Freedom [71]
Alas, not zero.
One hesitates to ascribe too much explanatory significance to sex, and yet the autobiographer would be derelict in her duties if she didn’t devote an uncomfortable paragraph to it. The regrettable truth is that Patty had soon come to find sex sort of boring and pointless—the same old sameness—and to do it mostly for Walter’s sake. And, yes, undoubtedly, to not do it very well. There just usually seemed to be something else she’d rather have been doing. Most often, she would rather have been sleeping. Or a distracting or mildly worrisome noise would be coming from one of the kids’ rooms. Or she would be mentally counting how many entertaining minutes of a West Coast college basketball game would still remain when she was finally allowed to turn the TV back on. But even just basic chores of gardening or cleaning or shopping could seem delicious and urgent in comparison to fucking, and once you got it in your head that you needed to relax in a hurry and be fulfilled in a hurry so you could get downstairs and plant the impatiens that were wilting in their little plastic boxes, it was all over. She tried taking shortcuts, tried preemptively doing Walter with her mouth, tried telling him she was sleepy and he should just go ahead and have his fun and not worry about her. But poor Walter was constituted to care about his own satisfaction less than hers, or at least to predicate his on hers, and she could never seem to figure out a nice way of explaining what a bad position this put her in, because, when you got right down to it, it entailed telling him she didn’t want him the way he wanted her: that craving sex with her mate was one of the things (OK, the main thing) she’d given up in exchange for all the good things in their life together. And this turned out to be a rather difficult admission to make to a man you loved. Walter tried everything he could think of to make sex better for her except the one thing that might conceivably have worked, which was to stop worrying about making it better for her and just bend her over the kitchen table some night and have at her from behind. But the Walter who could have done this wouldn’t have been Walter. He was what he was, and he wanted what he was to be what Patty wanted. He wanted things to be mutual! And so the drawback of sucking him was that he always then wanted to go down on her, which made her incredibly ticklish. Eventually, after years of resisting, she managed to get him to stop trying altogether. And felt terribly guilty but also angry and annoyed to be made to feel like such a failure. The tiredness of Richard and Molly, on the afternoon they came to visit, seemed to Patty the tiredness of people who’d been up all night fucking, and it says a lot about her state of mind at that point, about the deadness of sex to her, about the totality of her immersion in being Jessica and Joey’s mother, that she didn’t even envy them for it. Sex seemed to her a diversion for young people with nothing better to do. Certainly neither Richard nor Molly looked uplifted by it.
And then the Traumatics were gone—on to their next gig, in Madison, and then on to releasing further wryly titled records that a certain kind of critic and about five thousand other people in the world liked to listen to, and doing small-venue gigs attended by scruffy, well-educated white guys who were no longer as young as they used to be—while Patty and Walter pursued their mostly very absorbing workaday life, in which the weekly thirty minutes of sexual stress was a chronic but low-grade discomfort, like the humidity in Florida. The autobiographer does acknowledge the possible connection between this small discomfort and the large mistakes that Patty was making as a mother in those years. Where Eliza’s parents, once upon a time, had erred in being too much into each other and not enough into Eliza, Patty can probably be said to have made the opposite error with Joey. But there are so many other, non-parental errors to be related in these pages that it seems just inhumanly painful to dwell on her