The Kitchen Virus

After the West Nile virus came the Kitchen virus. My wife’s friend, Myrna Slotkin, got it first. Then it spread to Vera Popovsky. Soon it infected the eleven other members of her Wednesday morning book club. Convoys of trucks delivering colossal metal stoves and gigantic refrigerators - all of them stainless steel (colors are out) - converged on suburban Newton creating massive potholes the blame for which fell upon the mayor, nearly costing him reelection.

One morning, after the advent of the Kitchen virus, I happened to meet Ed Pinsky - like me a retiree in his late sixties - at Dunkin’ Donuts. “Howsitgoin?” I asked.

“Great.” But I could tell he didn’t mean it. After a while he confided, “You know Marianne and this makeover?”

“Yes.”

“Well, she’s happy - I guess - or, at least, she’s not depressed the way she usually is, but . . .” (It was hard for him so I said nothing.) “For the past few months…” (Somehow I knew what he was about to say.) “We, well, really, we haven’t had sex.”

The next day I met Lefkowitz at the dry cleaners. We were talking about nothing when a look of confidentiality came over his face. “Can we go somewhere and talk?” It was as if we might be overheard at the dry cleaners. We went next door to the deli for coffee and a bagel with cream cheese. Essentially the same story: “Daphne is very upbeat. In fact she’s been this way for several months, ever since the kitchen face lift, but - and this is difficult for me to say - for the past several months . . .” he paused.

Softly, I said - hoping I was wrong, “No sex.”

“How’d know?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Yeah, no sex. I even cooked dinner myself complete with candlelight and expensive wine. No effect what-so-ever.

The book club began ten years ago. There were six original members. So far I had talked to two. Surely it was a coincidence. It had to be coincidence. Popovsky would be a different story. Popovsky closed the door to his study. “There’s something weird going on with the book club wives,” he began. “Maybe it’s modeled on that Greek play - you know where the wives hold out on sex to force their husbands to stop making war.” So much for Popovsky.

Yet there remained Slotkin and Saltonstall. Raoul and Myrna Slockin were known as the love birds, a model couple. They never argued in public. They accompanied each other to the dentist. They took turns making the bed. “Funny you should mention it,” said Raoul after I had told him about the others. “I thought it might just be Myrna - an adjustment to all that construction turmoil - you know, plaster dust, hammering and so forth. I bought her underwear at Victoria’s Secret hoping it would help. It didn’t. But why is this happening? Is it only if you put in a new kitchen?”

I told him my findings - I had checked with friends having no work done on their house and discovered no changes in their marital life. “Call it the Kitchen Virus,” I said.

Raoul had an alternative hypothesis, “We’ve lost our sex appeal.”

Kirkland Saltonstall was our last hope. If anyone had not lost his sex appeal it was Kirk. Six foot four and rowing each year at the Head of the Charles Regatta, he radiated a youthful self-confidence. We found him at his woodshop in the basement turning a table leg on a lathe. He put up his goggles with a well muscled arm. Here was a man no woman in her right mind would turn down.

You know already. Saltonstall’s marriage was not immune. He was surprised to hear he wasn’t the only one. He had been planning on buying a boat, hoping the romance of the seas would do something. “What about the Young Turkettes,” he asked.

The Young Turkettes referred to the more recent members, the ones who voted for the Oprah book selections. These couples were in their forties and one in their late thirties, the Philbrooks. Normally I have little, if any, contact with the younger generation of book club husbands. We have little in common. In this case, however, I had to reach out to them. I had to know if their wives had been stricken.

I called each of them on the most preposterous of excuses: I can’t find the bit for my power drill and I thought you might . . . I was headed for the wine store, where they’re having a 20% off sale, when I remembered you’re into wine . . . With each I suggested we get together, and eventually I succeeded in doing so with the six Turkette hubbies. I took a rather blunt investigatory approach, e.g., “I’ve heard a peculiar thing is happening in the book club…” Each time I held my breath, hoping that the virus struck only older, more vulnerable, hosts. No such luck. Scott MacGowan, Ken Obotu, John Milton, Paul Watanabe and Mark Pingree confirmed my worst fear with mournful eyes, sighs, halting speech and hushed tones. Finally I talked to Tom Philbrook, a tender thirty-eight. Numero eleven of the husbands was a goner too. My dread of being next in line to join the ranks of the sexually disenfranchised grew intense. In desperation I tried preventive medicine. I threw away sections from the Sunday paper advertising new kitchens.

Interestingly, my wife, Gloria, did not succumb to the virus, and our kitchen did not join the confederacy of swirling granite countertops and bright Italian wall tiles. She reported on her friends’ kitchens in a tone somewhere between abject scorn and disdain. She had been psychoanalyzed in her youth and was excellent at applying the wisdom of the couch to her friends. “Lisa is trying to recreate the body she had thirty years ago,” she told me in a hushed whisper one night before turning out the light. “Linda Lee is having dentil molding put on the ceiling because she was famous in college for her fantastic teeth.” This she related as we were squeezing toothpaste together one morning. No, Gloria would have none of this exhibitionistic fad.

I took it that Gloria had insider knowledge of the psychology of the Kitchen virus phenomenon and didn’t question her logic. I didn’t ask her if she knew about the correlation of abstinence with new kitchens or how she might explain it. We were still making love. Why rock the boat?

I listened closely to her spontaneous remarks, hoping for a sign that might predict the future of our half century old relationship. Basically a modest soul she has maintained a somewhat exalted skepticism about membership in the gendered flock. For years she has confided to me that women are untrustworthy. Now she told me about a round robin of duplicity: Daphne visits Myrna’s kitchen and compliments Myrna. Then Daphne tells Beth that the color Myrna’s chosen is absolutely wrong. Beth nods sympathetically to Daphne but then tells Gloria she is disgusted by Daphne’s countertops. The theme is a familiar one - that Gloria distinguishes herself from other females. This might mean that Gloria’s feelings toward me would remain the same. Despite such reassuring possibilities a sense of impending disaster lurked backstage.

I was an entomologist during my working years and have always felt on foreign shores when it came to matters of human social behavior. By contrast, Kurt, a personal trainer at Evergreen Health Club had a wealth of experience listening to life stories from his clients in the old generation. I explained the situation - new kitchens and eleven out of twelve in the book club going the way of no flesh. I told him the big questions on which I was constantly dwelling: what is the role of sex in developing relationship of only fifty years? Is it of central importance? Do couples in their late sixties really need to do it?

Kurt, the personal trainer, wasn’t a bit flustered. Calmly he said he’d heard all this before. “You call it the Kitchen Virus. Yes, it strikes like a highly contagious virus and can spread like wildfire through community. Some - your wife is an example - are resistant but they too are vulnerable in their own particular way. It has to do with aesthetic, he said authoritatively. “You need a specialist, and I know just the person, a friend from Mexico. His name is Pico. He’s a fantastic portrait painter His work is magic. He’s a modern day Titian. He understands people and what they want - that’s why he’s so good.”

I was skeptical, “How will he help?”

“Trust me,” said Kurt, “He’ll figure it out and know how to proceed.”

At first when I told Gloria about Pico the Mexican Titian it only led to an argument. “It’s not Teeshun, it’s Tishun,” she said petulantly. But when I explained I had in mind his doing her portrait she said she’d like to meet him.

As an entomologist I earned not a great amount, but I could afford a portrait for my Gloria. It’s the royalties from my works of fiction on which I count. Fortunately my books are a success, particularly, The Revenge of the Fire Ants, a morality tale cast in Texas in 2000. The ants, described in meticulous detail, swarm over the corrupt and sadistic leader of a fundamentalist cult, who dies a slow, helpless, death. I got a tidy sum for the movie rights - before it was deep-sixed because of its political overtones.

Gloria wanted to look like a Titian Venus. She posed on the chaise lounge in the bedroom. And voila, there she was naked with a flutist at her feet. Pico proves to be a genius. We have Gloria - Gloria with about twenty years, and twenty pounds in absentia, just painted away with those magic brush strokes. I could’ve kissed Pico, but I maintained composure. I could understand why an ancient king was so grateful for the beautiful rendition of his wife that he offered her to the artist - a sensitive portrait can make a woman so happy.

Not that Gloria was ever depressed - she didn’t have time to be. As the decades ticked by and children left home to have children of their own she devoted herself to being, in sequence, a trainer of guide dogs for the blind, a massage therapist, a student of Rumanian and currently - a docent at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. From accompanying her on tours of the museum collections I have learned something about her intimate feelings. She would talk freely about the females in various works of art - often as if they were totally unrelated to her. Concerning the marble bust at the top of the grand staircase leading to The Rotunda, she said almost wistfully, “Look how her breasts hold themselves up. You can tell she was only twenty when that was sculpted.” About another young female subject, this in a Czech photographer’s 1929 study of a slender nude stretching diagonally upward through the photographic space her back well arched and her hands and feet pointed like a diver’s she said, “Look at that lumbar-sacral curve! Like an ‘S’ isn’t it? If she were older you would hardly see the curve. The fat on her hips would hide it.” It will not surprise you to know that Gloria in her youth had those bountiful up-tilted breasts and that sleek “S” shaped lumbar - sacral curve, and that she was justifiably proud of the fore and aft of her physique. The faces of the little girls in John Singer Sargent portraits would remind Gloria of her face as a child - without her current double chin, deep nasolabial folds and the downward - sad looking - corners of her mouth. Once as we walked through the galleries I heard the Beatles singing, “Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I’m sixty-four?”

I have learned in recent years that Gloria does not wish to think that sex is related to anything base or primitive. She likes clothes that are “more dignified” and do not draw closely across the bosom or hips. Romance and sexuality have no relation to one another she informed me one day, I’d never considered that. Maybe she spoke the truth. My desire for passionate romance might be nothing more than a grotesque prolongation of jerky adolescence. In Pico’s portrait Gloria’s perky young tits, swooping lower back and glowing face belie the ravages of time. Yet she is also a woman in her sixties. Her face is ever-so-slightly vague but definitely Gloria. It’s a masterpiece! And Gloria is happy. It seems to me that she now looks at herself in the mirror with a subtle smile - as if she had outwitted the enemy.

I was at the market a week after the unveiling, looking for Sun Maid Raisin Bread and Tropicana lots-of-pulp orange juice fortified with calcium and vitamin D, when my cell phone rang. It was Gloria: “Come home.” I asked why. “Just come home.”

I did so. She was upstairs in the bedroom in a sheer negligee. So began our new life together. Whether I was playing bridge, working out at the health club or shopping, when the cell phone went off, I dropped everything and headed home. When necessary I explained, “Sorry, my wife needs me.” Let them assume what they may. As often as three times a week I was suddenly called away. The afternoon was peak usage, but it was unpredictable. Nights were good too. I heard lines from an old favorite, Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It, “Some Argentines, without means, do it… Even educated fleas do it.”

One day, after a couple of weeks of this remarkable turn in viral symptomatology, she suddenly announced, “I’m giving the portrait away.”

I was astounded. “Giving away the portrait? I thought you loved it.”

“You loved it.”

I said, “Well, it made you happy.”

“That’s the point. You felt it made me happy. I’m not a vain person. The portrait is a superficiality. I’m giving it away.”

“What do you want? What is it you want?” I cried.

“I want a deeper love and respect.” I repeated, “You want a deeper love and respect?”

“Yes.” That know-nothing personal trainer! I needed a DOCTOR. In desperation I saw a shrink, a friend of Pinsky’s. I told him the whole story. I pleaded for answers. Is it viral? What do you think about the role of sex in a developing relationship? I went on and on. With pontifical poise he replied, “Freud asked, ‘What do women want?’”

“You’re saying it’s hopeless?”

“In many cases, yes,” said Pinsky’s friend. “But if you’re patient, the Kitchen virus may go into permanent remission.”

Gloria gave the portrait to Morgan Memorial Goodwill. I made no objection. Then the next blow fell. “I slept with Pico,” she said matter-of-factly stepping out of the shower.

I was stunned: “I can’t believe it!”

“I did,” she said. “And it was my idea.”

Despairingly I thought these must be fits of recurrent febrile delirium - some kind of marital malaria. Again I visit the shrink, the friend of Pinsky’s. Again I ask if the situation is hopeless. He waits, clasping his hands with the index fingers extended. This time he discloses that he has a friend whose wife did the same sort of out-of-character thing. I wonder if he’s talking about Pinsky. Then it occurs to me he may be talking about himself and his own wife.

“Your friend, what did he do?”

“He was patient and attentive, but not obsequious, you understand?”

I understood. No one respects a slave. “Please go on,” I said. “My friend’s wife had always made the vacation plans. She loved to hunt out bargain air fairs on the internet and discover romantic sites. Now she told him they’re going to Iceland for a vacation. Told him it was done deal. My friend hated the prospect of a vacation in Iceland. There were hundreds of places he wanted to go - none of them Iceland. They argued fiercely. She seemed intractable. But he stood his ground. Finally, after days of terrible fighting, she said she was not going to Iceland alone. Exasperated she said, ‘You choose the place.’ My friend chose Norway. And everything was better after that.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense. She really cared about her choice of Iceland. Why would she suddenly agree to Norway?”

“Actually,” said the psychiatrist friend of Pinsky’s, “I don’t get it either. It had, I think, something to do with putting him to the test. You know, the way Rosalind did in As You Like It and Portia did in The Merchant Of Venice.” He sounded a little sad as he said this. I am convinced the shrink’s friend is himself, and that he has confided wisdom earned through his own sorrow. I am grateful as I shake his hand goodbye.

Sure enough Gloria comes up with a challenge. She wants to go on a one-day trip to the opera in New York City. I tell her it’s ridiculous. In the first place I hate opera. And in the second and third, getting up early, taking the bus to New York and getting back in the middle of the night is not my idea of fun. We wrangle and wrangle just like my shrink and his wife, I think. After a few days she announces she’s not going to the Met alone. Just like the story my shrink told me! She is very unhappy.

The end of the story? We’re happy once again. No more viruses. The cell phone doesn’t go off while I’m shopping. And the frequency of sex is not at an all-time high. She is unpredictably moody and complains bitterly about her insensitive friends. But it’s clear that she loves me, and clear to me that I love her.

Why did the ladies with brand new kitchens turn off sexually? Maybe after achieving nirvana with their kitchens they didn’t know how to come down to earth. Maybe Gloria had the guts to face the demon more directly and thus win out. I don’t know-maybe things just happen the way they happen. Must everything have an explanation?

Oh yes, what did we do about the trip to the Met? I said, “Let’s go see The Producers.” She agreed. We stayed overnight in New York and had a wonderful time. The day after we got home she confessed she made up the story about the affair with Pico. I smiled to myself: so it was only a test. Now we’re musical comedy buffs together - have seen Kiss Me, Kate seven times. Good old Will Shakespeare he knew what he was talking about.