Part 2

First of all, it should be said that I have no interest in taking anything away from you. I don't. In fact, if I had my way your husband would give you everything he possibly can and walk toward me, if he walks toward me at all, empty-handed. Ready to re-address life from a less cynical and materialistic point of view.

Of course, you might argue, that would mean I am taking him away from you. I would disagree. I found him alone at a bar on a Saturday night during a holiday weekend. An accident. I went to meet my cousins and they had mostly already left and your husband was still there, drinking with the remains of my extended family. He was abrasive and vulgar, a hulking, hunched thing at the bar, but there was a force pulling me in and I did not expect it and I was not prepared to resist and so didn't. I didn't take him away from you. He was sitting out for the taking like a couch on the curb. My life is not so regimented in its style that I cannot incorporate a beautiful thing when it presents itself.

We can agree to disagree. And you can remember that I do not necessarily want him wholecloth anyway. He comes with too much attached shit, you for example and your spoiled children, and I do not know that I would accept him if he did leave you.

In any case, whatever my plans for the future may be, your husband is currently spending time and energy on me, and so it is possible you could be interested in what I have to say. There could be something I have to offer you of value regarding him, some clue you do not already have as to weak spots in your marriage, vulnerabilities in your relationship with him that could allow the whole thing to come tumbling down with a slight push. Perhaps I think I can tell you how to get your husband's attention back. Perhaps I have tools and instructions that will help you rebuild the deep structure of your marriage, to re-create a bond between you that could not be threatened by the likes of me. Perhaps I have the clue you need to put a stake in the heart of a bitter marriage.


Arrogant of me, I know. Who am I to tell you anything? I am nothing. I do not know him. Certainly I do not know you. I know nothing of your marriage.



All true. But I do know this much: I know that he will stay with you. One way or another, he is yours forever. Even if he were to leave you, he is bound to you by the children you share. Nothing will get rid of you. You are anchored in his life and in his world. You are tethered to each other. From my point of view, you might as well take care of the children and go to his dull dinners and entertain his friends in your well-appointed home. But from your point of view, as long as you are stuck with him, wouldn't it be better to also own his sexual attention? To enjoy a home filled with the tenderness of a sexual bond rather than the tensions of resentment and deception? Wouldn't that be better for your daughters? Better by far than anything you can buy for them. That is my point, not my point of view. If a marriage is held together for the benefit of the children, then shouldn't it benefit the children?



You are well-compensated for your role as his wife. I know that much as well. Perhaps that is enough for you. Perhaps it is presumptuous of me to think that you would want more from your marriage, that you would even want your husband's carnal attentions. Perhaps you have tired of him, no longer find him attractive and are happy to enjoy the material aspects of your world as long as you can present a reasonably happy union, a successful life and marriage to family and society. He shows up at all the right events, you have dinner with friends for his birthday, for yours, you go on a date for Valentine's Day. You are lucky it was Valentine's Day, as it happens. I had planned to come to town that day, but remembering the holiday I cancelled, not wanting him torn between his Hallmark obligation to do something with you and his now hallmark desire to be with me.

I am well-compensated for my patience and flexibility and my lack of regard for holidays. When I see your husband he has nothing on his mind but love and sex. Perhaps he will grow tired of me, this fervid thing may very well grow cold and quickly. But another will take my place now that he knows he can do this, that he can bring love and fresh sex into his life and you barely notice. Or if you do, you are too fearful of losing your comfortable nest to make a fuss about it. Whichever. If it is not me, it will be someone else. He is unlikely to return to the dry, suburban marriage bed having remembered what sex is like at lunchtime in sparkling-white hotel linens when there are no children around.



Yes. I agree that may be much of it. When I have asked what happened to his sex life with you, he doesn't really know but he does acknowledge that it is very difficult to have erotic attention for another in a house where children live. That is a cultural phenomenon, and one I find heart-breaking. I wonder, being an artist and a designer, if architecture and interiors aren't at the root of the problem. Being an activist and social theorist, I also wonder if the media isn't to blame for the sentimental overemphasis on children of affluence and the difficulty of keeping the focus on the richness of a marriage, on the web of sexuality between two people, when all the trappings and commitments of child-rearing are so invasive and enveloping, sharp scissors to those delicate strands. Carting children to and from their many activities alone seems enough to keep a person from remembering what their spouse looks like. And then one does come into contact with so many other adults doing these childish chores that one is perhaps not so dependent on the companionship of their spouse.

I can't know, of course, though I observe it constantly from my perch as aunt and friend. There are children I have known from birth who are headed for college, and there are toddlers not yet forming words. I have watched many couples do many different things for many different children. My nomadic inclinations have placed me in countless family settings over the past two decades, at every point on the economic and political spectrum. My understanding is broad, detached and long-term, rather than built of personal anecdote, and I have noticed the forest of domestic details that strangle sexuality and I hear the complaints, sometimes cloaked and sometimes not, the discontent which starts playful and becomes more resentful and eventually goes underground to hide its own ugliness and then resurfaces everywhere as anger and impatience and sometimes the couple completely forgets that sex has disappeared and thinks the problems are all the small things that are now so daily asserted, and that it is those problems that have squelched sex. The situation gets turned around and the source is viewed as symptom and the couple is helpless and confused and grows angrier with one another. "She needs to get laid," is a cultural joke that is not at all funny in the truth of it. She does, we do, he must, and it is all very serious. I prefer laughter to be taken during sex rather than instead of.



Did you know that the neglect of sex within marriage was the source for the invention of vibrators? Doctors once "cured" "hysteria" in women—the 19th century medical term for the nervous disorder associated with denying one's sexuality for too long—by massaging the patient's clitoris to orgasm. Which is not the same as having the sexual attention of one's beloved, but it is certainly better than nothing and might in many cases have been better than the attentions of a sexually ignorant or brutish husband to begin with. I imagine not a few women learned how to please themselves by way of this treatment and did in fact get much better, calmer. The vibrator was developed by doctors who found the procedure too strenuous or tiresome to do manually. Really. This all is true.



Anyway. The trouble with children... It seems widespread if it makes you feel any better. There are books on the subject. I haven't read them as it doesn't really have anything to do with me, but I imagine someone has been bold enough to analyze the fetishization of children. Someone must have examined the degree to which placing them as the most important thing in a family, its reason for being, can damage the original bond between the parents, the bond which is itself the source of the children. In a perfect world. The whole picture is very complex, always and of course. I don't mean to simplify things or suggest I know what goes on in your house. What I know is that your husband seems to be both de-sexed by the atmosphere of children in the home as well as chained to that same home by their existence. He is at once desperate to escape, to regain his whole self with sexuality intact, and terrified of anything threatening his domestic position with regard to the children.

It is not very surprising that he should have ended up on anti-depressants. Ironic that those very medications crumple the erection that might contain his salvation on this count. It's fortunate he makes plenty of money. The added stress of financial difficulties would probably be more than he or the marriage could take. Who knows, though. Maybe if he were less successful he would be less dismissive of your lesser successes in the workplace, which would be a positive turn of events for the home, I would think.




You two are fortunate, safe and snug in all ways, yet you reek of fear and discontent. Anger. What went wrong? Why do I find myself in a position of writing to you? Do I not have better things to do? My life is not so set and luxurious as yours. I have chores of desperate importance to attend to, yet I am equally desperate to communicate to you what I can. Desperate to offer you something of substance that will give you the ability to love your husband so that he can love you back. I don't know if you love him now, but I know he doesn't love you back. It has nothing to do with me. All I am is evidence that your husband is capable of great and romantic love, of driving desire, is able to throw himself upon the task of making a woman happy in every possible way, from sweetest licking to fat jewels. He is sensual and he is garish. He is. Can you displace me as the woman he wishes to please? You can trust me on this. It is in my best interests for you to steal your husband away from me. I can never have him and he is completely distracting and absorbing to me. He, more than my compulsion to spend this time writing to you, keeps me from my own work, steals my attention away from my self. I need you to get him back. I need for him to tell me that he has found a way to be happy with you, that he must do everything he can to honor and sustain this new hope for your marriage. I need to believe he will be happier with you, without me, or I cannot let him go.



So the letter proceeds. I continue to trudge through the things that might be keeping your husband from bringing his hardened self home to you, from finding sweeter hardness in your glance, your touch. This isn't particularly fun for me. I would not blame you if you threw the rest of this letter away in disgust. Another reason it is not addressed to you. Like anyone, you are careless and unthinking, believe you already know everything, that no one has anything to tell you of importance, and you would throw this away. By not addressing it to you, there is a chance that one of your friends might read it and bring my words to you through her own understanding of them. Perhaps you will in this less direct way still profit from this information I struggle to offer you. In any case, whatever you choose to do, I continue.





Children. Their absence and presence are an obstacle, one that is apparent to everyone but no one seems to have come up with a good approach, a fool-proof way of incorporating children into a marriage without the erotic aspects of that marriage suffering. The cultural prudery of our sexuality demands that we hide sex from children, that we keep sex and children in completely separate parts of our brains and bodies and houses—if we ever admitted sex was there in the first place rather than sneaking it in like some shameful thing behind our own backs.

No mystery then that the mere existence of children in a marriage might chase away, even negate, sexuality.

But sexuality seemed to have a hard enough time taking very deep root within us to begin with, even under the best of circumstances. Here in the modern and westernish world, where sex is demeaned constantly by a torrent of mean-spirited jokes, music, movies, where sexuality in an individual is denied from its very inception in the child's body and mind, where the impulse toward sexual pleasure is crimped and cramped and trampled in the directions it wants to grow even as it is force-fed on pornographic images of over-inflated bodyparts and airbrushed flesh, here is where we live. Sex lies on the surface, sexual arousal reduced to a response to a pleasing exterior, a topography not appreciated for its own pleasing qualities but rather for how it compares to other, more and less pleasing options. Now we have conceived a societal fascination for, an overwhelming absorption with, the technical aspects of sex and how "good" it might be with one person or another. The deep sexual connection that arises between two people, either magically at first sight or over the course of time as they build a history of love and sex between them, come to know each other as no one else will, that bond... what happened to it? It must have disappeared from the vernacular, no longer be standard issue for our culture. The divorce rates signify: Who, after all, would leave a person they were sexually bonded to?



I cannot give you advice on this matter. I have no idea how to make your home more warmly sexual, how you might to re-introduce the marital bed and bond, but I am pretty sure that it would be good for the children if you could figure it out.



Maybe you need to look at the house itself and see if it is not contributing to its own failure as a place for love and sex. I haven't been to your home, and know only that it is in an affluent suburb of a prosperous city. Not a good start. Studies show again and again that more sex happens in more modest surroundings. Trailer parks, for example, and the back seats of unregistered cars. Since both you and your husband seem committed to maintaining a moneyed lifestyle, it is worth noting that ownership of a house as such can be a terrible and debilitating burden on the sexuality of a couple. The demands of a home, especially if the property is responsible for presenting an image of success to the world, a pretty picture of domestic something or another, the demands of the building, its upkeep and the money needed to maintain it can mangle a marriage. I have seen sex disappear between unmarried lovers who take on a property together when that property is more demanding than giving. I have seen this phenomenon occur among gay men and between lesbians. No one is safe. There is something very wrong with the way we live as couples, something that dissolves the very thing that made us become couples to begin with. The weight of adhering to a version of coupledom, its expected togetherness, the arrival of children, the imperative to present a vision of material success to the rest of the world, the constricting conventions of the comfortable life, the seduction and acquisition of luxuries that create still more weight, all that is heaviness and distraction.

The life of a couple is supposed to be one of support for each other, helpmate and companion for whatever life may hold for that couple and for the individuals within the couple. But not for us in this time, in this industrialized world. We have other priorities and forget that all there is at the end of the day is the love we have carefully built with another, their body and the warmth it holds for us as we become old and our hearts grow fatigued from a lifetime of bruises. Soft kisses, the embrace of sex however it has transformed over time, this is finally sustaining. And the house itself too often is at odds with that.



Why?



One of the things I've noticed is the inclination of couples to find themselves living in buildings extremely different from the place where sex originally took hold for the couple, let alone where love was learned in the hearts and minds of the individuals. It is tempting to give you a slew of examples, stories, anecdotes, but somehow I doubt you have the patience. The idea is only this: That in this age of great mobility, terrestrial, social and economic, the likelihood that we will be having sex when we are fifty in a place that in anyway reminds us of the place we had sex when we were sixteen or twenty is slim. The associations are destroyed and we find ourselves adrift in interiors that are either the random fantasy of some designer, or fantasies of ourselves, or the hodge podge of a lifetime of mediocre furniture decisions, but in any case are not a careful and solicitous, intellectual, emotional and material evolution of the room where love first took root into the home of greater maturity and comfort that a life well-lived might produce.

So for example, the couple who began their sex life in a Chevy van and tents might do well to construct a bed that offers them once again the confined intimacy of those original interiors. I am not making this up. They have a new van with a piece of foam in it, thirty years into the marriage, and that is the "bed" they prefer, the place they prefer to sleep, and where they are most likely to have sex. The conventional thinking of what a house is, how a bedroom is furnished, etc. is in this way often at odds with basic elements of a couple's sexuality. Sexuality is a secretive thing so it doesn't occur to us to create a space in one's house that is specifically about sex. How could we explain such a room? Who can afford it? Stupid. Unbelievably stupid. It is easier to get Viagra from the doctor than to face unlikely, inconvenient truths about oneself.



We are all of us adrift. I don't know what to do about it. There is something wrong with the architecture we have opted for as a culture, something wrong with our relationship to it. To then layer children and the manic-compulsive attitude toward them that is so rife in the suburban sub-culture on top of that, to have the house which was not condusive to sex to begin with be transformed into a nursery by the paraphrenalia of childhood... it is too much. Too many of us do not have the will or the power of imagination to make a bedroom into a bower, a santuary for the sex that needs to exist between a couple. We litter our bedrooms with paper and plastic and computers and domestic detritus and bad paintings and sentimental photographs and ugly furniture and laundry that needs to be folded, so much so that only teenagers would have enough hormonal momentum to ignore the clutter and fuck anyway. Failing to create even one room, one part of a room, that speaks clearly to sex and love, how much more impossible is it for us to create a whole home that supports and encourages, honors and re-inspires the first wet bond that made the home possible to begin with?



Do I overstate the effect of a house on a marriage? Surely you can point out marriages that lived very happily in extravagant or disastrous houses. I submit that those houses and those marriages should be studied. Still, whatever clues those houses and their inhabitants may hold to the secret to marital happiness, there is a mountain of examples to the contrary. When a house is interpreted as a manifestation of the success of the marriage, when a display of material luxury is more common than a display of affection, when clutter and filth make every task herculean, when a couple is required to feed the needs of the house, the needs of the individuals and the sex between them are necessarily neglected, and the house itself suffocates the union.

But then, any occupation with how the world will view the life and the marriage might be deadening to love, any chronically distressing situation will poison a relationship. Discount and neglect the sexual union (however it may have evolved over time) and it will die and so goes the marriage itself. The individuals will survive. Love only is lost.



The trick is being honest about what will nourish the union. The more I look around with this in mind, I fear that for most couples the very things they think will make their life better are the exact things that strangle their sexuality. Dream houses too large to allow intimacy, interior spaces built to impress a buyer with fantasies of grandeur rather than to sustain the daily private and social life of an aware and intelligent resident. The financial, emotional strain of a house at the end of one's means. Houses too large to furnish effectively or to keep clean. Rooms arranged to deny real privacy or with no allowance for the fluid mechanics of social gatherings. Or a house may simply not be in harmony with the interior lives of its inhabitants. Unlivable, in very real terms.

These are all things good architects try hard to address. But if an architect is more concerned with something other than the real, whole life of the residents, or has no idea who the residents are to begin with, then those noble goals get quickly pushed to the side and are not addressed at all in the rush to create something that will impress the most arrogant and sentimental aspects of the affluent homebuyer. You.

Such a house overwhelms a marriage as easily as a giant wave crushes a sand castle, and as carelessly.



But again, to go back, it could simply be that a house is too unlike the interior spaces where the sexual union was formed and so does not ever feel like a place to make love, to be entwined in that manner. Soulfood, architecturally speaking. The house may be a place for entertaining, for raising children, a house possessed of all the amenities that an earlier house—the one where children were conceived—did not have, but then for small or large reasons sex sneaks out the back door. Our forebears might have been fortunate in arriving at marriage young and to find themselves living in the family home where they could expect to die. Sex between two people is born, grows, lives and dies a natural death in the same house, perhaps moving to a different bedroom when someone from another generation moves on. The same kitchen where young lovers shared post-coital omelettes and coffee becomes the kitchen where children are fed, where life is wrestled and resolved, where love settles when troubles subside. The memory of a frantic fuck against that very wall over there as present as the memory of a dinner party, a tragedy and its grief, the chaos of children, cakes baked and roasts roasted, ten thousand conversations adding up to a life in a room, in a house.

That is not how we live anymore. Not that we miss it so much, not that we aren't generally grateful for this freedom from the shackles of tradition. We make our own homes and enter them with our lover, make love in a place where we never were with anyone else, no memories, no relatives.

And too often no grace. Unprepared, uneducated and generally incapable, we are asked again and again to create spaces that will support us as individuals and as lovers, but it almost never happens. Not in this country anyway, this country of protestant priggishness, where the architecture itself is the equivalent of a whipple. And when it is not, it is a whore's costume, garish and meant to quickly delight, to sell at first glance, to please long enough to get the cash and then it is done. Merchants prey upon our sentimental fantasies, stores pop up filled with decorative particulars, from the lowest discount wholesalers of cheap towels and candleholders to the mass marketing of nominal classics to the overweening and baroque or snootily spare knick-knavery marketed at enormous mark-up to the nouveau richest. They assist us in sustaining the fantasy. But it's the wrong fantasy. Furniture is designed to trick the eye into thinking the body has entered a gothic castle or provincial farmhouse; but the chairs are cruel and hard on the body, impossible to sit in, the beds flimsy, and with nowhere to tie things, couches constructed of creepy synthetic materials devolve to dorm use in a matter of years. It is all so much set design for a shallow drama in which your whole, complex, long-lived, somatic self has no role.





Did this happen to you? It is so easy. "O ye of fast cars and master baths!" I tease your husband, and he doesn't hear the humor. "Yes, I do have a master bath," he says. And it is there that I worry you might see the bruises left on his body. "Don't worry," he reassures me when I notice what I have done. "The kids climb all over me. Bruises can be explained." Not hickeys so much, but that is his business. But I do wonder when you see his body, if you look at him, regard his nakedness, I wonder if you notice him, bruises, anything. I do wonder what goes on between you, if you embrace and kiss, or kiss thoughtlessly, briefly, a peck on the lips, no more than I get from a girlfriend, or do you share much much more. I cannot know, will never know, don't want to know though I might wonder. Your husband and I are new lovers so we kiss like that, as though we have been starved and will die if we do not drink all we can of the other. In a way our desperation, our starvation, precludes more meditative and powerful sorts of kissing. But I do kiss him with stillness and stay there and he does understand so maybe we have that too.



My apologies. That is not really the point. Houses. In the past several decades, maybe even the past few hundred years, there has been such swiftness of architectural change, so much creativity, so much bravado, the cult of the architect, the cult of the anti-architect, so much desire to find the solution to our architectural malaises, so much so that we are awash in built suggestions, most of them very bad. Ideas that should never have seen the light of the builder's on-site trailer are built and then someone has to live in them. Cruel ideas for work and for homes, for public places and for places of ritual. Very few deeply considerate buildings, buildings that are sublime and divine in their submission and respect for the complexities and simplicities of living and working as a human, the actual demands of human life in the different climates and ecosystems where we attempt to live, insist upon living. Fewer still the homes intelligently and sensitively padded with colors and fabrics to support rather than undermine the inhabitants. Can you imagine a home that could heal your marriage and make me unnecessary? If you can, why don't you live in that place?



I browsed this morning through a book of black and white photographs of apartments in Paris. The dwellings of contemporary, fantastically successful figures in design and fashion and literature who either are French or have chosen to live in France. The photos have none of the gross extravagance of living rooms in the United States today. The rooms are differently luxurious, full of stuff to support the emotional and intellectual lives of the inhabitants rather than gilded with things that scream extravagance to new visitors. Surely the apartments were selected for those qualities. Still, I was surprised, and surprised to be surprised. I have lived in Paris. I knew this. Too long here and I had forgotten. You have as well, I imagine. I notice your husband drives a needlessly extravagant car and knows nothing of art or music. He dresses beautifully, though I don't know how that happened. He is heavy and he is moneyed, so I suppose it is mainly a matter of going to the right store and submitting to a sales person. Is your home dealt with in the same fashion? Go to the right store and spend enough money with the guidance of a tasteful salesperson? Poof, you have a house suitable for showing off to your friends and co-workers.

It is a life I do not understand. Do you care about your home? Do you do what you can to make it a sanctuary for your family, for the eroticism between you and your husband? Does he? Or does it conform to the magazine photos of our time and so you think it is a home and are oblivious to the manner in which it might be poisoning your every day?





Your husband speaks only of a room where he likes to read, because we discuss reading and because he wants to winterize the room so he can use it all year. Apparently it is too cold in winter. A place to read is all important. I think I once left a man for a lack of such a place. It was as though food were being kept from me. Your husband took up with me as the chill of winter fell. Could it be that he no longer had his place at home and so felt he no longer had a home? Is it possible that if such a small thing had been different that everything might be different? You don't know. I recently rearranged my livingroom to accomodate a perfect reading chair, perfect light, music. Perfection. But for me, too, winter is cold and I stay in my office in another part of the house, and instead of reading for a couple hours a day I am on my computer writing erotic fictions to your husband. If my livingroom were warmer, if your sunporch were good for the fourth season, if all these things were in place, would your husband and I be sequestered in hotel rooms at every opportunity?



What is your feeling about your house? Are you happy there, are you careful to note the way your children relate to their rooms, their play areas, their sleeping areas? Are they happy? Do they have more room than they know what to do with? Too many things? Are their rooms decorated to manifest your own fantasy of girlhood, or are they furnished to nurture the growth of their best and truest selves? Is there art that challenges and soothes in your house, or are the only paintings on the wall things you thought would go nicely with your decorative scheme? If you could live anywhere, is your house in your neighborhood in your city where you would live? An interesting question because you and your husband and daughters could probably live anywhere. Why are you there? Right reasons or wrong? Remember, I am a stranger to you and you are anonymous. Answer truthfully, for no one will know. The only danger is that you might then know the truth, and then you will have to explain to yourself why you deny it.





It takes a great disinterest in a house, a willingness to let it go at any moment, for the love within a marriage to withstand its callous force.





So your husband and I fuck in hotel rooms. Plain, furnished rooms with no evidence of our lives outside of each other. Obviously there are no children or animals braying at the door, either. We fuck ourselves into an embarrassing tangle of damp sheets, spilling crumbs and wine and an assortment of other fluids and then I call housekeeping to make it perfect again before your husband returns for some later taste of this thing he has made up for himself. Me. I am a collaborator, but he has made his fantasies of sex and love, apparently dormant within the walls of your home, come true, fairytale-like, with me in the heroine's role and he king, prince, dragon, stableboy and toad, all at once in the tall castles of downtown hotels.

I let him do this for my own reasons, mainly because I fell in love with him one night, late, at a bar, and he reached between my legs and pulled the barstool and myself closer to him and I touched his forearm to punctuate a point and was shocked by a current of life and intelligence and sex, smoldering like frayed wires inside a wall. So we embarked within the week on this affair and I am aware that much of what is attractive to him is that I am not in that big house, there are no children, and I do not in anyway remind him of any other part of his life. I am just sex to him, and our sex exists in rooms designed for the purpose. A bed and a bath, with endless hot water and infinite clean towels.



On the other hand, he might really be in love with me. I am beautiful and intelligent and I am attracted to your husband like a moon to a planet. He pulls me in. And he confesses his love for me enough that one is tempted at least to believe he believes himself to be in love with me. Discount it as you will. He does not. He fears that I will break his heart, is ready to hear at every moment that I am tiring of this complexity, tired of not being first. I interpret this as a sign of love for I feel the same way myself. Fearful at every moment that this has become tiresome to him, too difficult, that he has decided to subtract me from his life. My fear that I might love him too much and scare him away feels like sharp evidence of my having succumbed to him completely. His parallel fear may be evidence that his heart is mine.



But let's leave that possibility to the side for the moment. We will assume your husband does not love me. That he is simply straying, having an affair, that it is all about sex and that he cares nothing for me. It may very well be true, anyway. So. Why on earth would he be having sex with me rather than with you? Why would he be throwing me and not you on a hotel bed and tearing off my panties rather than yours? Why am I and not you saying goodbye to him in the morning, my body like bread from an oven, naked or nearly so, kissing him goodbye in the hallways of hotels whose names I have already forgotten. Me warm and sleepish, he clean, damp and dressed and rushing off to the life you know about, either to home or to work. Whichever, or something else. I don't particularly care. I am exhausted, satiated. It appears to be a matter of pride for your husband. I go back to sleep in sheets rumpled from our night or afternoon. Or pull myself into soft clothes, thinking of him, whether he will like how I look, what his delight will be when he pulls these same clothes off me, and I go out, alone into the world, get coffee and try to remember what it is that I do when I am not making love to your husband.







Oh yes. I am a writer and a designer. I have no employer. I am an impoverished artist, by some standards, and though the life has drawbacks they are nothing compared to the richness of freedom I possess. I suppose I should work today, but perhaps I will instead shop for wine for this evening and spend the afternoon in the tub, shaving my most complicated parts. He asked me to and why not? It's his birthday. Whether or not he loves me, he behaves as though he does, and I do love him, with the fickle and fast love of a teenager perhaps though you can't know for sure, and there is nothing I would not do for him. His requests challenge me, make me stretch and press open my own sexuality, which was not exactly prudish to begin with. We nudge and beg each other for more and better ways to please the other like children wanting to impress a parent, out of the sincerest admiration for the other and the most innocent desire to give pleasure to another. We rush at first, desperate when we have had to spend time apart, but then we do not rush. We no longer worry that this will burn out shortly and we must make the most of it. I tell him we have all the time in the world, even if it may be spread thinly over months and years. He tries to make me understand that he does not see an end to this, that I do not need to worry that I will lose his devotion.



No. The only thing that will stop this now is you. You could do something to stop it. Will do something. Should do something. I don't know what it should be, will be, but it must be something and it will have to be you.



This is perhaps why I write to you. To tell you what I think you can do to destroy this affair, how to destroy it in a manner that might serve rather than further injure your own marriage. My thoughts on how things could transpire, how you might choose your course of action to best benefit yourself. You could choose to harm me as much as possible, even at your own or your husband's expense, but you know such a vindictive choice will be revealed and you will pay for it in the end. Maybe. Maybe your husband would be impressed by your mad revenge, take it as proof of your wifely affection. Maybe. That wouldn't be my style. I don't deal in evil or purposeful harm. You will have to come up with your own plan if you will be vicious and vengeful. I will rather tell you how to get your husband back with sugar so that there is no evil scattered about that might later find its way into your bed.

You should listen to me. I might know things.



This is an extraordinarily interesting challenge. What can you do to take my lover away from me?



A few things suggest themselves. The first, obvious thing would be for you to discover our affair and to put down some ultimatum in which you threaten to take his children away from him. Everyday I expect this, it seems so certain that you will discover us and so certain that this will be your reaction. Like a beaten dog, your husband would leave me and return to the prison of your home and do whatever he thought you required of him. He loves his children extremely and his responsibility to them is whole. I have heard of wives who have used this strategy to good effect. I would think it better for using on a man who is a habitual philanderer, who does not have one lover but many or a chain of them. The strategy is to shorten the leash almost to non-existence, and then to hold it very very tightly. I have been given to understand that most men will heel under these circumstances, and that sometimes the marriage does revive. I don't really understand the mechanics of it, but I am told it is so. Men who are under the thumb of a corporation or other institutional employer, who have already sold themselves into such servitude, apparently are good candidates for this technique of husband retrieval. I think it sounds like a lot of work for you, and very little fun. And there is always the chance that his obstinance and arrogance will suggest a different response, one not good for either of us.



The second thing, and something I would be quicker to suggest to you, would be to somehow revive your interest in him, to develop over time a dialogue about sex, to re-learn what you can of his sexuality, things you might have never known or things you might have forgotten. Men get older and they do change, so there is no doubt something for you to discover. In any case, slowly and imperceptibly get him to associate sex with you rather than with me. It won't be easy. I assure you that a day does not go by that his cock is not made hard by contact with me, his mouth waters at the thought of my lips, he cries out for my sex, his eyes go into a trance, his breathing becomes shallow, and I am not even there. His sexuality is all I have of him, and it is all I want. You will have to work to coax it back to you. As it stands, he pulls into the garage of your house, still talking to me on his phone and mildly concerned because his cock is up and he cannot get out of the car and go inside right away. I don't do this on purpose. Apparently just talking to me arouses him. Why wouldn't it? He associates me with nothing but sex. We do not negotiate child care or household chores. I have never been angry with him for a real or perceived slight. I have nothing to nag him about.



In truth I cannot imagine living with him full-time. He is a pill and a brat and I am sure I would tire of him as completely as you have and he of me and he would find himself betraying me with some other slutty piece of trash soon enough.



For the time being, though, he associates sex with me, not you. My voice, my laughter, the very idea of me is associated with sex for him. If you want him to stop responding to me, imagining me, plotting to be with me, if you want him to return to attending to you as a person and as a woman and a lover, then you must displace me. Replace me with yourself.



Really. Understand that your husband has come to despise you. That he associates you with all the things that chain him from his physical, sexual self. The demands of affluence, the reasonlessness of an extravagant life. Convention. Constriction.

Perhaps you are indignant to hear this. He is the one who wanted the big house. He is the one who bought the expensive sports car. He is the one who works all the time and puts money ahead of everything. You are right about all that. But there is a part of him that went and hid away and is boyish and randy and it wants sex and it wants it to be removed from the scene of the crime. No big house. No puffy, bloated furniture. No children. Just the bodies of two people compelled toward each other. He wants to feel desired, wants to feel desire, feel embraced and cradled, wants to feel that free fall of love and sex that the speediest sportscar failed to reproduce. From me if not from you. If not from me, from another and then another.



Can you imagine feeling this way with him again? I am told that you have taken to sleeping in a different room, that you do not care for his snoring. Yes he does snore, it is true. And as we have established, I can care less than you do because I do not have to get up in the morning and take care of children or go to a job.

Furthermore, I never wear pantihose and hardly ever wear wool and when I do it is lavender and periwinkle and lined with silk or it is cashmere and goes into the wash not to the dry cleaner. My clothing is soft and slips closely along my body, falls off accidentally to reveal my shoulder, snuggles around me in such a way that others are compelled to touch and to hug me, keeps me wonderfully warm but still slides easily off me. Hands can get into my panties or cup my breasts without much effort.

This is not because I am your husband's lover. It is because I do not have children and do not work for a corporation, because I am an artist, a writer and a designer, and it is my job to explore clothing and to never submit, as you do, to the conventions of the day, to the tyranny of tailored clothing and fit, let alone the larceny of the dry cleaner. Nope. Never. No one even asks me to anymore. I dress as I please, and lately I have been dressing to please your husband, not in ways he expects but in ways that will be nonetheless pleasing. I love surprising him with himself and his own desires. I love experimenting with clothing, to see how he responds to different shapes and colors, undergarments, dresses, shoes. He is a delightful subject, responds viscerally and with animation, noticing how the silk of my robe accidentally rubbed against his testicles as we were fucking, begging me to wear transparent things, things he can rip off, teasing me about what panties I might be wearing, admiring a kimono as though it and I were a work of art, but then in the end not caring at all, my body and his made naked and that being the only thing.

Are you willing to do that? Would you be willing to dress toward desire? To provoke his desires? Wear things simply because they make him think of taking, tearing them off you? Are you at all interested in regaining interest and in regaining his? You could, I should think. After all, you live in the same house. You have every opportunity to speak softly to him, to reveal glimpses of luminous underthings. To accidentally reveal too much shoulder or breast. To tell him how sweet and beautiful he is. To coax from him his fantasies, to laugh with him and to caress him for no reason and with no intention, just caress him as a communication of love. Get in the shower with him. Wash his hair. Make him a drink. Adjust the lighting so that you are beautiful to each other. Be in love, or at least act that way. How good would that be for the children to see their parents treating each other like lovers? What excellent lessons would they learn about what to expect from their own lovers and husbands?



"Oh, stop," you are saying. Why should you have to do things for him, pet him, tell him he is lovely to you. God knows it is his turn to do something for you. Yes, well god also knows I tell him that and encourage him to do just that and perhaps he occasionally does fuck you or take you to dinner, I certainly assume he does, but generally he is not very receptive to my ideas about being more kind and respectful of you. He has come to hate you, it seems. And he doesn't like you much either. He thinks you are greedy and materialistic, that you have a "demanding" sexuality, and I keep meaning to ask what he means by that. He thinks you are cold to the children, that you are careless of their little selves and unaffectionate and that you yell at them for insufficient reason. He only sees that you disapprove of him, that you think he drinks too much, which is true, but still, and that you have deceived him and tricked him into marrying you for your own agenda.



He may be right. I know you were at the very end of your childbearing years and were anxious to have a family and he, as he put it, probably was your "last, best chance." He might be right about all that. But he is equally to blame. He too was getting older, wanted to have a family, and he is guilty of what is perhaps a worse crime, of marrying someone he knew was not right for him because it was good enough, suited his purposes. I am told you are proficient at fellatio and that you use it to good effect. I know him to be a pig, so perhaps that is all he was considering. He also tells me he likes your parents and grandparents, that he was, is very happy to be included in a warm extended family, his own family being so difficult and not warm.

For no particular reason, I will give you the benefit of the doubt and grant that you might have believed you were marrying the right man. Of course, you should keep in mind that I only offer you that allowance because I am myself in love with your husband, find him completely lovable and can easily imagine someone, in all truthfulness, marrying him and believing it was the love of a lifetime. I fabricate this story and attribute it to you. But I have seen a picture of you in his office and you appear to me to be a stiff, formal person. I doubt you look at love as I do and I doubt you did not know what you were doing. I think you did know. I think he also knew. I think the two of you will have a lot of explaining to do if there is an afterlife, to have been so unbelieving in love, the only thing we have of the divine on earth. You were probably going to church the whole time, too, worshiping your false idols even as you betrayed love itself by marrying a man you knew did not love you and whom you loved with a false and selfish, untrue love.



You did not expect me to not be at all bitter, did you? Your husband and I push against each other in bars where we know no one, in theory though we are not all that careful, and we curse my cousin for not having introduced us sooner, soon enough that your husband might have known me before he married you and in our reverie of love we imagine that we would have known then that we should be lovers and that your marriage would never have taken place at all. "We should kill your cousin," is sometimes the way your husband greets me or says good-bye. Not always. Usually he just says, "I love you."

Sure. Your husband tells me a ten times a day that he loves me and I do a hundred things I hope will communicate my love back to him, reluctant to utter those words exactly because it just doesn't seem right to tell a man that you love him when he is married to another woman. Seems wrong. I don't want the chronology to be revised in our minds later and for anyone, especially not him, to think I declared my love for him in order to tempt him from you. I did not. I do not want to tempt him from you. I wonder sometimes if perhaps I should try to do that for the backward reason that it might be just the thing to jolt him out of this romance, to turn him against me as a thing that threatens his life and his children's home, and so be a way to push him back toward you.

I haven't tried that strategy. It seems convoluted and dangerous, and of course I have no desire for him to turn against me. I want him to turn toward me, at every moment he can steal from you and your organized and notated life. Every moment he can spare I want him oriented toward me, reaching toward me, allowing me to push against him, hard and with intention. We stay at the bar only to prolong the minutes of anticipation because once alone we do not wait at all. We are teenagers. You cannot hear this enough. Your husband, though possessed of the physiology of an overweight and middle-aged man, has the romantic and sexual inclinations of a college athlete. Maybe we all do, and it is just buried with time and commitments until we forget even that it was ever there.



Commitment. I am glad that word came up on its own. I am going to get to that. Not now though.