We saw each other for the last time on Monday, after the whirlwind weekend.
“I don’t do crazy,” I said, after trying to have an honest conversation with him about his well-being. Then I walked away without saying good-bye.
But he was the only man I had ever fallen in love with, at the time, and I realized that in many ways we were the same. I was as vulnerable as an alcoholic. I thought I was above self-destructive behaviors; I had always deplored them in others. But alcohol and religion have something in common: they are ways of coping with a scary and difficult world for people who feel they can’t manage otherwise. Sure, alcohol is something you choose, and religion is something I was born into, but for plenty of people, it’s vice versa.
Do I do crazy? I hardly know what I do at this point.
I became afraid, as time went on, that Conor had ruined me. I regretted being seduced by him; it felt as if he had somehow damaged the mechanism in my brain that powered my attractions. I couldn’t muster the slightest crush. I suppose, in a situation like that, all it takes is for one person to come along who can at least rival the appeal of your last love. That would be Jonathan.
“Don’t let your baggage get in the way of really going somewhere in a relationship,” Jonathan’s text message said portentously. He’d been talking about what kind of clothes I would look good in and how he wanted to buy me a gift, but I was making it difficult—no, depressing, he said. This was because I had insisted I wasn’t a doll to be dressed. I was fine with his having twenty pairs of shoes in his closet, or rather, his suitcase, but he needed to know that those sartorial habits were never going to extend to my wardrobe. One pair of shoes in a carry-on would always be enough for me (one very nice pair).
Jonathan was a film and TV director who traveled to his work locations with three large suitcases filled with clothes, shoes, and accessories. When we met, his house in Los Angeles was on the market and he was dying to move to New York. I had been hired to work as a consultant on a TV show set in Brooklyn; he was working there on an outgoing episode, and I was preparing for an upcoming one. On my first day, when I was desperately trying to keep track of all the people I was being introduced to and what their jobs were, I had given him the mental nickname of “scarf guy,” because he wore an expensive-looking ribbed cashmere scarf wrapped artfully around his neck, even though we were indoors and it was very warm. (The only way that’s not a crime, I thought, is if you’re gay.) He had tousled dark hair and a neatly groomed black beard with thin streaks of white running through it. His skin was dark and weathered like a skier’s.
He kept looking over at me, his blue eyes gazing intensely at me from underneath a dark and furrowed brow. I couldn’t decide if it was a Hollywood thing or if there was something on my shirt. When he insisted on leading me to all my meetings, taking over from the assistant that the studio had sent, I thought it was because he wanted more time to ask work-related questions. When he dragged me to the set and plunked me down on a director’s chair with a set of headphones and asked me to listen for nothing in particular, I figured my time was being monopolized for other reasons. He liked me, which I found immediately suspicious and then inexplicable. He was too well dressed, too cool, too L.A.
I gave him the same treatment I gave every guy who showed interest in me: a combination of withering scorn, acerbic wit, and the occasional glance of outright disbelief. Yet it wasn’t working, and I didn’t understand why.
When Jonathan called a couple of evenings after our first meeting, I took his innocent questions on my notes at face value. Then he called again, and again. And there we were, arguing about fashion and relationship baggage.
I learned that Jonathan had been raised by born-again Christian parents. He told me that he, too, had married young, and it hadn’t worked out; he mentioned he had a nine-year-old daughter. Oh, wow, I said; does she live with you or her mom? How often do you see her?
“Oh, once every few months,” he said nonchalantly. “On the short breaks between work commitments.” I was flabbergasted. Should that have been my red flag?
Or maybe the red flag was the fact that he didn’t read. Ever. Oh, he read scripts, and he read books, if you considered listening to them on audiotape in the car “reading.” But he never longed for the pleasure of picking up a book and perusing steadily through its pages. Yet I could tell he was interested in me because of my story; he told me he had immediately purchased the audio version of my book and was halfway through it within weeks of our first meeting.
“Can you imagine what people will say,” he asked, “when they see us together? My God, it will blow their minds.” He seemed excited more by the idea of me than anything else.
“Why does that matter?” I asked, confused.
He would get such a kick out of seeing how people dealt with the contrast between us, he said. I had this vague sense that I was only talking to his shadow, that in truth he was standing outside of our conversations, directing from behind the scenes, while I spoke with his stand-in.
His intensely sexy text messages often had me fumbling for a response. “The first time I’ll touch you, it will take your breath away,” he assured me. “I can’t wait to have you up against a wall, my mouth on your neck.” They were always specific descriptions, as if he was describing a scene in one his scripts.
One night, after I had ignored a few of those texts, he called and asked me, as soon as I picked up the phone, “Are you not able to enjoy sex?”
“I can enjoy sex just fine,” I answered. I can. Conor gave me that much, the certainty that I was sexually functional, that I had not been rendered defunct by repression and trauma. I had not removed all of my clothes with him, though. I had clung to the last pieces of underwear, as if by shedding them I would be crossing the line into some unforgivable territory. I wondered if I’d ever achieve the ability to really strip myself, physically and emotionally, for another person.
“Then what is it?”
If only it were that simple. I had no idea what it was. Was I shy? I could flirt, but only in metaphor. Was I afraid of the real thing, or was it just that vulgarity turned me off? I must have brought some of that with me from my upbringing.
My ex-husband hardly ever masturbated because it made him feel guilty. There’s no way Jonathan emerged from a rigidly observant childhood unscathed, I surmised.
“Jonathan, how often do you masturbate?”
“Never.”
“That’s crazy. Nobody ‘never’ masturbates.”
“Why would I masturbate? If I want some, I can get some.”
I pressed the point, but Jonathan was adamant. He was offended that I would think there was something wrong with that, but I did. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly, but I knew it wasn’t normal. Even I masturbated, and I was plenty messed up about sex.
I had just come back from yet another visit to my gynecologist. Although the fuss around my vagina had died down after I left my marriage, and had remained that way throughout most of my relationship with Conor, ever since our breakup, my difficulties had resumed, albeit to a lesser degree. I was beginning to wonder if vaginas were simply organs that demanded perfect happiness in order to function.
No gynecologist had ever been overly thrilled to have me as a patient, but my current one, Megan, was really starting to show her frustration. To her, my nether regions presented an infuriating conundrum. Nothing in her education equipped her for the battle with my irascible and mutinous vagina.
When Megan and I had originally sat down in her office for a first consult, I think I did my best to prepare her for the unique situation she would be dealing with. I gave her the basic rundown without going on for too long, using all the appropriate medical terminology that had been thrown at me over the years, and she dutifully took notes.
It started with vaginismus, at least I think so. I’m almost sure. I got married, I couldn’t have sex, I
received multiple diagnoses, but that was the one that stuck. I fixed it with dilators and hypnotherapy, at least to the point where I actually had a functional, if not happy, vagina, and got pregnant.
After giving birth, I developed a condition rarely seen outside menopause, a shedding of the vaginal walls related to a sudden drop in estrogen. I was a medical anomaly, but at least they had a cure for it. It went away, and over the next few years, it and many other things came back. Burning, itching, discomfort, you name it. Put it on a microscope slide and it looked like everything or nothing. I was given all the diagnoses, all the ointments, all the pills.
“Just warning you,” I had said. “My vagina is very unhappy.”
I started calling my vagina “unhappy” after reading The Camera My Mother Gave Me, by Susanna Kaysen. I requested it at the library during the period when I was dilating in preparation for sex with my husband, to give me something to do while I clenched down on those plastic tubes. It was a memoir of one woman’s vaginal pain, a no-holds-barred catalog of gynecological malaise so obnoxious I’m surprised it ever got published. Perusing the Internet for reactions to the book lent credence to my newly found conviction: no one wants to know that much about vaginas.
Which is unfortunate, because unhappy vaginas do not like to be ignored.
After the initial examination, Megan predictably tossed three prescription medications in my lap. A steroid, an antibiotic, and a topical painkiller.
“I don’t know what exactly is going on in there, but one of these is bound to get rid of it.”
I was back in a month, as promised. Megan took one look and threw up her hands in disbelief.
“I told you so.” I smiled. I was used to this. I had gone through this with other gynecologists.
Megan wrote another prescription.
“If this one doesn’t do it,” she said, “I don’t know what else I can do. The options are kind of limited. For most people, we just alternate between them.”
I came back a month later just to prove my point.
“I don’t want to give you another prescription,” Megan said. “These things are harsh on your pH. They have serious side effects.”
We had discussed my diet and lifestyle. I was off wheat, dairy, corn, soy, sugar, and preservatives. I was taking all the probiotics. Everything else was feeling great.
“I think you should see a naturopath,” Megan advised.
“Are you saying Western medicine can’t help me?”
“You saw what I can offer you. It’s not helping. I don’t want to be irresponsible and keep dosing you with the same stuff. This is all I have. But there’s something out of whack in your body that a naturopath might be able to help you with.”
How do you tell a naturopath to heal your vagina, I wondered? Does he have an exam table with stirrups? Or does he just recommend herbs and remedies? Our local naturopath was male. I simply could not imagine walking into his office and telling him the story of my unhappy vagina.
If all of it was in my head, as the very first gynecologist I had ever visited had told me, then it was up to my head to establish friendlier communications with my nether regions. For now, out of respect for its crankiness, it would have to be off-limits. Until I could figure out what it really wanted.
“You don’t just become a new person,” I said to Jonathan on the phone. “You go through a childhood of repression, a few years of sexual trauma, and then you run away—it doesn’t mean that you start from the beginning.”
“What are you saying?”
“I wanted to prove to myself I was unaffected. That all it took was escape from unhealthy sexual attitudes and an oppressive environment, and bam, there was my repressed sexuality back in its rightful place. But it comes back to haunt you. You have to deal with it.”
“I don’t understand. If you have a good lover, then the sex is great. It’s that simple. What more is there?”
What’s more is everything else that’s involved in the process of getting off. How you see yourself. How you see the person with you. How safe you feel. How scared you feel. Does sex make you feel better or worse about yourself after? Violated or complete? Dirty or clean? All those things matter.
I didn’t know how to say that to Jonathan, because the idea that sex was simple to him frustrated and terrified me. What did I have in common with such a person?
“I didn’t get to wipe the slate clean. Those are permanent markings. I’m going to have to figure out a way to draw on top of those markings and incorporate them into a new and beautiful picture. I have to make the ugliness in my past an integral part of what’s beautiful in my future. That’s not going to be easy. Not as easy as starting from scratch.”
“But tell me this in real terms, not in metaphor. What does it really mean?”
“You don’t necessarily recover from sexual dysfunction, but you can work around the handicap.” It sounded way less pretty when I said it that way. Maybe that’s why I liked talking and flirting in metaphors. Everything just sounded better.
“That’s not really that profound,” Jonathan said.
I paused, swallowed. “It’s just true. For a lot of people, not just for me.” And I wish you knew how to help with that. But Jonathan wasn’t deep. He was a movies guy. To him, it was all about what you see. Not what you think. You never get to see what the actors are thinking, I thought. If there’s one thing I learned working on a TV set, it’s that. I’d watch them on camera, and they’d rattle off their lines so articulately and convincingly that I’d assume they were drawing from personal experience—then they’d show up in the director’s tent and barely be able to stammer through half a sentence. Did they choose this job particularly for that reason, for the gift of other people’s words with which to tell a story, any story, even if it wasn’t their own? Or did they have to create a mental vacuum in order to make space for someone else’s words—get in a zone, in a sense? I worried that Jonathan looked at me like he looked at his actors: as someone to put in a spot marked with duct tape, someone to hand lines to. I felt as if I was being ever so gently manipulated into a story he had already written and planned out in his mind.
I never actually said to Jonathan what I meant when I talked about sexual dysfunction. I never told Conor, either. It wasn’t that I needed the specifics to be out there; I just needed a little more understanding than most. The only problem was, I met very few men in whom I could have faith that they would extend me that understanding. Did I really deserve that extra mile? What was I willing to offer in exchange?
A month later, Jonathan came to New York to shoot another episode of the TV show we had worked on together. He had sold his house in L.A., but he hadn’t yet found a place in New York, so he stayed at the Trump SoHo and commuted to the set in Brooklyn. He worked eighteen-hour days, including weekends. My phone would vibrate under the pillow around midnight, and I’d wake up to see his name on the caller ID. We’d talk for ten minutes, and I’d listen to him fall asleep on the line, and then I’d lie awake and wait to feel tired again.
Often on these phone calls Jonathan would give me fatherly lectures, words of advice or concern. I didn’t quite know what to do with them. I thought it was nice that he cared so much for me, always inquiring about how I was really doing, wanting to hear what was on my mind, eager to share his perspective. Yet it wasn’t sexy. I couldn’t imagine sleeping with him as I listened patiently to his parenting guidance.
“I just want to inspire you,” he would say. “I like to be a person that inspires others.”
After we said good night, I stayed up, tossing and turning. Although we had seen each other only a few times, his image was burned into my brain. Jonathan is dark, swarthy even. I had never dated dark-haired or dark-skinned men because they reminded me of my father and my father’s brother Uncle Sinai, who still liked to heap abuse on women, me being his favorite target.
I
remembered acknowledging to myself, back when Jonathan had befriended me on set, that he reminded me of my dad. Not in a specific way, like his facial features matched up, but in the coloring, the lean body type, the big, jolly smile that showed two rows of teeth. There was a vibe about him that I associated with the men in my family.
I did not have daddy issues. That wasn’t why I was attracted to, or kept attracting, older men. It couldn’t be, I said to those who accused me of suffering from them. I had not so much been hurt by my father as I had wrestled with his mental and physical absence. Not only was my father completely uninvolved in my upbringing, but also I was constantly aware of his inability to be consciously present. If I carried a scar, it was that of an excision. How to fathom the filling of my personal space with a male figure when none had featured in my original story?
This was my problem then, I thought. I lacked the ability to even imagine a man in my life.
“We have to try to meet again,” Jonathan said one night.
I thought, if I meet him and it goes well, I’m doomed to fall for a man who doesn’t even make his permanent home nearby. A man who works so much he has no time for anything else. Who sees his daughter on breaks between episodes. Why would he want to see me, I wondered, if he knows he has no room for me in his life?
And there was another fear. Since Conor, I hadn’t seriously dated a man for more than two years. Of the few men who had tried, most had triggered an anxious response; I would feel dizzy and nauseated and make an excuse to leave quickly. I didn’t want a repeat of that experience. What if I met Jonathan and had a panic attack? It would be late at night, the environment would be crowded, there would be alcohol involved—all of those things were triggers for me. It would be devastating for me to have to confront the idea that any future romantic encounter would always evoke a fight-or-flight response in my body. If someone like Jonathan, whom I had been talking to for months, couldn’t penetrate my walls, no one could. And I would have to go home and live with the knowledge that even the most well-intentioned man couldn’t get me to let my guard down. My fear would be set permanently, like pottery left to dry in the sun.
Exodus: A memoir Page 19
