Aftertaste

Over the past year that Mark and I have been separated, I’ve been flooded with memories of our life together. Some of these memories are sweet, like our wedding or holidays we spent together, others are bitter and clearly related to his sex addiction, and still others are of moments that seemed rather bland at the time, like doing laundry together or buying weak coffee in those paper “I (Heart) NY” cups at the bodega on Sunday mornings. Lately, these memories have pricking my consciousness with less frequency, but yesterday, while I was vacuuming my apartment, I had a really bizarre memory that didn’t quite fit any of these categories.

Mark and I had both just come home from work, and we were hanging out on the couch, catching up like we usually did before we cooked dinner. He was telling me about how a conversation with some friends on the subway had somehow led to someone mentioning vagina dentata, literally meaning “teeth in the vagina,” a myth/term often used in psychoanalysis to illustrate men’s castration fears and avoidance of sex.

I had first heard the term in college—probably in Psych 101 or a Women’s Studies class—and it was one of those phrases, like “Oedipus Complex” or “oral fixation,” that I sort of assumed was a pop-culture buzz word everyone knew. But this was the first time Mark had ever heard it, and vagina dentata had obviously made a huge impression on him. “Margaux, how crazy and scary is that? I mean, teeth in someone’s vagina?!” he kept saying over and over, shaking his head in frightened wonder.

“Well, Mark, you know that women don’t really have teeth in their vaginas, right?” I explained gently (okay, maybe a bit condescendingly), as you would to an older child who continues to insist monsters are lurking under the bed. “It’s a myth meant to explain a fear—an irrational fear of female power and sex.” I gulped, feeling unspoken, harsher words form an undigestible knot in the pit of my stomach, while, oddly, simultaneously stifling a laugh.

“Yeah, I get it, but it’s just so scary to think of teeth being in someone’s vagina and having them bite off…arrrgh, I can’t even say it!” Mark said. He reached for his laptop and typed “vagina dentata” into Google, clicking on a link to an article that was accompanied by, of all things, a Photoshopped image of a woman with, well, teeth in her vagina. “Look at that! It’s freaky,” he yelped, quickly hitting the X in the top right corner of the page and snapping the laptop shut as though clamping a cast-iron lid over boiling water.

“This shit is going to give me nightmares,” he said, shaking off a shiver and scurrying into the kitchen to start dinner. I lingered on the couch, thinking about how this shit had been giving me nightmares, only for different reasons.

This exchange took place when I was already well aware of Mark’s sex addiction/sexual anorexia, so seeing the irony in this conversation isn’t a case of 20/20 hindsight. But as I remembered this yesterday while vacuuming my apartment, I chuckled at the recollection of Mark’s innocent, almost comical reaction to a silly Latin-termed concept and smiled at our ritual of after-work banter. I also shook my own head in wonder at the thought of just how literally a psychoanalytical “myth” can manifest in real life and swallow a psyche—and a marriage—whole. And then I sighed at the realization of how soul-sucking it had been psychoanalyzing the man I’ve slowly stopped sinking my teeth into.

It was an event (and, really, an entire relationship) with an aftertaste I can only describe as umami.