had a drinking problem then. For years they dated and fucked, he often drunk, his future wife not. He was her first boyfriend. If they were apart for longer than several days, he wrote her letters, and in these letters, he professed his love and sketched crude drawings of the two of them in bed. This was before cell phones or email. She wrote him back. She wrote, If we weren’t together, I think some really bad thing would happen. The fact of us being together is keeping the world going. He kept her letters in a shoebox at the bottom of his closet, planning to pass them on to their future children. Michael did not know what happened to the letters he wrote his wife. There were no shoeboxes on the floor of his wife’s closet.
A month before the wedding, he stopped drinking. This made him a better person, he assumed, at which point his future wife stopped agreeing to have sex with him every night. This was, to Michael, confusing. He told a friend about it. “You mean, you stopped wanting to have sex once you stopped drinking?” “No. She stopped wanting to do it,” said Michael. “And she had stopped drinking?” “No, I did.” “I’ve never heard of that happening,” the friend admitted. So Michael and his soon-to-be wife had sex every few nights then it became once a week. “That girl is a keeper,” his mother told him, relieved that her son’s breath no longer smelled of liquor.
When sex dwindled to a biweekly event, Michael bought books for them to read, a stack for her and a stack for him. This was before anybody had heard of the Hojacki. His books dealt with how to pleasure one’s partner in bed. His wife asked him to stop touching her there if he tried a new idea. She was probably becoming a Hojacki during this time, she later told Michael, but she hadn’t known. “That’s ridiculous. The Hojacki didn’t even exist back then,” he told her. She didn’t want him to use his tongue on any part of her body. The books he got for her dealt with rekindling desire and included fun things to do with him in bed. He didn’t force her to read them, so she didn’t. Instead, at night, she read graphic novels meant for children, the books their son would go on to read, about boys who put on magic scarves and suddenly they could fly through clouds.
They married on Columbus Day. Michael’s mother, a schoolteacher, had thought this in poor taste, while Michael’s father said, winking, “Be prepared for wild seas and savages!” After the reception, Michael drove his wife to an upscale chain hotel in a suburb of Syracuse where his mother-in-law had reserved the nicest room, which was not that nice. Still, everything around him that night looked permanent and long-lasting: the heavy fabric seats of his car, the firm, indestructible hotel mattress, the flame-retardant bedspread. He removed his wife’s wedding dress and folded it into a neat pile of organza or whatever it was, and he dressed her in a pale silk negligée. He was seeing things he had never seen before. He saw the connections between things. He saw that his wife’s body and his body were connected by permanent threads of light. He was able to touch that light, those threads!
In the years following their wedding they traveled a lot. They took a cruise ship across the Atlantic. They drove through the vast Midwestern states until they reached the Rockies. They huddled in some mountain pass in Italy at the beginning of an early snowstorm, the scenic vista gone, replaced by a cold, impersonal white. They tired of traveling, so they had children. Then came the heavy satisfaction of watching one’s child fall asleep, the hushed conversations on the couch once the children were sleeping, and the closeness that comes from creating a human being together. Michael and his wife began to know each other deeply, and he was patient and understanding, and it was only once the kids started school that he expected sex to return to a greater frequency, and he expected it to also become more profound. This did not happen. “I was becoming a Hojacki then, too,” his wife later claimed. “No, you weren’t,” he insisted. He put the kids to sleep on certain evenings so his wife would stop acting harried and resentful. This was an idea from one of his books. Michael took charge of everything those nights, the food, cleanup, bathing, hugs, kisses, the kissing of each stuffed animal belonging to his daughter, kissing the stuffed monkey, kissing the stuffed turtle, plus the finding of his son’s escaped chameleon, while his wife took an evening swim aerobics class at the Y. He expected sex on those evenings in return. His wife claimed she was worn out from the swimming. “Right,” he said, leading her upstairs. In bed, he rubbed the bony protrusions of her hips and the area around her tailbone, which had become mottled. Having sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with you is not ideal sex, but it is at least something. When positioned behind her, holding on to her stomach with his left hand and gripping her right breast with his other hand, he felt so much love for her. He wrote her a new love letter. Once he wrote on his chest using a permanent blue marker: Love me!
Her lack of enthusiasm was noted.
“Do you not want me anymore? Is it because I gained some weight?” he asked. “I can lose the weight.”
“I want you now but in a different way,” she said.
“That way doesn’t count,” he said.
His wife printed out forum posts for him to read. Her favorite posts read like fairy tales, such as a Hojacki woman who claimed her partner had given up all expectations and intercourse, and in return discovered a new and satisfying closeness, a love that expanded beyond our current rigid definitions of love. How Michael hated those forums! “These people can write anything. They can make shit up. They are making shit up. You know that, right?” he told his wife. He refused to read any more forum posts. “I’m changing,” she insisted. Around her was an aura of achiness and complaint and anticipation. He said, “You need to make it stop. This is not even a real marriage right now. I don’t know what the fuck to call it.” He was scared that she didn’t want it to stop. Certain Hojacki symptoms—the shadowy eyes, the darkened eyelids, the hollowness of her throat—suited his wife, adding a delicateness to her features.
• • •
The night before his wife stopped talking, she had brought him out to the deck and stood beside him, looking into their darkened yard. Even in the dark, Michael could see the lawn was a mess and in need of mowing. They had a push-mower that smashed the grass and clover instead of cutting anything down, no matter how often he had the blades sharpened. The mower had been his wife’s idea. She said they would be helping to save the world.
She had not made dinner that night, though dinner was her responsibility. The kids ate bowls of chocolate cereal shaped like rabbits; Michael did not like cereal, so he didn’t eat. He turned toward his wife on the deck. “There is an expectation that you cook the meals,” he said. His wife replied, “I don’t think you understand what’s happening to me. One thing you don’t understand is I want to change.” A certain stillness surrounded her, a thickening of the air. He moved to stand in front of her. Otherwise she wouldn’t have looked at him. “What if I don’t want you to change?” he asked. Even though he stood right in front of her, she acted like it was difficult to lift her eyes in his direction. Her hair was in her eyes. She no longer bothered to push her hair away. “I’m going to become better than I was. Or truer,” she said. She used to pull back her hair. “Do you understanding what you’ll be giving up?” Michael asked. “I won’t give anything up,” she said. “Hojackis aren’t mothers,” he said. “Says who?” she asked. “The newspapers. The video feeds. Come on, they aren’t wives either,” he said. “Well, then, let’s rewrite the definition of a wife,” she said. “You can’t do that,” he said. “Yes, I can,” she said. He used to be able to study and adore her ears. He would touch the soft flesh of her earlobe and touch its three closed holes left behind from previous piercings. “You’re going to become a fucking monster,” he said. “Don’t use that word. It makes you sound ignorant,” she said.
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br /> She began writing her notes the next day. Michael said, “No way. You talk or we don’t communicate at all.” She left notes for him on the bathroom mirror, twenty-five hastily written I love yous. He crushed the notes then he took away her pen as well as her Post-its. “Talk to me,” he said, quietly and calmly. She drove to Target and bought more sticky notes. She claimed her mouth had been sewn shut. “It’s not sewn shut,” he said. He held her head with one hand and pried her lips apart using his other hand. This was difficult to do because she had tensed her jaw muscles so tightly. He ended up hurting her. “I’m sorry,” he said, offering her a baggie of ice wrapped in a washcloth. After that, she only opened her mouth enough to slip in a straw through which she sipped a high-calorie chocolate-flavored liquid. The straw was narrow. It took her a long time to finish a can. Other days she used a nutrition patch. She used to sleep curled up in her underwear. Some days, she used to sleep curled up and facing Michael. “There is a difference between can’t and won’t,” he told her on numerous occasions when he began to remove his pants and she backed away from him. He could not imagine his father in this situation, or his grandfather, or any of his married uncles. His father would have told his mother to knock it off and taken her by force.
This is love too, she wrote, pointing to where she was standing, fully clothed on the other side of the room. He remembered how carefully she used to dress in the morning. He used to lie in bed and watch her dress. She used to shake the creases from each piece of clothing before pulling it on. She had worked as an office manager at a design firm until they fired her.
Her name on the forums was Mentomyll. Her avatar was a cartoon beast with green eyes and matching hair. If he could touch his wife in a certain and familiar way, he believed he could bring her back. Coercion, his wife wrote on a Post-it after a different night when he had almost gotten what he wanted but not quite. “You’re making me sound like a creep. Actually, it’s marriage. It’s love,” Michael insisted. Though that word she used was such a vile one, heavy and criminal. It was a hard word to get rid of. Once, when they were dating, he drove her to a lake, and in the soft grass beside the lake, his arm wrapped protectively around her, she fell asleep.
• • •
That fall was ugly and unnecessary and windy. The kitchen calendar, were it still hanging on the wall, would have featured that month a cat in a bonnet looking out on them with ridicule and disappointment. The wind blew in every direction all at once, and Michael started walking funny, like he had a slight limp. Glossy campaign signs sprouted in the kept lawns of the neighborhood and also in the front windows, as if the houses were shouting out opposing names. And all the pumpkins left on their front steps rotted, squirrel bites in the orange flesh, and the cheesecloth ghosts hanging from the maple trees started to smell like mold. Michael had difficulty looking into a woman’s face. The porn he had downloaded weeks before to his phone made him angry. It made him want to throw his phone.
“Why doesn’t Mommy talk anymore?” his daughter asked in the checkout line of Trader Joe’s. Michael had discovered recently, underneath his daughter’s pillow, a hoard of his wife’s sticky notes, each one carefully smoothed and made precious, the stack preserved in a Ziploc baggie. She must have pulled the notes out of the recycling bin. He tried to meet the eye of the store cashier, a college girl who wore her hair pulled into an unbalanced braid. The cashier wouldn’t look at him. She must have known he wasn’t getting any at home. The entire world was fucking, he knew. In every movie, there were couples in pillowy soft beds, fucking. He made his wife rewatch those scenes with him, and when he turned the movie off, he listened to the neighbors in the next house over moaning while their bed creaked. The squirrels outside humped each other on the tops of the trees
He would be a different kind of husband in another life. One who woke early to cook a nourishing breakfast for the kids and his wife, who was not the wife he had currently but a woman who desired him, the woman he married. In this other life, he would be patient, and never raise his voice. He would, in hushed tones, praise everybody and everything.
Praise to the supermoon!
Praise to the bruise on the side of his wife’s leg!
Praise to the milk splashed against the dining room wall, and the foyer’s mildew, and the oily handprint on the window!
• • •
He made his wife get her hormones checked. “I know, we’ll get our hormones checked together,” he said. He wanted to make sure she did it. Her DHEA levels were low but still in the realm of normal.
• • •
George Kloburcher was to hold his next rally the following weekend at the western edge of the state. Michael had asked his wife if she wanted to go. Did you read the forum post I printed out? she wrote on a Post-it. He ended up streaming the event on their living room screen. His wife stayed in their study on the computer, printing out more forum posts.
The rally was held in a private and windowless airport hangar. The men and women who stood on the concrete floor had hopeful, needy faces. Some men hoisted children onto their shoulders, and the children cheered at inappropriate moments. “The governor is going to be a part of you, and you will be part of the governor,” shouted Kloburcher. The children cheered. “Do you really want Cheryl Mooney to be a part of you, and vice versa?” Again, the children cheered. The crowd shouted obscenities. Michael heard what sounded like his own voice in the crowd. His daughter wandered into the room and sat beside him on the couch.
“That man would like to be our governor,” Michael explained to his daughter. “You have to be eighteen to vote. I’m voting but I don’t know if your mom will. Voting is a right and everybody should exercise that right when they have it. For a long time, women couldn’t vote, but then they could vote starting a hundred years ago.” He didn’t usually talk so much. He was worried about his kids, who were growing up in an environment where radical change to a person was seen as acceptable or even desirable. He felt like there were a lot of things he must now teach them single-handedly, such as the value in stability of character, and how to say no thank you, and the importance of keeping your promises.
“I don’t want to vote,” his daughter said. “Well, you can’t, anyway,” said Michael. The girl clutched a dirty bear made out of alpaca fur. Every week, Michael had to blow-dry the bear’s fur to make it fluffy again. This was supposed to be his wife’s job. His daughter pushed her face into the dirty fur. “What’s happening?” she asked, her voice muffled because she was speaking into the belly of the stuffed animal. Michael put one of his hands on his daughter’s neck and the other hand he put on top of the bear.
Kloburcher said, “Who doesn’t want to be different, okay? Who doesn’t want to change a little? But we have to let it be known that certain ways of changing are not okay. They might be okay in Canada, or in Syria, or in Vermont, but not here. We are going to fight this shit! Whatever it is that thinks it’s okay to take the people we love and turn them into something we don’t understand—we are going to stop it.”
• • •
They found a therapist. Michael’s wife found her on a forum. Because Dr. Sabrina lived in Ohio, she conducted the sessions over Skype, meaning Michael and his wife could sit on the couch in their family room, Michael holding the portable screen, while Sabrina sat in her home office. The forty-minute therapy sessions were funded by the government and therefore free. This was the only reason Michael agreed to it. They had to sign a waiver allowing the NIH to publish articles about them at a later date. Dr. Sabrina promised pseudonyms would be used. Neither Michael nor his wife would get to choose the pseudonyms.
For our anniversary, I bought my own flowers, Michael’s wife wrote on her marker board. I bought them from Trader Joe’s.
“You bought yourself flowers,” repeated Sabrina. She sat very still in a swivel office chair. Behind her, pinned to corkboards on the wall, hung childish drawings of stick figures and monsters. “Michael, did you know your wife wanted flowers?”
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“This does not seem like our biggest problem here,” said Michael. “I have been celibate for months, okay?”
“You won’t buy your wife flowers if you aren’t having sex?” Sabrina asked.
Michael’s wife wrote, We need to redefine intimacy for our relationship. To me, now, physical intimacy means a conversation.
“Look, having sex is how people love each other. It’s beautiful, and it’s powerful, and there is nothing wrong with wanting it, especially wanting it with one’s wife. I just want to love you, okay?”
We need to redefine love too.
“Do you know what I actually need? I need my wife to take off her clothes in front of me with the lights on. I need my wife to want me or at least pretend to want me. I need sex with my wife because I love her and I am going insane. I need—”
Sabrina interrupted Michael. “We need oxygen. We want sex. Nobody has ever died, as far as I know, from a lack of intercourse.”
So what you’re saying is that you can only love me in one particular form. In one particular way? his wife wrote.
“What if I were the one who turned into something?”
I would still love you.
“What if I turned into a Smith-Smith right fucking now with those rancid fingernails—” Michael’s wife shrugged. “Do you even know how the Smith-Smith smell and what they eat?”
She pointed to herself. With her fingers, she jabbed at invisible points on her chest. Michael turned toward Sabrina. The therapist’s legs were crossed, her notebook open on her lap. “Shouldn’t you be writing some of this down?” he asked. Sabrina wrote something down. She called the two of them courageous. She told them that any problem worth solving cannot be solved within one session, but already they had made progress. “Do you know what I’ve learned about you so far? That you each are holding on to a different and equally acceptable definition of love. And you know what? Love is large enough for both of your definitions.” Before signing off, she gave them their first homework assignment: to hold a photograph from their wedding and recall several details from the day.
