by Lauren Oyler
I tapped pause on the interview and switched to an episode of a long-running sex-advice podcast that began with a woman who said she had been with her partner for five years and although she loved him a lot she had one problem, just one, which was that he really liked anal sex and claimed he could only get off if her anus was very tight and there was not much lube. @HelenofTroyWI may have had a point about ass-play. The babies made light discontented noises when I stopped moving.
About an hour later, having taken random turns while heading in the general direction of where I would need to be at 11 a.m., I found myself outside a coffee shop from which emerged the beaming woman from Los Angeles I’d met at the bookstore dinner. Nell. She remembered me. “Where did you get THOSE?” she shouted down the street. She hugged me and bent down to look at the babies. At that moment I was gripped by the certainty that she would one day force me to come to the bathroom with her, not just into a waiting area but into a single-occupancy restroom itself, for no reason other than, I guess, bonding. She was wearing indeterminate layers, several earrings in both ears, rings on most fingers, and a bright orange lipstick, and she had cut her hair into a bob that hung straightly around her chin. I pushed the stroller slowly back and forth as I explained that I liked her hair and had gotten a job walking babies for two artists in Neukölln. She interrupted me as I was about to broach the subject of visa advice. “Do you want a coffee? I’ll get you a coffee.” She went inside as I continued pushing the stroller, babyish muttering emitting occasionally, back and forth like I was doing an ineffective exercise, and a couple of minutes later she was handing me a cappuccino. “It’s just been awful!” she said, laughing at the dreadfulness of it all. “I have to leave my apartment this week! The landlord’s daughter is coming back from Iceland early! She ‘finds the people really too weird’!” I told her that at least she could now try to find a place with a shower, thinking that remembering this detail would show I was interested in her life, and she said, “Ja, but finding an apartment in Berlin is impossible.” I asked her if she spoke German and she said, “Ja. Danke Mutti!” She was a dual citizen and so would be useless in helping me procure a visa, so I didn’t bring it up. She said she had to go to a flat viewing now but still wanted to do the writing group with me and tapped her email address into my phone before daintily getting on her bike and riding away. I always said one of the reasons I didn’t want children was that I would be devastated if I had a boy, but sometimes I felt I didn’t understand women at all.
MAYBE IF I WROTE LIKE THIS I WOULD BETTER UNDERSTAND them.
*
A GERMAN PROGRAMMER WITH LONG CURLY HAIR MESSAGED ME and we met at an anarchist café with board games and chairs barely clinging to their remaining upholstery. I’d always liked the idea of dating a programmer, despite not knowing if that’s what they’re called anymore. Coder? No—developer. I found them difficult to communicate with and felt that if I met one who could make me understand what programming was it would be a sign he was my soul mate. “But who makes the back end for the back end!” I cried, nearly knocking over my beer as I showed off my vocabulary. “The back end for the back end?” he replied. I ask every developer I meet this question and I never remember what they tell me. He invited me to a movie screening on the roof of a parking garage the next night, but I told him I was going to Leipzig to see an exchange student from my high school play in a hardcore band. He said, “Ah, do you know the band?” I said I didn’t know the band and usually only listened to classical, “and some jazz.”
*
A CANADIAN GRAPHIC DESIGNER WHO HAD BEEN IN BERLIN FOR two months, struggling to find work, was intriguingly nihilistic. He was supposed to move here with his girlfriend but at the last minute she decided she wanted to stay in Toronto and, effectively, dump him. I asked him if this was surprising and he said, “In retrospect? Yes.” I asked him what he meant and he said he had never imagined a future with her and had even talked with his buddies about what he would do if he got to Berlin and decided he didn’t want to be with her anymore, but now that she’d left him and defected from their exciting new plan he couldn’t stop thinking about her and feeling they were certain to get back together someday. He didn’t seem very upset about it, just a little upset, so I had to take him at his word. I said, angrily, that if I had actually been looking for someone to date, I would have been very discouraged by this. I told him he should not be on dating apps, even though I didn’t care what he did with his life. I said that my beloved childhood dog had died that morning and I had to go mourn him.
*
I WAS STARTING TO GET ANNOYED. THESE PEOPLE JUST WANTED to talk about themselves. They weren’t giving me a chance to talk about my characters.
*
ONE THING THAT SURPRISED ME WAS HOW LITTLE I THOUGHT about having sex. Some of the guys were attractive, if not downright hot. One had a sexily crooked mouth. Yet to have sex with one of them would have been preposterous.
*
MAYBE I WAS TOO GOOD AT LISTENING. LISTENING, EVERYONE SAYS, is essentially female. Like 46 percent of the nouns in the German language.
*
I DECIDED TO GO ON A SERIES OF DATES ASSUMING PERSONALITIES based on the twelve signs of the zodiac. This would, I imagined, provide structure.
*
ARIES: I WAS A MASSAGE THERAPIST, YES, BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY I was an acupuncturist, I said to a serious Argentinean translator before I began proselytizing about pressure points and energy flows. Whenever he expressed a doubt or tried to suggest an alternative interpretation of something I said, I snapped that he was being sexist. I loved acupuncture. Sticking tiny needles into strangers was my calling. I sometimes got tears in my eyes just thinking about the beauty of the human body and spirit intertwined. I took his hand, very soft—he was clearly not someone who performed manual labor or even played an instrument—looked in his eyes, and pressed my thumb and forefinger into the wing between his thumb and forefinger, saying it would help with tension in his head and neck. He said nothing. I was pressing quite hard as I told him I would start my own acupuncture practice someday, hopefully in Berlin. He said he was jealous of my commitment, that he wished he cared about translating from German to Spanish and from English to Spanish as much as I clearly cared about acupuncture. I looked at him with a sympathetic smile and said I felt very lucky, to have known for so long that this was what I was meant to do. “One needs a purpose,” he said, wistfully, and I really did feel sorry for him, because we might have gotten along otherwise. “I wish it were enough just to exist.”
*
I’M GOING TO STOP THE EX-BOYFRIENDS RIGHT THERE: YES, I know astrology is fake. It’s not real. But as I’ve said to them before, who cares? It’s real enough to influence how real people think.
*
SEX SCENE: A COUPLE OF MONTHS AFTER FELIX MOVED BACK TO the U.S., I showed up to his new apartment unannounced and a little drunk. When I was outside his building, I rang his bell, and he buzzed without calling down, probably thinking it was someone who lived on a different floor and had forgotten their key. A minute later he was opening his door to my knock, surprised and then trying to conceal his annoyance. From the entryway I could see his kitchen table, where an aluminum takeout container and bottle of beer sat next to his laptop, open to YouTube; he didn’t let me in immediately but instead asked if something was wrong. It was as if we had not spent the last months speaking all day every day, relaying thoughts and feelings. As if I had never told him important, closely held things about my life’s recurring themes, about how the way I perceived myself misaligned with certain realities! I hadn’t felt like I was dying to see him, just that it would be nice, but being obviously unwelcome heightened the stakes of the visit. I doubled down, putting on a beaming smile and saying no, nothing was wrong, I just wanted to see him—not “to say hello,” not “to stop by,” but specifically to see him, Felix, an apparently simple desire meant to signify something deeper. Because of this phrasing, or so I imagined, he would have
to shut down his well-meaning girlfriend, with her unabashed love of him, if he wanted to continue to be alone. A mistimed kiss on the mouth. He stood aside to let me in, and I sat down on the couch with programmed ease; I’d only been there once before, when it didn’t look like an apartment that belonged to anyone. (He hadn’t asked for my help with the move, and when I offered he acted shocked, as if helping him move would be a horrible burden and not something friends and lovers did so often that it was a trope to provide pizza in exchange, and said he had hired people.) There were still a couple of small boxes in the corner, the miscellaneous stuff you transport every time you move, half-filled notebooks you might read in a nostalgic mood six years from now, notices from past banks, desk figurines, snow pants wrapped around a fragile vase. He had gotten a plant, a waxy Monstera, about three feet tall, and it bobbed like a curious prehistoric pet when either of us stood up or crossed the floor. There was nothing mysterious about Felix’s apartment, nothing that suggested it contained somewhere within its three rooms a secret laboratory or hidden trap door or child pornography, but still I felt I was seeing something I wasn’t supposed to. A framed poster on the wall advertised an Italian movie I’d never heard of, least of all from him.
He offered me a beer, took his own, sat next to me on the couch, leaving a little space between us, and asked as if it pained him whom I’d been having dinner with. I put my legs on his lap and told him I’d been at the Thai place down the street with Jordan, a friend from college, who wanted to meet him; they were neighbors. He said that would be nice and took out his phone, swiping and tapping at it a couple of times and, when the song he wanted didn’t play immediately, pointing the device at a speaker in the corner, though the gesture was useless, a reflex from growing up with remote controls. Following more frustrated fingering of the cell phone Ethiopian jazz began to play, and he set his hands on my shins. It was winter and the radiator hissed. We talked about our days and the primary debates, and though he wasn’t coarse or rude or even unwilling, after the initial display of mild reluctance I wanted to push him, if not toward intimacy then at least toward some affection. I sat up from my position lounging against the opposite arm of his sofa and took his face in my hands. When we kissed, I realized he too was drunk, maybe drunker than I. He softened and pulled me fully onto his lap, and we kissed a little while longer before he pulled away and smirked, his eyes lazy, looking so much like a teenager that I recalled being sixteen, in a car on a hill. Unlike his previous facial expressions this one was not forced or concealing; he took my hand and brought it to rub his erection, which was pressing against my inner thigh otherwise. I’d been operating on the adrenaline produced by my attention-seeking but upon his display of agency I suddenly wanted to leave. I mimicked the soft cooing of porn stars and noticed as I did the brightness of his living room, the stark unremarkability of the scene I’d walked into, the rug not quite big enough for the space, the curtains ugly and concealing no secrets at all. This had the effect of making me feel like a fool, and at once I needed to recoup my pride. Willing to risk seeming inept I started to rub his penis on the outside of his pants faster—too fast, I knew, to be pleasurable—and he soon put his hand on top of mine to slow me. In the unnecessarily low tone of sex he told me I looked hot; he must have seen himself as rescuing me from self-knowledge. I kissed him as if in response and as we parted I didn’t say anything, just kind of smiled, like I had some kind of plan that was better than taking off at least some of our clothes and having sex but that I was not going to reveal just yet. He said, “Baby,” not to direct me or request anything of me, just to declare, and although I hated the falseness of the endearment, the huskiness he brought to the kinds of words he’d never say in a nonsexual context, I felt a little happy that he’d called me something I had to assume he meant nicely.
Still, I didn’t want to have sex with him. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps laziness. Perhaps a desire to maintain the illusion of an uncontaminated metaphysical state. The brain chemistry is altered during sex, plus penetration does what it does, psychologically. A man I nearly had an affair with once told me, as we lay close but not touching on a blanket in the park, that women having heterosexual P-in-V sex could not fuck, only be fucked; I replied that there was a great body of literature that debated this very question and then despite his pleading never fucked him. But still: he had a point. One wants to be able to fuck a man while actually fucking him.
Felix and I had sex often, and it was good. I had plentiful orgasms, in quantities that made friends ask about vibrators. Because I had come there, at night, having drunk enough to be playful but not enough to be worrisome, having put my legs on his legs, having batted my eyelashes, I didn’t feel I could just say, “I don’t want it,” without offering some physiological excuse. I had wanted it earlier that very day, which had probably contributed to my decision to drop by. Yet not even the most genuine-seeming dirty talk could yank me out of this not-wanting; I wanted to have sex so little that sex was all I could think about. I saw her, the me of five minutes in the future, having to look at the wall as she undulated not too fast or slow atop this uninteresting structure, having to prop herself in some straining way, having to prepare a look of pleasure on her face, having to decide whether saying “I want you to come” would expose her disinterest or sound as if she craved his orgasm. I kept to my sophomoric secondary fondling until finally he unbuttoned his own pants with his left hand as he fingertipped my waist under my shirt with his right, still kissing, and I started to move away, almost imperceptibly, the slightest recalibration, just to prepare my body to disengage from his. As I moved my upper body backward Felix unbuttoned my pants and rotated his hand around unnaturally to slide it between our bodies and onto my crotch. After a minute of this I removed the hand and he used it to pull his dick out of his boxers. What was to be done? I decided to give him a blowjob.
As I moved down his body, shimmying his pants down so that he sat with his bare ass on the couch, he put one of his hands on the back of my head, not intending to actually do the job of downward movement but merely encouraging it, as if he had come up with this idea himself. I became sad. It was my responsibility to go down on him, not necessarily now but sometimes, and if I didn’t do it now, I would have to do it some other time. I could not go two weeks without giving a blowjob, or having sex. This was not a policy, simply a reality, and one that I rarely stopped to consider. Imagine if you were in a functional sexual relationship and then one party just started refusing to have sex. It would no longer be a functional sexual relationship. The sex is required. I mean, not required, but strongly encouraged. If I were dating a man who would not go down on me, I would not be dating him. I know a guy who really believes that the power differential between (heterosexual) men and women is no clearer than in oral sex, during which only one gender can look up at the squirming other while simultaneously performing her favor/duty. When he first posed this analysis I laughed and laughed, exactly what he was afraid of. He thought I didn’t understand what he meant, so he tried to explain. “The guy can, like, perk his head up, but not while he’s, uh, eating you out, not at the same time,” the guy said. “He can’t communicate with his eyes that he could hurt you.” I was in hysterics. I had tears in my eyes. I explained that while I got what he was selling I just didn’t buy it and said that just because the power could not, in this one specific instance, be seductively communicated it didn’t mean it wasn’t there; even men like him, I said, narrowing my eyes, trying not to smile smugly, were very strong, or at least stronger than me. You felt this when you fucked them, or rather were fucked by them. They could kill you more easily than you could kill them; in many cases you could kill them, but it would be harder, require more strategy and planning. You would also have to overcome your ingrained sense that you should not kill this person. What’s more, I added, there was the porn, which taught men to desire eye contact while they receive blowjobs, so they often tell the woman to look up at them, in order to monitor in real t
ime the effect their dicks are having on her face. I pointed out that many men like it when the woman gags; in fact, some want her to gag, and is this not humiliating, to be physically below someone sputtering and coughing and eye-watering in service entirely of their sexual pleasure? Women may want to gag as well, but again, there is a whole body of literature debating what this means; for the purposes of this anecdotal argument the gagging signified humiliation, whether desired or not. He said, “Well, I don’t make women gag!” reddening with regret as he did. I said it seemed that what he was actually afraid of was humiliation and he was forgetting that sex required either not looking or looking stupid. He held up his hands as if in retreat and changed the subject to the question of whether it was true that teenagers were having a lot of anal sex, as had been reported.