Another issue was that the clause “Before coming to prominence in the field of hip-hop” had a dry, academic tenor that was nicely balanced by the pedestrian familiarity of “Little Caesars Family Fun Center,” a balance that wouldn’t be as successfully achieved if I replaced “Little Caesars” with “Gilbert’s Lodge.” I wanted the opening sentence to reassure readers that this was a serious work, but that its seriousness wouldn’t alienate the common pizza-eater by bombarding her with academic jargon.
Ultimately, however, something felt disingenuous about beginning the book by mentioning Little Caesars. I felt an odd sense of loyalty to Gilbert’s Lodge, and worried that, in banishing Gilbert’s to the purgatory of Chapter 2, I was suppressing factual truth in favor of self-serving mythology. Stumped, I deleted the sentence and X’d out of the doc.
My laptop background was a photo from my honeymoon: Wendy and I, posing in the princess tower at Angkor Wat. The camera stares over our shoulders at the distant moat. It’s not a great picture—the sun is behind us, backlight obscuring our faces—but the honeymoon remained pristine in my memory, a reminder of my marriage’s optimistic prelude.
In Cambodia we ate curry, rode tuk-tuks, and visited temples. We discussed Western privilege, got stoned on pot-topped pizza, and shopped for counterfeit designer clothes. We kissed. We read books, feet entwined, on poolside mats. We spent mornings in lace-curtained canopy beds, drinking coffee from small porcelain cups and making love. For five US dollars, I got a Dr. Fish foot massage—a tank of baby piranhas nibbling the dry skin off my heels. And one night at a beach bar in a crab village called Kep, we joked about inviting a handsome waiter back to our bungalow after he got off shift to have sex with Wendy while I watched. This was a fantasy I’d entertained for some time, and though we were only teasing each other with the idea in Cambodia, it was something that stuck with me, and that I continued to suggest, always semi-jokingly, during the first years of our marriage.
It’s hard to say what about this arrangement appealed; the roots of desire, as my therapist, Dr. Becker, has pointed out, are often repressed for practical reasons. The only way I can explain it is that during sex—an interval when I’m meant to be a lit-up pleasure center—my anxiety about being in the quote unquote moment is such that sex has the opposite effect of increasing my self-consciousness. Dr. Becker claims this is a common phenomenon and the cause of much sexual dysfunction. For my part, I imagined that if I watched my wife in congress with another man while I masturbated, I wouldn’t need to worry about maintaining an erection, or hitting Wendy’s G-spot, or whether or not she came. I would be free to lose myself in the quote unquote music, while taking part in a larger, pleasure-giving picture. I would be able to spiritually connect with Wendy while someone else engaged with her body.
About three months ago, Wendy and I decided to enact this fantasy as a way of fighting through what we refused to call a rut. Ruts were for the gut-soft middle-aged, that smartphone-incompetent demographic who signed up for capoeira classes in the hope it might awaken their libidos. Wendy and I were still young and adventurous, millennial in spirit if only just within that generation’s bracket. We deserved a foray into all the world had come to offer while we’d been engaged in the anachronistic rituals of courtship and baby-making. In a sense, the threesome was consolation for the fact that we’d failed to become parents and fully shuck the skins of our younger selves. We found our third on the Troika app, a John Jay senior named Eric Darving who majored in criminal justice and had the kind of California smile I’d always admired on a man.
Wendy and I dared each other to go through with it, knowing full well the possible implications for our marriage. We spent a week emailing back and forth with Eric, who was gracious and patient. His lax attitude made us feel like what we were planning wasn’t outrageous, but de rigueur for anyone interesting. Neither of us had been to Burning Man or even Coachella; we’d never attended a swinger’s party or done much skinny-dipping. So though it seemed out of character for Wendy to show interest in something so boldly beyond the limits of her comfort zone, I understood it as a restorative act, a fixed match resulting in triumph over two decades’ worth of demons. Looking back, I can see that I was wrong, that Wendy’s interest—and mine too, if I’m being honest—was masochistic. We were trying to blot out our grief by replacing it with a more immediate trauma.
When Eric rang the bell, we welcomed him into our loft. It was one of those July nights when the heat’s still temperate after the relief of a summer storm, and you can turn off the AC and open the windows. I got beers from the fridge. Eric stared at the high ceiling and I recalled my own first visit to a rich person’s apartment, amazed that in this cramped city of nonconsensual subway rubbing, a single person might take up so much space. Eric was taller than expected. I’d known his height from the get-go—six-five—but it was something else to see him standing next to Wendy. She looked natural beside a taller man.
The three of us sat in a row on the couch and stared at the turned-off TV. No one made eye contact. I said, “This is awkward,” and Wendy let out
