Twenty-first date

God, but I’m tired.

I’m sitting in the airport waiting for my flight home from Faraway City. D left very early this morning; but getting up early and driving her to the airport before going into the office for most of a day’s work isn’t why I’m so tired. It’s more that she got only a couple hours of sleep last night, and her tossing and turning and crying interfered with my getting much more than that. Crying? Yeah. Somehow last night we got into a huge argument about politics,of all the silly things. It’s still hard for me to believe … and I still don’t get why she wouldn’t just drop it when I said (more than once), “Look,I think this argument is going to turn out badly. Why don’t we just not care who’s right and talk about something else?” All I can say is that she thought there were fundamental moral issues at stake. So maybe it’s worth mentioning that if your boyfriend disagrees with you over this or that public policy issue, it doesn’t necessarily mean he is channeling the Evil One. He might just be unconvinced that the practicalities will turn out quite as rosy as you think they will.

Have I ever mentioned that D can be a bit high-strung?

By morning she had cried out all her combativeness. All that she could say was, “Hosea, I love you so much. I’m so sorry I ever brought any of that stuff up.” I told her, “D, I love you. It’s OK. It’ll be fine,” a couple times – well, no more than a couple dozen – and she let me dry her tears. And then we drove to the airport. So I guess it worked out well enough. But dear God it was hard to get there.
__________

But that’s not the story I wanted to tell.

All told, we had four nights together; and the other three were filled with food, wine, and sex. It had been about three months since I last saw D, and I had a very narrow window into which to plan this trip. Before this, Son 2 was working on applications to independent high schools: he is applying to Hogwarts, where Son 1 is going, but doesn’t really want to go there; he is also applying to two others that I might as well call Beauxbatons and Durmstrang. Anyway, the point is that until a few days before I left, I was busy at home helping him with his applications. And a couple days after I get back, Wife is going to have foot surgery and be immobile for a month. Add to this that my company is in the middle of a reorganization that may spell the end of my trips to Faraway City, and you see why my window was so narrow. Nonetheless, schedule it I did. D got a couple days off work and joined me.

I met her at the airport. She was in a bar right next to baggage-claim, watching a football playoff game. D is a big football fan – much bigger than I have ever been. She says the appeal of the game for her is frankly sexual: she loves watching muscular men running around in skin-tight pants. So I waited till that game was over, slid my arm around her waist, and invited her to steal away with me. We got dinner and a bottle of wine, then checked into the hotel. The sex that night was fast and urgent, the way it usually is the first time after we have been separated for a while.

We talked about all manner of things, as always, but kept coming back – that night and the next morning – to Wife’s conversation with CreepyOnlineChatGuy. What could this really mean? Why would she have such fantasies? D could have understood it if Wife had said that she found our boys physically good-looking but of course was stopped by the relationship. D herself has said things like that about her son – handsome boy, and if she weren’t his mother she’d think more than that. But Wife said no such thing: for Wife, the relationship was the only part she considered at all. What she found attractive about the idea of sex with Son 2 was precisely that he is her son. And how could her sexual wires have gotten that badly crossed?

It was, in fact, the next morning that I was able to see some light on the question. D was recalling the conversations she had had with Wife about sex back when they first worked together some twenty-odd years ago, and she said that there had been no trace back then of this disturbing kind of sexual fantasy. I thought for a minute, and then suddenly I saw it: “No, you’re wrong. The feeling that it grew out of was there even back then.” D asked me what I meant, and I explained.

There are a lot of ways of interacting with other people. One way, one kind of relationship, is characterized fundamentally by comfort. It is the kind of relationship you have with a friend when the two of you are close to each other, caring towards each other, and – most important – comfortable with each other. What is critical is that Wife does not, perhaps cannot, tell the difference between Comfort and Sex. That is, some sexual relationships are also Comfortable (in this sense of the word) … of course they are. But the overlap is not absolute. There are other sexual relationships which are not at all Comfortable. And of course there are plenty of Comfortable relationships which cannot be made sexual. But I remember even decades ago that Wife couldn’t see this. Even decades ago, she felt that somehow – if only – all comfortable relationships were also potentially sexual.

Once I put this together, it made sense of a lot of things. Most immediately, it explained why Wife would fantasize about sex with Son 2 – because what she really wanted to express was a comfortable closeness to him. But the converse is also illuminating: if Wife believes all Comfort to be (potentially) sexual, she also seems to believe that all sex should be Comfortable. This explains why, although Wife seemed for years to have a really strong sex drive, she has also seemed in strange ways to be afraid of sex – because so often sex isn’t Comfortable at all … because sex, good sex, is energetic, uncontrolled, sometimes violently so. It explains why Wife has always been so strangely, eerily quiet and unresponsive during sex, even when she was really aroused. And it explains why she accused me of rape one time – only once – when we fucked fast and hard, urgent and energetic. She never said “No,” and she even called me at work the next day to ask if I wanted to come home for lunch to have a re-run. But at the same time it spooked her. And five years later, when she decided to paint herself as a victim, she told me she had “decided” that she was going to “count” that one fuck as “rape” so she could tell her friends I raped her.

This conversation with D paid another dividend as well, besides helping me see something important about Wife that I had never seen in quite that way before. As I talked about the difference between Comfort and Sex, and as I pointed out (a little carefully) the ways that sex can be violent, D added as an aside, ”Oh yes, it can. In fact, that’s a direction that I would like to grow our own love-making. I like it when sex gets violent. I mean, there has to be an underlying layer of absolute trust that the other person won’t actually damage you. But what is exciting about violence it that it means the sex is out of my control. And when I’m no longer in control – when the sex is in control of me instead – that can be very exciting.”

Oh really? Violence, eh?

So the next two nights our fucking was more violent. Nothing structured or planned, exactly … not bondage, not domination, nothing you could give a name to. It was just as if we relaxed the brakes a little bit. D struggled as if she were trying to throw me off of her, while I wrestled to pin her, to have my way with her. Only, … in a moment suddenly she was the one who had pinned me, who was having her way with me instead. And a moment after that I couldn’t tell who had pinned whom, only we were locked together, struggling, fighting, frenzied … fucking blindly with everything we had. It was wonderful. And when we finally pulled our clothes on and went out to get dinner, D was floating blissfully on air, basking in a giddy afterglow that seemed to last an hour. Two nights in a row. Damn, that’s good stuff!

The other highlights of the visit seem pedestrian by comparison. We spent all day Sunday at the Faraway City Art Museum, looking at a special exhibit they had there, one that brought together pieces from a dozen different museums to explore a common theme. I went into the office Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We had great dinners every night, and lots of good wine. We fought about politics, God help us, and by the time we were done I was in no mood for sex Tuesday night. Maybe that’s why D was crying …?

But the sex, and the violent edge … that’s something to remember.