Playing House

by Lauren Slater

  What happens when the partner we pick gets too fat, or too thin, or too . . . chinless or . . . something? I felt I was falling out of love, or out of attraction. I did not want to have sex with this man. That night we did have sex and it was creepy, the foreign face floating above mine, the moon peeping in our window. I wanted, more than anything, to feel the click of connection, but it wasn’t there. I kept saying to myself, “This is Benjamin, Benjamin, Benjamin,” but it seemed he’d shaved more than his beard; he’d shaved his self. Without his beard, his voice sounded different to me, higher and more hollow, as though he were not quite real, as though a motor ticked inside him. It was a subtle shift. His voice sounded different to me the same way a piano sounds different when it’s slightly out of tune. You keep pressing the note you know, and it keeps coming back at you all the more warped because it has within it the sound of something familiar, but far away. Later that night, when Benjamin was asleep, I got up and pulled out our wedding album. Now there was the man I’d married.

  Understand, I wanted to learn to love beardless Benjamin. In fact, I wanted to learn to love and be desirous of my husband in whatever guise he came in. To that end I decided what I needed to do was desensitize myself to his new face, force it into neutrality, whereupon, perhaps, I could learn to love it. I had a whole desperate theory worked out. It went like this: He had shocked me by shaving his beard and not telling me. I now associated his shaven face with shock, discomfort, even fear, and because of these associated emotions, I was bound to think he was ugly. Therefore, I needed to look at him beardless as much as possible. I needed to stare at his face, feel his face, run my fingers over his chinny chin chinlessness, come to recognize the blades of bones that had been hidden beneath his hair. I did this. Over dinner, in bed, I would lay the flat of my hand against him; I would touch him like a blind person, searching for clues, for the familiar . . . oh, it’s you! I went so far as to study his new face beneath a magnifying glass, when he was sleeping, of course, his pores huge, stalks of stubble struggling up through the pocked skin. Oh dear. He woke up. “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Studying you,” I said.

  “You hate the way I look without a beard,” he said. “I know.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I’m not going to grow it back,” he said. “Not right now.”

  “I don’t think I can adjust,” I said. “If I got really, really fat, like, two hundred pounds, I think you would have the right to tell me you weren’t comfortable with that.” Even as I said this, I was not sure it was so true.

  “Maybe I would have that right,” he said. “But I wouldn’t exercise it. Besides, I like a little real estate on a woman.”

  I asked my friend C. about it. Her husband, V., was a carpenter, trim, muscular, dark. Then he took time off to be home with his kids and before long his stomach was lapping over his belt, and a few months after that, plain and simple, he was obese. “Are you still attracted to him?” I asked.

  “No, not really,” she said.

  “Does that bother you?” I asked.

  C. paused. We were sitting in her kitchen, sipping coffee. “You know,” she said, “we have two kids. I work full time. I’m tired at the end of the day. He’s tired too, more so because now he’s out of shape. We’ve stopped having sex. I get a lot more sleep. And if I had to choose between sex and sleep, I’d pick sleep.”

  I asked my friend D. She had once had a boyfriend who got nose cancer, and they had to take off his nose. He was lucky, in that that stopped the cancer, but now he was maimed and had to wear a prosthetic nose held on by a band.

  “What did you do?” I said.

  “We broke up,” she said.

  “Because he had no nose?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way,” she said. “The cancer illuminated a lot of things for us, ways in which we were not compatible.”

  “So it had nothing to do with the nose,” I said.

  “That’s what I like to tell myself,” she said, and then she touched her own nose, as though it might be growing.

  I’m quite sure that I could not love a beautiful dummy, a stocky blond jock who watched football while tossing peanuts in his mouth. However, during the beardless crisis, I learned that I could not feel eros towards a man I found odd looking. And the old saying “To know him is to love him” just holds no water for me. Obviously, I knew my husband when he shaved off his beard or let it grow too long, and, sad to say, whatever inner beauty he had was temporarily blocked by his surface sheen, at least when it came to sex. Lunch, dinner, chess, hanging out, talking, none of that was affected, but sex is about bodies, it is about skin, surface touching surface; sex is superficial, and, as it turns out, the superficial is pretty profound.

  After my husband went baby-faced, I started doing some research into evolutionary psychology, specifically as it relates to sex. I spoke with anthropologists Helen Fisher and Elaine Hatfield, each of whom told me that beauty—our perception of it, that is—plays a crucial role in the survival of our species. According to these experts, we love/are attracted to beautiful people, those with symmetrical faces, proportioned bodies, and so on because these people are frequently the healthiest, and although we do not know it, we select our mates based on their ability to perpetuate our little packet of genes.

  This explanation comforted me. It did not bring the beard back to my husband’s face, but it did let me off the hook, at least a little bit. All right, so I was not a corrupt product of advertising culture, at least not totally. I was responding to an ancient limbic drive, protecting the babies that would one day be mine, yearning for symmetry, a chin, sanguinity to pass on down the line. “Beards,” Helen Fisher told me, “signify a man with a lot of testosterone, and that’s why women find them attractive.”

  One would think, then, that the bigger the beard, the hotter the guy. But somehow it doesn’t work that way.

  “Did you know, honey,” I said to my husband over dinner that night, “a beard signifies a good supply of testosterone?”

  “Really?” he said. He smiled at me. “So if you shave your beard does your testosterone level drop?”

  “I don’t know why you wouldn’t grow the beard back for me,” I said.

  “Maybe if you stopped asking I would,” he snapped.

  So I stopped. Weeks passed. I ceased being shocked, but in shock’s place was a sort of dullness, a certain reserve.

  Then a friend of Benjamin’s from college came to visit. “Hey, Benjamin,” he shouted as he came in. “You finally shaved off that beard. God, you look so much better without it.”

  “You think so?” I said.

  “If there is one thing I’ve learned over years of shaving and growing facial hair,” said Benjamin, “it’s that people always, always prefer you how they met you originally. No one who met me without a beard has ever really liked my beard, and no one who met me with a beard has ever really thought I look good without one.”

  “I met you with a beard,” I said.

  “That’s obvious,” he said.

  What exactly is the beauty we pursue to protect our progeny? Some studies have shown that people find symmetrical faces the most beautiful, but I wonder if beauty is best defined by familiarity. It’s not that there is some objective standard out there; we love what we know, and what we call lovely is really solace, home. In the 1950s, one of psychology’s greatest scientists, Harry Harlow, did a series of fascinating experiments with baby monkeys. These experiments were, in their own way, horrible, but like a horror movie, they revealed something essential about what it means to love and to be loved. Harlow removed baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers and raised them in isolated cages with mannequin mothers who were wired up to deliver milk. Some of these mannequin monkey mothers were not quite finished by the time the batch of babies were born, so some babies had mannequin mothers with just a plain wooden ball for a head—no face, no monkey mouth, no simian eyes, no features, nothing. And because this was the onl
y mother these monkeys had, they each came to love their faceless mannequin, and to cling to her, and to drink from her wired milk supply. A few weeks later, Harlow and colleagues painted faces on their incomplete monkey mannequins. They painted beautiful simian faces with eyes of gentleness and color. But when the baby monkeys saw these faces, they screamed, and with their little hands, reached out and turned the wooden ball of the head so the face faced backwards, and they were again in the embrace of the flat, featureless nothingness that for them was home, was whom they loved.

  The first face may always be the most beautiful face. When we find a partner attractive to us perhaps we are not really thinking take me with you so much as bring me back. Six years later my husband was bearded again, and I noticed his strawberry-blond beard was going gray, flecked here and there, and his eyes seemed tired. One night, he pointed out to me his bald spot, a circle widening slowly on the crown of his head, the exposed scalp pink as a salmon, too vulnerable looking to touch. “Will you love me when I’m old and bald?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. I somehow knew I would. Which, of course, contradicts everything I have just said. I know how an evolutionary psychologist would explain this contradiction: no longer in reproductive mode, I will no longer need his beauty. And he will no longer need any of mine. In other words, I will love him without eros. Of course this explanation falls prey to the assumption that the elderly do not need beauty because they do not have sex. I can’t comment on this right now, although I’m sure I will when my time comes, if I should be so lucky. When I am old and toothless, when he is gray and wrinkled . . . I think, if I get there, I will just be happy to have him near me—I will think, This is Benjamin—someone to sleep with in the truest, most literal sense, side by side as our days begin to darken.

  4

  On Fire

  My husband caught on fire smack-dab in the middle of our marriage, right around that inevitable but destabilizing romantic dip when all that had once waxed now suddenly waned, even the actual moon seeming to be—night in, night out, never changing—just a sliver of stone, or maybe my spouse’s fingernail cutting found on the back of our bathroom floor, signaling for sure a careless man whose spontaneity had somehow turned to sloppiness. His droppings, it seemed, were everywhere.

  At night during this time, I would lie awake and listen to the sound of my mate snoring, alarms going off in my body. What would bring us back? Little did I know that in just a matter of months those inner alarms would turn outer, the whole house going off as white smoke, almost creamy in its consistency, filled the rooms and the detectors shrieked, a sound so particular, so piercing, it caused our dog to go deaf in one ear even as it signaled, for us, the return of our senses—sound as well as sight, smell, taste, and, for a wonderful while, touch.

  But I’m ahead of myself here, because the fire came in mid-May, a beautiful, balmy month, while for the time being I was still stuck in the sliver-stone of my moon and marriage in the New England winter when the snow was starch white as it fell but turned tattered, gritty, almost the instant it touched down on the urban ground, strewn with broken glass, dented tin cans, candy wrappers crackling in the wind.

  It was a cold, cold time, that winter. Snow piled higher than our porch windows, and when the melt finally came, it oozed through the pores of the screens and rotted the painted porch floor. We’d been together, my husband and I, the proverbial seven years, each year before the seventh year, an A- or B+, in no particular order, seesawing grades we could do more than accept; grades we could celebrate, for we were mature and understood no union is as perfect as it once was, as it was the day, the moment, the second you first fell in love.

  We hadn’t had children yet. We hunted for mushrooms around the banks of the city’s polluted pond, parting the rotting grasses to find the enormous ears of fungi that Benjamin, my husband, a scientist, identified for me. We ordered every book Frank L. Baum, author of the Wizard of Oz, had ever written and read the volumes out loud before bed, ferreted into magical worlds where fruit trees grew tiny plum-colored people, their umbilical cords the stem attaching head to tree, until the sun finally finished its ripening and the miniature people dropped to the ground and began their bipedal lives. My husband and I had sex and fruit and fairytales, and for dinner we grilled steak-sized portobellos sautéed in thick pats of butter, the smell everywhere.

  And then that seventh winter came, carrying with it cloud sacks stuffed with snow and some mean man who lived right over the horizon weaving a wind whose edges he honed on a grinding stone as sharp as a shark’s smile. By January most everyone in Boston looked faintly anemic and wind-bitten; by February there was widespread talk of light therapy. Storm followed storm followed storm, and while I wouldn’t blame the demise of my marriage entirely on the weather, I would not hesitate to say it helped us down in a hefty way. Traits that had once seemed charming were now serious irritants. My husband’s skin, which had been a beautiful Scandinavian fair, had somehow, somewhere, in some way, turned faintly pinkish, and sometimes this phrase leapt into my mind: “I have married a pink man.” For his part, he became critical of my thickening waistline and my less-than-perfect flossing habits. We began to bicker, and then we began to be bitter.

  In general, people refer to this phase in monogamy as the “seven-year itch,” a term I dislike, implying, as it does, that a tube of cortisone cream or, in a very bad case, perhaps a titrating dose of prednisone would do the trick. But anyone who has ever been through this, this marital or relational itch, can tell you the phenomenon to which we are here referring cannot be solved with a scratch. And why not? Because it is not an itch to begin with. Itch is an itchy word, its ch-ch sound suggests some perseverative, compulsive yearning, some . . . some . . . urge for an answer that would, in this case, come not with words but with someone scratching . . . skin. Your skin. His skin. My skin. In my own case, I didn’t want my husband touching my skin, because he had begun to bother me in too many minor mundane ways. This was in no way an itch. It lacked any quality of intense neural focus. What we had was more like a lesion, essential cords cut, and the result: numbness.

  Researchers have found that in healthy pair-bonded relationships, there are in general five positive interactions for every negative one. Switch it around and you can catch the powerful punch of this measurement tool more easily. It’s called “the five to one rule.” In bad relationships, in fact in reliably doomed relationships, there are always two or more insults for every six interactions the couples have. It’s good I didn’t know this at the time or I might have thrown in the towel, perhaps even all our towels, so that, when the fire was eating my husband’s body alive, he would not have had anything to beat back the flames with.

  As it turns out, I hadn’t tossed in the towel the night my husband combusted, but neither did I have one handy, and even if I had, shock would probably have prevented me from offering it to him as I stood there, on the threshold of his study, and watched and heard (how horrible to hear; the hearing is what still, to this day, ignites my mind with terror) his raw human screams as the crazy flames, propelled by a chemical he’d spilled, made a crackling orange halo out of what had once been his beautiful hair.

  We sought couple’s counseling, but now, years later, I recall few of the specifics. There was a square office done in pleasing neutrals, abstract art on the walls. What I most recall was the counselor’s foot. It always had on it a very high heel that dangled halfway off, so her heel was in the raw, except for the nylons that netted it. She used all the standard phrases—baggage, communication, childhood, repetition compulsion. In her own way, I suppose, she was healing, as our joint dislike of both her and the process gave Benjamin and me something to bitch about together.

  Given the givens, the fact that the rough ride of my marriage was not at all unusual, that many, if not most couples, could tell a story with the same general spine, even if the specifics of the structure were different—one would think that marriage counseling would have evolved into
a state at least as high tech as your average PC. The numbers themselves suggest a national emergency. If, according to the latest census, about half of all American couples have children, and of those more than half divorce, then, well, why get married at all? It’s not a question asked with tongue in cheek. Everywhere one looks, in the animal world, that is, are ample examples of why marriage, the product of culture, is doomed in the nest of nature, where culture has no choice but to reside. Even the much-touted prairie vole, feted for its fierce lifelong monogamy, has recently been discovered to have illicit affairs, like so many other animal species probably in search of the dopamine high that comes with a fresh mate newly bedded.

  It has been definitively established that monogamy, while good for safe sex, babies, and probably income, is not really the way of the naked natural world. Take, for instance, the phenomenon researchers call “the Coolidge effect.” Discovered in the 1950s, the Coolidge effect has had ample time to demonstrate its impressive reliability and validity, which is that when you drop a male rat into a cage with a receptive female rat, you see an initial frenzy of copulation. Then, progressively, the male tires of that particular female. Even without an apparent change in her receptivity, the male rat reaches a point where he has little libido left, and, eventually, he simply ignores the female. However, if you replace the original female with a new one, the male immediately revives and begins copulating again. You can repeat this process with fresh females until the rat nearly dies of exhaustion.