The Loves of Her Life

Would you like to make love?” Stu called out to Marianne as she entered their apartment. She walked toward his office. It was mid-Saturday afternoon and Stu was still in his purple pajamas at the computer, a mug of coffee on the cluttered desk. He had a little wet mocha-colored stain under his lip on his beard, and his wiry gray hair stood up thinly around his large bald spot. He looked at her shyly for a moment, then looked back at the computer screen. His office was a small room off the entrance foyer, the glossy hardwood floor littered with unruly piles of papers and journals—she spotted Dissent, MIT Technology Review, the Hightower Lowdown. Beside these were stuffed canvas bags, a white one imprinted with SCHLEPPEN in black, a bright-blue one with multicolored flowers above the words GREENPEACE RAINBOW WARRIOR. Unframed photos of children and grandchildren lay scattered on the marble radiator cover.

Marianne had just come back from a frenetic brunch with her son, Billy, at a bistro on Madison Avenue and hadn’t yet taken off her coat. Because his wife was divorcing him, Billy was distraught. From her point of view as an ex-social worker, Marianne had always considered her son’s wife a borderline personality—from the human point of view, an outright bitch. And Marianne would have rejoiced that they were divorcing except that Billy was distraught. She had tried to comfort him at the same time that she was urging him not to give in to his wife’s outrageous demands: Lyria wanted the apartment and the country house and half of Billy’s business. “Only half?” Marianne had asked, but Billy was deaf to her sarcasm. He put away one Grey Goose after another while the poached eggs he’d ordered turned into hard yellow eyes and he kept making throat-clearing, half-gagging sounds that she hadn’t heard in twenty-five years, when he would get anxious as a kid. She had joined him in a Grey Goose herself, trying to smooth away her edginess, and since she rarely drank, she was still tipsy. Marianne wanted either to go to the gym to work it off or try for a drop-in appointment at her hairdresser’s where she would be cosseted. She could use some cosseting.

But she knew how hard it was for her husband to ask for sex, even after three wives; Marianne was his fourth. Why was it so hard? The best Stu had come up with was fear of rejection. She didn’t understand—if you were out one day, you might be in the next. But he was reluctant even to ask for all dark meat from the Chirping Chicken takeout place and also he tended to buy the first item a salesperson showed him. His timidity annoyed her. He thought he was just an easygoing, nice guy. Cooperative. And many agreed with him.

She had other resentments, some small. He never brought her flowers, although she adored flowers. “I buy you printer cartridges,” he’d said. “And flash drives.”

Some resentments were chasm sized. He didn’t make enough money, and what he made he was always giving to obscure political groups working for “social justice” or to one of his numerous importuning adult children—the major beneficiaries of his modest will.

And he dressed badly, and called her superficial when she complained, though lately he had let her go clothes shopping with him. Clothes delighted her. A tall, slender woman with prominent cheekbones, slanted blue eyes, and dramatic silver-white hair, Marianne attracted admiration—she did a little modeling for Eileen Fisher, one of the few fashion designers whose ads occasionally featured older women. She was proud of being, hands down, the best-looking of his wives. He loved her, she knew, in part for her looks, and so it wasn’t fair that he criticized her for caring how he looked.

And couldn’t he be even a little seductive, instead of asking for sex as if he were asking for a...