My "Goy Toy": Sex, Religion, and Rejection
Mama and Aunt Marianna, this is a very explicit post, and absolutely not for you.
This is a true story, but a name and a few identifying details have been changed.
“Don’t be silly. You’re never going to meet my parents.”
Nechama was on top of me still, my cock slowly softening inside her, her long, damp curls hanging in my face, her fingers gently stroking my neck, the transition from frantic coupling to pillow talk already well underway.
It was a Sunday afternoon in my tiny Westwood studio. Fellow graduate students at UCLA, Nechama and I had been sleeping together for three weeks. We’d been friends for three years.
I was hopelessly smitten.
“Sweet boy,” she murmured, seeing the hurt flash across my face. “Please don’t make this more than what this can be.” I sighed. Nechama raised herself on her elbow. “If you fall in love with me,” she said, her voice tender but serious, “we’ll have to stop this. I’ve always been clear with you, right?”
She had been. We’d first met at a new graduate student orientation. I’d been 22, Nechama barely a year older. We were each starting doctoral programs; I was a budding medievalist, she a renaissance scholar with an interest in Jewish texts. From a modern Orthodox family in Connecticut, Nechama had done her undergrad work at Brandeis before a very brief and unhappy stint in law school. When I met her that first day at UCLA, she’d just broken off her engagement to the medical student her parents adored and moved out west.
From the moment Nechama walked in – late – to the orientation, I was mesmerized. When she sat down next to me, in that hot and crowded Bunche Hall classroom, I could smell the mingled scents of her perfume and her sweat. Her first words to me were an urgent, throaty whisper, her hot breath in my ear: “What did I miss?”
Not much, I replied, cursing myself for not having anything cleverer to say. Nechama’s extraordinary red hair cascaded down her back, the tight curls glowing in the afternoon light. Our shoulders touched. I barely heard the department chair’s long-winded welcome. At the wine and cheese reception that followed, I felt pangs of jealousy the moment that she chatted with any other man – and a flush of intense pleasure when she turned her attention back to me.
When Nechama finally noticed my last name on my nametag (I’d only given her my first) her eyes grew wide with mischief. “A schvitzer? Do you live up to it?” (To “schvitz” comes from the Yiddish word for “sweat,” and that is indeed what my surname means.) I blushed red, transfixed with the way her pointed tongue darted out from between her lips. I couldn’t tell if she was flirting with me, but I hoped she was. At the end of the orientation, she tossed that impossibly glorious red mane of hair over her shoulder, locked eyes with me, and said she hoped to see me around sometime. I grunted inaudibly, and as I drove home, berated myself for my clumsiness.
I crushed on Necha (as her friends called her) for the next three years, through the entirety of a brief and very ill-advised starter marriage to a college sweetheart and through Nechama’s rather public flings with a couple of fellow graduate students. Finally, in the fall of 1992, we were assigned to the same professor to serve as teaching assistants for a survey course in modern European history.
At last, we went out for coffee alone.
We ended up back in her apartment, kissing on the couch. She pulled my tucked polo shirt out of my jeans, her hands running up my torso, finding my nipples. I gasped, my own hand cupping her breast. Nechama suddenly pulled back, and pushed her hair out of her eyes.
“Wait,” she said, “I need to ask you something.”
I was sure she was going to ask one of two things. Perhaps: Was my divorce final? (It wasn’t.) Or: Did I have a condom? (Not on me, but I was prepared to sprint to the nearest pharmacy.)
Instead: “Is your mother Jewish?”
I was stunned. My first thought was that she was trying to figure out if I was circumcised. But what an odd way and time to ask, I thought. “I’m only half,” I replied, “through my dad.”
Nechama nodded. “But not your mother?”
“No, she’s an atheist Episcopalian. Does it matter?”
Nechama leaned forward, butting her head gently into my chest. I kissed her hair, waited.
“This can never go anywhere serious,” she said, proceeding to explain – without ever raising her gaze to meet mine – that her commitment to her faith and her heritage meant she would only marry a Jewish man. (While Reform Jews recognize patrilineal descent, the vast majority of Jews – including those in the Modern Orthodox world in which Necha was raised – require descent through the mother.)
I stroked her hair while she spoke, trying to figure out if I was flattered that this brilliant, gorgeous woman would consider marrying me – or if I was insulted that my mother’s background took me out of the running. Mostly, I was amazed. It was 1992! What serious intellectual made decisions based on religion? Was she going to ask to see my astrological chart next?
I lifted Nechama’s face to meet mine. I kissed her. “It’s okay if we can’t get serious,” I whispered, “I just want to enjoy this now.”
She laughed. “I’m gonna hold you to that, baby; remember you said that.”
She cocked her head to one side, studying me. I held her gaze, sensing that if I wavered, I’d be asked to leave. And then, without another word and in one fluid motion, she pulled my shirt up, over, and off. I tried to lift her top off in turn, but was too slow; she wriggled out of it before I could figure out how to get it over her great mane.
Once we were both naked, she pushed me gently but firmly onto my back on the couch, and straddled me. She grasped my cock in her hand, gently rubbing the head against her clit. “You sure, sweet boy?” she asked, tenderness and lust mixed in her voice.
“Jesus, yes,” I groaned. Her brown eyes danced.
“Jesus,” she repeated softly as she took me inside, “has nothing to do with this.”
The sex was transcendently good. I was in awe of her hunger, her intensity, her raw wanting. I’d never been with someone so frank about what they wanted, so articulate and specific in their demands, so verbally, manually, orally adept. It was the best first time I’d ever had; we fucked over and over again against walls and on countertops and – finally – in her bed. When the day came, I went off to teach my 8:00 a.m. discussion section without showering, wanting to keep Necha’s scent on my skin for as long as possible.
I couldn’t play it cool. I wanted to see her every night. Nechama set the boundaries, reminding me of my research and my papers and our mutual grading obligations. Not wanting to seem as needy as I was, I readily agreed we should pace ourselves, even though I knew damn well I would have dropped my advanced paleography seminar in a heartbeat for her. She knew better.
Her boldness took my breath away; one morning, as we sat in the large lecture hall, listening to the professor for whom we both TAed drone away, Necha arranged her leather jacket over her lap, pulled up her skirt, and grabbed my hand. Our eyes fixed ahead, I slid my hand between her legs. She was already soaked; I began to stroke her, avoiding her clitoris at first, delighting in her barely perceptible, quickened breathing. As Professor Norberg continued her doleful recounting of the fall of the Paris Commune, I started to circle Necha’s clit with my forefinger. She gripped my arm, digging in her nails; when she came a few moments later, she feigned a small, expert coughing fit, patting her chest with her right hand while the fingernails on her left drew blood from my wrist.
Fuuuuuck, she groaned, just loud enough for me alone to hear. It was the guttural release in her words that pushed me over the edge. For the first and only time in my entire life, I came in my pants without being touched.
When we weren’t fucking – or trying unsuccessfully to grade together – Nechama and I often talked about religion. I’d had Modern Orthodox friends in college, but I’d never dated a woman for whom Judaism was so central to her life. Though she didn’t keep Shabbat, not even going to synagogue, she lit candles every Friday night and read the weekly Torah portion on Saturdays. I was fascinated. I knew so little about my father’s family history, other than that they were Austrian Jews and most had died in the Holocaust. Nechama gave me a window into a world that was both exotic and familiar. My infatuation with her bled into a fascination with my own Jewish heritage. But Nechama never failed to remind me, with a scrupulousness that was kind, firm, and disconcertingly frequent that her future lay with a – fully --Jewish husband.
After 10 days of sleeping together, she got her period, a fact that she announced with characteristic matter-of-factness when she came over to my apartment one evening. I told her I didn’t mind if she didn’t. She grinned. Her blood spattered the sheets and the bedroom walls, got on our faces and in our hair. I thought it was raw and hot and couldn’t have cared less about the mess. At least, I didn’t care until Nechama told me that when she got married to her “future Jewish husband,” she’d never have sex while menstruating. Lying on the stained bedclothes, she explained Niddah (Jewish law that forbids sex during menstruation, or for a week afterward) to me. When I snorted derisively at the idea of abstaining for so long because of some false notion of impurity, her voice grew sharp. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Hugo. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s how I will choose to live.”
I was confused. She would share her period blood with me but not her future husband? Was it supposed to taint him but not me? I felt like I was trapped in a gender reversal of the Madonna-whore complex.
As she sensed that I was falling for her, Nechama grew blunter, often to the point of teasing cruelty. She started calling me her “goy toy,” a term I loathed as much as I loved the “sweet boy” she used all too sparingly. “It’s just because you’re my hot younger Gentile lover,” Nechama said, “it’s really a compliment.” Except that it didn’t feel like one. It felt like an unkind way of reminding me that what we had was not only temporary, but also insignificant. When I responded with petulant indignation, Necha would turn chilly and distant.
The message was clear. She liked me. She certainly liked fucking me as much as I loved fucking her. But if I were to think for one instant that I was charming enough to override what she saw as both her identity and her destiny, I would be sent the unmistakable message that I was being a fool.
Then her parents came to town. They were flying in on a Monday, flying home on a Thursday night red-eye. Since she’d moved to L.A. they came to visit once a year, to take Nechama shopping and to dinner, and to visit museums. Nechama was nervous; her parents were ambivalent about her graduate work in history, worried that though only 26, she was rapidly aging out of what she bitterly called her “sell-by date.”
The day before they arrived, I chose to wait until we’d just finished lovemaking to ask one more time if I could meet her parents. I still thought this religious difference was something we could “work around.” Besides, what could be the harm in meeting her mom and dad? If necessary, I said hopefully, I could “pass” for Jewish.
“I have my Dad’s nose,” I said, tapping my face, trying to be cute.
Nechama just looked sad. Tenderly but implacably, she shot me down once more.
Even though her parents stayed in a hotel, she didn’t want to see me during their visit. During TA meetings that week, Necha was cordial but brisk, choosing not to sit next to me. Our friends cocked eyebrows and asked questions; the disappointment and anxiety were all too evident on my face.
I forced myself not to call, reassuring myself that Friday, when her parents would be gone, I’d hear her flirtatious laugh on the phone again, inviting me over to play. The call didn’t come. I called her Friday night. No answer. I left a message, then another – and stupidly, obsessively, another and another.
It was Sunday before she called me back, asking to meet for coffee. The distance in her voice left little mystery about what she was going to tell me.
I met her at the Coffee Bean, numbly resigned to the inevitable. Nechama looked both more beautiful and chaste than ever; her wild hair pulled back, leather jacket over an uncharacteristically modest turtleneck. She was as kind as she was unflinching. It needed to end now, she explained, before any real damage was done. She hoped we could still be friends but would leave that ball in my court. There would be no last afternoon of passion, no wistful conversations about what might be, no opportunity to change her mind.
I told her I understood. Necha smiled gently. “I’m not sure you do, sweet boy. I’m not sure you do.” She kissed me on the cheek and walked away.
For the rest of the quarter, we were civil and distant. The next term, Nechama left for Italy to work for three months on 16th-century Jewish texts. I focused on my qualifying exams. By the time she came back to L.A., I was dating the tall, cool WASP woman who would become my second wife. Nechama and I waved to each other in the hallways a few more times, and then disappeared into our dissertations and our separate lives.
In 2014, a year after my fall from grace briefly made the national news, Nechama sent me a friend request on Facebook. We reconnected. She told me she had married a rabbi, had had three children, gotten divorced, and had recently left academia to work in consulting. She now lived in the Midwest.
I told Necha that my (soon-to-be-ex) fourth wife and I had been married in the Kabbalah Centre, had kept kosher for years, and that my son had had a formal brit milah (ritual circumcision). She filled the Messenger text box with exclamation points and LOLs, and asked if she was owed any acknowledgement for my return home to the faith of my paternal ancestors. I told her she probably deserved a smidgen of credit.
I asked Necha about her dating life, and she told me she was casually dating a much younger, non-Jewish man.
It was my term to type multiple LOLs. I had to ask. “Do you call him ‘goy toy’ too?”
She had tried, Necha told me, but the young man loved it so much that he began to text her with phrases like “Hey, it’s your goy toy, want to play?” and she found that understandably tiresome.
Serves you right, I told her, and after a quarter-century, she admitted it was so.
*****
With each newsletter, I’ll be posting a song. “Precious Things” is on a an album that both Necha and I adored, a record that was inescapable in 1992— the Tori Amos debut, Little Earthquakes. The too-on-the-nose lyrics have always made me think of her, and I listened to it on repeat as I finished writing this piece.
I want to smash the faces
Of those beautiful boys
Those christian boys
So you can make me cum
That doesn't make you Jesus