My name is not Naomi. It’s a nom de plume to protect my identity. Though names have been changed, all the stories in Gen XXX are true. My anonymity means that I rely on word of mouth to grow my subscriber base, so if you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please do share with friends.
“How are you doing? I’m reading your newsletter. It’s hard to tell how you’re really feeling.”
That’s my friend Lauren. We’re talking over Zoom, me from my kitchen nook on the east side of Los Angeles, her from her artist’s studio in upstate New York. We’ve been doing some catching up and I mention that Antoine is coming to visit.
I tell Lauren that I’m fine. Life is happening around me. Sometimes to me. But I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel a little numb sometimes. It’s not the dating that is getting to me. It’s the increasingly dark and dystopian political climate. It’s my mother’s death, and me trying to figure out what grief looks and feels like. Because, to be honest, I’m not feeling a ton of anything.
Lauren was on vacation with me in Northern California when I got the call that I needed to hurry back to my hometown, to my mother’s assisted living facility. She had declined rapidly since I’d seen her a few days before. It seemed like it was time.
“There’s a certain relief because it was so bad at the end,” I tell Lauren. “But there are also some times when I'm like, ‘Oh, I'm never going to see my mom again.’ And my mom's never going to be like, ‘Hi, honey,’ on the phone when I call. I'm never going to hear that again. But I don't break down. And then there's part of me that judges myself for not breaking down.”
“Of course, we all do that,” Lauren says. “’What kind of monster am I that I'm not having more of an emotional reaction to this?’”
I concede that “Naomi” can come across as a little distant. That’s in part because she has a bit of remove from her “own” life, observing it and assessing it from the point of view of a storyteller and not necessarily point of view of the actual person on whom she is based.
Maybe giving myself a nom de plume is both to protect me from other people, and to protect me from me.
Maybe I’m also overthinking things.
I decide that it’s important that I go deeper in the future.
It’s exactly one week to the day before Antoine steps off a plane, into an Uber and is deposited in front of my house. (He may not know it yet, but I will not be driving to LAX.) I have a whole series of appointments set up to help me get ready for his arrival. There’s waxing — bikini line, lip and legs. (I can do my own eyebrows.) Hair trim. Maybe a manicure, too, though my feet are really what I need to be focusing on.
I guess I should say a little about Antoine, since I keep referencing him in this newsletter. He’s a 43-year-old European guy I met in Paris last June when I was on my way back to LA from a friend’s wedding in Tuscany. I’d decided to stick around Paris for three days to do…whatever. Walk. Eat. Maybe shop. Maybe meet men from the sex app.
Antoine is an engineer for a European car company. He’s been working in Paris for a few years now, and loves it, but he’s going to be transferred to Madrid within the next six months or so. He’s never been married, is a little bit shorter and skinnier than me, and is kind, curious, and handsome. Ice blue eyes and a shaved head and shapely lips.
For my first date with Antoine, we met for brunch at a mediocre but bustling Parisian corner restaurant — you know the type — near his apartment in the 14th Arrondissement. I don’t remember much about what we talked about except that I couldn’t stop looking at his beautiful eyes and he couldn’t stop grinning.
After brunch, we walked south towards the Seine and then across it, stopping at a garden where we sat on a bench and watched two teenagers make out a dozen feet away. I wondered whether Antoine was going to try to kiss me — I sort of hoped he would — but he did not. He did, however, ask me to dinner that night. I accepted.
Dinner was at another French restaurant, this one a lot closer to his apartment. (The sushi restaurant we’d planned to go to had a wait of over an hour.) I had two glasses of rose, which was unlike me, and Antoine had a beer, and after we ate, we walked back to his place and talked for a bit on his couch and then started kissing.
My phone rang in the middle of one of those kisses. It was from my hometown area code, which meant that it was about my mom, which meant that something bad had happened. Something bad was always happening. Two weeks before I was scheduled to leave for Europe, my mom had suffered some sort of dementia-induced psychotic episode and had been taken out of her assisted living facility and to the hospital, where she was treated with antibiotics for a urinary tract infection. (Ironic, perhaps, that I would leave Paris with my own UTI.)
But the antibiotics didn’t seem to bring her back to her “old” self, whatever that was. She was hissing and yelling and lashing out at nurses and had to be restrained. Eventually, she was moved to a nursing home in a nearby town, which she tried to escape during 95 degree weather. (She was found outside trying to cross a busy street.) She was then moved to a locked, geriatric psychiatric facility in yet another neighboring town; this was the facility that was calling when I was in the middle of kissing Antoine.
I went downstairs and outside to take the call. I don’t remember what the call was about except that it was nothing good, and that I wanted to burst into tears on this strange, empty, and dark residential street. Instead I took the elevator back upstairs to Antoine’s apartment. I gave him a reassuring look — actually, maybe more of a pained smile. To tell him what was going on with my mom, other than that she was “not well,” was more than I could bear, so I suggested we go into his bedroom. I wanted to forget what I had just heard on the phone, to forget everything that had to do with my mother and her decline, and the drama. All the fucking drama.
“Fuck the pain away,” sang Peaches. I never did like that song — or her — but at that moment, I could relate to the sentiment.
I spent four hours with Antoine that night. I loved the way he moved his body. He’d spread my legs wide and pull his cock out and then thrust his face between my legs like he was dying of thirst.
“You’re amazing,” he said at one point. He looked incredulous. Blessed even. I’d never had a man look at me that way.
“You’re amazing,” he said again. Louder this time.
I gave him an awkward smile. I mean, I didn’t think he was blowing smoke up my ass. Or anywhere else for that matter. But it’s always been hard for me to take a compliment.
I saw Antoine the next night — my last night in the city. Took an Uber to his flat after having dinner with a friend at a restaurant near the Louvre. After we had sex, Antoine asked me to spend the night with him. I declined. I told him that I needed my contact lens stuff and the oral device I wear to treat my sleep apnea. I also just wanted to be alone.
I don’t know why I’m feeling tentative about revealing more of the dirty details about my nights with Antoine. I feel protective of him. Maybe it’s because he’s protective of me. When he texts me to ask how I’m doing and I say anything but “great” he asks why, and expresses concern and support when I tell him the truth. (My upset usually has to do with work stuff.) What can he do to help? he asks. I say that there’s nothing he can do. But that I appreciate the offer.
A few days ago, much to Olivia’s horror, I text Antoine a very unflattering photo of myself from 6th grade in which I’m sporting a mullet.
“Antoine says I look like a boy,” I tell Olivia later. “Which I disagree with.”
“Omg why would you share that?!?!” she writes.
“Why not?” I respond. “It’s funny.”
“I would never send a guy I was banging evidence of me before my glow up!” she says.
That’s just one of the many differences between Olivia and I.
“Glow up? I was 11!” I say.
Alison and I go on a hike together in the late morning on Sunday before my scheduled date with Nomad No. 2. She tells me about a podcast she’s just listened to: Tracee Ellis Ross talking with Michelle Obama and her brother Craig Robinson. During the first part of the conversation, Tracee Ellis Ross tells the sister-brother duo about the way she approaches her dating life.
She’s not on the apps, she says — her public visibility would make that difficult. This means that most of her potential romantic connections are with men she meets in the wild, or is set up with. A lot of them are younger, too. (She’s 52.)
“There is an openness that occurs with a younger man, whether it’s gender fluidity or not even having an issue with homosexuality, I mean, something basic as that,” she says. “I have long been past the age where I feel like it’s my job to teach somebody or grow them up.”
Lol. Has she ever met a millennial man?
I meet Nomad No. 2 for coffee at a café called Dayglow on Sunset Boulevard. (He’s coming all the way from the west side, bless his heart.) He asks lots of questions, which I appreciate. I ask him about being in recovery, and the circumstances that led to his sobriety. I tell him a little bit about my own experience with abusing alcohol. How, at a certain point, I just couldn’t do it anymore.
The talk is earnest, and sometimes it is funny, but it is not at all flirtatious. I guess that’s fine. Though also weird? I mean, I met him on a sex app.
After about 90 minutes, I tell Nomad No. 2 that it’s time for me to go, and he asks to walk me to my car. First, we make a stop at an optical boutique to greet a Great Dane that belongs to the shop’s owner. A few minutes later, at my car, he tells me that he had a great time. “I really like you,” he says. His gaze doesn’t waver.
I don’t say “I really like you” back. Instead, I hug him and say, “it was great to meet you.”
I’m not totally sure about Nomad No. 2, or rather, my physical attraction to him. He has, I tell Alison later, a “pleasant enough” face. Also: A dad bod. Also, he lives across the city. And again, he’s allergic to cats.
Later, within the hour, Nomad No. 2 will text me and ask me out again and I will say “yes” because I know that I should agree to second dates with men who are present and open and direct and vulnerable, even if I meet them on a sex app and even if they have what I deem to be “pleasant enough” faces.
Olivia agrees. She comes over to my house on Sunday night and I cook a simple but delicious meal for the two of us. (Ginger chicken and cabbage salad). I open the sex app and hand over my phone and she begins doing a dramatic reading of Nomad No. 1’s profile.
The eye rolls are hilarious.
“I know I’m supposed to write a bunch of acronyms here and talk about my therapy or something but just pretend I stepped out of a time machine from the Viking era and happened to develop manners,” she reads.
Olivia’s mocking tone subsides; she concedes, finally, that Nomad No. 1 can be charming.
“He redeems himself towards the end there,” she says.
We move onto Nomad No. 2. I tell her a little bit about the date earlier that day.
“I like him,” she says. She also likes that he’s in recovery and seems committed to his sobriety. “Sober guys will fuck your brains out,” she says. “Believe me. I know.”
She continues: “If you take away one vice, sex becomes a really important pressure valve release and focus of creative attention. So for better or worse, guys who don’t drink or do drugs tend to be sex maniacs.”
I laugh.
She shrugs. “Could be wrong! His dick may not work at all.”
I wonder what Tracee Ellis Ross would have to say about sober guys.
I also wonder what Tracee Ellis Ross would say about perimenopause. On Monday, I email my ob/gyn, asking her to increase the dosage of the estrogen I’m on because of the night sweats. They’re getting worse, not better. There are other signs of aging staring me in the face. Literally. One morning, when I’m toweling myself off after a shower, I put my right leg on the bathroom counter in order to get at my privates and notice that the stripe of grey hair in my pubes has exploded in volume. There is no denying it. I am now a silver fox. I decide to deem this my Susan Sontag phase.
I don’t have much to say about Nico. He’s being predictably unpredictable. One day he’s there, another day he’s not. He texts me over the weekend, uncharacteristically, and mentions hosting an Easter party. He says something about his kids. Hearing about Nico’s kids, even obliquely, always makes me feel a bit queasy. I think this is probably a good thing. Maybe it means I haven’t totally lost my moral compass with regards to married men. I decide that if I ever want to be shocked out of this agonizing limerence I’m experiencing that I should ask Nico for his kids’ names and pictures. The guilt and self-disgust I’d feel might be enough to put me over the edge.
Might. But I have a feeling that things are coming, slowly but inexorably, to an end with Nico. There’s the matter of us meeting up in mid-May. He hasn’t said anything about it in weeks. I decide that if it doesn’t happen I’m going to walk away from it all. I won’t position it as an ultimatum. I won’t position it at all. I’ll wait for him to tell me whether or not we can actually make it happen, and, if he can’t, I won’t protest, or punish. I’ll just say that I’ve had enough. That we’ve reached an impasse and that I need to move on.
I’ll probably also tell Nico that if he ever decides that he’s serious about meeting up someday, he should send me some sort of sign. I fantasize about receiving a pair of lacy underwear in the mail at some point in the future when I’m least expecting it. I imagine the way my heart would race at the sight of a package addressed to “Naomi K.” (Nico claims to not know my last name.)
It’s pathetic, the way I always leave the door open for Nico. And he always — eventually — walks through it again.
As always, I just want to be wanted.
A note to readers: I’ll be publishing an “extra” post this Saturday, a Q&A with a Gen X mother of two named Margot, who is recently back on the sex and dating scene and has a lot of thoughts to share. (Among other things, she’s in the midst of setting up a threesome with herself and two other men.)
As always, Saturday posts are available to paid subscribers only, so please do consider upgrading your subscription to be part of the ongoing conversation.