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We had met at a June wedding of friends when I was finishing my first year of medical school. It was love at first sight for me. Tall, handsome, educated, an older third-year medical student—here was the perfect nice Jewish boy that my parents would sign up for instantly, for bragging rights. We made out in a coat closet, and it was magic.
At first I was crazy about Alex. This relationship took off fast and it sizzled in the summer heat. This was my first full-time boyfriend who seemed unaffected by the usual neuroses that I’d experienced in my earlier flings.
But Alex lived in Boston. The only way I could make it work was to move to his city during my summer off. So, I put a few belongings together, sublet a hole-in-the-wall apartment, and got a volunteer job doing diabetes research to buff up my resume. I filled my Jeep to the brim with cheap clothing and furniture and crammed it all into the sublet opposite Commonwealth Avenue’s famed grassy mall.
Hey, don’t blame me for the bad penis bit. Alex had come up with that description himself. In our first horizontal encounter, I had noticed the small problem. His girth was good and he stayed rock solid while the waves of pleasure rolled in. But on closer inspection, I could tell his urethra, the round exit canal for sperm or urine, had migrated off-center to the southern rim of his penis.
So, he had learned how to overcompensate with his stamina.
In medical terms, he had hypospadias. Erect, the tip was round and blind (it wouldn’t look at me), its eye hidden as if half asleep. My now-more-practiced oral techniques brought on a reasonably quick climax, but it felt like a car wash from an unruly hose.
On the plus side, once the spray calmed down, I would gargle and spit it out like a mouthwash.
I was very sympathetic to his irregular hours as an advanced med student. I would pass the time, sometimes in the middle of the night, by scrubbing his floors and even cleaning the toilet basin. The sex was good but frequently disrupted. Just a couple of hours after we would be half-slumbering in post-coital bliss, he would jump up, sometimes post-midnight, and bolt out of bed. He was scheduled for duty over at the hospital to “round” and to check on restless patients.
One night in the wee hours while I was cleaning, I heard a trio of beeps taunting me from his computer. That digital voice kept coaxing a response, like the serpent enticing Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. I put down my cloth and took a seat at his desk to examine the computer screen. I knew his password was his birthday, a confession he’d made during one of our drunken reveries.
I clicked into his system and then on to the latest in-box entry. There was a message from someone named Laetitia. Who the fuck was she and why was she emailing at 3 a.m.?
“Don’t do it, Rory!” I warned myself out loud, sounding like my mother, but it was too late. I had to know. I was caught up in being a private investigator, one of Charlie’s Angels, my hair in a frosty feathered flip, now working undercover. I should have been smarter, better, cooler.In retrospect, I should have dropped my rag, walked out, and let Laetitia have his damn awkward penis.
She must have noticed his curious condition,but she just accepted that it functioned well enough and solved what she needed: a wedding band from a rich American doctor. Instead of walking out right then, I kept reading the backlog of this bitch’s emails.For instance, “Oh Alex, will I see u soon, love? You come to Sweden this winter and meet my familee.Many long kisses, my sweetee.”
Tears of rage plunged down my face.I had just shared this bad prick’s bed for the umpteenth time. In the early dawn, the Back Bay sun landed like a spotlight on a picture frame I’d never noticed. Inside the frame it was HER. Exactly as I imagined her—standing next to Alex, a long, pale Nordic beauty practically sucking him up.
How had I not noticed, not questioned, this picture before? How could he have left it there so boldly to haunt me by daylight?I needed help, a very specific type of advice a girl could only obtain from her mother immediately, even if it was very late.
I grabbed Alex’s landline and phoned home.
“Hello?” My mother had picked up. Her greeting was groggy and, per usual, predisposed to disaster.
“Hey Mom, I’m here cleaning Alex’s apartment and I came across a photo of him standing with his arm around this chick who looks like a model. It’s right on the shelf above his desk.” I didn’t dare admit that I had checked his email.
Still sleepy, she assessed the situation with blistering speed. “Rory, first of all, this guy obviously has a girlfriend or a fiancée. He’s purposely letting you know, flaunting that picture right out in front of you.Second of all, why are you CLEANING his apartment? I did not raise my daughter to be a common housemaid. Get the hell out of there now and never go back.”
“Mom, that is crazy! We’ve been happy together, very compatible. He’s not engaged or in some relationship.He would never do that.” My voice sounded increasingly tentative, as if it were disagreeing with itself. “He’s a nerdy Jewish guy, my exact type, the type YOU said would surely want to marry me.”
“Rory, naturally he would take advantage because he is a MAN, and he has you running over at his beck and call. Listen to your mother. I love you and have your best interest at heart. Pack your things and go home. Do NOT wait for him to return.”
“But Mom—”
“No buts.Get. Out. Of. There.”And with that, she hung up.
I failed to heed my mother’s advice.I waited, and waited, and waited, but Alex didn’t come home that night.
Laetitia. Humiliation hit me like a European bullet train. At that moment, I had a vision of her perfect skin superimposed on the face of Medusa, her head sprouting ugly snakes in progressive horror. Even in my imagination, I didn’t dare look her in the eye; one glance might turn my heart to stone. But I would fight for my man.
My mind jumped to the night earlier, to our blessed orgasms. I shed a single tear, thinking of what was, in my mind, our great love. I felt nauseated and went to throw up the contents of last night’s dinner.
Was he thinking about her while he was over me, while I was under him...? The tears started coming faster more furious, leaving my eyes puffy and my nose all red. I mentally reviewed the previous hours of drama. Then I noticed Alex’s practice-suture model on his shelf. It stood out in my mind as some sort of clue.
I had discovered Alex’s practice-suture kit months ago quite by accident, while I was Windexing. I had fiddled around with it from time to time. Alex, who was studying to be a surgeon, knew that the art of suturing was the key to saving lives in surgery. I played with it a bit and after a while became proficient at it. I had imagined our wedding waltz as the I maneuvered the practice sutures in and out. I had wanted to marry Alex, so my career wouldn’t matter much. I would pick something easy like pediatrics and stand by my man as he trained to be a neurosurgeon.
It was then I realized how badly Ihad wanted to be a Laetitia, the beautiful, mythical creaturewhoappeared in my mother’s fable about the type of women who were pampered and taken care of by men. But in the end, I recognized that my mother was right. I was the other kind. I wasin the brain category and shouldn’t let the mercurialpursuitsofmales distract me from my highest careergoals.
And then, the epiphany came.
If that mangled monster, that douche, could become a surgeon, why couldn’t I? What was stopping me? Did I truly love Alex, or did I love what he represented? I took deep breaths and soothed myself with this affirmation: “Rory, you are a smart, strong woman. You can NAIL this city!” When Alex saw what I was capable of achieving, he would, one day, come crawling back, leaving the Laetitias of the world torn from their picture frames.
