What Do Women Want

and he likes to sleep with something over his face. A T-shirt, a pillow, an arm, all three—I don’t know how he breathes. It’s kind of hilarious. In the mornings, I have to peel away layers to get to where his face is. I want eye contact.” She endured sex once a week but yearned for this every day. “I’ll find his eyes under everything and wait for his eyelids to open, and then I’ll find space for my body right against his.”
    She was transfixed by the tenderness of his gaze and tormented by the fact that her lust for him had waned within a few months of their starting to date; she sensed that his proposing might happen any day. She dreaded it. She was in her early thirties. She believed that she couldn’t afford to make the wrong choice, and amid all the truths she tried to weigh rationally, it was impossible for her not to compare her situation with Eric to the two years she had spent with her previous boyfriend. When she had dressed for Michael, she had selected her clothes while subjecting herself to a silent inquisition. “Am I a doll?” she had asked herself as she stood in front of her mirror, or as she lingered in a boutique’s fitting room, deciding whether to buy. “Am I a fantasy?” Michael’s preferences weren’t extreme, but they were pointed. High-heeled boots, a short skirt. Or tight jeans and a T-shirt slung halfway off one shoulder, sizeable hoop earrings, dark eyeliner.
    He was ten years older. And he was particular, though his requests were never demands. What she put on was her choice. He let her know, keenly, precisely, what he liked: the black lace bra through which her nipples showed. But the decision about whether to fulfill his wishes belonged entirely to her.
    The problem was that she wanted to fulfill them all, though his taste in clothes was not hers. What was she collapsing into? she had berated herself. Yet it didn’t feel like collapse. There was strength in sliding on the lace thong that matched the bra, in pulling on the jeans or skirt, the boots. He would be riveted. She had that power. An alertness spread through her body as she dressed for him. An awareness suffused her skin.
    With Eric, she didn’t have to accuse herself of any capitulation. He liked what she liked, and she counted this as a sign. When they went out in summer, she often wore a loose-fitting pastel green dress she’d bought on a trip to Guatemala. It was girlish, she knew, and she laughed at herself because of it. But Eric cherished this quality in her. To be who Michael had wanted required stepping off a precipice, dismissing the voice that warned her against inhabiting his wishes, plummeting over that edge. Women who dressed with urgent, ungoverned need for the desire of men could set off, inside her, a flurry of disdain, like an instinctive aversion to a weakness or wound. Yet whenever she walked into a restaurant where Michael waited for her at the bar, his focus seemed to pluck her from the air, midfall, and pull her forward. His eyes held a thoroughly different kind of constancy than Eric’s later would. Eric adored her. Michael admired her. She was a possession, the heels of the boots she picked for him taking her across crowded rooms toward her owner. The boots were like the frames and pedestals he chose for the photography and sculpture in his gallery. He had specific opinions about how she was best displayed.
    Her mind was already reeling by the time they sat down to dinner, yet she kept the appearance of balance. The display that pleased him depended on a degree of agility. In conversation and body she maintained dexterity, but when his breath or hand grazed across her in any way, or even when there was no contact at all, only proximity, she could become so frantic with need she grew almost angry. “If you don’t touch me right now, I’m going to scream,” she would plead silently. “Please, God, touch me right now. Please, God, something’s got to be done here.”
    She came quickly, repeatedly, when the dinners were at last over and they were in bed. The certainty of her coming guaranteed it; she didn’t have to doubt, so doubt never got in the way. Her mind never obstructed; it had been unspooling since the evening’s start.
    Michael’s effect on her had been all the more enthralling because of the way she viewed her own body. At the age of seven, anointed a flower girl for a summer wedding, she had worn a dress of pink flounce and lace trim with a pink sash and a