Sex Object: A Memoir by Jessica Valenti

Author:Jessica Valenti
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Women's Studies, Social Science, Women
ISBN: 9780062435088
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

GRILLED CHEESE

THE DAY AFTER HE FUCKED ME WHILE I WAS UNCONSCIOUS, I HAD Carl buy me a grilled cheese sandwich and french fries.

I had gone to his apartment the night before with my sister because he was having a few friends over and she had nothing else going on. She left early in the evening and I got drunker than usual faster than usual. The next morning, I woke up confused and with ten missed calls from my parents. I was naked.

When I joked to him about date-raping me, he shot back: Don’t worry, I went down on you first.

I DON’T REMEMBER HOW OR WHERE I MET CARL, BUT I IMAGINE IT must have been at a bar, and it must have been in midtown because he worked in finance and there were none of those types in Williamsburg yet. I also don’t remember liking him much, which doesn’t say a lot for my taste or mind-set at the time.

Carl wasn’t great-looking or particularly charming, but he had a decent sense of humor and I was bored and dating a lot. So even though he had visible blackheads in his ear and I found him somewhat disgusting in bed—all sweat and freckles—I kept seeing him.

Whenever I spent the night at his place—a high-rise in Manhattan overlooking the river—he would give me money for cab fare home. It was often more than I needed and I could never figure out if I thought this was gentlemanly or if it made me feel like a prostitute.

He came to visit me in Brooklyn once, to look at the loft I had just rented with a girl I used to intern with and her boyfriend. It was huge and illegal, like any decent apartment in Williamsburg in 2002. I had to bring one month’s rent in cash for the building manager as a “down payment” that I would never see again before we could move in. Then I had to pay the building super extra to build walls for bedrooms.

I took Carl to my favorite bar in the neighborhood, a place on Bedford Avenue, but he wanted to leave quickly. That was weird, he said. When I asked what he meant he said he felt like a “cracker” because we were the only white people at the bar—which I’m pretty sure wasn’t true and I thought was such a strange thing to notice in any case. I had never heard anyone use the term “cracker” before in a way that suggested anything but irony.

After that we stopped talking. For months, I think. I don’t know how long it had been. I do know I hadn’t seen Carl in a while when he invited me to come over to his apartment for a small party.

That night at his place, where the only other partygoers were a small group of his male friends, I found out that he’d told them that I was bisexual, which I was not. My sister, confused, had heard them talking about it and came up to ask me if I was and for whatever reason had decided not to tell her.

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