Insatiable by Gael Greene Page A

day my wine knowledge surged ahead of his, someone less myopic than I might have seen the small gray cloud floating over our marriage. Not me. I was too much in love.
    For so long, we agreed we had the best marriage. I remember friends envying us. Our high ceiling with the cherub frieze, the living room’s big bay with double windows like French doors, the bed on the balcony with its wrought-iron railing, terra-cotta floors, and the row of tall stained-glass windows. How close we were . . . what fun we had . . . trips to Vermont each fall to see the colors, collecting antiques and Early American folk art, the precious little dinners we cooked, and our annual Christmas Eve open house. Don was unabashedly romantic. He found vintage diamond earrings for my birthday. He left love notes everywhere with wonderfully sappy love names. We never put each other down in public as our friends sometimes did. We never fought. Should that have been the giveaway that something might be wrong?
    Very early, I realized that neither of us wanted children. We agreed we would never have children, so we could always be children ourselves and not be forced to move to the suburbs for better schools or change our carefree ways for lack of a nanny. I wrote about the “Joys of Not Having Children” for
The Saturday Evening Post.
The editor called it “A Vote Against Motherhood,” a more inflammatory title. He made me promise not to have a child for at least a year from the date of publication.
    “Do you think this is a joke?” I asked. “Or that I would write this just for the money? We are not having children. I can promise you.”
    My mother was deeply disappointed. “But you love dolls and baby clothes.”
    “For other people’s children,” I said.
    I received more than five hundred letters from
Saturday Evening Post
readers, most of them urging us not to miss out on parenthood, although many said, “You don’t deserve children; you’re too selfish.” The saddest letters were from women who’d had children and deeply regretted it.
    The intimacy Don and I shared seemed organic, touching, a miracle. Don reading the morning papers in the club chair, with me sitting a foot away on the floor.
    “Promise me you’ll never leave me,” Don would say.
    “Promise me we’ll grow old and gum our gruel together,” I said. We promised.
    I had never imagined I could love someone so much or that I would be so loved. So why was it we rarely made love? I don’t remember when the sexual heat began to cool, just that often I was sleeping when he came home and he didn’t wake me, or I was waiting up with a late supper and he was too tired for sex. We hugged and kissed, swore eternal love, wept, and cuddled, sleeping like two spoons, tucked into each other side by side, chaste and miserable. I couldn’t understand what had happened. I knew he was frustrated and unhappy at work. When the
Trib
folded in 1966, and was about to be embraced in a bizarre threesome with the former
World-Telegram
and
Journal-American
after a bruising strike, he’d gone to the
Times.
    After years of synchronized opinions and agreeing about everything, our playful weekends had been strained by my ideas on how to restore the little church we’d bought on top of a hill outside Woodstock. I believed in do-it-yourself and he, true child of Brooklyn apartment living, believed in calling the super. But he acquiesced. He always seemed to come around to my way of thinking. Don bought
The New York Times Handyman’s Guide
and read it till late at night, well after I’d fallen asleep.
    No sex? Not even on the weekend. I snuggled against him in the little bedroom that had once been the Dutch Reformed Sunday school, attached to our precious church. He didn’t snuggle back. “This is how you fix a running toilet,” he said, reading aloud to me.
    I had always wanted a doll’s house. Now our church on the hill became my dollhouse. The family who owned it had put up walls everywhere,