Playing House

by Lauren Slater

  There are treatments for this sort of thing. A 1999 University of Chicago study found that about 40 percent of all women have some sort of sexual dysfunction, usually low libido.

  The real issue for me is that I’m not sure I have a dysfunction. On the one hand, I am miserable about our lack of a sex life. I am miserable about the fact that sex interests me about as much as checkers. I am miserable about it because it makes my husband miserable and cold and withdrawn, and it is so unhappy living this way. “Have sex with someone else,” I tell him, and then look down at my open hands. My palms are still pinkish, but they are cracked from wear and weather. “The problem with that,” my husband says, “is falling in love. If you have sex with someone else, you just might fall in love with them.”

  “I’d fucking kill you,” I’d say.

  Of course I wouldn’t. But I just might kill myself.

  I have no answers for how one lives without a sex drive, or with a sex drive that is equal to one’s passion for checkers. The rift it creates is terribly painful, and a gulf of loneliness enters the marriage. You could fake, but fake rhymes with hate. You could get treatment, but I’ve had so much treatment, I take so many pills, and in this one area, just in this one small area of my life, can I claim, if not health, then at least the absence of pathology? Please? Because when I say I don’t have an interest in sex, that might be a misstatement. Maybe I do have an interest in sex. But it’s just that, comparatively speaking, I have so many other competing and stronger interests, and these interests are crammed into a life that is already overloaded. A life I nevertheless love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love. There are so many things I love.

  Once I get past the daily dread that accompanies waking up each morning and that I cannot seem to shake no matter how blissful my state the night before, once I move past that and manage to throw my feet over the edge of the bed, then I am off, launched, singing through space, captivated by the thousands of solar systems I see everywhere. I see stones and stars. I see glass, which I cut and solder, silver liquid lines bringing scraps together in purposeful patterns. I love my wheeled mosaic nippers, how they take tiny bites out of solid opalescent or cats’ paw prints and how these pieces assemble into quilts of glass, into table tops, into garden balls of deep cobalt blue. I love my garden; I love finding wild echinacea, coneflower, black-eyed Susan, even loosestrife, finding these flowers in fields or growing between bricks and then pulling them up as gently as I can and bringing them back to where I live, nursing them along, hoping through the cold winters that they will pull their perennial magic and reappear again. And half the time they do! They do! I love seed catalogues, especially in the winter, when the pictures of the glowing globes of red-hot tomatoes remind you to have faith in warmer weather. I love horses and riding them. I love my dogs, of course, and my children I love so much it hurts; they pull on me painfully, and I love them. I have recently acquired a love of stones and am making a new floor for our bathroom entirely out of pebbles the streambed has polished. I love my router, my planer, my circular saw, the wood, especially salvaged wood I can pull off of old rotting barns and restore until it’s gleaming. I love clay. I like to sew and cook. I love words and writing, although that love is complex and fraught, a tense, toothy love that has made its marks on me forever.

  I spent a significant portion of my life battling with significant mental illness, and my Grim Reaper, which is not death but mental illness, still visits me from time to time, drawing me down with his sword. And each time this happens I never know if I will return to love. And each time that I do, I am more grateful than the time before, and so I see my life, my large unwieldy disorganized life, as though it was a banquet full of peach and blueberry cobblers stewing in their juices, all these antioxidants, all this flesh and mineral, so much! So rich!

  In our living room hangs a huge canvas sign that I, of course, made. It spells out my simple mandate, all in buttons. Make Things, my sign says. This is the mandate by which I live my life. As a Homo sapiens, the discovery of tools is embedded in my DNA as deeply, more deeply, perhaps, than anything else. I am quite sure that I am related to whatever ape first discovered that he or she could catch ants with a stick—oh, glory be! Make Things, my sign says, hung up there where my children can see, the buttons vintage and collected over many years. My sign does not say Make Love. I wish it did, as love is so much nicer to make, at least in sound, than things. But I am a person captivated by things, by solid, actual, concrete things that can be assembled, be they books or babies. Sex just does not equal or even come close to the thrill of scoring gorgeous glass for a window you will use, hearing the grit as the grains separate and the cut comes clean and perfect. Sex cannot compete with the massive yet slender body of granite I excavated out of the ground last week, six feet long this igneous stone, packed with time and stories if only it could speak. My stone. I’m going to spend months carving it with a silver chisel. I am going to figure out a way to make this stone into an enormous mantel under which, in the home I share with my husband and the babies we made, our fire will flicker. The stone will give off waves of warmth in the winter, and it will keep the night-coolness captive all through the summer days. I imagine and imagine my mantel, my windows, my glass, my gardens. I cannot believe how lucky I am. I have so very much to do, such wide and persistent passions, so little time in which to explore their many nooks and curves. Here. Now here. Don’t bother me. I’m busy.

  III.

  And then there is the issue of sounds.

  People make sounds during sex, or they try not to, if children or guests are near. The sounds you make in sex are deeply private, as are the expressions on your face, how you clench your fists, or feet, how you seize and separate. In sex—good sex, bad sex, consensual sex, or rape—you are split open and looked at. You are viewer and viewed. I find it extremely odd that on a Tuesday night you might go about this bizarre bodily act with another human being and then, the next morning, amidst a chattering group of children, eat Cheerios. It seems to me that if sex were separated out from the daily wheel of life, it might survive monogamy more intact.

  For these reasons, I think deeply religious groups like the Hasidim might be on to something, whether they know it or not. I think I could be more sexual if I had a mikveh, a sacred space into which no men were allowed. In our culture, sex has lost its sacred quality. There is no withholding, no separation, no ache. I would opt for a prohibition or two—no touching allowed until Tuesday—because longing springs from distance. It is odd, ironic, but also absolutely understandable that proximity can kill sex. Devout Muslims are not even allowed to touch one another until marriage. Ooh la la. Imagine that. Imagine the long courtship in which every gesture is watched, just to be sure that not even the slightest flick of a finger lands on your lover’s skin. Imagine the buildup of tension as time passes, as the wedding day draws near, as the woman is sheathed and wrapped for the pure and only purpose of being later unwrapped, after months of imagining. I know it hardly ever happens this way. But maybe sometimes it does.

  The sexiest story I ever read was about a couple who never had sex. It was in a book of erotica I have recently looked for but could not find. My retelling of the story will fall flat on its face, so I’d rather not try. Suffice it to say that each day the couple, a giant and a fairy, came just millimeters closer to consummation, always leaving the bed unfinished, their days gone heavy with a ripe ache.

  I have tried to tell my husband about this story, this extended extreme foreplay; he does not seem to understand. This is a problem, a classic problem that falls along gender lines. If I were mayor or president, I think I would institute some rules, some sanctions, for the good of the American Marriage.

  But even with all the right rules and sanctions, we still come back to the issue of sound. Stones don’t make sounds, which is maybe why I love them. They suggest sound but never utter any. And then there are the sounds of sex, which are deeply privat
e, and which, once made in the presence of a person, can never be unmade. In the right situation, with the right sanctions, these nighttime sounds would be preserved, bottled, so they did not wash away with the laundry, the toothpaste foaming down the drain, the nine-at-night-home-from-work nights, you angry, me angry, because . . . Because.

  “If you want sex,” I say to my husband, “you need to have time. Sex is dependent upon time. You can’t expect me to spread my legs for a man I never see, a man who is so immersed in his work he talks computer code in his sleep.”

  I mean what I am saying, but I also mean what I am not saying, and never have said, because it is too sad to say it. The sounds of sex are a shared secret between lovers, part of the glue that binds the couple together. They are considered, perhaps, the most private sounds we will ever utter in any relationship, trumping language so completely that words themselves are squashed beneath the primitive weight of the sound of sex. We have our regular speaking voices, and then we have our sexual voices, and while these voices may be odd, disturbing, even disorienting, especially if overheard by someone outside the dyad, they serve a special purpose. It is weird to me that I can have a best best friend, a friend I feel I know so completely, inside and out, but if I’ve never slept with her, then I don’t know her sound. I need not be my best friend’s lover to know her smell, her touch, how her fingers feel when they lightly land on my shoulder, but there is, locked away from me, a continent of her soul, and that is her sound.

  Sounds have a powerful impact on me and always have. One of the most entrenched and disturbing memories of my childhood is of hearing my brother getting beaten by my mother. My mother beating her children, while not commonplace, was also not entirely out of the ordinary, so I was familiar with her fists, familiar with seeing her violence, directed mostly towards me. But there was one day when she directed herself towards my younger brother, and I did not see it. I heard it. I heard the sound of her punch, the soft, revolting smack it made in his little-boy belly, the swooshing sound of his breath, in-sucked, and then the little grunts of pain and she came down on him. Those little intermittent grunts, those disembodied cries of his, made the fact of his body all the more real, and I don’t know why. I couldn’t see a thing but god, good god, I could hear my brother’s body; his flesh had entered my ear and lodged itself there, a song that can’t be unsung, an insane, repetitive ditty that still today makes me gasp with horror.

  The sounds of sex draw me close to my husband, when he allows himself to have them—what he says, what he does not say. But I have learned, the hard way, that while the sounds of sex are private, they are not in fact the most private sounds a human being is capable of uttering. I have heard sounds, from my husband, that have taken me an octave below sex, straight into annihilation, and these are sounds, like the beating of my brother, that I cannot forget, and that haunt me, and that have showed me that more private than the spasm of sex is the spasm of death. And once you have heard another human being make death sounds, you have gone too deeply down and will forever feel haunted in this person’s presence.

  I would prefer not to linger very long in this space of fire. It happened a long time ago, a decade ago perhaps, and late at night, midnight, I remember in fact, for the church bells had just gone off, striking twelve resonant peals that echoed in the spring air. I’ve told this story before, but as I retell it now, it’s somehow changed.

  We had married. I was finished with my affair, committed to the course ahead. My husband, who has always had a long-standing interest in chemistry, was downstairs in the basement, in a room we had built just for him, a study of sorts, lined with bookshelves upon which there were no books but bottles, and bottles, and bottles, mostly glass, some tin, all full of chemical concoctions tightly corked. His desk held Bunsen burners and glass pipettes, and a huge exhaust fan overhung the whole show, sucking out the toxic air.

  And I was upstairs in the kitchen washing pots, and he was downstairs finishing some experiment—I knew not what—when all of a sudden I heard, from deep in the bowels of our house, this, this . . . sound, this ugly, twisted, inhumanely human, stripped, screaming sound I had never heard before but recognized immediately as pure primal terror, the sound a man makes and has made for the millions of years he’s been on this planet, his body trapped in the jaws of a giant beast that is shredding him to bits. The Sound. I remember thinking that someone had climbed through the basement window and was murdering my husband—what else could account for that sound, as we lived no longer on the Pleistocene plains and our beasts were mostly men now.

  I remember running, running as fast, so fast, as fast as I could, which was not fast enough, down the interminably long (twelve) steps to our basement floor and running across the miles of concrete (ten feet?) between the landing and the closed door to his study, behind which the screams were coming, and coming, and coming, each one rawer than the next, only “screams” in the plural is not right, because this was one solid, unrelenting scream that comes from a place deep, deep down in a person and that we usually only make in dreams we can’t recall, or at the final threshold, so far gone into the darkness or light that no person can hear us, and our echo is gathered by angels or nothing.

  And here I now stood, at the door that separated me from the scream. I flung it open and saw him, saw what had happened to him, my man, my lover, my husband: he had caught on fire. A spontaneous chemical combustion. His long, lovely red hair had turned to a pure rivulet of flame, and he stood there engulfed and simply screaming. I saw his hair turn to writhing snakes of fire, and then I saw the fire clasp his entire perimeter, so he stood in the center, his margins fringed with angry flames, his mouth untouched and open and the singular solid deeply private scream a man makes when faced with eternity—coming and coming and coming.

  And I thought: Five seconds ago I was a woman who had a certain story about falling in love with a red-haired man, sidestepping into a stupid, embarrassing brief affair that freed me to marry the man I loved, and now the man I love is burning up in a fire right in front of my eyes. And forever and ever this will be my story. I will be, forever and ever, a woman who watched her lover burn to death in a fire.

  This is not an essay about how my husband caught on fire. No, this is a story about sex. And sound. And stones. And snap. Don’t look for the links between each position, because there may not be any, because sex is real; it is not art. It is shape-shifting and discontinuous. It has no beginning or end. Orgasms have beginnings and ends; affairs have beginnings and ends; marriages have beginnings and ends. But sex goes on and on and on for as long as this turquoise planet spins in its spot, in its particular, magical, miraculous, perfect distance from this sustaining star: our sun.

  Sex is private, and the little lady in me, with her teacup on a shelf, suggests it may not be in good taste to write too, too much about it. Nevertheless, because I also have stones in the pockets of my pants, I have kicked through the lady’s Do Not Enter sign and entered this essay here, only to find that though sex is indeed private, more private still is death, and that if you think you’ve seen your lover naked, if you think you’ve heard him sing his deepest self, you haven’t unless, god forbid, you have witnessed what he looks like in the maw of a beast so much bigger than he. And once you have seen that, once you have heard his sounds, once you know the body of your lover as it burns away, your sex will forever be infused with fear, and rage, and smell, and echo, and you will want to push that away while, at the same time, you will want to cling all the more tightly to this friable, tender, vulnerable body of his, and yours, and yours, and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours. And you will come to realize that there are so many yourses, so many bodies, and that they are all on fire or about to be, and so sometimes it seems that the entire world is his singular scream and the terrible dangle between the stuck lever and the ejaculated mist of white.

  The result of which is this: me, sitting here, pocke
ts full of silent stones. I am a woman in love, but I am not in love with sex. I am in love with the opposite of the sound of the scream. I am in love with glass and sand and skin. I am in love with my children, my animals, my bodies, my banquet. I am in love with making but not the reverse, making (minus the with) love. Someday, I hope to build not only a hearth, but a house. And inside this house I want to have with me my family—my children and my animals and my husband, whom I love so imperfectly, with so many gaps and hesitations. I hope he does not leave me for a woman who likes to make love, as opposed to a woman who loves to make . . . what? What is it I love to make? Oh, I’ve told you that already, and besides, the list is always changing. Here I sit, pocketful of stones. Remember a long time ago, those mornings in the room in the rooming house of the boy with all his F’s? Remember “Ripple”? I am in love with grateful, but I am not in love with dead. The music washes over us. The orgasm is over. I remember this.