This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America(18)

At twenty-two, I was trying to have a monogamous relationship with a man named Bradley, a childhood friend and longtime admirer whom I hadn’t spoken to since senior year of high school. I thought I was in love, and I hoped to marry him someday.

He lived and studied thousands of miles away from me, but to my surprise and delight, about three months before graduation, I received a text from him. I thought that he was reaching out just to say hello, but then he invited me on an all-expenses-paid trip to Nevada so we could catch up with each other. I didn’t hesitate. I yearned for male attention, and I was afraid that my four-year dry spell at Princeton was steadily turning me cold, bitter, and emotionally mute. For the several weeks leading up to the trip, we spoke every evening. We spoke so often, I felt like he was right beside me. As I descended the escalator at McCarran Airport, I saw Bradley—now several inches taller and wider with muscle—standing there with a bouquet of roses. All of the years of loneliness and rejection melted away as we cruised down the highway in his silver Porsche. When we were children, I’d constantly rebuffed this man’s advances, but now that we were adults I was ready. Except that Bradley expected us to have sex, but much to his chagrin I said no because we were not in a committed relationship. It also helped that I got my period on my connecting flight to Nevada. To this day, I believe this buffer was an act of God, signaling to me that the time was not right and he was not it.

Nevertheless, these excuses led to an argument, and he turned away from me in the bed that we shared. He told me that because he was in the military, he received very little physical contact and that was his way to connect. All of this seemed quite plausible, but I still wouldn’t budge. I planned on remaining a virgin until marriage, but I was trying to convince myself to settle for a committed relationship—it would be a way to make him stay. I cried in that bed and I wiped my tears without him so much as touching my back. He told me that he didn’t want to see me cry and that was that. The next morning, I woke him up, asked him to get a condom, and then I went down on him. It was the most emotionless thing I’ve ever done. I performed fellatio not because I wanted to but because I thought I had to. He’d spent thousands of dollars on me. He was going to be successful and could have had any woman he wanted. I, who was so unsure of myself, had no job prospects after college and needed a reminder that something was not wrong with me, that I could be wanted. I wasn’t going to allow him to penetrate me, but I was going to allow him to be in my mouth for a short while. After all, I thought, it was my mouth that dissuaded men from dating me anyway. I talked too much and gave my opinions too freely. My silence through giving head was my kind of docility. It wasn’t supposed to be pleasurable. It was my duty, my debt.

When I returned to New Jersey, I was terrified that he would never reach out to me again. I’d already found a man who was willing to chase me; why couldn’t I have been more docile by losing my virginity to him? But then he texted, and in a matter of weeks we’d said we loved each other and were planning a future together. Separated by thousands of miles and state lines, we tried our best to maintain intimacy through frequent video conversations during which we would get naked, and I would watch him climax. I never did because I had no idea what to do to myself. I assumed that if I squeezed my breasts and he orgasmed, then somehow his pleasure would be transmitted through the computer screen and disperse across all my erogenous zones. One night, he asked me if I wanted to watch porn with him. It wasn’t like I had never seen it before. I had inadvertently watched a few minutes of porn when I was a child, at the Peninsula hotel in New York City. I remember a guy waving a fleshy wand in between his legs; I was too young to understand that was his penis. When I got older, I used to watch soft-core porn late at night if I was bored, but I never touched myself, figuring that the voyeurism was enough. So when Bradley was enough of a gentleman to ask me to pick a clip out of thousands (or millions), my pointer grazed over random ones: “Asian housemaid gets taught a lesson,” “Ebony double stuffed,” “Blonde slut gets manhandled.” But the one that most piqued my interest was double penetration. Bradley could not understand why any of that would excite me. I couldn’t articulate why. He didn’t get off while we watched, so I allowed him to switch to something else, but the memory of watching a woman getting filled in three orifices at once, wondering how that was at all possible, flickered behind my eyes. I did the responsible thing and got on birth control. The plan was for me to fly back out to Nevada during the Fourth of July weekend, where we’d have sex and, I guess, ride off into the proverbial sunset.

A week before I was supposed to leave, my mother texted me and asked if it was okay to talk. I was in the middle of my first MFA residency, which I began immediately after graduation, and I knew this had to be serious. When we finally connected, she told me that she had been praying for Bradley and me, and she wanted me to make sure that he really loved me before I decided to be intimate with him. At first I was upset, interpreting her concern as an intentional effort to thwart me on my road to true and everlasting love. But out of respect, I allowed her to finish, and then together we prayed that anything hidden would be revealed. That night, as always, Bradley and I talked for hours. I happened to mention how glad I was that we were finally in a relationship that made me feel secure enough to fly out to see him and have sex, but Bradley was caught off guard. He told me that although he loved me, he was not ready to be in an exclusive relationship. He then went on to say that he thought I was enough for him, but in order for him to be sure, he had to experience some things. He still wanted to travel the world and sleep with other women. When I told him that I had waited too long to lose my virginity in such a noncommittal way, we ultimately decided that for me to fly back out to Nevada would not be in my best interest, and we stopped speaking.