Wish WHO were here : The Marital Bed
The Marital Bed could be the monument left standing to a concept that is very much ancient history. Marriage in all of it’s nuclear, Ozzie and Harriet-like wonder, seems to be as unrecognizable as, well, Ozzie and Harriet are.
My husband announced 6 years ago he was leaving. He had been online dating and he was outta here. He declared he had never wanted “that kid” and as far as he was concerned I was repulsive. He made the divorce drag on 5 years bankrupting me, destroying the kid and trying to get us to dissapear so he could move on with OK Cupid Chick. You would think, that would have made me lose all reverence for our marital bed! Would you not?
I never slept in the big, king sized bed again. I used the room to dress and the big bathroom to shower in. The bed became a ruin. The freakin’ Acropolis of my 20 year marriage.
The first man I slept with (after the 27 years with the ONLY man I ever splept with)… was a friend. He had declared his feelings for me and told me , he too was going through a divorce. Stupidly, I believed him. Our first time was in a hotel in NYC but it quickly became too expensive to get a room every time we wanted to be intimate. My house was easier to rendezvous in than his, with my one child at summer camp when he had yet moved out of his place with his family.
l never once thought of having sex in the big, king sized. marital bed! It felt like blasphemy! NO! Why? Why would I want to feel that mattress beneath me.. (I always hated the husband’s sleep number). I wanted this new man on a surface that was not shared with my husband. It was all happening in the guest room. So, I guess..I still cared about the marital bed. It held some sanctity beyond the infidelity and the betrayal and even in the midst of my own discovery (finally) of good sex.
I told this guy I would not be a mistress and wanted to know when he was moving out into his own apartment and that is when that guy announced he was not divorcing and ghosted me. Soon after, My husband forced me out of my house. I spent a year and a half in a fetal position in a bed in a crappy Brooklyn apartment getting my kid through highschool.
Then a nice guy (I thought) asked me out.
This guy was a fairly recent widower. He had 3 kids. He and I were in no rush. Two severely wounded hearts looking at eachother with fear and confusion and relief to be outside of the house. Months went by before he kissed me. When we finally had sex, he stayed up all night eating an entire package of oreos and crying. He felt like he cheated on his wife. I found that endearing.
Then he asked me to stay over his house.
I met his kids. That was hard. Seeing me date was hard on my kid, but my kid had abandonment issues from an asshole Dad.. these kids had a MOM. A Mom that loved them and went to sleep and never woke up. She was preserved in all her beauty and love and Momness. Here I was, walking into the bedroom across the hall with their Dad, climbing into the marital bed.
Here I was trying to not make a noise as we had sex. Here I was having sex underneath a giant charcoal portrait of HER. There SHE was on the dresser facing the bed in a picture frame. There SHE was on the walls. I went to hang up a shirt and there were her clothes and her makeup in the closet. Her cell phone was in his bedside drawer so he could listen to her voice memos. Family photos were all around the house. Really, before I had entered the bedroom, I had quietly cried that this was a family home. My family home was gone. There was love here. My love imploded in my husband’s rage and kinky fetish online pursuits.
Here, on their marital bed.. I was not a mistress but I felt like one. Or worse. I might have felt worse. Each time I came to his house and tried to tip toe around his kids and down the hall to the bedroom.. I felt worse. I finally asked for the giant charcoal portrait to be taken down. He told me it would take time. It did. In the time it took to take down the all-seeing charcoal portrait sex observer eyes of his wife, I was told that this mattress, was the same mattress.
How do you ask someone if you are currently sleeping and screwing where your wife died?
I could never find the words.
All I knew is he wanted me. He wanted me in his bed. I tried to get him to be at my place or go away as much as possible rather than be in that marital bed.
Before long, the bed became a problem for me. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I tried. It was too much. It was like shitting on a grave. It was defiling her death bed. It was creepy. It was icky. And dammit- it was a terrible mattress.
It had a smell.
Of age.
Decay.
My compassion took me as far as I could go. I bought a new house. I got a new mattress. I wanted him on that. I wanted him at my house.
The pandemic put time and distance between us and all I got were texts with a picture of his marital bed with “Wish You were here” scrawled on it.
I was diagnosed with skin cancer this summer. He was the person I was vulnerable with and cried to. He said “I am going to step away” in a cold and hard voice. And he did. I never heard from him again.
I have since learned, He was soliciting sex online, looking for “friends with Benefits’ for I do not know how long. I suppose for awhile while he was still seeing me.
Now I think “Wish WHO were here?” — Was it ever really about me? Or was it about an empty side of the bed. Three years of my life, I let compassion for a widower keep me in his marital bed. Now, I wish I had screamed at him the minute I figured out I was lying where she took her last breath. I would have cried for her. I would have honored her by saying “NO.” “I will not be under you with you inside me on this sacred spot. I will not let you disrespect me and my presence here by putting me here on the place she died.” I would have known he never cared about me if he had told me she died in that bed and he expected me to do things to him and with him there — in what was deserving of a funeral pyre. Burn it. Honor it. Let it be your marital bed.
He should have started a new relationship with me, a woman who could honor and care and respect. It turned out all he wanted was his own comfort. My comfort did not matter.
He can solicit strangers online with big boobs in New Haven, CT to fill that empty side of the bed. He can tell them anything and everything he told me. He probably won’t tell them about his marital bed as he has sex with them.
