DOMESTICATED - Lincoln Center Theater Review

Fall 2013 Issue No. 61

DOMESTICATED

Photograph by Nic Nicosia, Love + Lust #8, 1990. Courtesy of the artist.

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Fall 2013, Issue Number 61 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor Lincoln Center Theater André Bishop, Producing Artistic Director The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc., Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Brooke Garber Neidich and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary Dorothy Berwin Betsy Kenny Lack Jessica M. Bibliowicz Kewsong Lee Allison M. Blinken Memrie M. Lewis Mrs. Leonard Block Robert E. Linton James-Keith Brown Ninah Lynne H. Rodgin Cohen Phyllis Mailman Jonathan Z. Cohen Ellen R. Marram Ida Cole John Morning Donald G. Drapkin Elyse Newhouse Curtland E. Fields Elihu Rose Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Stephanie Shuman Marlene Hess Josh Silverman Judith Hiltz Howard Sloan Linda LeRoy Janklow, David F. Solomon Chairman Emeritus Tracey Travis Jane Lisman Katz Robert G. Wilmers William D. Zabel John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Anna E. Crouse, Ellen Katz, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

DOMESTICATED

by betrayal. This wickedly funny and riveting conflagration of gender, power, sexuality, and politics provokes exciting, surprising, and sometimes heated responses. We approached writers, varying in age, sex, and profession, and asked them to share what the play provoked in them. We looked for art that resonated with the themes of Domesticated. And the result is an edition of Lincoln Center Theater Review that is a portfolio of writers and artists confronting the issues Norris writes about.

The responses were as personal, alive, and as varied as their authors. The fresh-voiced novelist

roles, and desire. The upside and downside of domestication is investigated by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods—a husband and wife team of scientists who share their fascinating observations about bonobos,

What You Keep

by Alison Espach

wolves, and dogs. In his strikingly honest essay, the sharp-witted writer and philosopher Clancy Martin

5

reflects on the nature of love and reveals his first experience of power and sex. As he prepares for marriage, the talented novelist Nathaniel Rich reads up on the sacred institution. The young and gift-

Order and Desire

by Anne Roiphe

ed singer-songwriter Lolo meditates on how her music has been a training ground for romantic love

7

and shares lyrics to a new song. Listen on our website, lctreview.org.

Visually, we found art that responded to the driving forces of the play—addressing lust and desire,

The Pros and Cons of Domestication

by Brian Hare & Vanessa Woods

11

12

Frank Ockenfels 3 Portfolio

15

19

The Rosenthal Family Foundation is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

A Music Lesson

by Lolo

21

One by One

by Lolo

23

Back cover painting detail by Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Photo by Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

The work includes the cover photograph by Gail Albert Halaban (see below), as well as pieces by Neeta portfolios showcasing the journal art of Frank Ockenfels 3 and the work of Siberian photographer, Nikolay Bakharev.

This issue was surprising and unpredictable; the process led us down one path, then another, as the play will lead our audiences. A magazine emerged that defied expectations and is a rich and multifaceted reflection of Bruce Norris’s thrilling play. —The Editors

Nikolay Bakharev Portfolio

Cover photograph detail and photograph right by Gail Albert Halaban, from the book Out My Window, published by PowerHouse Books, 2012. Courtesy of the Edwynn Houk Gallery.

social mores, the distinctions between public and private—specifically, what is to be shared with whom.

Madahar, Kiki Smith, Mel Bochner, Abelardo Morell, and Nic Nicosia, and, in a special feature, we have

On Love and Lies

by Clancy Martin

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

© 2013 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

sion, explores a marriage in the shadow of scandal, a politician ousted from office, a family fractured

esteemed writer and feminist Anne Roiphe examines the relationship between biology, gender,

17

TO SUBSCRIBE to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org.

the pulse of American life. Domesticated, his incendiary new play, a Lincoln Center Theater commis-

Alison Espach shares a poignant story about divvying up belongings in the midst of a breakup; the

The Sexual Life of Savages

by Nathaniel Rich

Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

Bruce Norris, the Pulitzer Prize– and Tony Award–winning author of Clybourne Park, has his finger on

GAIL ALBERT HALABAN New York’s skyline may be iconic, but most New Yorkers don’t see the glitter of the skyscrapers; they see the glow of the apartment across the street—someone folding laundry or talking or cooking. They see the human face of the city, where the closeness of so many strangers is at once intimate and isolating.

“I’ve been spying on my neighbors. It’s gone on for decades,” says Gail Albert Halaban, a photographer exploring the tension between public and private life, what is displayed, and what is hidden. Her series Out My Window features photographs taken

through and into New York’s windows. The pictures seem voyeuristic but are nearly all posed. Her subjects are neighbors, friends, and strangers to whom she writes seeking permission to shoot into their apartments, which are lit specifically to make these images. Her work acknowledges the voyeurism we all are complicit in and urges us to confront the emotions—the hope, loneliness, and envy—that lie behind the act. Ultimately, her work, which has so much to do with how strangers see one another from a distance, is also about how we seek to understand and connect.

3

Photograph by Nic Nicosia, Love + Lust #8, 1990. Courtesy of the artist.

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Fall 2013, Issue Number 61 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor Lincoln Center Theater André Bishop, Producing Artistic Director The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc., Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Brooke Garber Neidich and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary Dorothy Berwin Betsy Kenny Lack Jessica M. Bibliowicz Kewsong Lee Allison M. Blinken Memrie M. Lewis Mrs. Leonard Block Robert E. Linton James-Keith Brown Ninah Lynne H. Rodgin Cohen Phyllis Mailman Jonathan Z. Cohen Ellen R. Marram Ida Cole John Morning Donald G. Drapkin Elyse Newhouse Curtland E. Fields Elihu Rose Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Stephanie Shuman Marlene Hess Josh Silverman Judith Hiltz Howard Sloan Linda LeRoy Janklow, David F. Solomon Chairman Emeritus Tracey Travis Jane Lisman Katz Robert G. Wilmers William D. Zabel John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Anna E. Crouse, Ellen Katz, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

DOMESTICATED

by betrayal. This wickedly funny and riveting conflagration of gender, power, sexuality, and politics provokes exciting, surprising, and sometimes heated responses. We approached writers, varying in age, sex, and profession, and asked them to share what the play provoked in them. We looked for art that resonated with the themes of Domesticated. And the result is an edition of Lincoln Center Theater Review that is a portfolio of writers and artists confronting the issues Norris writes about.

The responses were as personal, alive, and as varied as their authors. The fresh-voiced novelist

roles, and desire. The upside and downside of domestication is investigated by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods—a husband and wife team of scientists who share their fascinating observations about bonobos,

What You Keep

by Alison Espach

wolves, and dogs. In his strikingly honest essay, the sharp-witted writer and philosopher Clancy Martin

5

reflects on the nature of love and reveals his first experience of power and sex. As he prepares for marriage, the talented novelist Nathaniel Rich reads up on the sacred institution. The young and gift-

Order and Desire

by Anne Roiphe

ed singer-songwriter Lolo meditates on how her music has been a training ground for romantic love

7

and shares lyrics to a new song. Listen on our website, lctreview.org.

Visually, we found art that responded to the driving forces of the play—addressing lust and desire,

The Pros and Cons of Domestication

by Brian Hare & Vanessa Woods

11

12

Frank Ockenfels 3 Portfolio

15

19

The Rosenthal Family Foundation is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

A Music Lesson

by Lolo

21

One by One

by Lolo

23

Back cover painting detail by Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain. Photo by Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

The work includes the cover photograph by Gail Albert Halaban (see below), as well as pieces by Neeta portfolios showcasing the journal art of Frank Ockenfels 3 and the work of Siberian photographer, Nikolay Bakharev.

This issue was surprising and unpredictable; the process led us down one path, then another, as the play will lead our audiences. A magazine emerged that defied expectations and is a rich and multifaceted reflection of Bruce Norris’s thrilling play. —The Editors

Nikolay Bakharev Portfolio

Cover photograph detail and photograph right by Gail Albert Halaban, from the book Out My Window, published by PowerHouse Books, 2012. Courtesy of the Edwynn Houk Gallery.

social mores, the distinctions between public and private—specifically, what is to be shared with whom.

Madahar, Kiki Smith, Mel Bochner, Abelardo Morell, and Nic Nicosia, and, in a special feature, we have

On Love and Lies

by Clancy Martin

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

© 2013 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

sion, explores a marriage in the shadow of scandal, a politician ousted from office, a family fractured

esteemed writer and feminist Anne Roiphe examines the relationship between biology, gender,

17

TO SUBSCRIBE to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org.

the pulse of American life. Domesticated, his incendiary new play, a Lincoln Center Theater commis-

Alison Espach shares a poignant story about divvying up belongings in the midst of a breakup; the

The Sexual Life of Savages

by Nathaniel Rich

Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

Bruce Norris, the Pulitzer Prize– and Tony Award–winning author of Clybourne Park, has his finger on

GAIL ALBERT HALABAN New York’s skyline may be iconic, but most New Yorkers don’t see the glitter of the skyscrapers; they see the glow of the apartment across the street—someone folding laundry or talking or cooking. They see the human face of the city, where the closeness of so many strangers is at once intimate and isolating.

“I’ve been spying on my neighbors. It’s gone on for decades,” says Gail Albert Halaban, a photographer exploring the tension between public and private life, what is displayed, and what is hidden. Her series Out My Window features photographs taken

through and into New York’s windows. The pictures seem voyeuristic but are nearly all posed. Her subjects are neighbors, friends, and strangers to whom she writes seeking permission to shoot into their apartments, which are lit specifically to make these images. Her work acknowledges the voyeurism we all are complicit in and urges us to confront the emotions—the hope, loneliness, and envy—that lie behind the act. Ultimately, her work, which has so much to do with how strangers see one another from a distance, is also about how we seek to understand and connect.

3

By Alison Espach

Photograph by Neeta Madahar, Sustenance #95, 2003. Courtesy Julie Saul Gallery, New York.

When I moved out, I got the machine that shreds zucchini into noodles; he got the Hungarian paprika. He said he never understood why we had a machine whose only function was to turn zucchini into noodles in the first place. If we were going to be honest, he had always used the paprika more than I did. And we certainly were going to be honest—being honest was the only part of splitting up that felt any good.

I got the juicer, the Jack LaLanne we bought for the seven-day cleanse that lasted only two nights. He got the electronic mixer. He was Irish; his grandmother’s grandmother was Irish. He really liked mashed potatoes. And when was the last time I made mashed potatoes? I never had. “You don’t even like mashed potatoes,” he said. “Just admit it.” It felt like an accusation. I had never been Irish enough—I never made potatoes. I liked noodles. I didn’t realize this had been a problem.

“Okay,” I said. “I don’t like mashed potatoes.”

They sounded like things we should be saying to get to know each other, on a first date: I don’t like mashed potatoes; I really love paprika; I don’t care much for curtains. But it was our last date, and we were just starting to see the truth. He was not, it turned out, the man who would love me until we died. He was not a man who would buy our dream house on a lake, and I was not a woman who would water the basil plants on the ledge. He was not a man who would spend the next ten years making sure I was happy in Alabama, and I was no longer a woman who would have to look out the window during his road-rage outbursts. He would never have to eat zucchini noodles ever again. I would never make mashed potatoes. We could finally be honest with each other in a way that scared us before, when the stakes were too high, when there was still a chance that we could be the people we wanted to be.

We approached the kitchen, both claiming not to care who got the utensils. “There are so many of them,” we agreed.

“More than we ever used.” Never could we recount a time in which the utensil drawer had been entirely empty. Never did we use all the utensils at once. Even during our first Thanksgiving, there was a lone small spoon left behind in the drawer.

Who would ever need this many utensils? we joked. Why do people have so many extra utensils? We didn’t know. The utensils were like dust in the corner—they kept piling up over the years, and we couldn’t see the excess until it became an excess. Or maybe they were a kind of insurance: the more utensils we gathered, the harder it would be for someone to leave. This must be why the birds outside on the porch keep nothing but their babies in the nest. They build their homes out of mud and twigs and saliva. When it’s time to leave, they flap their wings and are gone. They don’t even have to say goodbye.

The birds had been there before we moved in. “Why, we can’t clean or exterminate your porch,” the landlord said. “We don’t want to kill the babies.” We quickly agreed—no, we definitely did not want to kill the babies. They were upsettingly adorable in their nest, with their little moppet faces that popped up to greet their mother when she returned. We loved them. We stood on chairs to take videos tracking their growth—growth, in this instance, meaning how far they could pop their heads up.

I had never lived in a place as southern and rural as Alabama. I had given up my job in New York City and moved there to be with Charles. Everything about the place was wild to me. Alabama heat was as thick and alive as rain, and sometimes during the worst of it, in July, we’d run from the door to the car as if it was something that could catch us. Spiders crawled out of the sink drain when I leaned down to brush my teeth. A majestic crane walked along the lake’s edge. On good days, we drank wine on the porch and joked that the crane knew everything in the world. It was both funny and comforting to think that it did, or that something did. The ducks congregated at sunset, floated without effort toward the sun, all heads pointed in one direction. Like a cult, we said. Like a bunch of kids watching TV. We were alone together at the edge of the country, and we liked to anthropomorphize everything in high-pitched voices, especially the baby birds above us.

5

By Alison Espach

Photograph by Neeta Madahar, Sustenance #95, 2003. Courtesy Julie Saul Gallery, New York.

When I moved out, I got the machine that shreds zucchini into noodles; he got the Hungarian paprika. He said he never understood why we had a machine whose only function was to turn zucchini into noodles in the first place. If we were going to be honest, he had always used the paprika more than I did. And we certainly were going to be honest—being honest was the only part of splitting up that felt any good.

I got the juicer, the Jack LaLanne we bought for the seven-day cleanse that lasted only two nights. He got the electronic mixer. He was Irish; his grandmother’s grandmother was Irish. He really liked mashed potatoes. And when was the last time I made mashed potatoes? I never had. “You don’t even like mashed potatoes,” he said. “Just admit it.” It felt like an accusation. I had never been Irish enough—I never made potatoes. I liked noodles. I didn’t realize this had been a problem.

“Okay,” I said. “I don’t like mashed potatoes.”

They sounded like things we should be saying to get to know each other, on a first date: I don’t like mashed potatoes; I really love paprika; I don’t care much for curtains. But it was our last date, and we were just starting to see the truth. He was not, it turned out, the man who would love me until we died. He was not a man who would buy our dream house on a lake, and I was not a woman who would water the basil plants on the ledge. He was not a man who would spend the next ten years making sure I was happy in Alabama, and I was no longer a woman who would have to look out the window during his road-rage outbursts. He would never have to eat zucchini noodles ever again. I would never make mashed potatoes. We could finally be honest with each other in a way that scared us before, when the stakes were too high, when there was still a chance that we could be the people we wanted to be.

We approached the kitchen, both claiming not to care who got the utensils. “There are so many of them,” we agreed.

“More than we ever used.” Never could we recount a time in which the utensil drawer had been entirely empty. Never did we use all the utensils at once. Even during our first Thanksgiving, there was a lone small spoon left behind in the drawer.

Who would ever need this many utensils? we joked. Why do people have so many extra utensils? We didn’t know. The utensils were like dust in the corner—they kept piling up over the years, and we couldn’t see the excess until it became an excess. Or maybe they were a kind of insurance: the more utensils we gathered, the harder it would be for someone to leave. This must be why the birds outside on the porch keep nothing but their babies in the nest. They build their homes out of mud and twigs and saliva. When it’s time to leave, they flap their wings and are gone. They don’t even have to say goodbye.

The birds had been there before we moved in. “Why, we can’t clean or exterminate your porch,” the landlord said. “We don’t want to kill the babies.” We quickly agreed—no, we definitely did not want to kill the babies. They were upsettingly adorable in their nest, with their little moppet faces that popped up to greet their mother when she returned. We loved them. We stood on chairs to take videos tracking their growth—growth, in this instance, meaning how far they could pop their heads up.

I had never lived in a place as southern and rural as Alabama. I had given up my job in New York City and moved there to be with Charles. Everything about the place was wild to me. Alabama heat was as thick and alive as rain, and sometimes during the worst of it, in July, we’d run from the door to the car as if it was something that could catch us. Spiders crawled out of the sink drain when I leaned down to brush my teeth. A majestic crane walked along the lake’s edge. On good days, we drank wine on the porch and joked that the crane knew everything in the world. It was both funny and comforting to think that it did, or that something did. The ducks congregated at sunset, floated without effort toward the sun, all heads pointed in one direction. Like a cult, we said. Like a bunch of kids watching TV. We were alone together at the edge of the country, and we liked to anthropomorphize everything in high-pitched voices, especially the baby birds above us.

5

We gave them religion, philosophies, romances. Minor conflicts. Ennui. In a way, they felt like our children, but of course they weren’t. Their mother was the one who brought the worm each day, and so we never admitted to feeling like this.

On bad days, he scraped their shit off the grill, and I said things like “How long until the birds are gone?” On bad days, he stayed too long at work, and I was too lonely to write. After I moved to Alabama to be with him, I found more comfort and satisfaction in hanging photos and buying ornamental vases. Runners for the hallway. Slipping photos of my grandmother into his photo albums.

When he returned from work, we didn’t usually go out for drinks or dinner; he just wanted to relax, stay in. I didn’t want to stay in, because I had been in all day. We thought about grilling as a compromise—in and also out—but we didn’t know if the smoke would suffocate the birds. We went outside to check and found their nest empty. We didn’t see them leave, just as we never saw them come. I wondered where they were, and if they ever thought of their first home.

We took down the nest, threw it in the trash. He started up the grill, and we missed them all winter.

Next, he pulled out a box marked “Christmas,” and we separated the stuff on the rug—the rug that we had always hated, the rug where we had made love many times, where he once jokingly dragged me by my feet to the office because I didn’t want to work.

He kept the white lights and the garland. He was big on garland; his mother was big on garland. I got to keep the Christmas mouse. I remembered, years earlier, pulling it out of the stocking he’d bought me, and I could feel the heat build between us. Just as quickly, he pulled away to pick up an ornament.

“I don’t want anything physical to happen,” he said, not that I had tried. “I’ll find it too confusing.” He wanted to be healthy about this.

“You want to be healthy about this?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

He was being so rational about our breakup, it made me want to date him all over again. If he could be so healthy about something like this, what an amazing life partner he’d make!

“If neither of us is willing to give up our career, then we have to be honest with ourselves,” he said. “We just can’t be together. I don’t know why it’s taken us so long to admit that.”

He made no advances after that. He kept the angel ornament with “Charles” inscribed on the bottom, and I kept the one named Alison. It felt dumb, separating the two; it was cruel, really, splitting the angel couple apart. Was I really going to hang the Alison angel on my tree next year? Probably not, but it felt wrong to leave it with the Charles angel, in the Christmas box, their tiny bodies side by side, peppermint scarves wrapped around their necks, smiling as if they were still an angel couple about to go ice-skating.

At four in the morning, I went out to the porch to take down my plant hanger. I’d never actually hung a plant in it.

The birds were noisy in the corner. Earlier that spring, they had come back, sat in a brand-new nest, though we hadn’t seen the mother build it.

I unhooked the plant hanger, and one of the birds got scared and flew out of the nest and into the apartment. We dodged its beak, and it shit all over our stuff as it tried to find a place to land. It settled on the cabinets, proudly, and gave the impression of being somewhere more dignified than atop particleboard. The bird seemed entirely indifferent to us, didn’t seem to know us at all. Up close, in the halogen light of the kitchen, it didn’t look the way I thought it would. It became clear in that moment, so out of context, that it had never really been our bird. It was nobody’s bird.

I told Charles that I didn’t know if I ever wanted to get married. He told me that he sort of knew that. “Is that why you never asked me?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said.

The bird chirped in the corner. We looked at each other and laughed. The objects of our life were heavy around us, but for a second the honesty of the moment made the world seem lighter. The bird took flight, out the door and into the black sky. I thought about the birds returning next year, when I would be gone, how it will be the father who picks the location, the mother who gathers. She will do it invisibly, in the dark, when she thinks no one is watching. She will collect twigs and mud and hair and feather. She will weave it all together with only her mouth, and she won’t keep any of it in the end. I will be somewhere else.

Alison Espach is the author of the novel The Adults, a Wall Street Journal “Top 10 Novel of 2011.” Her writing has appeared in FiveChapters, Slice, and other publications, and has been featured by McSweeney’s, Salon.com, and The Daily Beast.

She currently teaches creative writing at Providence College in Rhode Island.

6

By Anne Roiphe

Civilization and its Discontents—that is the way Freud saw our misery: inevitable, inherent, a pox on the human heart. Sex becomes lust, and lust may transform itself into domination, submission, cruelty, perversion, and all the uneasy forms of the erotic imagination that live in our brains like maggots off a corpse.

Biology urges us toward our desires, but society requires order and safety and routine. Society requires repression, control, suppression, so that humans can live and reproduce, and all the fine arts flourish, and the glory of human accomplishment— Sistine Chapels, Mozart, Notre-Dame, Frank Lloyd Wright, the microscope, the compass, the treasures of civilization—shine above the murderous mayhem of the imagination (that same imagination that always stands ready to erupt into actual blood and fury). In the real world, sex must be managed in the service of order, and that is not the most joyous of conditions.

There are very few photographs of Freud smiling.

But is it really so that biology split its species-survival tasks along the male-female divide? We have believed that for thousands of years, but, like so many other things we have accepted as true, this might be just a story that serves one sex better than the other and does not hold up on close examination.

The so-called “war between the sexes,” a subject for tragedy and farce and romantic comedy, is only a shadow play. Our biology needs sexual arousal so that the generations can follow one another out of the cave and up the mountain of history. Society, if it isn’t to burn up in chaos or smother in ash, demands restraint and repression. These uneasy bedfellows are uneasy indeed. But should we really divide the job of human survival so neatly between the penis and the vagina? Isn’t the sexual side of ourselves less cartoonish than “Me man, you woman, parts together, good night.” The sexual roles are not so quickly deciphered. Understanding them is more like reading Proust in Sanskrit than like listening to five-year-olds tell potty jokes.

And doesn’t the nurturing, tending side contain ferocity, ambivalence, dominance, rejection, great tsunamis of hope and fear?

There is no self-sacrificing, all-perfect mother who doesn’t in her dreams become Medea.

The story we have been told is that women who guard the hearth and produce the child require and seek loyalty and tenderness and a steady package of protein brought to the door, perhaps wrapped in diamonds. This story is a social myth, and while it has passed as truth for many centuries, it is not a biological fact or a human reality, like birth and death or the distance from the earth to the stars. It is a human design subject

to revision and correction and is no more embedded in our nature than a conviction that men should be doctors and women should be nurses.

It is indisputable that men, whose ancestors hunted the woolly mammoth, may succumb to the pulsing in the groin, the uncontrollable heat that leads them to chase, to grow restless in their homes, to forget their loves and break their vows. But is it reasonable for them to claim that they are programmed by nature for sexual sallies and they just can’t help it? How did they ever convince women that the female sex should be loyal and domestic and possibly veiled when wandering outside the cave’s mouth? Can it be true that women lose their sexual drive with their love of their babies? How can we still believe that old story in which men need many partners so that the sperm can cross the wild savanna, guaranteeing human survival.

That is the way the tale has been told, but I’m not so sure that if we look again, with clear eyes, we won’t see an even more complicated plot. Inside the vagina, blood rushes and throbs intensely, excitement rises and causes girls to forget their modesty and scream at rock stars or dance under disco lights like nymphs at an orgy in the Greek woods, where Apollo was chased

by Venus and mourned by her, too, not for his ability to shoot a deer but for the beauty of his torso, the wonder of his body.

Women and girls, trained to hide their sexual wishes behind sweet smiles and gentle touches, have wild dreams, and they are not about nurseries or babies dressed in bunny-rabbit-decorated pajamas or caves that are as clean as rain-washed stone. Women have sexual imaginations, too—ripe, raw, graphic sexual thoughts. The nipples tingle and the clitoris rounds up, and women forget the things that their mothers told them and they follow bad guys down dark hallways, and it has always been so. They also follow good guys, or guys who try to be good but can’t be. Women want, like men want, and, like men, they may be disappointed and left to take care of themselves under lonely sheets.

The idea that the male is a sex-driven vessel designed by nature to distribute his sperm across the veld is a man-made idea.

It doesn’t hold up to careful scrutiny, and it doesn’t seem to an honest woman to reflect her dreams or her secret imaginings.

There is no evidence that men are less tender toward their offspring than women, or less eager for them to survive than mothers. The fact that our social designs have sent men into battle and women into the nursery does not mean that we are

7

We gave them religion, philosophies, romances. Minor conflicts. Ennui. In a way, they felt like our children, but of course they weren’t. Their mother was the one who brought the worm each day, and so we never admitted to feeling like this.

On bad days, he scraped their shit off the grill, and I said things like “How long until the birds are gone?” On bad days, he stayed too long at work, and I was too lonely to write. After I moved to Alabama to be with him, I found more comfort and satisfaction in hanging photos and buying ornamental vases. Runners for the hallway. Slipping photos of my grandmother into his photo albums.

When he returned from work, we didn’t usually go out for drinks or dinner; he just wanted to relax, stay in. I didn’t want to stay in, because I had been in all day. We thought about grilling as a compromise—in and also out—but we didn’t know if the smoke would suffocate the birds. We went outside to check and found their nest empty. We didn’t see them leave, just as we never saw them come. I wondered where they were, and if they ever thought of their first home.

We took down the nest, threw it in the trash. He started up the grill, and we missed them all winter.

Next, he pulled out a box marked “Christmas,” and we separated the stuff on the rug—the rug that we had always hated, the rug where we had made love many times, where he once jokingly dragged me by my feet to the office because I didn’t want to work.

He kept the white lights and the garland. He was big on garland; his mother was big on garland. I got to keep the Christmas mouse. I remembered, years earlier, pulling it out of the stocking he’d bought me, and I could feel the heat build between us. Just as quickly, he pulled away to pick up an ornament.

“I don’t want anything physical to happen,” he said, not that I had tried. “I’ll find it too confusing.” He wanted to be healthy about this.

“You want to be healthy about this?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

He was being so rational about our breakup, it made me want to date him all over again. If he could be so healthy about something like this, what an amazing life partner he’d make!

“If neither of us is willing to give up our career, then we have to be honest with ourselves,” he said. “We just can’t be together. I don’t know why it’s taken us so long to admit that.”

He made no advances after that. He kept the angel ornament with “Charles” inscribed on the bottom, and I kept the one named Alison. It felt dumb, separating the two; it was cruel, really, splitting the angel couple apart. Was I really going to hang the Alison angel on my tree next year? Probably not, but it felt wrong to leave it with the Charles angel, in the Christmas box, their tiny bodies side by side, peppermint scarves wrapped around their necks, smiling as if they were still an angel couple about to go ice-skating.

At four in the morning, I went out to the porch to take down my plant hanger. I’d never actually hung a plant in it.

The birds were noisy in the corner. Earlier that spring, they had come back, sat in a brand-new nest, though we hadn’t seen the mother build it.

I unhooked the plant hanger, and one of the birds got scared and flew out of the nest and into the apartment. We dodged its beak, and it shit all over our stuff as it tried to find a place to land. It settled on the cabinets, proudly, and gave the impression of being somewhere more dignified than atop particleboard. The bird seemed entirely indifferent to us, didn’t seem to know us at all. Up close, in the halogen light of the kitchen, it didn’t look the way I thought it would. It became clear in that moment, so out of context, that it had never really been our bird. It was nobody’s bird.

I told Charles that I didn’t know if I ever wanted to get married. He told me that he sort of knew that. “Is that why you never asked me?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said.

The bird chirped in the corner. We looked at each other and laughed. The objects of our life were heavy around us, but for a second the honesty of the moment made the world seem lighter. The bird took flight, out the door and into the black sky. I thought about the birds returning next year, when I would be gone, how it will be the father who picks the location, the mother who gathers. She will do it invisibly, in the dark, when she thinks no one is watching. She will collect twigs and mud and hair and feather. She will weave it all together with only her mouth, and she won’t keep any of it in the end. I will be somewhere else.

Alison Espach is the author of the novel The Adults, a Wall Street Journal “Top 10 Novel of 2011.” Her writing has appeared in FiveChapters, Slice, and other publications, and has been featured by McSweeney’s, Salon.com, and The Daily Beast.

She currently teaches creative writing at Providence College in Rhode Island.

6

By Anne Roiphe

Civilization and its Discontents—that is the way Freud saw our misery: inevitable, inherent, a pox on the human heart. Sex becomes lust, and lust may transform itself into domination, submission, cruelty, perversion, and all the uneasy forms of the erotic imagination that live in our brains like maggots off a corpse.

Biology urges us toward our desires, but society requires order and safety and routine. Society requires repression, control, suppression, so that humans can live and reproduce, and all the fine arts flourish, and the glory of human accomplishment— Sistine Chapels, Mozart, Notre-Dame, Frank Lloyd Wright, the microscope, the compass, the treasures of civilization—shine above the murderous mayhem of the imagination (that same imagination that always stands ready to erupt into actual blood and fury). In the real world, sex must be managed in the service of order, and that is not the most joyous of conditions.

There are very few photographs of Freud smiling.

But is it really so that biology split its species-survival tasks along the male-female divide? We have believed that for thousands of years, but, like so many other things we have accepted as true, this might be just a story that serves one sex better than the other and does not hold up on close examination.

The so-called “war between the sexes,” a subject for tragedy and farce and romantic comedy, is only a shadow play. Our biology needs sexual arousal so that the generations can follow one another out of the cave and up the mountain of history. Society, if it isn’t to burn up in chaos or smother in ash, demands restraint and repression. These uneasy bedfellows are uneasy indeed. But should we really divide the job of human survival so neatly between the penis and the vagina? Isn’t the sexual side of ourselves less cartoonish than “Me man, you woman, parts together, good night.” The sexual roles are not so quickly deciphered. Understanding them is more like reading Proust in Sanskrit than like listening to five-year-olds tell potty jokes.

And doesn’t the nurturing, tending side contain ferocity, ambivalence, dominance, rejection, great tsunamis of hope and fear?

There is no self-sacrificing, all-perfect mother who doesn’t in her dreams become Medea.

The story we have been told is that women who guard the hearth and produce the child require and seek loyalty and tenderness and a steady package of protein brought to the door, perhaps wrapped in diamonds. This story is a social myth, and while it has passed as truth for many centuries, it is not a biological fact or a human reality, like birth and death or the distance from the earth to the stars. It is a human design subject

to revision and correction and is no more embedded in our nature than a conviction that men should be doctors and women should be nurses.

It is indisputable that men, whose ancestors hunted the woolly mammoth, may succumb to the pulsing in the groin, the uncontrollable heat that leads them to chase, to grow restless in their homes, to forget their loves and break their vows. But is it reasonable for them to claim that they are programmed by nature for sexual sallies and they just can’t help it? How did they ever convince women that the female sex should be loyal and domestic and possibly veiled when wandering outside the cave’s mouth? Can it be true that women lose their sexual drive with their love of their babies? How can we still believe that old story in which men need many partners so that the sperm can cross the wild savanna, guaranteeing human survival.

That is the way the tale has been told, but I’m not so sure that if we look again, with clear eyes, we won’t see an even more complicated plot. Inside the vagina, blood rushes and throbs intensely, excitement rises and causes girls to forget their modesty and scream at rock stars or dance under disco lights like nymphs at an orgy in the Greek woods, where Apollo was chased

by Venus and mourned by her, too, not for his ability to shoot a deer but for the beauty of his torso, the wonder of his body.

Women and girls, trained to hide their sexual wishes behind sweet smiles and gentle touches, have wild dreams, and they are not about nurseries or babies dressed in bunny-rabbit-decorated pajamas or caves that are as clean as rain-washed stone. Women have sexual imaginations, too—ripe, raw, graphic sexual thoughts. The nipples tingle and the clitoris rounds up, and women forget the things that their mothers told them and they follow bad guys down dark hallways, and it has always been so. They also follow good guys, or guys who try to be good but can’t be. Women want, like men want, and, like men, they may be disappointed and left to take care of themselves under lonely sheets.

The idea that the male is a sex-driven vessel designed by nature to distribute his sperm across the veld is a man-made idea.

It doesn’t hold up to careful scrutiny, and it doesn’t seem to an honest woman to reflect her dreams or her secret imaginings.

There is no evidence that men are less tender toward their offspring than women, or less eager for them to survive than mothers. The fact that our social designs have sent men into battle and women into the nursery does not mean that we are

7

biologically programmed that way, and the past fifty years of feminist thought have clearly challenged the inevitability and desirability of that design.

I suspect that even in the cave, with a small fire sending sparks up the walls, when a woman gives birth to a live child, when the woman herself lies back and holds the baby up to the man and he sees the living creature that is his—helpless, weak, small as the smallest animal he has killed on his way to the river—he feels the wonder of the thing, the genius of life and its ways, and he has understood, perhaps not how the baby came to be through the stirrings of lust in his organ but the holiness of the matter, the sacred moment of the birth, and the trust that

The myth of male adventure, and of females riveted to the hearth, is derived from a misreading of history and a male version of the tale.

8

Anne Roiphe is the author of eighteen books of fiction and nonfiction.

Her latest books include Epilogue, about her husband’s death, and a memoir, Art and Madness, about New York’s writers and artists in the early 1960s. She is now working on a new novel. She was a columnist at The New York Observer for many years and is currently a contributor to The Jerusalem Report.

Monoprint with collage by Mel Bochner, Obscene, 2012. Courtesy of Two Palms.

has been placed in his hands. He is no longer a mere brute in a brutish world. He is a man with a child. The woman, too, will see the need to stay with that man, to protect him as he protects her, to give to him as he gives to her. And both male and female sexual energies will fare as sexual energies fare, forced into good behavior, rising at odd times, causing trouble in many caves, in many homes.

You can say this is evolution at work, the urge toward species survival using its primeval cunning to shape the world as it wishes, and so it may be, but we are not worms or rodents or fish or mammals with little imagination. We are humans with specifically human needs for continuity, affection. We are not birds that push our children out of the nest after six weeks. Our biology demands endless years of childcare, and while we cannot ignore nature’s designs, we can alter them, construct them, as we need, and this is a joint project, male and female together.

The myth of male adventure, and of females riveted to the hearth, is derived from a misreading of history and a male version of the tale. Who is to say that the woman gathering the fruits and the nuts and the plants did not work as hard at family survival as the man with his stick, hunting the fierce animal? Who is to say that an equal partnership was not necessary between the plant and the protein gatherers, and who is to say that the infant does not need both parents to provide and that the community does not need both sexes to work for their offspring.

Sometimes the rules are too harsh and repressive and sex itself is reduced to a fearful act. Sometimes chaos reigns and sex leads both men and women into disappointments, angers, isolation. Sometimes our religious impulses are beautiful and humane, and sometimes they get out of control and impose sacrifice of pleasure on ordinary citizens who might have lived in joyous unions but for the guilt that church and state can create and the penalties that follow. Human matters often go sour, and it is the rare lucky man or woman who has never experienced disappointment in love or lust.

Men commit infidelity, sometimes with impunity, but they do it with someone, and usually that someone is a female who was a willing participant in the bed. From books and operas and myths of all nations, we know that women truly desire—and they do not just desire a baby. Anna Karenina, for example, was not destroyed by a man but by the prejudices of her society. Sex, embedded in the very essence of human biology, gender-neutral in its power, is dangerous to the social order. Nevertheless, the sexual imagination is a creative force that is equally alive, equally available, to male and female.

And then sex is not always about reproduction or about love or about tenderness. All too easily, sex derails from its species errand and becomes entwined with anger or guilt or fear, and thus the vast spectrum of human fantasies arise. This man needs to think of shoes in order to perform, and this woman dreams of spankings, and that man wants to wear a dress so his penis can engorge, and that woman thinks of whips and chains. In the darkness of his soul, this man wants little girls and that man wants little boys, and this woman needs an imaginary crowd to watch her movements and that one finds her satisfaction in piercings of the private parts. Urine, feces, animal costumes may all play a part in our fantasy lives.

Each sexual story has its origins in early years, in memories and wirings that we can hardly fathom, in our genes or in our nurseries or in our first experiences of our bodies, our own and those of others. We understand some things, but just a few.

Sexual preferences, some infused with hate or guilt, remain a mysterious continent open to exploration, open to spelunkers brave enough to follow the clues downward into our blackest hearts and our earliest memories. How good it would be to better understand the roles of shame and curiosity and pain and what part they play in our sexual lives. We have just begun to map our own complex minds.

But this list of sexual wishes, odd practices, less-than-dignified desires, compulsions is not confined to one sex or the other.

It is a feature of sexuality that affects many human exchanges, and even more private dreams. Perhaps these rise from the efforts we make to control our lusts, or perhaps they rise from strange coincidences, stray moments that became electrified in our memories, or perhaps they are the result of the controls we must exercise as human animals who can restrain impulses but pay the price for that restraint.

Maybe as we think more about our sexual lives we will find better ways to enjoy them, to fuse them with love and release them from hate. Or maybe not. But, either way, the species needs the sexual life of both male and female in order to reach out into time, enduring civilization while dragging its discontents behind it.

biologically programmed that way, and the past fifty years of feminist thought have clearly challenged the inevitability and desirability of that design.

I suspect that even in the cave, with a small fire sending sparks up the walls, when a woman gives birth to a live child, when the woman herself lies back and holds the baby up to the man and he sees the living creature that is his—helpless, weak, small as the smallest animal he has killed on his way to the river—he feels the wonder of the thing, the genius of life and its ways, and he has understood, perhaps not how the baby came to be through the stirrings of lust in his organ but the holiness of the matter, the sacred moment of the birth, and the trust that

The myth of male adventure, and of females riveted to the hearth, is derived from a misreading of history and a male version of the tale.

8

Anne Roiphe is the author of eighteen books of fiction and nonfiction.

Her latest books include Epilogue, about her husband’s death, and a memoir, Art and Madness, about New York’s writers and artists in the early 1960s. She is now working on a new novel. She was a columnist at The New York Observer for many years and is currently a contributor to The Jerusalem Report.

Monoprint with collage by Mel Bochner, Obscene, 2012. Courtesy of Two Palms.

has been placed in his hands. He is no longer a mere brute in a brutish world. He is a man with a child. The woman, too, will see the need to stay with that man, to protect him as he protects her, to give to him as he gives to her. And both male and female sexual energies will fare as sexual energies fare, forced into good behavior, rising at odd times, causing trouble in many caves, in many homes.

You can say this is evolution at work, the urge toward species survival using its primeval cunning to shape the world as it wishes, and so it may be, but we are not worms or rodents or fish or mammals with little imagination. We are humans with specifically human needs for continuity, affection. We are not birds that push our children out of the nest after six weeks. Our biology demands endless years of childcare, and while we cannot ignore nature’s designs, we can alter them, construct them, as we need, and this is a joint project, male and female together.

The myth of male adventure, and of females riveted to the hearth, is derived from a misreading of history and a male version of the tale. Who is to say that the woman gathering the fruits and the nuts and the plants did not work as hard at family survival as the man with his stick, hunting the fierce animal? Who is to say that an equal partnership was not necessary between the plant and the protein gatherers, and who is to say that the infant does not need both parents to provide and that the community does not need both sexes to work for their offspring.

Sometimes the rules are too harsh and repressive and sex itself is reduced to a fearful act. Sometimes chaos reigns and sex leads both men and women into disappointments, angers, isolation. Sometimes our religious impulses are beautiful and humane, and sometimes they get out of control and impose sacrifice of pleasure on ordinary citizens who might have lived in joyous unions but for the guilt that church and state can create and the penalties that follow. Human matters often go sour, and it is the rare lucky man or woman who has never experienced disappointment in love or lust.

Men commit infidelity, sometimes with impunity, but they do it with someone, and usually that someone is a female who was a willing participant in the bed. From books and operas and myths of all nations, we know that women truly desire—and they do not just desire a baby. Anna Karenina, for example, was not destroyed by a man but by the prejudices of her society. Sex, embedded in the very essence of human biology, gender-neutral in its power, is dangerous to the social order. Nevertheless, the sexual imagination is a creative force that is equally alive, equally available, to male and female.

And then sex is not always about reproduction or about love or about tenderness. All too easily, sex derails from its species errand and becomes entwined with anger or guilt or fear, and thus the vast spectrum of human fantasies arise. This man needs to think of shoes in order to perform, and this woman dreams of spankings, and that man wants to wear a dress so his penis can engorge, and that woman thinks of whips and chains. In the darkness of his soul, this man wants little girls and that man wants little boys, and this woman needs an imaginary crowd to watch her movements and that one finds her satisfaction in piercings of the private parts. Urine, feces, animal costumes may all play a part in our fantasy lives.

Each sexual story has its origins in early years, in memories and wirings that we can hardly fathom, in our genes or in our nurseries or in our first experiences of our bodies, our own and those of others. We understand some things, but just a few.

Sexual preferences, some infused with hate or guilt, remain a mysterious continent open to exploration, open to spelunkers brave enough to follow the clues downward into our blackest hearts and our earliest memories. How good it would be to better understand the roles of shame and curiosity and pain and what part they play in our sexual lives. We have just begun to map our own complex minds.

But this list of sexual wishes, odd practices, less-than-dignified desires, compulsions is not confined to one sex or the other.

It is a feature of sexuality that affects many human exchanges, and even more private dreams. Perhaps these rise from the efforts we make to control our lusts, or perhaps they rise from strange coincidences, stray moments that became electrified in our memories, or perhaps they are the result of the controls we must exercise as human animals who can restrain impulses but pay the price for that restraint.

Maybe as we think more about our sexual lives we will find better ways to enjoy them, to fuse them with love and release them from hate. Or maybe not. But, either way, the species needs the sexual life of both male and female in order to reach out into time, enduring civilization while dragging its discontents behind it.

By Brian Hare & Vanessa Woods

“What am I, a salmon? Am I supposed to mate once and then die?”

Artwork by Kiki Smith, Friend, etching with hand coloring, 2008. © Kiki Smith, courtesy Pace Gallery and Universal Limited Art Editions, Inc.

Not so long ago, scientists believed domestication dulled an animal’s intelligence, since a domesticated species no longer has the skills to survive in the wild. For instance, the wolf howling at the moon certainly seems, if not more intelligent, at least more impressive than the dog drinking out of the toilet bowl. However, in recent years evidence has shown that domestication actually gives species specific skills that make it easier for them to survive.

In talking about domestication, researchers are referring to something very specific. There are common differences between all domesticated species and their wild relatives—smaller craniums, for instance, and variations in pigmentation. There are also differences in behavior; domesticated species are less aggressive, more sexual, more tolerant, and more playful.

Far from making dogs dumber, domestication has given them a very special kind of intelligence—they communicate and interact with us in ways that are similar to those of human infants. We often take it for granted that a quick point of our fingers, or even our feet, can send a dog scampering in the direction of a lost ball or a hidden morsel of food, but this ability is extremely specialized. Even one of our closest relatives, the chimpanzee, cannot read our gestures as well as dogs can. In the same way that pre-verbal infants start paying attention to adults when they point, dogs understand that when we gesture we’re trying to cooperate and communicate with them.

This social savvy has made dogs the most successful mammals on the planet, besides us. They have managed to colonize almost every corner of the globe, including our sofas and, occasionally, our beds.

Besides giving dogs this special genius, domestication has also affected their sex lives. Dogs have more sex, and better sex, than wolves. Why have one mating season when you can hump legs all year long? While sex for wolves is a serious business (only one season a year, solely for reproductive purposes, and usually in winter), dogs are much more relaxed. They have several mating seasons a year, and enjoy non-reproductive sex (sex for fun) throughout the year.

Activities like bottom-sniffing in dogs are the whole point of going to the dog park, while it would never be tolerated in wolves. Also, while male wolves become extraordinarily aggressive when competing for females in heat, dogs are more likely to turn a romp into a ménage à trois. Or quatre. Or cinq.

While on the surface this promiscuity might appear to be an advantage, it actually comes with a heavy price. Wolf packs are usually made up of a single breeding pair and their offspring. Juveniles are forced to stay with their parents because meeting another wolf pack before they are fully grown would be dangerous. To earn their keep, juveniles help their parents raise the next generation. Juveniles bring back food to the pups after a successful hunt, and protect the pups while their parents are hunting.

In feral dogs, or dogs that live without human interference, there

is no cooperative breeding and no single breeding pair. Females mate with multiple males and rarely bond with a mate. Unlike wolves, the dominant females do not seem to prevent subordinate females from breeding. But without a bonded mate or suppressed juveniles, as wolves have, feral-dog mothers have little help in rearing their puppies. There are no helpers to provide food. This results in extraordinarily high mortality among the puppies of feral dogs. Their mortality rate is more than ninety-five percent.

One of the main differences between domesticated species and their wild relatives is their sex lives. Domesticated species tend to have more sex, more playful sex, and sex outside reproductive cycles.

The differences in the sex lives of dogs and wolves are mirrored in our two closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. Like wolves, chimpanzees can be extraordinarily aggressive when competing for sexually receptive females.

As for bonobos, promiscuous, non-conceptive sex is what they are best known for. Their sex lives make chimpanzees, and even humans, look dull. Bonobo males penis-fence, which is just about what it sounds like, while the females frequently engage in g-g rubbing— holding each other face to face and rubbing their clitorises together until (it sounds like) they orgasm. Babies rub genitals with other babies and everyone else in the group. In fact, everyone in the group pretty much has some sort of sexual contact with everyone else in the group. Unlike dogs and wolves, bonobo infants do not have a higher rate of mortality than chimpanzees. In fact, male and female chimpanzees have been known to kill the infants of other chimpanzees, while bonobos have never been known to kill another bonobo.

Some bonobo fans have asked whether we shouldn’t model ourselves on our more peaceful, sexually liberated cousins, among whom swinging and homosexuality are just par for the course.

However, we lack a crucial characteristic of bonobos: kindness toward strangers. Humans can be extremely tolerant and altruistic toward strangers—think of your last charitable gift or blood donation— but we can also be hostile to the point of persecution and genocide.

Bonobos, on the other hand, treat every stranger like a new friend.

While groups of chimpanzees in neighboring territories have hunted and murdered one another to extinction, if two groups of bonobos meet they are more likely to groom one another and have sex.

As a species, humans certainly seem domesticated. This means that we exhibit many of the same differences that exist between domesticated species and their wild relatives. But in order to have the sexual utopia that many people long for, there needs to be a major increase in tolerance, especially toward strangers. And, in addition to a better sex life, this will have another major benefit: world peace.

Brian Hare is the director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center at Duke University and the founder of Dognition.com, a service that allows you to find the unique genius in your dog. Vanessa Woods is a research scientist at Duke University. This essay was adapted from their book The Genius of Dogs.

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By Brian Hare & Vanessa Woods

“What am I, a salmon? Am I supposed to mate once and then die?”

Artwork by Kiki Smith, Friend, etching with hand coloring, 2008. © Kiki Smith, courtesy Pace Gallery and Universal Limited Art Editions, Inc.

Not so long ago, scientists believed domestication dulled an animal’s intelligence, since a domesticated species no longer has the skills to survive in the wild. For instance, the wolf howling at the moon certainly seems, if not more intelligent, at least more impressive than the dog drinking out of the toilet bowl. However, in recent years evidence has shown that domestication actually gives species specific skills that make it easier for them to survive.

In talking about domestication, researchers are referring to something very specific. There are common differences between all domesticated species and their wild relatives—smaller craniums, for instance, and variations in pigmentation. There are also differences in behavior; domesticated species are less aggressive, more sexual, more tolerant, and more playful.

Far from making dogs dumber, domestication has given them a very special kind of intelligence—they communicate and interact with us in ways that are similar to those of human infants. We often take it for granted that a quick point of our fingers, or even our feet, can send a dog scampering in the direction of a lost ball or a hidden morsel of food, but this ability is extremely specialized. Even one of our closest relatives, the chimpanzee, cannot read our gestures as well as dogs can. In the same way that pre-verbal infants start paying attention to adults when they point, dogs understand that when we gesture we’re trying to cooperate and communicate with them.

This social savvy has made dogs the most successful mammals on the planet, besides us. They have managed to colonize almost every corner of the globe, including our sofas and, occasionally, our beds.

Besides giving dogs this special genius, domestication has also affected their sex lives. Dogs have more sex, and better sex, than wolves. Why have one mating season when you can hump legs all year long? While sex for wolves is a serious business (only one season a year, solely for reproductive purposes, and usually in winter), dogs are much more relaxed. They have several mating seasons a year, and enjoy non-reproductive sex (sex for fun) throughout the year.

Activities like bottom-sniffing in dogs are the whole point of going to the dog park, while it would never be tolerated in wolves. Also, while male wolves become extraordinarily aggressive when competing for females in heat, dogs are more likely to turn a romp into a ménage à trois. Or quatre. Or cinq.

While on the surface this promiscuity might appear to be an advantage, it actually comes with a heavy price. Wolf packs are usually made up of a single breeding pair and their offspring. Juveniles are forced to stay with their parents because meeting another wolf pack before they are fully grown would be dangerous. To earn their keep, juveniles help their parents raise the next generation. Juveniles bring back food to the pups after a successful hunt, and protect the pups while their parents are hunting.

In feral dogs, or dogs that live without human interference, there

is no cooperative breeding and no single breeding pair. Females mate with multiple males and rarely bond with a mate. Unlike wolves, the dominant females do not seem to prevent subordinate females from breeding. But without a bonded mate or suppressed juveniles, as wolves have, feral-dog mothers have little help in rearing their puppies. There are no helpers to provide food. This results in extraordinarily high mortality among the puppies of feral dogs. Their mortality rate is more than ninety-five percent.

One of the main differences between domesticated species and their wild relatives is their sex lives. Domesticated species tend to have more sex, more playful sex, and sex outside reproductive cycles.

The differences in the sex lives of dogs and wolves are mirrored in our two closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. Like wolves, chimpanzees can be extraordinarily aggressive when competing for sexually receptive females.

As for bonobos, promiscuous, non-conceptive sex is what they are best known for. Their sex lives make chimpanzees, and even humans, look dull. Bonobo males penis-fence, which is just about what it sounds like, while the females frequently engage in g-g rubbing— holding each other face to face and rubbing their clitorises together until (it sounds like) they orgasm. Babies rub genitals with other babies and everyone else in the group. In fact, everyone in the group pretty much has some sort of sexual contact with everyone else in the group. Unlike dogs and wolves, bonobo infants do not have a higher rate of mortality than chimpanzees. In fact, male and female chimpanzees have been known to kill the infants of other chimpanzees, while bonobos have never been known to kill another bonobo.

Some bonobo fans have asked whether we shouldn’t model ourselves on our more peaceful, sexually liberated cousins, among whom swinging and homosexuality are just par for the course.

However, we lack a crucial characteristic of bonobos: kindness toward strangers. Humans can be extremely tolerant and altruistic toward strangers—think of your last charitable gift or blood donation— but we can also be hostile to the point of persecution and genocide.

Bonobos, on the other hand, treat every stranger like a new friend.

While groups of chimpanzees in neighboring territories have hunted and murdered one another to extinction, if two groups of bonobos meet they are more likely to groom one another and have sex.

As a species, humans certainly seem domesticated. This means that we exhibit many of the same differences that exist between domesticated species and their wild relatives. But in order to have the sexual utopia that many people long for, there needs to be a major increase in tolerance, especially toward strangers. And, in addition to a better sex life, this will have another major benefit: world peace.

Brian Hare is the director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center at Duke University and the founder of Dognition.com, a service that allows you to find the unique genius in your dog. Vanessa Woods is a research scientist at Duke University. This essay was adapted from their book The Genius of Dogs.

11

By Clancy Martin

1 First, a little theory:

A lover who is cheating on her partner is more likely to become impregnated when she is cheating than when she is with her partner (other factors being equal). Males are more likely to find sexual partners if they are deceptive about their own (especially, genetic) quality. The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers writes that women report commonly being deceived about “partner ambition, sincerity, kindness and strength of feeling.” Men report commonly being deceived about a future female partner’s willingness to have sex, and it is much more common for women to fake orgasm than for men to do so (although thanks, perhaps, to new antidepressant drugs that make it more difficult for men to climax, false reporting of orgasm among males is on the rise). Men regularly self-deceive about female sexual interest (men are inclined to believe that women are more interested than they in fact are). Men lie about how much sex they’ve had; women lie about how much they haven’t had. Both men and women commonly imagine the faces, bodies, and provocations of other lovers during sex. Deceit is commonly accepted as a part of the process of seduction in both sexes. As Trivers reminds us, none of this should come as a surprise: “Even within our genomes, deception flourishes, as selfish genetic elements use deceptive molecular techniques to over-reproduce at the expense of other genes. Deception infects all the fundamental relationships in life: parasite and host, predator and prey, plant and animal, male and female, neighbor and neighbor, parent and offspring, and even the relationship of an organism to itself.”

Given the fact that the more highly developed the brain of an organism is, the more prone to and the more expert at both deception and self-deception that organism will be, and given that deception and self-deception are most prevalent and useful in the context of (at least potential) reproduction, we should hardly be surprised to learn that the erotic life of human beings is riddled with deception. To claim that when we love we lie is almost tautological. What’s more interesting, perhaps, is that we are so insistent on the connection between love and truthfulness. Maybe we are searching for the truthful lover, at least in part, because we are all too familiar with the lover who lies. Perhaps I even recognize that the lying lover I fear and want to escape is me.

12

To lie in love is not necessarily to be irresponsible. On the contrary: “Don Juan was nothing if not conscientious,” the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote. Nor is it necessarily morally blameworthy. Phillips could have added: “but not nearly so conscientious as Scheherazade.” Scheherazade, we remember, deceitfully offered herself to the Emperor in order to save the lives of her sisters, and then spun lies for a thousand and one nights so that she could bear the Emperor three sons—and so convince him not to kill their mother. (He had resolved to sleep with a new virgin every night, because he had himself been deceived by his wife in love.) Our greatest lovers have always been both deceivers and remarkably scrupulous in their deceptions.

“A man who is expert in the arts, even though suffering a certain contempt, has success with women, if he is a good talker.” So instructs the Kama Sutra (Vatsyayana, third century AD), which is not a sex manual (only twenty pages of a five-hundredpage treatise is concerned with the actual practice of sexual intercourse) but, rather, a detailed psychological investigation into love, romance, and marriage, and, more generally, rules of good social behavior. It states that “in good society, women must secretly study the theory and practice of the Kama Sutra,” not principally for the sexual pleasure of their partners but for the cultivation and maintenance of successful romantic relationships—it must be done in secret, because part of the art of winning and keeping a husband is tricking him into thinking that he’s doing all the work. Among the sixty-four arts a woman must learn are No. 32, “the art of telling stories”; No. 56, “versification and literary forms”; No. 57, “the art of cheating”; and No. 58, “the art of disguise.” All of these, the reader will note, are arts of deception.

2 Now, some practice:

Her name was Sheila Dawn, and it started with a bet. Nikhil Dhawan and I were walking down the hill to Western Canada High School.

“I’m sixteen and I’ve never had a girlfriend. What a loser. My big brother had sex when he was fourteen. My dad lost his virginity when he was twelve.”

We were kicking leaves as we walked down the hill. It was late September. We had become friends because we were both in the International Baccalaureate program at Western, and most of the kids in the program were bigger geeks than we were.

“I’ve never even had a date,” Nikhil said.

The air was cold and smoky. The smell of fall near the mountains.

“I had a date in sixth grade. Denise. And Debbie at prom.

But Denise doesn’t count because I didn’t like her, and Debbie doesn’t count because she didn’t like me. She told me that during prom. She said, ‘I hope you’re not expecting anything, because I like Malcolm.’”

“Normal people have a girlfriend by now. Half the guys in tenth grade are already getting laid.”

I said to Nikhil, “Why don’t we make that a goal?”

“What? To get laid? I’ve had that goal for sixteen years. Or close enough.”

“No. Just to get a date. We could put twenty bucks on it. Or a vial of hash oil. Whoever gets a date first owes the other guy a vial of hash oil.”

“But it can’t be just anybody,” he said. “It has to be somebody you really want to date. I mean, anybody can get a date with some girl.”

We both quietly contemplated the untruth of this.

“Okay. Who do you want to date?”

“There’s one.”

There was a girl for me, too. But I wasn’t going to say her name first.

“That girl Wendy. Wendy Jackson.”

Wendy was the girl I was going to say. But, now that it was out of his mouth, he had dibs. We couldn’t both try to date Wendy: the problem was tough enough without creating unnecessary competition.

“Wendy? I know her. She went to my junior high school.”

“Yeah, I think I’m a little in love with her.”

This was one of the reasons Nikhil and I were such good friends. We could admit things to each other that we couldn’t admit to anyone else. That aspect of intimacy is common among very close friends: the ability to confess without fear—or with only a bit of fear—what we wouldn’t tell anyone else, and sometimes not even ourselves. In seduction, pretending to confess an intimate secret about oneself is a familiar technique; one hopes, of course, that the revelation of such secrets will be a key component of enduring romantic love.

“What about that redhead. She’s hot.”

“Redhead?” I said, though I knew the girl he meant.

“She sits behind Rob. She seems like she might be smart, too.”

To a sixteen-year-old boy in IB, it was unlikely that a girl could be smart, and being smart is not a recommendation, which Nikhil knew well enough. But I knew she was smart, and she was hot.

“She’s sort of chubby, don’t you think?”

I wanted to get his approval before I expressed my own. It would be about ten years before I entirely overcame that habit, which I have since observed in people of all ages. When my mom expressed the opinion, after meeting a girlfriend of mine—the woman who helped me break up my second marriage—that she was “skinny, but not pretty,” and “prematurely aged” I was hurt, resentful, and looked at my lover slightly differently.

“She’s got a big ass, I guess,” Nikhil said. “But she’s definitely hot. I’d ask her out if I wasn’t going to ask Wendy.”

We shook on the bet.

“Thirty days,” I said. “If we don’t set a deadline, we’ll never do it.”

The lies I told to win her attention were the most juvenile kind: I tried to seem smarter than I was; I bragged about the accomplishments of my older brother (he was Calgary’s most successful cocaine dealer at the time, lived in a penthouse, smuggled marijuana, LSD, and cocaine from California, and had many other extraordinary adventures); I wrote long erotic letters detailing imagined sexual scenarios. She loved those letters. I was a habitual liar at this time, I believe, but I think I was a bit too intoxicated with her to lie to her effectively. I didn’t have much to hide.

The actual romantic life I was beginning to lead—my first romantic experience—was already, at the outset, a fantasy life.

Novice lover that I was, self-deception was more important to

the initial stages of the relationship than the deception of her. I remember that my lies really only got going once another lover, a competitor, entered the scene.

In short, I won the bet.

Our first kiss was in her bedroom. I had one of Sheila’s tits out in my hand. I remember laughing with our tongues all wrapped up, from the joy—the pure surprise— of knowing I was going to fuck her. But even with the anticipation of sex, with my cock harder than it had ever been (I was a sixteen-year-old boy about to have sex for the first time), the pleasure was more mental than physical, and the experience was fitting itself into a narrative of expectation and hope. Sheila would be my girlfriend, we would fall in love, have dates, dinners, walks—we would be a couple: “There they go, Clancy and Sheila.” Holding hands. Kissing.

For a brief time Sheila Dawn and I were lovers. I was a lucky teenage boy: she was kinky. She liked anal sex more than vaginal, eagerly gave blow jobs—once on a road trip, under a blanket, in the front seat of her mother’s car, with her mother sitting beside us—and liked to have me come on her pantyhose, her bra, her bared tits, her face. We did our physics homework together. When at Christmas her little sister went on vacation with their parents, leaving her behind with her little brother, I stayed with them during the day and did her sister’s paper route for her in the snow. I enjoyed doing things for Sheila, and she liked it, and a kind of understanding arose between us that I was more in love with her than she was with me.

We were watching a movie at night in her living room, drinking hot chocolate and eating popcorn, when I told her that I loved her. I know I said it first. She said, “I think I love you. I think I’m falling in love with you, I mean.” Which showed that she already knew. Neither of us was lying, but both of us were venturing. She was more honest about it than I was.

Then Andrew came. My rival. He wasn’t from our high school.

He was a year older. Boys at Western, at the mall, in the grocery store, were approaching her. She reeked of sex.

One night she wasn’t answering the phone, so I rode my bike to her house. It was twelve kilometers in the Calgary winter, after dark, through the blowing snow. When I got to her house, there was a strange car in the driveway.

Sheila’s bedroom was in the basement: all our rough, wonderful, dirty sex took place down there, where her parents couldn’t hear or open a door and accidentally see. They would call from the top of the stairs before they came down. She even had a shower and a bath for afterward. We had rope.

The light was on in the basement. We had caught her younger brother peeping once, so she kept a curtain drawn over the window. I propped my bike against the side of the house and got down on my hands and knees in the snow. I could see a crack of light through the curtains. I lay flat on my belly. I could see the ceiling and part of a wall but nothing else. All the action was going on beneath my line of sight. I listened carefully, but she had her music on loud. I knew what that meant. I considered knocking on the window. Then I considered kicking it in. I stood there for half an hour watching the window for changes in the light, hoping the music would stop. At one point there

13

By Clancy Martin

1 First, a little theory:

A lover who is cheating on her partner is more likely to become impregnated when she is cheating than when she is with her partner (other factors being equal). Males are more likely to find sexual partners if they are deceptive about their own (especially, genetic) quality. The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers writes that women report commonly being deceived about “partner ambition, sincerity, kindness and strength of feeling.” Men report commonly being deceived about a future female partner’s willingness to have sex, and it is much more common for women to fake orgasm than for men to do so (although thanks, perhaps, to new antidepressant drugs that make it more difficult for men to climax, false reporting of orgasm among males is on the rise). Men regularly self-deceive about female sexual interest (men are inclined to believe that women are more interested than they in fact are). Men lie about how much sex they’ve had; women lie about how much they haven’t had. Both men and women commonly imagine the faces, bodies, and provocations of other lovers during sex. Deceit is commonly accepted as a part of the process of seduction in both sexes. As Trivers reminds us, none of this should come as a surprise: “Even within our genomes, deception flourishes, as selfish genetic elements use deceptive molecular techniques to over-reproduce at the expense of other genes. Deception infects all the fundamental relationships in life: parasite and host, predator and prey, plant and animal, male and female, neighbor and neighbor, parent and offspring, and even the relationship of an organism to itself.”

Given the fact that the more highly developed the brain of an organism is, the more prone to and the more expert at both deception and self-deception that organism will be, and given that deception and self-deception are most prevalent and useful in the context of (at least potential) reproduction, we should hardly be surprised to learn that the erotic life of human beings is riddled with deception. To claim that when we love we lie is almost tautological. What’s more interesting, perhaps, is that we are so insistent on the connection between love and truthfulness. Maybe we are searching for the truthful lover, at least in part, because we are all too familiar with the lover who lies. Perhaps I even recognize that the lying lover I fear and want to escape is me.

12

To lie in love is not necessarily to be irresponsible. On the contrary: “Don Juan was nothing if not conscientious,” the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote. Nor is it necessarily morally blameworthy. Phillips could have added: “but not nearly so conscientious as Scheherazade.” Scheherazade, we remember, deceitfully offered herself to the Emperor in order to save the lives of her sisters, and then spun lies for a thousand and one nights so that she could bear the Emperor three sons—and so convince him not to kill their mother. (He had resolved to sleep with a new virgin every night, because he had himself been deceived by his wife in love.) Our greatest lovers have always been both deceivers and remarkably scrupulous in their deceptions.

“A man who is expert in the arts, even though suffering a certain contempt, has success with women, if he is a good talker.” So instructs the Kama Sutra (Vatsyayana, third century AD), which is not a sex manual (only twenty pages of a five-hundredpage treatise is concerned with the actual practice of sexual intercourse) but, rather, a detailed psychological investigation into love, romance, and marriage, and, more generally, rules of good social behavior. It states that “in good society, women must secretly study the theory and practice of the Kama Sutra,” not principally for the sexual pleasure of their partners but for the cultivation and maintenance of successful romantic relationships—it must be done in secret, because part of the art of winning and keeping a husband is tricking him into thinking that he’s doing all the work. Among the sixty-four arts a woman must learn are No. 32, “the art of telling stories”; No. 56, “versification and literary forms”; No. 57, “the art of cheating”; and No. 58, “the art of disguise.” All of these, the reader will note, are arts of deception.

2 Now, some practice:

Her name was Sheila Dawn, and it started with a bet. Nikhil Dhawan and I were walking down the hill to Western Canada High School.

“I’m sixteen and I’ve never had a girlfriend. What a loser. My big brother had sex when he was fourteen. My dad lost his virginity when he was twelve.”

We were kicking leaves as we walked down the hill. It was late September. We had become friends because we were both in the International Baccalaureate program at Western, and most of the kids in the program were bigger geeks than we were.

“I’ve never even had a date,” Nikhil said.

The air was cold and smoky. The smell of fall near the mountains.

“I had a date in sixth grade. Denise. And Debbie at prom.

But Denise doesn’t count because I didn’t like her, and Debbie doesn’t count because she didn’t like me. She told me that during prom. She said, ‘I hope you’re not expecting anything, because I like Malcolm.’”

“Normal people have a girlfriend by now. Half the guys in tenth grade are already getting laid.”

I said to Nikhil, “Why don’t we make that a goal?”

“What? To get laid? I’ve had that goal for sixteen years. Or close enough.”

“No. Just to get a date. We could put twenty bucks on it. Or a vial of hash oil. Whoever gets a date first owes the other guy a vial of hash oil.”

“But it can’t be just anybody,” he said. “It has to be somebody you really want to date. I mean, anybody can get a date with some girl.”

We both quietly contemplated the untruth of this.

“Okay. Who do you want to date?”

“There’s one.”

There was a girl for me, too. But I wasn’t going to say her name first.

“That girl Wendy. Wendy Jackson.”

Wendy was the girl I was going to say. But, now that it was out of his mouth, he had dibs. We couldn’t both try to date Wendy: the problem was tough enough without creating unnecessary competition.

“Wendy? I know her. She went to my junior high school.”

“Yeah, I think I’m a little in love with her.”

This was one of the reasons Nikhil and I were such good friends. We could admit things to each other that we couldn’t admit to anyone else. That aspect of intimacy is common among very close friends: the ability to confess without fear—or with only a bit of fear—what we wouldn’t tell anyone else, and sometimes not even ourselves. In seduction, pretending to confess an intimate secret about oneself is a familiar technique; one hopes, of course, that the revelation of such secrets will be a key component of enduring romantic love.

“What about that redhead. She’s hot.”

“Redhead?” I said, though I knew the girl he meant.

“She sits behind Rob. She seems like she might be smart, too.”

To a sixteen-year-old boy in IB, it was unlikely that a girl could be smart, and being smart is not a recommendation, which Nikhil knew well enough. But I knew she was smart, and she was hot.

“She’s sort of chubby, don’t you think?”

I wanted to get his approval before I expressed my own. It would be about ten years before I entirely overcame that habit, which I have since observed in people of all ages. When my mom expressed the opinion, after meeting a girlfriend of mine—the woman who helped me break up my second marriage—that she was “skinny, but not pretty,” and “prematurely aged” I was hurt, resentful, and looked at my lover slightly differently.

“She’s got a big ass, I guess,” Nikhil said. “But she’s definitely hot. I’d ask her out if I wasn’t going to ask Wendy.”

We shook on the bet.

“Thirty days,” I said. “If we don’t set a deadline, we’ll never do it.”

The lies I told to win her attention were the most juvenile kind: I tried to seem smarter than I was; I bragged about the accomplishments of my older brother (he was Calgary’s most successful cocaine dealer at the time, lived in a penthouse, smuggled marijuana, LSD, and cocaine from California, and had many other extraordinary adventures); I wrote long erotic letters detailing imagined sexual scenarios. She loved those letters. I was a habitual liar at this time, I believe, but I think I was a bit too intoxicated with her to lie to her effectively. I didn’t have much to hide.

The actual romantic life I was beginning to lead—my first romantic experience—was already, at the outset, a fantasy life.

Novice lover that I was, self-deception was more important to

the initial stages of the relationship than the deception of her. I remember that my lies really only got going once another lover, a competitor, entered the scene.

In short, I won the bet.

Our first kiss was in her bedroom. I had one of Sheila’s tits out in my hand. I remember laughing with our tongues all wrapped up, from the joy—the pure surprise— of knowing I was going to fuck her. But even with the anticipation of sex, with my cock harder than it had ever been (I was a sixteen-year-old boy about to have sex for the first time), the pleasure was more mental than physical, and the experience was fitting itself into a narrative of expectation and hope. Sheila would be my girlfriend, we would fall in love, have dates, dinners, walks—we would be a couple: “There they go, Clancy and Sheila.” Holding hands. Kissing.

For a brief time Sheila Dawn and I were lovers. I was a lucky teenage boy: she was kinky. She liked anal sex more than vaginal, eagerly gave blow jobs—once on a road trip, under a blanket, in the front seat of her mother’s car, with her mother sitting beside us—and liked to have me come on her pantyhose, her bra, her bared tits, her face. We did our physics homework together. When at Christmas her little sister went on vacation with their parents, leaving her behind with her little brother, I stayed with them during the day and did her sister’s paper route for her in the snow. I enjoyed doing things for Sheila, and she liked it, and a kind of understanding arose between us that I was more in love with her than she was with me.

We were watching a movie at night in her living room, drinking hot chocolate and eating popcorn, when I told her that I loved her. I know I said it first. She said, “I think I love you. I think I’m falling in love with you, I mean.” Which showed that she already knew. Neither of us was lying, but both of us were venturing. She was more honest about it than I was.

Then Andrew came. My rival. He wasn’t from our high school.

He was a year older. Boys at Western, at the mall, in the grocery store, were approaching her. She reeked of sex.

One night she wasn’t answering the phone, so I rode my bike to her house. It was twelve kilometers in the Calgary winter, after dark, through the blowing snow. When I got to her house, there was a strange car in the driveway.

Sheila’s bedroom was in the basement: all our rough, wonderful, dirty sex took place down there, where her parents couldn’t hear or open a door and accidentally see. They would call from the top of the stairs before they came down. She even had a shower and a bath for afterward. We had rope.

The light was on in the basement. We had caught her younger brother peeping once, so she kept a curtain drawn over the window. I propped my bike against the side of the house and got down on my hands and knees in the snow. I could see a crack of light through the curtains. I lay flat on my belly. I could see the ceiling and part of a wall but nothing else. All the action was going on beneath my line of sight. I listened carefully, but she had her music on loud. I knew what that meant. I considered knocking on the window. Then I considered kicking it in. I stood there for half an hour watching the window for changes in the light, hoping the music would stop. At one point there

13

Frank Ockenfels 3 was silence, then she turned the record over. It was one of our records. There she was, in bed with him—screwing him, jerking him off onto her crotch, swallowing his cock into her throat the way she could—though, after all, they could be sitting on her sofa. Maybe she didn’t do the same things with him that she did with me. Maybe they were just talking, doing homework, they could just be friends.

I still remember the intensity with which I loved Sheila Dawn. And the excesses I committed loving and trying to prove my love to her—a suicide attempt, a Fiat convertible I gave her for Valentine’s Day, dropping out of school, lying to her parents and claiming that I had been kicked out of my house by my stepfather so that I could live with her, living for a time at a gas station, another time in the streets, sleeping in malls, stealing from my parents so that I could buy her Caesar salads and

Deceit is commonly accepted as a part of the process of seduction in both sexes.

14

Clancy Martin is the author of the award-winning novel How to Sell, several books and translations in philosophy, and the forthcoming Love, Lies and Marriage. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, and a DAAD Fellowship. He is professor and chair of philosophy at the University of Missouri, in Kansas City. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The London Review of Books, GQ, Esquire, Ethics, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications.

Frank Ockenfels 3 has spent nearly three decades as a portrait photographer, shooting musicians and celebrities as diverse as Kurt Cobain and the cast of Harry Potter. His work is in a constant state of flux, as he pushes the boundaries of how he works: collecting cameras old and new, experimenting with lighting techniques and exposing himself to fresh sources of inspiration.

He feels that every project is unique and requires “a different conversation.”

Ockenfels began working on his journals (pictured here) twenty years ago as a way of processing all the information that he collected during a project. He would take notes of his failures and successes, often writing backward since he is dyslexic. This helped him “empty his brain of all the crap that went on during the shoot.” He still works on these exquisite visceral journals today and has completed thirty-two.

All images © Frank Ockenfels 3.

mint-chocolate milkshakes that I would deliver to her at lunchtime. The lies I told her about my suicide attempts. The lies I told her about other lovers that I had. The lies I told her about when I had seen her with Andrew. The lies she told me about where she had been the night before, whom she was talking to on the phone, what was really happening….

This went on for two years. Then I turned eighteen and, as was traditional in our house, it was time for me to leave. I didn’t have a high-school diploma, so my mom sent me to live with my dad in Florida. He got me into college, and my relationship with Sheila was over.

Or it should have been. There were two more encounters with Sheila.

The first time, I was visiting my mom for Christmas and I took Sheila on a date. I borrowed my mom’s Toyota Corolla.

After pizza at our old favorite restaurant—she loved Hawaiian pizza—I fucked her in the parking lot, with the car’s motor running. First I took her from behind, in the ass, like I knew she wanted (“I don’t let boys do that to me now,” she told me), and then we fucked a second time in the back, with the seats of the hatchback folded down. I wanted her to have rug scars on her shoulder blades and elbows. I fucked her just to tell her that I didn’t love her anymore. Of course, I was still in love with her. But the rough, impersonal sex—the kind of sex, mind you, I knew she loved—was a technique I was using to convince myself that she didn’t mean anything to me.

Afterward, she asked me if I thought I’d ever move back to Calgary. “No,” I told her, but I also knew then that if she had asked me to I probably would have.

I was in the state between escaping from years of being in love with her and still wondering if there was a way to have her back. In that state, so common for the lover, it is almost impossible either to deceive or to tell the truth, to the lover or to oneself, because you truly have no idea what is and is not the case.

And this fact about love—that from one moment to the next the

lover experiences so many different degrees and even kinds of certainty, uncertainty, self-awareness, and self-doubt—is what makes speaking about “truth” and “transparency” and “honesty” in love so dubious. Nevertheless, as we will observe again and again, intimacy and trust will depend upon at least the possibility of these inescapably vague, frightening, and elusive ways of being with and knowing about each other.

The second time I heard from Sheila was four years later.

She called me on the phone. She told me that she had been dating a handsome Iranian medical student for a few years, who, she said quietly, “is abusive.” She did not specify what kind of abuse, and I did not ask.

“He’s nothing like you,” she said. “In fact, the opposite. Maybe that’s the attraction. To punish myself.”

I kept my mouth shut. I knew I wasn’t vulnerable, but I still remembered those two years I’d been so in love with her well enough to know that I could become vulnerable again. At the end of our second conversation, she called me Sunshine—her old nickname for me—and I knew I had her where I wanted her.

I asked her to send me pictures of herself.

“What kind? What do you mean?”

“You know what kind I mean.”

She sent twenty or more—Polaroids, most of them naked, some with her masturbating naked. In others, she wore just black pantyhose and garters in others. In one, she was hitting herself on her reddened ass with a riding crop. It was taken from behind, with her on her knees, looking back at the camera. They were wonderful pictures. You could see her ribs through her skin—that alone made me want to fuck her. She was slender and had come into her beauty. Her skin was pale and lustrous, her hair a true bold red, her eyes bright green. From a different woman, I would have masturbated to those pictures for weeks.

I threw them away, and I never wrote to her again. She wrote to me a couple of times, and then she went quiet.

That was my last seduction of Sheila, and my final, shameful act of revenge. It was a strange act of deception: to pretend to be falling for her again, just so that she would expose herself to me so that I could reject her. I wanted her literally, entirely exposed, so that her humiliation would be more complete. To me, at the time, this action had the flavor of truthfulness to it, that seamy truthfulness that certain acts of “justice” have.

“Morality,” Bertrand Russell wrote, thinking of sex and echoing Nietzsche, “is simply an expression of the repressed desire to be cruel to others.”

Frank Ockenfels 3 was silence, then she turned the record over. It was one of our records. There she was, in bed with him—screwing him, jerking him off onto her crotch, swallowing his cock into her throat the way she could—though, after all, they could be sitting on her sofa. Maybe she didn’t do the same things with him that she did with me. Maybe they were just talking, doing homework, they could just be friends.

I still remember the intensity with which I loved Sheila Dawn. And the excesses I committed loving and trying to prove my love to her—a suicide attempt, a Fiat convertible I gave her for Valentine’s Day, dropping out of school, lying to her parents and claiming that I had been kicked out of my house by my stepfather so that I could live with her, living for a time at a gas station, another time in the streets, sleeping in malls, stealing from my parents so that I could buy her Caesar salads and

Deceit is commonly accepted as a part of the process of seduction in both sexes.

14

Clancy Martin is the author of the award-winning novel How to Sell, several books and translations in philosophy, and the forthcoming Love, Lies and Marriage. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, and a DAAD Fellowship. He is professor and chair of philosophy at the University of Missouri, in Kansas City. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The London Review of Books, GQ, Esquire, Ethics, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications.

Frank Ockenfels 3 has spent nearly three decades as a portrait photographer, shooting musicians and celebrities as diverse as Kurt Cobain and the cast of Harry Potter. His work is in a constant state of flux, as he pushes the boundaries of how he works: collecting cameras old and new, experimenting with lighting techniques and exposing himself to fresh sources of inspiration.

He feels that every project is unique and requires “a different conversation.”

Ockenfels began working on his journals (pictured here) twenty years ago as a way of processing all the information that he collected during a project. He would take notes of his failures and successes, often writing backward since he is dyslexic. This helped him “empty his brain of all the crap that went on during the shoot.” He still works on these exquisite visceral journals today and has completed thirty-two.

All images © Frank Ockenfels 3.

mint-chocolate milkshakes that I would deliver to her at lunchtime. The lies I told her about my suicide attempts. The lies I told her about other lovers that I had. The lies I told her about when I had seen her with Andrew. The lies she told me about where she had been the night before, whom she was talking to on the phone, what was really happening….

This went on for two years. Then I turned eighteen and, as was traditional in our house, it was time for me to leave. I didn’t have a high-school diploma, so my mom sent me to live with my dad in Florida. He got me into college, and my relationship with Sheila was over.

Or it should have been. There were two more encounters with Sheila.

The first time, I was visiting my mom for Christmas and I took Sheila on a date. I borrowed my mom’s Toyota Corolla.

After pizza at our old favorite restaurant—she loved Hawaiian pizza—I fucked her in the parking lot, with the car’s motor running. First I took her from behind, in the ass, like I knew she wanted (“I don’t let boys do that to me now,” she told me), and then we fucked a second time in the back, with the seats of the hatchback folded down. I wanted her to have rug scars on her shoulder blades and elbows. I fucked her just to tell her that I didn’t love her anymore. Of course, I was still in love with her. But the rough, impersonal sex—the kind of sex, mind you, I knew she loved—was a technique I was using to convince myself that she didn’t mean anything to me.

Afterward, she asked me if I thought I’d ever move back to Calgary. “No,” I told her, but I also knew then that if she had asked me to I probably would have.

I was in the state between escaping from years of being in love with her and still wondering if there was a way to have her back. In that state, so common for the lover, it is almost impossible either to deceive or to tell the truth, to the lover or to oneself, because you truly have no idea what is and is not the case.

And this fact about love—that from one moment to the next the

lover experiences so many different degrees and even kinds of certainty, uncertainty, self-awareness, and self-doubt—is what makes speaking about “truth” and “transparency” and “honesty” in love so dubious. Nevertheless, as we will observe again and again, intimacy and trust will depend upon at least the possibility of these inescapably vague, frightening, and elusive ways of being with and knowing about each other.

The second time I heard from Sheila was four years later.

She called me on the phone. She told me that she had been dating a handsome Iranian medical student for a few years, who, she said quietly, “is abusive.” She did not specify what kind of abuse, and I did not ask.

“He’s nothing like you,” she said. “In fact, the opposite. Maybe that’s the attraction. To punish myself.”

I kept my mouth shut. I knew I wasn’t vulnerable, but I still remembered those two years I’d been so in love with her well enough to know that I could become vulnerable again. At the end of our second conversation, she called me Sunshine—her old nickname for me—and I knew I had her where I wanted her.

I asked her to send me pictures of herself.

“What kind? What do you mean?”

“You know what kind I mean.”

She sent twenty or more—Polaroids, most of them naked, some with her masturbating naked. In others, she wore just black pantyhose and garters in others. In one, she was hitting herself on her reddened ass with a riding crop. It was taken from behind, with her on her knees, looking back at the camera. They were wonderful pictures. You could see her ribs through her skin—that alone made me want to fuck her. She was slender and had come into her beauty. Her skin was pale and lustrous, her hair a true bold red, her eyes bright green. From a different woman, I would have masturbated to those pictures for weeks.

I threw them away, and I never wrote to her again. She wrote to me a couple of times, and then she went quiet.

That was my last seduction of Sheila, and my final, shameful act of revenge. It was a strange act of deception: to pretend to be falling for her again, just so that she would expose herself to me so that I could reject her. I wanted her literally, entirely exposed, so that her humiliation would be more complete. To me, at the time, this action had the flavor of truthfulness to it, that seamy truthfulness that certain acts of “justice” have.

“Morality,” Bertrand Russell wrote, thinking of sex and echoing Nietzsche, “is simply an expression of the repressed desire to be cruel to others.”

“I think people don’t put enough weight on failure and how amazing it is. I try to teach my sons that. To keep trying. You need to fall down twenty times on your bike before you actually ride it. The idea that you can go out and try something new and excel at it in a second is just not going to happen.”

—Frank Ockenfels 3

By Nathaniel Rich

With my wedding now less than three months away, I figured I better read up on the subject of marriage. Some people go through life like Augie March—self-taught, freestyle, first to knock, first admitted. I’m not one of them. I study. I read the canon. I check books out of the library. I take notes. I’m the last one through the door. I like to know what I’m getting myself into.

I started at the beginning. I consulted the landmark history of marriage by Rabbi Louis M. Epstein, the great twentiethcentury historian of Jewish life. The title of Epstein’s book, Marriage Laws in the Bible and the Talmud, promised certitude, scholarly rigor, reassurance. I opened to the first chapter. It is titled “Polygamy.”

“That there is a tradition of polygamy among the Jews,” Epstein begins, “no one can deny.”

This came as a surprise. After all, once God had created man and woman in his own image, he ordered them to be fruitful and multiply; he told them to replenish the earth and master it—together. In case that directive wasn’t clear enough, we learn later in Genesis that man “shall cleave unto his wife and they shall become one flesh.” One flesh—not lots of fleshes in different combinations. But man, it turns out, had a more nuanced interpretation. He had his own ideas.

How else to explain the fact that so many of the Bible’s most prominent figures kept multiple sexual partners? Abraham, Esau, Jacob, Simeon, Saul, David, Solomon, Gideon—guilty all, and those are just the most famous ones. The Scriptures are full of harems and concubines. Talmudic law, in fact, assumes all Jews to be polygamous. “One wife,” it tells us, “should not be neglected for another.” Elsewhere we are told, “Marry not two wives—but if you marry two, then take a third.” Finally comes the advice that you can marry four wives or more, but only so long as you’re able to “give each marital satisfaction once a month.” I made a note to look more closely at my ketubah.

But maybe the Talmudic scholars didn’t have all the answers. I decided to go farther afield—to Athens, the cradle of modern civilization, where I encountered the brilliant statesman Solon. Though best known as one of the founders of democracy, there was a matter closer to his heart: adultery. In the early sixth century BCE, Solon worried that too many men were cheating on their wives with women (and men) of low standing. Families were destabilized, political careers were ruined. Chaos beckoned.

Rather than censure Athens’s philanderers, Solon came up with a novel solution: a vast network of legal, state-operated whorehouses. A man would visit a concubine during the day so that, once home, he might be at harmony with his wife. As Demosthenes described the arrangement two hundred years later, “We keep concubines for the daily needs of our bodies…[and] wives so that we may breed legitimate children and have faithful housekeepers.” This practice proved effective for centuries. Certain contemporary politicians continue to follow Solon’s democratic model to this day.

All images © Frank Ockenfels 3.

I skipped ahead. Things got worse: Saint Augustine: “If any man has the nerve to say that he is chaste and faithful to his wife and this gets known, he is ashamed to mix with other men, whose behavior is not like his, for they will mock him and despise him and say he is not a real man.”

17

“I think people don’t put enough weight on failure and how amazing it is. I try to teach my sons that. To keep trying. You need to fall down twenty times on your bike before you actually ride it. The idea that you can go out and try something new and excel at it in a second is just not going to happen.”

—Frank Ockenfels 3

By Nathaniel Rich

With my wedding now less than three months away, I figured I better read up on the subject of marriage. Some people go through life like Augie March—self-taught, freestyle, first to knock, first admitted. I’m not one of them. I study. I read the canon. I check books out of the library. I take notes. I’m the last one through the door. I like to know what I’m getting myself into.

I started at the beginning. I consulted the landmark history of marriage by Rabbi Louis M. Epstein, the great twentiethcentury historian of Jewish life. The title of Epstein’s book, Marriage Laws in the Bible and the Talmud, promised certitude, scholarly rigor, reassurance. I opened to the first chapter. It is titled “Polygamy.”

“That there is a tradition of polygamy among the Jews,” Epstein begins, “no one can deny.”

This came as a surprise. After all, once God had created man and woman in his own image, he ordered them to be fruitful and multiply; he told them to replenish the earth and master it—together. In case that directive wasn’t clear enough, we learn later in Genesis that man “shall cleave unto his wife and they shall become one flesh.” One flesh—not lots of fleshes in different combinations. But man, it turns out, had a more nuanced interpretation. He had his own ideas.

How else to explain the fact that so many of the Bible’s most prominent figures kept multiple sexual partners? Abraham, Esau, Jacob, Simeon, Saul, David, Solomon, Gideon—guilty all, and those are just the most famous ones. The Scriptures are full of harems and concubines. Talmudic law, in fact, assumes all Jews to be polygamous. “One wife,” it tells us, “should not be neglected for another.” Elsewhere we are told, “Marry not two wives—but if you marry two, then take a third.” Finally comes the advice that you can marry four wives or more, but only so long as you’re able to “give each marital satisfaction once a month.” I made a note to look more closely at my ketubah.

But maybe the Talmudic scholars didn’t have all the answers. I decided to go farther afield—to Athens, the cradle of modern civilization, where I encountered the brilliant statesman Solon. Though best known as one of the founders of democracy, there was a matter closer to his heart: adultery. In the early sixth century BCE, Solon worried that too many men were cheating on their wives with women (and men) of low standing. Families were destabilized, political careers were ruined. Chaos beckoned.

Rather than censure Athens’s philanderers, Solon came up with a novel solution: a vast network of legal, state-operated whorehouses. A man would visit a concubine during the day so that, once home, he might be at harmony with his wife. As Demosthenes described the arrangement two hundred years later, “We keep concubines for the daily needs of our bodies…[and] wives so that we may breed legitimate children and have faithful housekeepers.” This practice proved effective for centuries. Certain contemporary politicians continue to follow Solon’s democratic model to this day.

All images © Frank Ockenfels 3.

I skipped ahead. Things got worse: Saint Augustine: “If any man has the nerve to say that he is chaste and faithful to his wife and this gets known, he is ashamed to mix with other men, whose behavior is not like his, for they will mock him and despise him and say he is not a real man.”

17

Nikolay Bakharev Geoffrey Chaucer: “It is he who has no wife who is no cuckold.”

William Shakespeare: “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever, One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never.”

I turned the pages more quickly. The decades and centuries sped past, but nothing changed: Thomas Hardy: “It is foreign to a man’s nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must and shall be that person’s lover.”

Vladimir Nabokov: “Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.”

Kurt Vonnegut:

Civilization had made a mess of marriage—fidelity had been a punch line for at least two millennia. Better to erase the record. If only we could free ourselves from the imperatives of religion, society, culture. What if we could discover marriage in its natural form, untainted and pure? That’s when I came across Bronislaw Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages.

The Polish-born anthropologist traveled to northwestern Melanesia in the early 1900s to live among the natives of the Trobriand Islands, in British New Guinea. The Trobrianders had some confusion about pregnancy—they believed that the fetus was implanted by spirits who paddled to the island, under the cover of night, by canoe. But otherwise they understood marriage much as we do. After an adolescent period of free sexual experimentation with multiple partners, young lovers paired off into couples. They cohabited in fervent amorous harmony for several months or longer, often sharing a house with other couples in order to keep the rent down. During this trial period, partners were not always faithful, but affairs were conducted clandestinely, so as not to jeopardize the relationship. (The only unrecognizable thing about this

Photographs by Nikolay Bakharev: Relationship #7, 1985 (top) and Pastime #7, 1987 (bottom). Courtesy Julie Saul Gallery, New York.

“My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.”

period of courtship was that the couples were not allowed to dine together.) Finally, should no great disruption occur, the lovers entered into a marriage contract. They moved back in with their parents, and prepared to build a house of their own. They ate together at last. The frequency of sexual relations decreased sharply.

Only one class of Trobriander was entitled to take multiple wives: the chieftain, who was the most senior man in the village, and ruled over his clan. This man was known colloquially as the “headman,” though a better translation might be “governor.”

I felt at ease with the Trobrianders. They weren’t without flaws, of course, but they seemed to have set a good example in the marriage department. I was further encouraged by their child-rearing practices—at least at first. Trobriander husbands, despite failing to understand the intricacies of procreation, behaved lovingly toward their offspring. In fact, the husband’s main household duties related to childcare. He cleaned and washed his baby, fed it, and provided consolation when it cried. He bounced it on his lap, he cuddled with it. All of that sounded nice. Who needed Saint Augustine when you had the Trobrianders? Then I learned that the word the Trobrianders used for “father” was tomakava. The literal meaning of that word, Malinowski tells us, is “stranger,” or, more precisely, “outsider.” I paused over that word for some time.

That night my wife-to-be came home from her job—agitated from work, tired, happy to see me. We kissed. I made dinner. We talked, we laughed, we sat quietly together. I looked at my books, piled on the bedside table. I looked at my fiancée. I put the books on the floor. I returned them to the library the next day. I decided that I didn’t need them after all. I know what I’m getting myself into.

Nathaniel Rich is the author of two novels, Odds Against Tomorrow and The Mayor’s Tongue. His essays appear regularly in The New York Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and The Daily Beast.

18

Nikolay Bakharev’s body of work is an evocative mix of images—some public and some private. The self-trained Siberian photographer was born in 1946 and worked as a mechanic and as a Communal Services Factory photographer. Bakharev began photographing on the Russian beaches in the 1980s, when the distribution of photographs containing nudity was banned in the USSR. His public portraits feel surreptitious and are marked by the vulnerability of the near-naked subjects—couples and groups wearing swimsuits—in the woods.

As a beach photographer, Bakharev was able to earn a living, create work that was far more revealing than was officially permitted, and find subjects whom he could photograph privately. These images, mostly of women or couples nude in their homes, are baldly sexual, and their intimacy is amplified by the apparent honesty and reality of the settings, which allow viewers to imagine that they have a window into the most private aspect of the subjects’ lives.

Nikolay Bakharev Geoffrey Chaucer: “It is he who has no wife who is no cuckold.”

William Shakespeare: “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever, One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never.”

I turned the pages more quickly. The decades and centuries sped past, but nothing changed: Thomas Hardy: “It is foreign to a man’s nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must and shall be that person’s lover.”

Vladimir Nabokov: “Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.”

Kurt Vonnegut:

Civilization had made a mess of marriage—fidelity had been a punch line for at least two millennia. Better to erase the record. If only we could free ourselves from the imperatives of religion, society, culture. What if we could discover marriage in its natural form, untainted and pure? That’s when I came across Bronislaw Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages.

The Polish-born anthropologist traveled to northwestern Melanesia in the early 1900s to live among the natives of the Trobriand Islands, in British New Guinea. The Trobrianders had some confusion about pregnancy—they believed that the fetus was implanted by spirits who paddled to the island, under the cover of night, by canoe. But otherwise they understood marriage much as we do. After an adolescent period of free sexual experimentation with multiple partners, young lovers paired off into couples. They cohabited in fervent amorous harmony for several months or longer, often sharing a house with other couples in order to keep the rent down. During this trial period, partners were not always faithful, but affairs were conducted clandestinely, so as not to jeopardize the relationship. (The only unrecognizable thing about this

Photographs by Nikolay Bakharev: Relationship #7, 1985 (top) and Pastime #7, 1987 (bottom). Courtesy Julie Saul Gallery, New York.

“My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.”

period of courtship was that the couples were not allowed to dine together.) Finally, should no great disruption occur, the lovers entered into a marriage contract. They moved back in with their parents, and prepared to build a house of their own. They ate together at last. The frequency of sexual relations decreased sharply.

Only one class of Trobriander was entitled to take multiple wives: the chieftain, who was the most senior man in the village, and ruled over his clan. This man was known colloquially as the “headman,” though a better translation might be “governor.”

I felt at ease with the Trobrianders. They weren’t without flaws, of course, but they seemed to have set a good example in the marriage department. I was further encouraged by their child-rearing practices—at least at first. Trobriander husbands, despite failing to understand the intricacies of procreation, behaved lovingly toward their offspring. In fact, the husband’s main household duties related to childcare. He cleaned and washed his baby, fed it, and provided consolation when it cried. He bounced it on his lap, he cuddled with it. All of that sounded nice. Who needed Saint Augustine when you had the Trobrianders? Then I learned that the word the Trobrianders used for “father” was tomakava. The literal meaning of that word, Malinowski tells us, is “stranger,” or, more precisely, “outsider.” I paused over that word for some time.

That night my wife-to-be came home from her job—agitated from work, tired, happy to see me. We kissed. I made dinner. We talked, we laughed, we sat quietly together. I looked at my books, piled on the bedside table. I looked at my fiancée. I put the books on the floor. I returned them to the library the next day. I decided that I didn’t need them after all. I know what I’m getting myself into.

Nathaniel Rich is the author of two novels, Odds Against Tomorrow and The Mayor’s Tongue. His essays appear regularly in The New York Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and The Daily Beast.

18

Nikolay Bakharev’s body of work is an evocative mix of images—some public and some private. The self-trained Siberian photographer was born in 1946 and worked as a mechanic and as a Communal Services Factory photographer. Bakharev began photographing on the Russian beaches in the 1980s, when the distribution of photographs containing nudity was banned in the USSR. His public portraits feel surreptitious and are marked by the vulnerability of the near-naked subjects—couples and groups wearing swimsuits—in the woods.

As a beach photographer, Bakharev was able to earn a living, create work that was far more revealing than was officially permitted, and find subjects whom he could photograph privately. These images, mostly of women or couples nude in their homes, are baldly sexual, and their intimacy is amplified by the apparent honesty and reality of the settings, which allow viewers to imagine that they have a window into the most private aspect of the subjects’ lives.

By Lolo To flee or not to flee—that is the question, or at least the question I’ve been asking myself for twenty-five years.

And it seems a strange one to be asking, since I’ve had nothing but marital bliss surrounding me my whole life, what with my parents being married for twenty-seven years and all my grandparents still married since they

“I tried to get an official permit to shoot nude models in my studio at the Communal Services Factory; I went to the municipal and regional party committees claiming that the openness of such work would help them monitor this activity. But they said, ‘You should be thankful that you haven’t been sent to prison yet.’”—Nikolay Bakharev

were teenagers. I’ve seen firsthand the faithfulness that goes into this kind of eternal, godly commitment. I’ve also seen the hair-pulling and screaming happen. One of them cheated a few times; one of them nearly died, twice. Someone else lost the family business because he knowingly hired a criminal to work for the company but didn’t tell anyone that he had hired a criminal. Another one had a Texas-size anger-management issue for years, until it climaxed one night and he was left with therapy as his only option. Then one time a car was repossessed during the worst part of the recession in 2008, and I thought I was going to have to change my identity, because this person saw it as a threat to his place in society and went on an emotional rampage trying to get his spot back.

The world looking in on them has only ever been able to see disaster and no escape in these moments, but they’ve always looked back at the world square in the eye, with a solution and a determination to survive together. It is the embodiment of “for better, for worse.”

I’ve always been mystified by marriage, because the only thing I’ve been able to commit myself to for longer than six months is music. I try to tell myself that this is just how it is for my generation, and that our twenty-first-century world doesn’t require the same sort of fierce loyalty that used to be required. But then I remember where I come from. My small, grassy hometown of Jackson, Tennessee, has a population smaller than my Brooklyn neighborhood, and a big reputation for being conservative. Marriage and starting a family are more than a way of life there; they simply are life. And challenging that philosophy is the equivalent of saying that Jesus isn’t real.

I’ve spent more money in the past four years on wedding travel and events and presents and fucking bridesmaids’ dresses than I have on a single personal reward for myself or anyone else. And when I sign a wedding card or my eyes drift to those fucking bridesmaids’ dresses in the back of my closet it causes a little pang in my heart, Photographs by Nikolay Bakharev: Relationship #19, 1983 (top left), Relationship #70, 1991-93 (top right) and Interior #40, 2006 (bottom).

Courtesy Julie Saul Gallery, New York.

because I’d actually really like a wedding card addressed to me, and I’d love my own white dress instead of some strapless sea-foam-green number. But I’m very scared to admit this out loud. I’m scared of the heartbreak and the embarrassment if it didn’t work out. I’m scared that I’d lose focus on my music, but most of all I’m scared to let go of the person I’ve convinced myself that I am, the girl who doesn’t really give a shit about getting married.

When I write about love and commitment, I tend to sound like the fourteen-year-old version of myself penning another annoying journal entry about broken hearts and period cramps. So, these days, I can only try and relate to love and commitment in a language that translates to me.

I’ve been deeply in love with music, my craft/hobby/passion/job/“boyfriend”/dream since I started singing with my cousin Brittany in a choir, when I was seven years old. This bastard-of-life partner that I’ve chosen has hurt me in so many ways that sometimes I don’t know why I keep taking him/her back. He/she hasn’t just tortured

21

By Lolo To flee or not to flee—that is the question, or at least the question I’ve been asking myself for twenty-five years.

And it seems a strange one to be asking, since I’ve had nothing but marital bliss surrounding me my whole life, what with my parents being married for twenty-seven years and all my grandparents still married since they

“I tried to get an official permit to shoot nude models in my studio at the Communal Services Factory; I went to the municipal and regional party committees claiming that the openness of such work would help them monitor this activity. But they said, ‘You should be thankful that you haven’t been sent to prison yet.’”—Nikolay Bakharev

were teenagers. I’ve seen firsthand the faithfulness that goes into this kind of eternal, godly commitment. I’ve also seen the hair-pulling and screaming happen. One of them cheated a few times; one of them nearly died, twice. Someone else lost the family business because he knowingly hired a criminal to work for the company but didn’t tell anyone that he had hired a criminal. Another one had a Texas-size anger-management issue for years, until it climaxed one night and he was left with therapy as his only option. Then one time a car was repossessed during the worst part of the recession in 2008, and I thought I was going to have to change my identity, because this person saw it as a threat to his place in society and went on an emotional rampage trying to get his spot back.

The world looking in on them has only ever been able to see disaster and no escape in these moments, but they’ve always looked back at the world square in the eye, with a solution and a determination to survive together. It is the embodiment of “for better, for worse.”

I’ve always been mystified by marriage, because the only thing I’ve been able to commit myself to for longer than six months is music. I try to tell myself that this is just how it is for my generation, and that our twenty-first-century world doesn’t require the same sort of fierce loyalty that used to be required. But then I remember where I come from. My small, grassy hometown of Jackson, Tennessee, has a population smaller than my Brooklyn neighborhood, and a big reputation for being conservative. Marriage and starting a family are more than a way of life there; they simply are life. And challenging that philosophy is the equivalent of saying that Jesus isn’t real.

I’ve spent more money in the past four years on wedding travel and events and presents and fucking bridesmaids’ dresses than I have on a single personal reward for myself or anyone else. And when I sign a wedding card or my eyes drift to those fucking bridesmaids’ dresses in the back of my closet it causes a little pang in my heart, Photographs by Nikolay Bakharev: Relationship #19, 1983 (top left), Relationship #70, 1991-93 (top right) and Interior #40, 2006 (bottom).

Courtesy Julie Saul Gallery, New York.

because I’d actually really like a wedding card addressed to me, and I’d love my own white dress instead of some strapless sea-foam-green number. But I’m very scared to admit this out loud. I’m scared of the heartbreak and the embarrassment if it didn’t work out. I’m scared that I’d lose focus on my music, but most of all I’m scared to let go of the person I’ve convinced myself that I am, the girl who doesn’t really give a shit about getting married.

When I write about love and commitment, I tend to sound like the fourteen-year-old version of myself penning another annoying journal entry about broken hearts and period cramps. So, these days, I can only try and relate to love and commitment in a language that translates to me.

I’ve been deeply in love with music, my craft/hobby/passion/job/“boyfriend”/dream since I started singing with my cousin Brittany in a choir, when I was seven years old. This bastard-of-life partner that I’ve chosen has hurt me in so many ways that sometimes I don’t know why I keep taking him/her back. He/she hasn’t just tortured

21

a few times, but here I am, still sitting in front of my piano every day. And, in the same way that I keep choosing, I keep coming back to my music as my source of love, because, yeah, it’s burned me more than once but I know that I can rely on it. Music has given me strength, a shoulder to cry on, and a hand to hold. Music has always found a way to meet me halfway. And, even though it’s not comparable, I feel that I understand why my parents have kept choosing each other for love for twenty-seven years. If your love is sincere, you’ll want to keep returning to it, and you’ll be willing to risk your family and friends, your sanity or job for it. The risks I’ve taken with music have helped me understand the risks people have taken for love.

© Abelardo Morell, Boston. Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York/Zürich.

me in private but has publicly embarrassed me, made me feel stupid, made me cry, and even sent me to therapy

I’ve always been mystified by marriage, because the only thing I’ve been able to commit myself to for longer than six months is music. I try to tell myself that this is just how it is for my generation, and that our twenty-first-century world doesn’t require the same sort of fierce loyalty that used to be required.

But I don’t want to just be a risk-taker in my job anymore. I want to put it all on the line in the name of passion, but I still have my reservations. I hope for a great love—I think we all hope for a great love. If we get it, we cherish it, and some of us can cherish it forever, taking care of it like a rare jewel. Cleaning and polishing it and showing it off to all our friends and family, but some of us can take care of it only for a little while. Then we forget to take the jewel off when we’re in the shower or when we wash our hands, and it ends up losing its shine and we end up wearing it less and less, until the day comes when we take it off and leave it in a drawer to become nothing more than a toy we’ve outgrown. We’ll think about it every now and again, but it’ll never really be the same for us, so we move on from it to something that’s shiny and better and new.

This is what really stayed with me after I read the script for Domesticated. What happens when you’re the kind of person that can’t take care of the rare-jewel kind of love? When you’ve tended to all the wrong things for so

Lyrics by Lolo

I woke up this morning Grabbed at your face Don’t see what should be bruises Been giving it to ya too straight You’re getting kinda used to this Like every day

long that you failed to notice that the things that are actually keeping you and your life in one piece are broken.

But you still got a peace about you

What happens when you realize that you’ve left it broken for too long, and not only can it not be fixed but you can

So why do we take the hard way

never get a new one or find a replacement? I imagine the heartbreak to be like finding out they’ve discontinued my favorite lipstick at Chanel times a billion. How do you recover when you just have to keep on living with this broken thing, the way the sad man in Domesticated has to keep on living with his bad decisions and his shattered life?

I think this is what I admire most about my parents and my grandparents. They noticed just soon enough when their love had lost its shine and needed some polishing. What is it in some of us that helps us find the prob-

Why why why on earth would you wish that away ’Cause I think I know you by now and I know you’ll stay I won’t worry about tomorrow like I have today We were both facedown and one by one got up and walked away.

I think I’m worthless But you’re not so sure

lem and fix it? Why do others ignore it and run to something that they think is unbroken? I haven’t yet been able

Keep saying you’re crazy about me

to tend to something broken in love, only in music. I’ve tried, without success. I’m hoping for success one of these

But I know you’re crazy that’s all

days. In the meantime, I will stay comfortably near my piano. The truth is I’m not trying to be deep or interesting or intelligent or profound about any of this. I’m just trying to find that unconditional love that we’re all taught to want and search for from a young age. I hope I’m getting closer to it now, and if I am, I hope I don’t fuck it up.

Lolo, who originally hails from Tennessee, is a singer-songwriter who resides in Brooklyn and is currently signed to Island Records. Her first single, “Weapon for Saturday,” is available on iTunes, with an album under the same title soon to follow. You may also know her from her past life as an original Broadway cast member of Spring Awakening, under her given name, Lauren Pritchard. For more information on Lolo, please visit WeaponForSaturday.com.

22

ONE BY ONE

Why why why on earth would you wish that away ’Cause I think I know you by now and I know you’ll stay I won’t worry about tomorrow like I have today We were both facedown and one by one got up and walked away.

I walked in this evening Thank God we didn’t burn this place down Why why why on earth would you wish that away ’Cause I think I know you by now and I know you’ll stay.

I won’t worry about tomorrow like I have today We were both facedown and one by one got up and walked away.

a few times, but here I am, still sitting in front of my piano every day. And, in the same way that I keep choosing, I keep coming back to my music as my source of love, because, yeah, it’s burned me more than once but I know that I can rely on it. Music has given me strength, a shoulder to cry on, and a hand to hold. Music has always found a way to meet me halfway. And, even though it’s not comparable, I feel that I understand why my parents have kept choosing each other for love for twenty-seven years. If your love is sincere, you’ll want to keep returning to it, and you’ll be willing to risk your family and friends, your sanity or job for it. The risks I’ve taken with music have helped me understand the risks people have taken for love.

© Abelardo Morell, Boston. Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York/Zürich.

me in private but has publicly embarrassed me, made me feel stupid, made me cry, and even sent me to therapy

I’ve always been mystified by marriage, because the only thing I’ve been able to commit myself to for longer than six months is music. I try to tell myself that this is just how it is for my generation, and that our twenty-first-century world doesn’t require the same sort of fierce loyalty that used to be required.

But I don’t want to just be a risk-taker in my job anymore. I want to put it all on the line in the name of passion, but I still have my reservations. I hope for a great love—I think we all hope for a great love. If we get it, we cherish it, and some of us can cherish it forever, taking care of it like a rare jewel. Cleaning and polishing it and showing it off to all our friends and family, but some of us can take care of it only for a little while. Then we forget to take the jewel off when we’re in the shower or when we wash our hands, and it ends up losing its shine and we end up wearing it less and less, until the day comes when we take it off and leave it in a drawer to become nothing more than a toy we’ve outgrown. We’ll think about it every now and again, but it’ll never really be the same for us, so we move on from it to something that’s shiny and better and new.

This is what really stayed with me after I read the script for Domesticated. What happens when you’re the kind of person that can’t take care of the rare-jewel kind of love? When you’ve tended to all the wrong things for so

Lyrics by Lolo

I woke up this morning Grabbed at your face Don’t see what should be bruises Been giving it to ya too straight You’re getting kinda used to this Like every day

long that you failed to notice that the things that are actually keeping you and your life in one piece are broken.

But you still got a peace about you

What happens when you realize that you’ve left it broken for too long, and not only can it not be fixed but you can

So why do we take the hard way

never get a new one or find a replacement? I imagine the heartbreak to be like finding out they’ve discontinued my favorite lipstick at Chanel times a billion. How do you recover when you just have to keep on living with this broken thing, the way the sad man in Domesticated has to keep on living with his bad decisions and his shattered life?

I think this is what I admire most about my parents and my grandparents. They noticed just soon enough when their love had lost its shine and needed some polishing. What is it in some of us that helps us find the prob-

Why why why on earth would you wish that away ’Cause I think I know you by now and I know you’ll stay I won’t worry about tomorrow like I have today We were both facedown and one by one got up and walked away.

I think I’m worthless But you’re not so sure

lem and fix it? Why do others ignore it and run to something that they think is unbroken? I haven’t yet been able

Keep saying you’re crazy about me

to tend to something broken in love, only in music. I’ve tried, without success. I’m hoping for success one of these

But I know you’re crazy that’s all

days. In the meantime, I will stay comfortably near my piano. The truth is I’m not trying to be deep or interesting or intelligent or profound about any of this. I’m just trying to find that unconditional love that we’re all taught to want and search for from a young age. I hope I’m getting closer to it now, and if I am, I hope I don’t fuck it up.

Lolo, who originally hails from Tennessee, is a singer-songwriter who resides in Brooklyn and is currently signed to Island Records. Her first single, “Weapon for Saturday,” is available on iTunes, with an album under the same title soon to follow. You may also know her from her past life as an original Broadway cast member of Spring Awakening, under her given name, Lauren Pritchard. For more information on Lolo, please visit WeaponForSaturday.com.

22

ONE BY ONE

Why why why on earth would you wish that away ’Cause I think I know you by now and I know you’ll stay I won’t worry about tomorrow like I have today We were both facedown and one by one got up and walked away.

I walked in this evening Thank God we didn’t burn this place down Why why why on earth would you wish that away ’Cause I think I know you by now and I know you’ll stay.

I won’t worry about tomorrow like I have today We were both facedown and one by one got up and walked away.

Lincoln Center Theater Review Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc. Lincoln Center Theater 150 West 65 Street New York, New York 10023

Alison Espach Anne Roiphe Brian Hare Vanessa Woods Clancy Martin Nathaniel Rich Lolo Gail Albert Halaban Nic Nicosia Neeta Madahar Mel Bochner Kiki Smith Frank Ockenfels 3 Nikolay Bakharev Abelardo Morell Hieronymus Bosch

Non-Profit Org. U.S. Postage Paid New York, N.Y. Permit No. 9313