“You’re sexually attracted to the prospect of being abandoned,” Dr. Rosen said.
I wanted to argue with him, but how could I? In every previous relationship, at least half of the attraction was the inherent dare to overcome the obstacles—the Intern’s religion, Reed’s wife, Alex’s ambivalence about me.
“Brandon’s not going anywhere,” Dr. Rosen said. In the silence that followed, I swear I heard him say, “Neither are you.”
Brandon showed up at my office with a please forgive me smile that night. “It’s hard for me to get close to people,” he said. All my breakup bravado slipped away. Instead of saying, “This isn’t working for me,” I said, “What should we do for dinner?” Later that night, when he flipped me, I detected urgency in his thrusts, and I imagined that he’d been afraid of losing me. It bothered me that we never talked about our sex life—the flipping, the weird silence we slipped into once we were being intimate. I drifted off with a single question in my mind: Could I honestly make a family with this man? Was this better than being alone?
34
I tested Brandon. Would I have done it if I’d been free to talk about him in group? Probably not. I wanted to know if he thought he could love me. If he saw a future with me. If he cared about me as much as he cared about those hospital corners on his bed. It felt easier to test him than to come right out and ask him directly.
The first test: when John, a tall, introverted corporate attorney from work, asked me out to dinner, I said yes. All I knew about John was that he liked golf, didn’t own a TV, and had a long-winded way of telling a story. I said yes to John because a date with another guy was just the thing to force a so where’s this going? conversation with Brandon.
When I told Brandon about dinner with John, he didn’t even look up from the newspaper. “Sounds fun,” he said. The next day, I canceled on John.
One night, Brandon and I ate prosciutto sandwiches and black olives on a ledge overlooking North Avenue Beach after the sun went down. He put his arm around me as we stared at Lake Michigan quietly lapping the sand. He kissed me in the shadow of the trees by the chess pavilion, and I imagined something deep stirring in me. Not the zing or thrill of lust. Something more substantial. Was this how functional adults fell in love? When he pulled away, he stared at me. “You may not know this, but I usually spend the winters in London,” he said. He reached for my hand. “This year, I want to stay here. To see where this goes.”
Later, when we had sex, he didn’t flip me.
On a Monday night a few weeks later, Brandon called from the sidewalk in front of my condo. Did I want to go for a walk? Outside, Brandon was typing something on his phone with a distressed look on his face. He started walking without saying a word, and I followed and waited for him to speak. He stopped abruptly at LaSalle Street. A bus whisked by.
“I want to tell you something, but you can’t tell anyone. Including Dr. Rosen. This is just between us.”
I stared at the red letters that spelled out Sports Authority. Now I was being tested. Why was he asking this of me? Worse, why would I agree?
In five years, I’d never shifted my allegiance from Dr. Rosen to one of my boyfriends. Would cutting my dependence on Dr. Rosen help me move forward? Maybe it was necessary to draw a circle around something and keep Dr. Rosen out. But should I really put my mental health in the hands of a guy who gazed more lovingly at his thousand-thread-count sheets than at me? Would saying yes score my heart? Or would saying no?
Yes. In the time it took for a light to turn green, I officially jettisoned my treatment so I could sequester Brandon’s deepest secret inside me and let it wedge me apart from Dr. Rosen, who was legally obligated to keep any secret I told him.
Brandon admitted: “I don’t have a libido.”
I burst out laughing. A real Rosen laugh where I grabbed my belly and folded forward. One, because I already knew that. Two, because who cared if Dr. Rosen knew about his libido? No one expected Brandon to fuck like Mick Jagger circa 1975. Relief coursed through me, and I felt warm and powerful. We could work through this.
He shook his head. “It might not ever change.”
“What does Dietrich say?”
“That I have intimacy issues.” Huh.
“Anything else?”
“Not really.”
Lights from the two-story McDonald’s lit the sidewalk ahead of us. The traffic on Clark Street jammed up by Portillo’s drive-thru. Libido was not a deal breaker. If we stayed together and worked on this—him with Dietrich and me with, well, I had just promised to do it alone—then who knew where we could end up? I wasn’t giving up over his big “revelation.”
“I should want to tear your clothes off, but I don’t.” He touched my arm and said he’d never felt like that about anyone, ever. His eyes told the story of his self-torture. I knew that story. My whole life I lived in a story that there was something deeply broken in me. I’d searched for years to find solutions to my own troubles. I’d battled who I was supposed to be as a girl, a dancer, a Texan, a student, and a girlfriend, and that
