Lust & Wonder (5 page)

I wondered if I should talk to my married therapist about how much work it was to give somebody a blow job and how I really didn't think I liked it at all and what did that mean? As I wondered this, Mitch pulled his dick out of my mouth and finished himself off.

I felt more relief than if I had come, too.

“You didn't have to do that,” he said. As if I had scrubbed his kitchen floor with Murphy's Oil Soap.

“I love doing it,” I said. Then I stood up and sat next to him on the couch, looking at the wet spots on his T-shirt.

“I need to change out of this shirt,” he said, standing up.

Alone on the sofa, the relief I felt was now being replaced by a sucking sense of unnamed dread.

When he returned wearing a fresh T-shirt, he sat at the end of the sofa and turned to face me. “You did that to please me, I know you did. And I know you didn't enjoy it, and it scares me.”

I wanted to smack him. The whole point of the blow job was so that we would not have this very conversation. “I'm getting more comfortable, I really am,” I told him. Then I thought,
So will you please shut the hell up?

Mitch looked increasingly agitated. “I feel rejected that I can't make you happy in that way, that I don't turn you on.”

On his face was the exact same expression he had when he talked about how Little, Brown turned down his novel.

I stared at the dark television set, and then he looked away from me and stared at the TV, as well. It was as if we were willing it to come on by itself, as if we were waiting for something—anything—to happen.

He left the couch and climbed into bed, which was just a futon on his floor. In less than a minute, he was asleep.

I was wired now from having had all those martinis at dinner followed by the frustrating oral sex and then the messy discussion that followed it. The thought of sitting quietly on his sofa watching the TV on mute or reading a book was unbearable.

So I quietly snuck out the door and walked the three blocks home. It was handy that we lived so close to each other.

I had several more drinks in my apartment, enough to put me in a rowdy mood. Enough to make me pick up my phone.

*   *   *

I called an ex-boyfriend who worked as a bartender in Soho and asked if he wanted to get together when he was done for the night.

An hour later, we were crammed against each other in the bathtub of his East Village apartment. We'd just had sex, but it seemed we were about to get at it again.

Sex with Doug had always been excellent. It was everything else between us that didn't work. Nothing that came out of his mouth interested me in the slightest. And his ears seemed to turn off whenever I spoke a word.

It was almost six in the morning when I finally dressed and walked back home to my place. Once there, I sat on my bed in the dim, opening light of the morning and thought,
Now it's over with Mitch. Now that I've cheated on him, I can't ever be honest
.

I lay back against the pillows and stared up at the ceiling. I hated myself. I thought,
I am just a destructive force in the world. Look at all the bodies I leave behind me.

*   *   *

By the close of the following week, I had decided not to tell Mitch about my infidelity because I'd come to see it in a different light. I hadn't simply been horny and called an ex to get off. It had been far more academic in nature: I needed to see if I even could still have sex.

Which I could.

So I had learned that nothing was broken exactly.

The problem was that sex with an ex-boyfriend isn't ideal from a research point of view. There was history, familiarity, a certain degree of comfort and ease. That one night, I realized, simply hadn't told me enough. It would be far more helpful to observe my emotions and responses with somebody I didn't know. A stranger. Therapy could take forever to fix a complex sexual issue like mine. What if I could fix it myself? Wasn't it worth a try at least?

Especially considering Mitch's latest ultimatum. He'd confronted me early one morning with another frank discussion about the withered state of our sexual relationship. Very soon, he said, we needed to resolve the sexual issues between us, because he was feeling increasingly frustrated and hurt. “It's making me want to cheat on you,” he told me. “And that makes me hate myself even more than I already do.”

He further admitted that Famous Author Friend “thinks we should break up. He said if we're not having sex, we don't have a real relationship, anyway.”

I was horrified that Mitch had talked about this stuff with him. Because now, a gigantic stopwatch had been set above my head. If I didn't fix myself fast, Mitch would have no choice but to dump me. Then at next year's holiday parties, I would be talked about as the unsexual ex-boyfriend, the one with a smooth, Ken-doll crotch.

What bothered me most of all was that I had been neutered in the eyes of Famous Author Friend himself.

And that would simply not do.

*   *   *

The ticking of the stopwatch above my head—
get fixed, have sex, get fixed, have sex
—placed me in a constant state of anxiety.

I thought of sex incessantly. Not of having it but of why I wasn't. When I closed my eyes to sneeze, I saw Mitch's pale, skinny legs, his wiggling toes. I heard, “Hey, baby!” spoken in a goofy, cartoonish voice.

If he wasn't sullen and depressed, Mitch was playful and odd. He collected action figures and wore superhero underwear. His rumpled hair made him look like Bart Simpson's older brother.

I was pretty goofy, too. In many ways, it seemed, we were so much alike. And this was what made me pause and wonder, exactly
how much
alike?

*   *   *

On AOL, you could have up to five different screen names, each with a different profile. Mitch's profile, attached to the only screen name I knew, contained several unusual abbreviations.

Brn
for his hair,
Bloo
to describe his eye color. His height and weight were not approximate but exact, because Mitch was obsessive about his body, though only the top half.

He listed the circumference of his chest: fifty-three inches.

AOL allowed you to search member profiles by entering information into any of the search fields. You could search by age, astrological sign; whatever string of characters you entered would be matched against existing member profiles.

The results were returned in the form of a list.

When I did this, it spat back two names: one was Mitch's own e-mail address, the one I used every day.

And a second, unfamiliar screen name: RealGuy100.

I clicked on the link to open the profile, and almost line for line, it was a match with Mitch's, except that this screen name listed him as single as opposed to blank like his familiar profile. Blank, of course, could mean many things, one of which was “seriously dating somebody and madly in love.”

I knew two things: this was
definitely
Mitch, and single meant
single
.

I immediately added RealGuy100 to my buddy list. The next time he logged on, his name would appear in a little window on the corner of my screen, along with the names of other people I knew who were also online.

I waited.

A half hour later, RealGuy100's name popped up.

AOL allowed you to click a name, and if the person was in a public chat room, it would tell you which one. I pressed the
LOCATE MEMBER ONLINE
button and it said, “RealGuy100 is in member chat room NewYorkCity Men 4 Men NOW.”

I thought,
Well, well, well
.

I poured myself a tall glass of scotch and settled in. This was deeply thrilling.

How far would he go? Would he actually hook up with somebody? Would he have sex with some complete stranger and then act as if nothing had happened the next time we were together?

Obviously, I realized, I had no choice. If Mitch was sneaking around behind my back and having sex with people he met in common chat rooms, that would change everything. I could never be with somebody who wasn't trustworthy and monogamous.

I would have to lay a trap.

I created my own new screen name: SwellGuyNY. I added a fantasy profile, assembling all the physical qualities I knew Mitch found attractive in a man. When SwellGuyNY entered the same chat room and Mitch clicked on the screen name, the profile would be irresistible to him.

Using his own profile measurements as a starting point, I subtracted one inch in height and added several inches to the diameter of my legs. I then named several movies, all of which I knew to be Mitch's favorites. I quoted something from a book I knew he loved and said I had a dog, because one of Mitch's greatest sources of complaint was that his building would not allow them and someday he wanted one.

I logged on under my new name and clicked my way into the chat room where I'd seen RealGuy100. There were twenty-three other people in the room. Instantly, a chat window appeared with RealGuy100's name.

What's up?

Thinking of hooking up
, I replied.

Me too
, he said.

I asked,
What are you into?

He wrote,
Totally versatile … love kissing … getting really oral, etc.

It was the
etc.
that made me feel queasy. What the fuck did that mean? I could not believe that I was dating somebody who would “etc.” with strangers and then wanted to kiss me with that same RealGuy100 mouth.

I now loathed Mitch. I typed,
Send me your picture?

He did, and it was Mitch, a scan of his six-year-old author photo. His mother had taken the picture.

I logged off. I just dumped him there. Now, not only was his boyfriend rejecting him sexually at home but so were the guys in the AOL chat room. Perhaps this new anonymous rejection would send him into a spiral of misery, which I felt he absolutely deserved.

An hour later, he called and left a message on my answering machine. “Are we getting together later?” he asked.

I didn't call him back. He called three more times, and I let the machine answer.

The following morning when he called, I did pick up. “Hey,” I said, upbeat.

He was crying. “What did I do? Are you mad at me? Where have you been?”

I told him I'd been exhausted and fallen asleep last night.

He said he was going crazy because it felt like things between us were falling apart. He asked if I'd been to my psychiatrist, and I told him, “He bumped me up to twice a week.”

Then I suggested we take some
space
.

I used exactly that word because it's the most infuriating word of all.

He tearfully muttered, “Maybe space is a good thing.”

Of course, it never is, but he agreed. He was sniffling when he hung up.

A minute later, RealGuy100 logged on and went into a chat room. I'd cloaked my name, made myself invisible so he couldn't see me but I could see him. Now I knew that my sexually frustrated and weepy boyfriend was completely willing to screw around on me behind my back.

And I knew this because I was stalking him like a psychopath online. I was exactly like Kathy Bates in
Misery
, except not as fat and therefore more nimble.

*   *   *

Dr. Schwartz looked drained that evening when I arrived for my emergency appointment at eight. A puffy-faced, red-eyed woman who had obviously been crying for the last fifty minutes was just leaving his office when I got there, and he ushered me in immediately. No doubt she had originally been his last appointment for the day, so I actually felt sorry for him.

But once I pulled out all my printouts, the pages and pages of documentation detailing Mitch's online exploits with strangers, each of which happened to be me using a different screen name, Dr. Schwartz seemed anything but weary.

Each of my different online identities had a unique photo, lifted from elsewhere on the Web. Along with this, I had brought a stack of e-mails from Mitch, with lines like “I would never cheat on you, but maybe we have to have an open relationship even though that's not what I want.”

Using these documents, I explained what I had done, or rather, how I'd tried to fix myself.

He was riveted.

He was holding all my printouts in his lap. “Help me understand,” he said. “After you had bathtub sex with your ex-boyfriend, what triggered the series of affairs that followed?”

I explained how the first affair happened because I thought maybe I needed to “practice.” Maybe I just needed to oil the machinery and I would be okay. I could forgive myself, I thought, because I was doing it for us, not me.

“Besides,” I explained, “with an ex-boyfriend, it's easy to just sort of add that one sexual encounter to all the other times you had sex before, when you were a couple. So in a real sense, that first affair didn't even happen.”

Dr. Schwartz nodded. He was following me. Possibly, he even approved of my logic. It was hard to know for sure.

“The next affair happened because the first one really didn't teach me anything, and I thought,
I have to do this again but with a total stranger
. But that was a failure, as well, because the guy I had sex with was physically much more my type than Mitch.”

“I'm confused,” he said. “How was this second affair a failure? Were you unable to get an erection?”

“No,” I explained. “I got several erections. It was a failure because the guy was much hotter than Mitch could ever be. So it wasn't a fair and unbiased study, you know what I mean? It's like, obviously, I can get it up for the Brazilian soccer player with the philosophy scholarship at NYU, because who wouldn't be able to get it up for him? I mean, he was semipro, you know?”

Dr. Schwartz glanced up at the ceiling as if performing calculations. Eventually, he looked back at me and said, “Okay, I think I've got it straight.”