NO ONE EVER REALLY LEAVES YOU: Chapter 1

The famous married guy left his dangly earring in my medicine cabinet.

It did not seem like a good sign for my development that a famous married guy left his dangly earring in my medicine cabinet, but I considered a far worse alternative—I could be sleeping with so many guys who might have a dangly earring that determining its ownership would be impossible. At least there was only one man in my life who definitively wore a single dangly earring. It was a hoop from which dangled both a feather and a dagger. I took a photo of it and sent it to the famous married guy, whose name was Anders.

Anders stop taking my drugs please I need them

He responded immediately, as he often did: haha sorry I’ll buy you dinner and you can bring it to me then

I examined my many pill bottles and deduced that Anders probably took my anxiety drug (which was actually prescribed for a skin thing) and not the gut drug (which I took off-label for my sleep thing, and probably would have given Anders the drug-using experience he was looking for, if he knew anything about pharmaceuticals, which he didn’t). I was due for a refill anyway. I set an alarm on my phone to call the pharmacy before it closed. I needed a better place to hide my drugs.

Anders was either a musician-turned-actor or actor-turned-musician—it was an untalented chicken-egg kind of situation, in that I didn’t know which field had generated success for him first. Every film and television show he was in received terrible reviews; every song he released was almost immediately turned into a viral internet joke. And yet the hate and criticism rolled off of him like he was some kind of smooth aquatic mammal. He was unflappably, almost maddeningly happy and confident, all the time. I usually didn’t go for perfect physical specimens like Anders, so the optimism was primarily what attracted me to him. It’s not that I was some black hole who needed his sunshine to get through the day—I’d always been a fairly positive person myself. But I allowed myself daily doses of snark, something with which Anders, who grew up in a New England Quaker community or something, was unfamiliar. I think I was the first Jew he had ever met. This, combined with being Brazilian, made me deeply exotic to him.

Anders was married to Ingrid. I met both of them at the same time, on a hookup app designed for ethical nonmonogamy. We met at a coffee shop and talked for an hour and I felt at least somewhat confident that they were not going to do human trafficking to me. Then I went to their house and I realized that when Anders said he was a “creative” he meant he was an entertainer who was wealthy beyond my wildest dreams and also I should have known who he was the second I saw him. I hadn’t known his real name, only the username on the profile he shared with his wife, so when I found out who he was and Googled him, I realized I had watched one of his movies on a plane in high school, had binged his second short-lived television show in college. It had been years since I had thought of him, and the chin-length blond hair he had sported in his twenties had been buzzed and dyed jet black. Ingrid was unfamiliar to me—she was a model, but primarily in Sweden, and since marrying Anders she had started halfheartedly working as an influencer. We had an unremarkable threesome, considering how beautiful they both were, and Ingrid, who had arranged everything, never contacted me again. Anders kept texting me, mostly links to podcasts he recommended and the music he liked, which seemed to get more unlistenable with every passing day. When he did ask to see me again, I just assumed Ingrid was going to be there. She wasn’t. He was cryptic about why she had exited the arrangement, and he never mentioned her going on dates with other people. Then again, he never mentioned his own dates with other people, although I had to assume that I was not his only extracurricular activity.

We fell into a comfortable routine. Ingrid frequently went home to Sweden to visit her brother, who had a new baby. When she was gone, Anders would invite me over two or three nights of the week. He would make one of the three things he knew how to make, all of which he made spicy for no reason. We would watch a movie on the couch while we ate, which half of the time was one of his old movies that he put on “as a joke” (it was not a joke at all). He would watch himself on the screen with rapt, unimpeachable attention for anywhere from thirty to forty-five minutes, at which point he would get distracted by his own body and initiate sex. It was customary for us to contemplate doing it on the couch but ultimately move to the guest bedroom, which was also an office and was adjacent to the living room. Anders never said aloud that we could not have sex in his marital bed. I did not even know if it was a rule, but we never used that bed, and I never questioned it.

After we finished, Anders almost always made a point to tell me that I was the second best sex he had ever had, after his wife. I wondered if this was also a rule that they had laid out previously, that he was allowed to compliment me as long as he was always complimenting Ingrid just a little bit more. I didn’t care where I ranked among the many hundreds, if not thousands of women that Anders had ever slept with. I had only slept with five men besides Anders, and he was not the best, nor was he the second best. That wasn’t the point of why I remained in the relationship, if you could even call it that. My friends were always asking what the reason was, if it wasn’t that the sex was so incredible. I offered different answers every time. Often I said it was the money, though the most he ever spent on me was a couple hundred bucks at a time. I had a nearly crippling fragrance addiction, and he was more than willing to spring for a bottle every time I wore a sample of something around him that he liked. I made it out to my friends like he was paying my rent or something, but I was terrified to ask him for anything that seemed prohibitively expensive. If I didn’t say it was for the money, I said it was for the story—Anders wasn’t famous enough that we were hounded by paparazzi when we went out together, but he was recognized more often than not, and if I ever mentioned to someone offhandedly that I even knew him, I was met with curious approval. I didn’t even have to divulge that I was sleeping with him to gain cultural capital. Truth be told, it was neither the money nor the story that kept me around. It wasn’t sex. It wasn’t love. I was still trying to figure out what it was.

“Why can’t you just bring the dangly earring to his house?” Reuben asked.

“I mean. I could have,” I said. I was laying on my back, head against one arm of his couch and feet dangling over the other, rotating his disco ball in my hands.

“So why not just do it? And then it’s done,” he said.

“Because he already said he was going to take me to dinner, so.”

“And if you just bring it to him? Does that mean dinner is off?”

“It doesn’t mean dinner is off. I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain this to you.”

“You know I’m just an especially direct person.”

“Are you almost done?”

“It’s eleven a.m.,” Reuben said.

“So?”

“I have to. You know. Do a full day of work still.”

“You usually finish early.”

“Yeah. Early as in three. It’s not even lunch. Is there something you particularly wanted to do today?”

“Why does there have to be something?”

“I thought you were just gonna do your usual thing where you bother me until you have to go to your next session.”

“I don’t have a session today,” I said. “Ethel canceled.”

“Fucking Ethel.”

“She still paid. She always pays, even though she cancels like every other week.”

“How is she ever going to get back in the saddle after her hip surgery if she keeps canceling on her trainer?”

I shrugged. “Maybe she just doesn’t want to fuck her husband that badly.”

Reuben gaped at me. It was the first time he’d looked away from his computer since I waltzed into his house. “Is that why she hired you? Because she wants to fuck her husband again?”

“She never said that, like. Explicitly.”

“As in she never told you what positions she wanted to do?”

“Reuben.”

“What?”

“I mean. She never told me why she hired me. Other than, like. You know. Vague references to being in her seventies and wanting to retain mobility, you know, just like general old age complaints.”

“But you’re assuming it’s about her husband.”

“I don’t know, I just said that. I wanted to make you laugh.”

“It worked.”

“You didn’t laugh.”

“Not out loud. I laughed in my heart.”

“That doesn’t count.”

“So if Ethel canceled, are you just going to dick around here the rest of the day?”

“Meirav has her internship ‘til like. Eight or nine or something. And then I think she’s spending the night at her boyfriend’s house.”

“What’s her boyfriend’s name again?”

“Joe.”

“Oh, I thought it was something super ethnic.”

“What ethnicity do you think he is?”

“I met him at your place once. He was…swarthy,” Reuben said.

“You’re going to get canceled.”

“But I’m black.”

“Joe’s not. You’re going to get canceled.”

“Only if you’re secretly recording me.”

“Surprise!”

He turned back to his computer. “That’s not funny.”