I had no desire to write about him until he told me, first over text and then later in his bed, which aspects of his life I was not allowed to touch. One was his ex-wife, whose name left his mouth so casually, I felt as if I were really a part of his world despite only having known him for a couple weeks. She went by her first and middle name, both so elegant, biblical; she sounded like a saint. It occurred to me almost immediately that my desire to write about what he had warned me was off-limits likely stemmed from the same place as his divorce; he had affairs because he wanted to do what he was explicitly not supposed to do, he wanted to transgress.
On our first date, it took us less than a minute to walk from the bar to his apartment, a sublet in the heart of the Lower East Side. The heat was so bad that I didn’t reach out to hold his hand. A homeless man asked him for money. I thought about how it had been six months since I last had sex, and now I was finally going to remember what it was like. We climbed the rickety maroon steps to the second floor. It was a claustrophobic studio; there was nowhere to hide, except the bathroom.
He put on a playlist with the Microphones, Electrelane, the Pixies. “I lost the speaker in the divorce,” he said, dropping the phone into an empty glass. He was a couple inches short of six feet, but his buzzed head and lithe body made him seem taller. Maybe his age—sixteen years older than me—contributed to it, too, and his style, which mostly consisted of innocuous button-downs and cargo jeans. I rarely felt comfortable around people, especially strangers, but he spoke and moved so tenderly and intuitively, with a boyish innocence, that I felt as if I’d known him for a long time. His eyes, which sparkled with boundless curiosity rather than scrutiny, had a way of opening me up. I felt like it was easy for me to amuse him; I didn’t have to do anything at all.
It hurt piercingly at first. I winced and groaned, feeling like my hymen was being broken for the first time. Against my preference, he wore a condom; I contemplated that the pain was from the rubber, a material I wasn’t accustomed to feeling inside of me. It had been years since I’d had sex without the influence of alcohol. He fucked me roughly and frantically, maneuvering my legs around his waist, then on his shoulders, squeezing and slapping my thighs, taking me by the throat, shoving his fingers in my mouth. Restless and insatiable. I wondered if he had fucked his wife like this. I thought about how good it must have felt to fuck a mistress like this. The few times I opened my eyes, I saw how his face had taken on an unrecognizable expression, how he was possessed by an acute aggression, a desperation to dominate completely. I lost hearing in my left ear for a few seconds. Everything was muffled, like I was underwater.
He had told me at the very beginning that, ever since his dad died, he had an unquenchable thirst for sex, and a tendency to escalate sexual situations. On our second date, I showed up in a white see-through tank top and a plaid skirt with knee socks. I was nauseous, plunged in a Lexapro-induced hot flash, my body burning. I lay in his bed sweating and compulsively hitting my vape as he sat in his desk chair watching me with his feet propped up on the mattress. I slid open the top drawer of his nightstand, leafed through his passport, stared at the younger version of him, which looked like a different person. Soul music poured from his laptop, a woman singing about love. In his warm, gentle voice, he rattled off a list of the other women he was seeing.
He penetrated me carefully, then with abandon, taking pleasure in my rhythmic shrieks. My head fell deeper into the space between the mattress and the fabric headboard, and when he reached for the pillow, I assumed he was making an awkward attempt to move it away from my face; instead, he smothered me with it, my sounds getting pushed back into my mouth, having no air to materialize. Alone in the dark, I wondered how he made time for the other women, considering how often we texted, a constant stream of affectionate messages.
I assured him I wouldn’t write about him because I hadn’t been writing about my life in general as of late. I hadn’t considered that that was probably the result of not having much going on before I met him. But I’d enjoyed the break because I was tired of writing things that dragged other people into my mess, which could be interpreted as a sort of revenge. Even if it was revenge I wanted, it was secondary to the real impulse, which was to write. There was no reason behind that, no explanation, no answer.
In a couple weeks he was leaving for Stockholm for his job. An exhibition for the artist he worked for, a figurative painter who’d once been canceled for a piece that many claimed glamorized Nazism. In his bed, he told me he was considering writing a story addressed to his ex-wife about his dating life. He said he avoided thinking about her, and that it would be a chance for him to finally confront her. I understood, then, how he allocated his attention to many women, and what my purpose was. I said I hated using writing as a form of communication to one person. It always left me feeling even more alone than before I started. It was better to write for no one at all.