Mrs Covet

Actual physical sex seems so clumsy and awkward to me these days. My own nudity seems rubbery, numb, this pregnant belly and thin weak limbs, rough shock of pubic hair. Sex works much more smoothly in my mind. I never think of anyone but my husband of course — that would be a real betrayal. I haven’t ever been unfaithful to Craig, and I wouldn’t. I always turn him into a stranger, though, when I do it: some guy I meet in a bar, or a library. He looks over at me and he just can’t help being excited by my huge butt (which I actually do not have).

So I do kind of secretly understand those gay men who say they just love to make it with strangers. I mean, I would never have the courage personally to go pick up someone I hadn’t even been introduced to, and I probably wouldn’t even like it, if it were real. Or maybe I would. But you know how some people are so disgusted with the idea of certain gay men and how they used to have sex with strangers before Aids; who knows, maybe they still do, but not all of them do – in fact the most solid couple I know, aside from me and Craig, are both men – Larry and Dennis, we had them over to dinner last week. They wouldn’t dream of picking up a stranger. I am totally non-homophobic – except of course when it comes to my sons, where it does make me mildly nervous, the idea of them being queers, but they’re not, I don’t think. It’s probably too early to tell, though you think I’d have an intuition.

Anyway the point is, I think there is something sort of heartbreaking about sex with strangers. But at the same time I believe absolutely in fidelity. Because I just can’t stand hurting people and I can’t stand being hurt. I never wanted a dog – even as a kid – because dogs die after ten or thirteen years, at the most, and then you have to live through that loss again and again with every dog. They make you love them, they practically become a person to you, and then they die. Or they get so sick you actually have to have them killed. We had a dog when I was a little girl, a collie, her name was Folly, Folly the Collie, and one day when she was old she got frozen to the ice outside. She couldn’t get up any more. It didn’t help warming her up; her legs had gone. She looked up at us helplessly and my dad and I took her to the vet and I held her while they gave her the injection and she peeked up at me with a worried, obedient expression. She knew that I was going to kill her, and she didn’t understand why. And then I was supposed to leave the room – or maybe I was scared to stay. I left Folly alone to die. So that was pretty terrible. And I have resisted getting my own boys pets for this reason. The price for love, we all know, is eventually loss, and it’s a stiff price, let me tell you. Romantic movies and books are waging a perpetual ad campaign trying to get us all to love with unbridled passion. ‘Love!’ they say. ‘Love! Love more! Abandon all precaution! Stop being so defensive! Feeling a chill in your marriage? Get a divorce! Marry the repairman!’

I haven’t noticed any of the authors of these propaganda pieces putting their home phone numbers inside their book jackets or on the end credits of their films, so that we can call them when we have to go to the hospital and watch the people we have loved with such abandon die. They offer no help as we witness our husbands, wives, parents, children, turn blue and green and crumple up like an old balloon; I haven’t noticed them offering to put away the garments of the dead, or those who have abandoned us for others. Where are these artists when we need them? Do they offer us any condolence whatsoever? No, because they don’t care about us. They don’t even think about us. They feed off of our yearning to be loved as totally as when we were at our mother’s tit, they grow rich off of our pathetic need to be happy as embryos, bathed in the warm bath of our mother’s blood.