Near the end, the husband starts talking about excitement, he wants excitement. He says I think we’re in different phases of life.
Really, she says. We wish you could see her face here, but you can probably guess that she’s not smiling. She’s hard not-smiling.
What phase am I in, tell me, is it the shuffleboard phase? He says she takes naps and watches TV all the time (habits in place since the Carter administration, which is to say, also in place when they met) and in terms of the excitement he’s looking for mentions mostly the biking and the hiking and the cooking. Not one of these things is exciting to her. They’re activities in which she could find degrees of enjoyment, but excitement seems like a stretch. She feels she has actual excitement in her life. She thinks, I have so much more excitement than you, dude. She thinks dude in her head about her husband right now. She has a willingness to participate in some of these activities, and hopes that he will have a willingness to meet some of her unmet needs. Excitement is not something she’s ever actively sought, though even he has pointed out how surprised he was that she went into the city as often as she did after they moved upstate. Her work life provides her with a great deal of excitement. But too much excitement makes her want to drink. She used to drink when she got too excited. (She also used to drink when she got too sad, there was never a reason not to drink, but extremes of feeling on either end were her primary motivations for drinking.) When she gets excited she stays awake all night after she gets home, replaying all the excitement, and is glad that the excitement happened and then is glad that she can watch TV and be plain-old content for a while.
I think I have plenty of excitement in my life, she says. Maybe he lacks excitement in his own work life? She knows that window restoration is meaningful to him, and even satisfying. She also knows that he’s not making art lately and he hasn’t read her most recent book and there might be a road between those two things. It takes her some time to figure out that as much as anything else it’s sex where he wants the excitement. She’s not looking for excitement in sex now. She’s not against it. She wants tenderness, familiarity. She’s not saying she doesn’t want hot sex. They try a few new things. Trust us when we tell you it’s nothing you’d have to google. The husband expresses gratitude for the wife’s openness and his satisfaction appears obvious. But really, she knows he has an idea now that it will only ever be exciting again with someone else.