This Really Isn't About You

by Jean Hannah Edelstein

  I learned at an early age that women who really enjoyed sex, who weren’t neurotic about sex, were women who were not entirely deserving of love. It took me many years to unlearn that. In my early twenties I thought it was probably OK to have sex as long as I was already in a Serious Relationship with someone, and in my middle twenties I hoped that having sex would lead to someone deciding to be in a relationship with me, and for a while in my late twenties and early thirties, when I was not in a relationship, I decided to just have sex when I felt like it, though afterwards I often felt that maybe that was the wrong decision. For a time before I moved to New York I decided that perhaps I should revert to my earlier strategy, to hold back on having sex with a man until I met one who gave me the confidence that he loved me. This meant that I was celibate for quite a long period of time. During that time one of my friends asked me what my most beloved sexual fantasy was and I said: To have sex with someone who loves me! and oh, how we laughed, as if that was witty, and not just very true.

  I decided to start having sex before I stopped having the desire for sex, before men ceased to desire me, before I needed to dig deeper into the article about sex after a hysterectomy that explained the ways and means to keep wanting it after all. I decided to start having sex because for now my body was still something that I had the ability to make decisions about.

  I met Henri around the time I made that decision. Or maybe I made that decision around the time I met Henri.

  I went on my first date with Henri one evening just a few hours after I’d arrived home from a business trip, back to my old office in Berlin. That morning, before I left the hotel to go to Tegel to catch my flight to New York, feeling sad about the life I’d left behind in Berlin and the one I hadn’t quite figured out in Brooklyn, I lay in my big hotel room bed on my own and listened to a couple having sex in the room next door to or above mine. The woman was moaning with rhythmic pleasure.

  That sounds nice, I thought, and maybe that’s what I was still thinking that evening, when I went out to meet Henri for a drink. I was wearing the same figure-hugging dress I’d had on when the geneticist checked me for brain cancer. On my way out of my apartment I ran into my landlady, and she saw me in my figure-hugging dress and she said: You look nice.

  So I guess that when I met Henri, I believed that I looked nice. Henri did not tell me that I looked nice, but he was French, and he was handsome, and he had an extremely worthy and interesting career. Maybe Henri looked like Ryan Gosling, or maybe I had watched a movie starring Ryan Gosling on the flight back from Berlin. Either way, Henri and I met at a bar a few blocks from his apartment to drink whiskey. I was exhausted from my trip, so maybe I lost my inhibitions faster than I usually would, or maybe that’s just an excuse. The next morning, when I walked out of Henri’s apartment, I deleted his number from my phone, and decided that the reason that I had just slept with him was that I was jetlagged. I decided that the reason I had just slept with Henri was he had plied me with whiskey, and because Henri had an alluring French accent. But the truth was that I did it – went home with a man I did not know, had sex with him – because soon I might have a hysterectomy. Because soon I might have cancer. Because waiting to have sex with a man who loved me could mean that I might never have sex again. Because for now, for the time being, my body was still intact, and my own. I’m sure Henri would not have slept with me if he had known any of that.

  I guess this is what a one-night stand is like, I thought to myself, as I got into the Uber that I’d summoned with my phone as I descended the stairs from Henri’s fourth-floor walkup. Before I went into Henri’s apartment, on the street outside the building he lived in, I demanded that he show me his driver’s licence, as if knowing his middle name and date of birth would deter him from killing me. Even though nobody knew where I was. I took the car home, I showered and dressed and took another car to the office, so that I wouldn’t be late, so that I wouldn’t be wearing the figure-hugging dress yet again. So that I would give the impression that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, as if it was something anyone could detect. I deleted Henri’s number from my phone that morning, when I walked out of the apartment, because I had no expectation that we would see each other again. Maybe because I wanted to ensure it.

  But he texted me later, or the next day, something about how it was nice to meet me. How he had fun. I’d deleted his number but of course I knew at once that it was him.

  It was nice to meet you, too, I wrote.

  I added his number to my phone again. I saved his name as ‘French’.

  Henri was the kind of man I thought I wanted to be with, in various ways. He was tall, he was good-looking, a few years older than me. He was very intelligent, he worked for the UN in a job that meant that quite often he left New York to travel to dangerous locations that had been ravaged by war and natural disasters, in order to make them less ravaged. From what I could tell, Henri was kind of heroic, but it really was hard to tell, because Henri gave very little away. I didn’t know about his family or his friends, except that he had them, and I didn’t ask him many questions: because he didn’t want to be asked, or because I didn’t want to know. Henri had lived in his apartment for a few years but the decor was still sparse, perhaps because he travelled so much or perhaps because that’s the kind of man Henri was. I didn’t know. I noticed one picture tacked up on the wall, the only hint in the space of him as a person with tastes besides a box of cereal on his kitchen counter. The picture was a drawing of a nude woman with her back turned to the artist, in a position that was maybe supposed to represent a bit of light bondage. Henri didn’t tell me about it, and I did not ask him.

  I did tell Henri the first time that we met that I moved to New York because my father died and he said, I’m sorry, in a way that seemed polite but not interested. Henri was only interested in my body: he was very interested in my body, and he seemed to be uninterested in about everything else about me, expect when he perceived that his lack of interest would obstruct his access to my body again. This didn’t matter to me. In fact, I think it was what I wanted, since everyone else with access to my body was focused on cataloguing its flaws.

  His texts were always brief. We didn’t chat. We didn’t exchange jokes. I didn’t tell Henri that I wasn’t sleeping well these days. I didn’t tell Henri about the doctors who kept telling me to remove my organs. I didn’t tell Henri how I wondered about whether I would still be a woman after those parts of my body were removed, even though I believe that the state of being a woman is not exclusively determined by the physical body.

  Sometimes I wondered what more was going on with Henri, why he seemed so closed and blank. I wondered if he had some kind of post-traumatic stress from one of the bad things he’d witnessed in one of the dangerous places he’d been, doing things that were probably heroic. I didn’t ask. I knew that it was important not to discuss anything pertaining to feelings with Henri because if we started to know things about each other we would almost certainly stop sleeping together. That was not what I wanted from Henri, and not – I suppose – what he wanted from me.

  Sometimes, after we had sex, which was always very good sex, I would pause for a moment before I put my clothes on. I would look at the ceiling and Henri would look at the ceiling, we’d leave a polite space on the fitted sheet between us, and I would think: Man, is this guy dead inside or what!

  I didn’t tell Henri that I had never thought too much in the past about whether I wanted to be a mother, and that now I thought all the time about my fear that I wouldn’t be one. I didn’t tell Henri about how some time ago I had decided that I would be more discerning about who I slept with, about how I had made a decision that I would not go to bed with a man who didn’t care about me, and how that had led to a long period of celibacy, well over a year of celibacy, until I learned how my body’s future betrayal of me was written in my DNA. Having sex with Henri was one way of saying that what those people had written in my body was not important. It was a w
ay of saying: No: my body is mine.

  I didn’t tell Henri anything, not really. Not that I can recall. But every two weeks or so, my phone buzzed with a text from him. He would ask me to go for a drink, we would arrange a time to meet, and then we would go back to an apartment, mine or his. After a while we stopped going for a drink. After a while we’d just meet at his apartment or mine, chat about things like the weather and business travel for ten or fifteen minutes, and then we’d go to bed. After the first or second time, we stopped spending the night. One evening I drifted off for a moment and when I woke he had moved to the living room, still naked. He was sitting on his futon, watching YouTube videos on his laptop.

  C’est horrible, I thought.

  I’m going, I said, rising from the bed, pulling my clothes on, calling an Uber.

  Henri got up from the futon, walked with me to the front door of the apartment. He kissed me goodbye with what felt like more affection than usual, which is to say any affection at all. I assumed it was because he was grateful to me for leaving. As I walked down the stairs of his building I felt more disgusted with myself than I usually felt after sleeping with Henri, which was always a little bit disgusted. I thought to myself as I walked down the stairs: Never again. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought this after sleeping with Henri, but this time I thought it with more intent.

  Once again, I deleted the listing for ‘French’ from my phone, but that didn’t matter: Henri’s number became the only one besides my mother’s that I knew by heart.

  Oh, I’d say to my friends, with a shrug, when they asked me about the state of my romantic life, I have a lover, he’s French.

  My friends seemed impressed. I didn’t tell them about the incident with YouTube.

  The stretches of time between our meetings grew longer. I assumed this was because Henri was dating someone more seriously. I wondered, for a moment, if he’d had a girlfriend the whole time. I didn’t care. I went on dates with other men. One used my time to tell me the plot of the television series that he was writing.

  I can tell you about all the episodes, he said, I have them all plotted out.

  OK, I said, because I had nowhere else to go, and half a glass of wine left.

  I went on a date with a Ph.D. student whose physical resemblance to a university ex-boyfriend repulsed me.

  Want to kiss? he said.

  No, I said.

  I went on a date with an emergency-room doctor who met me for brunch after his overnight shift and got angry when the waiter wouldn’t bring him wine.

  This is a shitshow! the doctor said, in a loud stage whisper, and the waiter looked at me with great sorrow, assuming the doctor must be my horrifying alcoholic boyfriend.

  I just smiled. I was happy that this was another man who didn’t mean anything to me.

  One day, after the longest period of silence ever, a couple of months, I got another text from Henri. Sorry I haven’t been in touch, he wrote, as if he had failed to meet some expectations.

  Nice to hear from you, I wrote, with no exclamation mark.

  I want to take you to dinner, Henri responded.

  Oh no, I thought, this will really be the end. But I texted him back: Yes.

  I wanted to see what would happen.

  We went to dinner, to an Italian restaurant near Henri’s apartment in the West Village, just down the block. I suggested it because I’d been there before, on a date with another man, and I knew that the food was good and simple.

  That’s convenient for me, Henri texted when I suggested it.

  Of course it was. I also suggested the restaurant because it was convenient for him. Because I wanted to sleep with him again but I also did not want him to come to my apartment again.

  We sat outside. Other times, Henri had met me in my laziest clothes, my home-only sweats, but tonight I made an effort to wear a nice dress. Henri was wearing the sweater he wore on our first date. Maybe it was his best sweater, or the sweater he wore when he was trying his best. We ordered pasta.

  Henri pronged a gnocchi with his fork.

  Henri and I have slept together many times, I thought, but I have never before seen him eat.

  We tried to make conversation, which also felt unfamiliar. Henri described a film he had watched on one of his long flights back from being heroic in a dangerous part of the world, an animated film, one that I hadn’t seen because I dislike animated films, and never watch them.

  It was cute, Henri said.

  I tried to smile. I tried to still find him attractive. He does have a lovely face, I thought, and I still like his accent.

  We held hands under the table, as if it would have mattered if someone saw us together. Maybe it would.

  By then I already knew that we had ruined whatever it was that we once shared. But we stuck with our shared, unarticulated agenda. We went back to Henri’s apartment. We had sex, but it wasn’t good, not like it was before. Henri was frustrated. Maybe even a little angry. I was distracted and impatient. As we went through the motions together, I wasn’t so sure that this was my first choice of things to do with my body, in that time and place. I’d guess that it wasn’t his, either.

  I put my nice dress back on when it was over. We said goodbye. It was awkward. This time Henri did not walk me to the door.

  I knew it, I thought as I walked down the stairs, I knew that we should not have had dinner.

  Once again, there was a car waiting to drive me back to Brooklyn. I climbed into the backseat. It was a relief.

  Did you have a good night? the driver said.

  Sure, I said. Sure. How’s yours?

  7

  I was longing for someone to hear my colonoscopy joke. Friends who knew that I was going in for the procedure texted me that morning to wish me luck, so I used the joke then.

  How are you feeling? my friends wrote.

  This is the first time in my life that I haven’t been literally full of shit, I wrote back.

  Some of my friends responded. Haha, they wrote. Some of them just didn’t respond. I tried not to judge the ones that I did not hear back from. Not too much.

  The day before the colonoscopy, I was instructed, I should mix and consume a gallon of laxative solution in order to flush out the contents of my colon. At the gastroenterologist’s office, a receptionist handed me a jug and an envelope of powder. In addition to the laxative, the instructions continued, I was permitted to consume only clear liquids: apple juice, black coffee, Jell-O. I went in and out of all of the bodegas in my neighbourhood looking for Jell-O that was not red, because red Jell-O was forbidden. I thought about my dad, and the tubs of Jell-O that he gave as gifts to neighbours, during his Jell-O phase. I thought about how if my dad was still alive, he would have made me Jell-O himself, green or yellow, presented with a flourish in a plastic tub that had once contained margarine.

  I thought about how much I missed my dad.

  I thought about how red Jell-O was clearly the preferred Jell-O in my neighbourhood.

  This is a good time to live alone, I thought the night before my colonoscopy, each time I chugged back another glass of the laxative and each time I flushed, but really I wished that there was someone there to hold my hand and decant the gallon into a glass. To be obligated to pick me up from the clinic after the procedure. You’re not allowed to go home on your own after a colonoscopy, because of the sedative. I didn’t want to ask my mother to come to Brooklyn, because of the fuss. Henri was out of the question. One of my friends said she’d like to, but she was too busy with work. Another was out of town. These refusals felt more painful, perhaps, than they should. In the end, my friend Zoe agreed to help.

  I let the receptionist at the colonoscopy clinic know that I’d arrived and she said, Did you drink a laxative? and I said, Yes, and then she said, We’ll need a urine sample and I said, That will be a bit difficult because I haven’t consumed anything since midnight, in accordance with your instructions!

  I was cranky, and dehydrated.

&nb
sp; The receptionist just looked at me and handed me a bracelet for my wrist. She gave me the kind of soft ridged plastic cup that you might use to get a drink of water from an office water cooler. It seemed a bit casual and unprofessional, for a urine sample.

  The bathroom is over there, said the receptionist. We don’t need much.

  I walked to the bathroom and peed in the drinking cup and then carried the cup, hot and sloshing, but with not much, back through the waiting area, which was enormous. The waiting area resembled a bus station filled with dozens of people who were waiting for a bus going to a place they didn’t want to go to. And who had all been drinking laxatives.

  I’m done, I said to the receptionist. I held out my plastic cup of pee.

  Oh, said the receptionist, oh, and I thought that probably she shouldn’t touch it without gloves, but then instead of taking the container from me she summoned a colleague and the colleague escorted me back through the bus station, and through a sort of bus station anteroom, to another room where there was a big plastic bin.

  Well, I thought, as I walked, well! Here I am, walking past dozens of strangers, holding an open cup of my own urine.

  I set my cup in the big plastic bin. It was the only cup. It seemed strange, so unsanitary, so I looked it up on my phone when I got back to my seat in the bus station. It was a pregnancy test, of course. You can’t have a colonoscopy if you’re pregnant. Mine was the only drinking cup of pee because most of the people in the bus station were well into their fifties, or men, or both.