Wife 22. Melanie Gideon

younger. No, I look younger. I play this game all the time. Honestly, I’m incapable of judging anyone’s age anymore.

      “Can I smoke in here?” asks Sonja.

      “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Some sort of an alarm would probably go off,” says William.

      Sonja smiles. “I’m not really a smoker. Only occasionally.”

      “Me, too,” says William.

      Since when did William become an occasional smoker?

      “So are you here because of your husband’s ED?”

      “No, I’m here because of my ED.”

      “Nod,” says Kelly.

      “I hate those Cialis commercials. And Viagra. And Levitra.”

      “Why?”

      “When your husband comes home and says, ‘Hey, honey, great news, we can have sex for thirty-six hours straight,’ believe me, it is not cause for celebration.”

      “Well, Cialis is not about having sex for thirty-six hours, it’s about enhanced blood flow to—” says William.

      “Thirty-six seconds, now then you’d have a winner.”

      “Seriously?” says Avi.

      “Yes, seriously,” says Sonja. Her face crumples. A big, fat tear rolls down her cheek.

      “That’s sad,” says William.

      “Don’t say that,” hisses Kelly.

      “Thirty-six seconds. I’m sorry, but that’s very sad,” says William. “For your husband, I mean. Sounds like it’s good for you.”

      “Oh, Christ,” says Kelly.

      Sonja is weeping now.

      “Can someone get her some Kleenex? Take your time,” William says. “I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad. Your answer just surprised me.”

      “It surprises me, too. Don’t you think I’m surprised? I don’t know what happened,” she says, dabbing her eyes. “I used to love sex. I mean really, really love it. But now the whole thing seems, well, it just seems so silly. Whenever we have sex I feel like an alien watching us having sex thinking, ‘Ah, so this is how lower life-forms that only use ten percent of their brain matter procreate. How strange! How messy! How brutish! Look at the ugly faces they make. And all the sounds—the slapping, the flapping, the suction.’?”

      “We can’t use this. Wrap it up,” says Kelly. “Change the subject. Ask her what she thinks about the tubs.”

      “How often do you have sex?” William asks.

      Sonja looks up at him with a tear-stained face and says nothing.

      “How often would you like to have sex?”

      “Never.”

      “This is not a therapy session,” says Kelly. “It’s a focus group for the client. This woman is not our target market. Cut her loose.”

      “Do you wish you felt differently?”

      Sonja nods.

      “If you felt differently, how often would you like to have sex? How many times a year?” asks William.

      “Twenty-four?” she says.

      “Twenty-four. Twice a month?”

      “Yeah, twice a month sounds good. That sounds normal to me. Do you think so? Do you think that’s normal?”

      “Normal? Well, that’s one more time a month than I’m having it,” says William.

      “That’s it. Shut it down,” says Kelly.

      I gasp. Did my husband just announce to the entire focus group and his team the frequency with which we have sex?

      “My wife and I pretend we have sex every week, just like most other married couples we know who are really only having sex once a month,” says William.

      “I’m shutting the camera off,” warns Kelly.

      “I wouldn’t call our marriage sexless,” William continues. “Sexless would mean sex once every six months, or once a year. It’s just the moment used to be right more often than not,” says William.

      “I’m very sorry to hear that,” says Elliot.

      “Tell me that’s not going to be us in twenty years!” says Melinda.

      “Never,” says Avi. “That will never happen to us, babe.”

      “Anytime the moment is right. It’s the anytime that really gets me. That’s not freedom. Not for the woman, anyway. It’s a threat,” says Sonja. “It’s an erection Code Orange.”

      “Can I ask you one more question?” asks William.

      “Go ahead,” says Sonja.

      “Do you think most women your age feel this way?”

      Sonja sniffs. “Yes.”

      I press Pause on the video and rest my head on my desk, wishing I could rewind the last ten minutes of my life. Why, oh why, oh why did I watch that? I feel ashamed for going behind William’s back, angry at the brash and unprofessional way he conducted himself (the cardinal rule of conducting focus groups: never, never share personal information), humiliated that he publicly outed us as having a sexless marriage (not true, we have sex once a week—okay, once every two or three weeks—okay, maybe sometimes it stretches to once a month), worried that he is on some sort of new medication that he hasn’t told me about, afraid that medication is Cialis and soon he’ll be telling me that thanks to modern medicine we now have a thirty-six-hour window in which I will be expected to have sex at least three times a day, but the strongest feeling is grief, because I saw parts of myself in both women. The desire-to-inhale-the-very-air-her-boyfriend-breathes Melinda. And the moment-is-rarely-right Sonja. They were—are—both me.

      Tell me, Alice Buckle, what car would you be if you were a car right now?

      That’s easy: a Ford Escape. A hybrid. Base model. Well-used. A scraped-up front bumper. Pings all over the doors. A mysterious rotten-apple smell rising up from the floorboards, but dependable. A car with all-wheel drive that’s good in the snow but whose potential is totally wasted because its owner lives in a city where the temperature rarely dips below 40.

      And that, right there, is the problem.

      18

      25. William’s girlfriend’s name was Helen Davies and she was the VP of Branding. The rumor floating around the firm was that they would be engaged any day. They came in together in the mornings, sipping their coffees. They’d go to Kendall Square for lunch. She’d retrieve him at the end of the day and off they’d zip down to Newbury Street for cocktails. She was always stunningly dressed. I shopped at Filene’s Basement.

      I was put to work on a toilet paper account. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. I got to go home with rolls of TP samples and think of inventive new ways to say gets your ass really clean with just one sheet.

      I put him out of my mind. Until one day he sent me an email.

       —Are those running shoes on your desk?

      I emailed him back.

       —Sorry! I know that’s a filthy habit. Putting my shoes on working surfaces. It won’t happen again.

      And then he emailed me again.

       —Just went by your cubicle. Where are they now?