What Do Women Want

She was charmed by this hint of shyness and by the deliberateness of his buying the bouquet in the first place. They were deliberate together. Their dates lasted through entire nights, yet they postponed sex for two months and then made sure they weren’t at her house or his—he lived with his parents, too. They planned the event. He booked a room at a nearby resort. When they finished making love for the first time—sex that was about as brief as she’d expected, given how long they’d waited—her eyes welled up.
    He asked if she was hurt. She assured him she was not. He asked if she was disappointed. She told him that she was tearing up because she knew she would never have sex with a new lover again, and he, understanding that she was grateful, told her that the same was true for him. She did feel a level of regret that she kept to herself, an undertow of loss, but soon they were enmeshed again, and this time the lovemaking lasted, and over the next two years, until they married and moved in together, they conspired to find hours when they could have sex in their parents’ houses without causing their parents discomfort, and the conscious intent involved in this collaboration, the plain acknowledgment of their desire for each other, the absence of all coyness about their feelings, taught them that a particular kind of magic could be created through simplicity and candor.
    Boredom did not creep in behind this habit of transparency. Eros, for them, did not depend on suspense, on worrying if wanting was reciprocated. Some things weren’t possible with three young children. The likelihood of the children’s needs interrupting her and Paul’s nights meant that she no longer slept naked, no longer had the radiating pleasure of feeling her nudity as a constant provocation. The eruption of the children’s energy on Saturday mornings meant that those hours were no longer a time when her and Paul’s desires could sprawl. And lately his training had cut their evenings apart. But distraction and fatigue didn’t drain away lust. Their lack of guile somehow kept the attraction between them taut.
    “We’re really not subtle at all,” she said. “My line is, ‘Are you going to pay attention to me tonight?’ Or he’ll say, ‘Am I going to get any action tonight?’ And I’ll tell him, ‘Well, if you get off your study call and come upstairs before I go to sleep.’ Or we’ll agree to wake up at three in the morning.”
    She went on: “We never stop admiring each other. I’ll say, ‘You got your hair cut; it looks great.’ And he still tells me all the time how good I look, even after the kids. ‘Oooo’—this is one of his subtlest lines—‘I love you in those jeans; can I get in them?’ We make out in the kitchen. While we watch TV I’m touching him, or he’s touching my breasts—even if there’s almost no way it’s going to lead to sex. I love that he loves to see me in these tight gray yoga pants I used to wear in nursing school.”
    Then, abruptly, she mentioned something hidden. She was a baseball fan, and when she had trouble reaching orgasm, or wanted to make love with Paul but felt that arousal was remote and needed beckoning, she tended to think about the Yankee’s shortstop Derek Jeter. She smiled at the comedy of this confession. It was only sometimes that this extra help was required, she explained. “Jeter is the ultimate Yankee. Tall, all-American, everyone loves him—he’s it. He comes home to me after winning the World Series. He’s still in his uniform, and he throws me onto the bed and kisses me in a frenzy all over and thrusts right into me without me being really prepared for it. He just ravages me.”
    Yet even when she enlisted another man, she said, she felt little distance from her husband. It wasn’t something they had ever talked about. “We’ve never asked each other. I don’t think your partner needs to know. The fantasy is only a device. When you’re with the same person for a long time, it’s fine to use your mind to escape. I’m still with him, I’m still touching him. It’s still him .”
    4
    The woman in the zebra-striped cowboy hat lay on a blue blow-up raft at the shallow end of the swimming pool. Passie, watching her, was in her late fifties. The woman was on her back, one leg draped over either side of the raft and dangling in the water. Long, dark hair fell from beneath the black-and-white hat, a thin chain adorned one ankle, and, in between,