The Taste of Salt by Martha Southgate Page B

are not at all monogamous. Why should we be any different? That’s what I believe. You’d think that I’d have raised this topic with my husband, my discomfort with monogamy. But somehow I’ve always been shy about doing that, as fundamental as it is. Scared, I guess. I’m scared a lot of the time.
    There is a small part of me that suspects I got married because I was tired of looking around, tired of the dry spells of being single, tired of the game. Daniel appeared right at that time. He loved me. And I loved him. But he loved me more.
    Although I was ready to stop running around when I met Daniel, there is one thing I miss: sexual variety. I love sex and I’m enthusiastic about it and so I didn’t have much trouble finding people to have it with, even though what they say about most scientists’ social skills is true. Talking to other people—generally a good preamble to getting into bed with them—is often not something they are particularly good at. But I can do what I need to do to make certain things happen. If I have to talk, I’ll talk. If I have to flirt, I’ll flirt. I’ll even enjoy it. Ever since I had my first lover when I was sixteen and even before that when I started to figure this whole thing out, I knew that sex was going to be a way to an essential mystery, something it would take me a long time to understand and even longer to get tired of. This is going to sound silly, but I have Prince to thank for this. Me and my friend Deena snuck into a screening of
Purple Rain
one weekend when we were hanging around the Randall Park Mall and, frankly, I was never the same after that. Until then, my crushes had mostly been chaste fantasies of adventure with one passing teen idol or another—we were spies together, we climbed mountains together, sometimes the boy of the week would take my hand. But after I watched Prince weep and moan and smile his way through “Purple Rain” (And don’t even get me started on “The Beautiful Ones.” Amazing.) something crossedover in me. I hadn’t thought about kissing a boy much, until that moment. Even when I lay on my bed thinking about Theo from
The Cosby Show
for hours and hours, I thought of
being
in his presence, not of kissing or anything further. But after that movie, it all made sense. Touching another person’s body would be the point of it all. It wasn’t like I didn’t know about sex. My mother was unusually frank about that kind of thing—maybe because of having been a nurse. She gave me the whole rundown when I turned twelve. I found the mechanics of it very weird. But now I got it. Why wouldn’t you want to do all that? All that kissing and stuff? Why wouldn’t you want to be as close as you could to another person’s glow, when you felt it? I still think that, to tell the truth. It makes being married hard.
    My lovers weren’t scientists, mostly. Sometimes this made for limited dinner table chat. But sometimes I wasn’t very interested in a lot of talk anyway. Often I just wanted skin to skin, the smell of it, the textures and the sounds and the animal pleasure, the feel of the sheets under my back, my head on someone’s chest, the taste of his sweat in my mouth.
    I make it sound as though it was always glorious, and of course it wasn’t always. And I make it sound as though I never loved anyone, and that isn’t true either. But that simple contact was also something I loved.
    I was in one of those relationships when I met Daniel. The guy’s name was Max. He was a bartender at my favorite bar in Honolulu. Diving culture involves a lot of hanging around bars. There are the long, glorious hours you spend underwater and then there are the hours you spend celebrating what you found there or what you did there. Most scientists I’ve met aren’t avid divers. Because I loved it so much, I spent a lot of time with divers and their