So, now, on this not-so-dreary November night, I look through the glass side of the tank at my creation. He looks back at me, interested, intelligent, and kind, his body sleek and beautiful, his mind and spirit equal to my own. Equal, but different. I’m sure I’ve got it right. There will be no misunderstandings, no doomed attempts at domestication, and no struggles for power, for although we are enough alike to love each other, we will always live apart: women on dry land, husbands in the sea. Their beautiful faces and their complicated minds are like ours, but their bodies are very different. We will always live in different worlds. They must swim, having no legs to walk with, and although they breathe the same air we do, their skin needs the constant, enveloping caress of the water. We each will have our own domain, each be happy among our own kind, and yet they will find us as attractive as we find them, and so we shall seek each other out from time to time, and come together not for gain or of necessity, but from pure desire.
I look at him, the first of the new race, and when I smile, so does he. He waves a flipper; I wave a hand. I feel love bubbling up inside me, washing away the pain of the past, and I know, as he does a backflip for my admiration, that my husband feels the same. This time, it will work out for the best.
When I wrote “Husbands” I was thirty-five, had been divorced for a couple of years, and was suffering the pain of unrequited love. It was an experience I thought belonged to adolescence; I’d thought I was past it. I knew it was ridiculous. But it was also overwhelming, and quite out of my control. I thought of Fate, and of Greek myths; of the Minotaur, born because a god took vengeance on King Minos by making his wife fall in love with a mad, white bull (at least I’d had the good fortune to fall in love with another human being!); of the mystery, and the absurdity, of desire.
At the same time, I wanted to write something based on the radical concept of Monique Wittig’s “One Is Not Born a Woman” (1979), a short paper in which she declared that far from being natural categories, the division of human beings into two distinct classes of “men” and “women” is “a sophisticated and mythic construction.” If our belief that human beings must be divided into two categories is a matter not of immutable fact but of learned perception, what happens if we learn to perceive differently? Particularly since there must have been a powerful reason to make us all accept that old man/woman, yin/yang way of looking at things for so long.
Two stories—one contemporary, impressionistic, set in the real world, about recognizable emotions; the other an idea, another world, another way of being, explored science fictionally. Yet I kept thinking of them as being the same story, with the same title. Then I had another idea, for a third story also dealing with the theme of desire and sexual difference, and there it was, my story: three stories, three parts of one story. That old, old story.
