What makes this so dispiriting is that the transformation seems to have as much to do with the actresses' aspirations as with Dick Wolf's fantasies. I may be wrong about this. For one thing, it's possible they're about to be canned and are trying desperately to hang on. Still, there's a thin line between keeping your crime-fighting cred and devolving into eye candy for the presumably randy and much-coveted 18-to-49-year-old male viewers, for whom television is awash with women who purport to swagger and swashbuckle, but whose grooming and bedroom eyes tell a different story. Meanwhile, the aging male star, comforting in his wisdom and authority, can go on forever, like a favorite leather shoe (think Jerry Orbach), whereas the female was put on Earth (or at least on movie and television screens) to supply visual variety.

How the various women on the crime shows handle this conflicted mandate-looking brainy and serious enough to handle a "man's" job while radiating the necessary quotient of sex appeal-makes a fascinating reflection of the contortions of women today, for whom dress and behavior are no longer easy or automatic, and for whom every decision, from makeup to marriage, is freighted with upsides and downsides. Shopaholism versus workaholism, skin-deep beauty versus inner drive: every piece of jewelry, every strand of exquisitely groomed hair, every inch of exposed flesh signifies some sort of choice between preserving professional, feminist integrity (we know how long it takes to look like that!) and succumbing to crass youth-and-marketing ideals in pulchritude.

Mariska Hargitay, Kathryn Erbe and Bebe Neuwirth on three different Law & Order shows; CSI's Marg Helgenberger and Jorja Fox; CSI: Miami's Emily Proctor and Khandi Alexander; Kathryn Morris on Cold Case; and Poppy Montgomery on Without a Trace: That there are so many interesting actresses doing plausibly serious work, in shows rich with the plot, character and narrative drive so sadly lacking in most Hollywood movies, is cause for uncorking the champagne. And one of the things that allows these women to develop as full-fledged people with recognizable personalities is the ensemble format of the weekly show, with its surrogate-family motif, its internal battles and turf dramas. The bond between the women and the men, the women and the women, the men and the men on these crime shows is as intense and varying as a love affair. Indeed, what slows the shows down for me, no less than "inappropriate" dress, is when their "real lives" take over, back-stories intrude, family skeletons rattle around and come out of the closet.

What's just as interesting as what my friend Caroline sees as the increased glam factor toward the end of these women's tenure is their remarkable evolution on the shows. They begin as interchangeable pretty girls with a few personality tics to distinguish them from each other. For example, Emily Procter-coming off her saucy Southern-Republican-in-the-liberal-woodpile role on The West Wing-is suddenly, on CSI Miami, a crime-scene technician in love with bullets and bullet holes. It takes them a while to get their footing, to create distinct personae, and it's playing off the other characters that enables them to do this organically. By now, who else but Kathryn Erbe can work with Mr. Know-It-All Vincent D'Onofrio on Law & Order: Criminal Intent? O.K., she's a subordinate, but she's smart-and, crucially, they've molded and adapted to each other in a classic duo of flyaway flamboyance versus common sense. Mr. D'Onofrio and David Caruso's Horatio are the amusingly grandstanding honchos of their respective shows; Gary Sinise and William Petersen the quietly confident savants, the ones who allow the women to emerge.

I have a few gaps in my understanding of these character "arcs"-e.g., I'm not sure when and why Ms. Helgenberger's Catherine Willows took over as boss lady from Petersen's Grissom on CSI-an ignorance I must here explain. My husband and I, despite making a living from watching and writing about movies, are techno-dummies who rely on our assistant, now removed from New York to Kansas, to supply us with our weekly videotapes of these shows. There are occasional hitches, such as when Eric goes on vacation, or when the broadcasts themselves are interrupted by Kansas' famous Storm Team. In case you didn't know from The Wizard of Oz, the weather is a very big deal in Kansas, a flat state, home to many storms and tornadoes. Even the absence of weather is a very big deal. Weather, you might say, is the state sport, a 24/7 operation. The Storm Team peremptorily and periodically interrupts the show to provide storm warnings, including one announcing that "there are no storm warnings." When there's even the remotest possibility of a downpour-not to mention a tornado-in any corner of the state, not only is CSI or Law & Order interrupted for advisories that include detailed maps and updates, but a continuous crawl provides moment-to-moment instructions such as: "All fallen branches should be brought to the schoolyard on --- Street." Or: "The Baptist Ladies' Bible Club will not be meeting at --- Church on Wednesday." What these offer is not so much a reality check as a reminder of the flatness and dullness of a weird landscape and culture that produces (along with nouveaux Republicans) some of the most lurid crimes in recent memory.

Why is there no CSI: Kansas, where they really need it? Because-to return to my original theme-there are no babes in Kansas. CSI: Miami's lab ladies can look serious as all get-out because frivolity is all around them and exposed bronze flesh is as unremitting as the sun. Who needs décolletage over the microscope when South Beach provides yards of barely clad hedonists in 24-hour-party mode; ditto Las Vegas! And New York's CSI (much improved since it dropped the gloom-and-doom look) has its own kinkiness in post-mortem nudity, outer-borough élan and gallows screwball wit. The growing comfort level and sparkle between Mr. Sinise and Melina Kanakaredes as the show's two leads suggests how actor chemistry can sell an improbable setup. Not only am I beginning to suspend disbelief regarding the exotic Ms. Kanakaredes and her look-at-me coiffure; I'm even ready to believe that it's New York humidity rather than eight beauticians with gel that create that billowing mountain of curls. Well, almost.

But having just gone through some redecorating of my own, during which I eagerly besought-well, begged, badgered and insisted on-my husband's opinion, I sympathized. We've had an apartment on the beach since the 1970's, and other than the occasional repainting, haven't altered so much as a light fixture or stick of furniture. This to the dismay of my mother, whose oft-repeated maxim was the importance of making at least one improvement every year so a property wouldn't deteriorate all at once. To be truthful, I had made one foray into Home Depot territory, and we were still living with the resulting casualty: a new lavatory cabinet which, because I'd mismeasured, half-covered the toilet-paper dispenser.

But things were different now. Mother had died and left a small legacy-nothing grand, not enough to buy a real house, but enough to spruce up the apartment. I got the number of an interior decorator and, one recent afternoon, dropped by her office on the Montauk Highway to make an appointment. There was no one there except a man (her husband, it turned out) who was snoozing away on the chintz sofa in the showroom. When, after a few telephone calls, the decorator came to our apartment, she looked around, trying to keep the expression of disapproval off her face. I remained resolutely unintimidated. Decorating's not my thing. I'm a writer (I tell myself), not a homemaker, entitled to live in bohemian, slovenly style. Decorating, at least until my recent conversion, was one area in which I felt no aspirations, no emotional investment, no pride and-there being no sense of dereliction-no guilt. The woman asked how long we'd been there. I said the 70's. She looked at the rusting light switches and said, "Sixties." I would have been crushed if she herself- a polite little woman with graying hair and a shirtwaist dress-had cut a more haute décor figure, instead of reminding me of my mother and her WASP-lady generation.

In fact, I had no idea that chrome plates were the sort of thing that went out of fashion. I'd simply never noticed. Our apartment, though small, faces the beach-a panoramic view which has served, gloriously, as both art and décor, enabling me to blind myself to the dinginess within. The condos had started out as rustic in their modesty: no dishwashers, no air conditioners. But everyone had "improved," some in very un-beachy and rather glitzy ways. I was determined to keep it simple, an objective that proved almost impossible to achieve once I was fully ensconced in the project. A new floor: Should I go down to the original wood, put in tiles, vinyl or-the newest thing-a Pergo faux-wood floor? I decided on the Pergo, known as a floating floor-but, I wondered, would it float away with the next tidal wave? And what color should it be? White, to keep the apartment's lightness? Tan, to bring out the wood look? Or a sort of blond in-between? Then, the counter (or "countertop," as they say in the trade) that serves as a bar. This introduced another perplexing range of choices: marble, granite, tile, Formica or (the newest) Corian-the faux stone. There were the pluses and minuses to consider, and much visiting of showrooms. Then, of course, new cabinets. Ditto multiple choices-wood, Formica, etc. At least I could stick with my Venetian blinds rather than go into the intricacies of "window treatments."

Now I realized that I needed a contractor. The one I hired was always going from one place to another on Long Island, reachable only by cell phone and, due to a very poor service provider (deliberate on his part, I'm convinced), impossible to communicate with. Naturally, I had no desire to make all these decisions alone, and wanted my husband to share the anxiety and obsession with me. I now had three samples of Pergo flooring. If my husband had gone to Tokyo or Australia at that moment, I'd have sent the three planks to his hotel-the white, the tan and the in-between-telling him to imagine each one over a large space, which makes the effect darker. And should they be laid parallel to, or against, the light? Perhaps pondering the aesthetics of flooring would give him something interesting to think about, so he'd stop feeling sorry for himself. Or, if not interesting, soporific. It's his floor, after all, and his big feet will be walking on it.

Men-at least all the husband-type men I know, as opposed to those glam shopaholic metrosexuals of current urban legend-detest shopping. Bad enough when it's something for their personal maintenance, but for the house? One dear friend, having been led by his wife to the umpteenth lighting emporium, finally put his foot down. "No more sconces!" he wailed. We women, in turn, get mad at our significant others for not taking an interest and sharing the burden. How infuriating that these partners of ours can withdraw into their cocoons of indifference-and when they finally do turn their ponderous brains to the problem and honor us with a preference, have forgotten all about it moments later.

But our anger conceals a kind of envy: If only we could compartmentalize that way, deal with things and then move on, not lie awake nights worrying. On some level, even as I resent my husband's single-mindedness, I love the fact that when he finally puts fingers to typewriter, he can concentrate through thick and thin. He's my alter ego, his concentration and purposefulness validating my own ambitions and forgiving my domestic inadequacies. Work is the priority I embrace, if never quite as singly as he. After all, as the Man of the House, his career is on the line in a way that mine is not. I get to do-have to do-all the other stuff, which is both pleasure and burden. I never have to be completely judged by my work. But then, if I'm not judged by my work, will I then be held to account as decorator and homemaker, acquitted or convicted for my taste in flooring, fixtures and countertops?

And so I found myself shuddering with recognition, my insides lurching, during the very first scene. The artist, on the brink of death, is being rushed to the hospital as the cumulative injuries from childhood polio and then a trolley accident finally claim her body. The vehicle she's traveling in hits a pothole. Eeaagh! The clenched teeth and seething eyebrows of Salma Hayek's Frida let us know that what was already a "10" on the pain-ometer leaps off the chart. It's one of the few times we are shown a glimpse of the physical agony Frida must have endured. In the rest of the film, the experience of pain is externalized and transmuted into art.

Eerily, five days later at midnight I was in an ambulance myself, with an intestinal obstruction and shrieking-out-loud cramps, on my way to New York Hospital clenching my teeth as we bounced over potholes that could give Mexico City a run for its money. I have the pain, I thought, but not the paints.

Acute pain, unlike chronic pain, has a way of sharpening the mind, distilling the moment into exact pinpricks of sensation, which is another way of stepping outside the agony by charting its course. Perhaps it's all that adrenaline from the fight-or-flight response pumping into the system. The recent J.F.K. medical revelation was not that the President was in pain and on medications. The surprise was the sheer quantity of both that the man put up with and that he could still perform as well as he did. Likewise, F.D.R. downplayed the crippling effects of his polio. And Jed Bartlet, the President on The West Wing , got through years of the job without revealing his M.S. The first impulse on hearing of such medical cover-ups is fear, then outrage that anyone so disabled should remain as Commander in Chief. But we might wonder if the very act of having and transcending pain doesn't concentrate the mind in productive ways.

In his fascinating 1991 study The Culture of Pain , an analysis of how different societies and eras read and interpret pain, David Morris (writer, English professor and former pain clinician), cites the example of Immanuel Kant. Up all night, "his toes glowing red from an excruciating attack of gout," the great 18th-century philosopher would handle his affliction by choosing a subject-say, Cicero-and concentrating so fiercely, summoning up everything he knew of the orator, that the next morning he'd wonder if he hadn't simply imagined the pain.

The emergency room offers plenty of time for cogitation between and during waves of pain, but my Latin is too rusty for Cicero to anesthetize my nerve endings. Mostly I eavesdropped on patients on either side of the curtain and waited. And waited and waited (18 hours as it turns out) to get into a room. Beds were tight. On that particular night, New York Hospital was harder to get into than an Upper East Side nursery. And then I missed the doctor who'd been waiting for us because my distraught husband signed me in, according to the name on our insurance card, as Mrs. S., while I was known to the doctor on call, and everyone else, only by my professional name.

I finally got into a room. I had nothing to eat or drink, but no pain. I'll eventually have to have surgery, but I can only be grateful my condition is neither chronic nor terminal. Mercifully, I'll forget the pain, and will be ready for another round. For now, I write in my journal, listen to books on tape, obsess over weird things, sleep only a few hours a night, watch television at odd hours.

In some African tribes, pain is interpreted as the work of demons. For medieval Christians, it was God's judgment, a reassuring message from the Divine. There's comfort in explanation, and we seek our own version of culpability: stress. I know it's what triggered my pain. A trip in a small plane to the snowy north, appearing on two panels, having to hold my end up and perform, the new tension of the working woman: "I'm tied in knots" as the saying goes, only in my case literally. Morris, in his book, challenges the mind-body dualism that leads to the "Myth of Two Pains." The numb trance-like state of a Marguerite Duras character, the "hysteria" of 19th-century women, the "Element of Blank" in Emily Dickinson are cries of pain in which physical and mental are intertwined, possibly indistinguishable. In the traditional woman's film, whose contours Frida reflects and subverts, women are paralyzed by their powerlessness; dependent on men, unable to effect any change in the world at large, their lives are spent busily denying their own purposelessness. As a result, they seem to embrace misery, even sink into illness, "real suffering," as a way of getting attention, wresting tears, a kind of Munchausen syndrome given romantic expression.

The irony of Frida is that the accident that condemned her to a lifetime of pain sprung her from conventional feminism. A tomboy to begin with, an incipient radical, she might still have ended up like her sister, a married member of the bourgeoisie. But flat on her back, looking into a mirror, she refused passivity and acted in the only way she could: She painted what she saw, X-rays of a mutilated body.

I'd actually have liked to know more about Frida's pain, when it happened, how it felt. Did spinal injuries hurt more than Diego's infidelities? Unlike slow-fading emotional insult, the thing about physical pain is the glorious feeling when it stops. Life rushes in, the world is sacred and born anew when the morphine drip works, when Imitrex intercepts the migraine. If the hospital strips you of your identity, it also strips you of pretense.

You can only laugh at this Purgatorial limbo where you shuffle around with tubes in every orifice, wearing a smock that barely covers your backside. I try to think of ways of converting misery and the ridiculous into something else without covering it up altogether, the writerly equivalent of Frida's wild, grisly drawing of her miscarriage in an American hospital and the painting, now so rich with symbolism, where she gives birth to herself under the portrait of her mother.

And the wedding invitations were Southern, hence had to be answered in the traditional, formal style: "Mr. and Mrs. [Full name] accept the kind invitation of [full name] for the wedding of [full name] to [full name]" at place, date, etc. On the correct paper (heavy vellum, single sheet) with the correct color ink. None of that cut-to-the-chase Yankee practice of providing invitees with a self-addressed stamped envelope and card, check "yes" or "no."

Being a Southern female, born not with silver spoon in mouth but with fountain pen in hand, means not only having to say you're sorry (or happy, or grateful) but having to do so in epistolary form. You've heard the joke: Why don't Southern women like group sex? Too many thank-you notes to write.

Extend the conceit a little further. Why do Southern women (of the "leisure class") rarely become artists or business executives or activists or writers? Too many thank-you notes to write. Those notes, which exhaust such creative and calligraphic talents as the author might possess, are symbol and baseline expression of the whole strenuous and complicated enterprise of maintaining the kinship web (in which religious and social rites are seamlessly interwoven) that's essential to the cohesion of the tribe.

It's no wonder that Southern women of spirit almost relished the Civil War: For four years, there were no thank-you notes to write. Domestic chores, meals, clothes, parties were reduced to a minimum. The women were caught up in the general excitement-not as warriors, but not as ladies in waiting, either. They were no Greek chorus of lamenters, women left behind by husbands, brothers, sons in faraway lands. Their homes were under attack, their men wounded. Parties revolved around politics and war news, and whatever the horrors and tragedies they lived through, for four years they were rescued from triviality and depression.

They were Scarlett O'Haras defending their land, or the real-life Mary Boykin Chesnut, the South Carolinian planter's wife whose diaries were possibly the most remarkable work of literature to come out of the war. The posthumously Pulitzer Prize–winning Mary Chesnut's Civil War shows a woman, of acute powers of observation and superb descriptive gifts, not only chronicling events from the social and political center of things, but challenging the cherished values of her time and place by advancing the twin causes of abolition and feminism. It was her visceral firsthand knowledge and resentment of the powerlessness of women in patriarchy that led naturally to an awareness of that other segment of humanity that also endured a life without rights or liberties. "There is no slave, after all, like a wife," she wrote.

C. Vann Woodward says of Chesnut in his introduction to the Diaries : "She feared and dreaded the war, but she embraced its demands with all the fierce passion of her nature. It meant outlet for many frustrated impulses and energies dammed up within her. It meant being involved, challenged, needed, wholly committed, and totally absorbed. It also opened doors of escape from dullness and boredom and self-absorption." "My subjective days are over," Woodward quotes Chesnut as saying, "no more silent eating into my own heart-making my own miseries."

Whatever happened to men taking over some share of the domestic and social duties? The other night, I sat next to two friends at a lecture. I reminded the husband of the couple that I had an article he wanted and would give it to him when the two of them came over for dinner two weeks hence. "Oh, are we coming to your place for dinner?" he asked with only a touch of shamefacedness. I recognized the syndrome: He's on a need-to-know basis, like my own husband. It's safer that way. It may cause for some embarrassing moments when they're clueless about a momentous event, like a wedding or a death, but it's preferable to putting them in the picture (they keep forgetting and ask you three times a day) or-more horrific-having them make the arrangements. When entrusted with social responsibilities, my husband has invited someone to the wrong party, accepted two invitations for the same night or, struggling to buy time till I can take over, given a reply so evasive the caller immediately suspects he's lying.

I don't know what the evolutionary biologists have to say about this division of labor; no doubt women create and maintain this network of ties to bind the husband to home and hearth, making the abandonment of family and divorce more difficult and consequential. On the other hand, men aren't as obtuse as they want us to think. They use and need us (also more than they want us to think) to get them off the hook. In a recent episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David's mother has died. He's less upset about her death than the fact that his father didn't call him in New York (his classic Jewish mother didn't want him to be disturbed). That evening, back in L.A., Larry tells his wife, Cheryl, to get them out of an upcoming dreaded bat mitzvah. When Cheryl calls and politely begs off because of her mother-in-law's death, the alternately rude and cringing Larry, having expected the usual social debacle, is amazed at how easily it goes down. He realizes he's got a new automatic out: the dead-mother excuse, which he will milk for as long as he can get away with it, not only to importuning friends and acquaintances, but, in the last scene, to his sleepy wife, with a tearful plea for sex.

In New York, a parent's death is good for approximately two weeks; the passing of a spouse or shrink slightly longer. Then it's back to the social grindstone. Women with children and careers-the freaked-out heroines of the new hen-with-chicks lit-aren't the only ones torn like taffy in every direction. You don't have to be in your 30's to want it all, or simply to be unable to figure out what in your life to get rid of and how.

I thought I came to New York to escape the mind-bending exigencies of the Southern "easy life." Instead, I found myself with much of that baggage still in place and a whole new set of obligations. Along with the usual weddings, births and funerals, there are all those command performances of my achieving friends I wouldn't miss for the world: readings, book parties, awards ceremonies, lectures, art-show openings, plays, films. Compared to the high-intensity New York social-professional life, group sex-thank-you notes included-would be a walk in the park.

Needless to say, the movies in question- The Good Girl , How I Killed My Father , Alias Betty , Secretary , Mostly Martha and 8 Women -aren't Hollywood studio films. Nor are their anti-heroines those familiar cinematic archetypes of evil: opposite sides of the virgin/whore coin, as filtered through the neatly dichotomizing male sensibility. Many of these Eves spring full-blown not from the rib of Adam, but from the perfervid brains of … other women. And even when the films are written or directed by men, these characters radiate such self-possession-and the actresses playing them give such bravura performances-as to turn upside-down any notion of oppression or objecthood.

Time was when such "negative" images would cause us feminists to stomp our sensible marching shoes and write protest letters crying "Misogyny!" As recently as a couple of years ago, I was talking to a best-selling feminist author who, having just caught up with the first year of The Sopranos , was appalled by the character of Livia. How can we allow such portraits of evil mothers? she expostulated. But we've gotten past that stage and its narrowly defined notions of acceptability, of "positive" and "negative" images, as if women were either/or electrical currents.

The point is, the old categories and the dialectical notions they embody no longer serve-if only because there are so many more kinds of women in play that no single emblem of perversity has to stand for the entire sex. If feminism is about anything, it's about the freedom to look further and deeper at those repressed parts of ourselves, the secret desires and fantasies that dictate the kinds of people we are attracted to long before we tell ourselves what we ought to think.

In The Good Girl , Friends sweetheart Jennifer Aniston-so miserable in her clerk's job and life in Nowhere, Tex.-turns into a bad girl who makes life miserable for everyone else as well. She is, in her own words, "hateful"-to her poor old slob of a husband; to her too-cheerful co-worker, whom she deserts in her hour of need; to her pathetic lover and would-be soulmate, whom she considers poisoning with blackberries. Yet thanks to their deft way with comedy noir, the filmmakers (director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Mike White) achieve a tone perfectly pitched between humor and horror, permitting the film's West Texas Madame Bovary to retain our sympathy, even as we reproach her for behaving badly toward her no-less-pitiable victims.

Likewise, tone is everything in Secretary , a bold and exquisitely funny examination of an erotic S&M relationship that threatens to capsize when "real" sex occurs. The movie, directed by Steven Shainberg (adapted, with co-scenarist Erin Cressida Wilson, from a story by Mary Gaitskill), features Maggie Gyllenhaal in an astonishing performance as the morose introvert with a cutting problem who, like Little Red Riding Hood, carries a "tool kit"-self-abuse implements and first-aid equipment-wherever she goes. The wolf in this case is a handsome but eccentric lawyer (James Spader), whose red felt-tip pens are the bloody weapons with which he corrects his new secretary's typos and brings her to heel. As they feel each other out in a series of alternating dominance and submission rituals (a more extreme version of the covertly S&M games all couples play), Maggie actually becomes more real to herself.

Some male critics seem to have been put off by the heroine of Mostly Martha , a German chef (magically played by Martina Gedeck) whose rapturous interest in what she does takes priority over that usual fixation of the single woman-i.e., getting a man. Written and directed by Sandra Nettelbeck, the superb first half of the movie shows a woman with "unwomanly" qualities-pride, shyness and social indifference-who is nevertheless attractive and desirable, even while chewing out diners who don't appreciate her fare.

When her sister is suddenly killed and Martha is saddled with her orphaned niece, she's completely nonplused. The so-called maternal instinct is not there, nor does it spring forth. Until the movie detours into sentiment when an Italian sous-chef comes along to save romance and family values for Western civilization, the single heroine's matter-of-fact happiness has been so subversive as to be revolutionary.

Alias Betty is a wildly improbable but juicy melodrama, directed by Claude Miller from a novel by Ruth Rendell, about a child-snatching with a happy ending in which there are not one, but two malefactor moms circling Betty, the saintly bereft mother. It's a deft balancing act, but the charismatic Sandrine Kiberlain in the Madonna/Betty role holds her own against Mathilde Seigner's dastardly hooker (who loses her baby-and good riddance) and Betty's own mother, played by a monstrous yet funny Nicole Garcia. Presumably to atone for past sins against her daughter, the mother steals the baby and gives it to Betty. The mother is given to garrulous self-absorption; no crisis in the lives of others is so great that it can distract her from her own. Yet we can't quite bring ourselves to hate her. She's like Isabelle Huppert's motor-mouth spinster Aunt Augustine in François Ozon's 8 Women : Both are witchy narcissists who dare you to turn away from them or feel morally superior.

How I Killed My Father , Mostly Martha and Alias Betty were hits among friends with whom I shared the videotapes this summer. The latter two especially stirred up a kind of feverish excitement. The very idea of women not bonding with children remains anathema in our culture, the last taboo of drama. No matter how often we're told that the complex phenomenon called "maternal instinct" is not necessarily innate, that there are numerous species and individuals in whom it never occurs, that many need to "learn" it and some never do, our quasi-religious faith in the idea gives rise to impossible images of Good Mothers. But isn't the Good Mother ideal more of a prison, a straitjacket, than any number of so-called slanders against motherhood?

In Anne Fontaine's haunting How I Killed My Father , we get not the feel-good father/son myth so popular in recent Hollywood movies, but an anguished duet in which an abandoned son turns furiously on his father, and the father, with cruel honesty, says, "I'm not obligated to love you." The same devastating words might have been uttered by some of the mothers above-suggesting that we love where we need to love rather than where our love is needed. It's a philosophy undreamt of in Hollywood, where matches are made in heaven or hell, rather than the in-between world where most of us live.

In keeping with the general dumbing down represented by George Bush's drawling Bible-class homilies and visions of Armageddon, the arts coverage gave us copious images and inches devoted to babes on surfboards (the new feminist career choice: "they live to surf") and flashy new über -hunk Vin Diesel. If the President needed an image to whup the nation into bellicosity, he had it in the CNN videotape revealing Al Qaeda terminating dogs with chemical weapons. On our beach, in a blessedly unchic corner of the Hamptons, we had our own little brush with an animal scare that made local headlines.

Over the course of the summer, the ocean had yielded nothing more malignant than clingy red seaweed and sea lice, scurrilous little critters who go for the inside of women's bathing suits and went for mine, leaving a super-itchy rash on my tender parts. But then, one recent Sunday, there arrived on our shores … a shark. A real one, not a divorce lawyer or a Hollywood producer or a still-operative chief executive in his private plane.

Reading on the deck of our apartment, I heard voices and looked up to see mothers calling their children in from the ocean. Moments later, a huge white fish appeared, just barely moving at water's edge. As a crowd gathered round, a young man took the creature by his back fins and pulled him on shore. From a distance, it looked like a swordfish. I ran down to see. I held my breath. There, nestled in the head of the silvery torso, were the unmistakable incisors-stiletto sharp and pearly white against the faint pink of the gums. The mandibles of our shark were, in fact, considerably more comely than the ones in Jaws , those famous vagina dentata (in subtext parlance) that could have used a whitening agent. Here he/she was, the terrorist of the ocean, the Jezebel of the deep. Everyone kept their distance, not quite believing it was dead, it had such ferocity even in stillness. It wasn't huge (I guessed five feet; the paper later said six), yet it made us all feel small, so awesome was this icon of fear in the flesh. I leaned down to touch it, expecting rough skin, but it was soft and supple. Ed from the building next-door began taking pictures. Somehow the scene, capping as it did an all-too-ignominious summer, was reminiscent of the ending of La Dolce Vita . In Fellini's classic film, an evening of wild debauch among symbiotic celebrities and paparazzi culminates when the drunken revelers hit the beach outside Rome in the wee hours of the morning and discover the beached whale. In a kind of danse macabre , they whirl around its carcass, a symbolic union of rotting flesh, human and bestial. Two weeks before the appearance of the shark, friends on a nearby beach had discovered a giant carcass of what might have been a cow, minus limbs. A few days later, a beachcombing resident showed me a tibia and a hoof she had found on our shore, skeletal segments of what I took to be the same ungulate. And now the shark: a reminder of our lowly place in the food chain when it comes to aquatic supremacy. Was nature pronouncing judgment?

As Ed snapped away, a young woman confronted him. "How can you do that?" she asked. "How can you take pictures?"

How can you take pictures? Was this eco-freak lunacy? Animal rights run amok? What infringement of animal rights was the photographer committing: the invasion of the shark's privacy? The theft of his soul? Treating him as an "object"? I'd just been reading the biologist Marlene Zuk's stimulating book Sexual Selection , about the human tendency to anthropomorphize animals for ulterior political and psychological purposes, about the way we turn certain mammals into pin-ups-the dolphin (it's smart like us) or the bonobo (it's sexually liberated, nonaggressive) -according to the needs and theories of the moment.

Was the woman on the beach who objected to photographs worried about the privacy of her brother/sister shark-or, to take a more sympathetic view, was she simply reacting to the tendency to turn every moment into a photo op? For, unlike those riotous drunks in the Fellini movie, our gathering had fallen into an almost religious hush, and remained that way until the shore patrol arrived and carted the fish away.

The story of the shark, a six-foot-long mako, was front-page news in the local papers. However, the cover photograph showed not our shark, sleek and inert, but an "action" photo of a generic killer shark, plowingfuriously through dark waters. But hadn't I, in imparting a sense of the sacred to our silent vigil, superimposedmyown meaning? Hadn't I transformed something that was pure nature into a human event, just as the animal-rights protester had invested the shark with her own meanings, andthenewspapers with theirs?

We just can't help turning animals into metaphors for our own use. My first New York play, as a college student in the city for the first time, was The Threepenny Opera . I fell in love with the Brecht-Weill musical at the Circle in the Square, and the diabolical shark and ur -capitalist Macheath. The growlingly exuberant rendering of that paean to predation, "Mack the Knife," was one of many seductive voices that sang the siren song of New York.

Today's capitalist sharks have none of the allure of Brecht's archvillain. They're boring and faceless narcissists with nouveau plantations in Texas and Florida. They don't seduce, but hide behind accountants and preside over corporations with blunt, meaningless two-syllable names that sound like Scrabble rejects-Enron and Tyco, WorldCom and ImClone. But maybe the bland façade is today's version of Macheath's "out of sight" jackknife teeth, the gloved hands that never show a single drop of red until-in our transposed animal metaphor-the market slides and bulls turn into bears, and the red ink billows and spreads.

With our own modest or nonexistent portfolios, we are in the happy position of being tourists rather than natives to the country of high-finance finagling. The bad guys are getting it; better yet, the more extensive the wrongdoing, the more likely that heads will roll, that "systemic" changes will be made. Yet, delightful as it has been to find inarguable evidence of the villainy we'd long suspected, something in this chorus of virtuous revulsion has made me uncomfortable.

I've been doing some historical research lately, and I keep hearing echoes of this Schadenfreude in the words of some eminent literary tourists of the last century-namely Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens-over the economic misfortunes of my home state of Virginia. Despising the institution of slavery (and, in de Tocqueville's case, the landed aristocracy), they were downright jubilant at the sorry state of Virginia's economy.

De Tocqueville was as much a cheerleader for (and idealizer of) the stern probity and industry of Northerners as he was against what he perceived as the idleness and frivolity of the slave- and land-owning Virginia aristocracy-themselves, he gleefully pointed out, descendants of blue-blooded bad sheep who'd been happily shipped off by their families in England. At roughly the same point in time (in 1827), Fanny Trollope, the free-thinking novelist and mother of Anthony, arrived in America with utopian fantasies of her own. But after disillusioning experiences-a brief sojourn in a muddy, bug-infested progressive community, followed by the failure of a grandiose commercial scheme in Cincinnati-her view turned sour, and all she found was further evidence of the boorishness of America and its institutions. Having abandoned her 12-year-old son to the untender mercies of his intemperate and impecunious father, Mrs. T. wept over the treatment of slave children in Virginia. The book she wrote, Domestic Manners of the Americans , a slash-and-burn exposé, was a best-seller in England.

Dickens, on the trip that produced American Notes and Pictures from Italy (both 1842), had initially hoped to tweak and perhaps outsell his older colleague and friendly rival with a more salubrious portrait of the new country-but that was not to be.

With his nose for injustice and his genius for dramatizing and humanizing the plight of the oppressed, Dickens was more interested in prisons and poorhouses than signs of progress. After all, on his visit to Pennsylvania, after a cursory look at the historic sites, he went to the horrifyingly brutal Eastern Penitentiary and was inspired to savage eloquence by his reformer's zeal. Didn't all these writers see what they wanted to see, discover ammunition for novelistic or ideological predispositions already firmly in place? And for Dickens and Trollope, wasn't there a lingering-if unconscious-resentment of this upstart nation's victory over the powerful mother country?

In any case, Virginians have never gotten over the vilifications of Dickens, who was wined and dined in a style befitting the great man and then turned on his hosts with a keenly observant eye for the signs of misery beneath the façade.

Voyaging from Washington through Fredericksburg to Richmond by night steamer and by coach, in conditions that were at the very least uncomfortable and at the worst life-threatening, Dickens took perverse satisfaction in the "ruin and decay" that signalled the exhaustion of the soil by the slave system. "Dreary and uninteresting as its aspect is, I was glad to the heart to find anything on which one of the curses of this horrible institution has fallen; and had greater pleasure in contemplating the withered ground, than the richest and most thriving cultivation in the same place could possibly have afforded me," he wrote.

Dickens' host in Richmond was a good man and, to his relief, not a buyer or seller of slaves, though he owned and employed them in his tobacco factory. Like the guest from hell, Dickens was the kind of snoop who peers under the rugs. He observed the factory workers and sought out the poorer neighborhoods, looking for signs of moldering spirits. They were the very slums that we, growing up in a later century, tried to keep at the back of our consciousness. In the 50's and 60's, not so much had changed: Dickens' wry observations on mint juleps and sherry cobblers and deferential black waiters held true for these staples of our debutante years.

But what Dickens and de Tocqueville missed were the paradoxes: How was it that this miserable state had produced such farsighted revolutionaries as George Mason, George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson-had, in effect, given us the Constitution? In his superb book American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia , the historian Edmund Morgan provides a complex portrait of the ups and downs of Virginia's government and economy: its boom years of greed (stemming from tobacco), the seesawing between protecting and restricting individual rights, and the state's resort to slavery in the late 17th century, when freed servants posed a threat of rebellion. Growing up in conditions in which slaves and free men intermingled, Jefferson worried that young Virginians must inevitably be tutored in tyranny with the example of such despotism before them.

"The man must be a prodigy," Mr. Morgan quotes Jefferson as saying, "who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances." If so, there were many prodigies in Virginia: men who, while complicit in the slave trade, were hardly depraved, and managed to retain manners and morals enough to suppress private disagreements and design the Constitution around the central belief in human freedom. The ultimate irony, Mr. Morgan suggests, is that it may have been precisely this concrete spectacle of bondage in their backyards, of men treated like chattel, that fired their ideas of independence and passion for liberty.

Even then, the drafters of the Constitution knew slavery had to be abolished, but so fragile was their hold on the union itself (their first order of business) that they didn't dare raise so divisive an issue at the time. What they had, what the great Presidents like Roosevelt had, was a combination of political acumen and farsightedness.

But now, with the instant-gratification impulse that rules our lives and our economy, nobody ever remembers (or wants to remember) while the times are good that boom is followed by bust. State governments go on drunken sprees of projects and commitments and then are surprised by the head-splitting hangover of money shortfalls. I did not have to be "persuaded" of the phenomenon by the Bad Guys, as the authors of we/them readings of the current crisis like to put it. As a "little investor," my investment was tiny enough, but I too was caught up in the same "irrational exuberance," perhaps even the same "infectious greed," that had others shifting from bonds to stocks like there was no tomorrow. Maybe that's just it: We no longer believe there is a tomorrow, which is a consequence of our inability to listen to history. You need a sense of the past to believe in the future, and you must believe in the future as a shared proposition to have any hope of making it better.

Such was the situation on a recent three-day jaunt, when I "took the waters" with my husband, brother and sister-in-law at the Homestead-the grande dame of hotels-in the vernal mountains of western Virginia. The oldest continuously operating resort in the U.S., built (in 1766) near bubbling hot sulfur springs which fill the spa pool and calm the nerves; a golfing paradise of Presidents and royalty-the place casts a long and enticing shadow over my childhood. Once a wooden hotel built by a friend of George Washington's from the Virginia militia, and now a huge brick structure (the same that I knew in my youth), it was a magical kingdom. It wasn't just that it was too pricey for my family (though it was). In those days, only the very rich took their children to expensive resorts, where the kids could be palmed off on swimming teachers and tennis pros, or sequestered in special nurseries and playgrounds-gilt-edged ghettos of noise and hyperactivity that allowed the golden rule of silence to maintain elsewhere. It's no longer that way; children are ubiquitous-a fly in the ointment?

Now an attentive staff was serving us tea in the great hall, off the plantation-like porte-cochere. But at least there were no personal servants (the Duke and Duchess of Windsor came with 12) to unpack our suitcases, lay out our clothes. (Though I could have used some in New York when I went through a frenzy of decision-making over what to bring.) The place is loaded with history: Thomas Edison was responsible for the hotel's first electric-power plant, the theater was built in 1922 to show silent movies, and the golf course sported the

oldest first tee in the country. Wilson honey-mooned here, and McKinley and Eisenhower trod the links. A special gallery houses portraits of the 20 Presidents who've visited. (Bush I and II were missing, as was J.F.K.; but the Bouviers came with little Jackie.) At the fabulous breakfast buffet one

morning, the Virginia governor was piling high his plate, as were other members of the Democratic Caucus.

On the second evening, the four of us took a champagne-sipping, horse-driven carriage ride around the grounds at the speed (5 m.p.h.) with which the plutocracy of old had hightailed it from one resort to another. Our tobacco-chewing driver was out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Almost unintelligible when he spoke, he nevertheless picked up every word we said, and interrupted our conversation about movies.

"I saw that movie The Horse Whisperer," he said, curling

his lip. "That Robert Redford-he didn't know how to talk-whisper to horses. He only knew how to flirt-whisper to women."

By the end of the second day, as our muscles were forced to relax under the ministrations of body whisperers, Weltschmerz threatened to engulf us. Desperate for something to enable us, in David Lodge's phrase, "to keep abreast of the global gloom," my husband and I turned to CNN, where experts were gleefully dissecting the Utah teen snatch-a story that hadn't even made the Virginia papers-pondering the significance of the age of the child (14) and her sister (9), and declaring the culprit a "preferential molester" rather than a pedophile.

Perhaps, I hoped, a book from the hotel's extensive stock would both soothe and stimulate. My heart had leapt when, walking down the endless corridor to our room, we'd come upon bookcases stuffed with offerings. But on closer inspection, there wasn't an author or title I recognized-not even on the more copious shelves of the Washington Library. The books had probably been bought by the yard sometime in the 50's. I investigated the newspaper boutique and found in its cramped space, along with Alka Seltzer, Band-Aids, deodorant and a smattering of best-sellers, 33 books about golf! There were also golf puzzles, souvenirs and assorted golfabilia. Now I've nothing against golf-it draws people to the courses and away from my chosen recreation areas (hot pool, cold pool)-but at some of these places the sport borders on a cult, with menus listing items like Eggs Hole in One and T-bone in the Rough.

In an attempt to relieve my anxiety, I headed for the pool. In my harried packing, I hadn't brought my bathing cap. I went to one shop after another without success. Partly as an antidote to inertia, I turned the search for a replacement into research into the disappearance of what I discovered is an ancient form of aquatic headgear. I'm not speaking of those little rubber Speedos, contraceptives for the head that pull your hair and pinch your scalp but produce the androgynous and bullet-headed look of a professional swimmer. I'm talking thick white caps with under-the-chin straps that snap and come in assorted colors, sometimes with pert little rubber flowers that come off with the first big wave.

I'd noticed for a few years that I was having a hard time buying the things, but I thought each drugstore had simply run out of stock. It wasn't until the 20-year-old daughter of a swimming friend told her mother that we looked like two old ladies in our bathing caps that I realized the truth: The bathing cap as I knew it was an extinct species, a 50's artifact, as out-of-date as the hair maintenance that went with it. (We had hairdos and, when we weren't at the beauty parlor, we were spending hours frying our roller-bedecked heads under drying bonnets.)

So, capless, I went to the Jefferson Pool and, for the first time that week, felt truly and sublimely at one, body and mind-immersed in watery history, adrift in time. The pool, or pools (there's an adjacent men's pool, and the two are still segregated), is filled continually by body-temperature water from the sulfur springs (yes, there's a slight whiff of fertilizer when you enter) and housed inside a primitive wooden structure that has a ramp and minimalist dressing rooms, sort of like Girl Scout camp. The water is four feet deep, clear aquamarine in color, with stones on the bottom, as it was when a 75-year-old Thomas Jefferson came in 1818 to take the waters for his rheumatism and, celebrity that he was, put the pool on the spa map. Now you lie on a Styrofoam "noodle" and feel a gentle breeze from the partially opened roof skylight. I blissed out in a way I've never done in yoga or at a spa. It only costs $12, as opposed to a hundred here and there for various forms of being "done" to. There, in the pool, I realized that it was the being done to that made me nervous-not the pampering, per se. I loved floating entirely my own, in complete silence, in a tiny world that hadn't changed an iota since 1818. Did Jefferson remove his wig, don a cap or dunk the peruke? For one precious hour, I felt closer to T.J. than to J. Lo.

That was before 9/11 ushered in the tempus fugit principle with a vengeance, and people suddenly began contemplating long-delayed matrimony or, for the already betrothed (if the current crop of adultery movies is any reflection), contemplating a long-delayed affair.

As long as marriage is the centerpiece around which we organize our lives, infidelity will always tantalize and disturb in equal degrees. Or perhaps not quite equal: As Freud wisely noted about infidelity (in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love ), "It is one of the obvious injustices of social life that the standard of culture should demand the same behavior in sexual life from everyone-a course of conduct which, thanks to his nature, one person can attain without effort, whereas it imposes on another the severest mental sacrifices; though, indeed, the injustice is ordinarily nullified by disregard of the commands of morality."

The "his" isn't gender-neutral; Freud was describing, and perhaps exonerating, compulsively straying men. Women didn't have "sex lives" (it was a reason for their "intellectual inferiority"-one of Sigmund's less stellar ideas). Flouting the Sixth Commandment was not an option, and if women did commit the unpardonable, they were branded, flogged, put to death or-in our more enlightened societies-treated as sluts, ostracized, placed beyond the pale.

For men or women, it's not just dealing with a straying spouse that's difficult. Adultery itself is a tricky proposition, not that easy to pull off, in life or on film. We may not believe the culprit should be stoned, but some retribution seems fitting. We want the act, whether "motivated" (as a woman's extramarital fling is classically seen to be) or purely libidinal (men, of course), to have consequences.

This is what makes Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful so amazing-and disconcerting. When was the last time you saw an American movie in which the woman who cheats on her husband "for no good reason" remains sympathetic to the end? Most of this is due to Diane Lane's astonishing, powerfully nuanced performance. But give Mr. Lyne some credit for taking such a non-judgmental view of a woman's carnality. Another film that gives full rein to a woman's complex desires is the immensely moving Mexican film Y Tu Mamá También . What begins with an armpit view of two randy teenagers soars into a coming-of-age road movie in which the philandering woman emerges as the moral and sensual heart of the story. But in more traditional fashion, her waywardness has both an immediate excuse (a two-timing husband) and, in the twist ending, a moral justification -hence it is "redemptive" according to the rules of old Hollywood movies.

In Unfaithful , by contrast, the affair has no apparent motivation; it happens, it's over. Connie of Connecticut could almost go back and resume her old life. Almost. She does get caught-thanks to a series of flagrant slips-and a conflagration ensues. After all, we are in punitive, puritanical America, where no pleasure goes unpunished. And do we really want no-fault infidelity?

Even European films and their patrons aren't quite as sophisticated as we'd like to believe. When Truffaut came to make Jules and Jim , he realized that in order to retain audience sympathy, he had to reduce the number of lovers entertained by his heroine Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), the Nietzschean belle dame sans merci of Henri-Pierre Roché's enchanting and mordant novel. We'll put up with more on the page than on the screen, where our one-on-one identification with the star narrows the limits of what we'll accept. (For example, the woman of large appetites; the woman who loves freedom and reinvents herself from moment to moment; or the seductress who runs through men and stirs things up to maintain her leverage in an unequal world, and according to her own private moral accounting-each threatens the boundaries of civilized life.)

There's nothing Nietzschean about Ms. Lane's Connie-at least not on the surface-and that's how she pulls us in. She's almost timid: a nice girl afraid of and startled by her own impulses, and the last person to risk everything for a fling. Gradually she unleashes another side in the hands of a lover-Olivier Martinez's sleazily seductive Euro-hunk in bibliophile clothing-who knows just which buttons to push. Sensing it's not sweet nothings that will melt her defenses, he tells her to hit him. The moment she does, she's thrillingly lost, shedding her innocence and her inhibitions in a rash of erotic fury. The responsible wife and mother make way for a woman who wants to feel as sinfully luscious as forbidden fruit, and Connie makes palpable the delicious paradox of the housewife-whore, Belle de Jour on a commuter train, feeling rosy and sore and scraped raw from sex, guilty and ecstatic simultaneously.

La Femme Infidèle , Claude Chabrol's sly, comic masterpiece from which Mr. Lyne and his screenwriters drew their story, is everything Mr. Lyne is not: witty, ironic, an exercise in style and sensibility, with glacial camera movements capturing the chilly "perfection" of a materially satisfied but emotionally arid marriage. Stéphane Audran, Mr. Chabrol's then wife, plays the impeccable and impassive bourgeois with just a flicker of disdain, and Mr. Chabrol keeps his audience at a satirical remove until the ending, in which the fastidious little husband (Michel Bouquet) suddenly discovers, through jealousy and the lengths to which it propels him, a grand passion he (and we) never knew he had.

Mr. Lyne, by contrast, panders to materialistic as well as lubricious fantasies; a breath of humor or irony would topple the brick-and-mortar paradise of his well-heeled couple. He so eroticizes marital life (in Fatal Attraction , the child was a pure charmer and Anne Archer was more sensual than Glenn Close; in Unfaithful , the uxorious, tormented Richard Gere is more attractive than the lover) that he makes infidelity even harder to understand. But that, if anything, is his point. His high-concept premises may have all the depth of a glossy magazine layout: think of Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal , and the buzz surrounding the weighty question "Would you lend your wife to Robert Redford for a million dollars?"-to which our loved ones variously responded, "Hmmm … " and "Tax-free?"

It's precisely through such crass provocations that Mr. Lyne continually touches a nerve by exposing our dirty little secret: Even when we're "happy," fulfilled, blessed by fortune-perhaps especially in those privileged moments-we can be lured away in an instant, drawn by some demonic urge to plunge into a darker form of eros, risking all for the dangerous thrill of life on the edge.

So should we just accept infidelity as a fact of life and say that anything goes? No, the code of conduct called monogamy is valuable as an ideal that humans have created and kept alive at some sacrifice. Marriage is the myth around which we organize our emotional, practical and imaginative lives. Just because we can't live up to its sometimes onerous demands doesn't mean we should abandon it. And no matter how prevalent adultery may become, or how easy it may eventually be to pull off, on-screen or in real life, it doesn't make it any less objectionable to those betrayed.

I interpreted this application of gender adjectives to the aesthetics of floor covering as going beyond the normal husbandly resistance to change, signaling that the new rug was somehow a threat to the territorial/sexual status quo. Not unreasonable, since his office, such as it is (desk, Smith Corona typewriter circa 1959, foothills of papers), occupies the "public" space of the living room, and the sofa is his "office" couch. The diurnal struggle over turf-the ebb and flow of advancing and retreating papers, and the land-for-peace negotations pertaining thereto-constitute a major orchestral theme in the contrapuntal music of our marriage.

Moving or redecorating-any disruption-can cause problems, but so can staying put. "Your problem," said the super when he came to help me remove the old rug, "is you've been married too long. Everybody else has split up, moved out, gotten divorced once or twice, divvied up, or thrown out the furniture and started over."

In Talking It Over , the first of his two brilliant fictional dissections of a modern marriage, Julian Barnes has Gillian, the exasperated heroine, complain of her husband, "Oliver, like most men, is fundamentally lazy. They make one big decision and think they can spend the next few years sunning themselves like a lion on a hilltop." That next few years can stretch out to 20 or 30. The lion doesn't want his hilltop moved, redecorated, landscaped, challenged in any way. My husband long ago-as a child at a nature film-found himself identifying with the king of the jungle, so assured of his power that he had no need to exert himself, but could sleep away the day contentedly like the cat he is. Our living room, with the proximity of sofa and desk, had proved the perfect accommodation for such royal inertia.

Inevitably, the atmosphere grew even testier when Elizabeth, the friend/organizer/decorator who's helping me with the current sprucing up, suggested (with my approval) the possibility of moving his desk-now against the wall in the middle of the living room with a splendid view-to a more inconspicuous corner. The proposal was made in the most diplomatic manner possible, hedged with hypothetical and modifying clauses ("If you don't like it … " etc.), but the lion wasn't fooled. Two women ganging up on a man. Turf threatened. He didn't roar, but a dangerous silence descended. There are times in a marriage to hold your ground, and times to give way. Every marriage is an ongoing power struggle whose exact nature-the balance sheet of wins and losses, grievances and humiliations-is kept hidden by common if unconscious consent, until and unless a breakup or litigation forces it into the open.

In another of Talking It Over 's La Rochefoucauld–like aphorisms, Oliver says, "Marriage always consists of one moderate and one militant."

Yes, but when it's working we don't get stuck in either/or roles, but take turns at them. Indeed, one of the great appeals of marriage (or enduring couples, whether gay or straight) is that it allows for such a safe and enjoyable expression of duality within each of us: moderate and militant, male and female. I once wrote about my "mismatched" marriage: his Greek heritage, where the women hunt and gather and put in 20-hour days while the men sit around cafés drinking ouzo; my WASP one, where the men do the heavy lifting; both of us waiting for someone else to do the work. The piece got a huge response, letter after letter describing similar marriages. And I realized that everybody thinks their marriage is a mismatch, not just black and white or Jew and Protestant, but Irish Catholic and Italian Catholic, early riser vs. late nighter, anal vs. slob.

The dialectic is necessary: The mating dance survives and thrives on the oppositions woven into the myths of our partnerships.

I went to My Big Fat Greek Wedding to see how it compared to my skinny little WASP one. In the adaptation of her one-woman show, Nia Vardalos is of course the Greek female, raised to marry, cook and reproduce males, whereas my husband was one of those hopelessly spoiled and idolized male offspring. In this reverse mirror image, my filmic counterpart was Ian the WASP (John Corbett). Each is retreating from the monotony of his or her particular world-the vulgarity of one, the blandness of the other. But poor Ian is finally overwhelmed by the avalanche of the Greek extended family in full-attack mode, going so far in immersion as to get baptized. For us, however, a Greek wedding was never a possibility-there wasn't enough time in the world. And as bride, I got to call the shots: brief wedding, skimpy hors d'oeuvres, lots of booze.

We don't tell the whole truth about the different trade-offs that constitute the his-and-hers power dynamic of a marriage, partly because they're things we don't talk about (money, looks, brains, status), and partly because they change constantly as we take turns at playing master and surrendering spouse. Nor can losses and gains be easily tabulated, since one party, if smart, is always ready to wrest triumph from the jaws of defeat.

Take redecorating: It is threatening in that it symbolizes the domestication of the male, reminding the husband of his precarious toehold as a beast of the jungle who, in the domestic preserve, is always in peril of being marginalized to a figure in the carpet. But once the rug was installed, it became, overnight, a fait accompli , a thing of joy-comfortable, homey, praised as if it were his idea all along.

This was the new reality, from which any deviation would now be seen as anathema. The living room is once again his domain; the lion is sunning on his mountain top. All's right with the world.