365 Nights (24 page)

He studied that point for a while. And I studied him. I was really intrigued by the fact that he was bothered—okay, maybe even jealous—that I called my old high school boyfriend. I mean, Brad Muller is pretty great and so much more than I deserve day in and day out (except when he refuses to eat breakfast for dinner) that to compare him with Alex is very nearly impossible. So on the one hand, it made me feel good. But on the other hand, it felt so, well, “high school,” almost silly and very unnecessary. Like when Marcie and her boyfriend would pick me up for high school in his white Camaro with AC/DC blasting so loud that I had a viselike headache
before
AP English with Mrs. Reinhardt (it was usually the other way around). If there was some emotion other than nosiness embedded in this gesture, then I am not self-aware enough to know what it is. So instead I just pinned it all on Brad and his stuff, which was silly, unnecessary, and very “high school” on my part.

So then I asked some girlfriends about it, and while I find this terribly hard to admit, they disagreed with me. “Just because you don't care about an old boyfriend doesn't mean you don't
care
about an old boyfriend.” Well, that was a bit cryptic. “Why did you call him? Why didn't you just Google him?” Apparently, Googling old boyfriends is practically an art so I dropped everything and immediately Googled Alex (as I suspected, nothing to note on the World Wide Web). Another asked why I didn't coordinate a “run-in” with him so I could check him out in person. As my girlfriend noted, “I ran into a Top Five All-Time Crush the other day and I thought, “Damn, he's still cute after twenty years.” I don't know why I didn't do a run-in.

And before I pull out all that psychobabble about how our pasts craft who we are today and blah, blah, blah, the long and short of it is this: Sometimes you just want to know. Sometimes you're just driving across town, listening to the Eagles and waxing nostalgic about a nice time in your life, and you just want to know how someone is doing. There is no ulterior motive or current flaw in your life other than the fact that you're human and you just want to know. And of course, there is no wrong in that. Certainly you can't divorce yourself from your past but it doesn't mean you regret the present. I suppose I could have Googled Alex (less embarrassing) or coordinated a “run-in” with him (more work) or simply let the moment pass without action (definitely my best bet). And perhaps I would have felt differently had I discovered that Alex was living some over-the-top life. But in reality, he wasn't. And if I had to say who had fared better after we “moved on,” I would have to say me (and that has nothing to do with anything except my own hubris).

Later I would tell Brad: “Honey, I don't know why we're even talking about this. But here is one thing I can tell you for sure—Alex is
not
having sex every day with
moi. You are.
” It's not like I was keeping Alex in the bullpen in case I needed to call him up later. No, we were a bad fit the first time around.

Nice save, Charla. Batter up!

I do have a friend who told me that if anything happened to Hubby No. 1, she has someone waiting in said bullpen. Now I haven't quizzed her at length on this second-string guy, but I do know that he's pals with her current husband, if that doesn't beat all. And in reality, this probably happens more than we'd like to admit. My mother always kiddingly claimed the only man for whom she would leave my father was Robert Urich. Remember him? He was in
Vega$
(I love that
$
) and
Spenser for Hire.
Unfortunately, he died in 2002, which was terribly sad for my mother and probably not so much for my dad, who surely had grown tired of her swooning.

Who hasn't thought, at the end of a really bad argument with her husband, what life would be like if only she had married the one who got away—especially a good-looking guy like Robert Urich? Who hasn't sat at the computer at work, taking a break from writing up that report, and Googled her ex-boyfriend (apparently every woman in America but me). While there is something seemingly uncomfortable about this strategy, you do hear of many men whose wives have been suffering for years from cancer, and when these poor women finally pass, the widowed men are dating again within months. While this may appear shocking and upsetting, the reality of living with death for years probably made the surviving spouse want to get back in the game, and quickly.

But sometimes that relief pitcher can be worse than the starter—I mean, they are a “backup” after all. One friend's sister got divorced, and she looked up an old boyfriend. This is the man she'd been dreaming of—they had a really passionate relationship with fights, and drama. And he was single, and they did get back together. After a couple of weekends away together, she thought, “What on earth was I thinking?” It had been that perfect romance in her memory when she was unhappy with her husband. She was sorely disappointed when she met up again with the real deal.

Perhaps people break up and make a trade because they think that it's going to be better with this guy, and the grass is greener. Sure, marriages break up for lots of tragically sound reasons: infidelity, abuse, the list can go on. But to kick out the starter because you're bored with him, or because he's not scoring well, that's just unfair. As a friend of mine noted on her second marriage: “I compare and contrast my first husband with my second husband all the time. Then I finally figured out the common denominator is me.”

I think both Brad and I would be devastated if we found out that the other had somebody, at least mentally, warming up for us in the bullpen. However, I do think if either one of us died, we both would like the other to remarry . . . But on the one hand, my friend does have a point and I'm paraphrasing when she says, “If my husband dumped me for a bench player, it had better be someone not remotely like me. Because if he dumped me to marry a better version of me? Well, I would be really pissed off. And besides, everyone backslides, so he'd really be marrying me all over again. So why make the trade?”

On an alternate tack, one of my friends says she's not interested in remarrying should the worst happen to her marriage. But she does have someone in the bullpen, only it's not a man. She would move in with a woman, and no, she's not a lesbian. She just thinks everyone needs a wife . . . even women. “I would live in a house with a female roommate who would do her share of the cooking, cleaning, and maintenance,” she commented. “Wouldn't you miss being married?” I asked. “Nah, you can always date. And then come home to a nice, clean, and well-organized house.” It does sound pretty good, doesn't it? I guess that's what you call a free agent.

While we're all dreaming of a world where men reject sports and instead favor a good Lifetime movie and a glass of chilled chardonnay, I recognize that this is never going to happen in my galaxy. Instead, Brad and I cozy up with some Bud Lights to watch some major sports drama unfold in Technicolor. While I may take breaks to read my book, thumb through a cooking magazine, or fold some laundry, we're there together. And if his teams lose, no worries. We're on to our game of doubles . . .

MAY

May Flowers . . . I Mean Showers

“You know, sweetie, I think I'm going to take a pass tonight, if you don't mind,” Brad said, hidden from view behind the pages of
Newsweek
.

As if I hadn't noticed.

The children are almost done with school. The garden is ablaze with blooming azaleas, and the crepe myrtles are getting ready to show. It's now eleven months into this year of daily intimacy. I'm feeling like I'm running a marathon and getting agonizingly close to the finish line. I go through moments of elation—a real endorphin rush that I have been able to make good on this gift to Brad. And then there are moments where I've hit the proverbial wall, and feel like beating myself over the head with the nearest flat iron or maybe a spatula.

While I have mixed emotions about what we've done, Brad's emotions have been pretty consistent—utter and sheer delight. It's not until spring that he's even exercised his right to take a pass (well, there was that New Year's Eve thing). To me, that's an amazingly long stretch of time, and it's likely that if Brad had offered me this birthday present and it was Day 305, I would have “passed” on the offer about 200 times now already, give or take a dozen. Ten months into this offering and the difference between the sexes when it comes to sex couldn't be more evident. It was an “aha” moment. I was beginning to suspect that men and women were so totally on opposite ends of the sex continuum that men would always take the opportunity to have sex, and women, after the first three years of a relationship, would try to avoid sex. It was comforting to know that after a certain period of satiety, and exhaustion, Brad could admit that he didn't need to have a “go” that night. Across the huge gulf of sex drive, a bridge had been built.

My girlfriends agree that men are so differently wired from women in this regard that we will never know what it is like to have that kind of drive. One friend, the mother of three children under the age of five, said, “My husband knows he's a frisky dog, and I'm not. I don't want to all the times he does— which is all the time. While sex is important to me intellectually and it's really important to my marriage, it's harder to turn on to it. He knows not to feel rejected because he knows I'm not wired like him.”

But a lot of men do feel rejected, my husband included. It wasn't until this daily gift that Brad finally admitted that my dubious dodging—while not an outright “no” to sex—still stung. “I know you're avoiding sex and it bums me out,” he later told me. “It's humiliating to have to barter or game for sex. Why can't you want it as much as I do? I'm your husband, for Pete's sake, not some cheesy college guy looking to get lucky.”

My best friend, who has never struggled with her weight, sometimes “forgets to eat.” She is energetic, athletic, a driving Type A who is always on the go—running errands, running a marathon, or running her three kids somewhere. Now I'm sorry, you can forget to pick up the dry cleaning, or forget that it's “Pajama Day” at your daughter's school, or that you had a 7:30 A.M. staff meeting that you slept through. But forget to eat? Never for me. But she is tall and thin and I'm, well, not—so maybe she has a point. I take such pleasure in food, in taking a meal, in cooking and preparing a meal, and in all things gastronomical, that “forgetting to eat” is very nearly impossible for me. I mean, God intended for us to eat—that is what fuels our body. And apparently, He also designed sex for that whole procreation thing. So yes, I will never miss a meal. And no, sex doesn't have the same urgency for me as feeding my hunger. But I wonder, is that how it works for men? Do men take such pleasure in sex, in taking sex, in thinking about and preparing for sex, that “forgetting to have sex” is very nearly impossible for them? Perhaps if I likened having sex with my pleasure in food, I could for a tiny moment—albeit very tiny—appreciate where Brad is coming from. Or maybe not.

The sex drive discrepancy causes many women to do a lot of subtle dodging. I present Exhibit A: Charla Muller prior to July third. One woman I know stays up until midnight so her husband will be fast asleep when she tiptoes in for bed. Another friend told me, “My husband wants me to go to bed at the same time, because he doesn't want me to wake him up when I come to bed, and he always wants to think there might be some lovin' on tap. I always take longer in the bathroom. And I found out by accident that he often will fall asleep while I'm still in the bathroom. Now I might take a little longer flossing my teeth, and applying moisturizer, to get out of having sex.”

But those hubbies still give it the old college try. My friend Wendy told me at a cocktail party, “If I don't have sex with him, he's going to start
rubbing
my back and
rubbing
my back, and pretty soon there's going to be a hole in my back, because he is just
not
going to stop trying. The very few times that I have said no, it's become a bit competitive and I know he'll just come right back at me the next night.” I asked Wendy what she did when he kept trying to have a romp with her. “Who was that woman, was it Dr. Ruth?, who said, ‘How hard is it to give just two minutes, just two to five minutes, for the life of your marriage? ' So I'll be like: ‘Okay, let's just do this, it'll be a relief for you, and then we can just go to bed, and I won't be lying there with you rubbing a hole in my back.' ”

My sister-in-law, the investment banker, has a more pragmatic approach to intimacy. Like any good business school graduate, she compares intimacy to the concept of the time value of money. The idea is that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow, because of the beauty of compound interest. So if we invest a dollar today, we make interest on it, and then make interest on the interest, and that dollar will be worth much more than a dollar saved next year. She has brilliantly correlated this idea with time value of intimacy. Namely that having sex today is always worth more than having sex tomorrow. We reap the benefits of having sex plus all the goodwill it generates for our marriage and in the eyes of our spouse. In turn, this accrues (like compound intimacy interest) and we now have a “bank account” of intimacy that can be reflected in less stress between partners, less anxiety, a closer relationship, and so on. An added kicker is the assumption that sex today is going to be better than sex tomorrow . . . and God forbid, if there's ever an accident, you know?