What Tempts Our Wives

My wife no longer washes her hands when she comes in from the garden. I find traces of earth around the house: dirty fingerprints on the refrigerator handle, last season’s leaves on top of the toilet seat, blood-like drops of tomato juice on the hardwood floor.

When we got married, we promised to eat one meal a day together, even if it was just leftovers in front of the TV. I knew I was losing her when she began snacking on peas and berries straight from the plant, preferring that to my own well-intentioned cooking.

“I’m not hungry,” she says when I go outside to tell her the food is ready. My arms are crossed and I am wearing her sandals. “Eat without me. I’m in the middle of dividing these hydrangeas.” She leans over the chicken wire fence and dismissively kisses the side of my mouth.

I watch from the kitchen as she pokes around in the plot of dirt on our own modest property. As I smear rhubarb jam on a piece of bread, she pulls weeds from the ground, her ungloved hands gripping tight to the uprooted stems. I can hear her speaking through the open window and assume she’s on the phone, but then I hear it ding beside me as I wipe the knife clean on a napkin. She is talking to the plants.

⚘⚘⚘

We met several springs ago when the pollen count was at its highest and my longing was nearly too big for my body. Each morning, I woke up feeling like I had swallowed bees. Allergy symptoms are often indistinguishable from those of yearning—in both cases, I am itchy and watery and overall irritable.

We met several springs ago when the pollen count was at its highest and my longing was nearly too big for my body. Each morning, I woke up feeling like I had swallowed bees.

I often went days without hearing the sound of my own voice. I worked alone, mocking up fact sheets and copyediting medical documents for clients on my computer. Most nights, I would leave my apartment and walk down the street to the bodega for the dollar deli sandwiches and the cats. There was an old calico that had been there since the store’s opening and a white one with dusty paws that apparently wandered in one day and never left.

I saw the same woman there multiple times a week. She had wavy brown hair that was cropped around her head, wore slacks and a button-up, and bought the same thing every time: a cup of coffee and two microwavable falafel wraps.

It started pouring one day, unexpectedly trapping us both in the hot food aisle.

“Finally,” she said to no one in particular—I just happened to be there, watching her watch the rain pelt the cars and the sidewalk. She looked over at me and clarified. “We really needed this.”

I nodded in agreement. “It’s been so dry,” I said, dryly.

She inspected me without any obvious judgment. “Do you work around here? I’ve seen you around.”

“Um, sort of. I live a few blocks away, and I work there. From home.”

“What do you do?”

“Freelance stuff, mostly copyediting. But I hope to pivot to like, actual writing sometime soon.” I was nervous, not used to talking to strangers like this. I had subconsciously picked the sticker off the back of my candy bar. Willing her not to walk away, I said, “Coffee at dinnertime? Don’t you sleep?”

She chuckled. “I’d like to. I have to work on my thesis tonight,” she said. I learned that she was an English Ph.D. candidate at a nearby university, which made her even more attractive to me. I had always had a thing for academics, thought brains were hot and creativity meant compassion.

I did not believe couples actually met this way, and I certainly did not believe it would happen to me. But under the guise of interest in the college she worked at, I got her phone number. A few days later, a bottle of wine in, I texted her and asked if she would like to join me at a park by the bodega, one of the far and few green spots in the city. She said yes.

⚘⚘⚘

Whenever it rains now, she watches it fondly from the dining room table. I see her gazing past my face, over my shoulder to the cracked-open sky. I like to imagine she is thinking about how we met and those ridiculous months of fondling that followed, but I know all that’s on her mind is how big the pepper plant is going to grow.

“How was your day?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Alright. Busy.”

“Any interesting paper topics submitted so far?” Her undergraduate students are supposed to pick a novel, then form a thesis on what it has to say about humanity’s relationship with the environment.

“One girl wants to write about The Doloriad. It’s like, this twisted book about a surviving incestuous family after the world pretty much ends. Definitely an unexpected choice.”

“It sounds cool. Different.”

“It is, but only if she can actually tie it back to the stuff we talk about in class. I think she’d rather talk about the family members’ relationship with each other than their relationship with the earth.”

She doesn’t ask me how I am. It has been two years since we eloped in the city courtroom, one since we moved into the house. At first, we felt high on the promise of a white picket fence life, the slow movement of the mornings easing us into day. Then, for me at least, the fantasy faded into a deep uncertainty.

Every evening she comes home from work with her sleeves rolled up, her forearms raw from how badly she itched to get her hands in the ground. It was her idea to buy the house—It’ll be nice to have more space, she’d said—but it often feels as if I am the only one who lives here.

In the morning, I wake in an empty bed. At night, she is there but might as well not be—there is no touching or talking and our breathing doesn’t sync up like it used to. This house, so removed from the life I lived before her, has begun to unsettle me in its size and silence and the way it makes me feel like I am truly, totally alone.

The city was different—when I felt lonely, I could tumble down two flights of stairs and emerge in a cocoon of bodies, a mess of people who reminded me I was a part of something that moved fast and meant something, even if our collective purpose felt muddy.

But I am here now. With her, in theory, and the plants and the little basement mouse we named Rasputin.

I think I hate her sometimes.

When she said more space, she didn’t mean for better furniture and a more user-friendly kitchen. She wanted space from me.

Her body has become a part of the backyard—she blends with the lilac bushes, the long leaves of the irises, the mess of dead branches she’s collected after storms knock them down. When she said more space, she didn’t mean for better furniture and a more user-friendly kitchen. She wanted space from me.

“Pass me the potatoes?”

I hand her the ceramic bowl and then watch as she chews unselfconsciously. We quietly clear the table, a chorus of crickets seeping into the house. They sound to me like mourning and to her, I fear, a calling.

⚘⚘⚘

I cried the first time we had sex. Her face had been buried between my thighs for what felt like hours and, committed to honesty and certain she would see through my act, I refused to fake it. The antidepressant I was on made it hard for me to come and contain my emotions, leaving me irrationally weepy and overall frustrated. My apologies were profuse, but she refused to accept them.

“It’s totally normal, baby.” A more pronounced sob shook through me when she called me that. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s really not you,” I said. “Like, you’re definitely doing everything right.”

She smiled. “I know. It’s okay.”

She made me so nervous in those first few months. I turned into a stupid mess of desire every time she left me a voice memo, or looked me in the eyes, or buzzed me from the door of my building. It became frightening how quickly we attached to one another. How did I, after so many years of being alone, find myself in a ridiculously stereotypical lesbian U-Haul situation? I couldn’t say. But from the first moments together, I felt her wrapping me up in some kind of chrysalis and I couldn’t wait to emerge as hers, entirely.

When we started meeting each other’s friends and family, I knew that was it for me. Knew I could never be without her.

“Oh, she’s just lovely,” my mom said. “I worried about you for a while there, but she really seems to be the one.”

She taught my parents and me card games on the deck of my childhood home and I lost every round, too busy imagining us ten, twenty years down the line—our lives intertwined like two thick branches that’d need to be killed to be separate.

That night we tried to keep quiet in the twin bed I first bled on at thirteen, the one where I spent so many restless nights dreaming about this, about her.

Sex has now become a perfunctory act, the same as shampooing or changing the filter in the water pitcher—we do it because we must. The other option is admitting that we are not what we were, that maybe our roots have grown as far as they can. But her hands are occupied, and mine are tied up in resentment. I refuse to tell her what she should already know.

⚘⚘⚘

I wonder if all couples eventually lose their language. Romantic adages say that when you find the right partner, you won’t always need words to communicate. You will learn to read each other’s grunts and glances; you will be content to sit in silence, everything unspoken except for what the body conveys. But our silence doesn’t hold meaning. It does not hold anything. It sounds like this:

• The terrible squealing of the oscillating sprinkler, its metal head rubbing against the plastic mount as it rocks back and forth, and back and forth again
• Our house’s midafternoon creaks that come from upstairs, the ones that make my heart drop but are really just a side effect of the sun
• How my ears ring in even small quantities of quiet to cover up the bizarre state of nothing
• Her sleep-talking, riddled with undefinable syllables and sentences that trail off to a place I am uninvited
• The scream of cicadas; the warning I mistake for a song.

⚘⚘⚘

Summer always leaves like a lover: slowly, at first, distancing itself almost imperceptibly, and then all at once. I used to dread the elderly days of August. Now, mid-July, I long for cool air, the crisp leafy skeletons scattered on the lawn like an omen. It will diminish the space my wife has to wander.

As I sit in the shade, sunglasses resting on my nose, I watch from afar while she cups the earth. She is currently planting more peas because the rabbits got into the garden through a hole in the fence and ate them.

There is a bluejay that frequents the feeder hanging in our crabapple tree. It is mean. Today, its usual victims, a group of finches, seem to have had enough. They trail the squalling streak of blue, looping in circles in the sky. Probably the bluejay could easily defeat the little birds, but their annoyances alone are enough to drive it away, for now. The finches feast triumphantly as wind tickles their tail feathers.

I think I’d prefer fighting to this foolish denial. We are two bodies in the same space, cohabitants but nothing more. I am in love with her and I am angry and I need her so bad and I want to leave.

I think I’d prefer fighting to this foolish denial. We are two bodies in the same space, cohabitants but nothing more. I am in love with her and I am angry and I need her so bad and I want to leave.

In the dullest, most defeating moments, I know I owe her a certain dedication. I made a promise, too. She cannot be responsible for all of this.

Besides, if we never met, I would’ve closed in on myself and written off any opportunity to open back up as a trick of the light, a waste of time. I was so close to slamming shut when she pried me open with such care, such ease, and promised that if I stayed this way, she’d be there. She’d make my vulnerability worthwhile.

Now, exposed as I am, I think she is bored with what she sees. But my hinge is broken and I hate that I cannot shut again. I am in two pieces, in the palm of each of her hands. I need her when I swore I’d never need anyone.

She pats the dirt into suggestive mounds and I wish for her to touch me like that again. I can feel her phantom handprints on my body, all the spots she used to love tingling in rigidity.

Lots of women are replaced like this. I just didn’t think it would happen so soon, here and now, in my own yard, where mere weeds are more tempting than me.

⚘⚘⚘

If I’m being honest, I can understand why she has turned to the plants. Unlike me, they do not ask too many questions. Unlike me, they are consistent; they do not oscillate between needing and disinterest, just ask for regular decency. Unlike me, they are always responsive and reliable and able to do exactly what they’re supposed to. They offer what I cannot: a distinct purpose, undeniable as the summer.

If she would just invite me to join her, show me how to prune and tell apart the plants that belong from those that don’t, maybe it could bring us back. Maybe the dirt does hold the magic she says it does. Maybe I am the problem—unwilling to dig my hands into the muck, too cynical to believe it would make any difference.

⚘⚘⚘

On a Saturday morning, I join her outside, where she’s sitting on our cushioned swing with a cup of coffee. I don’t like the sun as much as she does—I burn so much quicker—but it is still low in the sky and I have to admit I enjoy the thawing.

We discuss our evening plans: a trip back to the city for our author friend’s launch party. I notice that the dragonflies flock to my wife, and so do the bees. They land on her arms as if they are trying to suck pollen from her soft, freckled skin. “I don’t have freckles,” she says. “They’re sun spots.” I don’t understand the difference.

Late afternoon, we get ready to go out. We do it side by side in our two-sink bathroom instead of practically on top of each other, arms tangled together, the way we had to in our apartment. We feigned annoyance but secretly enjoyed the closeness.

The wine at the reading is free and strong. I clap after our friend reads her excerpt but couldn’t repeat a single line if I tried. When I stand up, the room spins slightly. Old acquaintances talk to me and I laugh and laugh even at what isn’t funny.

My wife is not drunk, so she drives us home. We reflect on the evening, making fun of the guy who asked if we were related. She laughs at that strangeness and my chest contracts.

At home, we leave our clothes in a single pile by the bedroom door. The sex feels like a conjuring—as if all this friction will generate what we need to go on. The workings and weight of her body are so comforting, so familiar, and in the brief moments between breaths, I am certain she has come back to me. But her sweat smells like soil and when we’re finished, she rolls over and stares out the open window in silence.

I imagine this is how straight couples feel when they try for a baby: raw, desperate, each secretly blaming the other for what won’t take root. I used to want to be a mother, but now I am too selfish for parenthood. Or, depending on how you look at things, not selfish enough.

⚘⚘⚘

“Here we are,” she said.

My wife parked on a narrow driveway. It was our first night at the new house. The sun was low in the sky and the air carried a particular weight that can only be described as possibility.

We unbuckled, stepped out, and let the car doors close gently behind us. It didn’t feel real yet, so we left the vehicle unlocked. Next door, a neighbor did laundry. We could smell it as we stood shoulder-to-shoulder, taking in what was now ours.

“I can’t believe we finally have a yard,” I said to break the silence.

“God, me neither. Look at all that space.”

“It’s lovely.”

She smiled at me. “You’re lovely.”

I wrapped my arms around her. Inhaled the new air of our new life.

There would be the sweetness of Sundays—then the death-grip on the bed on Mondays, dread to leave our little cocoon. Taking turns mowing the lawn. Saving frogs from the blade. Fresh bread from the oven beckoning her home. All sorts of places to break in with our love—the couch, the tub, the kitchen. A reclaimed domesticity. We were there because we wanted to be, both of us, completely.

“Shall we?” I asked, gesturing to the front door. On her way to meet my eyes, something in her sightline snagged her attention. I traced her gaze to the garden, overgrown and begging. Saw a brief flicker of something different in her face.

“You go ahead. I’m just going to scope out the garden.”

“But it’s getting dark.”

“It’ll just be a minute.”

I watched her cross the yard. She grabbed a stick from the ground, dragging it beside her as she gained distance. She unchained the hip-high gate and stepped into several shades of green, pondering this new, needy thing. I saw myself in it. Grew jealous. Stood there with the house keys clutched in my hand as the darkness digested.

⚘⚘⚘

I have decided the only way to make her love me again is to become what she is always running toward.

She is at work and I am on the couch, my body swallowed by the hole that’s formed after months of rotting. My disjointed emotional state, made from equal parts longing and loathing, has disrupted my usual drive. I spend days drifting in and out of consciousness, biting ice cream bars, then nursing a toothache until it’s gone.

It hasn’t rained in a month. Our water bill is outrageous and the sky is pure blue and parched. When I open the screen door, the sharp difference in temperature shocks my body. I try to put myself in her shoes, to allow myself to be drawn to the garden. I rarely open its gate, and never on my own. It latches automatically behind me.

I dig my bare toes into the dirt. It is pleasantly warm. On my knees now, I run a finger up the fuzzy stem of the tomato plant. So many textures here—the smooth skin of young peppers, the feathery feeling of sunflowers. I touch everything.

There isn’t enough of it to cover me entirely, but I arrange the dirt into an outline of my horizontal body, just tall enough to be noticeable when I stand up. Then I lay back down, careful to stay within the lines.

As the sun melts my skin, I bury my hands, smear dirt in my hair, wiggle into the ground. I wait, begging my body to grow roots. For her to come and look for me, to take me back. And when she does, I will never ask for more than this: a knowing, an acknowledging. I will never demand more than the plants.