What Do Women Want

attractive that is to me. There he is in a way that has nothing to do with me, and my gaze gains a little bit of the gaze a stranger has on him.”
    None of this, she said, would lead to anything spectacular every time—or half the times—you made love as the years together accumulated. But sometimes, because the grasping had ceased, you might find yourself within a momentary, miraculous paradox, a brief merging after all. “It’s about looking at each other in the midst of sex and feeling like you just dove into this pool of somebody else . It’s about being astounded. It’s about feeling breathless with that dive. That union. It’s the fusion of two people with no differences in that instant. It’s a complete I-am-yours-you-are-mine-I-don’t-know-where-my-body-starts-and-yours-ends.”
    H ad it only been Derek’s failure as a player that deterred her from going to the Blazers’ games, Alison knew she would have given herself a quick lecture and been there on the sidelines. Had it only been his chubbiness, his hovering as towel boy, and the irksome praise of the other mothers that had preyed on her, she would have told herself that the compliments were probably sincere, in their way, and reminded herself that her son was in fact a wonderfully spirited and open-hearted child. Though she might have felt that it would be nice to be the mother of the Blazers’ leading scorer instead of the team’s avid helpmeet, still she would have gone to the community center every Saturday—or many Saturdays, anyway—with hard-fought pride.
    What plagued her, though, was that her minor issues with Derek and basketball mirrored her less ignorable issues with her husband and her life. She tried not to think about the parallels. And because she was a busy woman with a career as an editor that could easily crowd out other thoughts, she sometimes succeeded in keeping herself unaware. But she was also an analytic woman who reflexively drew connections. Thomas was pudgy and had never been much of an athlete, and Thomas’s obsessive devotion to teaching the box-out to elementary schoolers was about on a par with Derek’s alacrity with the towels—or would have been, except that Derek’s role with the team was just one positive part of who he was, while Thomas’s commitment to instilling basketball fundamentals seemed quintessentially Thomas. It seemed, more and more, to define him.
    Until two years ago, while Derek was a player, her husband’s faith in the character-building potential of his twelve basketball basics had struck her as maybe somewhat nuts but also admirable and poignant and slightly life-changing for the kids. But with Derek retired, the sight of her husband with his clipboard was a lot less sentimental. And his lengthy talk, over family dinners, about a new method for inculcating one of his twelve lessons—which might, for his players, carry over from the court and eventually help them to achieve thriving careers or happy marriages—made her feel that she might be serving a life sentence. Occasionally she imagined something devastating: that one day one of the other mothers would come over to her and pay her husband the same kind of cloying praise that she heard about her son.
    As all of this was taking place at the community center and in her mind, two other things were happening. Thomas had purchased some stretchy bands, some dumbbells, and a video, and was putting himself through a persistent and hapless routine in the basement. And she and her husband were leaving their Manhattan offices once each week to meet together with a therapist, who liked to assign them exercises. In one, they had sat facing each other, palms resting on the other’s palms, their breathing synchronized. Recently they had moved on to spooning, clothed, Alison behind Thomas, one hand on his heart and the other on his groin, or he behind her with hands positioned the same way, their inhaling and exhaling, the rising and falling of their chests, in gentle and exact alignment. They were supposed to let lust gather at its own pace, to postpone anything more sexual until desire coalesced within each of them, to feel no pressure to progress beyond this exercise, to understand that weeks might go by. They were supposed to simply experience the unity of breathing and allow this unity to permeate their hearts and genitals. But she, whose wanting felt extinguished and who was the target of the program, sensed no change aside from more