He took an astronomy class his first semester at SF State in the spring, after taking four years to get through junior college. He was bored, and had been since middle school, so it didn’t matter much to him what classes he took.
It would be simplest just to picture him as eleven. His first grade teacher had once described him as “delightfully immature.” The redeeming modifier had long since ceased to apply. He dressed indifferently, bathed occasionally, and did not dance or look directly at other people. At the occasional party he was invited to, he would go into the kitchen and wash the dishes. He had never kissed a girl. He was quite talkative on any subject unrelated to intimacy. He sometimes imagined other people either couldn’t hear him or weren’t listening, and compensated for this by talking loudly. He craved attention, and was oblivious to the fact that, when he got it, it was usually for the wrong reasons. He was actually better off alone, not constantly having to reconcile his own idea of himself with everyone else’s. He hadn’t learned this yet.
The class was called Stellar Astronomy. It was an upper-division class for astronomy majors. There was a lot of math, which he had avoided since high school. He bought a scientific calculator and learned how to use it, or at least most of it. Stellar magnitudes were exponential, so he needed to familiarize himself with the power and log keys. He remembered powers and roots, and eventually figured out that logarithms solved power equations where the power was unknown. He had trouble with trigonometric functions. Most of the class was in the same predicament he was.
He sat next to a woman in the class. She was more than quiet; she was self-possessed to the point of being eccentric. She sat like a stone idol, never speaking to anyone or looking around or even turning her head. She looked at the teacher when he spoke, and down at her desk when he didn’t. She was wrapped in a shawl that seemed intended to discourage attention. It didn’t work in his case; he noticed her mainly because she looked so out of place, which he knew he was. He thought at first that she wasn’t bad looking, but because of her hair he couldn’t really tell. She had collar-length blonde hair, which she refused to tuck behind her ears, and so it hung down, screening her face when viewed from the side. For this reason, and because she never turned her head, and because he was afraid to look at her, he only got an occasional glimpse of her face.
The teacher was a pleasant man in his late twenties. He was knowledgeable about astronomy, but less so about teaching. One day the teacher wrote a series of calculations on the blackboard, which he called the Stefan-Boltzmann law. The teacher said they could be used to determine the energy radiated by a black body, given its size and temperature. The calculations covered half the blackboard. Everyone looked at the board. No one said anything.
He raised his hand and asked the teacher what a black body was. The teacher said it was a star. He asked why a star would be called a black body. The teacher said it was just a technical term having several applications, one of which modeled a generic star. He asked what was the long curved diagonal line in the equation with the infinity sign at the top and the zero at the bottom. The teacher said it was the symbol for an integral. He asked what an integral was. The teacher looked around the class, perhaps hoping to find a consensus of scorn for the question among the other students. Not finding it, he looked at the blackboard, thought for a moment, and then said not to worry, the class wouldn’t be required to know the calculations. The teacher then erased the blackboard. In the hallway after class, two other students came up to him and thanked him. At the next class the woman asked him if he wanted to study with her.
She was taciturn, unaffected, unsentimental, and almost humorless. She was seven years older than he and had been married, but now was alone with a child. He was unable to make her laugh on purpose, but occasionally did inadvertently. She told him that he said out loud what other people were thinking. The more he looked at her, the nicer looking she got. She really was lovely, way out of his league, and he could tell she was aware of it, although she didn’t act anything like a woman who knew she was attractive. She seemed to regard beauty as a burden she was tired of carrying. He couldn’t decide if she liked him or was just putting up with him in order to get the study help. She wasn’t even pretending to be nice to him, did not disguise her occasional annoyance at his behavior, and yet she obviously preferred having him around at times. He assumed she associated with him because she thought he was useful to know.
Once, while discussing relations between a married couple, she said the situation would be tolerable unless the husband wasn’t taking care of business. It took a moment for him to realize what she meant by this. She was saying that the husband was not fucking his wife enough, or well enough. She had said this without inflection. It startled him that she could think of sex as a business to be taken care of, and refer to it in the sort of dismissive, phlegmatic tones a plumber might use in describing a leaky faucet. It served to remind him that they had much less in common than he had supposed.
He went to her apartment one evening to study with her, and they ended up spending the night on her couch, talking and sleeping. The next day in class, she asked him why he hadn’t tried anything. Caught off guard by the question, he was able to respond, with some hesitation, that he was shy. He had never admitted such a thing before. She said she understood. He changed the subject.
* * *
A week later, they spent a Sunday together and then went to her apartment to spend the night. When they arrived, he sat in a straight-backed chair in the middle of her living room. He didn’t know what to do when they came into the room, and sitting in the chair seemed like the safest choice available to him. It would at least relieve him of the burden of making any more choices about where to stand, or whether to approach her. He was becoming frightened. What had been, for most of the day, some uncertainty about how things were going to go, had very quickly evolved into an avalanche of anxiety. In other situations he’d been in with women, there was always enough ambiguity attached to the circumstances to allow him to deflect any tension towards small talk. But here, he was certainly going to be expected to touch her face with his own. There was no passage through this circumstance that was not traumatic. He was simply scared to death. He could not even have described what it was that frightened him so much, other than that he would be exposed as a fraud for ever pretending not to be afraid.
She came into the room and looked at him without betraying a sense of anything being out of place. She asked him, in a voice that a secretary might use, whether he had brought contraceptives with him. He said no. She said she was going to put on her diaphragm, and left the room. He sat, frozen to the chair. Eventually she came back into the room wearing a bathrobe and sat on his knee.
He looked down at the floor. He couldn’t look at her; he was having trouble controlling the muscles in his face, and he knew she would see this as soon as he turned towards her. She would know exactly what he was thinking. Not just the thoughts he would intend to share, but even his private thoughts; the ones he was having right then and would never want revealed. He would lose control over his presentation of himself, and become completely transparent. She would know immediately how scared he was, how this mindless, implacable fear was enveloping him. There would be no explaining. There would be no time or opportunity or point. It would already have been made plain what he was. He wouldn’t be able to tell her about his feelings, rationalizing and justifying himself and putting things in a favorable light, as if his cowardice could be an interesting topic for conversation. She would see his fear for herself, written all over his face. She would realize at once what a phony he was, nothing at all like the detached, normal, rational grown man he was pretending to be. Anything would be better than that. So he kept looking at the floor.
She was sitting on his leg, so he couldn’t go anywhere. She waited patiently, and didn’t say anything. Thirty seconds ticked by. The sense of awkwardness in his not looking at her became acute. By now he could feel himself breathing, his mind was racing but to no effect, just thoughts stumbling over themselves. He couldn’t think of a thing to say, and in any case trying to speak to her while looking at the floor would only make things worse. It was as if he was slowly being pushed off a cliff. Every choice was unbearable. There was to be no escape from this, from being so cruelly exposed. She still wouldn’t say anything; by now she must already know, it must be so obvious, if only he hadn’t come here at least she wouldn’t know. All this trouble to get to this point, years trying to climb out of the cave he lived in, only to be seen through by some pitiless woman who would of course demand first of all some demonstration of his courage when in fact there was none. It was over. There was nothing left to be done that would make any difference. Slowly, almost as if being forced against his will, he turned his head and looked up at her.
She immediately kissed him. He opened his mouth a little, and she put her tongue inside. He reached up and put his hand on the back of her neck. Six years late, he passed through the membrane separating acquaintance and intimacy. It was the strangest thing. It was like taking off in an airliner on a rainy day. The acceleration, the roar of the jet engines, the bouncing, the clouds rushing by as the plane climbs, and then the sense of calm as it clears the overcast and levels off. Suddenly it’s quiet and peaceful, with light everywhere. It was just like that. There was no noise. The only disconcerting part was his sense of detachment. He had expected there would be something more to it than what he was experiencing. He could do this, it wasn’t hard, but there was nothing like sensory overload, and no great physical pleasure. He was relieved it wasn’t difficult, and supposed that, after some time, it would become enjoyable. It was strange having her face so close to his. She smelled funny, and he kept thinking he should excuse himself, as if they’d bumped into each other on a crowded bus. He wasn’t in love with her, and didn’t know her well enough to feel entirely comfortable touching her in this way. His strongest sensation was the recognition that he was making out and it wasn’t at all traumatic or difficult. The thought passed through his head that, for the first time in his adult life, he wasn’t acting normal around a girl. What he was doing wasn’t acting normal; it was normal. What he was doing was normal. And if that were true, then by extension he must be, at least for the moment, normal as well.
She was in charge. He was just going along, with no idea of the protocol, and too grateful to be of any use in making decisions. After a few minutes, she got up and prepared the bed by stripping off everything above the fitted sheet. She placed a single pillow in the center of the bed. The rest went into one corner, and a small towel into another. She turned out all the lights, leaving only a small amount of light coming from the kitchen. Of course, he thought, things have to be a certain way: this has to go here, and that has to be just so, or else things might not go as well later. It reminded him of groundskeepers before a baseball game.
She came back and they kissed some more, and then they undressed and got on the bed. He had some idea that he should go down on her, but he was acutely aware that he was putting himself forward in a way that would demonstrate how ignorant he was. This hesitation was obvious, and his clumsy attempt succeeded only in annoying her. From her abruptness in cutting him off, he suspected she must have figured out that he had no idea what he was doing, but he was nonetheless happy to forego the opportunity of demonstrating his incompetence.
She had him sit on the edge of the bed, and then got on her knees and put her mouth on his penis. This was a shock. He actually shuddered; it was all he could do to refrain from stopping her. Fellatio had always existed in his mind as a fantastic visual feast, breasts and tongues and lips and testicles and cascading hair, all the wonderful sleek dangling things that sex was made of summing to an ever-blossoming profane dream of it as being the absolute contravention of feminine modesty. But this, what he was experiencing, was far removed from all of that. She was somebody he knew. He didn’t want to witness her ruin; he wanted to be close to her, and she was down there. All he could see was the top of her head. She was servicing him; for all that he was feeling, she may as well have been shining his shoes. He already had an erection, so none of this was necessary. After a minute or so, he’d had enough to overcome his natural reluctance to assert himself. He reached down and grabbed her under her arms, lifting her towards him to kiss her and change positions.
It wouldn’t go in. He thought at first that he was, yet again, doing something wrong, but then she used her hands to direct him to the right spot, and that didn’t help. She must have had the wrong size vagina. This was a calamity. He’d read every book about sex ever written, and there had been no mention of this. It didn’t occur to him at the time that she’d already had a baby. She wasn’t particularly upset by this development, and seemed determined to see the thing through. This was a relief; maybe things weren’t as bad as he thought. He was sure she wasn’t reluctant; apparently, she wasn’t able to relax her muscles enough for him to enter her. After several attempts, he finally just put his weight on his penis and waited. He hoped he wasn’t hurting her, but he couldn’t imagine how that could be. It started in, but slowed to a crawl after an inch or two. He was inside of her. Even if everything else went wrong from this point, at least he could comfort himself with the knowledge that he’d had sex.
It was not possible to move comfortably. Each thrust took three or four seconds; they were making love in slow motion. If he were to go any faster, he would certainly hurt her. After a few minutes, they rolled over, so she could control the movements between them. He liked that better. She wanted to sit upright, but he wanted her face close to his, so he pulled her down and started kissing her. She supported herself with her elbows on either side of his head. He realized he was quickly getting over the strangeness of her face being so near his. Her hair, hanging down beside her face, was becoming tangled up with their kisses. After what seemed like about five minutes, she began to lubricate inside, and they were able to move more or less normally.
With her moving more rapidly, he gave up trying to keep his mouth on hers. It became a kind of face mashing, more like rubbing garlic into a steak than kissing. He wanted his face to touch the greatest possible surface area of her skin. Her hair, caught between their faces, was getting damp from their sweat and saliva. He was surprised to find that he was able to think in a detached fashion about what they were doing. There was nothing overwhelming about the sensations he was experiencing. The thought struck him that this was a lot more work than he had expected. If he’d been by himself, he’d have been done and in the shower by then. There were no covers, and after a while she said she was cold on top of him. She stopped and got off the bed. She went to get a rubber band for her hair, and then put her bathrobe back on, leaving it open in front. With her unkempt hair stuffed up underneath the rubber band, she looked like a badly dressed sumo wrestler. It really didn’t matter; by that time, he was more feeling her than looking at her.
They finished. When she pulled off of him, there was a small mess on his stomach. She used the towel she had left on the corner of the bed to wipe them both up. Then she recovered the sheets and blankets, disrobed again, and lay down next to him on her side. He turned towards her. She was smiling. She was looking right at his face. She was not glancing, or offering any expression that would have conveyed some additional meaning. She was just smiling at him. If she had not been so close to him, he would have turned around to see what she was smiling at. Without thinking, he smiled back at her and put his hands on her face, suddenly unafraid of the wondrous light she was shining on him. He had not experienced this, or anything like this, since the last time his mother had given him a bath.
Finally came something like the euphoria he had been expecting earlier. The sex had been a distraction. Up until then there had been a plan, a way things were supposed to go, which she knew and he didn’t, all leading to a goal at the end, and they both had to stick to the plan. But now they were relaxed, just lying next to each other and touching for no reason at all. He could do this as well as anyone. There were no rules that he was unfamiliar with. He didn’t have to keep up, or wonder what was supposed to happen next. For the first time since they’d come into the apartment, he wasn’t looking to her for cues as to what to do. He thought she’d think he was a baby for holding her this way, but she obviously didn’t mind. The thought occurred to him that she must have been as lonely as he was. It seemed a miracle to him that something that felt so wonderful could have given pleasure to someone else. It was just heart-filling, there was no other phrase he could think of to describe it. This, the two of them lying together after making love, touching and talking, would always be his clearest memory of their time together.
They made love again, and then lay and kissed for awhile, and then again, and finally at about 1:00am they slept. He migrated to the far end of the bed before falling asleep. He couldn’t be touched when he was sleeping, he just wasn’t used to it. He slept fitfully, his restless wanderings back and forth across the bed interrupted repeatedly by the shock of bumping into her. At about 6:00am they woke, immediately came together on the bed and kissed for a while, and then made love. By this time it was he, no longer so concerned about what the rules were, who was reaching for her, making clear by his actions what he wanted, without looking to her for permission or guidance before each step.
The sun rose over the buildings across the street and now there was light flooding into the apartment. This changed everything. His eleven-hour-old sex career had, so far, been played out in the dark. But now he could see her so much more clearly. She looked different, the light on her illuminating her features and bringing her curves into relief. They weren’t really excited in that way, but it didn’t matter; at this point they were just a pair of delirious three-year-olds in a sandbox. It was completely pointless, a celebration of some elemental joy which, having been denied them for so long, was now within reach. They could have as much as they wanted. They were both smiling at the thought of it, smiling and rubbing each other like a pair of contented cats. It wasn’t even sex.
He didn’t have a change of clothes, so it would have been pointless to take a shower. He got dressed and left, the smell of her all over him.
* * *
They would meet again at her apartment Tuesday night. He hadn’t seen her for a day, but he had slept, and had spent much of his waking hours reflecting on what they’d done. The result of this day’s worth of reflection was that the parts which had before felt strange and mildly disconcerting now felt much more like the most wonderful thing ever, and could this wonderful thing be made to happen again as soon as possible, and how might that be accomplished.
He arrived at her apartment that evening. She opened the door and he stepped into the foyer. They were alone, and he was surprised to find that he was unsure of himself. There was a brief moment, a few seconds at most, when they looked at each other, each seeking to confirm that their mutual understanding was still in place; that the state of affairs between them when they last parted from here was unchanged. That took only a moment, and then they were at each other. There was an urgency not present two nights before. Sunday night had been a gradual unfolding of the joy that was to be had; now there was no time to lose. He tried to go down on her again, but she wasn’t having any of it, and again there was the sandpaper tightness inside until she lubricated.
The realization that it was really her he was with, not some imaginary stranger but this real person he had known briefly and then dreamed of for two days, came to him once they started, and then suddenly there she was, revealed in all of her quivering feral perfection, now clothed only in her gleaming silky coat and that not being nearly enough, she being eaten up from nose to tail; and he wanted to see the shock of it in her eyes, frolicking only moments ago without the slightest notion of what was to become of her. And then, just like that, they were done and holding each other and she was smiling at him, oblivious to his dream.
They made love again before they could relax and lie with each other. Late that night she bled a little and they stopped. She didn’t complain, but they didn’t have sex in the morning, and they agreed that when he came the next day to spend the night they would not make love. On Thursday, this resolution survived a period of time best measured in seconds. He didn’t force himself on her, he would have been happy to go along. But it was her vagina, and she was no more inclined to stop than he. Anyway, she had begun to stretch out by then, and there wasn’t any more bleeding.
They had their first argument. She’d been alone for six months since her marriage had broken up. They obviously had similar appetites, and he assumed she had pleased herself since her husband had left. He asked her about it. She said she never did that, and then reflected the question back at him. Her phrasing made it clear that there was to be only one acceptable answer, but this hint was ignored. Oblivious as usual, he blurted out that he did, but only a couple of times a day now that he was seeing her. By the time the words were out of his mouth, he knew he’d made a mistake. He started to explain that it only happened on their days off and it didn’t affect anything that went on between them and were they really not fucking enough as it was, but the words wouldn’t come out fast enough to calm her down. She was simply furious. She seemed to take it as a personal affront.
He was tempted to say, fine, come on over and take care of me if you don’t want me to, but in fact that would not at all have been what he wanted. He loved wandering in his pornographic garden, sifting through the scores of luxurious, sleek women who were to be found there, imagining scenarios he would never dare or even want to act out with her. He’d grown accustomed to the efficiency and convenience of it; if he had to get that from her every day, he thought, he’d never make it out of the house. And he liked being alone with his dreams, unrestrained by the confines of opportunity or morality, enjoying the complete absence of any distraction external to his own pleasure, not having another person there to complicate matters by adding a social layer to the experience.
He hadn’t fantasized yet while they were making love, she had filled his thoughts. But if he couldn’t dream of other women at all, ever, even when he was away from her, it would only be a matter of time before it affected their lovemaking. This was the first time in his life that he’d had sexual thoughts about the same woman for more than two days in a row. He tried to imagine what it would be like to think of other women while he was having sex with her. The thought horrified him. When they made love he was promising her that she consumed him, and up until then the promise had been true. If he dreamed of other women he’d be breaking faith with her. It would be a betrayal, like Jane Fonda glancing at her watch. So he remained silent. There was obviously no point in talking to her. Of course he wasn’t going to stop; he just wouldn’t tell her. And so now there were secrets.
* * *
Her ideas about his equipment were fanciful. She swore it was the biggest one ever, and measured it with a ruler. He hit her diaphragm one night, and when they were done she put him in a headlock, her arms like a vise around his neck as she whispered lasciviously into his ear: You’ve been places nobody’s been before. She told him one night during their second week that her ex-husband had come by the night before to see their child, and she’d had sex with him. She described his reaction to the roomier new her with obvious relish. He could tell, she said. He could tell the moment we started. She was quite pleased with herself at this triumph over her former spouse.
Years of watching porn had made clear to him how ordinary he was. But this knowledge couldn’t possibly stand up against the onslaught of her flattery. Soon, by the operation of some mysterious psychological phenomenon consisting mainly of human vanity, he was overcome with self-satisfaction. Her admiration was so childlike and unabashed that he actually came close to being jealous of his own penis. And the effrontery of it! He would never have dared get a seamstress’s tape and try to measure a girl’s boobs, and yet here she was, thinking she had the right. He was both amused and mortified to find out how susceptible he was to her admiration. Like everyone else, he’d always looked down on flattery as a crass art, unworthy of his refined sensibilities. He now realized that this was only because nobody had ever gone to the trouble of flattering him before.
He was astonished at the obvious pleasure she took in pleasing him, and how that pleasure was magnified as it was reflected back and forth between them. This had to have been deliberate behavior. She must have been aware of the effect her admiration was having upon him, but even this knowledge of her motives couldn’t undermine his instinctive reaction to her attention. It was overpowering. So this was what it was like to be pretty; to be well-thought-of and to receive such attention, simply because of the way nature formed you; to have a girl look at you and like what she saw. She must have seen how wonderful it was for him to think of himself in this way, but she never let on.
It wasn’t long before his thoughts took a darker turn. It occurred to him how unfair this was. He finally had some physical attribute that favored him, but the one person who knew about it had only made the discovery after having already decided to sleep with him. This nullified the whole advantage. Women had breasts, which didn’t shrink away to nothing when their owners weren’t excited. It really bothered him that this wonderful instrument of his was hidden away. He thought about asking her to sign some kind of statement testifying to what she’d said, and have the thing notarized. But how to word it without it seeming weird? And then he’d have to figure out some way to show the statement to a girl, and that could be awkward. He tried to think of ways he could steer a normal conversation to the point at which it would be appropriate to whip out the statement. Nothing came to mind.
Eventually there was proof of her sincerity, and this was his downfall. She went and purchased some condoms for him to use, and of course she came back with the largest size they had. He tried one on. It was enormous. He could have unrolled it, held it by the tip, and lowered it onto his penis without it touching the sides. This should have been the end of it, but she was not so easily disillusioned. She seemed like an obsessed 4-H club member, grimly determined to believe that her prize pig was the best one, notwithstanding any extrinsic evidence to the contrary.
They almost never got out of bed. She must have fed him at some point, but afterwards he couldn’t remember ever eating there. Except for bathroom breaks, and a bath they took together, as far as he could remember they spent the whole time sleeping, making love, or lying on their sides with their limbs intertwined, talking and kissing. Their lovemaking was distinguished only by its frequency. As new as they were, the added stimulus of novelty was just not necessary. In its place was an intensity that was almost grim, as if they were trying to make up for lost time. Once, when they had two days off in a row, he rode down to a building in the Haight where she was working alone and they made love on the floor of her office. This was to be the extent of their invention.
Now that they had gotten down to business, there weren’t any more non-sexual activities being planned. One night, he insisted they go out on a date. She was perfectly indifferent, but agreed. They went to a Chinese restaurant on Geary Street and sat across from each other, holding their menus. He started to speak, but then realized that the subjects they’d been talking about would feel strange being said out loud in a public place. She was miles away. Her facial expressions were different from when they were in bed. For the first time, he felt pressured to say something that would make her smile. This was a waste of time. They could have been at home. He thought perhaps she had already known this. They finished their dinner and went back to her apartment.
He slowly came to the realization that, all the time they’d spent together beforehand, she’d just been waiting on him. This, what they were doing now, was what she’d wanted all along. The irony of it was that he’d wanted the same thing. All of his efforts had been directed towards the same end, to no effect whatsoever; the only thing he’d done to advance their relationship was to ask what a black body was. He crawled towards women. He was incapable of putting himself forward in a direct way, and this just confused her. The reason things took so long was her assuming that he would eventually make his feelings plain. Once she realized that he was never going to try, she simply took matters into her own hands; even his pathological shyness hadn’t put her off.
There was a singular economy of purpose to her. He’d noticed from the first how self-possessed she was, but only now recognized its object. There was no chrome on her, no extraneous motion, nothing not purposeful to her objective. Intimacy was, to her, life’s greatest joy, and she directed all of her energies to that end. She was not to be distracted. Every word she spoke was in marked contrast to the forms of speech he’d previously heard from women. He thought at first that this was just another aspect of intimacy, and partly it was; but mainly it was the fact that he had been chosen by a woman completely free of guile. Up until then, his whole life with women had consisted of thoroughly engineered conversations, safe and censored, stripped of any real content of the minds from which the words sprang. But now, finally relaxed, he was able to say what he thought, or nothing at all.
This new-found candor was a mixed blessing. One night, he’d arrived and they’d made love. To get to her apartment, he would ride across the Golden Gate Bridge, turn right just past the toll plaza, then down along the coast to 25th, and out Geary towards the beach. His sense of anticipation, building as he rode along this route, was palpable, and he wanted to convey this to her. The image of Ferdinand the Bull sprang into his head. Without further thought, he said: Sometimes I want to fuck you so much, I can’t even see you. She didn’t say anything, but rotated her body on the bed until she was perpendicular to him, and then kicked him as hard as she could. He flew off the bed and bounced onto the hardwood floor. He spent the next half hour on his knees, rubbing his hip and trying to undo the damage he’d done. She let him dangle for a while, accusing him, among other things, of regarding her as a “sordid little sex toy.” He meditated briefly before saying, no, he never thought that. By this time he knew better than to answer spontaneously; he was gradually discovering the limits on telling women how he actually felt.
* * *
He was playing baseball with some friends in the lower yard at his old elementary school during their second week. This was an exercise in nostalgia, since the playing surface was asphalt, with 60-foot baselines, and they were all years past the age when they would have played on such a small field.
Standing at home plate, he noticed the shade tree that stood in foul territory in right field, one sprawling branch overhanging the field and interfering with play on balls hit down the first base line. The ground rule was that anything fair hit into the tree was a double, and even back when they were kids this was a travesty, since the tree was only about thirty feet past first base.
When he had attended the school, trees had ringed both the upper and lower yards, shading the wooden benches which had been placed along their perimeters. Once there had even been a spring in the lower yard, but this had long since been covered over, and several of the trees in the upper yard that he could remember were now gone. Some day this tree would be removed as well, as the school’s character evolved over time from that of a building hastily built in a field near an old sawmill, to a boring proper school in an affluent neighborhood. He felt sad for the tree, and lucky to have seen it. He thought how fortunate he was to have attended school here. He remembered the coolness of the room underneath the auditorium stage where they stored their bicycles, and the hurt look on the school secretary’s face when he was sent to the office.
His thoughts turned to the question of why he was even entertaining such idle reflections; this had never been his habit. Before, moments like these would have been a distraction, providing only a temporary refuge from the normal course of his thoughts. Now they were an enhancement, adding to joy rather than thwarting misery. And this was all because of her, even though he wasn’t thinking of her and hadn’t for several hours.
His friends couldn’t tell any difference in him. Of all his acquaintances, only a friend of his sister had noticed anything, when he had stopped by her shop to say hello. And almost the whole of his external life was unchanged from before. But now he was happy over nothing at all; and the ordinary annoyances he experienced, while still the same, formed only the tiniest offset to the general sense of contentment that he now took for granted. The last week had stilled the incessant drumbeat in his head that he was alone and unworthy of companionship because there was something wrong with him. It was not so much that some calming knowledge had been added, as that the relentless self-disapprobation that he had labored under had been subtracted. He wasn’t constantly being attacked by his own mind. He no longer felt that he was looking at the world through a pane of glass, as if peering into a restaurant window on a rainy night. He was, for the first time as an adult, a part of the world, as deserving of his place in it as anyone.
He did not want to reveal this happiness to others. He wanted to keep it as a secret, suspecting that if it were to be made public, it would lose its special character and become only common pleasure. But he didn’t know this. And as private as he was, she was even more so. He had noticed that her public behavior was largely unchanged from what it had been before they became intimate. She still would not look around, or smile, or speak loudly, or communicate with him in any way that would betray to a stranger that things between them had changed. She would whisper to him in class; that was all. He knew she had changed, but only because he had witnessed her private behavior before their first night. She had never smiled before, not like after the first time, and now it was always there when they were alone. But she would never flirt, nor be coquettish, in public or in private, neither before nor after. To her, intimacy was not a fit subject for humor or satire.
He wondered how much joy had been hidden from him in this way. All of the things he was enjoying now, he had experienced before without particularly noticing them; whereas now, only with this new knowledge added, all of life’s other pleasures flowered before him, so that even standing stupidly at home plate looking at a tree was a source of contentment. He was frightened to think that perhaps some day he would take happiness for granted; that, now having obtained what he had before felt jealous of in others, he would become as complacent as they had once seemed to him.
* * *
That night, as they made love, she closed her eyes and turned her head to the side, laying her cheek against the bed, as she would sometimes do. She seemed to be hiding from him, trying to block out what they were doing. Maybe it was modesty, or some weird desire for privacy. He thought this wasn’t right. Her face was the part of her body that mattered most to him when they were being intimate. It was the part she used to look at him, to smile at him, to speak to him, to kiss him. Her face reflected the remarkable changes she went through when they made love. She must have known this, and been somehow ashamed or embarrassed by it, or else she wouldn’t have hidden herself. He had thought he was shy, but now he believed that it was she. He went inexorably towards her with his eyes open, even as she veiled herself. He knew exactly what he was doing to her and was glad of it, while she could not face the fact of her own exposure to him, and averted her eyes, as if somehow to withhold the frightful knowledge that was being had of her.
He sometimes held her head in his hands as they made love, but he couldn’t forcibly move her head that way. So, when she turned away from him, he was reduced to using his face to harass her, not much different from what a puppy would do. He used his open mouth and the front of his face to rub the half of her face that was exposed to him, and then tried to work his nose and his jaw underneath her cheek, to force her head up. Eventually she turned her head to the other side. He left her alone for a few minutes, and then started in again until finally she turned to face him, and he put his tongue into her mouth. He wanted her to know that there was no point in trying to hide from him. He wanted her to see that he could see all of her beauty; and when it was all displayed before him, when she had given up trying to hide, he groaned and came inside of her. Coming was just nature’s way of recording the fact that, for a fleeting moment, he’d seen her. And in that moment, he felt as if they were together inside of her, the two of them riding the beating wave of her heart, finally joined and safe with each other after being somehow lost and apart. And there she bathed him in the unbearable light of herself, as if she were the sun; and the world and all of its mean distractions ceased to matter, because they were with each other and entirely self-sufficient, not dependent upon anything outside of themselves to complete their happiness.
He wondered whether she was really hiding from him, intending not to be found, and his finding her was thwarting her will; or whether she was, in hiding from him, only inviting him to look for her. He never asked her. He felt uncomfortable discussing their lovemaking, and in any case the answer didn’t matter; he would have dug her out of her hole either way. Other than groaning at the end, he didn’t talk to her while they were making love. He was new at this, and it felt strange; he didn’t know what to say. It was as if speaking would somehow be a defilement of what they were doing, that it would disrupt the strange, sacred irrational space they were inhabiting when they made love. And it made no difference anyway; he thought it would be impossible for them to do these things and her not know how beautiful she was to him. Much later, he realized his mistake, and thought of things he would have liked to say to her; and the things he had not said were among his many regrets.
He thought it strange that he had not noticed any of this before. With a shock, he recalled his perceptions of their first time together, of how she had seemed to him then. She had been an angel hovering above him, sharing herself with him in an act of spectacular condescension. There was no room for desire in how he felt at the time, just a mixture of gratitude and relief that his isolation had finally ended. Now, a week later, he thought it astonishing that he could ever have felt that way about her. All this time they’d been together, and only now was he beginning to realize how exposed she was to him when they made love.
He recalled having experienced the same feeling before. He’d been playing with a cat. Suddenly, in a paroxysm of excitement, it had wrapped its paws around his lower arm in an awkward bear hug, and then alternated between rubbing its head against his arm and softly biting it. That was how he felt. That was why he wanted to be on top of her. He wanted to hold her. He wasn’t holding her to express affection. He was holding her down. He was holding her to restrain her, to make her be still, so he could smell her and feel her and taste her and know her and own her until he was done with her, until his seed was in her and his smell was on her, until she was resigned to it, unresistant, certain that nothing she could do could affect the outcome of what they were doing, of what he was doing to her. In a perfect world she would have been still, but of course she couldn’t be counted on to do this, wild thing that she was, and so he had to hold her.
It was remarkable that he never fell in love with her. All of the girls or women who had, up until then, been important to him had been the objects of intense romantic attraction, and not one of them was ever aware of how he felt. His previous fantasies about intimacy had always involved mutual feelings of love; but here, it was not speculation about her unexpressed thoughts or feelings, but rather the mere fact of her holding him, that created his sense of connection with her. The entire abstract idea of the exact state of her feelings seemed strangely irrelevant. It was enough for him that she so obviously wanted to be touched.
* * *
She had warned him. She was polygamous, she said. She would never again want only one man. She used the wrong word, but he understood what she was saying. He ignored it. Knowing her, knowing that she had never deceived him, he should have listened.
They saw each other on Sunday, two weeks after their first night together. The last time they made love she screamed a lot. It didn’t sound normal. This was more like being-knifed-to-death screaming than sex screaming. After they were done, she was panicked that the upstairs neighbors were going to call the police.
Tuesday morning, in class, she passed him a note that said: after what happened Sunday, we should never make love again. He thought, what a nice thing to say. When he got to her apartment that evening, she told him in a conversational voice about some guy she’d had sex with the day before. That would have been Monday. She had passed him the note Tuesday morning. He was so angry with her. The rest of the evening, they were polite, and made small talk. They did not touch each other.
Years later, he discovered how routine sex could be, realizing at last that he was not the great lover he had supposed; that was just the way she had made him feel. He gradually became inclined to believe that there are no such things as great lovers, just, occasionally, great sex. He eventually got over his anger towards her, and began to realize what a miracle it was that he had ever known her at all. She was an adventuress. Knowing exactly what she was doing, she helped him up. Having no idea what he was doing, he helped her up. She got up. She moved on.