FoodSexLit

“Do you remember when you first said ‘forever’ and thought you knew exactly what it meant?”

– “Forever,” Unknown Prophets featuring Promoe

One summer day in August 2002, I stood on an altar in a couture wedding dress and said my share of the familiar, time-honored words of the marriage vows.  I cried when I said them, because I often get swept away by my own emotions and I’m easily moved.  At the most important part of the vows, the part where you pledge fidelity, I had this feeling of being outside my body, of watching myself—complete with the gown of my dreams and a tiara—finally experience the moment I had been waiting for so many years: I pledged to be faithful to one man, the man holding both my hands and now putting a ring on my finger, forever and ever, until death do us part.

This morning, my latest lover left my bed early for work.

“Oh,” he said.  “I didn’t realize I spilled my wine.  And I broke the glass.  I’m so sorry.”  Still dazed with sex and sleep and the Ambien I had taken a few hours earlier, I didn’t process his words.  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

A few hours later, I woke up for real.  I went out to the kitchen to make tea, then wandered back into my bedroom to put on some clothes.  I was surprised by the huge red stain spreading across the bed.  Is that blood? I thought.  It looked like someone had died in my bed—and not just in the metaphorical, le petit mort sense.  Then I remembered the fragments of the early-morning conversation.

*          *          *

Ambien Sex is hot.

I discovered Ambien sex on Christmas Eve with a guy I took home from the bar.  I first saw him about a month ago while picking up a few things at the corner drugstore.  We made eye contact a few times and small talk in the parking lot.  I walked home glowing from the interaction.  I thought about the handsome stranger with thick curly hair a lot over the next few weeks, but chalked it up to yet another moment of connection that would never be consummated.

Then, as I sipped a glass of champagne at Matador on Christmas Eve after mass (my own private holiday tradition), he slipped onto the bar stool next to me.  We recognized each other instantly.  And after a few splits of champagne for me and a glass of single-malt Scotch, neat, for him, we were talking and kissing on my couch.

Turns out he’s has been having trouble sleeping since his wife left him.  “His wife?” my friend Melissa asked me.

“He’s going through a messy divorce,” I said.  “It’s my dating M.O.”

“It is your dating M.O.,” Melissa said.

It is indeed.  I seem to attract men going through nasty, complicated, fucking horrible divorces.

This man is still clearly in love with his wife and grieving the loss of his marriage.  We’re insanely attracted to each other though, and of course that complicates things a bit.  Christmas Eve, however, as I sat on the couch drinking even more alcohol, my bedroom in close proximity, I wasn’t really thinking about sex.  I was thinking about how much I just wanted to hold this man—to wrap my arms around him and make him feel better.

And help him sleep.  So I offered him an Ambien.  And took one myself.  And a few hours later I sort of woke up to realize we were having incredible sex: I was getting a contact high from stroking his skin.  I just want to touch him, feel my body against his.  “I haven’t had sex like this in a long time,” I said.

“It’s Ambien sex,” he said.  “You’ve never heard of it?”

So yeah.  Ambien Sex. Who knew?  Tiger Woods, apparently.

Anyway, here’s what happens, with or without the Ambien: these men feel like family to me, at first, and then I make it complicated by fucking them.  The relationship is never as clean after that, literally or metaphorically.

*          *          *

Apparently Ambien sex, which we had again last night, is so good that you don’t notice when you spill an entire glass of red wine in the bed, nor the very expensive crystal wine glass breaking when you drop it on the floor.

Before I can change the sheets, I need to sweep up the remains of the wine glass.  As I try again and again to get every last little shard, I found myself meditating on how really fine crystal shivers into so many slivers and tiny fragments.

In my experience, cheap stemware breaks in a totally different way.  It’s generally a clean break; your clean-up is as simple as throwing two or three large pieces into the trash.

But fine crystal shatters.

I also found myself thinking about Edward Albee’s play The Goat or Who is Sylvia?  The play is about an architect named Martin who is hitting the peak of his career, his fiftieth birthday, and a goat named Sylvia.

So I’m thinking of marriage and bestiality as I’m cleaning up the broken wine glass because in the play, as Martin tries to explain to Stevie (his wife) that he loves Sylvia (the goat) the way he loves her, Stevie becomes so enraged that she starts breaking shit: a painting, plates, china, and a vase.  And then she tells Martin, “You’ve broken something that can’t be fixed.”

A few lines later, she says “That you can do those two things . . . and not understand how it . . . SHATTERS THE GLASS?!”  The latter phrase, all in caps, with its erratic punctuation, is a fragment.  When I read those lines, I think of a pane of glass, shivering into silver shards.  I think of an heirloom crystal vase shattering, like the one I’m looking at right now, a wedding gift I salvaged from the divorce.

Stevie and Martin’s marriage is like the vase.  It can’t be put back together.  It’s too broken.  You can’t even glue the shards back together like you can with some other materials.  There’s a porcelain statue in my parents’ living room—a shepherdess, coyly looking down.  A long time ago her arm broke off and my dad, an engineer to the core, meticulously glued it back on.  She still stands on one of the coffee tables, a little worse for wear, the seam like a scar, but she still makes eyes at the handsome shepherd, who remains unbroken.  As far as I know their relationship remains unmarred.

But crystal can’t be mended.  And the more beautiful it is, the more finely made, the more precious it is, the more shards it collapses into when dashed to the floor with force.

The Goat has two subtitles: the first, Who is Sylvia?, is taken from a song in one of Shakespeare’s first plays– Two Gentlemen of Verona.  Gentlemen is a pastoral comedy.  The second subtitle highlights the other mask: Notes towards a Definition of Tragedy.

When I taught Reading Drama a few years ago, I themed the class around tragedy because I was interested in the connections between Oedipus Rex, Othello, and The Goat.  I was also interested in the concept of love and sex with “the other.”  Oedipus, of course, marries and impregnates his mother.  Othello marries a beautiful young Venetian, Desdemona, who is from a different race and class, and arguably (I think this is fascinating) never consummates the marriage with her.  And Martin, happily married, falls in love with a goat, so fully, in fact, that he can’t help but act on his physical desire.

All this goes nicely with my working definition of tragedy: when a character does something that cannot be undone and then must face the consequences.  Oedipus discovers that he’s had three children with the woman who bore him and gouges out his eyes with a broach.  Othello strangles Desdemona with their wedding linens and then stabs himself in the stomach.  Martin fucks a goat.

Once you’ve gone there—sex with your mother, murder, bestiality—you can’t ever go back.  You are forever changed.  You can’t undo the sex act: once you’ve had sex with someone, well, you’ve had sex with that person.  You can’t bring someone back to life after you’ve killed her.  This is the stuff of tragedy, from classic to modern to post-modern.

A marriage breaking—it’s one of the most tragic things I can think of.  I know I sound all cavalier with my blithe references to Ambien sex and goat-fucking, but I believe in marriage.  Even though I’m divorced, perhaps maybe because so, I think a marriage is precious—so fragile—like the vase Stevie throws to the ground with so much anger.

News of a divorce has always shocked me.  That two people who spent years together—10, 20, 30—who spent all those moments of years together—holding a newborn child during the first moment of her life—spending nights in bed, naked, planning your future—all those mornings reading the paper and drinking coffee.  It’s mind-boggling that you could then spend the rest of your life never speaking to that person again.

*        *          *

Clearly, this man is not in love with me.  Infatuated with my youth, my beauty, my passion?  Sure.  But he’s in love with his wife.

Soon to be ex-wife, I’m afraid.  They may still love each other deeply (her response to the news that he’s dating again certainly indicates, to the casual observer, that she’s still in love with him and can’t stand the thought of him with another woman.)  They may even be soulmates.  But their marriage, after their separation, is as shattered as the pieces of the Tulipe wine glass I carefully swept up and deposited in my garbage can this morning.

“Your Tulipe stemware!” my former-mother-in-law exclaimed joyously once.  She loved beautiful things, just like I do.

I have one Tulipe wine glass left from the six I had originally.  I no longer have a mate to match with it, so I probably won’t use it much.  I’ll use my other wine glasses, also crystal, that I bought after the divorce.

It’s not just the wine glasses.  Slowly, my ex-husband and I have divested ourselves of the things of the objects of our marriage—I no longer drive the car we bought together.  He has sold the house we lived in together, along with the garden we spent so many hours working in together.

I wonder when this last wine glass will break.