Sugar in My Bowl (21 page)

We put on bathrobes and opened the doors to the patio so we could look out at the sea right from the bed. I started playing with his penis. When it got hard, he pulled me on top of him so his mouth was in between my legs and I was facing the headboard. That position annoyed me. It was the only way he ever went down on me. I couldn’t concentrate on coming, because I was so worried I’d smother him. He always told me it was okay, he had been a competitive swimmer and could hold his breath. I knew that was part of the turn-on, too, being smothered by pussy and all, and I was all for that every now and then, especially after years of choking on cock. But now, my breasts dribbling milk, him gasping for air, it just didn’t feel sexy. I knew that after fifteen minutes of it, Henry would get pissed I wasn’t coming. Then he would ask what was wrong with me. We were headed to a bad place, so instead of trying to struggle through, I aborted, getting up and off of him. It was the first time I’d ever stopped oral sex in the middle like that.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Nothing, I’m just not into this right now.”

“What?”

“I don’t feel like having sex.”

“Why? Did I do something wrong?”

I sighed. He was going to make me say it. “I hate that position. It’s the only way you go down on me. Once in a while it’s okay, but that’s the only way you do it.”

Henry got up, pulled on his terry cloth bathrobe, and stomped out onto the balcony. I couldn’t believe he was acting like such a baby. I got up and went out after him, naked, saying, “This is my honeymoon! It’s supposed to be romantic. Why can’t you just go down on me like a normal person?”

“It sounds like you don’t like having sex with me,” he said.

“I just don’t like how you’re so passive. I don’t like how I always have to initiate sex. I don’t like how I’m always sucking your dick and doing everything you want sexually, except anal sex and I even do that, and you never go down on me unless it’s a special occasion and then you want me to sit on your face!”

“It sounds like you have a lot of problems with me,” he said, looking as furious and mean as he could in his fuzzy robe.

“I wish I liked it,” I said. “I hate how you make me feel like a prude or like there’s something wrong with me. I don’t get why you don’t put some effort into having sex with me the way I like it.”

“You’re crazy if you don’t think I put effort into pleasing you. All I do is try to please you.”

“I Googled face-sitting,” I said.

“You
what
?”

“The last time. I was just trying to figure stuff out. I typed that in. I didn’t even know it was a word. I thought I made it up.”

“Jesus.”

“Hundreds of sites came up. Mostly dominatrix ones. Women stabbing shoes into men’s faces. I know you’re not into that, so it just confirmed for me—it’s the most passive way for you to go down on me.”

“You’re insane.”

“But can you just tell me why you don’t try to figure out what I like? Is it that you’re too good-looking? You never had to try that hard? God, I just had a baby, I’m breast-feeding all night long! And then you want me to sit on your face!”

“Oh my God,” he said, “I want a lactating woman to sit on my face? That
is
fucked up.” He smiled. “That wasn’t exactly my fantasy growing up.”

He made me laugh. I couldn’t help it. I stood there on the patio, naked and laughing.

That night we ordered room service and watched a Lauren Ba-call movie on our TV. There were a few candles in the room, and we lit them all, leaving the doors open all night and listening to the sea.

In the morning Henry woke up with a hard-on and wanted sex again, but I was too sleepy, so he masturbated on my ass. Henry loved my ass. He said it was my fault, that I made him act that way, all sex crazy about my ass. It took him a long time to come, maybe because I wasn’t paying attention to him at all. He never used lubricant, he thought it was cold and slimy, but he rubbed so hard and long that when he was done, there was a sore on his dick. It hurt him so badly, he wouldn’t let me touch him for days.

Our sex life pretty much ground to a halt after that weekend, though there were a few more lame attempts. Some nights, when tiny Ivy was asleep, I’d be the one to go find Henry. Seek him out while he’d was working on a lamp downstairs to see if that former turn-on would do it for me now. I started kissing him. I was going to seduce him again, fuck my way back to my true identity. I’d sit on his lap, wrap my legs around him. But his mouth seemed so wet, his tongue heavy and gross, reminding me of the Popsicle ad that had turned my stomach. He reached out to hold me closer to him, his fingers pressing hard into my arm, which hurt. I pushed him off of me. “What’s going on?” he said, seeming frustrated and confused and angry with me too.

“I don’t know.”

“If you don’t want to have sex, fine. But this starting-stopping drives me crazy.”

“I want to and then I don’t.” I started to cry. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“It’s okay,” he said, stroking my hair. “That’s what lionesses do during sex, you know—they throw the lion off of them.”

“I feel defective,” I said. “Imagine if all of a sudden you were impotent.”

He nodded. “That would be hard. I mean difficult.”

I smiled, in spite of myself.

“Let’s just try to be patient,” he said.

“But how? What are you doing? Are you masturbating? In the shower or something?”

“Please stop worrying so much,” he said. “This will pass.”

Part of what was so mystifying to both of us about my alien body was that it looked just like my body. I’d lost all the baby weight immediately, just like my star friends in
Us Weekly
who waxed poetic, in cover story after cover story, about their victorious postbaby weight losses. Yet they had nothing at all to share about any lack of sex drive, postpartum, with their Sexiest Man Alive husbands.

In fact, no one had much to say about it. I read over all my pregnancy books, searching for information. In the
Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy,
which was supposed to be so candid and frank, there was this glib advice: “inebriate and lubricate.” Of course, now I knew what that meant. But the pregnancy expert only gave some lame, vague explanation for those recommended accoutrements, like feeling fat or unattractive.

Nothing I read described my problem, exactly. The books referred to exhaustion, or physical healing of vaginal tears. There was nothing about disliking his touch or disliking him. There was quite a lot of information about postpartum depression. That seemed closer to how I felt than anything I read about sex. But I didn’t really fit that either. I wasn’t depressed about my baby. I thanked God for my baby, otherwise I really would’ve felt as if I took a wrong turn. I wasn’t indifferent about Ivy or having any thoughts about hurting her or feeling like I couldn’t care for her.

When my friend Sheila called me, I finally told her what was going on with Henry and me. Just a few years ago, confiding in her would’ve been no big deal. But I’d resisted for a couple of reasons. Sheila wanted a baby so badly, I felt like I couldn’t complain to her about any negative side effects of the whole birth miracle. She had a miscarriage right around the time I got pregnant.

Another reason I avoided talking to Sheila was because of something she’d said that haunted me. She had told me once, crying, that her husband, Stephen, didn’t seem to care whether or not they had kids. That shocked me, because I knew Sheila was desperate to be a mom. When I asked her why she had never told me about how Stephen felt, she rolled her eyes and said:
Married people don’t talk about their relationships
.

It wasn’t just that my best friend said that to me. Now I felt it. To speak about my unhappiness or confusion seemed disloyal, a betrayal of Henry. It also scared me, because I needed him. But then I wondered: Was never speaking of it really so great for the relationship? That idea reminded me of not swearing in front of a lady or being careful not to upset an old man on the verge of a heart attack; it implied my marriage was too fragile to withstand
words
. So I talked.

“You weren’t into it,” Sheila said. “What’s the big deal? Jesus, calm down. It’s not the end of the world. Haven’t you ever had bad sex before?”

“No,” I said. “Not like that. I mean, I’ve been with inept guys. I’ve had frustrated moments. And I’ve been not satisfied.”

“Well . . .”

“But this is different. This isn’t like not getting something I want. It’s not
wanting
.”

“Welcome to married life.”

“Are you serious? Don’t joke about this.”

“Look, I don’t know how babies factor in. It probably takes a while to get your sex drive back. Call Alicia or Jennifer. Ask them.”

Alicia or Jennifer would have been good choices if my friends still talked about their relationships. Like me, they’d met their husbands and got pregnant quickly. I actually knew a lot of women my age who’d done that, maternity wedding dresses and all. Vera Wang should’ve designed a line just for my slutty generation of thirty-something women, careless brides who got knocked up and tied the knot like it was something that was meant to go together in one sitting, a well-balanced meal, meat and potatoes. Of those paired events, having a baby was supposed to be the big deal, the life-altering event. Getting married wasn’t really supposed to
change
anything.

“I can’t just call people up and ask if their vaginas hurt. You basically said that yourself. Wives don’t talk.”

“Listen, Juliet, don’t make such a big deal out of this. Just fake it, act like you’re having a good time.”

“What?”

“Just fake it. Everyone’s happier that way. Trust me.”

I felt so separate from her; she didn’t get me at all. It was like when I was in labor and felt all alone.

“They’re lots of things you can do,” Sheila went on. “Try fantasizing about someone else. It’s no big deal.”

“But I got married because I was in love with Henry. Not to fake orgasms.”

“Oh, come on Pollyanna. Lust fades. Everyone knows that. Baby or no baby.”

“But I don’t believe lust has to fade. I think it’s more complicated than that. I don’t think that’s a given.”

“Okay, so you guys are the exception,” Sheila said. “I don’t want to be a downer. Call your doctor about the pain.”

I called the advice nurse at Mayfield’s office. “Sex hurts.”

“It’s hormones,” she said. “Thinned vaginal walls. That will get better when you stop breast-feeding. Use lubricant.”

So I went out to buy a couple of kinds. I went to a sex store called Good Vibrations in the same neighborhood where Henry worked. I’d been there a few times before, but it all repulsed me now, the purple dildos stacked on counters and black leather harnesses and chains hanging off the walls. It occurred to me that maybe my sex disgust was a form of birth control, making sure you spaced babies apart in a healthy way. I thought I’d even heard something like that before, though attributed to not menstruating while breast-feeding. But if that were true, it seemed so harsh of God. And limited, linear thinking, confining sex to reproduction. I’d just given birth after ten months of pregnancy. Didn’t I deserve an orgasm?

So I bought three different kinds and even picked up some free samples. But Henry hated lubricant. When he groaned at the sight of my purchases, I thought back to the sore on his dick and felt hopeless. He finally gave in, but I felt like a controlling, nagging wife when I wanted to be a sex goddess.

And the thing is, when he did use the lubricant, it still didn’t feel good. Nothing felt good. I stared to wonder if I should fake orgasms like Sheila had said, just to get it over with. But that idea felt so bad and against everything I believed in. Lying about something so intimate was unthinkable. Except that I
had
thought it. And even if I didn’t do it, I understood doing it. That was new.

But if it were true that great sex was something you grew out of, not into, I honestly couldn’t believe no one had warned me. Or maybe the whole world had, with all those impersonal, ubiquitous clichés like “infatuation fades.” But hadn’t we also been sold true love? Didn’t that include passion? And if it didn’t, why had no friend sat me down and let me in on all this before I’d gone and married my sexy husband whom I had planned on fucking and maybe supporting for the rest of my life?

In an attempt to get my mind off my troubled sex life and disconnected marriage, I often took long walks or focused on potentially distracting and mundane tasks like paying bills. Henry still hadn’t made it to the AT&T wireless place to get a cheaper plan, so I decided to combine distractions: go for a walk with Ivy and get a new plan.

There was no line in front of the Asian guy with spiky hair who sat behind the counter. He had a cell phone in parts laid out in front of him, and his furrowed brow and row of tools made me think of the first time I met Henry.

“I’m late on my bill,” I said, sitting down in the swivel chair across from him, “which is really high. Can you take a look at the charges? Maybe I could get on another plan.”

“How high is it?”

“It was over three hundred dollars last month.”

He looked at me, tilting his head. “That’s high.”

“It’s two phones, my husband’s and mine. I could’ve missed a payment, too.”

“Still,” he said, shaking his head, spinning around in his own chair to face his computer. “Have you been buying anything on it?”

“Buying anything?” I repeated.

“You can get stuff off the Web and charge your phone,” he said.

“I didn’t even know that,” I said, thinking—so, that’s how Henry bought the vibrating chair. The baby monitor. All that stuff I was so grateful he finally purchased. “Maybe my husband . . .”

“You have no extra charges on your bill.” He shrugged. “What’s your husband’s number?”

I rested my elbows on the counter, looking at the tiny, dissected phone parts while he tapped keys.

“There’s something on your husband’s account,” he said. He turned the screen to me.

I saw rows and rows of the same five-digit sequence and across from each of those $9.99 going down his screen into infinity. “What is that?” I said. “I don’t understand.”