Free Envy by Kathryn Harrison Page B

movie? Shower or bath? A walk to the park? Window-shopping along the avenue? White wine? Red?
That it had once been worth considering such choices seemed marvelous, a matter over which to marvel. “All right,” Carole said, and he guessed this was because it didn’t matter to her what they did or didn’t do. What could be given to her? What could be taken away? Nothing that would return them to the consideration of minutiae.
    But they hadn’t made love since the morning before Luke drowned, and Will felt an awkward and uncomfortable something growing between them, a film of alienation that was almost tissuelike, thickening with every passing hour, acquiring that much more substance. Soon this membrane would be opaque; soon he wouldn’t be able to see beyond it to his wife on the other side. He went up the stairs behind her, eye level with the back of her tanned thighs, feeling his gratitude. She would open herself to him. He could follow his body and disappear into hers. For a little while he could.
    Carole undressed. She flipped back the covers and lay down without turning off the light. “Did you want it on?” he asked, because she didn’t usually.
    â€œIf you do.” She turned onto her side to face the window, and Will couldn’t see her expression. He bent down to pull off his socks and got into bed carefully so that it didn’t jounce or creak, drew toward her to embrace her from behind. She turned onto her stomach.
    â€œDo you want to do it that way?” he asked, after a silence.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYou don’t want to start the other way?”
    â€œNot really.”
    So he entered his wife from the back, which he liked—he liked it just as well as any other way, better sometimes—and when he asked, a few minutes later, “Do you want to turn over?” again Carole said she didn’t.
    She was on her hands and her knees, and he bent over her damp back, reaching to touch her. But he’d barely brushed her pubic hair when she moved his hand. “No?” he said, and she shook her head. He stopped moving; immediately his erection started to ebb inside her.
    â€œWell, will . . . will you do it?” he asked, and she touched herself with her own hand. Obediently, she worked her way toward orgasm.
    Carole could deny it, but Will understood the meaning of her silent compliance. It was a judgment against him. Against any organism so primitive that it could take comfort in flesh, against a bereaved father who chose this brief oblivion, who allowed himself a comfort he didn’t deserve.
    Except
deserve
was his language, not hers. So perhaps she was right: he was unfair, he projected his disgust onto her, he craved punishment as much as he did sex and cleverly manipulated her into a vessel for both. He’d scripted her as his monolithic mother, was that it? The great force who gave and who withheld, who soothed even as she condemned. And Carole was indulgent enough to act this out.
    â€œOh God, Will! Shut up! Won’t you please, please just stop?” she says when he drags her down after him into one of his psychoanalytic rabbit holes, refusing to plummet with him through his bottomless, convulsive guilt.
    Whatever it means, it did begin that August evening, their new one-position sex life, unvarying to the point of ritual. Ritual and seemingly irrevocable, as conclusive as a burned bridge, Luke’s death the obvious divide. Did this have to be an issue? Did he have to make it into an issue? Were he to accept without deconstructing the shift, he might grow used to it, complacent even. Many husbands—he can think of several—would celebrate a wife who took care of her own pleasure and left him to concentrate on his. But increasingly, Will found this hard, very hard. And the fact that she still went down on him but wouldn’t let him touch her, neither with finger nor tongue— so that there could be no parity (not