and squeezes my cheeks and says something sweet in Italian. I guess I’m doing something right. It’s already dark outside, but we’re just getting ready to put together new press kits. I’m sitting on the floor in stocking feet, collating hundreds of photocopies and stuffing them into folders. Then I’m attaching labels to photographs and inserting them into the folders; this goes on into the night. Everybody else is slaving away, at their desks, while Martina is out to dinner entertaining clients. Soon people start leaving. At midnight I finally decide to call it quits. I’ve done my sixteen hours. At home I stay up for a few more hours watching television until I can fall asleep and start the cycle again in the morning.
The Pill
I’m visiting Allison at Yale, the fall after my graduation, and we come back to her dorm room slightly drunk after dinner one evening. There’s a message from her mother on the answering machine about some unpaid bill. Slight intrusion. I take off my pants and T-shirt and lie down in bed and watch as she strips in front ofme. She’s laughing like this is a game. It’s kind of charming. We haven’t seen each other all week, and I’m pretty aroused. I light a joint. She asks me about places I’d like to travel to, and I tell her Iceland, China, Africa, and Australia. She thinks those places are so far away—maybe too far away, I think. The pot is making me crazy and a little paranoid. Her hair smells like smoke now, and I feel like a voyeur, like I’m watching this couple kissing, about to make love. Afterward, we go out for scrambled eggs and bacon and ice cream sundaes and start laughing hysterically when we see a napkin stuck to the waiter’s shoe as he’s passing by. It’s not really very funny at all. We finally get so tired that we go back to her room and sleep until noon.
My relationship with Allison becomes more serious, and we start spending more time together. She is finishing her final year at Yale and she spends the weekends with me in Manhattan. There are so many notations in my datebook about our incredible sex (“great night of sex,” “up all night,” “hot sex”). It seems like the perfect relationship, but it clearly isn’t. I don’t know how to communicate with her. I take on a very controlling role in the relationship, minding her day-to-day activities and taking care of her errands and appointments. I try to make her life as simple as possible, and she becomes accustomed to my omnipresence. When we first started sleeping together, she used a diaphragm, and I would do the prep work. I thought it was fun, real teamwork. But she tired of this nightly ritual, and her doctor recommended that she go on the pill. Now each night I remind her to take her pill, and if she’s too lazy, I pop one of the little peach tablets out of the case and give it to her with water. I also keep track of her menstrual cycle in my date book, so we know when to expect her next period. When it’s late, we are thrown into a panic. We’re not talking to each other; she’s crying and telling me that this time she’s sure she’s pregnant. Each time I assure her that she isn’t and show her the calculations. I suggest that we go out to dinner. It’ll happen by tomorrow morning. She’s only two days late. We go out to Nishi for sushi. She comes home and gets her period. It’s thewasabi. I make a red star in my date book and I’ll know when she had her period so I can remind her for next time.
Years earlier, the loss of Allison’s virginity to someone else left me crushed. She was dating a guy a year younger, and I was constantly jealous. One day she called me, sounding scared and on the verge of tears. “Andy, what am I going to do?” she asked. “I think I might be pregnant.” I assured her, for some reason, that she probably wasn’t pregnant but that I would make an appointment for her to see my mother’s gynecologist, Dr. Strauss, a man in his early seventies. It
The Pill
I’m visiting Allison at Yale, the fall after my graduation, and we come back to her dorm room slightly drunk after dinner one evening. There’s a message from her mother on the answering machine about some unpaid bill. Slight intrusion. I take off my pants and T-shirt and lie down in bed and watch as she strips in front ofme. She’s laughing like this is a game. It’s kind of charming. We haven’t seen each other all week, and I’m pretty aroused. I light a joint. She asks me about places I’d like to travel to, and I tell her Iceland, China, Africa, and Australia. She thinks those places are so far away—maybe too far away, I think. The pot is making me crazy and a little paranoid. Her hair smells like smoke now, and I feel like a voyeur, like I’m watching this couple kissing, about to make love. Afterward, we go out for scrambled eggs and bacon and ice cream sundaes and start laughing hysterically when we see a napkin stuck to the waiter’s shoe as he’s passing by. It’s not really very funny at all. We finally get so tired that we go back to her room and sleep until noon.
My relationship with Allison becomes more serious, and we start spending more time together. She is finishing her final year at Yale and she spends the weekends with me in Manhattan. There are so many notations in my datebook about our incredible sex (“great night of sex,” “up all night,” “hot sex”). It seems like the perfect relationship, but it clearly isn’t. I don’t know how to communicate with her. I take on a very controlling role in the relationship, minding her day-to-day activities and taking care of her errands and appointments. I try to make her life as simple as possible, and she becomes accustomed to my omnipresence. When we first started sleeping together, she used a diaphragm, and I would do the prep work. I thought it was fun, real teamwork. But she tired of this nightly ritual, and her doctor recommended that she go on the pill. Now each night I remind her to take her pill, and if she’s too lazy, I pop one of the little peach tablets out of the case and give it to her with water. I also keep track of her menstrual cycle in my date book, so we know when to expect her next period. When it’s late, we are thrown into a panic. We’re not talking to each other; she’s crying and telling me that this time she’s sure she’s pregnant. Each time I assure her that she isn’t and show her the calculations. I suggest that we go out to dinner. It’ll happen by tomorrow morning. She’s only two days late. We go out to Nishi for sushi. She comes home and gets her period. It’s thewasabi. I make a red star in my date book and I’ll know when she had her period so I can remind her for next time.
Years earlier, the loss of Allison’s virginity to someone else left me crushed. She was dating a guy a year younger, and I was constantly jealous. One day she called me, sounding scared and on the verge of tears. “Andy, what am I going to do?” she asked. “I think I might be pregnant.” I assured her, for some reason, that she probably wasn’t pregnant but that I would make an appointment for her to see my mother’s gynecologist, Dr. Strauss, a man in his early seventies. It
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