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Why
I Married My Wife
I
was, I suppose you could say, in a Prepartum
depression.
It started when my wife, Connie, decided it was
time to have a baby. I was thirty-one and she
was twenty-eight, a circumstance which, I
reminded her in my argument against the idea,
was no cause for alarm. But after she'd voiced
her ambition--and thereby made it real to
herself--the achievement of motherhood became an
obsession for her, and she would not leave me
alone about it. Finally, after several months,
my reluctance to enlist in her project compelled
her to resort to a not so veiled threat:
"Steven, she said. "Either we have a
baby now or I'm going to leave you."
All right, I told her, get off the fucking Ovril
then.
Now it wasn't that I never wanted a baby, and
not that, when I had one, I didn't want it to be
with Connie. Strong of character and will,
nurturing, quick-witted and sometimes uncannily
perceptive and discerning (not to mention
pretty), Connie was a terrific wife and more
than qualified to be an exceptional mother. The
notion of one day having a family with her was
hardly repugnant to me.
No. What troubled me, what troubled me to the
point of discombobulation, was a consequence
inherent in the making of a baby, a consequence
that I could not stop recognizing. Fathering a
child would tie me into the hideous plan that
Creation has devised for everything corporeal. I
would be, and by my own hand, replacing myself.
Once the deed was done, once I had accomplished
the only thing we know with any certainty
Creation wants of us, I would be, in Creation's
estimation, expendable.
If Connie, born Catholic but now earnestly New
Age in her faiths and sentiments, calmed her
fear of death by believing in reincarnation, I
had only the void to anticipate. And if I'd
always been keenly tuned to the perils of
existence, and lived in a perpetual state of
medium-grade anxiety as a result, my heightened
appreciation of my mortality destroyed any
semblance of internal equilibrium I could claim.
With Connie's demand, the sinister underside of
nature had turned itself toward me, and it
wouldn't turn away. Indeed, my now all too acute
and persistent consciousness of what it
ultimately meant to be flesh made a vista of
extravagant pullulation, albeit as manicured as
Central Park, grotesque to me. On the most
festive of occasions I would look up and see
what William James saw--"the skull grinning
in at the banquet." And I understood what
William Burroughs meant by "Naked
Lunch"--when I ate I perceived exactly what
it was on the end of my fork. I mean, I could
not listen to the most bathetic of popular love
songs anymore without hearing the primal terror
that its simple rhymes were, I knew now,
intended to blunt and mask. I felt altogether
fragile, that I could come apart in the
slightest breeze.
And much of the time I was also in a small rage
about the new burden I'd be taking on. I'm
referring not to the responsibility of child
raising per se, but to the fact that no matter
how large was the contempt I'd developed for
humanity over the years, having a child would
force me to give a shit about what the world
might be like after I died.
Seriously tipped over, I even began to think
about homosexuality; about, that is, the
solution it afforded to the problem of getting
your rocks off without spinning what Jack
Kerouac called the "wheel of the quivering
meat conception." Though a less than
appealing option for me, there were hours
when--oddly and perversely--I could not help but
feel...well...TITILLATED by the concept of
having sex that was unencumbered by procreative
implications.
In the petrifying absence of contraception, I
found myself avoiding sex with Connie. And when
I could not avoid it, my performance was
uninspired and frequently impeded by occlusions
in my circuits that would leave the both of us
in a condition of considerable frustration.
Worse, my very biology joined in the protest,
forcing me to suffer the embarrassment of a
sperm count that a lab, visited at Connie's
insistence, twice reported was "virtually
negligible."
Compounding these miseries, locking me deeper
into paralysis as it increased my sense of
urgency, was Connie's evident disappointment in
me; a disappointment that was evolving into
disdain. Terms of endearment like
"honey" and "sugar," for
example, were routinely being replaced by
"washout" and "loser." In my
timorousness, my cowardice, I'd become, in her
eyes, something less than a man. Recalling her
admission to me, shortly after we married, that
she'd bought into the myth about Jewish men
being extraordinary providers and great
fathers--and having long before disabused her of
the former illusion--I knew that I had no choice
now but to keep the latter one alive.
Then, reasoning that a change of scene might
turn the trick, Connie came up with the idea of
spending a few days in the country together.
When I agreed, she arranged for us to stay with
our friend Betsy, who ran a little print shop
out of her ramshackle house in a Catskill town
not far from Kingston.
With Connie's patience rapidly disintegrating,
it was, I knew, something like now or never for
me and I geared myself as best I could.
Scrupulously adhering to a plan we devised--a
month of wholesome foods and regimented
exercise; no sex or masturbation for a
fortnight; I made ready to win a war with
myself.
But arriving upstate, I felt like a German
soldier must have felt upon arriving at the
Russian front. It was the middle of winter, the
sky was low and gray, the snow drifts were
thigh-high and the temperature was near to zero.
It was not exactly an atmosphere conducive to a
successful completion of the undertaking at
hand--especially not when, in the back bedroom
to which Betsy assigned us (and which she used
to store old printing equipment and bound stacks
of yellowing posters and flyers), you could see
your breath and needed to wear your coat.
But as inopportune and unlikely as the setting
may have been, it was on our second afternoon
there that a child was conceived.
I should say, first of all, that I was feeling
not a little physically ill--and it wasn't only
that I was on the edge of a cold. A city
apartment dweller, I've noticed that country
people, who pay for their own heating oil, tend
to be flinty about using it, and Betsy was
obviously no exception. On this day, however, in
an extremely generous and woefully misguided
demonstration of support, she had pumped the
thermostat up to steam bath levels. The
oppressive heat, coupled with an unfortunate
effluvium of cedar, pine, musty furniture and
nasty chemical compounds, threatened my ability
to both keep my lunch and remain conscious.
In any case, with Betsy at work out front,
Connie, after giving me a thumbs up sign, took
off her robe and arranged it carefully over a
chair. Deliberately presenting her bottom to me
as she bent to the bed to pull away the quilts,
she followed this maneuver by abruptly turning
around and flopping onto the bed on her back.
Then, reaching for a pillow, she propped it
under her buttocks and spread her legs.
"Stevie, do you feel it too? It's as though
there's a spirit hovering near us waiting to be
born."
"Great," I said, removing my pants.
"I hope it's the spirit of a heavy-duty
bond trader who happened to have a coronary
while he was up here for a weekend. Please don't
let it be one of the local yahoos who ran his
pickup into a tree."
I entered her immediately--it had, after all,
been two weeks. But just as quickly I knew I was
going to wither. My deprived penis's rote
reaction to a welcoming vagina notwithstanding,
the gravity of the occasion continued to
undermine me--the longer I put this off, the
longer I had to live. Still, I had made a
compact which I had to keep, and I began to leaf
through bodies, shuffle through poses, postures
and configurations in my personal mental Kama
Sutra file--then, starting to panic and sweating
obnoxiously, to ransack my memory and
imagination. But no one and no thing I could
remember or think to want would keep me up, let
alone elicit he participation of my gonads. I
tried, with my hand, to STUFF it in. I would
happily have settled for a premature orgasm.
"Stop." Connie said. She squeezed out
from under me and, her hair trailing along my
chest and stomach, ran her tongue down the
length of my torso to the numb thing between my
legs.
Practicing Catholicism devoutly until her late
teens--and though she had still not permitted a
man inside her until she was twenty-three--less
so thereafter, Connie'd had more than a little
experience keeping boyfriends with her hands and
her mouth. In seconds, despite my mental state,
she got it half way up and we tried again. But
once more I evacuated her ignominiously and she
was obliged to root in me again. Ten minutes
must have passed before she raised her head. I
was expecting an expression of scorn. Look, I
was prepared to say, I'm sorry. This is really
out of hands. But Connie was grinning at me.
Crawling backwards a little, she reached her arm
under my legs and lifted them until they were
almost perpendicular to the bed. Then, holding
my haunches up and steady with both of her
hands, she lowered her head to my starkly
exposed ass and drove her tongue as deep as she
could into my rectum. Lingering there for a
while, she finally came out from under me and,
brushing it against my nostrils en route,
brought her mouth to my ear.
"You little Jew bastard," she
whispered hotly. "I wish you'd be the
lesbian you are right now because what I really
want to do is eat your pussy."
Score one for Connie's acumen and her
resourcefulness in an emergency.
"Harder," she was instructing me after
no more than a minute had elapsed. "Go
deeper. Yeah. Oh. Splash."
Cody was born nine months later, almost to the
day. Nature being oblivious to human
expectations of justice and symmetry, he had,
contrary to the circumstances of his conception,
both a proper allotment of toes and fingers, and
a countenance that was amazingly genuine in its
sweetness and innocence. I mean, there was
nothing unhealthy or freakish about him; nothing
that was even remotely DAMIENISH. By every
measure he was a wonderful specimen.
And me? Well, I was worn by then to a physical
as well as emotional nub--I lost fifteen pounds
during Connie's pregnancy that I didn't need to
lose. But not dropping dead with Cody's arrival
had a salutary effect on my nerves that was
almost immediate. I was still filled with
trepidation, of course, but--my panic
significantly less clamorous and debilitating,
my not-so-quiet desperation much quieter--it
was, relatively speaking, a manageable
trepidation.
Within just days of his birth I was, in fact, as
close as I get to all right again. |
