Exodus: A memoir (26 page)

We slept in the same bed and hugged and cuddled, but we did not kiss or do anything else. This was for the better, but at the time it felt wrong and terrifying, like a form of rejection. Then we went out on Saturday night with his party-hardy cousin Katie, and he ordered three identical drinks from the bartender. They were
golden brown and had cherries in them. He gave Katie and me our drinks, and I peered at my glass.

“Shirley Temple?” I asked.

“No, silly goose,” he said. “That’s a Manhattan.”

“What’s in it?”

“Bourbon. And some other stuff.”

“Oh.” I was so surprised. He’d never gotten me an actual alcoholic drink before. We’d always had this thing, our matching Cokes or club sodas.

“What’s yours?”

“Same thing.” I was so stupid, too. I didn’t get it. I thought it was his first drink. I had observed the tension between him and his sister; I knew they’d been fighting for years before I first met Conor. I thought he was being tempted to drink because he felt bad. He had been so emotional last night, going on about how I was the only consistent person in his life, which seemed to say more about everyone else than about me.

So I watched him drink. I got drunk first, of course. Inexperienced, I downed my cherry-topped Manhattan in one delicious gulp. I think we each had three Manhattans. I hit my max and cried while we shimmied on the dance floor. Katie let me bawl into her jacket. But then I was over it. It wasn’t until we hit the third bar that I realized that Conor was beginning to be affected. I’d never seen him like this, slushy almost, his usual crisp manner and presence blurred into a sort of miserable blob.

I urged Katie to help me take him back to his sister’s house. But she wasn’t ready to be done with the night, and I ended up leaving her at some other bar while I carted Conor home. He was completely gone. I worried about getting him into the car, but I should
have been more worried about getting him off of it. He collapsed onto the hood and refused to move for five minutes despite my begging and shushing. It was 3 a.m. The lights in the house were out. Conor’s sister said she’d leave the back door open for us, so I dragged him around, through the little door in the fence. But before we made it to the back door, I heard a loud thunk and crash. Conor had tripped over the barbecue and knocked it over. He lay sprawled on the ground pathetically. Something clicked quietly and quickly in my brain that I would later qualify as disappointment. He wobbled back to his feet and beckoned me close, drunkenly.

“What?” I whispered. I was angry now.

“Please,” he slurred. “Don’t let . . . them . . . see . . . me like this. They can’t see me like this.”

So he was aware of that much, at least, aware that he had gone too far because he didn’t know how to stop, aware that in this moment he really was an alcoholic, aware that his deciding to drink was bad and put his family in a terrible position.

I sighed. “Okay.”

I snuck him upstairs, where he fell into bed, already asleep as I pulled off his shoes, jacket, and belt.

He was very blasé about it the next day, refusing to admit that his drinking was a problem. It had always been drugs, he said, in complete contradiction to what I had heard before. Alcohol had never been his problem. Anyway he had been sober for ten years now, he could have a drink once in a while, and would I just give it up? He confessed that he had started drinking again a while back.

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.”