Lisa Tuttle was born and raised in the United States, spent ten years in London, and now lives in a remote part of the Scottish highlands. She began writing while still at school, sold her first stories while at university, and won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer of the year in 1974. Her first novel,
MY FIRST HUSBAND WAS a dog, all snuffling, clumsy, ardent devotion. At first (to be fair to him) we were a couple of puppies, gamboling and frisking in our love for each other and collapsing in a panting heap on the bed every night. But time and puppyhood passed, as it tends to do, and as he grew into a devoted, sad-eyed, rather smelly hound, I found myself becoming a cat. It is not the dog’s fault that cats and dogs fight like cats and dogs, and probably (to be fair to myself) it is not the cat’s fault, either. It is simply in their nature to find everything that is most typical in the other to be the most difficult to live with. I became more and more irritable, until everything he did displeased me. Finally, even the sound of his throat-clearing sigh when I had rebuffed him once again would make my fur stand on end. I couldn’t help what I was, any more than he could. It was in our nature, and there was nothing for it but to part.
My second husband was a horse. Well-bred, high-strung, with flaring nostrils and rolling eyes. He was a beauty. I watched him for a long time from a distance before I dared approach. When I touched him (open-palmed, gently but firmly on his flank, as I had been taught), a quiver rippled through the muscles beneath the smooth skin. I thought this response was fear, and I vowed I would teach him to trust and love me. We had a few years together—not all of them bad—before I understood that nervous ripple had been an involuntary expression not of fear but of distaste. Almost, before he left me, I learned to perceive myself as a slow, squat, fleshy creature he suffered to cling to his back. We both tried to change me, but it was a hopeless task. I could not become what he was; I did not even, deeply, want to be. It was not until we both realized that such a profound difference could not be resolved that he left me for one of his own kind.
I didn’t intend to have a third husband; I don’t believe the phrase “third time lucky” reflects a natural law. With two honorable, doomed tries behind me, and having observed the lives of my contemporaries, I concluded that the happy marriage was the oddity; in most cases, a fantasy. It was a fantasy I wanted to do without. I still liked men, but marrying one of them was not the best way to express that liking. Better to admit my allegiance to the tribe of single women: My women friends were more important to me than any man. They were my family and my emotional support. Most of them had not given up the dream of a husband, but I understood their reasons, and sympathized. Jennifer, bringing up her daughter alone, longed for a partner; Annie, single and childless and relentlessly aging, wanted a father for her child. Janice, who worked hard and lived with her invalid mother, dreamed of a handsome millionaire. Cathy was quite explicit about her sexual needs, and Doreen about her emotional ones. I had no child and didn’t want one, earned a good living, seldom felt lonely, had friends for emotional sustenance, and as for sex—well, sometimes there was a lover, and when there wasn’t, I tried not to think about it. Sex wasn’t really what I missed, although I could interpret it that way. I yearned for something else, something more; it was an old addiction I couldn’t quite conquer, a longing it seemed I had been born with.
