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Bookmark | Jun 28 2002

So I stumbled on some of photographs on the Internet of my ex-girlfriend having sex. This was on a porn site. I visit porn sites.

Suffice it to say, I hadn’t expected to find any photos of her there, and certainly wasn’t looking for any. Not that I haven’t looked for photos of her before—on the web, I mean—I have. I just haven’t looked for photos of her having sex. In any case, I wouldn’t have found these particular photos had I tried, because she used a pseudonym.

Jennifer Joy.

Lord knows how she came up with that. I find it embarrassing. There are photographs on the Internet of my ex-girlfriend fucking some guy with dyed blond hair and a tattoo of a chain around his bicep, and she’s calling herself Jennifer Joy. Probably the name was someone else’s idea, but even so, she agreed to it. Besides agreeing to the photos.

Sadly—and this I noticed immediately—she wasn’t aroused. Not to pull rank or anything, but I happen to know how this woman looks when she’s aroused. She gets splotches. I wouldn’t have known I knew this, but as soon as I saw the photos, I found myself looking for the splotches. A few years after we broke up, I happened to see her walking down 17th Street. I was in a car with a friend and she was walking with her back to me. I spotted her at least two hundred feet away, recognizing her by her walk. I didn’t know that I knew her walk, but to see her there walking, I knew it was her. The splotches are the same. You know certain things without knowing you know them.

The worst part was her pubis. I mean the hair. She had shaved everything but this tiny vertical strip above her labia. That’s the style these days, to shave everything but this little landing strip. It looked like one of those “soul patches,” only upside-down—an upside-down pubis soul patch.

After we broke up, the first thing she did was buy a flank steak and grill it on a neighbor’s barbecue. When we were together she was a vegetarian—we both were—but as soon as I walked out the door she became a carnivore. The same day. A mutual friend told me about the flank steak. It turns out that she’d been a vegetarian because I was a vegetarian—to please me, I suppose. I had no idea; she had me completely fooled. Once I learned this I began to wonder how else she had fooled me, which, trust me, is a terrible thing to wonder about your ex-girlfriend. Because there’s no limit to it. Which words, which moments, were lies? Which may have been lies but hopefully weren’t? Which probably weren’t but hopefully were?

Seeing that landing strip made me think of the flank steak. Because it struck me that maybe her partner, the man in the photos, who I presume to be her boyfriend or perhaps her husband, wanted her to shave this way—or perhaps she believed he wanted this, which adds up the same thing. On the other hand, maybe she chose the landing strip herself, having seen it on other women, but even this I find depressing. How many women shave their pubic hair in this exact way in order to appear desirable to men whose ideas of what is desirable come from photos of women who have shaved their pubic hair in this exact way?

Granted, perhaps I’m being too much of a modernist here, lamenting the absence of something that never was and never can be. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done this.

They used the doctor’s office bit. In the early shots he wore a lab coat and had one of those round strap-on mirrors on his head. The office (it was a real office!) had diplomas on the wall and an examination table. All the action revolved around the table. Sometimes she was on it, sometimes he was, and in a few shots they were on it together—precariously, it seemed.

I found myself fixating on the fact that I had done these same things with her, more or less, although never on a table like that and never with a photographer circling around us. I couldn’t remember any of it. I mean I could but I couldn’t. She was there—under me, over me, in front of me—but I couldn’t feel her there. It was like watching a film of those times filmed from my perspective but with her removed, just an empty space where she had been, except that what was missing wasn’t her but my feelings for her.

I’ve made her into a ridiculous character, haven’t I? With flank steaks and landing strips. It’s unkind. And it’s only possible because I’ve forgotten her.

Strangely, though perhaps not that strangely, I saw this coming. I mean when we were together. We would be having sex or… well it didn’t have to be sex, just a moment of closeness, of feeling connected and happy, and I would recognize that moment, the preciousness of it, and I would tell myself to remember it, to memorize the feeling of it, because even as it was happening it was slipping away.

And now it’s gone. And all I remember is trying to remember it—to memorize it, I mean—an effort I knew would come to nothing, as it has.

There’s more to say, I suppose, I just don’t know what it is. I’ll probably go back and look again. I bookmarked the page.