Sex Object (8 page)

I called my father, and while I didn't tell him the whole story I did tell him about the condom taped to my door and about hooking up with Kyle's roommate. He told me it would be fine.
It could have been a lot worse
, he said.
When boys get to that place they can do really bad things.
I was lucky.

I stopped leaving my room during the day. I didn't go to
class and ignored the mailed warnings that arrived in my campus box. I knew I did not want to be there next year.

Spring was rainy but beautiful in New Orleans. I spent more time walking around the neighborhood that surrounded the campus than going to class, dodging the buck moth caterpillars that fell from the trees. They were plump and cute but their stings hurt like hell.

I heard a rumor that Kyle's parents had shown up at the dorm. They found out that he was failing classes and so they pulled him out, putting all of his things in the back of their car and not even giving him a chance to say good-bye to anyone. When I expressed my relief to one of my girlfriends on the floor, she scowled at me.
It's shitty
, she says,
to take pleasure in someone else's pain
.

Before I left at the end of the semester I got a letter saying that if I wanted to stay enrolled I would need to take summer classes to make up for all the ones that I skipped in the spring. I threw it away and told my parents that I wanted to transfer—leaving out that I didn't have much of a choice.

FRIENDS MAKE FUN OF PAUL AND ME FOR BEING
BASICALLY
married
while in college but we are far from perfect. I am far from perfect. One day while we are at Paul's house in Westchester, he plays video games with his youngest brother, sitting on the floor in front of the bed that belongs to his middle brother. His middle brother and I are lying on our stomachs, heads
propped up by our hands, also watching. At some point, this brother slides his hand over and puts it on my ass. I don't move my eyes from the screen; I don't say anything. I'm not sure what to do so I do nothing and let him leave it there, though I think I remember his rubbing me at one point. He is seventeen years old. I am flattered but also frozen.

We catch up over a dinner years later, and Paul tells me that despite his support of my bourgeoning feminism I got drunk one night and yelled at him when he tried to pick me up off the floor, saying something about not needing a man. I'm not sure if this is the memory of a person who has caricaturized what a feminist might do or the actions of a drunken idiot newly finding her politics, but either case does not seem very flattering to me. I am either an asshole or someone that a person remembers as an asshole.

I WOULD LIKE TO SAY THAT BEING WITH SOMEONE WHO LEGITIMATELY
loved and respected me brought out the best in me but the truth is that anything good that Paul gave to me I rejected. I know that I loved him—he's probably the only person other than my husband for whom I really think that's true—but I treated him poorly, still. I'm sure I was a good girlfriend in many ways (see: road head, above) but although I was drawn to someone who treated me as his equal, I did not know what to do with that gift.

That I thought it was a gift rather than a given was probably the problem.

Being treated nicely felt wrong somehow, as if we were acting out what a relationship should be rather than being in it. For men who hate women, an admission like this one is proof that
see, women want a guy who treats them like shit
but that's not true either. What is closer to the truth is that when confronted with the love you deserve, it is easier to mock it than accept it. Especially when everything else you have experienced of love and connection is based on something more like control or disdain. That is part of the reason I ended up with my husband. I loved him, yes—passionately and fully. But I also recognized at some point that loving him was a good choice. It took me a while to get there.

Before we moved out of our apartment in Albany—heading back to New York so Paul could move back in with his parents and look for jobs and I could move in with a friend and apply to graduate school—our cat, scared by the noise and disappearing furniture, snuck behind the stove and into a hole in the wall. Neidra ran far in and couldn't figure out how to get back out. As friends helped us move, she stayed in the wall—for hours, I think. Paul sat by the wall, calling to her, reaching in occasionally, trying to lure her with treats and then, finally, tuna fish.

We decided that I would keep her, but one night when my roommate got drunk she slammed the door on Neidra's tail—amputating most of it and skinning the rest. My roommate
didn't realize the harm she'd caused, she said, but when I got home there was blood all over the apartment and I had to rush the cat in to get surgery to remove the rest of her tail. She stayed with Paul for a while after that.

We had talked about getting married but he wanted to live near his parents; he wanted a housewife, I thought, and wasn't interested enough to ask which graduate programs I was applying to. He wanted a calm sort of life. And so we broke up, not long after the dream about olives; I told him that we wanted different things.

Later we would sleep together when he was seeing other women, when I was seeing other men. It was easy to have a drink or go to dinner and by the end we would be holding hands again, looking at each other as if we were still in college. In a way I think I wished we were.

So when I told him, years later, that I thought we should give it another try it did not surprise me that he responded by saying that his mother never thought I would be good with kids. That I would work too much and not be willing to be a stay-at-home mom. It felt as if he had been waiting to hurt me with something for a while, maybe deservedly.

He married someone—smart, blond, pretty—who wanted the same things that he did. They bought a house in the same town as his parents and had two kids. He seems happy.

THE DAY AFTER HE FUCKED ME WHILE I WAS UNCONSCIOUS, I HAD
Carl buy me a grilled cheese sandwich and french fries.

I had gone to his apartment the night before with my sister because he was having a few friends over and she had nothing else going on. She left early in the evening and I got drunker than usual faster than usual. The next morning, I woke up confused and with ten missed calls from my parents. I was naked.

When I joked to him about date-raping me, he shot back:
Don't worry, I went down on you first.

I DON'T REMEMBER HOW OR WHERE I MET CARL, BUT I IMAGINE IT
must have been at a bar, and it must have been in midtown because he worked in finance and there were none of those types in Williamsburg yet. I also don't remember liking him much, which doesn't say a lot for my taste or mind-set at the time.

Carl wasn't great-looking or particularly charming, but he had a decent sense of humor and I was bored and dating a lot.
So even though he had visible blackheads in his ear and I found him somewhat disgusting in bed—all sweat and freckles—I kept seeing him.

Whenever I spent the night at his place—a high-rise in Manhattan overlooking the river—he would give me money for cab fare home. It was often more than I needed and I could never figure out if I thought this was gentlemanly or if it made me feel like a prostitute.

He came to visit me in Brooklyn once, to look at the loft I had just rented with a girl I used to intern with and her boyfriend. It was huge and illegal, like any decent apartment in Williamsburg in 2002. I had to bring one month's rent in cash for the building manager as a “down payment” that I would never see again before we could move in. Then I had to pay the building super extra to build walls for bedrooms.

I took Carl to my favorite bar in the neighborhood, a place on Bedford Avenue, but he wanted to leave quickly.
That was weird,
he said. When I asked what he meant he said he felt like a “cracker” because we were the only white people at the bar—which I'm pretty sure wasn't true and I thought was such a strange thing to notice in any case. I had never heard anyone use the term “cracker” before in a way that suggested anything but irony.

After that we stopped talking. For months, I think. I don't know how long it had been. I do know I hadn't seen Carl in a while when he invited me to come over to his apartment for a small party.

That night at his place, where the only other partygoers were a small group of his male friends, I found out that he'd told them that I was bisexual, which I was not. My sister, confused, had heard them talking about it and came up to ask me if I was and for whatever reason had decided not to tell her. I wonder if it just made what he thought was a good story for his friends. Finance bro dates Williamsburg feminist. “Possible bisexual” could have added to the allure, I guess.

Normally I could handle my booze, and I don't remember drinking much, but I know my sister left, I said I was staying, and then I woke up to Carl taking off my clothes. Briefly, I thought it was sweet—he was undressing me for bed because I was too drunk to do it myself.

I don't know much about what happened next. I know I remember asking what he was doing when I realized he was on top of me. Then nothing. I don't know if I said
Don't do this
, or if I said
That's nice
, or if I said nothing, which seems the most likely possibility given my state.

I do know I was upset. I know when I woke up the next afternoon—I had slept until two p.m.—I said you're not supposed to have sex with someone who is passed out. I know I was still drunk when I said this. I joked. I made a joke about
uh isn't that date rape?
, saying it in a way that seemed ribbing or sarcastic; I'm not sure why. That's when he smiled and promised me that he ate me out first.

Then I told him if he was going to fuck me while I was unconscious the least he could do was order a grilled cheese and
french fries from the delivery place so I could soak up some of the previous night's alcohol. I know I waited for the food to come and ate it before I left. I know I called my parents to apologize for worrying them. I know I cried when I got home.

I have never called this assault. I'm not really sure why. As a feminist writer I've encouraged others to name the thing that happened to them so our stories can be laid bare in a way that is inescapable and impossible to argue with. And I realize, and I realized then, that by definition penetrating someone while they are unconscious—even if you've had sex before with this person—is rape. I just have never wanted to call it that.

The truth is that this thing that happened, no matter what you want to call it, did not have a lasting impact on me, and for that I feel . . . strange.

It did not destroy me or change who I am in the way I thought something like that is supposed to. I don't still think about Carl or that night. I don't carry scars from it. On the scale of things that have happened to me, things that have hurt me and damaged me, this registered lower than finding a stranger had ejaculated on the back of my jeans on the subway. I don't know why.

I know that my shameful uncertainty likely has to do with the fact that I did not feel like a person who was capable of being violated because at the time I barely considered myself a person. I was wandering in and out of relationships as frequently as I was walking in and out of bars and jobs and friendships. I
remember taking the subway listening to music a lot and narrating to myself as if I was watching a movie about a girl with headphones in her ears walking through subway tunnels.

I want to be unequivocal because my politics call for it and because I know that by not doing so I am opening myself up to criticism on all sides. I know that if any young woman told me this same story I would not hesitate to call it what it is. I don't know why I don't allow myself the same courtesy. Maybe I'm just exhausted of feeling like an arbiter of sexual violence, even for myself.

I have had men accused of rape come up to me at colleges after I've spoken there, looking for some sort of absolution and for me to tell them that this thing they did was not rape even though I was not there and I have no idea.

One young man followed me around a reception after a speech I gave at a Midwestern college insisting that I give him an answer as to whether lying to someone about something important—he would not say what—and having sex with them under these false pretenses was rape. For a friend, he said.

He would not take my
I can't answer that
as an answer and even when I told him I didn't want to talk with him anymore, he kept following me around the room, which told me a lot more about the possible answer to his question than the actual circumstances he described.

Another told me he had been kicked out of his previous school after being found guilty of rape but he did not do it. I
don't know what to say to these men, these possible rapists, who want something from me, because I have nothing to give.

I never saw Carl again. We never spoke after I left his apartment after eating my grilled cheese and french fries. He did give me cab money, though. And I know that I took it.

I KNEW IT WAS OVER WHEN INSTEAD OF GETTING ME A RING FOR
Christmas, Ron got me the outline of one. He had been asking about my ring size all week, which I thought strange because the idea of this man's proposing—my boyfriend of almost two years who I thought was cheating on me and I was sure had a drug problem—seemed impossible. So it's not that I was expecting an engagement ring. I wasn't.

I first met Ron in 2004 in an outdoor bar called the Yabby that used to be on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn and is now, I think, a subpar grocery store. I was drunk when I got there so I don't remember how we started talking; I might have bummed a cigarette. I'm almost sure that I did.

My friend Lori and I were there to celebrate the success of a website we had started together, and we told Ron and his friends about the party we were having for the site the following night. We didn't chat for that long, so I was surprised when he showed up the next night with friends.

Ron was six foot three and broad shouldered, and had blue
eyes. I thought he was fine looking at the time but his somewhat greasy longish hair pulled back in a ponytail gave me pause. He talked to me about feminism and his work as a designer, and flirted mercilessly as we drank more and more. I was wearing a pair of “political” underwear that night that said
GIVE BUSH THE FINGER
and I surreptitiously lifted my skirt and let him take a few pictures of them as I got drunker. By the time we got back to my apartment it was four a.m. and I could barely walk. So when he pulled out a bag of cocaine, it seemed like a decent idea even though it had been years since I had done any.

Once we were high, we talked about his fucked-up childhood in the South, how as a boy he watched a man hold a knife to his mother's neck, her drug problem, and the fact that he had half brothers and a father he didn't talk to. We didn't have sex until we woke up the following morning. When we did, he didn't even bother taking my underwear off, just pulled them to the side while lying behind me, and when he got on top of me I told him I couldn't take him seriously with all of that hair hanging down into my face.

He called to ask me to dinner a day later, and I repeated my joke again—
I don't know, I really don't like long hair
. Still, I agreed to meet him at a wine bar on the corner of N. 7th and Wythe Avenue. When he showed up, his hair was gone. He had cut it off himself that afternoon and now his reddish-brown hair was close to his head in small waves. The gesture had me so smitten, I didn't mind much when he disappeared for more than a half hour during dinner,
to buy cigarettes
, he said.

We were together immediately, in love within weeks, and the sex was better than any I'd had before. To friends, I likened him to a dirty Ed Burns with a motorcycle. I could not fall fast enough.

His group of friends in the neighborhood were mostly young men whom he knew from design school. They worked at industrial design firms or shoe companies; some were artists on the side, selling their paintings on Bedford Avenue on the weekends. They all were younger than Ron and worshipped him. He was clearly the smartest and most talented of the bunch and had a charisma with people that we discussed often after doing a few lines. We both shared the feeling of not ever being the best-looking person in the room but being the most engaging, the most able to hook up with someone if we wanted to or convince someone of a point over a beer.

Cocaine is not a humble drug.

Soon, every night we went out—two or three evenings a week, at least—involved cocaine. It was as much a part of my evening routine as showering, putting on makeup, or getting a cab. As I got ready for the night out, I had a delivery service bring a bag or two to my apartment. I would do a few bumps off of my house key before meeting Ron at a bar, or if we were going out to dinner, I'd wait until I was done eating to snort some in the bathroom, washing away the drunken feeling that came with the meal's wine. The truth is that I loved coke not so much for the drug itself but because it let me drink as much as I wanted without passing out or embarrassing myself.

It was not a good time, but it was the first time in a long time that I felt something.

When I was high I didn't feel fucked up; I felt present. I could have conversations with people for hours on end without getting distracted and feel like the things I was trying to relay were actually making sense and that I sounded smart. I could finally talk about myself kindly and be proud of the work I was doing—not just thinking it was important but saying so. I didn't take shit from anyone. I was in the moment rather than watching myself from afar. It all felt blustery but true.

Everywhere we went, Ron had friends. He knew every bartender, every drug dealer, every restaurant manager. We never left Williamsburg because we were regulars everywhere. We snorted lines with the bar owners, who loved me for hooking them up with my cute friends, in back rooms and upstairs apartments. The owners and chefs of our favorite restaurants came to the Halloween parties I threw in my loft on N. 3rd Street—an illegal apartment that I now shared with two girls I'd met on Craigslist. Sometimes before the sun rose we would go up to my roof—where we could see Manhattan's full skyline—and just wait for morning, looking at the lights from the city fade.

Work felt like an afterthought. The thing about doing drugs is that if you're privileged enough no one seems to care so long as you can hold yourself together. So long as I showed up to work on time I was a “weekend warrior” even if it was Wednesday and I was still up at seven a.m. considering buying another bag.

One night, a few months in, Ron asked me to marry him while we were having sex. We were high, and it was four or five in the morning, but it didn't feel as unreal as it should have. I told him,
Don't say that
, not to joke about something like that, but he said, with tears in his eyes, that he wasn't joking, that he wanted to be my husband. We never talked about this moment again.

We continued on like this for over a year: having good meals, drinking until four a.m. without getting drunk, and talking until six thirty, doing line after line after line in his friend Ned's basement apartment because it was the darkest even as the sun came up. We had threesomes with his friend's girlfriend, a neighborhood friend, and a Danish woman visiting one of Ron's coworkers. His friends were impressed. We applauded ourselves for our lack of traditional jealousy, scolding others about what true love looked like. It was not possessive; it was not joyless.

Ron took a lot of pride in the fact that I was a feminist and smart. He liked to watch me debate his friends who would insist, noses moist and dripping from too much coke, that rape wasn't that common or that life began at conception. But when it suited him, my feminism became an excuse for him not to do things he didn't feel like doing—if I asked Ron to walk me home at three a.m. he'd say,
But I thought you were a strong feminist
, a common refrain when I needed help to change a tire or, once, asked him to come along to an ultrasound of a lump in my breast.

I started to worry that my nose was going to cave in, that I'd become disfigured and everyone would know what I was doing
at night. I favored my right nostril so much that it would always become swollen shut at some point in the night and sometimes stay like that for days.

Sleep became impossible. We covered my bedroom windows—huge factory-style windows that almost reached the ceiling—with dark blankets and sheets, taking Vicodin and drinking beer so that we might finally pass out. I would let the pill dissolve on my tongue for as long as I could take the bitter taste, hoping that somehow this would make it take effect quicker. It never did. When we woke, sometimes not until four or five p.m. the next day, we would order pizza and watch movies as the hangover subsided.

I knew this was all a bad idea, terrible even, in the long run. But in the short term everything seemed to be working out okay. I called in sick a bit too often, that's true, but I had friends, was having fun, was in love, and my website was starting to do really well.

Ron convinced me that I should quit my day job doing communications work at an international women's nonprofit to work on my blog full-time. I loved my job, but it was easy and I was spending work days moderating comments anyway. So I took a consulting job for a DC-based pro-choice organization that would let me work from home, infrequently, for two thousand dollars a month and spent the rest of my time working on the blog and being with Ron.

Excusing his faults became an art. When Ron was late—he was always at least a half hour late to everything, including a
birthday dinner that he threw for me—it was only because he needed to feel like he controlled something in his life after having such an uncontrollable experience as a child. The lies he told, about everything from whether he'd taken a taxi or a train to why he'd stood me up yet again, were a product of his trust issues.

I woke up one night with a terrible pain in my abdomen that didn't go away. I asked Ron to take me to the emergency room but he said he was too fucked up—so I called my mother to take me and Ron said he wouldn't be far behind, as soon as he could shower and catch a cab. He didn't answer calls or texts for the rest of the night, and when I finally got home the following morning with a diagnosis of a ruptured ovarian cyst, he was asleep. The reason he didn't come, I told my mother later, was because hospitals terrified him—he saw his own mother taken there often as a child and couldn't bear to be in one himself.

But I remembered how on another night, as I fell asleep on his shoulder in a cab, he took my face into his hands and started kissing my cheeks and forehead softly all over.
I love you,
he said. And when I got into an accident on my scooter—a Vespa-like contraption Ron convinced me I could learn to ride easily—crashing into the street, giving myself road burn all over my arms and legs, and fracturing my hip, he was at my house in under five minutes, saying
baby, poor baby
over and over. He could fix anything from a car to a pair of glasses, he could charm anyone, and when I rode on the back of his motorcycle in the
middle of the night looking upward I thought, This is what life is supposed to feel like.
This is what people feel.

But on Christmas morning, when I opened a ring box in front of my parents that contained
a flat silver ring
with a 2-D silhouette of a diamond on top—as if a real diamond ring had cast a shadow and someone made a ring out of that—I knew it was over. The symbolism was too embarrassing. It was a prop ring, a joke.

Besides, it was becoming clearer that our partying had long turned into something else, something that I could either move away from or linger in with no end date in sight.

That New Year's Eve, Ron had invited our drug dealer to party with us in my apartment along with a small group of friends. We were in my bedroom as the sun was coming up, doing lines off of a hardcover book balancing on my bed, bags strewn about the duvet. I kept putting on more and more blush until my cheeks looked clownish, a fact I didn't notice until after I looked at pictures of that night/morning. It was closing in on six a.m. when, a few feet away from Ron, the dealer told me he would give me coke for free whenever I wanted it if I would just let him eat me out once. Maybe twice.

I told Ron later, horrified, but he shrugged it off as if this was the most expected thing in the world. He thought it was hilarious.

So we stopped seeing each other but kept sleeping together, moving in and out of each other's lives without any sort of official breakup. I stopped doing drugs and asked him to stop as
well; he agreed. A few weeks later, when I confronted him with empty baggies found in his jeans pocket, he said he knew he didn't really need to stop doing coke but that I just needed to
feel
like he had stopped, and that in itself would make me happy. My father took me aside one day soon after and told me this: The things you do in your twenties are just things you do. But as you approach thirty what you do starts to become who you are. And there are some things you do not want to be forever.

I had signed my first book deal and secured a modest advance that wouldn't pay for more than a few months' rent, so I left Brooklyn. The new owners of our building were desperately trying to get tenants out so they could turn the building into high-end condos, so I took a buyout; moved to my parents' house in Woodstock, New York; and lived there for nine months as I finished my book and awaited its release.

Since then I've had people ask how I quit cold turkey—the drugs, especially. The truth is that I don't know. But I'm sure it's a lot easier when you have a nice roof over your head and work that you love. As my dad would say, it's not digging ditches. It seems strange to me that it was as easy as it was. Sometimes I wonder if I never turned that switch off completely and it's still there, waiting.

Because the truth is that up until a few years ago, I could not even drive through Williamsburg without my palms getting sweaty, thinking about how much I wanted to call my old dealer, still listed in my phone under the contact name “Coke.” I don't know why I never erased it—it's been nearly a decade and I
can't imagine he has the same number. But when I see the name and number with the rest of my contacts under the Cs I don't delete it; having another life—or the opposite of one—at the tips of my fingers feels comforting somehow.

I was dating again on the last day that I saw Ron. I was seeing a few different guys—guys who woke up at eight a.m., went to work, drank a few beers in the evening, and called it a day. Normal guys. Stable guys. Guys who answered the phone when I called and showed up to dates on time. One was so normal that I remember saying to my friend, concerned,
He wants to talk things out all the time
.

After we had sex next to a pile of dirty clothes on his bed that had been there since we first met, my distance must have been palpable. He was still naked as I started to walk out the door to go home.
I think I'm ready to move in together,
he said. Six months earlier this had been all that I wanted—some sort of recognition that what we had together was real and not just a drug-induced haze. But it struck me as so cruel in that moment—a way to keep me hanging on for just a few more months. I don't remember what I responded, just that I said it from the hallway.