I love Rachel, but after fourteen years together and two children, sex isn\u2019t the same. Being inside her feels like inserting a finger in a nostril. Where I used to feel the grip of her, I\u2019m aware of empty space. And none of my solutions work: sticking pillows under her, though Rachel claims she feels like she\u2019s the princess on the pea getting fucked atop a pile of mattresses. Doggie-style, her on top, it\u2019s all the same. I feel shrunken, as I literally am\u2014according to my GP only 5\u201911\u201d now, no longer six feet. And of course death looms, still decades away but within sight now, a cypress on the horizon.<\/p>\n
No doubt these observations seem well-worn, just as my wife is well-worn, but I present them not as excuses but rather as context. Rachel and I fit well in so many ways, just not, unfortunately, in this most literal sense. There I find myself fitting better with a young, childless woman. In her late-twenties, Eileen is so pale she\u2019s almost amphibious. The blue veins networking her milky breasts make her look like some transparent creature, a jellyfish.<\/p>\n
But to be inside her is to be clasped in the warm grip of life.<\/p>\n
Outside of bed, we have only the blandest things to say to each other\u2014conversation as stuttering and out-of-tune as my wonky record player\u2014but who cares? I\u2019m not looking for a partner in any sense other than this specific one. I see Eileen as an exceptionally graceful woman I ask to dance at a wedding: she has that little to do with Rachel, with my marriage.<\/p>\n
Rachel and I are well-matched, in ways not necessarily forecastable in advance. For instance, our parenting is in accord. We are similarly delighted by and realistic about our children. Whereas Lillian, my ex-wife, is a deeply flawed mother, raising our daughter Annika to be an eye-rolling, gustily sighing teenager, with eyes for nothing but the small glow of her phone. After one exhausting visit from Annika, I complained to Rachel that Annika\u2019s mother was an odd mixture of neglectful and indulgent. \u201cThere should be a word for that combination,\u201d I said, and Rachel said, \u201cThere is: negligent.\u201d<\/p>\n
But then Rachel proceeded to downplay Annika\u2019s obnoxiousness\u2014\u201cIt\u2019s fucking hard to be sixteen.\u201d She\u2019s a good step-mother as well as mother, as well as wife. In so many fundamental categories, I am blessed to have my witty, clear-eyed Rachel, with the exception of this limited, inconsequential way in which we no longer fit.<\/p>\n
And I have so convinced myself of Eileen\u2019s inconsequence\u2014of her status as merely a dance partner at a wedding, that unthreatening\u2014that I\u2019m shocked to return from extracting leaves from our gutters to a transformed Rachel, red and puckered, like one of Caravaggio\u2019s vegetable-faced people. She shakes my phone at me: \u201cWho the fuck is Eileen!?\u201d On our bed she\u2019s put my roller bag. \u201cSo this is why you\u2019ve been so cheerful lately. This is why I hear you singing in the shower,\u201d she says, in a voice both wet with tears and dry as grit. \u201cNow it all fits.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I love Rachel, but after fourteen years together and two children, sex isn\u2019t the same. Being inside her feels like inserting a finger in a nostril. Where I used to feel the grip of her, I\u2019m aware of empty space. And none of my solutions work: sticking pillows under her, though Rachel claims she feels […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14862,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","writer-kim-magowan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14831"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14864,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14831\/revisions\/14864"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}