Epistolary Evidence in the Death of Sex

The wife wouldn’t understand if I joined a dating service. At least, I wouldn’t think so. And that’s how she’d think of it: a dating service. Any normal person would. I know I would, if she did it.

But it’s not a date I’m looking for, just correspondence. I haven’t corresponded with anyone in what seems like a lifetime, like somebody else’s lifetime. Least of all the wife. If I did join a service, I’m sure I could never keep it from her. I’m a poor keeper of secrets and mysteries. I sometimes forget to take the dirty movies out of the DVD player when I’m done, though I can usually be counted on to dispose of the tissues. If I joined, she’d know. She’d see the credit card charge, or stumble across an email. And if I could explain it to her, really tell her the truth, then I wouldn’t need a dating service at all.

It’s only been three days, and I’m already going crazy. How about you? I can’t wait for spring semester to start. Did I really live here? It seems like years, not months. Every night, my mom asks me where I’m going and when I’ll be back. I don’t know how she survived an entire semester without knowing what time I went to bed! I miss you and all my friends so much, I can’t wait for Christmas to be over!

While she was working late, I decided to do a little research. No, that’s not true. I decided days before and was waiting, waiting. The search engine was waiting, too. If it remembered me, and maybe it did, it would expect any moment to fetch me back pictures of naked celebrities: a flash of white panties exiting the limo, grainy nipples on a European beach. The cursor was ready, and even patient. It blinked, blinked, blinked, and I watched it with my fingers on the keyboard. I got up and went to the bathroom. I came back, and it was still blinking, still patient and perhaps non-judgmental. I went to the kitchen and drank a beer in front of the open refrigerator door, almost hearing the metronomic patience of the prompt as it waited in the other room. I drank two more beers that way. Finally I sat down and typed “pen pal.” “Submit,” it said. So I did.

Surprise! I hope you use your Western Civ book today. Otherwise, when you sell it back to the bookstore, some guy next year will find a little love note inside, no extra charge! I wanted to think about you thinking about me today, and smiling. Are you still smiling? I can’t seem to stop. You said you never thought of us except as friends. You said you’re no smoothie. Margaritas and a massage after work? You can’t fool me, that was no innocent offer! What did you think would happen? Not that I’m complaining!

“Did you mean ‘penpal’?” it asked me snobbishly. I’m sure it’s two words, really, but I agreed. “Penpal” was indeed what I meant. I’d even thank it for correcting me, if that’s what it wanted. There’s no profit, I’ve learned, in arguing with The Internet.

Quite pleased with itself, it presented me a list of 124,825 web pages for people seeking the joys of correspondence. I clicked on the first, then went back to the second, then to the third.

I know you need the overtime if you’re going to save enough to get back into school, but I missed our little meeting this morning. With you working nights, we get so little time together. Five minutes on a subway platform and a kiss goodbye. I think about it all day. It seems so clandestine, meeting in the subway, that I almost feel like we’re having an affair. I wait with all those people who don’t know about us, don’t know that I’m waiting for you. My heart flutters a little more with each train that comes in. Then you’re there, holding my hand – then my train comes – too long for yours, too soon for mine! We steal a quick kiss, and we’re off in our different directions again. I think about those minutes all day long, waiting for the next one. If only our trains crossed in the evenings, too, I’d have two kisses a day to keep the cold, cold wind from chapping my lips!

Dating services, mostly. As I expected. Friendship was usually third or fourth on the list of goals the sample satisfied customers had for their foray into the world of correspondence. It seems like people would want to start with friendship. That’s what we did, a hundred years ago, when we met. I forgot all of that, the beginning. I remembered the Story, the Genesis Tale, the history become mythology, but I forgot the experience itself until I found the box in the garage. It had all of them, His and Hers, the letters, the notes, the cards. Our correspondence.

“If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ‘twas but a dream of thee.”

I awoke with a smile, pleasantly surprised as always to find you there, curled up next to me. You were still asleep, so warm and soft that I reached out to touch your cheek, almost before I realized I was doing it.

Lightly, very lightly, I traced the tips of my fingers along your neck to your shoulder, wanting to kiss the soft, white hollow of your neck but not wanting to shift the bed and wake you. Already I felt familiar stirrings that rise so easily at just the thought of you.

You lay on your side, facing me, your arm across your naked breasts, your legs drawn up beneath the quilt. I slipped my hand beneath the covers, running my fingers slowly past your shoulder, down your side, and, and into the maddening curve of your hip. I thought I saw the faintest trace of a smile on your lips. Were you only pretending now to sleep?

As I moved down your hip and around to follow the rounded line of your ass, I was fully aroused, fully awake. The warmth, the feel of your skin beneath my hand, and memories of the night before were enough. I dragged my fingernails lightly down the back of your thigh, and you turned, a sleeper changing her position, shifting onto her back in mid-dream. Now I knew you, too, were awake, but still you pretended...

By the time I finished the six-pack, I was reading descriptions of women in prison. Some even had glamour shots, presumably taken before they were incarcerated. I paused for a moment, imagining myself as the photographer at a prison glamour shot studio. The fantasy wouldn’t develop.

A serial killer, I thought. That has promise. I do admire strong women. Serial killers are likely to be on death row, and death row inmates are unlikely to show up at the front door while I’m having dinner with the wife. And better a serial killer than a battered, embittered woman who set her husband on fire. Were there any women serial killers? I didn’t know. They’re supposed to be smart, though. Crazy too, sure, but maybe crazy doesn’t come off in correspondence like it does face to face. Antisocial. Maybe She wouldn’t write back. Egotistical. She probably would. Maybe I won’t even read Her letters. I wanted to write, was beginning to feel like I had to write, but the thought of reading didn’t give me the same pulling sensation in my chest.

Ah, but I’d have to read Her letters to know whether or not She’d understood. Understood? No. Pitied? No. A nameless, faceless She, absorbing me through Her eyes. Drawing me in, liquid on a sponge. If ever I got caught, then I’d think about why and chastise myself for such a pointless, dangerous act. But this was the time for the heat of the act itself.

The Internet is chock full of nuts, sure, but how would I find a female serial killer who wanted to be a penpal? That’s probably too specific a fetish. I thought about the pornography I’ve downloaded and realized that no, correspondence with murderers was probably pretty tame stuff. Probably even has its own name, something Japanese or German. And I’d heard of women writing to men in prison, women falling in love and marrying those men. But would men seek women? I smiled at the ridiculous question. Of course they would. Men would go pretty far for good masturbation material. I decided to write the letter first, then find its recipient later.

Roommates! I don’t want to have roommates anymore – I just want you! They eat my food, they don’t pay their phone bills, and they let their drunken friends sleep in my bed when I’m working! Two months seems like a lot of days to count, but I am. I’m counting them down one by one until summer comes at last and we can make a home together. I don’t know how we’re going to look for an apartment together, though. Do realtors work on weekends?

I pulled a blank sheet of paper from the printer. I type faster than I write, but I didn’t want any sort of record on the computer for the wife to stumble across. I knew the lines of my thought would curve across the unlined pages, as if the writing would spiral in on itself on a large enough page. I took a blue pen from the desk drawer, then replaced it with a black one. Black seemed more official. On the top of the page, I wrote, “June 4.” I thought about opening another beer.

I know you’re tired of this schedule. I’m tired of it too. It’s hard to have a relationship when I only see you when you’re blow-drying your hair before you run off to school, or coming through the door from your job while I’m going out the door to mine. We should put in a revolving door; we’d have less risk of cracking our skulls together coming and going. We have our weekends: grocery shopping, housework and homework, and bus trips home to see your family. I’m trying to get off this damned night shift, but the only way it’s going to happen is if someone quits or gets fired. It’ll happen, I swear; you’ve just got to hang in there with me. It’s still you and me, right? You and me against the world?

“Last night she said to me, ‘I don’t know what changed, or why, and I’m sorry. But, well, I don’t want to swallow anymore.’ She paused, and then, in case it hadn’t been enough to get the job done, she added, ‘I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time.’ I can feel it still, like a punch, two punches, in the belly. I can’t even write the words without squinting my eyes and baring my teeth.

“It’s been a long, costly war of attrition, and I’m running out of allies. I almost cry reading the casualty reports. The Kitchen Counter. The Bathroom Floor. Standing. Sitting. Wednesday Afternoon. Tuesday Morning. If Friday and Saturday Night fall, I will truly be without a friend in the world. And now Fellatio, critically, mortally, wounded. Alas, poor Fellatio! I knew him, Yorick… Here hung those lips, that I have kissed I know not how oft…

“Are you married? You may know what I mean. In the wedding announcements, the plastic smiles of people who can’t yet see the trajectory of their marriage look remarkably similar to the plastic smiles in the obituaries of people who can’t yet see the detonation of their lives. I certainly didn’t see it coming.

“I’m jerking off almost daily now, even two or three times in a day. I’ve outpaced my adolescent self, the boy who dreamed sweaty, sticky dreams of the geometry teacher outside whose door daily gathered the coaches of football, and baseball, the teachers of history and shop. Now I am the man, not the boy, and I know that the yearning ache in the chest and beneath it never went away for them either, those nervous, laughing coaches and teachers: the ache for a smile, a glance, a glimpse of lace between shirt buttons, a flash of white thigh beneath the hem of a skirt.

“Almost fifteen years married, I should be past all that, past the hidden pornography, past the extra-long showers, past the driving home from the office in the middle of the day for “lunch.” I should be settled comfortably into a routine of sedate twice-monthly lovemaking, a slight upturning at the corners of my lips where once there was wild laughter and mischievous grins. I am ashamed to remember that I used to tease my poor, lonely, single friends, when they rolled their eyes at my folly, marrying so young. I laughed at them, laughed that marriage was sex on tap, and I could pour myself a glass any time, any time at all. I knock on the empty keg now, a hollow thunk, and think ruefully of my pride. The tap has run dry.

“I used to think that Sex was not dying, just ailing from time to time as we all do. It was supposed to be, as the books and the scholars say, cyclical. Peaks and valleys. I am not so foolish that I believe that happiness can be maintained for any length of time, but I did believe that, though it would go, it would always come back around again, as sure as Halley’s Comet, but on a shorter orbit. I thought it was axiomatic: sex doesn’t die, it just winters in the sunnier climes.

“I have the letters, the evidence. They go back almost to the day we met, a story that I didn’t know we were writing since I only saw it a word, or a phrase, or a sentence at a time. Would you like to read them? They do not point to murder, I think – nothing so deliberate or pre-meditated as that. We could, both of us, be charged with reckless endangerment instead. Neglect, perhaps, but not abuse. There are a stack of them here, the letters, some still folded in their envelopes, some scratched on yellow notepads faded white, some on white paper wilted yellow. You can see our scribbles and doodles, sketches and coffee rings, poems and songs stuffed into the margins. I’ll send some next time, or maybe some excerpts. For you to look at. For you to see.

We should be talking about this in person, but when I tried, you walked out on me. I’m sorry this is hard for you. It’s hard for me too. I’ve finally found a therapist I really like, and I think I’m on the verge of something powerful now, something liberating. But to get there, to really deal with my past, I have to shut that part down right now. I know it’s important to you. It’s important to me too. But I can’t do both, I just can’t. I hope you understand. I’ve dredged up so much ancient history lately, and I can’t stand the idea of thinking about that history when you’re touching me. I don’t want that between us, too. I hope you won’t pressure me, or resent me for it. I know it’s hard, and I understand if you can’t stay with me through this. I love you, and I always will, even if you choose to go.

I read through the letter once and smiled. It was clever, I thought. Clever and well-written, particularly the little turn on Shakespeare. I read through it again. It wasn’t much of a letter, though. Not really. There was no “how are you, I am fine.” It didn’t matter. Some random Woman, sitting in a tiny room, maybe windowless, as She opened the envelope. Would She really care to hear what I look like, or how I twisted my ankle mowing the lawn last week? Probably not. She’d care to hear it even less than I’d care to tell it, most likely. It wasn’t important. Only an idiot twists his ankle mowing the lawn.

When I get back from Mom’s next weekend, we’ll talk. I think what we need, what we both need, might be a vacation. A change of venue, a breath of fresh air to clear out all the old dust and debris and help us start over again. I’ve always wanted to spend a week or two on white sand beaches, not doing anything. It seems like we’re always doing something.

“Women prison penpals,” I submitted. Not quite so smug this time, it returned a list of only 2, 689. I should have known: babesbehindbars.com. Alliteration is always good in marketing, no matter what you were selling. At least the prices seemed reasonable. Some charged a monthly subscription, some charged per address. The payment problem again, I thought. Yes, that’s definitely how I’m going to get caught.

milk
bread
cat food
fabric softener
cigarettes

In the end, though, I narrowed the search (“death row women free penpals”,) and discovered that death row inmates were a special breed of prison penpals, Anti-death penalty organizations were handing out their names and addresses for free to anybody that would take them. They even gave out helpful statistics, like age, interests, even religious preferences. No glamour shots, though. And what pictures there were had no smiles in them. Maybe nobody writes to a happy death row inmate. I tried to picture what kind of person would choose this as a hobby, and I couldn’t. Freaks and weirdos, I’m sure. They say it takes all kinds.

You’re not getting old... That was last year! Have a fantastic birthday!

I settled at last on a woman in Virginia who was fifty-six, enjoyed singing, had no religious preference, and spoke English. I was meticulous addressing the envelope, carefully following the instructions and checking and re-checking her prisoner number. As I was writing, I imagined the wife, pulling an envelope from the mailbox, “Insufficient Postage” in giant red letters across my neat printing. I put two extra stamps on the envelope.

For three weeks, I sweated nervously and tried to think of a lie I could tell that would make her stop checking the mail. I couldn’t. But in the end, she carried it in with a couple of bills. I needn’t have worried. She left the envelope on the kitchen counter for me. She never even asked me what it was, showed no curiosity at all. I took the envelope into the bathroom. My hands were shaking. The wife had touched the envelope. Now I was touching it. I let the water run. I flushed the toilet. I pictured the wife outside in the hall, listening. I didn’t picture her wondering why the sink was already running when I flushed.

Inside was my own letter. I couldn’t fathom what this meant; was it returned for excessive postage? I unfolded it, stared for a second or two without reading, without even really seeing. Then I turned over the first page. Written with red ink in generic, draftsman’s print was:

YOU KNOW THEY’RE GOING TO KILL ME, RIGHT?

I turned over the second page. In equally tidy print was:

BY THE WAY, I’M NOT GETTING LAID EITHER.

I dropped both pages and the torn envelope into the toilet. I flushed again. Then I washed my hands.