An Intimate Life (21 page)

Mary Ann explored and then said, “I guess I’m one of the women who isn’t sensitive here.”

“And that’s alright.”

As we untangled our legs Mary Anne said, “I wonder if my husband ever noticed that my lips are slightly uneven.”

“Is this something you feel you can talk about with him?” I asked.

“I think so now. Before, I just assumed that he noticed and didn’t want to hurt my feelings.”

Mary Ann’s perspective had shifted a little. I believed that the two exercises I had done with her were likely to be effective.

As we parted that day, I told Mary Anne that if she felt she ever wanted to see me again or if she had more questions that she should call me. I called Jodie that night to update her on our last session.

Several months later, Jodie called about another client. She let me know that she was still seeing Mary Ann and that it would take some time to fully address her body image issues, but she no longer believed that her vulva was the problem.

10.

becoming a surrogate

M
ichael and I hadn’t had sex for almost a week. For some couples this would be unremarkable; for us it was a red flag. We had been in California for about a year and suddenly our sex life had dropped off a cliff. When I tried to kiss or cuddle up with him in bed he told me he was sleepy and rolled over onto his side with his back facing me. Michael being too tired for sex was like a fish being too tired to swim. I remembered when he would work a ten-hour shift at his hospital job and then come home and spend hours making love with me. The first couple of nights I tried to convince myself that maybe he was tired. Maybe he just needed some downtime. But when I was rebuffed for the fifth night in a row, I knew something other than fatigue was at play.

On the evening of my sixth day of involuntary abstinence I went to a yoga class; at the end, as I lay in corpse pose with my feet flopped out, palms turned up, and my back pressed against a rubber mat, I started to cry. Anxiety ran through me like a current that couldn’t be shut off. Six days without sex was surely a sign of trouble. Was it the first stage of total disengagement? Was this Michael’s way of easing out of the relationship?

“Deep breaths. Don’t forget to breathe,” the willowy yoga teacher said as she walked between the rows of prone students.

I couldn’t breathe because my nose was too stuffed up from crying. I sat up, walked over to the doorway of the room where our shoes were lined up against the wall, slipped my feet into mine, and left the class. As I drove home, I decided to talk with Michael. I needed to know what was going on. Even if my worst fear was true, at least I would know what I was dealing with and I could put an end to the speculation that was making me too anxious to relax even in corpse pose.

When I got home, Michael had just put the kids to bed and he stood at the kitchen sink washing dishes. I walked up behind him and put my arms around his waist. He turned on the water to rinse the suds off his hands and then twisted his body around, loosening my embrace. He took a few steps away from the sink with his hands up and grabbed a dishtowel.

“Michael, we need to talk,” I said.

“Okay,” he answered, and sat down at the kitchen table.

I sat down across from him.

“What’s going on? Why aren’t we having sex?”

Michael explained that he was feeling performance pressure because I regularly initiated sex.

“When I want sex I’ll initiate it,” he said.

This rocked me. First, I was humiliated. Was he saying that he didn’t want to have sex with me? Was this Michael’s way of accusing me of being a sex maniac, à la John, my teenage boyfriend? Also, I thought we were casting off tradition here. Was it suddenly wrong for me to want and initiate sex? I tried hard to maintain my composure, but soon I was crying again.

“Remember back in Boston when I told you that I had never been monogamous?”

I sure did. Michael told me this the first time we slept together. I wanted to think the sheer force of my love would turn him into a one-woman man.

“Well, I don’t want to be monogamous now. I need more stimulation,” he said.

More stimulation? I felt like the wind had just been knocked out of me. Then he pointed to an issue of the
Berkeley Barb
that lay on top of a pile of papers on our table. “Have you seen the ads for swingers parties in here?”

It took me no time at all to realize that Michael was asking for an open marriage. My feelings were not just mixed, but at odds. In 1970, traditional marriage was one of the many institutions up for popular review. In truth, I was curious about exploring with other men. I was only twenty-five. I had finally shaken off my religious guilt and shame and I was living in the heart of the sexual revolution, the San Francisco Bay Area. Part of me was happy to dispense with the confines of marriage, but another part of me was terrified of losing Michael. But then if I refused, would I push him out of my life completely? I did a quick, barely perceptible calculation and realized that opening the marriage would probably offer me the best chance at keeping it.

That night as I lay beside Michael, watching his chest rise and fall to the rhythm of his even breathing, I thought about our life together, about what I wanted it to be, and about what it was in reality. I remembered one evening back in Boston when Michael, his friend Ron, and I spent most of the night talking in my apartment. Somehow we got on the subject of cheating. Michael asserted that if he was attracted to a friend’s girlfriend, he saw nothing wrong with sleeping with her behind his friend’s back. Ron fired back that that was a betrayal of the friendship, but Michael held his ground. If both people were interested, why should they deny themselves? There was plenty of reason to know that no matter how much I loved him or how special I imagined our relationship to be, Michael would never limit himself to me.

On a brisk Saturday night a couple of weeks later, we left the kids with some friends and headed to Concord, a bedroom community about fifteen miles east of Berkeley, for our first swingers party. Michael, who rarely wore anything other than jeans and a T-shirt, donned a pair of dress pants and a button-down twill shirt. He even had combed back his hair. I remember thinking that my husband looked like he was going on a first date with a woman he wanted to impress.

It was easy to recognize the house where the party was being held because the driveway and the street in front of it were clogged with sedans. Michael maneuvered the yellow submarine behind a mammoth Lincoln and a red Chevy Impala. I wanted to grab his arm as we walked up to the front door, but instead I kept both my hands wedged into the pockets of my skirt.

Michael smoothed out his shirt before he rang the doorbell. Through the frosted glass of the door window the group of people standing in the foyer looked ghostly. I was trying to make out the ratio of men to women when our host opened the door. Her hair was styled in a beehive and lacquered into place. She wore a blue polyester jumper over a white blouse that tied into a huge bow at her neck. I could detect a change in her skin tone along her jaw where her heavy pancake makeup ended. She took our coats and my purse and led us into the sunken living room. I quickly scanned the crowd, which I judged almost immediately as decidedly unhip. If Michael expected a grotto of lolling bohemian beauties he had wildly miscalculated and I was tickled because of it.

I turned to say something to Michael and discovered he was already mingling. As I made my way through the crowd, several men, none of whom I found attractive, ogled me. I felt like I was being looked at like a new piece of meat. We were supposed to be scaling the heights of sexual adventurism and all I could think was, Is this how a new prison inmate feels?

I poured a glass of wine and pretended to examine our hosts’ record collection. As I flipped through the rows of LPs in the cabinet next to the stereo, a few intrepid men approached me, but I was about as welcoming as a dentist’s drill.

Many of the guests had paired off and were having sex on the shag-carpeted living room floor. As I pretended to read the back cover of a Neil Diamond record, I noticed Michael out of the corner of my eye chatting with the one woman in the crowd who was his type. She was tall and slender and her dark hair hung down just below her chin. She had a pointy nose and chiseled cheekbones.

“Having fun?”

I looked away from Michael and found our host standing next to me.

“Oh yes. It’s great. Thanks for having us.”

“Looks like your husband’s met Nina. Did you know she just made her debut at the San Francisco Opera?”

“No, I didn’t. Isn’t that wonderful.”

“Yup, she’s got a gorgeous voice—a soprano.”

“Fantastic.”

I drained my glass.

“Time for a refill,” I said and walked across the room to the bar.

So, Michael was chatting up a diva. At that point I had some very particular ideas about how to raise his voice a few octaves.

I sat down on the couch and nursed my wine. I watched as the conversation between Michael and Nina heated up. He touched her arm. She smiled and ruffled his hair. They kissed. Before long they were one of the writhing couples on the floor. I told myself to stop watching, but I could barely blink. What really upset me was that Michael was doing stuff with her that he did with me. He was going down on her and she was wriggling with delight. I wanted to believe this was reserved for me, his wife, the one who was special enough to marry. Neither one noticed me staring at them. About four other couples were splayed out on the spacious floor, and at least two of them were having intercourse. People buzzed around as if it were normal to have to step over copulating couples to get to the other side of the living room. It was all so tawdry.

Finally, I pulled myself off the couch and went out onto the deck. I leaned against the redwood railing, the cool night air pressed against my burning face. I looked up at the moon and out over the hills. It was a big world filled with lots of people. Seeing Michael with someone else hurt, but I reminded myself that I, too, now had the freedom to wander.

I left the party without even speaking to another man, and I was pretty quiet on the drive back home. I knew the boundaries and rules I had been raised with would have never worked for me. They would have led to a life of misery. But should there be no boundaries? Was Michael’s contrarianism really just a guise for his hedonism, a convenient vehicle for selfish behavior? Once again I felt myself pulled in opposite directions. I was hurt. I didn’t want to share Michael, but at the same time I was curious. I wanted to redraw the boundaries. At this point, I just had no idea where.

I had always wanted four children, but with our tenuous financial circumstances Michael and I decided to stop at two. For now, we would concentrate on raising our two wonderful children with as much love and attention as we could possibly give them. Also, an open marriage was complicated enough. The last thing I wanted was to get pregnant by another man.

I tried taking the Pill, but it caused my mood to do gymnastics. One minute I was cheerful and content, the next I was crying and battling despair. So I opted instead for an IUD, called a Lippes Loop. It was painless and I didn’t have to remember to take a pill every day or endure mood swings the size of the Grand Canyon.

One day, about three months after the Lippes Loop had been implanted, I was in the shower and I noticed that the strings attached to it pushed out farther than normal. I pushed my finger up and felt something protruding out from my cervix. It was blunt at the end and about as wide as a toothpick. My IUD had come loose. I tugged on the strings and eased the Lippes Loop out of my cervix. As it exited, it sprung back into a double-S shape. I stepped out of the tub, toweled off, and called my doctor.

A few days later I sat in his office wrapped in a paper gown.

“Yes, Miss . . . Mrs. Cohen,” Dr. Sutton said as he looked down at my chart.

“Well, as I mentioned to the nurse my IUD—”

“Yes, I heard all about it. What is it you’d like me to do?”