What Do Women Want

kissing her breasts, stroking her legs, licking her clit. I spent thirty minutes watching her.”
    “I used to bemoan the fact that I’d never have sex with another woman in my life,” Nelson said from his leather chair. As Passie cooked dinner on the other side of the counter, he listed two or three of the sessions he’d had with women at the events they’d been attending, at hotels in surrounding states, every few months over the last seven years. His tone sounded vaguely rote, bewildered. It wasn’t celebratory.
    “I wanted to throw away my inhibitions. I decided she was going to be my role model,” Passie said about the zebra-hat woman.
    “Looking back, I think she had a stronger desire for other partners than I did,” he said. “I think she felt it before that first trip.”
    “Subconsciously,” she said.
    On the table she set a basket of bread that their farming area claimed as its invention.
    “We still have sex with each other.” It seemed important, to him, that I know this.
    “Nelson is my husband,” she said. “I love him. He is the father of my children. When I say I love him, I mean it.” She explained that at the events, she made sure he had someone to “play with” before she went off to another man’s room.
    “I t’s a paradox that I’m laying before them.” Meana was speaking about a method she tried with just a few of her couples. Most of her patients weren’t ready, she said; they didn’t really want to take such risks. Her prescription didn’t involve anything like alternative lifestyle gatherings. But it required a kind of divide. It meant the surrendering of safety.
    She returned to a phrase, a dream, she had criticized before: “You complete me.” The seeking of a lover to embody these words; the pining for a love that will be unconditional; the search for a union that is absolute; the sense that our partners should give us what we were given—or what we believe we should have been given—by our parents; the craving for reassurance— tell me I’m special, tell me I’m beautiful, tell me I’m smart, tell me I’m successful, tell me you love me, tell me it’s forever, no matter what, till death do us part —these were, for Meana, scarcely more than a child’s cries. Yet most of us could not bear to give up on these longings. Most of us could not stand to relinquish the yearning for someone to be our fulfillment, our affirmation, because to turn away from such hope would be to acknowledge that we are, inescapably, navigating our lives alone, supported by love if we are lucky but, finally, on our own. Few of us want to navigate this way.
    “There has to be an Other for there to be sexiness,” she said. Yet in trying to save ourselves from our solitude, we strain to make our Others one with us. We flail; we grasp. We pray that selves will give way, that souls will combine. And eros, one of the forces we employ in our struggle, is crushed as we try to wring distance forever from our domestic lives. She wasn’t suggesting that couples shouldn’t turn to each other for comfort, for solace. “Love has to exist in different dimensions.” Still, for most of us, in her eyes, something was out of balance: the longing to depend, to be propped up and protected, was given too much power.
    With the couples who seemed willing, she liked to ask, “Why should she desire you?” or “Why should he desire you?” She demanded, “ Tell me what’s desirable about you. . . . And sometimes they look at me in a way that says, I can’t believe you’re asking me that. Sometimes they hear that as an insult, a slap. Sometimes my question hangs there for weeks. But slowly they realize what I’m doing. I want them to focus on what it is, to know what it is. I want them to work on what they see as desirable in themselves, to strengthen what they see as their strengths. And I want them to think about what they themselves wish for in a lover and try to turn themselves into that. I want them to make themselves better .”
    Her technique incorporated, too, tricks of disentanglement. Going out to dinner should begin with arriving at the restaurant separately. Date night should hold to the forms; it should mean a date. And chances should be seized to view the spouse apart. “If I can, I will have them watch their partner perform some function that has nothing to do with them. When I see my husband give a literary talk, and I’m in the back of the room, it’s amazing how