OUR FIRST TIME WAS IN NEBRASKA. It was winter. Holiday Inn Express. We fucked once in the shower and again, later, while watching a documentary about glaciers. I remember snow fell from the night sky and we watched it from our bed. I remember the taste of your tongue (mint) and the color of the drapes (teal). When I asked what you remember, you said, “For one, it wasn’t snowing. We got married in September.” When I asked for more, you said, “I remember there was a lot of blood.”
§
After fifteen years of marriage, we still can’t go more than two days without having sex. I did the math, and this means we fuck approximately two hundred times per year. It means that, since we first met, we have fucked approximately three thousand times. Given this redundancy, sex should not feel new. But it does. Even now, as I write this, I am thinking about you, and how, instead of finishing this sentence, I would much rather slip my hand down your pants and make a memory. I would rather be inside you than inside this paragraph. You laughed when I told you this. “I can’t tell if you’re crushing on my body or justifying your book,” you said.
§
When I told the most brilliant writer I know that I wanted to write a book about having sex with my wife, she warned me not to. “Marriage is anachronistic,” she said. “Find a new subject.” I believed her. Then I ignored her.
§
I do remember the blood. I remember how, the morning after our wedding in Nebraska, we said goodbye to your family and started the long drive back to South Carolina. I remember driving all day and making it as far as St. Louis, where, parked outside a forty-dollar motel with a neon boot for a sign, you said, “Some honeymoon.” I remember having to ask the night manager for more towels. “There was four in there,” he said, without taking his eyes off the television in the corner that was showing a basketball game. “What are you doing you need more?”
§
When I told the second most brilliant writer I know that I wanted to write a book about having sex with my wife, he said, “Do you have a picture of her?”
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My favorite picture of you, which I still carry in my wallet, was taken six months before we got married. It is a shot that makes no attempt at verisimilitude. The angle (low and heroic) captures your profile as you recline on a porch in Santa Monica. You slouch in a deck chair, afloat on the backing haze of lemon trees. The angled jaw, the splayed hair—here is that woman who is keenly aware of the camera’s presence. Here is the smile that says, “I know how a thing endures.”
§
If marriage is anachronistic, then so are we. I have friends who are giving away their lives for ideas. We gave ours to a home.
§
“It’s not the sex that makes this unpublishable,” said my friend and sometimes editor. “It’s the happiness.”
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If you are happy in your marriage, it is a mistake to be overly conspicuous about it. If you are unhappy in your marriage, it is a mistake to be overly conspicuous about it. Ambivalence (once a cancer) is now a currency.
§
“Three thousand?” you said. “That’s being optimistic.”
§
In the early months of our marriage, we made it with the sense of feral desperation only youth comprehends. We made it in parked cars. We made it in public restrooms. We once made it in the corner of a community swimming pool while beset on all sides by a teeming mass of suburban families. This was all a high joy for me, and I assumed you felt the same. It wasn’t until later—years later—that you described the discomfort brought on by penetration. “I wouldn’t call it pain,” you said. “But it definitely wasn’t pleasure.”
§
The problem with ambivalence is that it doesn’t fuck with curiosity. The problem with curiosity is that it fucks with everyone.
§
Me: I wrote something today about your pussy.
You: Is that the word you used for it? My pussy?
Me: Give me an alternative that isn’t immediately awkward.
You: Trap. Call it my trap. Write an entire book about how much you love my trap.
Me: I’m going to stick with pussy.
You: Pussy is boring. Trap is fun. Trap even has metaphorical potential.
Me: Fuck metaphors. We’d never say trap.
You: Yeah, but this is them—not us.
Me: This is who?
§
Even now, as I write this, I am thinking about you, and how, instead of finishing this sentence, I would much rather touch my mouth to the lovely brown lips of your ineluctable trap.
§
I once wrote a book about childhood, but it wasn’t really about childhood—it was about dying. I wrote another book about teaching, but it wasn’t really about teaching—it was about happiness. Now I’m writing a book about sex, and (as far as I know) it’s about sex. It’s really, really, really about sex.
§
If a book about sex were going to be mistaken for something else, it would be mistaken for a book about power. The positions, the demands, the surrender—you’d think the story of fucking was the story of control. You’d be mistaken.
§
I love the nights when, in order to come, you need me to pull your hair and bathe you in slurs. I also love the nights when, in order to come, I need you to wear your black garter and order me around in the nameless imperative. The problem with tracking metaphors about power across sex is you end up dizzy from all the giving.
§
Desire that keeps time with theory is not desire—it’s choreography.
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“I know what I want,” you once told me. “About seven seconds after I’ve asked for it.”
§
Me: Will you let me come on your face?
You: Of course. But I’m warning you—you don’t want that like you think you want it.
Me: How do I want it?
You: You want it as an enactment of, possibly an homage to, many years of bad porn.
Me: Maybe. But I still want it.
You: And I’m going to give it to you. But once it’s over and you’re wondering why it felt so underwhelming, remember this.
§
Desire has as much to do with sex as plot has to do with story. In a certain sense, it’s orthogonal. In another sense, fundamental.
§
Before I orgasm, I like to announce the event, as if describing a future ecstasy somehow heightens its effect: “Fuck, baby…I think I’m going to come…Fuck, baby…I am going to come…baby…baby…I’m…” Afterward, I like to say nothing. I like to lie on my back in the dark.
§
Two realizations followed my coming on your face. One: inherited desires are destined to disappoint. Two: all desires are inherited desires.
§
Without pornography, sex is conjecture. With pornography, it’s pastiche.
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Before you orgasm, you like to say absolutely nothing, as if some invisible hand has crushed your windpipe. After you orgasm, you like to say, “Thank you for that. Can you please turn on the fan?”
§
After the first night in Nebraska and our honeymoon in St. Louis, we returned to South Carolina, where for three years I held a teaching position at an inner-city high school and you gigged part time as a nanny and part time as the manager of a hair salon, and the two of us lived and worked and fucked in ways that seem increasingly vaporous when viewed through the accumulated years. Remembering is not a stroke of inspiration—it’s an act of composition. We parse the past for our former selves. Sometimes the sex tapes help.
§
Your favorite sex tape is the one where I pick you up and slam you into the wall. My favorite sex tape is the one where you sit on my face while taking nips off a gimlet. There are twelve of them, each one an ill-lit reliquary holding bodies we might have otherwise lost.
§
They are not us. They only look like us. They cannot be us because they are busy being memories.
§
The first time I suggested we masturbate together to one of our old sex tapes, you said, “It makes me sad to even think about doing that.” But you did. And you came. Afterward, you said, “I don’t mean to brag, but before kids, my ass wasn’t too bad.”
§
Even with the sex tapes, we don’t remember fucking. We remember memories. We try to let that be enough.
§
Masturbating to your own sex tape is not narcissism. It’s nostalgia. I get off on your old ass. You get off on my old stomach. We come like true historians—high off the dream that nothing recorded ever truly dies.
§
You: Look at my tits back then.
Me: I can’t stop looking.
You: Fuck time, you know?
Me: So sneaky.
You: The cruelest of all traps.
§
In watching our sex tapes, I realize what a performance fucking used to be. In the last one we ever made, you are pregnant. Your nipples appear dark and enlarged. Your belly, which I grip as you ride me, is a shape too wondrous for metaphor. When it’s over, you walk over to the camera and, just before turning it off, say, “This one’s going to break your heart.” I wonder how you knew.
Dan Leach has published work in Massachusetts Review, Southwest Review, and The Sun. In 2023, Texas Review Press chose him for the Southern Poetry Breakthrough Award and released his debut collection, Stray Latitudes. He teaches writing at Charleston Southern University.
Photo obtained from Unsplash+.
