I won't sleep with you just because

I WON'T SLEEP WITH YOU JUST BECAUSE

"I'll take the couch," Claire suggests one day, "you can sleep in the
MASTER bedroom."
"Is it because I can't be faithful to you?" I ask.
"That's one of the reasons," she states flatly, "But the truth is, I
need a place where I can be alone with my thoughts and my desires,
without having you invade that territory. IT'S not like I'm asking for
a divorce. I just won't spend any nights with you. I'll still spend
every day with you, whenever you are available, that is."

That's how she put it. The next morning when I woke up, she had already
prepared the tea. She was reading the morning papers.

"Terrible what's happening in Israel, isn't it?"
"It's hard to be human when you are always on the lookout for a war," I
commented.
"Whatever do you mean by that?" she asked, squinting her nose.
"I just mean that it's difficult to be human when you are always
fighting."
"OH," she answered, "That's quite an observation." Then she stared up
at the ceiling.
"I must prepare for my class."

I'm really confused by my wife. It's not like she does not know the way
I have been all my life. She knows that I am incapable of fidelity, and
it has nothing to do with my morals, absolutely nothing. It's just
completely beyond my control. It's who I am. There's something about
the beginning of the college year with the new faces. The young women
who enter my classes, they are just so filled with the stuff of life. I
like to watch the changing colors of the leaves as I drive home. Fall
is the month of rebirth after a hostile, hot summer. I want to light up
the candles of their intellectual curiosity. When their curiosities
light up, I feel as if I alone were the center of their
attention.

It would be great, even sublime if that were enough: to simply light up
their souls. It's not. Not at all: those young, fresh bodies enter into
the equation and I just can't resist when they, in their bold, brave
way, ask me out. Perhaps they find it to be something that they do in
college, but for me, such moments, which occur every year, such moments
are to be cherished, polished or even pondered.

BUT NOW that Claire refuses to have sex with me, I begin to wonder if
in searching for love in these young girls, if I am not seeking to
reignite the flame of love that I once felt for Claire.

"Professor Chang," the girl stresses, "Do you really feel that "Lolita"
is a name for the female organ?" She coughs as if she finds a peculiar
type of perversion in my suggestion.
"Well yes," I answer, "Low is the first syllable, Lie is the second
one, and Ta is the third. Now you may ask what I think Ta means. It
means "at" spelled backward. That settles it for me."

I go on and on, but all this time, I am thinking of sleeping with this
young girl, fantasizing about the fabulous conversation we would have
in bed. My head becomes light, loose, almost mad, crazy, or even
divine, even cerebrally celestial. No longer do I feel lost, but
somehow at home.

"What are you writing about?" Claire asks.
"Lolita," I answer, trying to ignore her.
"REALLY," she stresses, "How sexy."
"It's a work of art," I continue.
"What makes it a work of art?" she asks.

I can't really think of anything about Lolita that makes it a work of
art. The only thing that I can think of is the chess scene in Seinfeld
in which Seinfeld is playing chess with himself. One of the Seinfelds
is a penis and the other is a brain. The BRAIN-SEINFELD loses in chess
of all games.

"It sustains a tension between our intellectual and sexual curiosity.
It reveals our need to?" I am stumped.

"What's so intellectual about Lolita?"
"It's really the professor who has an interest in impressing upon the
mind of Lolita something permanent, lasting."
"His sex?" she asks pruriently, almost purring with an evil joy, sealed
by a wicked, condescending smile.

Claire is now behind me. I could almost touch her neck with my cheek. I
really want to kiss that neck.

"Don't even think about it," she answers, "I can't believe that you are
writing about such filth. Pornography, that's what Lolita is. All that
intellectual learning? a European professor out to DO little Lolita, a
13 year-old with as much intellectual curiosity as a cat lapping milk.
Doing her in hotel after hotel, with his little station-wagon or
whatever it is that he drives, afraid that the pornographic genius
Quilty, is it? That he will have her star in a film. What a bizarre
little novel. What a bone-fide pervert this Humbert Humbert is?"

"It's not filth," I plead, "It says something permanent about the male
psyche. We have a permanent desire to return to the age and experience
of our first love and to try over and over again to regain the pleasure
that our first experience of love gave to us."

"By trapping a girl, by preventing her from maturing, and by
fetishizing her as a zero so that you can impose an infinite number of
fantasies upon her? You could be screwing all the women in your
imagination as long as she remained a pure vessel of your
fantasies!"

"Lolita is not about me!" I thunder. I feel sweat on my brow.
"Finally!" she snaps triumphantly.
"Good point!" again she snaps as if I'd scored a basket.

Sometimes at night, I stare at Claire in the dark while she sleeps on
the couch. I really do miss sleeping with her. I just feel so
comfortable around her. I couldn't deny it. I felt at home for once.
It's just that I had many homes. It was so difficult to keep up so many
homes. Is that why I was so miserable because I had so many homes? Did
I really have so many homes? I'm really, really messed up as a home
could be messed up and I did not know how to change?

Next morning, I prepare the tea and even think of complimenting her on
her looks. For a whole thirty minutes, I practice smiling in front of
the mirror. I want it to look as authentic as possible for Claire could
answer a false smile with a flash of malignant humor.

"You look beautiful this morning," I state flatly.
"Stop it," she says.
"Stop what. I'm telling you the truth."
"Stop staring at me. It's making me a LITTLE self-conscious here. It's
so annoying. I feel like a mirror being stared at like that. Do I look
like a mirror to you?"

I am really sick of this crap. I have tried and tried to contain my
anger. I have tried and tried to put up with this woman who seems to
think that she can just walk all over me as though I were the floor.
It's not easy putting up with a woman's moods. She needs some time by
herself. She does not want to sleep with me. She thinks that I'm
annoying. This is not what I deserve from a person who loves me? I am a
MALE person. I have a right to demand that my WIFE sleep with me.
CLAIRE is MARRIED to me. She is MINE as this apartment is mine, ours.
THE SIMPLE FACT IS THAT SHE AGREED TO PUT UP WITH MY VICES. IT WAS
CLEARLY AGREED!

"You seem annoyed," my student says as we are walking around campus
together, "It's just that I find your analysis of Lolita to be so
superficial. The male, lazy organ in the disguise of a train, that's
what the name Humbert Humbert evokes for you? You find the death of the
mother to symbolize the wound that is Lolita? Do you find Nabokov to be
so shallow or are you disguising your own shallowness through your
interpretation of Nabokov?"

The truth was that I did not know what I was doing. I was trying to
figure out the text myself and I was hoping that my students would help
me.

"Professor Chang," she suddenly asks, "ARE YOU IN LOVE WITH ME?"
Suddenly, I felt a rush of warmth suffuse my face.
"No, no, NO, not at all," I stress, "I found your paper on the use of
photography in Lolita to be exceptionally clever."
"What do you particularly like about it?"
"When you talk about how the artistic process of Nabokov in Lolita
begins with a photograph. The first image is of Lolita, from head to
toe. You suggest that Nabokov forms his characters by looking at
certain photographs and naming them. He then finds another photograph
and names it Humbert Humbert. It's as though he were taking photographs
of random people and scenes, constructing stories around them,
imagining their lives. A photograph, you state, is a frozen memory
taken in the present, but meant to be remembered in the future as a
past memory. The appeal of Lolita for Humbert Humbert, even if one were
to buy his pathetic narrative that he is trying to relive his first
love, is purely physical as a photograph. SO that, as in Vertigo by
Hitchcock, he would simply be trying to reconstruct the personality of
the first love upon this new girl, destroying her, ravaging her
sexually and psychologically at first, but then, trying to reconstruct
her into the being of his first love, the perfect photograph that
death, separation and time could not touch."

"Claire," I confess, "I no longer find joy in seducing my students. I
mean, I've stopped my cycle of seducing my student every year."
"Gabriel," Claire frowns, "Don't you think that our life has become so
much simpler now. DON'T you like me so much better now that life is so
much less complicated?"

NO, no you witch! That's what she was to him, a WITCH. This was
unforgivable. He was MAKING SACRIFICES for her sake, SACRIFICES THAT
were threatening to destroy his ENTIRE sense of being a man, even being
a human. That she could take the hard and difficult decision that he
had made over days and days of anguish, yes anguish, that she could
take it so lightly. This was impossible. HE WAS CHANGING ON behalf of
her. HE HAD HAD a profound realization: that what he really wanted was
not these young girls but the feeling of love, the breath of love, the
dazzling, bewilderingly wonderful sense of life that he had had when he
was in love with Claire, before it become too beautiful for him to
handle, became too hot and he was burned by it. She owed him obedience
for his newly minted virtue!
"I demand that you, my wife, sleep with me," he screamed.
"YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO DEMAND anything from me. For so many years I've
watched you. Every year, an affair to remember with a vacuous student?
You always said that it would be the last and that it was the old flame
of love that you had toward me that was rekindled when you fell in love
with the student. Well, it's just not going to work anymore. I'm just
as sick of this shit as you are. In fact, you could say that I am doing
this for your own good."

At night, I wept on my bed. I really felt like a child again. I did not
know why I slept with a student each year except that I did not want
ever to be alone. If I had two lovers, even if one left, the other
would still stay. But if Claire left, who would I have. That she could
do this to me terrified me. I felt very vulnerable and cold. For once,
I began to understand something.

I was in a faculty meeting. I could hear my colleagues talking about me
but soon, I lost all interest. I could hear the voice of my
student:

"You are so superficial,"
"Why am I so superficial?"
"You are afraid of going into a text, exploring the realm of experience
and meaning that is language."
"Why am I afraid of that?"
"I don't know. Perhaps you wish to know what you will find
there?"

AS I was typing my lectures out that night, I could not stop myself
from hating Claire.