Love and Marriage

The title of Nava Renek's short story collection, Mating in Captivity, is a bit misleading if one associates procreation with mating and marriage with captivity. Many of the characters in these twelve stories are, indeed, married, and each story has its fair share of sex, either dramatized or narrated. But the vast majority of the sex in this book happens outside of marriage, in the wild, to extend the metaphor. The first-person narrator of the epistolary "I'm Your Husband's Mid-Life Crisis" insists, "I am like the Stature of Liberty who begs for humanity's hungry masses, but instead I say to married women, you in particular: 'bring me your oppressed, your down-trodden, your emotionally abused, and I will comfort him—temporarily—provide an ear to listen to his petty complaints about domesticity, kiss his parched lips, fondle his untended cock, and have hot acrobatic sex with him whenever our schedules happen to coincide.'" The sex act around which this story turns, however, is not one that occurs between the narrator and the husband but instead between the husband and the wife. The narrator, who signs her missive simply "T," tells the wife not about the illicit sex the husband is currently having with her, but the passionate sex he used to have with his wife, the sex T hears the husband talk about and sees him wistful for. The reader, positioned to identify with the Dear L— to whom the story is addressed, understands that the transgression of the affair is as much about who says what to whom as it is about who does what with whom, as is the act of aggression the letter embodies. Sex in these stories serves as the primary way characters both reach out for and lash out at one another, and coupling is as often figured as the destruction of marriage as it is used as a metaphor for it.

For this reason, a more technically apt title for the collection might be Sex After Drinking, Before, During, and After Divorce. Indeed, the characters in the title story, Gary and Cora, are married to one another, but the action of the story unfolds around the ultimatum Gary gives himself as he walks home from a one-night stand with stranger he picked up at a bar: either he'll have sex with Cora that night or the next morning, or he'll leave her. Sex that night is made impossible by the fact that Cora is passed out in bed with a half-empty bottle of vodka on the night stand and is made impossible the next morning by the usual week-day routine of preparing for work and bickering. In a moment of perfect literary irony, Cora remarks about the dating pool: "Do you know what's out there? Nothing but rejects and retards. At our age, everyone is either hunkered down at home with a bunch of kids or insane." The reader, of course, knows that Gary is already swimming in that dating pool—he knows exactly "what's out there"—but the irony is more nuanced than that. He knows what's out there and he is what's out there. This story, and the others in the collection, suggest that the lines between those who are married and those who are not, those who are coupled and those who are looking to couple in the carnal sense, those for whom marriage is a permanent state and those for whom it is a temporary one, are not nearly as bright as most would like them to be. And, perhaps more importantly, those lines are drawn in sand rather than in cement. While Sex After Drinking, Before, During and After Divorce would be a more accurate description of what happens in these stories, it would, of course, miss the irony, acerbic wit, and often bruising honesty of the title as it stands and the stories as they are rendered.

These are stories about dissolution and disillusion. Lydia, in "Suite Before Winter," reminds herself...