I'm in Bed With a Man and a Cat Named Hussy and I Miss My Wife

Are all stories untrue—especially the ones we tell ourselves about whom we desire and why?

Each week, The Queer Love Project publishes an original essay. Want to submit your essay and add to our growing archive? Find our submission guidelines and more here.

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I’m in bed with a man and a cat named Hussy and I miss my wife. The cat has climbed onto his chest and sleeps there with her eyes half-closed, rising and falling with his breath. The light is brightening the curtains, the sparrows in the hedge are bickering already. Soon I’ll get up, make up some excuse to leave early, and bike my way home.

But I don’t move. I wait for him to get up, falling in and out of restless sleep, waking disoriented as to where I am, whose bed, whose home. I shouldn’t be this disoriented. I’ve been with my wife for going on 20 years, with this man for a year and change. I should know where home is.

He wakes finally with a stretch that displaces a miffed Hussy, smiles at me across the pillow gap. His eyes crinkle at the corners like an old man’s. Though he’s only a few years older than me, he looks much older with the wrinkles, his bald head, his gray beard. I like that. I let myself be pulled in. His body is warm with sleep and his chest hair tickles my nose. He’s gotten a tattoo of a sound wave of his sons’ laughter across his chest. The hair there is still stubbly. I love his body, the warmth, the male vastness of it. I don’t know if I feel safe, but I feel wanted. 

“Bad night?”

“Just feeling a bit anxious. I should get home.”

He pulls back enough to look down at me.

“Everything OK?”

I shrug, extract myself, swing my legs down off the bed so that he can’t read my face. The fact of me missing my wife would come as no surprise to him. But I want to keep it just mine, this longing that’s not for him. 

There’s plenty of longing for him, too—even now in his bed. The way he looks at me with such hunger for my body. The way his beard scratches against my belly, on my inner thighs. The way the mass of him pins me down, opens me in ways I’ve never opened myself to anyone. 

I hate wanting him this much, bad enough to make me cleave my life. I hate that my wife is home alone, waiting for me to return from my boyfriend’s house. I hate being a woman who needs a man to fuck her. Worse: a queer feminist who needs, apparently, a man to top her. 

How can breakfast take this long? He makes banana pancakes as one of his sons tries to teach me Minecraft. 

“Running late, breakfast taking forever (insert eyeroll). Miss you (insert kiss),” I text my wife. 

“Walnuts are great!” I answer the man brightly. 

“You’re like some person I don’t know when you talk to him,” my wife remarked after the first time the three of us had dinner. I can hear it in my voice now, my me-talking-to-men-I’m-fucking voice. Smaller, brighter, higher. My girl voice.

“OK,” my wife texts back then leaves WhatsApp. Sunday is her day of the weekend and I’m not home. 

It occurs to me that I’m like a child of divorced parents, clinging to the last hours with Dad.

It occurs to me that I’m like Persephone, splitting my life between a lecherous uncle-husband and his dark kingdom of boy socks and cat hair, and a bereaved mother who gives life and wheat and writes a sci-fi novel as she waits. 

I tell myself to stop being dramatic and get up to set the table. 

I know why I’m here. It’s for that moment when he says, “Come here baby, come sit on Daddy’s lap,” and I do, and I straddle him and press my face into his chest, and he unzips my jeans, and he unzips his jeans and when his cock is in me, he whispers in my ear, “You’re home now with Daddy where you belong.”

I love that moment on my bike ride, somewhere between Empire Boulevard and Eastern Parkway, when the hill levels off and the Jewish men hurrying to shul give way to tattooed queers walking their dogs, and I finally start to breathe easier. I’m on the home stretch. I’m coming up from Hades, and up here, even in the heat wave of August, there’s a breeze down the wide stretch of the parkway.

My wife is sitting where I left her Thursday night, in her corner of the couch, barely glancing up at me from her laptop, piles of books stacked up next to her, all about desert ecosystems. In the novel she’s writing, Earth has been desertified, the remains of humanity now living in a place not unlike the Taklamakan desert. She’s explained to me the vibrancy and complexity of desert habitats, how precise the adaptations are of the animals and plants who live there. She’s studying desert farming and how animals adapt to drought. She wants me to go to the Sonoran Desert with her for research. I want to take her, learn together about lizards with black linings sheathing their organs to protect them from desert heat. About darkling beetles who stand with their backs to the wind to gather dew from the air. 

I want to learn how to survive in the desert with her. I want to want nothing else. 

“Why bother telling me when you’ll be home,” she says, hardly glancing up.

“I know. I’m sorry,” I say lamely. She lets me wrap myself around her, laptop and all, my face in her neck. Eventually she puts her arm around me. I’d like to tell you that I feel like I’m home, every bit of me. But my body no longer knows where it belongs.

I could use neat identity words to try to tell you a true story. Bisexual, androsexual, homoromantic, subby. Would that be clearer? Or I can tell you a story in a different genre, in the language of psychotherapy, my profession, about growing up a fatherless girl, about my unresolved, ungrieved longing for Daddy. Or I can say, it’s just that I missed dick. Or that I never really dated men and had to try, to either walk through that open door or close it for good. I could say, I was about to turn 40 and had to find out. But each of these stories leaves something vital out, something to do with my confusion about desire and home.

“I couldn’t keep anything from my wife, except the most important things. Like, when we had sex, I always imagined men in order to come.”

When I was young and my civilian friends were hooking up with their boyfriends after school, I was swimming. Four hours a day, before and after school, head down in the water, my body pared down to Swimmer Girl, all shoulders and goggle tan and longing to be fast. I dated a teammate, a nice butterflyer boy with killer abs, but my body hung back. Our sex was just another workout to get through. My body had better uses, like going under a 4:20 in the 400 free or under 8:50 in the 800, like making Nationals and Trials. My home was swimming, and when I desired nothing else and was fast, it was all I ever wanted. 

After I quit early on in college, burned out and heartbroken, I thought dating girls was about as far away as I could get from the Southern California suburban world I swam in, the straight jock world I told myself I’d quit. I had a girlfriend in college, a kind woman who loved me and would’ve made a lasting home with me had I let her. But I’d just started to shed Swimmer Girl body and had so much left to explore, so many queer versions of myself to still try on. I called her from Paris, two years into our relationship, to tell her I was going to Princeton for grad school, sorry. I remember staring out at a courtyard with a defunct fountain full of dirt and pigeon poop and the red welts I’d gouged into my forearm with my nails as we talked. 

And then I met my wife. First year of grad school, she a scientist who knew everything and would keep me safe. I thought I’d found a home for us, me and my body. I thought I could rest now and forever from the scary, uncharted labor of queer explorations. She held me when I couldn’t sleep, through panic attacks about my dissertation, after I puked or cut and then confessed. I couldn’t keep anything from her, except the most important things. Like, when we had sex, I always imagined men in order to come. Like, when we had sex, I did not desire her body (but I did desire her to desire my body). But she was my home. What did desire, or at least sexual desire, have to do with it?

Later that Sunday, we venture out for our evening walk once the heat begins to ebb. My wife spots Shithead, the sapsucker who lives in the spruce at the entrance to the park and bores neat, vicious rows of holes in the trunk so that the sap oozes out and we worry the tree will die. She points out the chimney swifts swooping down over the lawn, hunting gnats. We sit on a bench and watch the dogs go by. Friend parade, we call it. We have a thing for corgis and dachshunds. I scud down to fit myself under her arm. My wife is a head shorter than me, corgi to my poodle. My senses read her as female, with her full curves and the softness of her skin, but her body also knows how to appear bigger, stronger than me, sturdier. She sounds pretty toppy and masc to me, my therapist remarked when I described to him my wife’s body. So then, what’s this nonsense I’m letting myself believe about the strength and sturdiness of the male body? How am I still longing for some elusive, unreconstructed version of cis masculinity—didn’t I learn anything from Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam? What if I’m cleaving my life for an untrue story? 

But aren’t all stories untrue, especially the ones we tell ourselves about whom we desire and why? 

I could say, I do not desire my wife. By which I mean, I do not desire to have sex with her. I don’t want her to pin me down and whisper dirty threats in my ear, then carry them out. I do not desire her to be the agent of my sexual pleasure or to be the agent of hers. I desire to desire these things our bodies used to do together. I miss a time when I could invite my wife into my body, even if my mind was sometimes elsewhere. I miss a time when I could let myself feel both safe and wanted by her.

And yet: like all stories about desire, that I do not desire my wife is an untrue story. That I do not desire her body is an untrue story. But to tell you this other, possibly truer, story, I have to contort language. Maybe we don’t have the language to describe this desire I’m trying to describe, because our language of desire is not a queer enough language, or a lesbian enough language. If I were writing a dissertation about it, I’d call it, Home for Desire: The Lesbian Erotics of Everyday Life.

I desire to sit on my wife’s lap until she tells me to scooch my bony ass off her. I lust after the way she masterfully formats my Word documents with that scientist competence I first fell for. I’m mad for the way her fingers dig into the ridges between my fingers and I think, at least our hands haven’t forgotten how to fuck. I long to hear with her the scorpion mice howl in the Sonoran Desert, and I can make my body hum just imagining us out there in a tent, under a sky so bright with stars we’ll joke, it’s like a nighttime sex scene in a Hollywood movie. I crave to fall asleep next to her, comforted and annoyed by the light of her tablet. I get monarch butterflies in my stomach imagining how we’ll plant milkweed and sea holly together in our future pollinator garden. I yearn to learn to better speak her language so I can better talk to her parents. I’ve already learned all the many ways to say longing, desire, yearning in her language. Hasret. Arzu. Özlem. She’s taught me all of them, except one. 

Daddy-longing. But something in that longing shifted and went underground, a little over a year into my time with the man. Maybe I had learned something from Andrea Dworkin after all. A day came—and it really did feel that sudden—when I could no longer find it tenable to enact fantasies of misogyny with a male partner who wouldn’t ever fully grasp my conundrum and his role in it. Consent had nothing to do with it. I simply could no longer tolerate opening my body to rituals of humiliation and female disempowerment at the hands of a cis man. This refusal was not ideological or abstract. My body simply said no.

The man and I parted after two years. The lights had gone out on every other part of our relationship, like a whole coast going dark with power failure. The sex was the only light remaining, until that too went dark. That is a true story. And so is this one: I left because I could no longer bear to be in bed with this man and a purring Hussy and long for my wife. 

This is not a story about how I embraced one desire and rejected the other. It would be so much easier if it were. To come, I still picture him or a body like his. In my fantasies I’m young and he, or someone like him, is old. I still struggle to turn myself on without imagining some sort of power, age, or gender difference. I don’t intend to, but sooner or later my brain will turn to the old, hot fantasies and my body follows suit. This is not a story about forsaking my kinky desire. It’s just that I don’t currently know of a form it can take in the world we live in, and within the contours of the life I want with my wife. 

Today, I think that being queer also means, among so much else, living with these jagged longings that don’t fit, about learning how to sift through all the true and untrue stories about whom we want and why. Maybe us queers, we’re just better at recognizing these multitudes and dissonances in ourselves, then grieving those desires that can’t thrive in the home we choose to make. 

The grief comes rarer these days. When the man and I parted, I would’ve said, this grief is devastating. There were days when I couldn’t breathe, thinking, I’ll never have sex again because I don’t know how without not only cleaving my life but also splitting myself down the middle. But, some time the second summer after the breakup, my wife and I and a couple of swimming friends were at Fort Tilden in the Rockaways. Oystercatchers squabbled over a ghost crab and an osprey soared back to the dunes with a fish in its talons. My friends and I swam to the gay beach and back, about an hour and a half total, long enough for euphoria to set in. The ocean was a smoky green that day, shot through with bars of gold. We whooped back in through the surf, and my wife made room for us in the shade of the umbrella. I plopped down in the sand, resting my head on her lap, devouring the watermelon she passed to me, scientist that she was, so as to avoid sand contamination. And how do I describe it, it was like whatever I didn’t and couldn’t have just was, right there with this salty joy. A love for the ocean shared with my tribe of swimming queers, with my wife swaddled in her UPF gear, swiping through a graphic novel on her tablet.

That day, and so many days since, there was no rift, no unbearable longing, no split in myself. I adapted to the drought, and the grief felt like an awareness mixed with respect and acceptance of wildlife in the ocean as I swim. It’s there and it could hurt me, but most days it won’t, and it wouldn’t be the ocean without it. So, while it’s been going on three years and I’ve solved nothing, sign me up for the grief, I say now. Because what I desire most, and what I have, is a life of friend parades and Shithead sightings with my wife. What I desire most, and what I have, is the way I can breathe easy with her, like when I finally crest a hill on my bike, quads burning, and then begin to coast downhill, all the way home.

Each week, The Queer Love Project publishes an original essay. Want to submit your essay and add to our growing archive? Find our submission guidelines and more here.