Blowout

You Don’t Get to Tell Me What to Do Ever Again

69 You Don’t Get to tell Me What to Do ever Again —Lester Burnham There was a time all my husband wanted was sex. I was premenstrual, too tired, in a bitch of a mood, then perimenopausal, or maybe even bored. He would lie beside me jerking off while I pretended to be asleep. Maybe he saw a neighborhood cheerleader suspended on the ceiling like Kevin Spacey did, which made me the uptight Annette Bening. Whom did I want to have sex with then, if not him? There were wild crushes I never let get out of hand even though one time I spent the night at someone else’s apartment but alone on a couch. My husband was oddly cool about it. He said I know you are having an affair, almost pleased, as though now he was off the hook to make me happy. The year before he left we avoided being awake in bed at the same time and, when we were, we lay on our backs hoping the other would take over. One night I turned on my side, facing the wall, remembering the way we used to kiss, the eager way all lovers kiss at first, then the way the kisses fizzle and shorten to a peck. I took a deep breath, tried to formulate something loving or seductive to say, but instead snapped, Will you please stop that! and my husband’s secret was out. He left the bed for the bathroom and the recliner 70 and eventually for another woman in another state, which leads me to today. Now that it’s too late, all I want is sex. I am the one jerking off as the hands of my imagined and real lovers, dead or gone, reach down from the ceiling sprinkling me with rose petals, red American Beauty mouths that whisper there’s no way to domesticate you, darling, and I pretend I can do whatever I want. ...