The Average American Marriage Read online

  Roland says, “It’s okay. I don’t judge anything that’s said in this room, and I need you both to be open and honest for this process to work. Okay?”

  Alyna says, “Okay.”

  I say, “Fair enough. If we’re putting it all out there, the reason I was jerking off—”

  Alyna cuts me off. “Can you say masturbating, please?”

  I say, “Fine. The reason I was masturbating is that my wife will only fuck me twice a month, if I’m lucky, and she doesn’t even seem to be interested in those two times while they’re happening.”

  Alyna stares at me with her mouth open. “Can you say making love, please?”

  Roland leans back in his chair, puts his little journal down on the ground, and says, “Okay, guys. This is a very common issue in marriages, especially after kids are introduced. It’s tough to maintain that same level of physical intimacy that you had in the beginning of the relationship when you have to worry about dirty diapers and trips to the pediatrician and rides to school. So what I’ll ask both of you to do right now is be extremely honest with one another and promise each other, and me, that you won’t react emotionally to anything that’s said over the next hour but instead you’ll hear everything and process it logically. Can you do that?”

  I say, “Yeah.”

  Alyna says, “Of course.”

  Roland says, “Good. So, Alyna, you start again and tell your husband one thing that turns you on about him.”

  I can’t fucking believe what I’m hearing. Roland is a fucking genius. With one sentence, it’s like he’s erased every complaint in Alyna’s head. As I wait for her to say something, to say anything, I know the real answer is that nothing about me turns my wife on.

  She says, “Well, you really are a good provider for us. For our family, I mean. You work hard.” This is a total crock of shit. Alyna’s just throwing out some generic compliment in an effort to completely avoid actually answering the question, actually addressing the matter at hand. I want Roland to nail her to the wall for it.

  Roland says, “And this sexually arouses you?” Roland is my new best fucking friend. I love this guy.

  She says, “Well, not sexually, but it’s an attractive quality.”

  Roland says, “Well, can you think of something about your husband that sexually arouses you?”

  She says, “This isn’t a fair question. We have two kids. We’ve been married for five years. I mean, can he name something that sexually arouses him about me?”

  Without hesitating for a single second I say, “Your ass, your tits, the sound you make when you cum, the way your neck smells, the way your mouth looks when you eat marshmallows, and the taste of your pussy,” and I sit there staring at her, waiting for her to have anything to say in response to this. She just stares at me. She knows I’m being honest, and she knows she can’t even come close to my answer.

  Roland says, “Alyna, how does hearing that make you feel?”

  Alyna says, “I feel a little embarrassed, actually.”

  Roland says, “Why?”

  She says, “Because I just don’t see myself like that anymore, I guess. I’m a mom now.”

  Roland says, “But before you were ever a mom, you were a woman your husband was very attracted to, and obviously still is.”

  Roland spends the rest of the hour giving us pointers on things we can do to increase the frequency with which we have sex. When we leave Roland’s home office we walk past another couple sitting in the plastic lawn chairs. The guy looks like he’d rather be drinking from a fountain of liquid shit than sitting on that porch until he sees that I have a giant smile on my face and Alyna looks like someone spent the last hour kicking her in the cunt.

  chapter seventeen

  Nooner

  Holly walks into my office at twelve-thirty on Monday and says, “What are you doing for lunch?” It’s the first time I’ve seen her since fucking her in the backseat of my car on Friday, and it’s the first time I’ve communicated with her in any form since she texted me the play-by-play of her fingering herself in her dorm room on Saturday night.

  I say, “I have no plans. You want to grab something with me?”

  Forty-five minutes later we’re in her dorm room at CSUN and my dick is in her ass. She’s riding me reverse-cowgirl-style and moaning as she says, “Don’t cum in my ass. Save it.”

  I say, “For what?” as she answers my question by spinning around and sucking my dick until I fire a mess of cum all over her face and mouth. She giggles a little as I do, then she opens her mouth and shows me the cum on her tongue for a few seconds before she swallows it and says, “That was so fucking hot.” She keeps sucking my dick until it goes completely limp and then crawls up next to me and puts her head in the crook of my arm.

  I go over a mental checklist of the shit that just went down, making sure I’m remembering it accurately, making sure I won’t forget a single detail later when I’m jerking off while Alyna sleeps.

  When we got in my car forty minutes ago, I was expecting to go to Chili’s or something. She said, “My roommate has class until two. You want to fuck me in the ass?” I drove to her dorm room doing eighty miles an hour. We walked in, she gagged on my dick for a minute, then forced it into her ass using only her own saliva as lube. Then she sucked my dick again until I blew a load immediately after it was in her own asshole.

  Once I have it all straight in my head I say, “So . . . don’t take this the wrong way, but where did you learn to do all of that?”

  She says, “Do what?”

  I say, “The stuff you do during sex?”

  She says, “What do you mean? Do I do something weird or something?”

  I say, “No, no, no. I don’t mean it like that at all. I fucking love everything you do. You just . . . well, you have sex like it’s a porn movie or something. Again, I love it. I’m not complaining, I’m just curious. That’s all.”

  She says, “Is there some other way to have sex?” And it hits me: She’s twenty-one. When she first got curious about sex in junior high, she didn’t go to her mom or to Cosmo, she went to the fucking Internet. Everything she knows about sex came from watching porn because she grew up with instant access to it. It dawns on me: It’s not just Holly. Every girl her age probably learned about sex by watching porn. And they probably all fuck like they’re in a porn movie. I wonder if Holly actually enjoys getting fucked in the ass, or if she just thinks that’s a normal part of sex because it’s in virtually every porno movie she’s ever seen.

  On our way back to work we drive through McDonald’s and I decide I should never question it again. I should accept it and enjoy it and be glad that, although I am not young enough to be part of this generation, whose questions about human sexuality were all answered by Internet porn, I am lucky enough to be tasting some of its fruit.

  some chapter

  The Sleeper Has Awakened

  I’m stopped at a red light on my way to work. I look over at the car next to me and see an average-looking woman using the rearview mirror to put her makeup on. I imagine her sucking my cock followed by me fucking her in several positions and finally blowing my load all over her freshly made-up face. This immediate reaction to a woman who is only averagely attractive is something I haven’t experienced in a long time.

  Once I get to work I stop in the coffee shop on the first floor to get a coffee and some gum. The girl who works the register, the same girl who has worked the register every morning for the past year or so, the girl who is probably in her late twenties, who is about five foot four and about two hundred pounds with a pierced eyebrow, hands me back my change and I can’t help wondering what her pussy tastes like and wondering what her asshole looks like when you’re fucking her doggy style and wondering if she gets many offers for no-strings-attached sex because she’s so unattractive and wondering what her reaction would be to such an offer ma
de by me. I take my coffee and gum and get in the elevator.

  A woman gets in with me. She’s unremarkable in every way: slightly older than me, average body, average face, bad perfume. I imagine biting her nipples and fingering her. I look down and can’t see a panty line under the skirt she’s wearing. I imagine fucking her hard against the wall of the elevator. She gets off on the next floor without making eye contact.

  On my floor I pass several female coworkers, all of whom I see every day and none of whom has provoked any sexual thoughts since I’ve known them. I think about fucking them all in various positions, in various combinations, concluding with loads deposited in various locations on their respective persons.

  I get to my desk and I’m almost ready to rape somebody in my office. This is the horniest I’ve been in a long fucking time. It’s almost like I can taste every woman’s pussy in the air as I pass her. I look out at Holly sitting at her desk. I look at her ass and accurately picture it naked sliding up and down on my dick.

  At first I thought fucking Holly might just slake my thirst for sex. I thought it might actually make my relationship with my wife better. I thought it might quell my need to fuck, so that Alyna and I could exist in a more platonic relationship, which is clearly what she wants. But sitting at my desk, looking out at every woman in my office and imagining their pussies in my face as I eat them out—even Sandra Thomas, who is easily sixty-five years old and has a severe limp—I realize that fucking Holly has had the opposite effect.

  Fucking Holly has awakened something in me that was asleep for a long time, for years. I am truly alive again.

  chapter eighteen

  The Thought Does Not Count

  I get home from work, expecting to walk through the door and find Alyna watching TV with the kids followed shortly by a discussion about whether we have anything in the house for dinner or if I need to go pick something up. Instead, I open the door to find no Alyna and no kids. There’s just a little note with my name on it lying on the rug just inside the front door.

  It reads, “Kids are with Isabelle until 11. I’m in the bedroom.” At one point during our therapy session, I remember, Roland told Alyna that she should be more spontaneous with sex, that it would potentially help both of us become more interested in having more of it. I assume this is her attempt at spontaneity. I get mildly excited by the idea of fucking my wife and then realize that, even after Alyna and I fuck, I will have fucked Holly more this month than I have my own wife. I push this out of my head and walk to the bedroom.

  I open the door and see Alyna on the bed in lingerie, which I have no interest in, reading A Walk Across the Sun. She looks up and says, “Oh, I didn’t hear you come in,” then quickly reads a few more lines, marks her place with a bookmark, puts the book on the nightstand, and says, “Why don’t you get out of those work clothes?”

  I strip down in a few seconds and get in bed next to her. She says, “I bet you weren’t expecting this today.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Is it getting you excited?”

  “Uh . . . yeah. You?”

  “Sure. Yes.”

  She kisses me. It’s a strange, forced kiss, almost vacant. It’s almost what I would imagine a kiss with a prostitute to be like. I can easily tell that she’s not into it, that she’s doing it for some other reason. For Alyna, that reason is that it was ordered by her therapist. For a prostitute it would be money. The result is the same: a stiff, nonsexual kiss that seems unnecessary.

  I stop her and roll her over on her back, take her lingerie off, and start kissing her down her stomach. It’s obvious I’m making my way to her pussy. She says, “Wait. Let’s just do it.”

  “Just fuck?”

  “Yeah, just have sex. No foreplay.”

  “Why?”

  “Just to be spontaneous.”

  Alyna clearly thought of the “no foreplay” scenario long before I got there, which of course makes it anything but spontaneous. I say, “Okay,” and get a condom from the night table on my side of the bed. I say, “You want to put it on?” hoping this will play into her doctor-ordered sexual spontaneity.

  She says, “No. You do it. You’re better at it than I am.”

  I roll the thing down my dick and she says, “Let’s do a position that we haven’t done before.”

  I think back to when we first started dating, when we would fuck three times a day in every position in every hole. I think back to when she wanted to fuck. There isn’t a position we haven’t tried. I say, “I’m game. What did you have in mind?”

  She says, “The pile driver.”

  I say, “What?”

  “Yeah, it’s like, I don’t know. I looked it up online. It’s like a porno thing. I thought you’d like it. It’s like where the guy, you, kind of gets up above me and squats down and I’m kind of like rolled back on my shoulders. Hang on, let me just show you.”

  I can feel my dick getting soft as she reaches over and gets her iPad. She cues up a video of a guy pile-driving some chick. I’ve seen the pile driver a million times. I just didn’t know that’s what it was called. It doesn’t seem fun at all. It doesn’t seem like it adds any sexual pleasure. It just seems like work.

  I say, “Do you really want to do this, or is this something you think I want to do?”

  She says, “I think it’s something that we haven’t done, and if we’re trying to spice things up, we should do things that are new.”

  I say, “Alyna, you don’t have to do this. I can tell you’re not into it.”

  She says, “Yes, I am. I want us to have sex more. I know you think I’m fat now and I don’t like sex, but it’s not true. It’s just that—” She starts crying. “We’re just not the same people we were, you know? I want to want you to fuck me like we used to fuck before we were married, up against walls and in the shower and all of that, but it’s just different for me somehow now. All I think about is the kids. I remember when all I thought about was your dick. That just seems like so long ago, and we can’t be the same people we were then, right? I mean, we’re parents now and that means things change, right? The things that were important to us before we had kids are different. That’s all it means. I mean, is that terrible?”

  She breaks down sobbing. I hug her and kiss her on the forehead. I say, “It’s not terrible at all. Not at all.”

  Through tears she says, “I’m a good mom, right?”

  I say, “You’re a great mom. You really are,” as my dick goes completely soft.

  We lie there for another ten minutes. I console her about the state of our relationship. She assures me that she had only the best intentions when she set this whole thing up. I tell her that I appreciate the effort. She tells me she loves me and I tell her the same thing. Then I go to the bathroom and pull the unused condom off my limp dick.

  chapter nineteen

  Walking Dead

  I’m sitting at a table with three other couples at the Woodland Hills Country Club having brunch. It’s a pre-baby-shower being thrown by one of the couples for their closest friends. I am friends with none of these people. I know them only through casual exposure at other similar events that I’ve been forced to attend by Alyna, who actually is friends with these people. The real baby shower happens next weekend. We are obligated to bring gifts to both.

  The women congratulate each other on every aspect of their lives in high-pitched laughter and praise. The men say little, chiming in only to confirm things their respective wives have said, and only if prompted to do so. Their default state is staring into space, or at each other, with the knowing dead-eyed gaze of a body and mind that no longer comprise a man. I used to think I was like them, but I can feel that I’m not anymore. I stare at a passing waitress’s ass and I know that only very recently I had my dick in an ass that was younger and hotter. Only very recently I felt the mouth of a twenty-one-year-old girl on my d
ick. Only very recently I was reminded that we are all animals who exist only to eat and fuck.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see one of the other husbands, Craig I think his name is, catch me checking out our waitress’s ass and probably gritting my teeth like a maniac. He looks at her ass, too, and raises his eyebrow nonchalantly, as if to say, “Wouldn’t know what to do with it if I could get it.”

  I look at the other guys at the table. They’re all like Craig. They’re all resigned to their fate. They all understand that their lives are over except for the dying. They exist only to provide for their children, only to make sure their offspring will grow to reproduce their own offspring. I know I was like them before I fucked Holly. But I did fuck Holly, and I’m not like them anymore. Their lives have become slow trickles of meaningless moments spent watching children’s television and listening to their wives fart in their sleep. They are no longer vital. I can’t go back. I can’t be like them again.

  some chapter

  Gay Wisdom

  I’m at lunch with Carlos. After I’ve filled him in on all the details of the affair I’m having with my twenty-one-year-old intern, he claps and says, “Finally, my straight married friend gets laid. Well, congratulations.”

  I say, “Thanks.”

  He says, “And you’re doing okay with the guilt?”

  I say, “Yeah, that’s surprisingly easy to deal with. I just think about Alyna refusing to fuck, or not being into fucking anymore, and I can rationalize away the guilt pretty easily.”

  He says, “That’s good. You have to get laid.”

  I say, “Actually the weirdest thing about all this is that I’ll sometimes question why this girl’s fucking me at all, like what she finds attractive about me.”

  He says, “You’re insecure? What a fucking pussy.”

  I say, “It’s not insecurity. It’s just questioning the whole thing, I guess. Does she really like me or not? You know?”