The Best American Essays 2016 Part 13

I was brought up in these places. My grandma can be found in one three or four days a week. Even on the phone she has a suffocating hopefulness. All that she survives she does so "by G.o.d's good grace." I'm still not irreverent enough to tell her that her G.o.d and our Black lives are irreconcilable to me. I want to call more often. I wish she would just pray at home.

I'm anxious, ambivalent about the representations of daily horrors-man shot down, gun planted; woman pulled from car, her pregnant body slammed-because I neither trust America to live with its own memory nor trust myself not to forget to live. I mean I might try to forget in order to live. I might try. I'm often afraid. I'm not above trying.

There's a scene in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, after a hurricane hits and the body pile first peaks, when Julie-who took this vacation in the Bahamas in an effort to move on from the murders of the previous year-finally reveals to her friends that they're all going to die and the who and the why.

KARLA: How could you not tell me the whole story? I'm your best friend!

JULIE: I just wanted it to be over. I didn't wanna involve anybody else.

KARLA: Well, it's too late for that now.

They all stand in a downpour, distraught, on a useless pier.

OLIVER SACKS.

A General Feeling of Disorder.

FROM The New York Review of Books.

Nothing is more crucial to the survival and independence of organisms-be they elephants or protozoa-than the maintenance of a constant internal environment. Claude Bernard, the great French physiologist, said everything on this matter when, in the 1850s, he wrote, "La fixite du milieu interieur est la condition de la vie libre." Maintaining such constancy is called homeostasis. The basics of homeostasis are relatively simple but miraculously efficient at the cellular level, where ion pumps in cell membranes allow the chemical interior of cells to remain constant, whatever the vicissitudes of the external environment. More complex monitoring systems are demanded when it comes to ensuring homeostasis in multicellular organisms-animals, and human beings, in particular.

Homeostatic regulation is accomplished by the development of special nerve cells and nerve nets (plexuses) scattered throughout our bodies, as well as by direct chemical means (hormones, etc.). These scattered nerve cells and plexuses become organized into a system or confederation that is largely autonomous in its functioning; hence its name, the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS was only recognized and explored in the early part of the twentieth century, whereas many of the functions of the central nervous system (CNS), especially the brain, had already been mapped in detail in the nineteenth century. This is something of a paradox, for the autonomic nervous system evolved long before the central nervous system.

They were (and to a considerable extent still are) independent evolutions, extremely different in organization, as well as formation. Central nervous systems, along with muscles and sense organs, evolved to allow animals to get around in the world-forage, hunt, seek mates, avoid or fight enemies, etc. The central nervous system, with its sense organs (including those in the joints, the muscles, the movable parts of the body), tells one who one is and what one is doing. The autonomic nervous system, sleeplessly monitoring every organ and tissue in the body, tells one how one is. Curiously, the brain itself has no sense organs, which is why one can have gross disorders here, yet feel no malaise. Thus Ralph Waldo Emerson, who developed Alzheimer's disease in his sixties, would say, "I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well."

By the early twentieth century, two general divisions of the autonomic nervous system were recognized: a "sympathetic" part, which, by increasing the heart's output, sharpening the senses, and tensing the muscles, readies an animal for action (in extreme situations, for instance, life-saving fight or flight); and the corresponding opposite-a "parasympathetic" part-which increases activity in the "housekeeping" parts of the body (gut, kidneys, liver, etc.), slowing the heart and promoting relaxation and sleep. These two portions of the ANS work, normally, in a happy reciprocity; thus the delicious postprandial somnolence that follows a heavy meal is not the time to run a race or get into a fight. When the two parts of the ANS are working harmoniously together, one feels "well," or "normal."

No one has written more eloquently about this than Antonio Damasio in his book The Feeling of What Happens and many subsequent books and papers. He speaks of a "core consciousness," the basic feeling of how one is, which eventually becomes a dim, implicit feeling of consciousness.1 It is especially when things are going wrong, internally-when homeostasis is not being maintained; when the autonomic balance starts listing heavily to one side or the other-that this core consciousness, the feeling of how one is, takes on an intrusive, unpleasant quality, and now one will say, "I feel ill-something is amiss." At such times one no longer looks well either.

As an example of this, migraine is a sort of prototype illness, often very unpleasant but transient, and self-limiting; benign in the sense that it does not cause death or serious injury and that it is not a.s.sociated with any tissue damage or trauma or infection; and occurring only as an often-hereditary disturbance of the nervous system. Migraine provides, in miniature, the essential features of being ill-of trouble inside the body-without actual illness.

When I came to New York, nearly fifty years ago, the first patients I saw suffered from attacks of migraine-"common migraine," so called because it attacks at least 10 percent of the population. (I myself have had attacks of them throughout my life.)2 Seeing such patients, trying to understand or help them, const.i.tuted my apprenticeship in medicine-and led to my first book, Migraine.

Though there are many (one is tempted to say, innumerable) possible presentations of common migraine-I described nearly a hundred such in my book-its commonest harbinger may be just an indefinable but undeniable feeling of something amiss. This is exactly what Emil du Bois-Reymond emphasized when, in 1860, he described his own attacks of migraine: "I wake," he writes, "with a general feeling of disorder."

In his case (he had had migraines every three to four weeks, since his twentieth year), there would be "a slight pain in the region of the right temple which . . . reaches its greatest intensity at midday; towards evening it usually pa.s.ses off . . . At rest the pain is bearable, but it is increased by motion to a high degree of violence . . . It responds to each beat of the temporal artery." Moreover, du Bois-Reymond looked different during his migraines: "The countenance is pale and sunken, the right eye small and reddened." During violent attacks he would experience nausea and "gastric disorder." The "general feeling of disorder" that so often inaugurates migraines may continue, getting more and more severe in the course of an attack; the worst-affected patients may be reduced to lying in a leaden haze, feeling half-dead, or even that death would be preferable.3 I cite du Bois-Reymond's self-description, as I do at the very beginning of Migraine, partly for its precision and beauty (as are common in nineteenth-century neurological descriptions, but rare now), but above all because it is exemplary-all cases of migraine vary, but they are, so to speak, permutations of his.

The vascular and visceral symptoms of migraine are typical of unbridled parasympathetic activity, but they may be preceded by a physiologically opposite state. One may feel full of energy, even a sort of euphoria, for a few hours before a migraine-George Eliot would speak of herself as feeling "dangerously well" at such times. There may, similarly, especially if the suffering has been very intense, be a "rebound" after a migraine. This was very clear with one of my patients (Case #68 in Migraine), a young mathematician with very severe migraines. For him the resolution of a migraine, accompanied by a huge pa.s.sage of pale urine, was always followed by a burst of original mathematical thinking. "Curing" his migraines, we found, "cured" his mathematical creativity, and he elected, given this strange economy of body and mind, to keep both.

While this is the general pattern of a migraine, there can occur rapidly changing fluctuations and contradictory symptoms-a feeling that patients often call "unsettled." In this unsettled state (I wrote in Migraine), "one may feel hot or cold, or both . . . bloated and tight, or loose and queasy; a peculiar tension, or languor, or both . . . sundry strains and discomforts, which come and go."

Indeed, everything comes and goes, and if one could take a scan or inner photograph of the body at such times, one would see vascular beds opening and closing, peristalsis accelerating or stopping, viscera squirming or tightening in spasms, secretions suddenly increasing or decreasing-as if the nervous system itself were in a state of indecision. Instability, fluctuation, and oscillation are of the essence in the unsettled state, this general feeling of disorder. We lose the normal feeling of "wellness," which all of us, and perhaps all animals, have in health.

If new thoughts about illness and recovery-or old thoughts in new form-have been stimulated by thinking back to my first patients, they have been given an unexpected salience by a very different personal experience in recent weeks.

On Monday, February 16, I could say I felt well, in my usual state of health-at least such health and energy as a fairly active eighty-one-year-old can hope to enjoy-and this despite learning, a month earlier, that much of my liver was occupied by metastatic cancer. Various palliative treatments had been suggested-treatments that might reduce the load of metastases in my liver and permit a few extra months of life. The one I opted for, decided to try first, involved my surgeon, an interventional radiologist, threading a catheter up to the bifurcation of the hepatic artery, and then injecting a ma.s.s of tiny beads into the right hepatic artery, where they would be carried to the smallest arterioles, blocking these, cutting off the blood supply and oxygen needed by the metastases-in effect, starving and asphyxiating them to death. (My surgeon, who has a gift for vivid metaphor, compared this to killing rats in the bas.e.m.e.nt; or, in a pleasanter image, mowing down the dandelions on the back lawn.) If such an embolization proved to be effective, and tolerated, it could be done on the other side of the liver (the dandelions on the front lawn) a month or so later.

The procedure, though relatively benign, would lead to the death of a huge ma.s.s of melanoma cells (almost 50 percent of my liver had been occupied by metastases). These, in dying, would give off a variety of unpleasant and pain-producing substances, and would then have to be removed, as all dead material must be removed from the body. This immense task of garbage disposal would be undertaken by cells of the immune system-macrophages-that are specialized to engulf alien or dead matter in the body. I might think of them, my surgeon suggested, as tiny spiders, millions or perhaps billions in number, scurrying inside me, engulfing the melanoma debris. This enormous cellular task would sap all my energy, and I would feel, in consequence, a tiredness beyond anything I had ever felt before, to say nothing of pain and other problems.

I am glad I was forewarned, for the following day (Tuesday, the seventeenth), soon after waking from the embolization-it was performed under general anesthesia-I was to be a.s.sailed by feelings of excruciating tiredness and paroxysms of sleep so abrupt they could poleaxe me in the middle of a sentence or a mouthful, or when visiting friends were talking or laughing loudly a yard away from me. Sometimes too delirium would seize me within seconds, even in the middle of handwriting. I felt extremely weak and inert-I would sometimes sit motionless until hoisted to my feet and walked by two helpers. While pain seemed tolerable at rest, an involuntary movement such as a sneeze or hiccup would produce an explosion, a sort of negative o.r.g.a.s.m of pain, despite my being maintained, like all post-embolization patients, on a continuous intravenous infusion of narcotics. This ma.s.sive infusion of narcotics halted all bowel activity for nearly a week, so that everything I ate-I had no appet.i.te, but had to "take nourishment," as the nursing staff put it-was retained inside me.

Another problem-not uncommon after the embolization of a large part of the liver-was a release of ADH, anti-diuretic hormone, which caused an enormous acc.u.mulation of fluid in my body. My feet became so swollen they were almost unrecognizable as feet, and I developed a thick tire of edema around my trunk. This "hyperhydration" led to lowered levels of sodium in my blood, which probably contributed to my deliria. With all this, and a variety of other symptoms-temperature regulation was unstable, I would be hot one minute, cold the next-I felt awful. I had "a general feeling of disorder" raised to an almost infinite degree. If I had to feel like this from now on, I kept thinking, I would sooner be dead.

I stayed in the hospital for six days after embolization, and then returned home. Although I still felt worse than I had ever felt in my life, I did in fact feel a little better, minimally better, with each pa.s.sing day (and everyone told me, as they tend to tell sick people, that I was looking "great"). I still had sudden, overwhelming paroxysms of sleep, but I forced myself to work, correcting the galleys of my autobiography (even though I might fall asleep in midsentence, my head dropping heavily onto the galleys, my hand still clutching a pen). These post-embolization days would have been very difficult to endure without this task (which was also a joy).

On day ten, I turned a corner-I felt awful, as usual, in the morning, but a completely different person in the afternoon. This was delightful, and wholly unexpected: there was no intimation, beforehand, that such a transformation was about to happen. I regained some appet.i.te, my bowels started working again, and on February 28 and March 1, I had a huge and delicious diuresis, losing fifteen pounds over the course of two days. I suddenly found myself full of physical and creative energy and a euphoria almost akin to hypomania. I strode up and down the corridor in my apartment building while exuberant thoughts rushed through my mind.

How much of this was a reestablishment of balance in the body; how much an autonomic rebound after a profound autonomic depression; how much other physiological factors; and how much the sheer joy of writing, I do not know. But my transformed state and feeling were, I suspect, very close to what Nietzsche experienced after a period of illness and expressed so lyrically in The Gay Science: Grat.i.tude pours forth continually, as if the unexpected had just happened-the grat.i.tude of a convalescent-for convalescence was unexpected . . . The rejoicing of strength that is returning, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and antic.i.p.ation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that are open again.

Epilogue.

The hepatic artery embolization destroyed 80 percent of the tumors in my liver. Now, three weeks later, I am having the remainder of the metastases embolized. With this, I hope I may feel really well for three or four months, in a way that, perhaps, with so many metastases growing inside me and draining my energy for a year or more, would scarcely have been possible before.

Notes.

1. Antonio Damasio and Gil B. Carvalho, "The Nature of Feelings: Evolutionary and Neurobiological Origins," Nature Reviews Neuroscience 14 (February 2013).

2. I also have attacks of "migraine aura," with scintillating zigzag patterns and other visual phenomena. They for me have no obvious relation to my "common" migraines, but for many others the two are linked, this hybrid attack being called a "cla.s.sical" migraine.

3. Aretaeus noted in the second century that patients in such a state "are weary of life and wish to die." Such feelings, while they may originate, and be correlated with, autonomic imbalance, must connect with those "central" parts of the ANS in which feeling, mood, sentience, and (core) consciousness are mediated-the brainstem, hypothalamus, amygdala, and other subcortical structures.

KATHERINE E. STANDEFER.

In Praise of Contempt.

FROM The Iowa Review.

I buy the ice cream cone because I want a cold treat, but by the time I hit the underpa.s.s on my way west out of town the heat has cracked off the chocolate dip, folding it into my mouth, and what's left underneath is a white phallus, tongue-slicked into perfect shape. I grin. And deep-throat it. The way I do. The way I always have, since I first did by accident on the train out of Chicago some time in middle school, heading back to the suburbs, sitting next to my suited father in the ill green light of the Metra. I slid the long cone of cream deep into my soft mouth and drew it slowly out. I licked around and around and around its sides, plunged it back in. Then my father leaned over to hiss at me, "Stop, the businessmen are staring."

"What," I said. And I meant it, for an instant. Then I felt the color draw into my cheeks. And looked around. What I was tasting was so sweet.

West out of town means the Tucson Mountains, parabolas of dust and cliff. Out here, the warm pavement crumbles to gravel. The car bends through the last dusty strip malls and pops up over a ridge of saguaro cacti. White ice cream drips down my hands; I lick my fingers. I lick at the soft bow of flesh between my fingers; I lick my sticky palm.

This is what happens when I've just had s.e.x for the first time in a while: I get lit. My body will not shut up, wants more. I've come to the desert to concentrate, to read a book I needed to finish weeks ago. I've got to get out of the house, because we know what happens when a girl stays in the house.

What always has.

What always has since I became friends with Lexi Alexander in the sixth grade, since we spent summer nights in the air-conditioned cold of her parents' bas.e.m.e.nt office signed into AOL chat rooms. She taught me to "cyber," to type dirty things, to give dirty and get dirty in return, whoever it was out there, who they said they were, or maybe not.

A/S/L? we asked. Age, s.e.x, location? Were these really men with pants at their knees, or were they middle-school boys like we were middle-school girls, t.i.ttering, crossing our legs?

It was my favorite thing. The guttural clicking and grinding sound of the modem as it struggled to connect. The way we pretended to be just pretending. There was a language I was learning there. Once my parents got a second landline and I had my own AOL account, Aryn sent me a picture of six, seven middle-aged men, their faces red, their d.i.c.ks out, and one slender woman lying beneath all those hard c.o.c.ks. c.o.c.ks in her hands and mouth and c.u.n.t. And after I'd looked and looked and looked, I went downstairs to one of the poles that held up the bas.e.m.e.nt ceiling, and I held myself up by the crossbar and slid myself along the pole until I got that feeling. Pumping, my legs wrapped around the concrete.

It was a wildness in me, the way I needed this, the way I went back again and again. There was a magnet in my body that drew pleasure toward it.

But listen, I've lied; this did not start then. This started so early there is no start. I've been humping things as long as I've been conscious.

Yesterday I f.u.c.ked a married man. Have I graduated? He is a military intelligence officer.

At my favorite trailhead, the mountains round and swoop like a woman lying on her side. Cliffs drop off her back. The only sound is the high-pitched worrying of Gambel's quail in the brush.

I ditch my car, the only one in the lot, and follow the dry wash a few curves into the canyon. There's a shelf in the rock about six feet up that I clamber to, taking out a dewy water bottle. For hours I read, heat radiating up into my belly through the rock. A few people pa.s.s with their dogs, paws crashing into the sand. The light shifts, goes warm against the cliff walls. Then the light goes down.

At some point I text the man I have just f.u.c.ked, who is on a training base two hours away. Yesterday you could not have told me to drive an hour or two for s.e.x. It is the end of the school year, when papers are due and my grading stack piles up, and I'm leaving the country in a week. Yesterday I would have said I was busy. Now I am texting the offer to drive halfway, saying we could get a hotel room or f.u.c.k somewhere in public. I take a deep breath, put the phone away.

In the dark, the owls hoot at each other from opposite sides of the canyon. I can see one settle onto the crown of a saguaro, then swoop, big wings outstretched, to the next. A black whoosh. A bulk of a shadow. Backlit by the moon, I can see how she leans forward to hoot, flipping her tail feathers down for balance. Her body rocks when she hoots, hoo-HOO. My phone buzzes. The military intelligence officer's wife isn't sure right now, he says. She is in Georgia, the last place they were stationed. She thinks she doesn't want him to have s.e.x with anyone again until she can. I feel myself slump in disappointment, or maybe desperation. Not about him in particular but for the s.e.x, this brief burst of pleasure. The day before, I'd made him come too quickly by bucking.

These hips don't lie, etc.

He sends me a picture of his p.e.n.i.s, draped flaccid onto his eased-down athletic shorts: a consolation prize.

"Enjoy that while it's out for me," I tell him.

The thing about this man is, I don't really even like him. At lunch the day before, at a downtown restaurant where we sat by the long gla.s.s windows and slowly ate salads, I actually thought I might kill him. He was one of those people who had to be right. He talked a lot. He had a funny half-smile he used when he said inflammatory things, as though his being cute, being gap-toothed, could take me off my intellectual guard. Everything I said he needed to tweak, to correct. The bizarre opinions he held are not of importance here. I became blank and drank a lot of water. I tried to determine whether or not, once he shut up, the s.e.x would be good.

I did not invent the Hate f.u.c.k, which makes me feel better about this.

At that point, it had been just over two months since I'd had s.e.x. This was not the worst s.e.x drought I've experienced. Not by far. Still, I admit an edge of desperation. There is a kind of madness that sweeps over me when I have been celibate between six and eight weeks, an irritating, distracting hunger, a skin need. It becomes nearly impossible to get my work done. I sometimes pay for a ma.s.sage, just to feel someone's hands on my body. If the buildup reaches five months, I begin to make terrible decisions.

So while a younger, more romantic version of myself might have walked out, I waited. Online, our exchange had been marked by clear communication, the directness I prefer. It seemed entirely possible the s.e.x itself would be good, and that was the point. Not lunch. One's lunch-conversation skills do not appear to be particularly correlated with one's skills in the sack.

Besides, this is how it goes now. The single men my age are picked over. The ones on the websites whom I meet for a drink are disagreeable, unattractive. I wonder if this is how I am viewed too, on the cusp of thirty. I joke with my friends that I won't get to date seriously again until the first round of divorces.

In the meantime, I seem to be star pickings for married men. The ones who've been with their partners ten years or more, who stopped sleeping with each other, or who almost broke up out of infidelity. For these couples-working out their definitions of openness, cracking their relationships to accommodate s.e.x in new ways-I am something of a unicorn. Willing to sleep with men with wives. Willing to step into these secret arrangements, intended to infuse new energy into old patterns. Willing to replace, for all of us, what has quietly slipped away.

Some of my friends give me horrified looks when I say the word married.

This particular married man, monitored by no less than the United States government, gave me a fake name online, used a fake town. His picture, though certainly him, looked like a different him. Mildly irritating, but I understood. "If the military finds out you're having extramarital relations, you lose your job," he told me.

"Even consensual?" I said.

"Yeah, they consider everything an affair," he said.

"Like a don't-ask-don't-tell for straight people," I said.

Which is to say that my friends are not the only ones who conceive of marriage as an immutable thing. An immutably monogamous thing.

Some of them shake their heads, saying, "I could never." Meaning they could never do what I am doing. Others narrow their eyes and ask how I know, definitively, that the second person in the marriage has really consented to the arrangement. Often the wife's accompanying profile on OkCupid provides rea.s.surance. Sometimes it's the way a man answers these questions-the specificity of his answers.

With the anonymity of the Internet, though, it's frankly more likely a married man simply wouldn't tell me he's married. So in some way, I tell my friends, the fact that he even brings up his wife is a tally in his favor.

Which is all beside the point. What makes people more nervous, I think (even with the wife's consent squared away), is the foundation of such a relationship. To sleep with men already committed to someone else is to affirm our right to s.e.xual pleasure. There can be no other rationale. To f.u.c.k a man who cannot vow his emotional support, who will not meet one's family, who may not even be a friend, nods to the primacy of the body. To the body's set of needs beyond our systems of morality. The needs exist whether we are married or not, although I think many of us like to believe that exchanging "I do's" will somehow shift this essential nature. It does not. And if I am not encountering men I want to commit to-if the men before me are simply not those who echo back the life I am building, and if I believe that as a body I need and deserve s.e.x-a married man is no different from any other.

What I did like was his thighs, stocked with muscle, and the light hair barely visible beneath the collar of his shirt. What I liked was that gap in his teeth. He paid the check. And after that, when he caught my hand in a public park on the way back to our cars, when he leaned over and gently kissed me, when he asked me where I would like to go, tilting his head, something trembled inside me. I took him to my house.

Back in the wash, night settles. Owls. The flutish, descending song of canyon wrens. Stars brightening. The rock ledge, radiating heat. Bats flutter over the wash. Some bird makes a kind of vibrating sound, high-pitched, almost electronic. Then my phone buzzes. It is a picture of his erect c.o.c.k.

There are two stories here, one in which I get wet in a canyon and lie down on the warm rock and slip my fingers into my swollen self, or one in which I watch the owls. Both stories are true, although perhaps both can be exaggerations too-stories I tell to characterize myself for different audiences. For between those afternoons in Lexi's finished bas.e.m.e.nt and this buzzing cell phone, I have been many different people.

The owls, in some way, represent the life I wanted as a young woman, a sort of quiet existence, romantic and velvet-dark, in which s.e.x was a component of love. In which s.e.x was making love, unfurling quietly and slowly, with meaning, on thin air mattresses beneath the stars.

How does one go from this sweetness to the woman who f.u.c.ks married men she does not much like? I can only say that first it went the other way. How did the cybering girl become so sweet, locked down? Culture had its way with me. The girl who loved cybers.e.x did not go anywhere but inside, hidden behind heavy layers. For years I could sense s.e.x moving inside me, giant and hot, pulsing against the gates, and I did my best to put it away-through judgment, through restriction, using No as my measure of success. This, I know, is an old story. But what is buried sears its way through. If I go back to the beginning, none of this is surprising.

We a.s.sume these things do not go together, the owls and the fingers wandering south, but as Sallie Tisdale writes, "the planet itself is laden with s.e.x, marbled with my physical and psychic responses to its parts, made out of my relationship with its skin." She says, "How we are rooted to the earth through our bodies determines how we see other bodies, and ultimately the earth itself." What I think Tisdale means is that the romantic pleasure I take from this dusk-the depth of my presence, the sharpness of the details I take in-is not at all different from the way I enjoy my own body, the bodies of others. Which is to say, I am no less romantic than I used to be-only more openly other things too.

On the hike out, I walk with my headlamp off, fumbling by starlight. Even with my bad knee I can pick my way through the sand over the rock. In the side pocket of my hiking pack, my phone buzzes. He came.

I was not raised by swingers or prost.i.tutes but by midwestern Methodists sincere in the idea that s.e.x is appropriate only in the context of marriage-or at the very least love. To be fair, my parents, married for more than thirty years, are the kind of couple who make this seem easy. Growing up, my parents kissed in front of us. They spoke gently. They laughed. They compromised, each of their lives fashioned in balance with the other's. As a teenager, a friend of mine-whose parents fought bitterly-confessed that my parents alone were her model for a healthy love.

Still, I have begun to wonder whether my parents' devotion to the sincerity of s.e.x was perhaps just what they believed to be the correct parenting line. No doubt it was an ethics supposed to prevent my own pain and confusion. Perhaps like any good parents, they hoped to usher their daughters, three of them in total, through young adulthood without the kind of mess that s.e.x can inspire-a stew of self-esteem concerns, infection, and potential pregnancy. For this, I cannot fault them.

But as a grown-up I've begun to hear stories, and I'm realizing that even my parents likely diverged from love-based s.e.x at some point. Why, then, steer me so intensely toward the idea of abstinence until marriage? Were their own s.e.xual experiences outside wedlock negative? Have they, afterward, categorized them negatively because they feel like they're supposed to, while attending to the memories privately with nostalgia or a wry amus.e.m.e.nt? I wonder how many of us are pretending we fit, holding publicly to conventional moral standards while pursuing (or stumbling into) our true interests. As Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jeth discuss in s.e.x at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships, if we all pretend we don't have-or want-s.e.x outside the common narrative, the common narrative remains: as a thick, muscled force that makes people question their desires, their "normalcy." How damaging this is depends on the way someone experiences such secret desires, the way they judge their own ability (or inability) to deny such cravings. Years ago I carried a toxic shame, spitting hot judgment at others out of my anger toward myself. While of course there are those who truly want what's considered "normal," those people are not me. And so it is critical to me that I honor these desires, that I fumble my way toward them. I learn how this works; I find my way into strange s.p.a.ces with strange men. I set my own boundaries, I check my intuition. And in the end I get myself quite happily f.u.c.ked.

The wife changes her mind. We meet halfway, at the Sh.e.l.l station beside the main junction of a tiny town. When I pull up next to his red car, he looks over, grins. We meet in the s.p.a.ce between our cars and kiss like we love each other. He taps his pelvis into mine.

"There's law enforcement all over this town," he says when he pulls back. "Border patrol, sheriffs . . . could actually be hard to find a spot."

"We could try for a pullout somewhere," I said. "These are rural roads."

"Could," he says. He shrugs. Then he glances into the back of my car. "Oh, your seat's even down," he says. "Your car may be dirty, but it's got more room. You have a blanket."

"I do indeed have a blanket," I say. I grabbed it because I had a feeling this would happen.

"Dirty, but with character," he nods.

We head south in my station wagon, around the bend from the pizza place, through the bulk of the vineyards. The gra.s.slands are shining a sharp white in this dry season, in this late-afternoon light. He's telling me why he's hung over this time. It seems he's always hung over. He tells me about all the military guys razzing this one other guy, who's into Jesus, who's into monogamy. They were telling him he should find some s.l.u.ts with them tonight, because there's things you can do with those s.l.u.ts that you wouldn't want to do with your wife because you'd degrade her. They were kidding, he says-they just wanted a rise out of this guy-but I kind of hate him for even joking like this. The words roll a little too easily off his tongue. The Jesus guy, he said, left with two "morbidly obese" women. "Someone's gonna have a guilt hangover tomorrow," he sings. I laugh hollowly. I focus on the road.

If I were true to one part of myself, I couldn't be true to another part. Which is to say, if I want to f.u.c.k this man in five minutes, it's a good idea to be amenable.