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.
26 June 2002 | Feeling
My feet are wet. They’re wet because my sandals are wet. I only just realized this.
I got caught in the rain on the way home. It was my own fault. The rain didn’t appear so imposing when I emerged from the subway, so I decided not to change into the sneakers I was carrying in my bag.
Soon, though, the rain became a downpour. Stupidly I stuck to my decision. This was where I made my mistake – my original decision was reasonable; sticking to it was stupid. Within a few blocks my feet were sliding back and forth inside my sandals, which made it difficult to walk without seeming to mince. Embarrassed (I become embarrassed by mincing; I won’t bother to explain it), I considered going barefoot, only I was concerned about stepping on some sharp little thing and cutting my foot. Mincing was better, I decided, than possibly cutting my foot.
On entering my apartment I put the sandals in a corner to dry. Two hours later, as I was leaving to get dinner, I slipped them on again. They were still wet. When I returned, I neglected to remove them, having adjusted to damp sandals.
That was hours ago. I don’t remember what made me finally realize I was wearing wet sandals, but once I did, I decided to write this. I kept wearing the sandals while writing to stay connected to the feeling.
Now I can remove them.
My eyes aren’t working right. This happens sometimes, my vision goes blurry at the sides. When I was a kid I liked to push in my eyes with my thumbs, pushing on my eyelids, so that my vision would become messed up in an interesting way. This is like that. It’s from the computer of course, from all the time I spend looking at a computer monitor.
When it happens the only thing I can do to make it stop is to sleep. That’s why I’m in bed now, in the middle of the afternoon, when I have work to do.
I’m having trouble seeing the words I’m writing here, so I’m mostly writing with my eyes closed. I just peek now and then to make sure I’m not writing on top of things I’ve already written.
I have this idea that I’m going to go blind one day. I also think (imagine?) that I’m going to die in a car accident. If both happen, it follows I will need to go blind before dying in an accident, which means that someone else will have to be driving the car. I don’t know who this person might be. The way I think of it, I’ll deal with this question once I become blind and people start driving me places.
A new thought: I could go blind just before the accident, in the car. Or even: The accident could be a result of my sudden blindness!
I hadn’t realized this before. It changes things.
Noticed a sheet of loose leaf paper swirling with the rest of the trash in front of my apartment building. Handwritten. Pencil. Bottom left corner torn, but otherwise unmarked. Some erasures related to line-spacing.
Stood there reading, then looked around for something else, a thing resembling an “attachment.” Found only a paper plate, or rather a styrofoam plate, a paper plate made of styrofoam, which I turned over to check for writing on the back. Nothing.
This is what was written on the sheet of paper:
1.) I am myself at my age
2.) I am dressed in everyday clothes
3.) I am in my brother’s room.
4.) My brother who is falling for a girl who I know is bad news. He’s giving up a chance for a great scholarship to a school.
5.) He said, “Randy, I think I’m in love with her.”
6.) I want him to go to school.
7.) See attached
8.) forget Susan. Are you not seeing that this will ruin your life.
9.) Yes, she could be a murderer
10.) I can’t physically force him to understand me.
11.) I really care about him, and it would kill me if that happens
12.) He is trying to convince someone that is close to him.
The height of it is at “I hand to you like a brother.” He starts to walk downstairs
13.) See attached
14.) See attached
15.) I am trying to see if he’s listening.
16.) Ugh … I wonder if he’s heard a word of it.
17.) I hope I did enough.
18.) See attached
07 June 2002 | Dollop
I want to note here for my future self to read, that yes I am aware as I write these words that my happiness at meeting this woman is at best one phase of feeling, and that as our relationship develops, this feeling will be replaced by other feelings, feelings like the feelings I’ve felt with others, what is to stop it from happening?
*
Later, as we were leaving, I looked at the picture of us on her mantle, taken by her roommate at the beginning, the first or second week. It touched me, our happiness then. “Look, baby,” I said as she wrapped the collar of her coat around her, “this is when we fell in love.” At that moment I saw her again as I had in the beginning. Where has she gone? Or more to the point, where have I gone?
*
The way I’ve stated the problem, there’s no solution that leaves me happy, or even with any hope of happiness. Perhaps then the problem must be restated.
*
A man in the future remembers a woman he saw as a child, before the outbreak of World War III, before the human race was forced to live underground. He is chosen for an experiment. In this experiment he either goes back to this earlier time or dreams that he does, going as himself today. He meets the woman and without a word is accepted by her. I cannot describe how beautiful this is, the dream-like quality of it. I too fell in love with her. Or not with her, but with these photographs of her, of the two of them together, their tenderness. There were two pictures in particular that struck me, both of the woman. In the first she is prone, I think, I cannot tell if she is prone but it seems that she is. She appears to be naked, but too is uncertain: she has her arm crossed before her. In the next photo, the next moment, she opens her eyes, she has her eyes open and is looking at the camera, at her lover, with happiness and wonder.
*
—I suspect I’ve never been happy with anyone, beyond a few weeks or months. When I think like this, I wonder if happiness isn’t another red herring.
—Meaning?
—Meaning happiness can never be a stable condition, so if I expect to find a relationship that makes me happy in this sense, I’m doomed.
—But if I understand you right, you lose something different from happiness if you lose A.
—Yes, closeness, intimacy.
—But doesn’t the intimacy you share with A make you happy?
—In a way, yes. But there’s another kind of happiness I want that A can’t give me.
*
Told A last night that I want to feel more happiness with her. What I meant, I think now, was not happiness but love.
In Akerman’s film a couple lay in bed, unable to sleep. Finally the man says, “What are thinking?” The woman replies, “I wish that summer were over,” and then, “We no longer love each other.” “You’ve been thinking that a long time,” says the man.
*
When we walked in, A went into my room to hang up her coat and I hit the PLAY button on the answering machine. As has become my habit when A’s around, I turned the volume down to an almost inaudible level, for fear there’d be a message from K. The first message was from one of my roommate’s kooky friends, so I turned up the volume. A came out of my room at this point and stood with me listening to the second message, which was from a different friend of my roommate’s. The third message was from K. She simply said something like, “Hi, it’s K, give me a call.” At the sound of her voice, my heart sank. I looked at A to gauge her reaction. Her face was blank. Neither of us said anything as K finished and the fourth and final message began. It was from A’s sister; I wasn’t able to pay attention to anything she was saying. I saved the group of messages so that my roommate would hear his, and A and I went to my room. I sat in my green chair, had A sit in my lap, and embraced her. After a minute I said, “K and I are friends,” and A said, “What did you say?” and I said, “K and I are friends,” and A said, “I don’t understand,” and I said, “I don’t know how else to say it: K and I are friends.”
*
While I napped, the phone rang. This woke me enough to wonder if it was K. It may have been. I considered getting up to see if the person had left a message, but then decided it was better to continue to nap, not knowing.
Even now I want to know, and even now I prefer to stop myself from knowing.
Happiness is the possibility of happiness. It is the belief that something pleasurable is coming, or may be. So long as I put off checking that message, it remains possible that the message is from K. But once I check it, it becomes what it is, which may not be a message from K. Until I know what it is, it can be what I want.
*
Thought again of giving up everything and setting off. But where to and why? I know enough to know I need other people for my dollop of happiness.
*
I think I’m about to call K. The problem is, I can’t call her yet because I’m in a crummy mood. I can’t call K while I’m in a crummy mood; I have to be happy when I call her, I have to be a source of happiness for her. It’s sad in a way. I mean that I feel compelled to pretend. Maybe I won’t call.
*
K said that Nietzsche said that life or happiness, I forget which, is a zero-sum game: the greater one’s capacity for pleasure, the greater one’s capacity for displeasure, so we all experience roughly the same amount of pleasure as displeasure, which puts the lie, K said that Nietzsche said, to Utilitarianism.
Neither K nor Nietzsche know what they’re talking about.
*
I’ve so hoped that K will call but I don’t think she will. Why is this? Maybe she feels she can’t expose herself, her feelings, anymore. Or the other hand, maybe she wants to be won over: she spoke of being impressed how her now ex-boyfriend persisted. Perhaps I will call and try to win her over. But to what? To me? What is it I would want? I don’t think it’s sex so much as what sex expresses: intimacy, wanting and being wanted. I’m not saying it, but I’ve often thought of A. In the end this thing with K, whatever it turns out to be, is only going to make me miss A more. But how I do stop it? How do I stop myself from wanting it? And not just with K.
*
Camus does not say that we must imagine Sisyphus free, but that we must imagine him happy. Though, again, he does not say that Sisyphus is happy, but that we must imagine him so. What seems to be implied is that life is unbearable if we have no faith in the possibility of happiness.
*
It’s possible that one only completely remembers or completely forgets, that there is no middle ground of half-remembrance. Still, I’m dubious. A thousand grains of rice can surely be called a pile of rice (A taught me this), whereas five grains cannot. At what point does a collection become a pile? At a certain point it’s definitely not a pile and then at a certain point it is. Somewhere between these two points is the point where collections become piles, but where this point is, is fuzzy. It’s fuzzy because the idea of a pile is fuzzy. A surprising number of ideas are fuzzy like this: love, happiness, [more examples here].
