I enjoy variability, like the days when it rains and then the sun makes the streets steam, and then the clouds stage an attack and the sun fights back with a red and pink explosion over the western mountains. I'm bored when the sky is gray and depthless all day. I tried to explain this to my wife.

"What, I'm not good enough for you?" she said.

"What?"

"You want more variability. You want a redhead, like every other fool?"

She teased me, but the next day came home with a wig. Not red, but black with a few strands of purple. Straight stiff hair that was bobbed below her chin. She surprised me with it in bed and I was so obviously turned on that she bought a different wig the next week, and another the week after that.

Now when she wants sex, my wife wears one of her five wigs. There is the black one, three different shades and styles of brunette, and an atomic pink one with pigtails. It's fun. She likes having me look at her as if she were a stranger, a one-night stand whom I would handle differently, with more hunger and less tenderness than usual. She, too, behaves differently when she's wearing those wigs. She leans back to watch me watching her; she wants me behind her as she kneels in front of a mirror; she moans as if we're being recorded. But now I'm starting to feel like we're having an affair with each other and I'm ready to have my wife back. I say, "Could we try it without the wig?"

"You want me to find a red one?"

"No, just you."She looks at me as if I'm being ridiculous. "You want to try costumes? French maid or a nurse?"

Clichés. What's next? Cheerleader, stewardess, school girl. She's trying hard, and I know better than to shut her down. We've been married for a decade and the sex is better with the wigs than it's been in years. But what I want is how she was when I first met her: a girl outside the canoe club with a wet bikini bottom soaking through her white shorts. A girl who wanted nothing to do with me as she tied her surfboard to the roof of her jeep.

"I want you," I say.

She rolls her eyes. "You think you do, but my tits sag and none of my jeans fit anymore. You just haven't noticed.

"I'm ready to contradict her, ready to recite her best assets. But she's right: I daydream of yester-her and yester-me, and still see who we were more than who we've become. This, I think, is a gift.

I lean back and pinch my bottom lip. When she turns to me, I say, "How about surfer girl?"