What Do Women Want

on, and that makes my body more focused. And meanwhile I’m fantasizing—it might be about other women, sometimes it might be about a man. Is there something wrong with me that I have to fantasize to be with her? I think maybe there is. I didn’t have to at the beginning. Anyway, I orgasm pretty easily and so does Jill, and most of the time we orgasm again, and it is a release. And afterward my head is emptied out, and even with everything my mind was imagining I feel closer to her. So sometimes I ask her, ‘Why don’t we do that every night?’ I say, ‘We should do that every night.’
    “Then a night goes by. Then another. I let them go, I make sure they go. I don’t know why. And then the nights after that.”
    2
    Susan wanted a low headboard. The master bedroom had banks of windows; she wanted the headboard to look right, not to block the panes. “And I wanted it to be good to hang on to during sex, which might have meant old-fashioned brass with bars, but that would have been too high. So I found a wooden one that went with a platform bed. It had these circle things, these circular openings, cut out of it.”
    The windows looked onto the suburban town where she lived with her husband. Below were their birch trees and the bird feeder he’d built for their son. At night, though, she recalled, “the windows kind of freaked me out. There were too many of them, and they turned into black holes of nothing. I think I must have been feeling something about my father. When he was dying, the hospice people moved him from his bed, which had a beautiful headboard by the way, with this blue silk upholstery, to a cot in front of a window that faced an air shaft.” He was in his early fifties and single; he and her mother had divorced years before. “I was in college, and when I would come back to New York to visit him, I felt like someone was going to come in and snatch him there. I knew he was going to die anyway, but I felt like he was going to die sooner. He seemed so exposed next to that back window. I felt like it was stealing away his virility. It’s funny, because there was another window in his apartment, a set of windows. And I remember nude sunbathers out there. They were on towels on a roof. That must have been east. The light that way was lovely.”
    With no transition, she said, “It was heartbreaking to lose my attraction for my husband. I couldn’t talk about it. I didn’t want to hurt him. And in a superstitious way, I felt like if I admitted out loud that it wasn’t there anymore, it would never come back. I just prayed that it would. I get the feeling that for women it goes away more quickly than it does for men. I get the feeling that women are more dissatisfied than men are. It’s the norm, but it’s not talked about, and a lot of women struggle with the reality that they’re not attracted to the spouses they’re supposed to be with for the rest of their lives.
    “We were very passionate in the beginning. But I think there’s this whole misconception about women needing to be emotionally invested. I think it might almost be the opposite, that in the first part of a relationship the attachment is the product of the attraction. Sometimes, in long-term happy relationships, maybe, sex ends up serving the relationship, but at first it’s the relationship that’s serving the attraction.
    “I don’t know, though. Is that right? We were friends before anything else. It wasn’t like I looked at him and thought, Oh, he’s incredibly hot. It was the way he sounded. It was the way he smelled. It was the whole person. But I definitely found him really attractive.
    “I remember one night our younger daughter came into our room. We’d just been starting to make love. I snuggled with her. I had no desire to be physically close with my husband. It had been like that for quite a while—that headboard never did get much use. She’s a really good snuggler, and those windows were threatening. I could feel their presence. I’d had curtains made. In the winter they were heavy velvet. We did have sex maybe once a week, but it didn’t reach me. My body would respond, but the pleasure was like the pleasure of returning library books.
    “I had a friend who used to say, ‘The longer you’re married, the larger the bed you need.’ And the thing about being repulsed by him was, I felt like my body was a room that I didn’t want to mess up. Unlike that openness in the beginning when my body was