What Do Women Want

and more futility.
    This was the situation as she walked into the rec center gym clutching the hand of Derek’s pretty younger sister. There, with about fifteen minutes before the jump ball of the season’s first game, was Derek, giving a shoulder rub to the Blazers’ captain. And there, farther along the sideline, was Thomas in a Blazers black jersey. This was something she’d never seen and hadn’t prepared herself for, her husband wearing the top half of the team uniform above his jeans—most of the coaches wore polo shirts or sweatshirts, as Thomas himself always had—and it was jarring enough that she didn’t see it precisely but perceived, instead, a semishapeless, almost blurry display of bloatedness and pallor: his shoulders and arms. She was already starting to remind herself that his misguided choice of shirt made no difference, that actually it was an endearing demonstration of caring about his and Derek’s team, when she watched a mother step down the bleachers, taking long strides from level to level in her high-heeled, ankle-high boots, and stand next to Thomas.
    His shoulders and arms, she recognized over the next seconds, and realized more fully over the following minutes, might be ghostly white, but they weren’t puffy in the least. An outline of bulky strength was emerging. The woman in her suede boots, the mother of one of the Blazers’ better players, started to chat with him, shoulder to shoulder, smiling. Whatever subject the woman raised—something about basketball, Alison assumed—it was plain that she spoke with affection. And as the minutes went by, it was clear that she was flirting with her son’s basketball coach, with a sturdily put-together man who had been drilling sound principles into her child, lessons imbued with larger meaning.
    Alison waited her turn. When it came, she pressed herself against her husband quickly from behind. She put one hand on his heart, told him where she wished the other one was and what she wanted tonight to be, and rejoined their daughter to watch the game.

Chapter Eight
    Four Orgasms
    S hanti, a former model who’d just turned fifty, took off her black boots, her black wrist bands, and her blue, red, and yellow Tantra Warrior choker. She slid off her dress, slid off everything, then arranged her body under a sheet and her blond head in the mouth of an fMRI cylinder. This was in Newark, in a Rutgers University lab with a wide glass pane dividing a pair of rooms. The giant cylinder was on one side of the window, and Barry Komisaruk, a Rutgers neuroscientist, and Nan Wise, a sex therapist and a doctoral candidate in his program, were on the other. They watched Shanti get settled.
    Over the next hour, she would masturbate in various ways. She would use her finger on the external part of her clitoris. She would use a dildo to stimulate her G-spot and her cervix. Clitoral, G-spot, cervical—with Shanti and their other subjects, the scientists were trying to get clear and distinct pictures of the brain regions that burst into activity during three different types of climaxes. Komisaruk, a cheerful man in his late sixties with a horseshoe of curly gray hair, designed and made the translucent streamlined dildos himself to facilitate internal stimulation while avoiding contact with the clitoral exterior. He bought plastic rods, heated them at home in his oven, and bent them to his specifications.
    Tantra Warrior was Shanti’s self-created profession. She’d once been on the cover of Elle ; now she made her living around Manhattan and the resort towns of Long Island, imparting erotic wisdom at soirees held by the erotically foiled, the erotically seeking. Komisaruk and Wise needed subjects like her who had no problem masturbating in public and amid the fMRI machine’s bleating and clanging.
    “When you’re about to have an orgasm,” Wise told Shanti through an intercom, “just raise your hand.”
    Shanti started on her clitoris under the sheet. Komisaruk, in khakis and a light blue button-down shirt, and Wise, in a crisp black skirt and silk blouse, were joined now by Wen-Ching Liu, a Chinese physicist and expert at interpreting neural imagery, in a white lab coat. They alternately glanced through the window and stared at a monitor on their own side of the glass, watching a map of Shanti’s brain light up in constellated dots.
    Komisaruk’s decades of orgasmic research had begun with his wife’s final stages of fatal breast cancer. They’d