Colin Harrison: The Havana Room

A man whose wife apparently does not mind that when he suggests that they have sex he uses mock-witty metaphors involving speedboats ("get up on my water skis") or professional basketball ("drive the lane"). Yes, apparently Judith likes his conventional masculinity. It does not cause any rearrangements of her femininity. It is part of Judith's life, her life style, to be honest, which is not quite the same as a sofa or a minivan, but not utterly divisible from them, either. This is the way she prefers it, too, and any danger to their marriage will come not from a challenge to its conventionality- some rogue element, some dark and potent knight- but from her husband's sudden inability to sustain the marriage's predictable comfort. He, for his part, doesn't yet understand such things, which is to say he doesn't really understand his wife. He understands his law firm and his son and the sports page. He is, in fact, very similar to a sofa or a minivan. He has never lost or gained very much. Just dents and unidentified stains. His griefs are thus far minor, his risks utterly safe, his passions unremarkable, his accomplishments incremental and, when measured against his enormous advantages of class and race and sex, more or less obligatory. If he has the capacity for deep astonishment or genuine brutality, it is as yet undiscovered.

Am I too hard on him, is my description cruel and dismissive? Probably. He was, after all, handsome enough, quite well thought of, dependable in word and deed. A real workhorse in the office. A heck of a guy. Right as rain, a straight shooter, a good dude. His waist really wasn't one Sunday Times too thick. He was even reasonably fit. But I am allowed to distort this man, to seek indications of weakness and decay, because it makes his fate easier to explain. And because that man- you know this already- that man was me, Bill Wyeth.

I'd last talked to Judith early that afternoon, telling her I'd see her the next day. It was one of those marital conversations full of irritation and subtext. "Timothy really misses you," she'd told me. "He wishes you were here."

I'd thought about telling her I was taking an earlier flight. But I wanted Timothy's surprise to be hers, too. I'd been away for four days. My boy was turning eight, and he and his friends were set to go bowling, attend a Knicks practice, and eat at a midtown restaurant featuring waiters dressed like aliens. Then, stuffed with stimulation, they'd all sleep over at our apartment that night. And as I opened the door the signs of their wolf-pack activity met me in the hall: a dozen-odd sport shoes scattered over the floor, a spray of coats and hats, a pile of gift bags, then a finer grade of debrisjelly beans, baseball cards, sneaker-flattened candy, removable vampire teeth, balloons, plastic spoons, streamer paper, chocolate cake, even fake rubber fingers oozing fake rubber blood. With children, one learns to read domestic disorder and its patterns like a forensic investigator sifting the wreckage of a plane. Judith, I concluded, had corralled the boys into bed, then skipped cleaning up after them. A shadowed glimpse into our bedroom confirmed my guess; there Judith lay, exhausted in her sleep, her breasts rising and falling. (She hadn't nursed our son much, and they were still "the franchise," I always told her, which both disgusted and pleased her, and which, we both knew- and were to learn again- was exactly correct; at age thirty-four, her breasts still had market value- more, in fact, than either of us had dreamed.)

I gently closed the door- on this, the night my old life was to end- and peered into our son's bedroom, where all nine boys lay huddled and overlapping in their sleeping bags like puppies. Perhaps one sighed or tossed or addressed a professional athlete in intimate dream-whisper. I kept the hall light on in case of bathroom seekers (who can forget the hot shame of pee, the furtive, groin-clutching pajama-shuffle?) and drifted into our new kitchen, which had cost almost $100,000, and picked up stray plates and pieces of shredded paper tablecloth. The multi-colored chaos of the apartment suggested nothing so much as a hurricane passing over a small coastal town, leaving denuded trees and tossed pickups. No wonder Judith was exhausted.

On the new kitchen counter, a kind of grayish Brazilian marble streaked with purple quartz ("It looks- oh, it looks a foot deep!" our designer had moaned at the prospect of further insertions of our money), lay a list, typed by my secretary, of each boy's full name, his parents and/or stepparents and/or nannies, and the numbers of each (offices, home, cell); in addition, the names of certain boys had been annotated by my wife with pickup times, ear infection medication doses, etc. Innocent enough in its intention, the sheet was sociologically revealing. Here were the sons of some of the most prominent fortyish fathers in the city or, in the case of several second marriages, fiftyish fathers, and likely as not their equally prominent mothers. Every day their corporations and banks appeared in the global financial press. Citibank, Pfizer, IBM. This fact hadn't been lost on me from the beginning. Certain boys in our son's class were favorites of his, others not. But the favorites didn't correspond perfectly with the boys in the class whose parents might be cultivated. Perhaps I had suggested a few certain other boys be invited "for fairness." Perhaps? Of course I had.

Judith had just sighed, tallying the added effort and hypocrisy, the cost of arguing with me, the cost of not. "Okay," she'd breathed heavily, knowing my motivations. That was partly why she married me, no? To eat what I killed? Our son, meanwhile, had clapped his hands in excitement. He was a generous kid and so the party went from five to eight other boys. And here was the list of them, blurred by spilled juice, appended with a smear of chocolate icing.

I set it aside and prowled the refrigerator. Some cold pasta, eight-packs of butterscotch pudding for Timothy's school lunches. But nothing ready-to-eat for a hungry man. I called the Thai takeout place two blocks away and ordered up a hot, greasy mess that came in fifteen minutes, the delivery boy smiling as he took the cash tip, and then Bill Wyeth, yours and mine, spent the last minutes of his former life eating dinner, watching the sports scores, opening bills, and checking his e-mail. There was some consolation in all this multitasking and functionality, the servicing of diverse needs at the same time. Some, but not enough.

Bill Wyeth has one other need, so he steals into the bedroom just to check again. But Judith is miles under, her breath faintly foul, her arm flopped out on the sheet like she's just lobbed a hand grenade against his advance. She is not the kind of woman you can wake up in the middle of the night and jump on. Judith needs preparationon-ramps and gradual acceleration. They'd had sex before he left for San Francisco, but that was five nights ago, and he never partakes of the hotel porn, out of fear that it will somehow appear on the law firm's bill. Every click, every selection stored forever, a string of data trailing behind each of us like a spider's filament. He'd been hoping that getting home early might put her in the mood. But no dice. He needs release, a little shot in the dark. He needs some comfort. Just a little. Besides, he'll sleep better, have more energy tomorrow to deal with the work that's piled up in his absence, to deal with Kirmer.

Judith rolls on her back, breasts shifting, letting go her own wet, capacious breath, and he watches her, his hand idly massaging his groin. Is he frustrated? Hard to say. Bill Wyeth has, sexually speaking, reached the Age of Acceptance. He accepts the fact that he is faithful to his wife. He accepts his desire to plunder any number of younger women and a few older ones who cross his path. He accepts that this will not happen. He accepts that it could happen, given sufficient prevarication, rerouting of cash, and subtle adjustment of his schedule. He accepts the fact that his wife has become rather unmotivated in bed-"disinterested" would be clinical yet polite. "Lazy" would be inflammatory but true. He accepts the fact that it might be his fault but that it really might not be, either. He accepts the idea that marriage is the best arrangement for raising children, although it's pretty tough on the parents. He accepts the fact that many, if not most, of the women he desires to plunder are, no doubt, biographically bruised, and that their intriguing neuroses would quickly become tedious, and he accepts the fact that, all things given, Judith is a rather wonderful human being and that he is enormously lucky to be married to her. She is, above all, a devoted mother to their son, still feeling guilty about not nursing, but unconflicted by the outlay of time and energy of mothering. She'd wrecked her career to be a mother, and because she's accepted this, so has he. Also finding his acceptance is the fact that Judith- sweet, loving, busty, good and nervous Judith- has failed to understand exactly what he needs sexually, despite his patient, nonconfrontational description of what that is, and it is not a position or explicit behavior- no, not at all (well, maybe a few behaviors), but rather a kind of emotional largesse on her part, a kind of lingering generosity he has yearned for his whole life it seems and received only rarely. He accepts that she may desire all kinds of lovers who are not him, for it is clear- just walk the streets of New York- that human beings are infinite in their variety. She probably thinks about women, and she definitely goes a little weak around older, powerful men with full heads of white hair, and says she doesn't find black men attractive (but she has said this a few too many times for him to believe it), and anyway, he accepts this, too. Just as he accepts that out there, in the real world, not just the thin stratum of economic frosting where he resides, people are fucking and boffing and sucking and humping, all shapes and sizes, and putting things into each other- dicks, fingers, tongues, hands, fists, toys, vegetables, viruses, etc.- and that often they are made happy by these activities and often not. He accepts that there are women who require their men to be hairless, and men who desire their women to bench-press three hundred pounds. He accepts that a few radical lesbians actually inject themselves with gray-market testosterone even as certain gay men are stealing estrogen pills from their postmenopausal mothers. He accepts the "classical" feminist critique of men, male hegemony, etc. He accepts the "do me" feminist revision of those critiques. He accepts the terror that women feel at the idea of rape- real, mouth-covering, vagina-tearing rape. He accepts his own occasional, always unplugged desire to do so. He accepts that in certain moments in bed with Judith, he gets close to doing it himself. He accepts that this is a lot of baloney. He accepts that sometimes she loves, loves, loves this (his forceful passion! her helplessness!) and other times accepts it dutifully as a necessary chore to be endured, as transcendent as replacing empty toilet-paper rolls. He accepts that the she-males advertised in the back pages of The Village Voice often look better than the women. He accepts that he has wondered what it would be like to give a blow job or get fucked up the ass. He accepts that he will never know. He accepts that each one of us wants, wants so much, yards and miles and continents of affection and sensation and release, and that mostly we do our best to get it and our best not to get it, depending. We deal with disappointment, we sublimate, we masturbate, we accessorize, we fantasize, we sprinkle psychosexual condiments onto our gruel. Yes, he accepts this, he accepts all of it.

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