You'll Grow Out of It (12 page)

A quick word on Mike—about two months into my dress search, he decided it was time to find a suit. I went with him on a Saturday afternoon to Prada. I was prepared to comfort him, to tell him not to be discouraged when nothing fit. Within twenty minutes, he found a suit that looked perfect on him the moment he tried it on. He bought it, and we went home.

Total wedding suit search time: an hour and forty-five minutes. I wanted to murder him. I wanted to murder everyone.

I was becoming unglued. Finding a dress became a job, with whole days spent running from one place to another, heels and a strapless bra always in my bag, like I was a hybrid of superhero and stripper. I made an appointment at Nicole Miller, where I found a dress that I loved except for the fact that my boobs were spilling out of the cups. Me and the salesgirl, who was busy planning her own wedding, had an increasingly contentious conversation about whether the dress could be altered for my body. She insisted it could work, and stuck about thirty pins into the top to create a simulation of how the dress, once tailored, could offer more coverage, but the effect was like trying to cover a wombat with a cocktail napkin.

I also struck out at a newly opened “bohemian” studio where the owner sat in front of her MacBook Air twisting flowers into headwreaths while I tried on vintage hippie dresses inside a tinsel-strewn yurt. I'd held out big hopes for this place, but everything I tried on made me look like someone half-assing a Stevie Nicks Halloween costume, and at the end of my appointment my friend Kate and I fled to go get drunk.

I eventually broke down and went to Kleinfeld, where I'd hear spontaneous bursts of applause as bride after bride said yes after yes to dress after dress.

All this time, I thought about the tiered dress like an old lover I couldn't get out of my head, occasionally casting wistful looks at the pictures of it on my phone. On Memorial Day, my friend Eleanor came over and we locked ourselves in my bedroom as Mike made cheeseburgers in the kitchen.

“I think I have to buy the tiered dress, I can't handle this shit anymore,” I whined. I begged her to give me permission to just buy it.

“You look beautiful in the dress,” she said, looking at the photo.

“You sure?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

I picked up my laptop to order the dress online, but right before I hit
SUBMIT PAYMENT
she blurted out: “I'm worried about the first tier, I think it hits you at an awkward spot.” I looked at her. There was desperation in her eyes, and I knew she felt awful. It was as if she'd unburdened herself of a terrible secret that could destroy both of our lives. We've known each other since we were eleven years old, when she wore Mickey Mouse suspenders and I wore a nightbrace. I knew she loved me. She wouldn't say something if it wasn't true.

This is how I found myself the next morning, in ninety-five-degree heat, sweating my way to Bergdorf Goodman, a department store that I'd never set foot in, despite having lived in New York almost my entire life. I'd imagined it was too posh for me. I was right.

I skulked the halls like Javier Bardem's terrifying villain in
No Country for Old Men
, a broken husk, running my hands lightly along sequined gowns and then moving on, hunting down my target.

And then I saw it. A bright-white beaded A-line cocktail dress; not a wedding dress, but better, timeless. Valentino. I picked up my pace, practically jogging toward it. Up close, it shimmered magically. I grabbed it in my size and ran into the dressing room.

I looked in the mirror, and for the first time since I'd started this whole ridiculous chase, I felt that I knew with certainty, the way Oprah knows certain things FOR SURE, that this was my wedding dress. I snapped nervous selfies in the mirror, and even with my sweaty chest and flushed face, I thought I looked just a bit like Audrey Hepburn. I looked like Audrey Hepburn if Audrey Hepburn was Jewish and had narrowly escaped a burning building. Nevertheless, I felt I could work with this look. The sense of relief that I'd found the dress of my dreams, and not just my dreams, but probably everyone's dreams, was so intense that I hadn't even bothered looking at the price tag, but it was scratching me somewhere around my neck so I twisted to see it.

Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars.

$$$$$!!!!

I began to ponder the difference—financially, spiritually—between something that costs ten thousand dollars and something that is one hundred pennies less. My budget, which at the beginning of this process had been a hard-and-fast two grand, had been rising at an alarming rate. At Kleinfeld, I'd tried on something very pretty that was over five thousand dollars and had decided that five thousand bucks was the absolute bar-is-closing, get-a-fucking-life limit. And here I was, in something more than twice that price, hearing some weird voice telling me to just go for it. I looked around. There was no one else in the dressing room. Holy shit, the voice was coming from inside my own head.

I began a long, spiraling, nonsensical internal monologue justifying the purchase of the dress. “Here's what I'm gonna do,” I whispered to myself. “I'll put this dress on my credit card, and I will simply never tell anyone about how much I spent, not ever. I will lie to anyone who asks, including Mike, about where I bought this, what it cost, and even who makes it. No one needs to know it's Valentino. I can say I bought it at Loehmann's. When my credit card statement comes, I will give it a Viking funeral on the East River. Furthermore, I was poor as a child, and if I add it up, ten thousand dollars probably just about covers what I'm owed from my poor childhood. No one will ever ever know, and since this isn't technically a wedding dress, I can wear it again to, like, a garden party, or someone else's wedding, or even the gym. I'm owed this dress. It would be wrong not to get it. I want it and it's okay and I was poor and I'm gonna lie and it's fine.”

At this point in the monologue, I had the sudden realization that the completely illogical circular argument I was building was not unlike what men must tell themselves as they plan to murder their wives.

I stared at myself in the mirror, and then slowly took off the dress and put it back on the hanger. I packed up my strapless bra and my heels and walked to the 6 train and went home. I called my friend Becky and cried about how I'd lost my bearings, how the idea of choosing the wrong dress had become paralyzing, but mostly, I lamented that I had become someone I didn't recognize, the worst kind of cliché. Becky, bless her, talked me off the ledge. She reassured me that every bride goes through this, and I was putting too much pressure on myself, and generally kept talking in a calm voice until I started breathing again. Somehow her words sank in, and when Becky hung up, I called Lovely, ordered the stupid tiered dress, and then had a
bottle
glass of wine to celebrate the hundred-pound weight I had just thrown off myself, like Chief tossing the sink through the window at the end of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
. Yes, IT WAS JUST LIKE THAT.

We think of the bridezilla as this insatiable, bitchy dragon, breathing fire through a constantly inflamed temper, devouring the patience of anyone who dares to defy her whims. I was a bridezilla, but in reverse. Feeling the heat of impossible expectations, I spent months throwing daggers at my own reflection.

Toward the end of my wedding, drunk and joyful, I grabbed a girlfriend to help me pull the dress off and slip into a cheapish little shift I'd brought along just in case I wanted to change. I threw the wedding dress onto a heap of coats without a second thought.

When Mike and I got back to our hotel suite at the end of the night, I discovered that the wedding planner had already brought it back, carefully zipped into its garment bag. That bag is now at the back of my closet. I've only peeked inside once. The dress's hem is blackish with soot, and there are wine stains all over the front. Mike says I should clean it, but I'm not going to bother.

T
hey say that women don't like porn. I used to think I didn't like porn, but now here I am on my bed, on my stomach, just moments after Mike has left for work, typing four x's into my Google search window. They will lead me to a porn site where I will scroll through a series of thumbnails offering a panoply of sexual images, from the banal to the genuinely horrifying, until I find something I think I can work with. Minutes later, I am done, experiencing that feeling every guy friend I've ever discussed this topic with has described, of going from highly revved up to vaguely repulsed with myself, and then stuffing the whole experience into a mental dirty laundry hamper and moving on with my day.

I have become someone who masturbates to porn. That is actually only part of the truth, and to be honest it's the part that I have no problem admitting. After all, we now live in a pornified world where it almost feels like a greater effort not to look at porn than to be staring at it constantly. What bothers me is not that I now have a porn habit, but rather that after almost three decades of old-fashioned, pornless diddling, I've lost almost all interest in masturbating without it.

Which means that looking at porn has somehow rewired a primitive, reptilian neural pathway in my brain in such a way that I am now jerking off like a man.

How did this happen?

A brief history of my experience with porn:

I was born in 1975. I came of age in those long-lost sepia years when porn was something that had to be meticulously searched for and excavated. Magazines and videos were surreptitiously stashed in hiding places by fathers and brothers, like so many filthy afikomen. The purchasing of such materials usually required you to man (or woman) up and acknowledge, to at least one other live human being standing in front of you, the specific shameful needs of your erotic life.

In fact, from a relatively young age, I was very interested in naked people and nudity. Because there was no Internet, and we didn't have cable (my parents didn't even give up their rotary phone until well into the 1990s), the bar for what was sexually exciting to me was extremely low. Around the age of nine or ten, after discovering a pair of binoculars somewhere in our apartment, I developed a serious peeping tom habit. At night I would stand behind the curtains at one of our windows and scan the lit windows of the building complex across the street, waiting for some unsuspecting citizen to walk through his or her apartment in a towel on the way to or from the shower. The shades were often half down, which meant I would only catch a glimpse of a pair of pasty legs. And it was a building whose demographic was primarily over fifty, so the flesh I saw was often a little loose. No matter. Just the fact of seeing what was not meant to be seen would give me a little shiver.

In third grade, even though I was extremely shy and didn't really have friends, I enjoyed a brief surge in popularity when I attracted attention for my ability to draw naked people. I was a gifted artist (according to my parents) who had been drawing horses and dogs to great acclaim (from my parents) for many years, but one day I suddenly found myself inspired to tackle this new subject matter. My seatmates noticed me drawing these anatomically correct(ish) figures and were fascinated. I can't remember if I drew them in sexual positions or not; I think maybe sometimes I just drew them kissing, or even lying on top of each other, like planks but otherwise emotionless. Pretty soon during free period I was surrounded by a cluster of my peers as I dashed off naked people, like a nine-year-old-girl version of Picasso handing out scribbles as payment for meals. This went on until my teacher noticed what was happening and immediately alerted our principal, most likely out of concern that I was being molested (fair enough).

Our principal was a brilliant and gentle man from New Zealand named John Meltzer, a freethinker who rightly became a legend after his death and for whom the school is now named. John called me into his office for a meeting. I was a very good kid who never got into trouble, so I was extremely nervous. He sat me down across from him and, with a bemused look on his face, asked me:

“Jessi, love. Why are you drawing naked people?”

“Um…I don't know.”

After a few more questions, John seemed satisfied I wasn't a victim of a crime, but rather just a young pervert in the making; to interfere would prevent me from becoming my most authentic self. It was a Montessori school, after all.

I was released back into the wild.

In fifth grade I became friends with a girl named Margo who had a classically shady stepfather: long-haired, unemployed, and possessing a slurred manner of speaking that made it impossible to understand a word he said, which was probably for the best. One afternoon Margo and I went to the movies. Afterward, we were sitting in the theater lobby finishing a box of Junior Mints when she asked if I wanted to do something “fun.” She told me that her stepfather and his friends had been hanging out in the house calling phone sex lines on speakerphone and laughing their asses off (because what else would you do for fun with your friends when you live with a ten-year-old girl?). I was not familiar with phone sex lines but I was intrigued. We found a pay phone in the corner of the lobby and came up with the sixty quarters needed to dial a phone sex line from a pay phone. We then both put our ears to the receiver and listened to a recording of a lady saying something, if I remember correctly, about how horny she was getting while inserting a toothbrush in her vagina. Most likely I am not remembering this correctly, seeing as how that makes no sense, but I do distinctly recall the orgasmic moans and groans this disembodied voice was making and how darkly exciting they were, even more stimulating than old-people legs seen from three hundred feet away.

Over the next few weeks, anytime I was home alone I would call this sex line and listen to these moany recordings, trying to understand what they were making me feel. I probably called about twenty-five times. I was oblivious to the fact that they cost money until about a month later when my mother approached me with a funny look on her face and asked if I had made any unusual phone calls. My blood froze as, without thinking twice, I straight-up lied and said no. My mother moved on, surely confirming in her mind that it made much more sense that the culprit must be my fourteen-year-old brother.

After that I was spooked. I didn't know where to look for porn, but even if I had, the risk of being caught seemed too high. Besides, about two years later, while I was lying on my stomach in my room, doing social studies homework and listening to horribly cheesy pop radio, some terrible techno song came on that featured a part in the middle during which the beat slowed down to accommodate the sounds of a woman having a prolonged orgasm. I do not know how this was cleared for FM airplay, but I felt a funny Judy Blume–ish feeling near my pubic bone, and sixty seconds later I had learned how to masturbate.

But I didn't need porn. In addition to my cheesy techno song, I was also titillated when people on soap operas kissed. And I'm talking about afternoon prime-time soap operas in the '80s, not anything even basic cable edgy. Just two white people in crewneck sweaters kissing for three seconds before a tasteful fade to commercial was all it took to fuel my most torrid fantasies.

The one other visual stimulus I remember obsessing over was the video for Billy Idol's “Cradle of Love,” which featured a blond girl in booty shorts named “Devon” doing splits on a bed while a nerdy white guy hid in the corner of his apartment, terrified of this sexy girl and her subversive Billy Idol tape. This video was my equivalent of hard-core filth although in reality it was just dancing and light pillow fighting.

What all of these naughty little blips had in common, aside from their G-ratedness, was that in the pre-Internet age, they could not be voluntarily summoned. I had to patiently wait for them to appear, like a bird-watcher waiting to see a sexy canary. But it was enough for me, and I never once thought about going through the process of trying to procure anything genuinely graphic, partially because I didn't care and partially because it seemed like too much work. This was confirmed for me when, during my summers home from college in New York, I worked as a clerk at a delightful neighborhood video store in Chelsea run by a very nice man named Adam.

Adam was a fatherly type who prided himself on running a “family-friendly” shop, but he was also a businessman, which meant that the store still had a small porn section in the back. To remain “family-friendly,” Adam instituted an arduous procedure through which customers could rent their porn without disturbing the
Jumanji
crowd. In the filth corner in the back, there was a pile of scraps of paper and little golf pencils. Customers wanting to rent porn would write their titles of interest on the scraps of paper, and then come up to the counter and wordlessly hand them to me, the nineteen-year-old girl who was tasked with fetching their VHS cassettes. I would silently go check on whether
Buttman's Bubble Butt Babes
(a very popular title at the time) or
Cinesex
(slightly less popular) was available, which it often wasn't. I would then go back to the customer at the counter and say, “We don't have this one or this one,” handing them back their slips of paper, at which point they would retreat back to the porn room and start over. It broke my heart when this process had to be repeated several times over, knowing that these customers were going to be masturbating to their fifth or sixth choice of tapes.

My lack of curiosity around porn was also a result of the fact that my boyfriend Pete didn't seem interested in porn. I never once found anything incriminating around the house or on his computer. True, it was still the early days of the Internet, and his laptop was one of those tangerine clamshell Macs that seemed to have been beamed upon us from a futuristic Martian society when in fact they had the Internet speed of bird feeders.

In retrospect, the best evidence for Pete's lack of interest in porn was our sex life, which could be generously described as perfectly average. It wasn't until years later, after we broke up and I started dating for basically the first time in my life, that I saw how things could be different.

My second boyfriend after Pete was Harrison, moodily handsome, darkly funny, and sexy in a way that was foreign to me. He had a shaved head and biceps that he had actually put real effort into. He was more soccer hooligan than nerd hipster. He told me stories about walking down a nude beach when he was visiting Australia and having a chat with a beautiful topless Australian girl who became his girlfriend. He drank a lot and had a chin-up bar in his bedroom doorway. And yet, he was deeply sensitive, even depressed; and for these reasons, I fell in love with him.

Because I'd only had sex with one person for a long time, I was prepared for it to be a different experience. What I was not prepared for was sex in the age of Internet porn, and how interested Harrison was in ejaculating on my body, and then, gradually, when I didn't flee or register protest over that act, my face. I was unhappily surprised by it, but I was so timid about my lack of experience at the advanced age of twenty-seven that I didn't want to ask any of my plentiful follow-up questions, among which were:

1. Why did you want to come on my face?
   
2. How do you think I feel about you coming on my face?
   
3. Is this A Thing everyone is doing?
   
4. What gave you the idea to do this?
   1
   

The answer to #4, of course, was Internet porn. I didn't know this yet. I was at the very beginning of this new trend where masses of young men learn how to have sex from watching porn. But I didn't make this connection, not even when I innocently went on his desktop computer one afternoon to check my email and, upon pressing a random key, threw off the cover of his “sleep” screen to reveal the activity underneath, which was a browser frozen on hundreds of thumbnails of the most filthy German porn, creating a mosaic of naked genitals and random objects being recruited into unimaginable penetrations.

At first I was embarrassed for him; and then, when I realized I could neither unfreeze the computer nor put it back into sleep mode, I was way more embarrassed for me. There was nothing to do when he came back from the bathroom but to explain that I had not meant to snoop, and yet here I was staring at fifty gaping buttholes. I wasn't mad, which was good, seeing as he wasn't anything more than slightly sheepish. He was primarily ashamed of the fact that his masturbation habits had brought a rather expensive Dell desktop to its knees. He ended up needing to buy a new computer.

The one thing to which he did confess was that he'd been watching maybe a bit too much porn in the last year, and now he felt he needed to stop.

“I think it's affecting the way I have sex” was what he said.

I wanted to say, “Yeah, it's funny, I was thinking the same thing right when you ejaculated into my eye the other night,” but I felt that might be impolite.

I didn't want to be the kind of person who looked down on anyone for using porn, and intellectually, I wasn't. And yet—I was distrustful of it. I can't emphasize enough how badly semen stings in your eye. It's worse than shampoo. If there was a Johnson & Johnson's “No more tears” version of semen, I might have felt differently. But the whole episode put a strain on my and porn's already thin relationship.

Which brings us to my current situation.

A few years ago, I was dating a man I liked very much. I was always worried about whether he felt the same way, and as a result, I was often jealous. I wish I could say I went on his computer to check my email but that would be a big fat lie because the truth is I wanted to dig through his Internet history. I had to click past oodles of ESPN.com and sneaker site visits, but with enough scrolling I eventually dug up what I was looking for, which is to say, anything that would annoy me and make me feel terrible about myself. A pile of sites with x's followed by backslashes followed by various adjectives of different female body types rose from the bottom of the screen. And maybe because I was so jealous, and was so worried about being what he wanted, I felt compelled to look at what he was looking at, to see if it in any way matched up with what I am. (Because obviously that is why men turn to porn. To find women who look like the women they're with.) Like an idiot, I was holding out hope of finding a site filled with videos of pale, bespectacled Jewish girls with their hair up in sloppy buns.