What a snarky jerk. (Obviously, I later slept with him.) I tried my best to dismiss the comment, but it nagged at me, crept in during that nightly moment between eating three slices of pizza and being asleep. What was it that I couldn’t understand and how could I understand it, short of moving to a war-torn nation? I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had experiences to gain, things to learn. That feeling was the crux of my whole relationship with Joaquin.
Well, friends, learning about the “world” is not pretending you’re a hooker while a guy from the part of New Jersey that’s near Pennsylvania decides which Steely Dan record to put on at 4:00 A.M. The secrets of life aren’t being revealed when someone laughs at you for having studied creative writing. There is no enlightenment to be gained from letting your semiboyfriend’s bald friend touch your thigh too close to the place where it meets your crotch, but you let it happen because you think you might be in love. How else can you explain why you’ve spent so much money getting to his house?
The first few times Joaquin and I had sex, it was quick and a little sad. The overhead lights buzzed. He didn’t look at me, and afterward he didn’t linger. I wondered if it was somehow my fault. Maybe I was a dead fish, uncreative in the sack, paralyzed by my desperation to please. Maybe I was destined to lie there like a slab until I was too old for intercourse.
Then, the night before Thanksgiving, I met him at a bar in Queens. Wearing fishnets and a little gray skirt-suit from J. C. Penney, I was dressed like a hooker dressed as an insurance broker. But something about the outfit inspired him, and he looked at me with a new kind of hunger that drove us back toward his house, where he kissed me on the couch, determined, maybe a little pissed. He guided me to the bed, where he turned me on my stomach. Alcohol, fear, and fascination cloud my memory, but I know my tights were balled up and placed in my mouth. I didn’t know where he was in the room at certain points, until I did. And he spoke to me, unleashing streams of the filthiest shit I had ever heard leave another human’s mouth. Impressive in its narrative intricacy, and horrifying in its predilections. This, I decided to believe, is the best game I’ve ever played.
I walked out into the street the next day bare legged and reeling, not sure whether I’d been ruined or awoken.
But I got no closer to enlightenment hiding in a bodega down the block from Joaquin’s house, pretending to be at a cool party “kinda near your place.” He was busy. With his other girlfriend, who, he told me, was “very well raised and even her dirty underwear smells clean.” Why did I keep calling? Because I was waiting for his mind to change, for him to talk to me the way my father does or the way Geoff did, even in our darkest hour. Intrigued as I was by this new dynamic of disrespect, at my core I didn’t want to be spoken to like that. It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself, a feeling that I believe, next to extreme nausea sans vomiting, is the depth of human misery.
The end never comes when you think it will. It’s always ten steps past the worst moment, then a weird turn to the left. After a long post-California cooling-off period, Joaquin and I fell in love for a week. At least that’s what it felt like. It was October, still warm, with a near-constant drizzle. I had a new leather blazer, bought with my first paycheck. With its silver grommets and wide lapel, it made every outfit feel like a uniform from the future. We met for drinks, and he hugged me tightly. We talked about Los Angeles, how sad it had gotten, and the fact that we were better off as friends. We lingered, drink after drink, then at his house we agreed friends could have intercourse if they didn’t kiss at all, Pretty Woman style. The next morning he rolled toward me and not away. He texted a few hours later to say he’d enjoyed the evening. It was like a miracle.
Two days later we met for a movie. I wore the jacket again, and he bought me a hamburger—he is the one who ended my vegetarian streak, for which I will be forever grateful because I grow strong on the blood of animals. He walked close to me, and I realized it was the first time he’d taken ownership of me in the street. Back in my bedroom at my house—my parents were away—we laughed and talked and returned to kissing. This is what it could have been like. This is what it had never been like. And so I was angry.
Emboldened by my new life as a woman with a meaningful job and a good jacket, I told Joaquin to fuck off forever. Well, I told him via the Internet. After the best night we had ever had, the first night he’d let me feel like myself, I wrote him an email saying he had hurt me, taken advantage of my affection, and made me feel disposable. I told him that wasn’t a way I was interested in being treated and that I wouldn’t be available any longer. And then I made myself sick to my stomach waiting for an apology that never came.
After sending that email, I only slept in his bed one more time, wearing a full sweatsuit. Baby steps.