Exodus: A memoir (27 page)

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.

There was a pit in my stomach as I walked toward him in the dim light of the restaurant, already thinking of ways to shorten our meeting. He was in a corner, wearing his ubiquitous scarf, tied in that same signature way. He stood up to hug me, and we both held on a moment longer than normal. And just like that, my anxiety dissipated like a rain cloud banished by the sun. I felt as if I were seeing a very old friend from a distant past, like a friend from home. He radiated warmth and affection.

I sat down. We joked awkwardly with the waiter. We smiled at each other. He looked straight at me, just like he had when we’d first met, the kind of gaze that most would find disconcerting but that I interpreted as a desire to really see me, as a commitment to get to know me. I let him stare.

At one point, after a bit of small talk, I reached my hands out across the curiously long, narrow table between us. I couldn’t reach his end of it, but I let my hands dangle there anyway, as if to illustrate the physical gap between us.

“Let’s not do this,” I said. I had told him over the phone that I didn’t want to do dinner or drinks. I didn’t want a date. I wanted a friend, a lover, a real connection. I didn’t want to go through the alienating motions of convention.

“What?”

“Let’s not put a table between us.” I was reminded of the table that had separated me from my future husband ten years earlier, when we had met for the first time.

“Let’s not do that whole dinner thing when we get together. We don’t have to do that. Why can’t we just hang out, go for a walk, just be around each other? We don’t need to structure it.”

“Come sit here,” he said, smiling. His seat was a silver booth built into the wall. I came over to his side. We kissed, and it was
familiar, as if we kissed the same way. Our spontaneous impulses, although generated individually, felt like they traveled along the same track. His movements anticipated my own.