What Do Women Want

woman—who was blowing a whimsical kiss from the screen—without some mayhem to camouflage the long premeditation of his escape. Obeying a therapist’s advice, Rebecca tried not to beg her husband to stay. She lobbied through friends. She gave her husband a book about seeking spiritual fulfillment instead of chasing new love. But within weeks, she was a single mother who spent a good amount of time in front of the computer, comparing herself to the seminude picture, which she’d forwarded to her own email address.
    Rebecca—who was among the women I spent my time talking with, questioning relentlessly—had a talent for self-disparagement. This encompassed everything from her body to her career. How had she wound up teaching flute and clarinet to fourth-graders and never performing herself except during the intermissions at her students’ recitals? And how, she wondered further, had she managed to corner herself into this marmish existence in, of all places, Portland, Oregon, America’s city of hipsters?
    Yet her skill at self-denigration was matched by a fiery resilience. Increasingly, on her screen the image of the twenty-nine-year-old girlfriend was replaced by the home site of an Internet dating service.
    Gradually she had some dates. And gradually there was a man she saw as attractive and felt was kind, and—even before they slept together—she confided, over dinner in a Thai restaurant, something that had taken her fourteen years to tell her husband. She wanted to have a threesome with a woman. The discord and dissembling that ran through Chivers’s and Fisher’s findings weren’t her issues. Why she’d waited so long to raise her desire with her husband she wasn’t certain. Yes, some shyness was involved, but she guessed it had more to do with a hunch that turned out to be prescient: he didn’t show any interest. Probably, she thought, this was because having another woman in their bed would have made a glaring reality out of his lack of interest in Rebecca herself. In any case, her date agreed that a threesome would be good. They abandoned the topic there, began sleeping together, and returned to the subject a few months later. She said that she would leave the arrangements to him.
    He asked whether she had any criteria. She’d never been with a woman in a threesome or in any other way. Her wishes were specific. Hair color different from her own. Not too tall. In decent shape. White or Latina. And—a factor she’d been fixated on for years—large breasts. C-cups, at a minimum, as long as they were real.
    She and her boyfriend joked that she was as male as any caricature of a man. Because he’d never done anything like this before, it took him a while, but eventually he presented her with possibilities. He showed her a photograph from a casual connections site, a woman Rebecca found herself fantasizing about right away. But the emailing with this candidate flickered, and the chance faded. They debated whether to hire an escort. Periodically during this process of false starts, Rebecca was seized by fear: what if the woman saw her as old, repellent? But her boyfriend reassured her, and her desire was louder in her mind than her worry, and as they shifted toward the idea of renting someone, she reminded herself that her own attractiveness simply wasn’t supposed to matter.
    At last, with a babysitter taking care of her children, they waited at his apartment for the arrival of an escort he’d chosen from row after row of thumbnail images online. Wanting to be welcoming hosts and to soften the prostitution-like aspects of hiring a prostitute, they had lit tea candles and chilled a nice bottle of wine. When the escort rang the doorbell, though, and when Rebecca and her boyfriend glanced out the living room window, the harsher qualities of the situation became more difficult to ignore.
    Despite her high price, the woman was homely and built along the lines of a lumpy block. Rebecca whispered to her boyfriend that maybe the homeliness was due to the glare of his porch light, that all would be okay once they opened the door and began. She felt relieved, meanwhile, that she wouldn’t have to be concerned about her own looks. But when they opened the door and the escort stepped quietly, even timidly, into the vestibule, with the manner more of a housemaid than a call girl, the trouble did not improve. The woman appeared to be around ten years older than Rebecca. And now Rebecca was calculating at