“I can’t spend tonight with you, sweetie, because I have a
date
.”
And that. Was. It. I was suddenly sober. Something in my ailing brain snapped back into place with the accompanying
blam
of a cap gun being fired, and all of a sudden, I felt my crazy collapse into itself, like a demolished house, until all that was left inside of me was a single, raw nerve. And it wanted to kill the fat, nude jerk in my bed. It wanted to fucking
kill
him.
I got steely silent—the kind of internal quiet that makes men nervous when they see women go there, because it means they’re stewing and plotting. And as I processed the audacity of the morning’s events, I thought about that old fortune cookie game—the one you play with your friends at the end of a Chinese meal, when you add the phrase “in bed” to whatever’s in your cookie? This guy—this fucking narcissist with the hygiene of the Unabomber—told me that he had a date with the bisexual vegan he’d been dating this whole time—
In. My. Bed.
I GOT
up and started putting my clothes on, and Ben frantically followed me into the next room. It was like he had to take a cue from my behavior to see that he’d done something wrong: He didn’t know before I’d reacted that he said something he wasn’t supposed to say. He begged me not to be mad, and I icily deferred, and then he got hysterical, hoping I’d respond, but I didn’t. He wasn’t going to defuse my anger, and he wasn’t going to confuse me any more into thinking that I was as crazy as him. And then he made himself cry.
Have you ever seen a grown man in the act of working himself up into a lather so that he can cry real tears in front of you? It’s an excellent cure for being attracted to someone.
Ben stood in my living room, squeezing out tears like he was wringing a damp rag, whimpering out everything he could bring himself to say except that he was sorry. He said he was “flipping out,” that he “couldn’t handle” it, that “What did I want him to do—lie?” It was all self-saving. It was what he had to tell himself out loud so he didn’t have to face the possibility that he’d actually done something wrong. I watched him self-destruct with indifference. I wanted him to get out of my apartment. It was like I’d woken up from a nightmare, but I still felt complicit. Like I’d watched a scary movie before going to bed.
Later that day, I got rid of Ben for real, but he kept calling to argue with me about why I had no right to be mad, until I had to hang up on him. I made the mistake of trying to convince him that he was wrong and I was right, and you just can’t do that. People like Ben just can’t understand anyone else’s point of view.
There’s a test that was developed by a child psychiatrist named Piaget, where you show a toddler a three-dimensional model structure, like a castle, and you sit with him across the table and ask him to draw it twice: one from his point of view, and one from the point of view of the person across the table, who sees the castle from the back. But the kid will draw the same thing twice. He will draw, two times, what the castle looks like from where he sits. Because he hasn’t reached the point in his development where he can imagine another person’s perspective.
Ben didn’t even try to see the castle from my position on the table. What he
did
do—aggressively—was try to be friends with me after the wreckage. He would send me long e-mails and leave me rambling voice mails saying he wanted to make sure I knew how awesome he thought I was. As though me being kick-ass was ever at stake in our not seeing eye-to-eye. And he begged me not to hate him. It made it harder for him to sleep at night knowing that there was somebody out there who knew his “sensitivity” only referenced his ability to bruise easily with standard handling. Because Ben’s was not a two-way thin skin. He didn’t have any problem hurting the girl smart enough to know that “Please don’t hate me” is not the same thing as “I’m sorry.” He just couldn’t stomach the consequences: He could not be hated.
And I don’t hate him. But I don’t like him. And I don’t have to. Of the many lessons one can learn from dating crazy, I’ve learned that asking Ben to be decent and empathetic was like asking somebody with two broken legs to run a marathon. He just can’t, and it was cruel of me to expect that he could. But I also know now that there are some people who, even though they are low-status and should, by definition, evoke compassion, will instead bring out a side of you that is so sadistic, so eager to be mean and combative and other things that are not you, that you must avoid them altogether. These are the provokers—the ones who can’t evoke pity because they’re inherently infuriating. It’s the woman at the gym who screams at you when you change the channel, or the old man who wanders around the park and gets mad because you’re sitting on his bench, or that asshole baby who throws his toys.
There are plenty of troubled, cluttered souls who make you want to hurt them as much as they hurt you, even though you know they’re already suffering plenty. The part of me that is kind sympathizes, because I know that as difficult as it is to be around someone like Ben, it’s way more difficult for him to be himself. The part of me that still hurts knows the same thing, and takes comfort in the karma of it all.
giants and monsters
I
was going to meet Greg at the bar again. He was home, visiting New York, and I hadn’t seen him for years, since we used to sleep together, in my early twenties. Greg holds the distinction of being, to this day, the ugliest person I’ve ever had sex with.
THERE ARE
a couple of advantages of sleeping with an ugly guy. First is the obvious: that if he’s self-aware of his visual deficiencies, he might be nicer to you than a good-looking person, and possibly even try harder to please you sexually. This theory is in line with the water-tight one passed around frat houses that fat girls will “do more” in bed because they hate their own bodies and don’t want you to leave them.
But the other attractive thing about ugly guys lives in the uniquely female part of the brain that makes sex with them exciting. Because just as men can be really turned on by the act of degrading a beautiful woman in bed—coming on her pretty face and generally violating her perfect body—some girls get off on the idea of letting a hideous monster have his way with them. It’s a turn-on for some of us to be defiled in some way. If you try hard enough, you actually feel like a prostitute!
I hooked up with Greg on and off for a long stretch of time—we did not date. Greg was ugly
and
angry—a winning combination, only the opposite—and in no way did he want me for anything beyond the occasional last-minute night together, when he’d take me home with him and plunge his dry, plump fingers inside of me. After we’d sleep together, neither one of us would talk about it to each other or mention it to anyone else.
I WANT
to clarify what I mean by “ugly,” because it’s a harsh word. Greg was heavy and tall, and he had sausage lips, tiny eyes, and a broad nose with nostrils you could see just by looking straight on at his face. He wore the kind of glasses you’re supposed to get rid of in 1989 or when you turn sixteen, whichever comes first, and his hair was thick and curly, like a bush he’d pruned into the shape of a mushroom. Greg was pigeon-toed and his shoulders rounded forward, and he wore striped wool sweaters and pleated chinos with trainers.
Here is what he had going for him, and here is why I would sleep with him, which are two very different sets of criteria. Greg was big, so he made me feel small when he held me, and he did hold me sometimes after we had sex, and that was nice. He also had a soft, gentle speaking voice, and he was very funny. But, like plenty of funny people, Greg was unusually angry. He was constantly sarcastic and seemed to hate everybody, including himself, but he’d never talk about the philosophy behind his contempt for everything. He’d just alchemize his vitriol into a steady stream of droll put-downs, sometimes directed at me, and I don’t know if he realized how mean he could be, or whether he cared. And I’m afraid the second grouping of Greg’s qualities—the one that doesn’t read as a list of assets—has more to do with why I let him take off my clothes and impale my pale early-twenties-ness on his big, chubby erection on a semi-regular basis over the course of a year, when we were both drunk enough.
Oh, we drank a lot then too. Greg would drink more pints at the bar than I’d ever seen anybody drink in one sitting, and then he would get flirty and handsy with me, and I remember thinking I was lucky when we’d end up sharing a cab back to his place late at night. He’d ignore my jokes or dryly poke fun of things I’d say in earnest, in attempts to connect, and I’d laugh when he made fun of me. We’d sit on his couch and watch
Conan
, and then we would start making out, and soon we’d go into his bedroom and have rough sex, and I have to confess, it was thrilling.
He would spank me and bite me with his liver lips, and bounce me up and down, and I’d watch his massive chest jiggle from the force of my body on top of his. I would bring myself to orgasm, because he never bothered, and I would think to myself, “How
perverse
! How
exciting
! How
kinky
and
exotic
to let a man grotesque enough to resemble one of Quentin Blake’s illustrations of the child-eating giants from
The BFG
have his way with me, then snore himself to sleep.”
THERE’S SOMETHING
inherently repugnant about a naked man. Before you fuck a guy for the first time, the element of mystery is sometimes more scary than alluring before his clothes come off and he’s up against you. His odors, his flab, his body hair—all those variables are all up for grabs before a man shows you what he has. I never clutch and tear at snaps and zippers: I do not undress men. I let them take their own clothes off, and hope there’s dignity in their behavior when it comes to that part of the process. That there’s no posing or flexing, no long drum roll implicit in the pacing of how he peels down his drawers. I pray that he isn’t looking at my face, hoping to see in it the reaction of a six-year-old girl at her first Ice Capades. Meanwhile, men relish every detail of the reveal of a beautiful woman’s naked body. They savor the observations of the kind of panties she has on, the unhooking, the unbuttoning, the gradual unveiling of the statue beneath the pretty silks draped on top of the alabaster undulations. But I just want to know what I have to deal with as straightforwardly as possible. What parts I’m going to have to pretend aren’t there and which ones I know I need to focus on after making out stops being polite and starts getting real.
Men’s bodies need to grow on you. As comfortable as men are with their penises, and as exhilarated as they are when they’re tumescent and buried in a pretty girl’s face, it is never not weird to be on the receiving end of the act, at least at first. I’m certain that even seasoned escorts have to work past their initial wave of reflexive disgust at the strange task ahead of them—sucking off a stranger—before they can dive in, and eventually even enjoy it. But it beats temping, right girls? Of course it does not. Get your life together, you whores!
Then, it’s not the penis but what’s around it that’s always oddly off-putting in some way. Before you actually know and love him, I mean. Look, I’m hardly the first girl to say that balls are weird. Because they
are
. I don’t know a single woman who can put at the top of her flights of fancy the task of sucking on her boyfriend’s scrotum. I don’t mind a pair if they’re shaved or trimmed and tight—the kind that come with a lovely, massive erection—but I’ve always regarded balls the way I think about a boyfriend’s brothers. You have to be friendly around them, but then you’re secretly glad when they say good night after Thanksgiving and you don’t have to hang out with them again until the next special occasion.
Even men I have gone on to fall in love with, and to relish every inch of their bodies—balls and A.H. included, because I am talking about
love
—have seemed foreign and bizarre when appearing naked in front of me the first time. I think boys grow up using pornography as a road map for what they should expect once they get a girl naked. They know since their adolescence precisely what they want to do to us, they like the idea of “ruining” a virgin, and they know when girls get naked that it will be mostly skin and no hair, because women are supposed to be perfect and smooth and soft and smell good, and we’ve all had practice sucking on tits since we were babies.
The male body is chaotic and obscene. It’s funny like a monkey is funny, but if the man who lives in it is a good one, you can learn to love his body completely, like a tree you used to climb on as a little girl. But at first, seeing a man naked is like being cornered by some odd dog. And seeing Greg naked was always that: It never got better. I would habitually divert my eyes from his formidable love handles, which spilled out the waist of his Dockers like hairy pizza dough. I focused my attention on kissing his neck and ears and pretended the moles on his back—the ones sprouting long, coarse black hairs, like ponytails—weren’t there. I’d close my eyes and take his fat, darty tongue in my mouth, and tolerate any incidental pain that came along with his gruff technique.
During my time with Greg, I would get off on being treated badly by somebody unattractive and mean. I would misinterpret what was going on between us as
sizzlingly erotic
. I cherished what I reckoned was an addiction to the S&M stylings of a true sexual artisan, who really hurt me when he spanked me, and took the whole “treating me like shit” thing beyond the bedroom, like when I’d see him at the bar sometimes, flirting with other girls.
I didn’t want Greg to be my boyfriend. I just wanted him to be nice to me in public if we were going to keep having sex in private, or maybe call me on occasion to see what was up, after he was done with me for the night. Then, one day, when he decided he didn’t want to see me anymore—that it was over—I cried in front of him and asked him to reconsider. But he said no—that we were through. He was done and there was nothing I could do to convince him otherwise. I met him at a sports bar near my apartment and asked him to come home with me, but he said no again, and he was cold when he cut me off, like my pleas really disgusted him, and I didn’t see him after that until years later, once he’d moved away.