A Doctor's Touch

Being with R was like listening to different radio stations at the same time—reggae, classical, pop, hip hop, blues, jazz.  He spoke in a cacophony of thoughts, intentions, questions and misunderstandings  that it was difficult to get him straight.   It’s not that he had ADHD or was restless.   It wasn’t even that he was trying to mislead; it was more like he had too many unprocessed experiences battling for position in his emotional psyche: sadness, dissatisfaction, insecurity, fear, shock, bitterness, brilliance, arrogance, unhappiness, happiness, impatience, selfishness, confusion, excitement, hope, love, desire, youthfulness, exhaustion, ambition, and nostalgia, were evident in his conversations.   Mostly, he was sad.

From our online chats,  I learned he was a doctor and an employee of an international peace-keeping organization at the UN; he spoke English, Russian and Indonesian; he lived in Geneva but constantly traveled the world for his job; he had a grown son; he lost his first wife during  childbirth; he was recently divorced from his second wife (some sort of betrayal was involved from the bits of info. I gathered).   He had been in East Timor and Bosnia during their great conflicts; he had lost friends to bombs; he  had dodged several bullets; he had been to every nook and cranny in the world, yet he didn’t feel comfortable in any of it —  except for some talk of moving to Bangkok one day and opening a restaurant.  He was considering either retiring or vying for a promotion at his job.  He was constantly aware of  the money in his pocket, whether he felt he had enough of it or barely enough.  And, he knew that in order to catch a rabbit in the bush you froze it by aiming your headlights at its eyes.

His connections to the here and now consisted of a few possessions and the practice of familiar routines/experiences:  a beloved Jeep he was considering shipping to his parent’s home in Canada; an obsession with the different chains of Marriott hotels (his employers provided discounts at this hotel);  a Blackberry that beeped at all hours of the night;  driving styles and cars (for the last 19 year he had been driven everywhere for his job);  and trying all the ethnic foods of the place he visited.

On a side note, let me just say  that there is something  disorienting about meeting someone from the internet for the first time.  And, it doesn’t matter how many pictures you have shared or how many chats you've had.  At the time you meet, you have already vetted for Nigerian, Russian and Ugandan conmen/women; and dismissed potential rapists/murderers/abductors.  You have even skimmed the surface for possibilities: soulmates, future wife/husband, good friend, penpal. But, that first encounter brings up all the underlying questions about why he or she was online in the first place? What does he/she really want?  Is this really the women/men I thought he/she was?    And… . Why can he/she get a date in “real life?”  But what I’ve learned is that people are lonely and want a connection, no matter where it comes from.   The internet provides an opportunity to imagine — or at least entertain — the possibility of such a thing as the perfect  fling, sexual encounter, wife, penpal.   But reality is something else and there needs to be some “catching- up time” where perceived expectations run into the very real person standing in front of you.

I didn’t like R when I first saw him.  He was too short and dark. I don’t necessarily have a type but he didn’t seem to be mine.  And when he grabbed my hand in the car, I was determined to drop him off at his hotel room and never see him again.  But in the first couple of hours of talking, I remembered everything I liked about him: he exciting, impatient, insistent, interesting and an adventurous man who had kept me interested in him in our three months of online chats.  Then, we drank a bottle of the French wine he brought from his cellar, the wine that smelled of all the flowers in France.  R was  all over me, and I didn’t have time to take off my stilettos.

In bed R was like a wild cat, spider and heart-broken boy; he was here, there and everywhere.   The first time we met,  I was not going to sleep with him because I wanted more from him than his application form responses (place of employment, age, relationship status?).  But, during sex he became a confluence of all his scattered emotions.  His push, pulls, and nips were rhythmic and smooth. He had the precision of a surgeon (at one point in his medical career he practiced surgery) and the wildness of man just set free. We must have done the kama sutra at a 100 mph.  I was sitting, kneeling, crossed.  Little did I know that the next morning I would be bruised but happy.  At one point,  I was standing on the bed, my heels digging deep into the Marriott’s Heavenly mattress. I let him push his hardness up against me and the bed's board, as if he were dancing to pounding drums.   I kept my eyes closed for it all, so that I could run free with him to other places and times. It was important that he lead me through his fragmented world — a world in which he had experienced everything but come to terms with nothing.   In bed, R searched for meaning — in the most abstract sense of the word — and total liberation.  He especially wanted to confirm our connection by hearing my voice. I could say anything — the rain in the Spain…”— and he screamed.  But, what I wanted to say with a new-found sense of conviction was that all men should go to medical school before they touch a woman.