The Stuff That Never Happened Read Online Free PDF

thing was all Grant’s idea. And because I like sex and also because I had decided to try to stop arguing with him over minor things, I agreed to it. He’d read a study that said middle-aged people often get so tired or so busy that they just let sex slip out of their routine. He said it was such an irony, how couples spend all those years trying to do it quietly so the kids won’t wake up, or being so hungry for it between times that they ignore all safety precautions and attempt it in the shower (very dangerous), or else they fall on each other during their ten minutes of alone time during the Saturday morning cartoons (unsatisfying)—and then suddenly, middle age hits, the kids move out, and bam! Nobody’s in the mood, and evenings are spent retreating to their separate corners of the house, and then, and then …
    “And then what happens to them?” I asked when Grant first brought up the topic. This was before his book had swallowed him up, but perhaps he already knew it was sneaking up behind him, ready to devour him, and he was trying to arrange all the loose ends and appointment calendars before he succumbed. It was the week after Nicky had gone off to school. We still had not mapped out the shape of our grief, and we were standing in the kitchen with the late-afternoon September sun slanting through the kitchen window, suggesting possibilities.
    “What?” he said, and his eyes twinkled. “What happens to them? Oh. Well, I suppose their penises fall silent, their marriages fail, and then civilization as we know it slides into a deplorable decline. And I, for one, don’t think we want to be responsible for that.”
    So Grant and Annabelle McKay are doing their part for the free world. We make love each and every Wednesday morning, barring flu, final exams, or faculty meetings. Standing there at the calendar that day, Grant said it had to be Wednesday because it’s the morning that he has late classes so he doesn’t need to rush off. And it couldn’t be the weekend because he likes the NPR shows too much—and why rush through lovemaking just for the sake of Car Talk? And it couldn’t be at night when we’ve gone to bed because he likes to take a shower after sex, and since he would have already taken a shower in the morning, that would mean he’d need to shower twice in one day, and that would be a waste of water, as well as a waste of time, and when a man is writing a book, there is no sense in wasting even one second.
    See? I’m doing it again—telling things all wrong. I’m making him sound like an automaton, when the truth is that I like making love with Grant; he’s enthusiastic and good and efficient at it, and it’s kind of sexy knowing that on Wednesday morning I am going to get his full attention for at least twenty minutes. Just the other day I got together with some of the faculty wives for lunch, and we got to talking about husbands and sex, as occasionally we’ve done through the years, standing together at faculty parties and on the sidelines at our children’s soccer games. This time we had a shocking agenda item: the history department chairman, Grant’s boss, had upped and left his wife of thirty years and married a grad student—a student —with no warning whatsoever. Naturally we had to have an impromptu meeting about that, hear all the stories, point fingers at the wronging parties, discuss what we would do if that were ever us .
    Everybody else was stunned and disapproving—you could see it in their faces—but I was a little, well, fascinated. So we got to talking about sex, and it turned out that Grant may be right about the middle-aged thing: lots of couples just aren’t doing it anymore, and for no other reason, it seems, than that they fell out of the habit. There were complaints and justifications around the table: husbands who stay up too late watching sexy movies on cable rather than come to a flesh-and-blood wife, and ones who have let themselves get run down,