The third night we were together, he pulled me into his bedroom with a puckish glint in his eye. “I have a surprise for you. Wait right here,” he said, backing out of the room. When he returned, he handed me something blue and white that was folded like a flag.
“What the?” I giggled as I unfolded the heavy fabric and held up a giant football jersey with a number eighteen on it.
“It’s Peyton Manning’s jersey. I want you to wear it.”
“Just because I’m from Texas doesn’t mean football makes me hot.”
“It’ll be hot to sleep next to you if you are wearing that.”
My body surrendered to the force of his easy freedom. I wanted to crawl into the jersey, into his body, into his world, where desire was naked and blatant and having sex was always on the table.
Both my groups loved the Intern. Both unanimously predicted that he was falling in love with me. Both pronounced me cured of whatever emotional injury or character defect led me to stay so long with Jeremy. Dr. Rosen beamed at me, session after session, praising my detailed disclosures of our intimate encounters, my joy, my surrender to pleasure.
I floated through my workdays. The glow of hot sex and a real, budding relationship softened the daily humiliations of being a junior female associate at a law firm. One Tuesday, when the partner asked me, the only female in the room, to take notes during a team meeting like I was a secretary, I bit my lip, but let it go when I saw an e-mail from the Intern pop up on my BlackBerry.
Two hours later, I handed Dr. Rosen a hard copy of the e-mail. “Read it,” I said. “Start with the second paragraph.”
“ ‘It’s imperative that I marry a Jewish woman.’ ” Dr. Rosen looked up.
“Why’s he talking marriage? Y’all fucked, what, six times?” Nan said.
“Five.”
“He’s just scared,” Marnie said. Emily and Regina agreed.
“White people are so weird.” Nan laughed to herself, her golden hoop earrings catching the sunlight.
Panic coursed through me, making it hard to sit in my chair and hear what everyone was saying. How could they be so calm? The Intern was going to pack up all the pleasure and freedom and drive it away in his fancy black car.
“You don’t know that,” Dr. Rosen said.
“A lot of good dating Jewish men has done me! Thanks a lot, Dr. Rosen.”
“It has done you a world of good. And you don’t know what’s going to happen next.”
I knew the next time I walked into this stupid fourteen-by-fourteen room, I’d be sitting in a heap of my own heartache, kicking the tissue box away as tears streamed down my face.
When the Intern rolled up to my office for the last time a few days later, his smile looked fake and betrayed no hint of his trademark sass. His hug was the swift A-frame embrace you’d give your great-aunt Beatrice. Heat and the promise of sex no longer warmed the air between us.
He drove us to Sai Café in Lincoln Park, where we ordered separate sashimi rolls. I avoided the shrimp to prove what a good Jewess I could be. I called Rory from the bathroom where water softly trickled through a miniature rock garden. “I can feel a ‘good-bye forever’ coming.” My stomach was at the top of a hill about to plunge into free fall. Rory told me to breathe and stay open to all possibilities. “Maybe he’ll ask you to convert,” she said.
“It’s not going to work,” he said as he pulled in front of my building at the end of the night.
I asked why we couldn’t just keep hanging out. He shook his head, insisting it would be wrong to lead me on. I told him I’d consider conversion.
“You’re Catholic.”
“I haven’t been to mass in years, and I’d be a wonderful Jew. I hate ham. I’ll send my kids to shul. I’ll blow the shofar.” His lips turned up, but it wasn’t a true smile. It was a pity smirk.
“I’m serious. I’m not talking about an Internet conversion course. I’ll go to Anshe Emet or KAM Isaiah. I’ll have a mikvah and a bar mitzvah—”
“Bat.”
“I’ll keep kosher, bake challah, circumcise—”
“I’m sorry.”
I shut my mouth and stared straight ahead at the spot where he first kissed me, where my appetite shriveled, where this thing I called a “love affair” but would later downgrade to a “fling” had started.
“Can’t you come up for one more night?”
“Let’s not turn into caricatures of ourselves.”
From my office the next morning, I begged Dr. Rosen to call me back. I couldn’t wait until the next session. I needed him now. When he called, I cried into the phone, asking him to tell me why. Why didn’t the Intern want to be with me? Why was I on the phone with him crying again? Why did I have to be raised Catholic? Why did my parents have to name me after Christ? I twisted the phone cord around my finger and listened for the hope in Dr. Rosen’s answers. Nothing he said soothed me. He asked me if my life was getting better than it was before I started treatment. Yes, my life was better than it was before—I felt close to him and my group mates. Clare knew about my groups and my recovery. I was learning how to be who I really was in front of other people. But a relationship with a man felt as impossible as ever.
“I need more help. Something more. There must be something more. Maybe I’ve gone as far as I can with you, Dr. Rosen.” I had no idea what I was asking him for. My thoughts were not coherent—I was babbling into the phone trying to beat back my sadness. My index finger turned white under the black phone cord.
“I have
