I'm Fine and Neither Are You(30)

“Oops! It clearly is a bad time,” she said as she rose from the sofa.

He turned to me, not bothering to lower his voice as Lorrie skittered outside. “Whatever happened to the eye hook on the front door?”

“It’s still there. The kids unhooked it when they went out front to play.”

“We’re going to have to talk to them about stranger danger.”

“Lorrie’s not a stranger,” I said.

“I cannot think of anyone stranger than Lorrie.” His face grew serious. “You need to tell her to stop letting herself into our house.”

“I know,” I said.

I looked at Sanjay, who seemed awfully sprightly for what he usually referred to as an ungodly hour of the day. “Aren’t you exhausted?”

“I wouldn’t call myself well rested,” he said. “But I’m up, which is a miracle given my two a.m. shake-awake.”

My thigh was damp, and my hand was still dripping coffee. “About that . . . I hope you’re not upset with me.”

“Not at all,” he said.

I eyed him suspiciously. “What happened to ‘too much honesty might be a bad idea’?”

“You truly want to improve our marriage, right?”

I nodded.

“Well, I do, too. I’ll admit, I was pretty surprised by you bringing it up. But then I was thinking about it this morning and maybe you’re right. It couldn’t hurt to try to make things better, could it?”

There was a lump in my throat. “No,” I said. “I don’t think it would hurt. And though I’m having a hard time about Jenny and probably will for a long time, I don’t see an advantage to waiting to get started. The problem is, I don’t know what we should do to make things better.”

“As it happens, I have an idea.”

“Really?”

“Yep.” He looked awfully pleased with himself, which made me nervous. “The thing is, you’re a list-maker.”

“By necessity,” I said.

“All the same, you like lists. They work. So why don’t we give each other a list of what we want the other person to change?”

That was what I was asking for, wasn’t it? So why was his suggestion making me clammy and nauseated? “You’re serious,” I said.

“Completely.”

“Then that’s it? I tell you what I want and you do it?”

“And vice versa,” he said. “We’re not mind readers. I mean, I know some of the things that irritate you, but I don’t know what’s most important to you or what you think would most improve our relationship.”

This was a good point. But did I even know what was most important?

“I do think we should keep the lists fairly short,” he added. “I don’t want to get stuck in the weeds about stupid little things. Let’s stick to what’s important.”

“Good call.”

Sanjay smiled broadly, revealing the dimples that had first drawn me to him when I had spotted him on the other side of the Hudson newsroom. He was happy I was on board with his idea. “I even have my first request,” he said.

“And what’s that?”

“I would like for us to have sex more often.”



Sex! We had sex. We did. Well, not as often as we used to. Maybe once a week—or at least once every other week. Looking back, I was forced to admit that January, February, and May had been particularly dry.

But that was what happened when two people decided to make two more tiny people.

Once upon a time, in a land before children, Sanjay and I had been very good at sex. That’s probably what kept us together when we first started dating, because back then neither of us really knew how to have a healthy relationship. After all, I had never been in close proximity to one myself. Likewise, Sanjay’s parents’ marriage had been arranged, and rather than the story most people wanted to hear—that they fell deeply in love soon after their wedding—they didn’t particularly care for each other and spent most of their time in separate rooms of their large home. Riya was happiest when she went to India for a month and a half every winter to see her extended family.

Sanjay and I had no relationship role models, but we had epic rolls in the hay. By the time we finally figured out how to mostly be decent partners after our breakup, our erotic encounters had slowed a little, but they were still hot enough that we didn’t have to schedule sex like a dental cleaning, as the purported relationship experts in women’s magazines always seemed to recommend.

Then came Stevie’s birth and Sanjay’s brief medical school tenure. Sex petered out.

And by petered out, I mean we basically stopped having it.

It’s hard to bounce back from that kind of baseline—even Sanjay dropping out of medical school didn’t help. Nowadays it happened when it happened, which I supposed wasn’t particularly often. And when it did happen, it was usually in the dark or with my eyes closed, because I got distracted by Sanjay’s ear tufts, which he had the barber trim and then promptly forgot about until his next appointment. Anyway, it was easier to get to where I was going when I couldn’t see the laundry basket at the end of the bed.

Really, was it any surprise that when he came on to me—which was almost always at the end of the night when I was ready to pass out—I thought about how I would be awoken by my urine-soaked son in another two to four hours and said, “Maybe tomorrow”?