They had sex the way Mia liked. The way Phil had grown to like, too. Nothing turned him on as much as his wife’s happiness, her heels digging into the mattress like she was backpedaling a bike: left, right, left, right. Afterwards, he took care of her the way she liked. He dappled her face with pecky kisses, folded up her disposable diaper, and ferried it to the trash.
He led Mia by both hands down the hall, across the black-and-white tile of their pre-war bathroom, and into the oblong tub that looked as though it was carved from a giant bar of soap. He lit candles and sat on the edge, bathing her with the squishy pink sponge and foamy gel scented with vanilla and sweet almond oil. Mia liked it. He helped her slide onto all fours so he could clean her delicate parts, parts shaggy with her distaste for societal expectations of female intimate grooming. He washed the sag of her tummy, the scraggle of her armpits. The landscape of her aging body was a welcome reminder that he was in love with a forty-nine-year-old woman, not a little girl who had yet to be potty trained.
She flipped over and sank into the suds. He lifted a foot and massaged it, dragging his index fingernail the length of her sole until she shivered. His wife was so beautiful when she was fulfilled to the point of exhaustion. The whole house was calm.
“I love you,” he whispered.
Her eyelids drooped.
“Don’t fall asleep in the tub. Wait ’til I put you to bed.”
“Mmhmm.”
He searched for a topic of conversation to keep her awake. Mia had strict parameters about what was and was not appropriate to talk about during her baths.
“I read a good article the other day,” he said.
“No articles,” she said.
“No, you’d find this interesting.” He massaged the other foot. “It said a single disposable diaper could take 500 years to decompose. It said that every minute on the planet, we’re throwing away 300,000 diapers. So when you multiply that—”
She jerked away.
“Hey. Careful.”
“Do you have something to say to me?” She grabbed the slippery sides of the tub and struggled to her feet.
“Sit down, Baby. I’m sorry.”
Mia stood there, dripping like a statue in the rain. He knew she was debating whether to run or stay. He saw the squinch of her lip and the clench of her jaw—yearning to finish her bath, yearning to punish him by storming out. It had happened like that a hundred times before.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let me take care of you.”
She huffed. Trying to blow the house down.
“You’re still soapy. Ignore me. Dumb.”
She sat. What had convinced her, he was not sure. He wanted to know. He was forever scanning her for data he could input into his notebooks, which were stuffed with all things Mia, causes of and remedies for the dissatisfactions that had arisen over the past eighteen years. She glared up at him through wet clumpy lashes. At least she was making eye contact.
She allowed him to lather a slug of shampoo into her long black hair. His fingertips knew well the planet of her scalp, the dents at her temples she liked him to knead, the flaky spot prone to dandruff she liked him to scratch. He rinsed her with the hand-held sprayer, clicked to the gentlest setting. When she flipped her head upright, she was still glaring.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, wiping her cheeks with his thumbs. “I thought it was interesting, that’s all. Making conversation. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Are you seriously still bringing this up? Fine. Okay. Get it out. Say what you’re going to—whatever.”
“That’s all.” He leaned in to kiss her forehead, but she ducked.
“And?”
“I love you,” he said.
“And?”
“And nothing. I mean. You know. The environment…”
He did not know what he was saying. He screamed at himself: No, stupid, what are you doing? Mia’s face went flat as putty scraped with a knife. There were pages and pages of notebooks dedicated to this phenomenon. The awful depth of it.
“Hold on,” he said. “You’re going in the hole.”
“I’m fine.”
He held out both hands and drew her from the tub like a corpse, heavy with inertia. All of the fight was gone from her, the fight that was, on good days, the electric center of her dazzling personality. Collapsed, a dead star. He toweled her off and dressed her in the warm robe which had been hanging, thanks to his foresight, over the floor heating vent. She was so stiff with inwardness, she forgot how to stick an arm through a sleeve. He did it for her. He knotted the belt around her waist, loosely, so she would feel held, but not held down.
“Lean on me,” Phil said, and she did, a slash against his straight line. “Feel the cold tile under your feet. Feel my arms around you. You’re safe. You’re loved. I’m sorry.”
•
Eighteen years ago, they first hooked up in his old apartment on Avenue C in Kensington, Brooklyn. Mia let him lead the way that time, and the second, and the third, and the fourth. She went along with whatever he suggested, and she seemed happy enough, although he was not convinced he was pleasing her. After each encounter, Phil hid in the bathroom and catalogued her rhythms in the small notepad he hid in a box of cotton swabs. The pages were scrawled with observations and conjecture. Maybe she liked being on top. Maybe she liked her inner elbow caressed? She never finished. Twice she complained it went on too long. One time she felt nothing at all. He asked her, “What do you like?” so many times, she told him to stop, which he did.
A few days after their fourth encounter, Mia invited him last-minute to a promotional party hosted by a tech startup where her roommate’s boyfriend worked. He agreed to tag along. Standing at a cocktail table too close to the DJ, they sipped branded drinks from a liquor sponsor. Mia announced, in the same bored tone with which she ordered her second Wild GINseng Blitz, that she hadn’t enjoyed having sex with Phil at all.
“It’s not your fault,” she said, smoothing her long hair away from her face as if the hair was the problem, not his ineptitude. “I guess I should mention—”
And she told him what it was she was into. Later, he would try and fail to recall her exact words. He could only approximate her phrasing in his notebook, cursing his memory for short-circuiting in that crucial moment.
“Oh, God,” Mia’s roommate, Marley, said. “You didn’t tell him yet?”
Mia laughed. “Shut up.”
“There’s barely any alcohol in this.” Marley frowned.
“I know, right?”
They went back to the bar, leaving him alone at the table. “Crank That” rumbled from the sound system, the bass rattling in his shoes. A cloud of pasty tech bros tried to dance the Soulja Boy. He wondered whether Mia was telling the truth or if this was a prank that she and her roommate played on unsuspecting guys. On the F train back to Kensington, he started to ask her a question, the first of many that were bubbling inside him.
“So, like, what if—”
She interrupted him with a long kiss. Pulling away, she wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist.
“You’re not freaked out?”
She asked it in such a way that implied that if he was freaked out, which he was, now was not the time to admit it, which he didn’t.
•
Phil cancelled his subscription to the website where he had read the bath-ruining article about diapers and the environment. It was the best idea he could think of to make amends with his wife. She didn’t ask him to do it; he knew it was the right thing to do. She hadn’t talked to him for twenty-eight hours, and he needed to take action.
As part of the cancellation process, the website forced him to click through a long list of reasons to stay.
Are you sure you want to give up your trusted partner in current events and culture?
Yes.
Are you sure you want to give up access to thirty-five years of archives?
Yes.
Are you sure you want to give up our award-winning advice column, “Valdez Sez”?
He hesitated. He loved “Valdez Sez” and read it with weekly fervor. He had, in fact, emailed Valdez the day after that life-changing promotional party, all those years ago. He hadn’t known where else to turn. He could not seek guidance from his friends, or his parents, or his sister. It was too personal. They would not understand. And they were judgmental, unlike him. He believed himself to be an empathetic person, a person who approached the world with curiosity, not condemnation. He needed advice from someone like that. Someone like Valdez.
In his email to Valdez, Phil had camouflaged the truth, not wanting to expose Mia or get himself in trouble with her. Instead of diapers, he wrote that he had discovered his new girlfriend was into monsters. She wanted to be a monster, he wrote: a big, mythical creature with a meaty serpent’s tail and purple skin shingled with scales. She wanted to wrap him in thick rubbery tentacles and comb his hair with her pointy talons. Then she wanted to hold him down and force him—in her fantasy—to impregnate her with his valuable human seed. Something about how her species was dying out and this was the only way forward. She wanted him to struggle, then to give in, then to become aroused by her power and might. At the height of their shared pleasure, she wanted him to see through her frightening exterior to the vibrant soul that burned inside. She wanted him to crawl on top of her and take control, to soothe the angry beast, to tame her wild instincts with the truth of his love. They would cuddle in the afterglow inside a cozy nest, content, excited for the impending beginning of their new interspecies family. She explained her fantasy to him, but he was unsure. He had never done anything like that before. What, he wrote, should he do?
Valdez was the only person Phil had ever confided in about the whole situation, and that made it extra hard to cancel his website subscription. But it was a sacrifice he had to make, if it brought him back into his wife’s good graces. It occurred to him to save Valdez’s published response, just in case he could never access it again. He found it in the archives and copied and pasted the text into a document. He saved it in a work folder on his laptop in which he knew she would never look. He navigated back to the website.
Are you sure you want to cancel your subscription? This action is final.
Yes.
•
While he waited for an answer from Valdez, Phil went to Mia’s apartment in Ditmas Park for the first time.
Marley’s at her boyfriend’s all weekend, Mia had texted.
Oh! Cool.
He was more nervous that time than the first, second, third, and fourth times. Mia, on the other hand, seemed more relaxed. He assumed that she was no longer weighed down by the immensity of her secret and was relieved to be herself. She sat him on the couch and brought out a cardboard box and gave him a tour of her diapers, as matter-of-fact as the tour of Brooklyn Brewery they had both enjoyed on their second date. She opened a clean diaper and ran his hand over it, the smoothness and the crinkles, the fluffy insides dry as chalk, so dry that he felt his fingertips drain of all moisture. She told him about the specific brand she ordered from Germany—extra bulky—and how she had tried so many other brands, experimented and explored, until she found the perfect fit. She had never been so animated in his presence, like godlight streaming through clouds. He was sucked into her, craving the warmth of this newfound exuberance. He knew now the secret of making her happy, and that made him happier still.
“Are you into this?” she asked.
“I’m into you,” he said, and that was enough.
Mia placed the diaper on the floor and sat on top, still in her jeans and T-shirt, and showed him how to fasten it. He knelt beside her and did his best, struck with the gravity and absurdity of the situation, watching himself from above, as if he were a character on one of those prestige TV shows that slide from comedy to drama. Between the taping of the left tab and the taping of the right, Mia’s voice changed. She grew hushed, describing how the pull of adhesive kept her secure in all the ways she was not secure in the outside world, where anxieties leaked through and had no remedy. It was her safe place. Her magic power. She arose and modeled for him, wild and timid, bunching and scrunching, the look and sound of her impossible to ignore, the same way, he was beginning to understand, that Mia’s deepest desire was to be impossible to ignore, to be the center of a lover’s rapt attention, a lover who could, he hoped, be him. The rustle of gathered plastic announced her presence like a medieval herald with a trumpet, imbuing her with a majestic confidence that knocked him back on the couch, a real confidence unlike the false one he could now see she had projected on their previous dates, the false confidence of eye rolls and loud talking, the crossing and uncrossing of arms. Now, she was enchanted, holy, pure. She wriggled onto his lap and flung her arms around his neck with spontaneous ease—none of the awkwardness of the first four times—and he held her just as easily, kissing her with a newfound tenderness of which he had not known himself capable, as if he might absorb a morsel of her sacred radiance. Nobody had ever been so vulnerable with him, nor could he recall being so vulnerable with anybody else, reverent at the altar of a soul. He never knew it could be like this. He wanted it to always be like this. The blood rushed from his head and engorged his heart. He leapt up, ready to kneel at her feet and confess his feelings, to beg for some kind of commitment, a promise that she would be his alone, to protect, to cherish.
He didn’t have the chance to speak. He fainted, coming to with a faceful of throw rug, the spell broken.
“What the fuck?” She was standing over him, nudging with her foot.
“What happened?”
“You left me all alone!” she said. “When I was emotionally exposed! You can’t fucking do that!”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said to the dust bunnies under the couch.
She sent him home.
•
He struggled without his website subscription, without access to his trusted partner in current events and culture, thirty-five years of archives, and award-winning advice column, “Valdez Sez.” He did not realize how much he relied on the website in his daily life. It had been his comfort blanket for so long, a mindless thing he could look at every five minutes or whenever he needed a quick dopamine hit. He kept clicking the bookmark in his web browser by mistake, even though he couldn’t see past the headlines and the first few sentences of each article before hitting the paywall. It was not easy to change a ten-year—no, twenty-year!—habit overnight. But he was resolute. It was his self-selected punishment, and he had no choice but to go through with it. His wife was still mad at him, had unsubscribed him from her inner world, had erected her own invisible wall of silent stone that he would have happily paid to pass through if she only allowed him to know the price. To demonstrate further penance, he decided to delete the bookmark and erase the website from his browser history altogether. It had been years since he had edited his bookmarks, and he was sitting at the kitchen table on his laptop, trying to remember how to do it, when Mia slithered in. She held something behind her back.
“Guess,” she said, with a child’s flair for the dramatic. It was the first time she had addressed him in almost two weeks, and with a smile, no less. His heart hoped.
“Is it… a big bag of cash?”
“You wish.”
“I do wish. So?”
“So…” She revealed, with a flourish, a thick white piece of folded material.
“What is it?”
“A reusable cloth diaper, stupid.”
A swell of peace overswept him. She had seen him. She had heard him. It was the kindest thing she—or anyone—had ever done for him. Phil wanted to embrace her and implore her: Don’t worry about it, Baby, don’t worry about diapers ruining the environment, I don’t even care anymore, what’s a few diapers in the grand scheme of things? I’m sorry I ever brought it up, I was wrong, it was a total lapse in judgment, it was a dumb article, forgive me, forgive me. But to say that would dismiss the immensity of what she had done. The effort she must have made, the mental hoops she would have jumped through to even attempt such a gesture of goodwill on his behalf. He pictured her with her therapist, working through the rage and fear of his bathtime betrayal. Awake in bed, debating with herself while he was asleep on the couch. Perhaps she even read the offending article to see what it was he was talking about. Maybe she had learned a thing or two about climate change and plastic pollution. Then, she would have researched eco-friendly products online: evaluating their various features, reading reviews, and posting on her message board to see if others of her ilk had recommendations. She had selected one particular item, making the purchase, tracking it as it shipped across the country, or the world—the international shipping perhaps canceling out the environmental benefits of the endeavor, but he was not going to nitpick. Her selfless action proved her commitment. She was willing to go outside her comfort zone for him, the way he always had for her.
The invisible wall dissolved. He kissed her eyelids, and they fell into their usual routine. It was automatic, but that did not make it any less romantic. What a thrill to be allowed once more into the sanctum of her fulfillment! She presented the cloth diaper to him. It had Velcro instead of adhesive, a new sensation for them both. He pulled open the first tab, separating the two sides, rough rigid plastic and malleable fur. How easily those opposites snagged together, and how violent it was to tear them apart. Mia winced at the long-textured sound of it.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Mmhmm.”
The second tab seemed to rip right through her, opening an old wound. She froze, her eyes fixed, the light retreating into her skull like a dog cowering inside a doghouse, its shadow huddled against a far dark corner.
“Baby? Are you in the hole?”
She gasped and gulped, unable to form words. What had he done? He hurled the cursed cloth thing across the room. He may have yelled. He cocooned her in blankets and squeezed her as she shook, his chin digging into her shoulder.
“I got you,” he said. “You’re safe. Breathe. Breathe.”
She sobbed into him. His arm was beneath her for so many minutes that it became a dead paw. He left it there to suffer. He deserved to suffer. The whole mess was his fault. He should not have mentioned the article. Should never have read it, should never have even clicked it. He should not have let her go through with the whole charade. He should have stopped her. Of course it wasn’t going to work. Velcro was never going to work. She needed an adhesive that was sticky, binding until the moment she wanted it gone, and then, in that moment, she needed it thrown away forever. Reusable was too scary for her. Reusable meant permanence. Reusable meant she had to live with it, to watch the fabric fade in the wash, become dingy, depressing, wrinkled, and peppered with lint. He knew from his tireless observation that the discard was everything. The discard was strength, power in the chaos of her universe. If she did not have something to discard, one of these days she would discard him. Would throw him to the side for the fleeting satisfaction of control. He should have known better. He should have said, You don’t need to change for me. You never need to change for me. I want you just the way you are.
•
Mia agreed to marry him after a year and a half of dating. He had never been so happy. He took her on the train to his parents’ house in Edison, where his mother greeted them at the door, already irritated. He was used to the fluttery physicality of her annoyance, the way she fiddled with her cross necklace and pulled her earlobes as if taking off clip-on earrings, which she used to wear when he was a kid. He and his sister used to find those earrings everywhere, stuck between couch cushions, amongst grapes in the vegetable crisper, wedged into the magazine rack. He would return them to her, and she would smile for one brief moment before returning to her usual frantic curmudgeonry.
“Everything’s a mess,” his mother said. “I told your father to vacuum before you got here—”
His father was watching golf in the living room. “I did it two days ago!” he yelled.
“You make a lot of mess in two days,” his mother yelled back.
Phil hung up the coats in the front closet and took out the vacuum cleaner.
“No, honey!” his mother said.
“It’s okay. It won’t take long.”
“No, no! That’s not the point. It’s your father’s job. Stop.”
“I did it two days ago!”
Phil had read a news story on the train ride about an eyewitness who had recently appeared for a murder case that was cold for fifty years. Mia squeezed his hand and he ran his thumb across her diamond, relieved to finally have an eyewitness to the tension of his upbringing. She looked cute in her meeting-the-parents outfit, a skirt and tights and a cardigan he had never seen. Her black hair ironed straight and sleek.
They ate a chicken-and-rice casserole the color and texture of the dining room’s stippled ceiling. His mother forked at salad with one hand and yanked her ear with the other as she explained her current drama. The volunteer who was in charge of publicity for the breast cancer walk had done nothing to help. They were nearing the signup deadline and had almost no signups.
“She doesn’t even have a Facebook. How is she supposed to get the word out?” his mother said.
“Sounds like you should be in charge,” he said. “You did such a good job last year. What was it again—?”
“Biggest turnout in five years. Everybody said—everybody. The best walk, ever.”
“It’s ridiculous they didn’t put you in charge again this year. They don’t know what they have in you.”
Her fingers fell away from her gold cross and Phil was satisfied he had done his part to soothe her.
“So it’s La—. Llama?”
“Lamia, mom.”
“Just Mia is fine,” Mia said.
“Is that a family name?”
“No, not really.”
“Where are you from, dear?”
“Indiana.”
“Oh, how interesting.”
They spoke in shallow terms, like the invasive vines taking over the backyard of his parents’ house—spreading everywhere but rooted nowhere, skating across the surface. Anytime his mother turned in a dangerous direction (her lack of grandchildren, the expense of modern weddings, her daughter’s betrayal by moving to Raleigh), he turned the conversational steering wheel. He did not want any sensitive topics or anything that might offend Mia.
“And, Lamily—”
“Lamia, Mom.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Mia’s fine. Just Mia.”
“Where are you from?”
“Illinois.” Mia winked at him.
“Oh, how interesting.”
He loaded the dishwasher the way his mother liked, and she packed him leftover casserole that he was not allowed to decline. While Mia slipped into her coat, he went to the bathroom and rinsed his mouth and spit. He stared at himself, trying to see into his own pupils. The lights cast a shadow. The closer he leaned toward the mirror, the darker his eyes became.
•
He was still recovering from the embarrassment of fainting on Mia’s floor. She didn’t reply to any of his calls or texts for almost a month. He persisted. That, he prided himself on. He was not one to give up. She could count on him. He would not abandon a woman at the first sign of trouble. He was desperate for her to know this, for her to see the unshakeable empathy which was his superpower, as diapers were hers. He assumed she had been judged by men before, or laughed at, or ignored. Maybe she had dated some creeps who shared her kink for all the wrong reasons. He refused to be any of those men. She would see. He would prove it to her.
He called again after work, with no answer. He had known Mia a short time and already was halved without her. Love had entered him at her apartment, real love, actual love, like nothing he had ever encountered, and she had kicked him out before he had the chance to regain full consciousness after his mortifying swoon, to lift his wobbly knees from her dirty floor and confess: I love you, Mia. I love you. The feeling pressed against him ever since, unexpressed, a boil about to pop.
He sat down with a mug of tea to distract himself with the new “Valdez Sez” column. He was surprised to see that someone had written in with the same exact problem he was having, a new girlfriend who wanted to dress up as a tailed and tentacled mythical creature. Except—no, it was his own letter! Right there on the website, in public, for everyone to see. He burned his lips on the rim of the mug.
Hey you, Valdez began his answer, as he always did. Here at the Ol’ Valdez Advice Emporium, I usually tell folks that if you’re not into a kink you don’t EVER have to participate in it. Sometimes I tell folks that if you’re curious about a kink you can always TRY it in a safe and consensual situation and see if you like it, but you are never ever EVER under any obligation to go along.
All of that advice still stands. But dude, I’m gonna complicate your life and tell you another thing. Based on your letter it’s pretty obvious to me you’re not “curious” about this mythical creature roleplay thing your girlfriend is into. You’re REALLY REALLY into it, too. I wonder if you got off just writing about it to me. It sure sounded like it. My editor had to cut out an entire page of phantasmic, orgasmic details that were too explicit for our general readership. (P.S. Have you considered writing and selling creature erotica? You might make a killing. Maybe you already do. I wouldn’t be surprised.)
So if this isn’t a prank (which it very well might be, though I try to take every letter at face value), then dude, I’m BEGGING you, get out of your own head and give yourself permission to dig your claws into the tentacular roleplay fantasy that you are obsessed with. Go forth, man. Live your scaliest, slimiest dreams. Your girlfriend wants to be a monster. You want to have sex with a monster. Sounds like a match made in heaven, or in a medieval dragon boudoir. Why the hell not? Maybe the better question is: What’s stopping you?
•
The Bathtime Article Aftermath was bad; she shut him out for weeks. That was nothing compared to the Cloth Diaper Debacle. Instead of her usual wall of quietude, Mia faked a sunny countenance, as though nothing had happened and nothing was wrong. It was terrifying in its utter cheerfulness, and even more terrifying to realize she had it within her all along—a stranger’s face he had never seen. One night she made him dinner, which he could not be certain was not poisoned. The next night she vacuumed the whole apartment. He came home a third night to find her folding laundry, whistling.
“Why are you doing that?” he asked.
“Doing what?” Her smile, a trap door.
Mia rubbed up next to him in bed. He was careful not to engage. He did not trust her, did not know yet what trick she was up to. His notebooks yielded no answers because she had not acted that way before. He could not settle. The scales of their relationship were uneven, and he was the one in debt. He had started it all, had rattled her first, had backed her into an insecure corner where she had no choice but to fight back. Until—what? How long would it go on?
On Saturday, they walked to the grocery store. She held two grapefruits to her chest, squeezing them with a porny face. His stomach sickened. It was so unlike her, so lewd, so tacky. She was acting nothing like the woman he so adored, who was precious as a wounded bird, regal as a warrior. As he placed apples into the cart, she came up behind him and exhaled into his ear.
“I. Want. To. Have. Sex. When. We. Get. Home,” she said, hands parenthetically cupping the sides of her mouth.
He batted her away. “Quit it.”
They unpacked the groceries together. She performed an appalling striptease right there in the kitchen, a striptease he would have been flattered by in the bloom of their first meeting, unaware of its fakery. If artifice was what she needed to mend their rift, he decided he would pretend to be okay with it. She undressed him, something she had never done before. With each article of clothing removed, dread rose in his chest, until it gurgled against the back of his throat. He glanced around, at the cobweb high up on the corner cabinet, at the dead bulb over the sink he hadn’t yet replaced. She grabbed him by the waistband of his underpants and announced that she did not want to do it her usual way.
“C’mon. We’ll do it your way this time,” she said.
Your way. His way. The phrase shattered him into panic. That was it. That was her endgame all along. She knew. She knew his vile inclination, and she was going to force him to admit it. How did she know? Had she gone digging on his computer and found the “Valdez Sez” letter saved in his work file? Or had she read it when it was first published? Maybe she had met his parents, knowing, had stood at the altar, knowing, had brushed her teeth beside him for almost two decades, knowing—waiting their entire relationship for him to slip up in a way grievous enough for her to torture him with the revelation of his secret desires. He would rather she divorce him.
“My way?” he said. “What do you mean?”
She yawned. “Your way. You know. Boring.”
Relief slapped him like a cold glove. No, she did not know. She had no idea. “Boring” was what she called the first four times they had had sex, awkward, getting-to-know-you, B.D., Before Diaper. “Boring,” or “vanilla,” or “normie.” She thought boring was what he liked because that was what he had initiated, back then. Regular old sex: a dollop of foreplay, a few positions, a 50% completion rate between the pair of them. He did not want boring. He knew that she knew that he did not want boring. She knew his arousal was all tied up in hers, and if she couldn’t enjoy it, he wouldn’t either. That was her punishment. It was childlike in its simplicity. He was disappointed for a flutter of a moment, wishing she had exposed him instead. It might have been freeing, no matter what it meant for their future, even if she lost all respect, even if she left him. Oh, to stop carrying the burden of it like a boulder! To wear his shame as proudly and openly as she did!
He could have told her right there in the kitchen of their nakedness, could have confessed it all, could have said “Mia, I’m into—,” a sentence he had never found the right words to finish. It was a miracle she hadn’t already found out. How easy it would have been for her to discover at any point. It would only have taken her a modicum of effort. He had no password on his phone, which he misplaced around the apartment with regularity. He no longer deleted the history on his web browser, the crevices of which held scaly, slippery evidence if she had ever bothered to look. He had dropped a few hints at various points (after their engagement party, on their honeymoon, watching a movie, on the beach, on a dragon-themed roller coaster), but she had ignored every one, had never been hooked by his bait. She had no curiosity about him, no ravenous need to know. He wondered, had he kept himself a secret from his wife, or had she never cared to ask? He almost wished—no, he did not dare to wish. It was pointless to consider. He would rather go through with her punishment than risk the loss of her. Your way. Boring. He deserved to be punished. If he could get it over with, things could get back to normal.
“Fine,” he said.
He held her chin and pressed his lips to hers. It was awkward, like dating again, navigating a thousand angles. He fought the urge to sink into the worn-in cushions of their longtime ritual, trudging instead through waist-deep mental muck to get on with it, to go through with it. He pretended she was someone else. He pretended he was someone else. He pulled her on top of him on the kitchen floor, expecting her to resist, but she didn’t. She went along—the worst kind of sex, going along. Going along was the opposite of love.
“Are you into this?” he asked.
“So into this.” She half-bounced, grasping at her breasts in the same gaudy way as the grapefruits. “Am I giving you what you need?”
“Yes.”
She closed her eyes and he knew she was fantasizing away from him. He closed his eyes and fantasized away from her, too, as he had done before, as he had done a thousand times before, in every final moment when he required one specific push to fall over his craggy edge. It did not work that time. They were on opposite sides of bulletproof glass, scratched and smeary, trapped in a prison, or a lab, or a bank, and no matter how he jammed his fingers at the tiny ventilation holes, nothing would pass through. He could not see her, and she could not see him, even though that was all he needed, to see her, to be seen by her, to be granted freedom, or the antidote, or the permanent erasure of debts. She fake moaned, and it broke his heart. He gave up; she rolled off of him. She had won. He had been duly punished. She had shown him how lonely it could be, when he dared to disappoint her.
“Can we move forward, now?” he asked, his back sweaty against the tile.
“Isn’t this what you want? Some normal wife?”
“I want you, Mia. The real you.”
“You hate me!” she screamed. “You hate diapers.”
“How can you say that?”
“You keep sabotaging me.”
“What are you even—?”
“Say it. Say what it is.”
He fought the urge to say it, to ask the question he had started to ask on the subway ride home from the promotional party where Mia first revealed her truth, the question that had been interrupted with a long kiss, an interruption that lasted eighteen years, a question that had never left him. Unanswered, it pushed him, against his will—a gun at his back—to do wild things like tell her about the stupid article while she was in the bath, testing her, to see how she would react to the data about plastic decomposition. The question, hazy, because it had never been spoken aloud: What if he was not into it? Would she be okay if he did not do it? Would she go? Or would she choose Phil? Would she choose Phil, the way Phil had chosen her all those years, the way Phil would continue to choose her, ’til they were very old, ’til they were both in diapers, ’til death did they part? It was an unaskable question. It was unfair at its core, juvenile, passive aggressive. Cruel, to demand: Would you give up your identity for me, would you give up the thing that makes you happiest? He did not want her to give it up. He did not want her to choose, but to confirm what she would choose, in an alternate universe, in a hypothetical scenario, in the untold story of another life, a better one. He longed to hear her say it, even if it was a lie. To hear her say that she would do anything, try anything—even that. Give up anything—even that. As he had done! To hear her acknowledge how difficult it would be, how impossible, to make a sacrifice like that, a sacrifice like his, a whole-body sacrifice she did not even know he had made, and was still making, every day. Would she choose him? What would she sacrifice, for him, the way he had sacrificed, for her?
He did not ask. He already knew the answer.
•
About a year later, things were almost back to normal, when there was an unexpected sour stink in the apartment. Mia opened the cupboard to find her diaper stash had been chewed apart by mice. There were pellets everywhere, dotted lines through shredded fluff, pointing the way towards inconsolable anguish. She was beside herself with the violation of it, the ruination of her safe place. It would not be cheap to replace it all, let alone the international shipping.
Phil ran to the rescue. An opportunity to prove himself. He cleaned out the mess for her, discovering, in the process, a nest of baby mice dead in a downy crotch. A cluster of gray-pink bumps like cursed gummy bears, or monster pox, or fleshy uvulas ripped from wretched throats. Thank goodness she had not seen the babies. If she had, the image might flash hideously in her mind the next time she reached for a diaper, and every time after. She wouldn’t be able to go through with it. But, without it. Who would she be, then? What would hold them together? He hated himself for indulging such a thought. All he wanted was her happiness. And yet. If he had to go without. It was only fair—wasn’t it?—that she might do the same. For a small while, anyways.
“Baby,” he called. “Come and look.”