Forensics. (Part One.)
Gay sex, Trevor Noah, and my dates with a French police investigator.
My name is not Naomi. It’s a nom de plume to protect my identity. Though names and some details have been changed, all the stories here are true.
The British architect, James, lives in Venice. We converse for a while on the app. He’s attractive, and educated, and successful, and 35 years old. He tells me, without prompting, that he is not interested in ENM. He just wants to be upfront about that. I say “okay.” Good to know. What would I think if he decided he wanted me all to himself, James asks. I explain to him that he’d need to show me he is serious.
“You’d have to fuck me really, really, really well,” I explain.
Maybe some women want to hear this — hear a man they meet on a sex app talk about a future in which they are the man’s one and only. I’ll admit, it’s sort of hot. We all want to be wanted. But it also feels manipulative and premature. Like James is trying to exploit what he thinks is a woman’s natural inclination to be dominated or owned.
I explain that I’m not necessarily looking for a passel of lovers either, though I don’t use that word — “passel.” Seems a little pretentious to use in casual conversation on a sex app. Plus, if James doesn’t know what the word means, I’ll feel dismayed, the way I feel dismayed when smart people don’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re.”
James responds to my answers to his prompts about sexual proclivities with “good girl!” I have a vision of Nicole Kidman gulping down a glass of milk. Then James asks me what I like to do for work. I tell him that I work in media. There’s a moment of silence. Then, without further comment, he disconnects.
This has happened before. It’s the “media” part. And yeah, I guess there’s reason for James to be paranoid. Smart boy!
I tell David about everything at lunch. He’s in town from New York and is probably one of my closest confidantes. (He’s also on the apps.) David is dying to show me a picture of the penis of a guy he had sex with that morning. I tell him I don’t want to see it. I’m getting sick of pictures of penises, I tell him. Guys are always sending dick pics, and it’s gross and rude. “At least I asked first,” he laughs. David explains that dick pics, solicited or otherwise, have a real currency in the gay community. Sometimes, he says, a man he matches with will send him a dick pic before even saying “hello.” David appreciates it; he’d rather know what the guy looks like in advance.
“Part of the fun is opening the present,” I protest.
“It’s taking everything I have not to share this photo!” he retorts.
David tells me that a lot of guys he meets on the apps don’t want to kiss. This is especially true with “dominant tops.” “For them it’s about power,” he says. “They like to withhold. And they think you earn kissing.”
Earn kissing? I say. Jesus! Some of these men sound outright Machiavellian.
A few days after David leaves for New York, the Frenchman, Adrien, comes to town. Adrien and I “found” one another on the sex app at some point in December — he was planning a trip to California in late January and was looking to go on dates. We get along well online, and he’s handsome. Sort of like a leaner, more Gallic George Clooney with a bigger nose and closely cropped hair.
Adrien is going to be traveling to Los Angeles with his wife. She’ll be here for a conference and he’ll be tagging along and will need something to do during the days, and at least one night. Adrien says the two have an open marriage. A few years ago, he says, his wife told him she wanted to be non-monogamous and he agreed. They have two children.
Adrien is extremely attractive but I won’t lie: I’m more fascinated by what does for work. He’s a forensic investigator, which means that he works crime scenes for a living, taking pictures and making measurements and dusting for fingerprints and collecting DNA. Adrien tells me a little bit about his job while we chat on the app in December but promises he’ll say more in person.
I show Olivia Adrien’s picture and she’s impressed. She also likes that he’s into forensics. (She’s a crime girl.) It’s a good thing Olivia has a boyfriend, I think. Otherwise she might be angling for Adrien, too.
On our first date, Adrien and I have a quick drink at the Library Bar downtown. He tells me that before switching to a hotel on the east side, he and his wife stayed for a few days in Santa Monica at a “Humpton Inn.” I burst out laughing. “Hampton Inn,” I say. I explain that “hump” is a noun that means “bulge” or “protrusion.” Something you’d find on a camel’s back. Or on a roadway. It’s also a verb that means “to have sex with.” He finds this last part funny. “Humpton Inn,” he says a few times.
After our drink, Adrien helps me pick up half a dozen enormous trays of Mexican food for a fundraiser that Leah has put together for victims of the LA fires. After delivering the food, we walk around the corner to Bar Sinizki and talk for a bit, and then make plans for lunch and a hike the following day.
I’m weirdly nervous the next morning. Discombobulated. I find a prime parking space outside of All Time on Hillhurst and then come running out of the restaurant 20 minutes later when I realize that I’ve forgotten to lock my car. I thought the HRT was supposed to help with the forgetfulness, but I’m not sure it is. I make a note to talk to my ob/gyn about it. She’s a doctor in San Francisco who got mentioned in the acknowledgements of Miranda July’s book, All Fours, which makes my vagina feel fancy.
As I eat my plate of cheesy eggs on toast I ask Adrien questions about his job. 70-80% of the work he does involves burglaries, he says. The rest is robberies, deaths, murders and suicides. He begins to tell me about a recent suicide scene he worked — the man sat on his couch in his living room and put a shotgun to his head. Adrien says that when he and his colleagues entered the apartment, they stepped on the man’s teeth. I stop him right there.
The air on our hike is hazy from the recent fires and we can’t go up to the lookout I want to go to because Adrien doesn’t have the right shoes. Oh well. But he’s brought an enormous camera with which to take pictures of birds, and we walk around pointing at hawks and ravens and sparrows and blue jays and a bunch of avian species neither he nor I can identify. That’s okay though. Unlike dick pics, part of the fun is the looking.
I notice that Adrien doesn’t ask many questions, though he does listen when I share stories about my life. He talks about his interest in art and the universe, and the atoms in our bodies. Interestingly, he doesn’t come off as pretentious. But when he gets deeper into the subject of fundamental physics, I begin to focus my attention on what appears to be a trio of blackheads lined up like an ellipses on his cheek. I hate blackheads: Once spotted, they cannot be unseen. If Adrien was my boyfriend or a close friend, I would tell him to get rid of them. Or let me. But with someone I don’t know well, all I can do is stare and squirm.
After the hike we head to my house, where we talk for an hour or so and drink coffee. Adrien is a smoker, it turns out, so we spend a fair amount of time on my porch, where I complain about the cold. Adrien says he really wishes we could have gone up the trail I’d wanted to take us on, but his silly European sneakers made that impossible. Then I remember that there’s a different, gentler, path up to the lookout. It’ll take longer but Adrien won’t risk falling when we come back downhill. Let’s try and time it for sunset, I say. We head back to the park.
I can’t tell whether Adrien is attracted to me. He is not giving me any concrete signs. No meaningful looks. No touching. It’s been half a day! Alison texts me while I’m on the trail. “What’s happening?” she asks. “Nothing!” I tell her. “He hasn’t tried to kiss me.” She is surprised, and a little bit appalled. “What is he waiting for?!” I’m wondering the same thing myself.
Adrien and I make it to the lookout at around sunset. We take it all in. The clouds, lit from below by the disappearing sun. The grid of city lights spread out before us. I point to the skyscrapers of Century City and, beyond that, Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean. Some doves and sparrows peck at the ground as the sky darkens — “last call!” I say. A man with two male dogs arrives. One of the dogs mounts the other from behind and gives it a go. “Now THAT is humping,” I tell Adrien a bit pointedly.
It’s time for dinner and none of the restaurants we go to have room. Blairs has a 45 minute wait. The wait at Little Dom’s is over an hour. (Edendale, thank god, is closed.) Eventually I settle on Forage, where Adrien and I have a quick bite before going back to my house, where we sit on the couch. He wants coffee, so I make him some. We go out to the porch, where he smokes and I complain about the cold a bit more.
Then I say it.
“Are you attracted to me?” Adrien gives me a surprised look and I immediately regret asking the question. But I need some answers. We’ve now spent a total of nine hours together and he has yet to make a move. It feels like some sort of record. “I mean, we met on a certain app,” I say, trailing off. “I’m just wondering.” Adrien stubs out his cigarette and we go back inside and begin to make out on the couch. He sucks on my lower lip; I suck on his thumb. Soon I am astride him, grinding up against him to the point that my vulva gets irritated through my pants and it stings later when I pee.
After about 90 minutes of this, Adrien says it’s time for him to go. He doesn’t want to get back to the hotel too late. And he doesn’t want to have sex and then leave immediately. “I’m a gentleman,” he says. “I’m French.”
Before he leaves, Adrien goes to the bathroom and stays there for what feels like an awfully long time. I wonder whether he’s taking a dump. Couldn’t it have waited? Maybe he’s looking through my medicine cabinet. If so, he will find the following: hormone patches, CBD gummies, a prescription cream for a rash on my torso, and Gas-X. A veritable inventory of a perimenopausal woman’s favorite pharmaceuticals! He’ll also see my oral device for sleep apnea, steeping in a cleaning liquid and looking like a pair of dentures with no teeth, just gums.
Adrien and I make plans to get together the next day but, after a brief exchange in the morning, he disappears. Maybe he got in an accident, I think. Maybe his wife freaked out. Maybe I said something wrong last night. Maybe I shouldn’t have reached out first this morning.
I call Olivia, who says that there’s a French term for this, “poser un lapin,” which translates literally to “place a rabbit,” but also means “to stand someone up.” “I don’t understand,” I say to Olivia. I try to swallow the lump that I feel rising in my throat but I know she can tell that my voice is a little garbled. And I’m embarrassed that I care.
The ghostings really get to me. They hit me deep in my soft underbelly, reinforce my belief that men’s bad behavior is my fault, the result of something that I did. Something that I am. Something sad and vulnerable and earnest and easily excited and self-conscious and insecure and fragile. This, despite the fact that I’ve spent all my adult life trying to play it cool with men. Maybe that’s the problem, I think. Maybe I’m getting ghosted not because I’m too much but because I’m too little; giving men the impression that I’m somehow blithely indifferent to meaning or emotion. Unable to be hurt. Or injured. Maybe I am unwittingly giving men permission to be themselves, and then I get hurt when they reveal their true natures.
“Their true natures.” It’s like when David says things to me like “all men are bad.” It’s so cynical. It’s not true. And, like so many untruths, it’s empty and self-serving. It provides an easy out for uncomfortable feelings. “Men are bad.” End of story. Next!
At around 4pm, Adrien reappears on our WhatsApp thread with a roundabout excuse for his disappearance that involves his crappy French cellphone service and being out for most of the day wandering around DTLA. He hadn’t mentioned he had plans to do a solo walking tour and, though he’d complained about his phone service the day before, I hadn’t realized the phone wouldn’t work unless he was on wi-fi. Indeed, when Adrien drives over later in the afternoon to meet up with me, he gets lost and has to stop at a McDonald’s on Sunset Boulevard to use the public wi-fi to re-load Google Maps. Sort of funny, sort of pathetic. I mean, Jesus! Are French people known for being cheap? Just pony up for the international phone plan, already!
About an hour before Adrien arrives, I go online and make a reservation for dinner at a favorite restaurant – Saffy’s. He shows up at my place at about six and I brew some coffee and then we leave for our meal. Standing outside my car in the dark Adrien looks up at the sky. There aren’t many visible stars, but there are some. “Orion’s Belt,” he says, pointing to a constellation of three stars in the southeast. Orion’s Belt looks a lot like those blackheads, I think.
We sit outside under some heat lamps at dinner and flirt with the waitress. The food is delicious but we’re too stuffed to indulge in dessert. Out on the sidewalk at the valet station, I spot Trevor Noah standing with two friends. I wonder whether Adrien knows who he is, so I wait until Trevor Noah is looking away from us and tell Adrien that he’s “a wonderful and famous comedian.”
Adrien’s eyes light up. “I’m going to go take a selfie,” he says. He makes a move in Trevor Noah’s direction.
I see red. Well, maybe more like orange.
“No,” I say quietly. “You’re not.”
Adrien is taken aback.
“Why?” he asks.
“Why?” he asks again. He makes another move toward Trevor.
I position my body in front of his. “If you do, I’m going to leave you here,” I say.
I’m deadly serious. I have never been so serious about anything in my life. It is now my sole mission in life to make sure that Adrien and his crappy smartphone are kept far away from one of South Africa’s preeminent cultural and intellectual exports.
“Who cares? I’ll never see him again!”
“Doesn’t matter!” I say, my voice rising. “I might!”
Just then my car pulls up at the curb. I hustle Adrien into the passenger side seat. We bicker about the Trevor Noah thing all the way home.
Next week: The French investigator uncovers clues about my intimacy issues.