Weekly Wrapped #57: But Daddy, He Was Such a Normal Guy

• A Gemini with a kink résumé

• Deloitte men doing deeply undeloitte things

• Female friendship as an anti-spiral device

This week, I cannot stop thinking about where I was during these days last year.

I was, in way, exactly where I am today.

Last year, I was staying in a house in South London. Last year, I was making the final edits to the personal essay about my ex-fiancé joining a cult.

I was trying to figure out how to end a story that was very much still in motion. I was trying to figure out what to do when my editor left a comment in the Google Doc that said, “I think you can tell more of the truth here.”

Last year, I was wondering what the fuck it meant to tell more of the truth.

This time last year, I was just beginning to do the reporting that would ultimately become the story I wrote for The New York Times. But before I ever arrived there, I would travel to Tunisia for the second time, I would drive around in dusty taxis with Karen for days on end, I would write a story for an entirely different magazine, and an editor would tell me, “This isn’t exactly what I’d hoped it was going to be.”

Last year, during these dog days of July, I sat on a bench in Brixton and that man that would become first date man sat next to me. His thigh pressed against mine, and when he hugged me goodbye, I felt his callused fingertips on my lower back and he grumbled, “For fuck’s sake.”

I would know the moment I walked away from him that I probably shouldn’t speak to him again.

Naturally, I would do the opposite.

Now, I am sitting here and I have twelve minutes before I need to walk out the door. I am wearing a billowy white dress that barely covers my ass, my sparkly black flats already on, and my make-up done. I have fake freckles dotted across my cheeks, and a barely-there red-tinted lip.

I am going on a first date that I am genuinely excited for. Or, maybe, I am just curious and horny.

I am on the date, and the man is telling me many things about himself.

He is telling me that he is a Gemini; that he was engaged and called off a wedding ten days before. He is reciting his kinks like a well-crafted resume. He is telling me that he really needs a lot of alone time and is therefore “probably autistic.”

“Do you think you’re really autistic or do you just have regular human needs?” I ask.

Despite this long list of things probably autistic man tells me, one thing crystalizes in my mind.

He is telling me about a threesome he had a few years ago.

“I came inside his wife, and then he went down on her and Hoover-ed it right up,” he says.

“What’s wrong with that?” I ask, laughing.

He does not seem happy that I find this funny. Somehow this sexual escapade seemed to have crossed some line.

“I don’t know,” he says. “He was such a normal guy. Like he worked at Deloitte and everything.”

Imagine if life were really so simple. If men who worked at Deloitte, didn’t do things like join cults and swallow another man’s semen.

Alas, life isn’t really that simple. Which is exactly why I am laughing now.

I am running along water, and there are swans and herons, and everything is a sign. I feel the burning inhale, and the relief of the exhale. I remind myself that this time a year ago, I was regularly running over ten miles every single Sunday.

Suddenly, the six miles left feels manageable. Simple.

I am walking through an art gallery, and my new friend Frankie is beside me. Each room represents phases of the day: dawn, morning, zenith, dusk, and night.

Frankie reads the signs to me in her best American accent, and I do my best British, which is to say my best impression of Princess Diana — a wispy, posh accent with the word gosh intermittently inserted.

We begin laughing, and it is that kind of middle-school classroom laughter. That laughter that bubbles up so intensely in your body, and is made only louder and wilder by the fact that you are supposed to be quiet.

It is that kind of laughter that has nothing to do with the joke, and so much more to do with feeling alive.

Lately, there’s been a part of me saying I shouldn’t be enjoying my life this much. I should be grieving. I should be sad. Aren’t I heartbroken? Over what, I have trouble remembering.

“The joy, the time with friends, the days floating in the sea — it’s all an escape,” she tells me.

She is the self who believes that life is fundamentally unsafe. That happiness is merely the moment before something terrible happens.

But Frankie grips my hand and pulls me into the next room, and for a moment I understand that joy is not evidence that I have forgotten to grieve.

It is evidence that I am still here.

The arc of my life bends toward unreasonable enchantment. Toward an almost embarrassing amount of love.

And, as always, the women in my life are the ones dragging me toward it.

In September last year, I wander aimlessly around Brussels with the voice of Sheila Heti in my ears narrating her novel, Motherhood. I found her prose strange and satisfying. I scanned her website and surged with envy: essays and interviews and book reviews in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and The New York Times. She got to interview Joan Didion, for Christ’s sake.

It is my firm belief that envy points us in the direction of our own desire, so I took to studying Heti’s style and voice. In the springtime, I read “Should Artists Shop or Stop Shopping?,” an essay she wrote in 2018 about the distinction between shopping and making art, and whether consumption is a form of creativity or a substitute for it.

Now, I refer back to this essay constantly. It is one of those pieces of writing that left me thinking: no wonder she has been called “one of the freshest, funniest and most ingenious humans writing today.”

It changed something about my worldview — how I shop and consume, and how I think about the objects I use to construct myself.

So, naturally, when I saw that Heti had published a new piece of fiction in The New Yorker this week, I was ravenous.

“Earthly Delights” begins with a woman remembering the small things she once wanted: her first period, the loss of her virginity, a boy named Ivan whom she admired for an entire year before discovering that actually possessing him was much less erotic than imagining him. All that longing, all those poems, all those glances across biology class — and for what? “This uncircumcised bit of flesh in her hand?”

From there, the story follows the woman’s lifelong desire for Pier, a man she dances with once at a New Year’s Eve party and never sleeps with. Her desire becomes something she can return to privately, extracting pleasure from the memory long after the encounter itself has ended. Heti writes that desire was a gift from God, and that “a memory of desire is desire.”

Eventually, both the woman and Pier die and find each other in the afterlife, where they are at last free to fuck for eternity. And the sex is astonishing. Mind-blowing, even. But it happens in the middle of nothingness. There are no partners to betray, no ordinary responsibilities being abandoned, no friends to tell. Without earthly life surrounding it, the sex loses its mystery.

This is the question Heti keeps circling: What if the object of desire is merely the excuse? What if the true pleasure lies in the wanting?

I have spent much of this year thinking about limerence, the term psychologist Dorothy Tennov used for the obsessive, involuntary state we tend to call “being in love.” Limerence is animated by a hunger for reciprocation, but it also depends on uncertainty. Once reciprocation is secured, the intensity often begins to diminish. The fantasy cannot survive full contact with reality. The beloved becomes a person. The penis becomes, simply, a penis.

The woman in Heti’s story does not merely want what she cannot have; she wants it to remain barely beyond her reach.

Which is both absurd and, unfortunately, recognizable.

Perhaps the limerent object is valuable not because they will satisfy us, but because they enlarge us. They give the mind somewhere to go. The woman’s desire for Pier creates decades of private pleasure, and God tells her, “I gave you the gift of desire and you used it properly: in private. The whole point of it was to enlarge your inner world, and it did that.”

May this idea be burned into my brain: some desires come into our lives not to be fulfilled, but to make our inner lives more vivid. Perhaps, we can honor the pleasure without mistaking it for prophecy. Perhaps, the feeling can be real even when the future it promises is not.

Near the end, the woman and the man wonder whether they are good or whether they both just understood that “the sensation of lust would always be superior to whatever lust was pointing to?”

I laughed, and underlined that.

Because perhaps this is the humiliating truth about yearning: sometimes we are not really waiting to receive the thing. We are waiting because waiting is the thing.

• My new obsession with fake freckles

• Having really, really great sex

• Calling my best friends and telling them good news

• An everything bagel croissant

• Linen

• Seeing all the seeds I’ve planted start to bloom

• Wandering through art galleries with women

• Seeing the moon