What Do Women Want

home, near the college where she continued to teach and a few miles from the silo company from which he’d retired, was a single-story brick house on a leafy, trim cul-de-sac. The street might have run through a thousand American neighborhoods in a hundred towns and cities, the trees young, the smooth blacktop driveways outfitted with basketball hoops. Inside, Passie and Nelson’s walls were decorated with landscapes: a nearby lake with a fisherman casting his line from a dinghy; a picket fence and horses bending to the grass of a field. Nelson wore a green golfing shirt tucked in tight over a loose middle and had a face and neck at once soft and strong, broad, generous. She wore a bright floral blouse and jeans that were slightly roomy over her slender, nimble frame.
    About seven years ago, and thirty years after they were married, they were on vacation with their children and grandchildren, and while the rest of the family wandered through a fairgrounds one evening, the two of them went out to dinner at a favorite chain restaurant and had one of the few brutal fights of their decades together. She had already left their bed at home. At first, she had begun to sleep in the den sometimes because she had trouble with insomnia, but the separate sleeping arrangement had become permanent. Once, in the years before children, they had spent entire weekend days in bed. Later, after they’d started their family, if they were in the car together, just the two of them, she liked to read him the letters from his Penthouse magazines, turning herself on. But by the time they were in their fifties, she joined him in what had become his bed once per week, on Friday nights, joined him for what might be only a few minutes. He tried to thrill her, tried in all the ways they had, years before, learned together, tending to each other’s bodies, listening to each other’s skin. But the surface of her flesh seemed far off to her, let alone to him, and even a perfunctory orgasm had grown impossible. He came; they cuddled; she left.
    And on vacation, her endurance disintegrated. All week she had felt entrapped by his wanting. With their children and grandchildren around them in their rented condo, she felt less than nothing in return. “This is not working,” she erupted at the restaurant. “I know you’re angry. I’m angry. If you come home one more week and say, ‘Oooo, it’s Friday night, you know what that means,’ I’m going to leave the house. I’m not going to have sex with you anymore. I can’t. I’m just not going to.”
    “I don’t think I said too much,” Nelson remembered. “I had felt this level of frustration in her for a good while, but we never talked about it. I knew something was going wrong, but I didn’t know what to do.”
    Back home, they bought and read books of marital advice. Defeat followed determination. When Nelson heard an acquaintance say that he’d visited a clothing-optional hotel in the Caribbean, he mentioned the resort to Passie, half-jokingly, as a far-fetched idea that might rescue their marriage. “When he brought it up, I realized that I was interested—interested but very, very uncertain. I wasn’t sure I could bare my body. I didn’t know if I had the courage. No woman is ever convinced that she looks good enough to do that—definitely no woman of fifty-something. We thought it was just nudity, but they have lifestyle weeks when it isn’t.”
    A month later, they were checking in for a weekend—in the front lobby, nudity was not allowed—and stepping tentatively from their room in bathing suits and, for her, a wrap.
    “But even before I reached the pool, I threw caution to the wind. My bathing suit came off. I buried it in my tote bag. The guests were every age from twenty-five to eighty. There were women I tried never to stand next to, because they looked so good, and there were women who didn’t look good at all. There were cesarean scars and hysterectomy scars and women who were totally out of shape, and I thought, If they can stand there and expose themselves, why shouldn’t I? Bodies aren’t perfect. The pool was up on a platform; you went up five or six steps to get to it. Every chaise lounge was filled with someone naked. There was a gal fondling someone’s erection while she was having a conversation with someone else. There was a gal going down on another woman. And these men were rotating the float with the zebra-hat woman on the water, stroking her arms,