"Are you still going to be attracted to me after I do this?" Katie, my wife, asks one night, puncturing the post-coital silence with my least favorite question. "This" was the breast reduction I kept hoping she'd forget all about, the way she'd forgotten about wanting to relocate our family from Brooklyn to rural Costa Rica, or like she'd forgotten about opening a trendy housewares outlet called The Jesus Christ Superstore, or like she'd wisely forgotten about naming our son her invented name, Ajoa. But "this," I discovered unhappily, was a stickier aspiration, something that she'd apparently wanted to do since she was in college, though I didn't find out about it until after we'd been married. It wasn't the first time she'd asked the question. The moment we decided that two kids were enough and she was no longer a one-woman craft-services operation, she began semi-regularly raising the topic of a reduction.
The thing I can't bring myself to tell Katie is that even before I'd fallen in love with her—her wicked humor, her decency, her strength—I'd fallen in love with her extraordinarily large breasts. The breasts had beguiled me, pulled me to her like the glowing batons of the guys who marshal airplanes around the tarmac. It was only after I had her—them—that the woman attached to them truly came into focus. The profane made way for the sacred, but they seemed in my mind to be a great team, my wife and her breasts. And after more than a decade together, my love for my wife was inviolable. But was I really in any position to predict how my penis would react? My penis isn't reasonable, and it's not me. How can I speak for it?
I am well acquainted enough with it to know, however, that the slightest contact between any part of my body and Katie's spectacular, pendulous, edible gazongas, even fully clothed, would precipitate its stirring. I, the evolved husband, would be supportive of whatever Katie needed to do to feel better; my penis, however, might see her plan as nothing less than a potentially unforgivable betrayal. "I just don't know, sweetie," I finally tell her, which is the absolute most optimistic thing I can muster without lying. She weeps. "Did you marry me for my breasts?" she asks. Of course I didn't. But I did marry her with her breasts, and I never imagined that they might at some point decide to go their separate ways.
From their first appearance, seemingly overnight, in eighth grade, she resented her breasts, she confides. "I was renowned for them," she says. "Suddenly, I was the sexy girl." She remembers the feeling of horror when, as a high school freshman, while she was jogging around the intramural fields with the field hockey team, she witnessed the high school's entire baseball team stop practicing, drop their balls and bats, and silently watch her run, agog. She had no idea how to handle the attention. "I mean, what was I supposed to do?" she says. "Own it?" (To this day, she never raises her eyes from the ground while she's walking on the street.) Even more disturbing, she'd get similar leers from men old enough to be her father. "It was grown-ass men salivating at me," she says. "It was intimidating and scary. What 14-year-old girl would be ready for that? Your mother doesn't prepare you for that." Her costume in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat had to be redesigned into something resembling a potato sack for decency's sake. "Dear God," the drama coach gasped when he saw her wearing the original two-piece ensemble with an exposed midriff. A popular upperclassman asked her out, got grabby, and reported afterward to anyone at school who'd listen that the date had been a bust because Katie "wouldn't let me get my hands on those titties." Her parents pretended not to even hear her when she came home and reported, as a sophomore, that she'd been voted Girl I'd Most Want to Be Stuck on a Desert Island With. It was, she now realizes, the Great Tits Award. Through no agency of her own, biology had chosen her to be a sex object.
But by the time I met her, in her twenties, she seemed to have at least outwardly embraced what she'd been given. We started hanging out as friends; but the tops she'd wear, with a good three inches of visible décolletage, drove me crazy, resulting in involuntary spasms, a yearning to be near her, and a thoroughly enthusiastic yes whenever she suggested late-night dancing, despite the fact that I loathe dancing.
Whenever she was near, a fantasy would unspool: We might be talking about her asshole boyfriend or her dog or her job, but all the while I'd be thinking, What's preventing me from reaching across the table and, with one solitary, naughty finger, pulling her top down? And so exposed, is it possible that whatever her initial surprise, even horror, at this breach, it might give way to something else? Would she be unable to resist if I just dropped to my knees and began kissing her?
Of course, when we finally did get together, it wasn't because I'd pulled her shirt down in public; that probably would have done me in with her, and possibly the cops. And those revealing tops, she told me after we were married, weren't contrived as a sexual semaphore for me or anyone else. They were, she said, simply an attempt to differentiate her upper half from her bottom. "I had a great waistline then," Katie told me, "so it was appealing to show that off, and to show that I actually had a shape and wasn't just some blob." But still. Oh God, when I finally saw them fully unleashed, beams of heavenly light seemed to emanate from them, angels blew trumpets, choirs sang. "Don't move," I told her one of the first times she lay naked in my apartment. "I just need to remember what you look like in case I never get to see you like this again."
As we fell in love and became comfortable together, there were stories I would get her to tell me, of her wild twenties in the city, finally liberated and at ease with her body, and seemingly finally at peace with her breasts and those who loved them. This one tale she told—about the time she had a man kissing each breast, about how much she enjoyed that, or maybe it was more that she enjoyed how much the men obviously appreciated them—it's hard to imagine that any man could have gotten off as much as I did hearing the story, over and over, over the years. And I reveled in it because not only was I the man who'd ended up with her, I was also the man who'd ended up with them.
With kids, her breasts got bigger. Much bigger, she says. How big, she won't even tell me. "I would really prefer you not even having the image in your mind," she says. She wanted to wake up and not have to put on a bra first thing. She wanted to run again. After two C-sections, her waist had never returned to how it was, and she felt that her breasts were conspiring to turn her into that blob she'd always feared becoming. "They just aren't sexy anymore to me," she says. But they were still sexy to me, and if they were different from what they were a decade ago, I honestly didn't notice. I couldn't help but tell her that, though it was the last thing she wanted to hear. "I was still going to do it, even if you weren't going to be attracted to me," she says. "I waited two full years after I wanted to do it because you didn't want me to. You were the worst part of the whole thing." We haggle about desired cup size. I plead for a full D. She settles for a C and tells me I'm an asshole.
The morning of the procedure, I drop Katie off at the train that will take her into the city to her doctor, for an outpatient procedure that is to begin at 9 a.m. and last three hours. Katie tells me that the doctor will call me after she's moved into recovery so I can begin the 90-minute drive to his office to pick her up. First 1 p.m. rolls by, then 2. I begin to panic. I realize I have no idea what her doctor's name is, where his office is. By three o'clock, I'm certain that something terrible has happened to her. Some butcher masquerading as a Park Avenue plastic surgeon has obviously lured her to his office, only to harvest her kidneys and leave her for dead propped up on some medical-waste dumpster. What would I even tell the police when I called them? That because I didn't want my wife to get a breast reduction, I have been a criminally neglectful spouse and didn't even bother writing down the name of the man who was going to put my children's mother to sleep and slice her up with a scalpel? At 4:30, as I'm hurtling down the highway toward Manhattan, practicing what I'll tell the kids about how Mommy ended up in heaven, my cell phone finally rings. "Your wife is fine," the doctor tells me. He's been briefed on the insensitive, tit-man husband, apparently. "And don't worry," he says. "By no one's definition are her breasts small now. She's just got the breasts she was always supposed to have." To hell with her breasts, I thought. Where's my wife?
She'd been beaten up pretty bad. The three-hour surgery had taken eight. A nurse deposits her, swollen and moaning, into the car. "I have no idea what they were doing in there," Katie says. "I imagine you could separate conjoined twins in that time." A good month without sex follows. A month after that, it's below-the-waist, don't-touch-the-bandages sex only, which provides a welcome reunion with the most indispensable player in the sex situation, a part that has literally lived in the shadow of her breasts and probably hasn't received the adoration it deserved over the years. For an entire year, her breasts are hidden from me and, during sex, dwell in darkness or shadow, like goblins in some low-budget horror film. "The scars are worse than I was promised," she tells me.
One drunken night, they finally come out. "They're beautiful," I say, which I mean. The scars, a T-shape under each breast and leading to the nipple, have faded, and the longest ones, running the length of the bottom of the breast, are hidden when her breasts settle on top of them. She's been running again and can now walk around the house sans bra without shame. Our sex has returned to its pre-reduction level and fury, and my penis hasn't once tried to stage any sort of protest. It's been fine without the same amount of breast play. It's not that I don't love them—if they're not full Ds, they're doing a hell of an impression. But when I touch them, I think we're both taken from the moment and forced to remember the talks, the arguments, and that terrible day, as Katie puts it, "when you dumped me on a train so I could ride off and be cut open." The same day that I finally realized the insignificance of her breasts in comparison to the life we've built together.
So yes, honey of two years ago, I've been to the future, and yes, I'll absolutely be as attracted to you afterward as I was before. Let's never again have another talk like this about your beautiful breasts, at this or whatever size you decide they should be.
This originally appeared in the June 2015 issue of ELLE.
