Charming. In the event, I was astounded when she invited me for a home-cooked meal. I spent the next week in a not-unpleasant tizzy of coital anticipation.
And I can remember driving south for that inaugural dinner, past the town of Climax, North Carolina, where I wished her to live, as this suited my slobbering poetic intentions. I remember, too, the nervous shuffle of my blood as I walked up the flagstone path to her door. She was dressed in an outfit I associated with debauched debutantes: the plunging velvet neckline, the tight mini.
Her house was fantastic, a Southern Living demo, down to the matte-and-copper accents. As it turned out, it wasn’t her house at all. It was her mother’s, but her mother was out of town and her dad had died when she was a young girl and so it was just us two and a meal of boggling proteinous complexity. I should note my habitual diet: Apple Jacks, cheese and crackers filched from readings, Progresso soup if I was feeling flush.
Vanessa lit candles and poured wine and praised my appetite. She ate little, drank much, and laughed politely at my horny-boy patter. The wine helped. By the time we were through dessert—some kind of viscid pudding—it was nearly midnight. I couldn’t be expected to drive home in such a state, could I?
She led me upstairs. And I remember her pausing on the stairs to show me a photo of herself as a girl. Actually, it was a series, a kind of devotional gallery. In each, Vanessa was dressed in a leotard, flat-chested and beaming. She had wanted to be a dancer, but a bum ankle had done her wrong.
We proceeded to the bed in the guest bedroom, shared a cigarette. Vanessa asked if I needed to be tucked in. Then we were kissing, smashing our ashtray tongues together and grabbing for the junk. The tenor of these initial moments—lunging, impatient—seemed sexy enough to both of us. We’d seen enough movies in which such hostile incompetence passed for passion. It wasn’t long before her shirt was peeled and her bra snapped open and there they were—great buoyant rondures in the Playboy register.
They really were something to see; my limbic brain went into an immediate suckling frenzy. The problem was they didn’t feel right. Not to tongue, nor fingertip. They felt, rather, like croquet balls that had been upholstered in a thin layer of adipose and skin. Strangest of all was their appearance, the way each breast rose perfectly round from her chest, the skin so taut, all but her nipples, which drooped a little, as if suffering from poor self-esteem.
I couldn’t figure it out. Were her pectorals really that toned? Did she have calcium deposits? I put the question aside for the sake of our unfolding sexual drama, which now proceeded to the damp lower regions and culminated in a panicky, partial fuck session, our bodies striking quick blows that knocked the breath out of us. Every few minutes, Vanessa informed me that her womanly virtue was in question, she wasn’t just going to fuck me like that, in her mother’s bed (we’d relocated), then she bit my shoulders and fucked me some more.
How was it, all this fucking? How was the fit? Did I come? Did she?
I don’t remember. It is the hallmark of such doomed affairs: The sensations—ecstatic as they might be—have no emotional grounding, and one is left, years later, with a residue of peculiar detail. I do remember waking up with bruises on my shoulders, pale purple gnaw marks, and I remember strutting around for the next few days wishing it were summer so I could wear a tank top that would announce to my classmates the sexual abandon to which I might inspire a woman.
Instead, I arranged to meet her at the local dive bar. She showed up in a gauzy top that left no doubt as to her size, shape, and miraculous heft. The other guys in my program were stunned, and I was full of that heady pride that permeates guys who have not quite discerned that they are fucking for the esteem of other guys.
I managed to
And I can remember driving south for that inaugural dinner, past the town of Climax, North Carolina, where I wished her to live, as this suited my slobbering poetic intentions. I remember, too, the nervous shuffle of my blood as I walked up the flagstone path to her door. She was dressed in an outfit I associated with debauched debutantes: the plunging velvet neckline, the tight mini.
Her house was fantastic, a Southern Living demo, down to the matte-and-copper accents. As it turned out, it wasn’t her house at all. It was her mother’s, but her mother was out of town and her dad had died when she was a young girl and so it was just us two and a meal of boggling proteinous complexity. I should note my habitual diet: Apple Jacks, cheese and crackers filched from readings, Progresso soup if I was feeling flush.
Vanessa lit candles and poured wine and praised my appetite. She ate little, drank much, and laughed politely at my horny-boy patter. The wine helped. By the time we were through dessert—some kind of viscid pudding—it was nearly midnight. I couldn’t be expected to drive home in such a state, could I?
She led me upstairs. And I remember her pausing on the stairs to show me a photo of herself as a girl. Actually, it was a series, a kind of devotional gallery. In each, Vanessa was dressed in a leotard, flat-chested and beaming. She had wanted to be a dancer, but a bum ankle had done her wrong.
We proceeded to the bed in the guest bedroom, shared a cigarette. Vanessa asked if I needed to be tucked in. Then we were kissing, smashing our ashtray tongues together and grabbing for the junk. The tenor of these initial moments—lunging, impatient—seemed sexy enough to both of us. We’d seen enough movies in which such hostile incompetence passed for passion. It wasn’t long before her shirt was peeled and her bra snapped open and there they were—great buoyant rondures in the Playboy register.
They really were something to see; my limbic brain went into an immediate suckling frenzy. The problem was they didn’t feel right. Not to tongue, nor fingertip. They felt, rather, like croquet balls that had been upholstered in a thin layer of adipose and skin. Strangest of all was their appearance, the way each breast rose perfectly round from her chest, the skin so taut, all but her nipples, which drooped a little, as if suffering from poor self-esteem.
I couldn’t figure it out. Were her pectorals really that toned? Did she have calcium deposits? I put the question aside for the sake of our unfolding sexual drama, which now proceeded to the damp lower regions and culminated in a panicky, partial fuck session, our bodies striking quick blows that knocked the breath out of us. Every few minutes, Vanessa informed me that her womanly virtue was in question, she wasn’t just going to fuck me like that, in her mother’s bed (we’d relocated), then she bit my shoulders and fucked me some more.
How was it, all this fucking? How was the fit? Did I come? Did she?
I don’t remember. It is the hallmark of such doomed affairs: The sensations—ecstatic as they might be—have no emotional grounding, and one is left, years later, with a residue of peculiar detail. I do remember waking up with bruises on my shoulders, pale purple gnaw marks, and I remember strutting around for the next few days wishing it were summer so I could wear a tank top that would announce to my classmates the sexual abandon to which I might inspire a woman.
Instead, I arranged to meet her at the local dive bar. She showed up in a gauzy top that left no doubt as to her size, shape, and miraculous heft. The other guys in my program were stunned, and I was full of that heady pride that permeates guys who have not quite discerned that they are fucking for the esteem of other guys.
I managed to
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