Most of the time we start out with one of us devoting him- or herself to the other. When we try something in a 69 position, we always find that, while it’s nice to see all the parts up close, you’re too distracted doing things to enjoy what’s being done to you. One or the other! Not that we ever actually talked about it. It was one of those tacit understandings. Our sexual accord. While I’m tending to him, I always make sure that I can rub my vagina on something—otherwise he’s miles ahead of me in terms of being turned on. As I treat my jaw muscles to a rest and put all my effort into the whole two-hands-lifting-and-tugging thing, I sit with my legs splayed and my vagina on his thigh, getting messy from all the wetness. It’s such a rush—we work ourselves into something like to a drug-induced trance. It makes me proud, all the things I can do with my husband.
Beyond the electric blankets, there are a lot of other steps that I have to take before I can have sex. I’m petrified by the thought that our neighbors might hear us. So part of our foreplay is making sure all the doors and windows are shut. It’s the only way I can be relaxed. It’s happened only rarely that I left it to my husband and he forgot to close a window. But if I do discover an open window after all our noisy sex, I turn bright red from shame. It must be terribly annoying for the neighbors, though my husband constantly makes fun of me for thinking so. Of course, if I look at it like a therapist, it’s dead easy for him to play the easygoing role, because he can always be sure that I’ll be the uptight one in our relationship—and you take on the role in the partnership that’s available. I play the parts that are panicky, obsessive, ashamed. That leaves him to be the cool one, the exhibitionist. But I make sure that nobody hears him anyway. I close the windows, doors, and curtains. Sometimes at night I’ll go outside in my bathrobe, tell him to lie in bed with the light on, and double-check that nobody can see in from outside. Because sometimes I worry that our curtains are too thin. They’re made out of the same kind of silk as a tie, with a brown paisley pattern on them.
Sometimes during the winter, the electric blankets aren’t enough, so we get the infrared lamp Georg occasionally uses for his back pain out of our basement storage space and use that as an additional source of heat. It’s a big, broad, expensive model, and we’re lit up all red by it. It’s like being in one of those window displays in Amsterdam—which makes me worry even more that the silk curtains might reveal two sweating interlocked bodies to passersby. Georg knows I’m crazy. I always have to go outside and double-check that we won’t be visible, however the lighting is set up. How many times in life have I seen that people apparently pay no attention at all to the shadows a 100-watt bulb can cast through a window. A normal person might find it pleasing to be able to watch a woman undressing that way. But all I can think is, Oh God, I hope that never happens to me—I have to make sure it never happens to me.
I continue to cater to my husband. Sometimes he’ll lie there for ages and just let it all happen. Most of the time he lies on his back because for years he’s had back pain—and because I know him so well, I feel pain in my back, too, anytime he does. He hates to appear weak in front of me. The only reason we’re together is because I invented this idea of him being ridiculously strong. If I were to ask him how his back was every day, it would be emasculating. But even so, I want to be polite. I want to show that I commiserate. It’s the kind of problem that can come up when you are together with someone who’s older. But in the end it’s not about what I do, it’s about the fact that he thinks it’s terrible to show he’s in pain when I’m around.
I think it’s new for him, too, just to lie back and enjoy. He used to be with women he had to put incredible effort into pleasing, and there was not much left for himself afterward. For that, thank the women’s movement. But that’s not the way it was supposed to be. That only women get their way and men just have to see what happens. He loves it when I play his sexual servant. I repeat everything I’ve just described, first quickly and then at a slower pace. I don’t even have to think. Everything seems to happen on its own, like when you’re high.
When we’re in the middle of having sex, I lose track of time and space. It’s the only time during the day when I can just shut everything off. I really think it has more to do with the breathing than with the sex itself, but maybe it’s a combination of both. Contrary to what my mother wanted, I’ve learned through years of therapy that I am indeed a sexual being. I’m slowly learning to be conscious of my own desires.
Earlier, for years and years, it was just like the old cliché of marriage with us: the wife never felt like doing it and the husband did—constantly. But once the right buttons were pushed, I would always think, Why don’t I ever decide to make the first move? Why don’t I seduce him sometime instead of him always seducing me? It was humiliating for him to have to constantly ask, to get rejected—always to be the one who had to initiate things. It often led to fights. I would have been lying, though, if I said I felt like having sex. I didn’t feel like it one single time. I just went along as a favor to him—and because I knew our relationship would go down the tubes otherwise. Everyone knows that: if things aren’t working in bed anymore, it’s just a question of time before the whole relationship stops working, too. Of that much I am sure. But as soon as we’d get past the initial paralysis, I’d really get into it—every time. And every time I’d say to him, “Why don’t you just remind me how much fun I have, and then you won’t even have to ask!”
Thanks to my therapist, I initiate things myself more and more often. About twice a week I say, “Again today?” I can only be so selfless during foreplay because I know I’ll get the same treatment back afterward. No matter how much effort I put into pleasing him, I’ll never be as good as he is at oral. I ask him all the time whether he thinks what I do to him is as fundamentally good as what he does to me. It’s a dilemma. We’ll never know.
When I feel I’ve done enough as far as servicing him, I gradually stop. He always understands and then very gratefully starts to do the same for me. He spreads my legs apart and positions himself with his head between them so he can see everything. He examines me millimeter by millimeter, like a gynecologist. Do you say “playing doctor” when adults do it? That’s what it’s like. It’s best if you’ve showered that day. Because anyone who looks and smells so closely will pick up any impurity. He takes my hand and puts it on my vagina. I know exactly what to do. He wants me to get myself off for him. I never play with myself when I’m alone. My mother brought me up as a feminist. I think something went wrong during that upbringing, though, and I became some sort of sexual Catholic. I’ve never gotten myself off. The only thing I ever do that comes even remotely close to masturbating is a shameful scratch or two in my pubic hair. And in those instances, I think I’m tricking myself. First I think, Hey, something itches in my crotch, then I scratch a bit in my shortly cropped pubic hair, then I realize it turns me on, and I stop immediately. For whatever idiotic, archaic reason, I don’t continue. I mistake my own lust for some sort of uncomfortable condition because I just don’t want to admit it.
If it’s been a few days since we’ve had sex and I’ve done this secret scratching beneath the bedsheets, sometimes I get so horny it hurts. But I don’t want to admit that I’m horny, and think instead that I have a yeast infection or a bladder infection, or that I’ve contracted herpes, despite the fact that I’m totally immune to it—otherwise I’d have gotten it long ago. They say that about herpes—either you get it or you don’t. And I appear to be immune. At least I’m immune to something. These thoughts about being ill stay in my head until I have sex—when my husband initiates it, of course. Then all my ailments are pleasantly fucked away.
But when my husband wants me to, I put on the best masturbation act of all time. When he’s watching and encouraging me, I really go for it. I rub and flick and finger. He doesn’t look at my face at all. I exist only as a vagina. I am my vagina. He keeps his head between my legs and watches closely as I go through all the masturbatory