The Lessons (2 page)

He looked up at me from my phone. “I think I’m doing a little better than trying,” he said as he winked at me. “Here, now you have my number. When you’re settled, give me a call. I think we could have a lot of fun.” He grabbed my hand, and for a moment I thought he was going to kiss it, but instead he placed the phone in it. “It’s been a pleasure, Ms. Natalie With No Last Name.”

I blushed again as he flashed a demure smile at me and turned to leave.

“Oh, wait, uh Ryan?” He stopped and turned back to me hopefully.

I looked down at the floor and then back up to him. “It’s probably in New Fiction. Against the front wall.”

The corners of his eyes crinkled as he shook his head. “I fucking knew it.”

              Once he’d rounded the corner, I fell back against the shelf, my heart racing. What had just happened? I looked down at my phone and tapped the screen. There was a new entry in my Contacts.

Ryan Andrews.

Natalie

You could threaten me with the guillotine, but I would never admit to anyone the real reason I moved across the country. See, I’d always been a very private person, plus, my story was watertight, my excuse too good. That part, I’d made sure of.

I’d spent the last three years caring for my ailing mother. Or rather, my ailing adoptive mother. Having grown up in foster care, my mom wasn’t just a mom—she was my angel. I mean, she’d literally
saved
me. So you can imagine, when I’d found out her breast cancer had returned, I was shattered. She’d also been a child of the ‘system,’ and our family consisted only of each other. So at the fresh age of twenty-six, I quit my job in marketing, and stayed with her night and day. At the time, the doctors had given her six months, but she ended up hanging on for three years. I stayed with her as she was slowly taken from me, one diseased cell at a time.

After she passed, I was flung back into the real world, a twenty-nine-year-old virgin with no job, no prospects, no family: nothing. Of course, ever since I was little, having lived a life full of everything but normality, it was what I craved the most. In some ways, I was ashamed to say it aloud, but I wanted it all. I knew it was passé, but I wanted the American Dream: the cute little house with the white picket fence, and the 2.6 kids, and the golden retriever. Yet I knew there were a few things I’d need to get me there. A college degree. A job. A husband.

Details, details.

The degree, well, at least that was taken care of. Despite not having attended college herself, my mom had been amazingly supportive throughout my four years at Columbia. I ended up graduating at the top of my class, eager to take on the world, and I even scored full-time work right after graduation. All of that was going well, until the cancer came back, and I left my job to be with her.

But let me be clear: I do
not
regret it. Not for a second.

As far as the husband thing, well, by now I’d been out of the dating pool for so long, I felt like a dinosaur, and a virgin dinosaur at that. Honestly, the virginity box should have been checked off my list eight years ago. That was the primary task of Josh, the aforementioned Serious Boyfriend #1. Okay, maybe it was unannounced to him, but I hadn’t thought I needed to lay things out for him in such detail. I mean, wasn’t that what guys were supposed to do? Stick it in any chance they got?

As you may recall, Serious Boyfriend #1 ended up being the one gay rugby player at Columbia. Just my luck.

I never told Josh that he’d fucked up my plan. In my mid-twenties, I’d managed to go on a few dates with who I thought were nice guys, but I’d mistakenly shared my secret, and they’d fled. Like, pretend-emergency-phone-call “my friend is in the hospital I’ve got to go” fled. Every one of them.

It eventually just became easier
not
to date. Everything I’d read in online made it seem like you were a scientific anomaly if you managed to graduate college without stamping your v-card. Plus, everything I’d heard men say on the subject, well, let’s just say having your virginity intact was no longer as desirable as it was, in say, the 1500’s. So, yep, I was pretty sure in this age of digi-dating, most guys wouldn’t be able to swipe left fast enough if they knew my secret. So I just stayed out of the game, and shelved The Plan.

Josh still knew nothing about The Plan, and despite everything, he was still my best friend. I didn’t really let many people get close. In a way, I guess I’d avoided female friendship too. Maybe it was so I wouldn’t have to pull stories from
Cosmo
to swap over brunch. Yep, this way, the shame was mine and mine alone to revel in.

Whoopee.

So why the new city, and more importantly: why San Francisco? Well, the short answer is sex. And the longer answer is that through my research, I’d found San Francisco to be home to a certain
business service
that I wanted to use. A very particular type of business service that you couldn’t find just anywhere.

I’m talking about a sex surrogate.

Yes, it’s a thing. You may have even heard of them before. Sex surrogates are used in conjunction with therapists to help people get over a variety of sexual, um, issues. Yet by now you are probably asking:
But Natalie, surely New York is full of helpful licensed sex surrogates just waiting to take your money. Why move all the way to San Francisco?
And you’d be right. New York
is
full of them. In fact, that’s how I got the idea. A friend of a neighbor was using one.

And I knew about it.

I fucking knew about it!

Disgusting, right? Not the act, of course, but the fact
that I knew so much about someone I barely knew.
New York can be incestuous like that—everyone is always up in each other’s business. So I made up my mind. I’d use a surrogate to help me catch up on my to-do list, but I’d do it somewhere anonymous. Somewhere I had
no
social networks,
no
connections. And that location, by virtue of its distance, was San Fran-fucking-cisco.

So I applied for jobs, and within two months, I had secured a new gig. The job paid well, really well, and I felt grateful that someone was willing to take a chance on me. For the first time in my life, I was thankful I didn’t have any family—no one was there to question the decision. The only other person my choice affected was Josh, and while he was bummed at first, he quickly realized this now gave him an excuse to visit San Francisco whenever he got horny.

Plan B
was officially in motion.

And so here I was. Outside the door of The San Francisco Center for Sexuality. It’d been a long eight years since I initially passed my ‘due date,’ and I couldn’t believe it was finally happening. Butterflies in my stomach? Nope, I had giant vultures and eagles knocking around in there.

Yep. I was nervous.

Duh. I had a number of very good reasons to be nervous. I
had
forked over an ungodly amount of my mom’s life insurance payout, sight unseen. The nerves also could have been nervous excitement. Or maybe I was worried that years of sexual atrophy had left me unable to be helped.
Un-sexable.
Is that a word? God, what if the surrogate found me wholly unattractive and ran for the hills—no, they weren’t allowed to do that, right? God, my mind was running a mile a minute, screaming every excuse it had at me so I wouldn’t go into that building. Maybe I should have listened to it.

But I didn’t.

Instead I threw open the door and held my head up high, hoping to fake the confidence that I so desperately needed. I walked through the vast, granite lobby of the downtown San Francisco office building, skipped the elevator, choosing instead to hoof it up to the fifth floor. On the way up, I practiced my breathing exercises and re-iterated The Story I was going to tell the therapist.

The Story was an important part of Plan B. A
very
important part.

I was seeing the sex surrogate because my life had run off the track. Not in any dramatic television-movie kind of way, but in a sufficiently bothersome manner. I was thirty years old, and instead of being married with two kids, I was still single. Single and completely sexually inexperienced. To make up for lost time, I knew I’d need to skip a few steps of the original Plan. Using a sex surrogate to check ‘
losing my virginity’
off the list seemed like a very expedient and efficient way to do this. After I had that
bump
out of the way, I’d be free to fast track my selection of a partner which was a critical component of The Plan. Yes, I would finally be able to meet someone and sleep with them after a few dates, without worrying that the effort was in vain, should they discover my lack of bedroom ability and bolt.

But I couldn’t tell this to the therapist. Their website was explicit.

“Use of a sexual surrogate is clinical in nature, and each candidate is closely evaluated to see if their personal sexual goals meet the ethical guidelines of the surrogacy field. Surrogacy is not a quick fix; it is only enlisted if a variety of criteria are met.”

After a brief telephone chat with an intake specialist, I had managed to decipher what that meant, exactly, and I had crafted a story to fit. I congratulated myself again on my decision to move to San Francisco. Here, no one would be able to poke holes in my story, because no one knew me.

Bravo, Reese.

Once on the fifth floor, I made my way down the hall, until I was outside a door with
SFCS
in gold letters. Inside, a young Indian woman with dark, shiny hair smiled at me from behind the reception desk.

“Hello, may I help you?” she asked, and as she spoke my phone rang.

“Uh, yes,” I said as I fumbled in my purse, “Natalie Reese, I have an appointment with Dr. Lerner at two o’clock.” I looked at my screen. It was Josh. Of course. Nice timing. I switched the phone to silent.

The woman made a quick scan of her computer screen. “Yep, I’ve got you right here, Ms. Reese. If you’d have a seat, Dr. Lerner will be with you momentarily.”

I nodded and took the seat nearest to the door. I tried to lose my nerves in an old copy of
Life & Style
, and was about halfway into an article about the latest celebrity pregnancy when a tall figure appeared in the doorway.

“Ms. Reese?”

I glanced up. It’s so funny when you meet someone in person after having only chatted on the phone. Based on her laissez-faire approach to sex-talk, I guess I had imagined Dr. Lerner as more of a free-love hippy. In reality, she was more understated and graceful, her ash blond hair drawn up in a sleek knot. She was wearing gray trousers and a white silk blouse and was much younger than I’d pictured—probably about thirty-five, thirty-six.

I stood up to shake her hand. “Dr. Lerner. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

“Likewise,” she said, gesturing for me to follow her down the hall. “How did the move go?”

I chuckled. “It’s still going. Half my things are still in a truck somewhere in Missouri, but so far so good.”

“Are you enjoying San Francisco?” she asked as we entered her office. It was a bright space, with one large window framing a view of downtown. I don’t know why, but as I looked around, I expected to see a bed and maybe some clinical sex gadgetry. Nope— the office was pretty standard-issue-therapist. My eyes first caught a cream-colored leather couch with a matching chair opposite it and a couple of bookshelves lined with provocative titles like
Unleashing The Orgasm Within
and
Sex After 50
. Oh, and a rectangular fish tank.

I eyed the tank. “What? Oh, yes. It’s a great city. I like your fish.”

“Thanks. Larry is the striped one, and Lucius is the orange one.”

I nodded and looked at the couch. “Am I supposed to lie down?” I asked, unsure. Despite the urging of the hospice workers, I’d never been in therapy of any kind and wasn’t sure of the protocol. I chuckled to myself; I suppose I was taking a pretty deep dive for my first time in the pool.

Dr. Lerner smiled and shrugged. “Up to you.”

I chose to sit.

“So, Natalie, I know we talked about this on the phone, but I always find it useful to review the process with patients in person, in case any new questions have come up. Does that sound like a good way to get started?”

I nodded. My throat was a little dry, so I bent over and retrieved a water bottle from my purse.

“Good. So to begin, I wanted to re-iterate that this process is two-fold. In addition to meeting with the surrogate, you will also continue to meet with me. Generally we suggest two sessions per week with the surrogate and one with the therapist. This allows us to keep close tabs on your
progress
, but without interfering too much with the
process
.”

I took a sip from my bottle and nodded again. That sounded fine, and I desperately wanted her to get through this so we could just get on with it, but I knew that if I showed any impatience it would be a red flag and I couldn’t afford that. The application process alone had taken a month, and I wasn’t about to start
that
again. So I sat silently on the couch.

“As we discussed, you’ll have six sessions with the surrogate. That’s more than enough for ninety-five percent of cases.”

I said a silent prayer that I wouldn’t be in that last five percent. In fact, I was hoping I’d be done after just one or two sessions. Having sex with a stranger wasn’t exactly something I was looking forward to. It was just the means to the end, just something to get over with. The website explained all the psychological and physical testing surrogates go through before being licensed, and I figured it was safer than a prostitute or even a one-night stand. I actually really appreciated the one-stop-shop nature of it all.

I took another sip of water and tried to act casual. “And you said the surrogate is pre-selected for me, correct?”

“Yes. We selected him based on the questionnaire you filled out. However, it’s important to remember, while we try to connect you with someone you’d find physically attractive, surrogates aren’t meant to be a perfect match. You might even find yours somewhat off-putting at first. That’s why we’ll ease you into your relationship with them, and then only after mutual trust has been built, will any of the physical work start.