But I was young. After about six or so months together, I cheated on him. When I finally got up the courage to tell him that I had had sex—and with a girl, no less—he barely flinched. He understood my desire to experience the world. He was a wise, wonderful, understanding person who granted me the freedom and the support to do anything and everything I ever wanted or needed to do. He understood that I was young and needed to experience life and he wasn’t petty or judgmental. Being with him was the best of both worlds.
When I finally graduated from college, I got offered a job that would send me to Thailand for a year. We never discussed sex with other people or the boundaries of our relationship. While I was there, we spoke on the phone and wrote long letters and e-mailed, and halfway through my stay Noam visited. We had missed each other and it was clear that when I came back, we’d be together again.
But when he left, I had a brief affair with a really hot Israeli medic on a weeklong rafting trip in Nepal. I hadn’t had sex with anyone before Noam visited, so it was strange that I did after he left but for some reason it seemed okay to me. I traipsed around India for a while and eventually, after about a year away, I made my way back to Arizona for graduate school. I never mentioned my fling, he never asked, and I just pretended nothing ever happened. It was entirely possible that Noam had indiscretions of his own in my absence but it was a subject neither one of us ever broached.
We were happy to be reunited and that was enough. Shortly thereafter, we found a beautiful rammed-earth house and moved in together, probably too quickly. Then we got a dog. I named him Eli, after the Jewish prophet Elijah, because he turned up on our doorstep during Passover dinner. It was, by all accounts, domestic bliss. But it was also absurd. As much as I loved Noam, to think that someone like me would be ready to settle down in her early twenties was outrageous. And even though neither one of us ever said it, we both knew it. This became a very problematic theme in our relationship: instead of dealing with our issues, we just pretended they didn’t exist.
Two years later I finished graduate school and reality set in. And that was when things got complicated. I was twenty-six and ready for another adventure. Noam was thirty-five and ready to settle down. I was antsy. Among other things, our sex life had taken a turn for the worse; i.e., it was nonexistent. I, who wanted to have sex every minute of every day since I discovered I had a clitoris, was beside myself. Instead of actually dealing with it, I decided to go away again, this time to Paris for the summer. I had no idea what I was going to do when I got back, so we got rid of our house. I went to Paris and tried to figure out what it meant to be a writer. Part of what this entailed was having an affair with a butch lesbian and a really hot artist with the most enormous penis I had ever seen and who looked exactly like Jean-Michel Basquiat.
So I went to Europe for the summer and Noam stayed in Tucson. He decided that after the summer he would move back to New York, and he wanted me to come with him. I had decided that I could not yet move to New York because I needed to move to Los Angeles. Instead of breaking up, we decided to have a long-distance relationship. And somehow this all seemed very reasonable. In the interim, indeed, the day after I arrived from Paris, I received a phone call at the crack of dawn.
I don’t do anything well at six o’clock in the morning except sleep. And I couldn’t imagine what my mother wanted from my life at six AM. I assumed she had forgotten that since she was in New York and I was in Arizona that there was a three-hour time difference.
The second I heard her voice, I knew something horrible had happened.
I was right.
My mother told me that two planes had just flown into the Twin Towers. Moreover, my friend Lori’s older brother, Guy, was nowhere to be found. Lori and I had been best friends since we were thirteen. I slept at her house nearly every weekend and had a huge crush on Guy all through high school. I hadn’t spoken to her in a few years. We had had some big dumb fight but I called her anyway. I figured the worst she could do was hang up on me, which thankfully she didn’t. I actually caught her as she was on her way to Guy’s apartment to pick up his toothbrush so the authorities would have something with his DNA so they could identify his body—if they ever found it. Lori told me that she and Guy didn’t speak on the phone very often but for some reason, the previous night she had spoken to him for two hours. Seemingly out of nowhere, Guy told her that he was sick of his job at Cantor Fitzgerald and was going to quit soon and pursue his true love—music. He had been thinking about it for a long time, he said, and he was ready to make his move.
The next day was September 11, 2001.
This story would resonate with me for the next decade.
Noam did move to New York and I did move to Los Angeles. I started a T-shirt company and I wrote a book and I had more affairs. It was a very productive few years but my relationship with Noam was on precarious ground. I mean, obviously. I’d been hemming and hawing for years and he finally gave me an ultimatum: come to New York or it was over for good. I decided to move and it was fair enough on his end, but in hindsight, if you have to give someone an ultimatum, that’s never a good sign. And though we really, truly loved each other, we ultimately were more best friends than anything else.
All in all, we were together for more than ten years. It seemed possible that for as much as we loved each other, the things we loved about each other in the beginning were the things that would tear us apart. When our lease was finally up in our Nolita sublet, Noam was dead set on moving to Brooklyn and I was dead set on staying in Manhattan. His bohemian nature and my bourgeois tendencies were clashing. Big-time. Noam wanted to teach English in a disenfranchised neighborhood in Brooklyn. He wanted to give underprivileged kids a chance at a great education; he wanted a simple life.
I, perhaps more than ever, still wanted everything I had escaped Queens in search of—like Chanel bags. And maybe it’s not exactly that I escaped Queens in search of Chanel bags—as there are more Russian ladies than you can count who have Chanel bags and live in Queens. But I did escape in order to find something . . . grander. And Noam just wasn’t interested in those things. So our lives became very separate. I wasn’t particularly crazy about his friends, and he wasn’t particularly crazy about mine. We rarely went out together because we didn’t enjoy doing the same things. And if we did, I wanted to take taxis and he wanted to take the subway. We were constantly butting heads.
The last thing in the world I wanted to do was move to Brooklyn. As far as I was concerned, I hadn’t clawed my way out of one outer borough to move to another. I knew all about how great Brooklyn was and how cool it had become and how beautiful it was and everyone we knew who lived there loved it. As far as I was concerned, in spite of all that, there was still one fundamental problem with Brooklyn: it wasn’t Manhattan.
I knew from the first time I went to the Patricia Field store in the Village (back when it was on Eighth Street) when I was thirteen and watched the queens getting ready to go out at night that I was living in the wrong borough. It was painfully clear that everything was much more exciting on the other side of the bridge. I didn’t want to see the skyline; I wanted to live in it.
By the end, before we moved out, we had pretty much stopped having sex altogether, which helped me rationalize the fact that I was cheating on Noam nearly every opportunity I got. And it all seemed fine in some fucked-up way since we had still never, ever in all of our more than ten years together had a conversation about this. It was almost a silent agreement that what we didn’t know couldn’t hurt us. And there was just so much that was unsaid.
Euripides said, “A slave is he who cannot speak his thoughts.” And in that relationship, for whatever reason—for many reasons—I could not speak my mind. Mostly, I think, I wasn’t speaking because to speak would have been to acknowledge the painful fact that we were like two pieces of a puzzle that simply did not fit. And I knew that. We both did.
We were still l
iving together when I shot the pilot for my first book, but I knew it was the beginning of the end. The whole experience was thrilling for me and I became more self-consumed than ever.
Because it was everything I had been dreaming of, it was the perfect excuse to not deal with my relationship. In my megalomaniacal frenzy, I had somehow convinced my agent to convince the producer to let me “act” as “myself.” This was the stupidest idea I had ever had, primarily because I know nothing about acting and shy of a minor role in Oliver Twist when I was nine, I had never so much as even been on a stage. But minor details like these have never prohibited me from following my dreams. It’s likely that this is also why the pilot never got picked up.
My brief stint on the fringe of Hollywood gave me a whole new understanding for on-screen romances. At first I was kind of skeptical, but after being naked together for three days, my “love interest” was actually starting to turn me on. I was not only convinced that I was on my way to superstardom, but I was also convinced that Seth and I had real chemistry. I had reconciled the fact that getting naked and making out with Seth was “acting.” And Noam never even asked me what we were shooting, so as usual I just kept my mouth shut.
One day after we wrapped, as they say in the industry, I leaned in to kiss Seth, which we had done a hundred times already. But Seth pulled away from me and said no.
I was baffled, to say the least. “Excuse me?”
Seth said, “Periel, you have a boyfriend.”
I was genuinely perplexed. I was like, “Yeah? And?”
And Seth said, “And you live with him.”
I said, “And?”
Seth was like, “Periel, I don’t hook up with girls who have boyfriends.”
I couldn’t believe what a philistine he was!
I was like, “Seth, it’s a little bit more complicated than that.”
And Seth goes, “Maybe for you it is. For me, it’s not complicated at all.”
And, implementing what I had learned from Noam, I said, “Seth, things are not black-and-white.”
Seth said, “Maybe for you they’re not. That’s your shit. My shit is that you have a boyfriend and I don’t hook up with girls who have boyfriends.”
Buddha says that you should learn from experiences like these and be grateful to have a bruised ego. And really, who better to take advice from than Buddha? So while in the short term I was mortified, in the long term I think I did learn a thing or two. For example, if you are trying to have sex with someone while you are in a relationship with someone else, it’s pretty likely that something is seriously wrong with your relationship. If you’re trying to have sex with someone while you’re in a relationship with someone else, instead of focusing your attention on trying to get laid, you should focus your attention on being honest with yourself as to why you’re in that relationship to begin with.
In those moments when I was not distracting myself, I knew in my bones that everything was far from okay. I eventually came to terms with the fact that, ultimately, it’s yourself you have to face every morning in the mirror, so you damn well better like what you see. This was becoming more and more difficult.
When there were only weeks left to move out and find a new apartment and we hadn’t, I found myself, literally, on my knees in the bathroom, with my head in my hands, knowing that if we didn’t end it now, I was going to wake up in five years and be in the exact same place I was right then. And I would never forgive myself.
Noam eventually did move to Brooklyn and I moved into my friend Hanna’s apartment down the block. After ten years, we had broken up for real and it was the most painful thing I had ever done. I can’t remember ever having felt more sad or empty inside. It felt like part of me was missing and there was nothing I could ever do it to get it back.
2
Loser in Love
It was incredibly kind of my friend Hanna to take me in after Noam and I broke up so that I wouldn’t be homeless. Plus, Hanna is so crazy that focusing on her dysfunction was much less traumatic than dealing with my own. Hanna is awesome—funny, talented, great-looking—but she is totally out of her fucking mind. She had always been particularly neurotic and insecure, but especially when it came to men. It was a testament to what a mess my life was becoming that I was taking advice from her. We’d been friends since we were thirteen and I had always been the wild and fearless one and she had been more careful and timid. While it never even occurred to me that people might be talking about me, she was always worried about what people thought. Her neuroses were as crippling as they were charming.
Her neuroses came as no great surprise given her history. Her parents were pretty out of it while we were growing up, so we used to go to her house and take over her basement with weeklong parties and no one ever noticed. But when her mom got mad at her, she used to scream and throw shoes at Hanna. In addition to throwing shoes at her, her mother also used to tell her on a regular basis that her girlfriends were no good, she should trust no one, and she had better find a nice, rich Jewish man to marry her. We were fifteen.
This constant badgering turned Hanna into a nervous wreck. Despite her beauty, her talent, her charm, and her wit, she was so insecure and nervous around guys that she didn’t get laid until she got to college. And that experience was such a disaster that to this day the only way she can have an orgasm is by masturbating. She has literally never come from having sex with another person. The good news was that no matter how down I was, her stories would always cheer me up.
I would say, “Hanna, please tell me the story about Jonathan. It’s the only thing that is going to make me feel better.”
Hanna would answer, “Oh, God, Peri, not this again.”
But since we were kids, she has always given in to my peer pressure and would always acquiesce. “Fine. But you better not write about it.”
As I sat in front of her with a notebook and a pen and scribbled furiously, I said, “I won’t, I promise.”
Hanna: “I met Jonathan in college when I was eighteen years old. He was my first real boyfriend and I was a virgin.”
Me: “Why were you a virgin?”
Hanna: “You know why I was a virgin! All the guys in high school were assholes and I was waiting to be in a relationship to have sex.”
Me: “Was your first time as good as you’d hoped?”
Hanna: “Well, no. It wasn’t exactly what I’d thought it would be.”
Me: “Why not?”
Hanna: “Well, we would start to hook up and he would always stop in the middle—”
Me: “Why?”
Hanna, glaring at me: “You know why! He had erectile dysfunction.”
Me: “Did he tell you that?”
Hanna: “He didn’t have to tell me. It was obvious! Plus, I knew he was on Prozac and I thought that was why he couldn’t keep it up. I thought it was the perfect situation. He was a really nice Jewish boy. But every time we were right about to have sex, he just couldn’t get it up. Until—”
Me: “Until what?”
Hanna: “Until we realized that there was only one way he got superexcited . . .” She trailed off.
Me: “Hanna! Can you put your phone down and concentrate please.”
That’s the other thing about Hanna. She has the attention span of a mouse and she is constantly distracting herself from real life by way of her phone or her computer.
Hanna: “Okay, sorry! We figured out how he could get turned on and stay excited.”
Me: “This is getting me excited.”
Hanna: “It is?”
Me: “Yes. And I’d be even more excited if you continued.”
Hanna: “Okay. When he introduced the topic of diapers, he became ridiculously turned on and I didn’t understand why, but I was so excited by the fact that he could stay hard that I didn’t even care.”
Me: “How does something
like that get introduced into the conversation? Hey, want to fuck? Got a diaper?”
Hanna: “I don’t think we ever actually used diapers. We just talked about them. All I had to do was describe them and he would go insane.”
Me: “Is that true?”
Hanna: “Yes.”
Me: “I thought you told me you did use them.”
Hanna: “Well, I never wore one.”
Me: “I know you never wore one. I thought he wore one.”
Hanna: “I really don’t remember. I don’t think so.”
Me: “Hmmmm.”
Hanna: “Does that make the story worse?”
Me: “Yes. No. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Just go on. So what would you say?”
Hanna: “What?”
Me: “To him.”
Hanna: “About what?”
Me: “What do you mean about what? Stop texting! About the fucking weather.”
Hanna: “About the weather?”
Me: “Oh my God, you are impossible. Concentrate. No! Not about the weather. About diapers!”
Hanna: “Oh, right. I would have to talk about how it smelled like baby powder and it was white and soft and cushy. Or ‘I’m wearing a diaper.’ Or ‘You’re wearing a diaper.’ It was a really long time ago. I don’t really remember the details but just that all I had to do was say the word ‘diaper’ and he would just go berserk. That was more or less the only thing I could say or do for him to actually stay hard.”
Me: “That’s wild.”
Hanna: “No, what’s wild is that is how I lost my virginity . . . On top of someone who was balding and clinically depressed, while talking about diapers.”
On My Knees Page 2