You Think It, I'll Say It(15)
Noah said, “She’s pissed because I didn’t want to fuck her.”
I blinked, then said, “Why not?”
Did I think there was useful information to be gleaned here, sexual or romantic lessons, or was I already scheming? Looking back, I’m still not sure.
Shrugging again, he said, “She’s on the rag.” He grinned as he added, “I told her she could still blow me.”
I hesitated, and my heart abruptly began to pound at double or triple time. But I spoke slowly. I said, “I’m not on the rag.” Although this wasn’t a locution I generally used, there was much about the moment that was out of character.
If I’d been hoping that some transporting lust would seize both of us, I would have been disappointed. The expression on Noah’s face was a surprised and faintly amused sort of curiosity, as if he was wondering if I’d farted. He raised his eyebrows and said, “Yeah?”
We were, at that point, only about four feet apart. “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t know what to do next, and I thought of turning and sprinting away. But I again recalled the GFU night, my failure of nerve. Presumably, I needed to touch him, but how? The two times in Des Moines when I’d kissed boys, they’d both initiated it.
The most logical place to make contact with Noah seemed to be the crotch of his pants, but that was too aggressive even for the person I was pretending to be. And kissing him seemed logistically complicated—he was well over six feet, significantly taller than I was, and I wondered how Rae had made it look easy.
From somewhere far away, I heard bells ringing—the eight o’clock bells, followed by the distant, cheerful-sounding, intermittent shouts and cries of teenagers. Instead of having sex with me, was Noah about to depart for choir practice? With both my arms, I reached for his right hand, brought it to my chest, and held it against my left breast, on top of my navy blue sweater. This, apparently, was all I needed to do. There were a few seconds when I thought he was pulling his hand away, which he was, but before my humiliation could be fully activated, he slid the hand back under my sweater and T-shirt, over my bra, and before long he’d slipped his thumb beneath the bra. Then he did kiss me. In spite of his handsomeness, I remained completely unaroused. My lack of arousal did not, however, prevent me from saying, after a minute or two, “Is there somewhere we can go?”
He grabbed my hand and led me inside an unlocked door of the gym and through a corridor. Outside another door, this one maroon, he looked in either direction down the hall before pulling a key from his pocket. The room was windowless and contained soccer balls in vast net bags, bats, stacks of orange traffic cones, and other kinds of athletic equipment. There wasn’t much open space on the polished concrete floor, but there was enough for a girl who was five foot four to lie down and for a boy who was a foot taller to lie on top of her. We used one of the condoms I’d just bought at the pharmacy—had any condom purchased outside the heat of passion ever been used so efficiently?—and the whole encounter lasted less than ten minutes, maybe closer to five. None of it was physically enjoyable for me, except when he held my hand to lead me inside the gym; that had been the kind of thing I’d pictured a boyfriend doing. About thirty seconds after coming (as advertised, he did so with a whimper), he said, “I need to go to choir practice,” and he rose up off me. We’d both kept our shirts on and hadn’t entirely removed our pants. We refastened them, and I smoothed my hair. He opened the door carefully, looked into the hallway, then motioned for me to follow him. Outside the door, he locked it, glanced at me, smirked, and said, “See you around.” Then he headed in one direction and, retracing our route in from the parking lot, I headed in the other.
* * *
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After college, I was a research assistant in a lab in Boston for two years before attending medical school at Johns Hopkins. I matched to my first-choice residency, which was at the University of Iowa, and I was a year into it when I received a phone call from Isaac. I later learned that he had called information in Des Moines to get my parents’ phone number, then asked my mother for my number. He was driving cross-country because he was about to start an English PhD program at Berkeley and wanted to know if I’d like to have dinner when he passed through Iowa City the following week. I was working twenty-four-hour shifts, so we met instead for breakfast, at a diner. From the minute I entered the restaurant and saw him sitting in the booth—when we made eye contact, he smiled, waved, and stood—I understood that Isaac was not gay. My heart thudded as we hugged, though I felt more excited than nervous. I was by then almost thirty, and I’d had a few boyfriends and a few additional sexual partners, but I’d never before been able to tell for certain that someone else was as happy to be in my presence as I was to be in his.
In medical school, I’d studied by relistening to first-and second-year class lectures on tape, and I would speed up the lectures, making the professors sound like cartoon chipmunks, in order to get through them as fast as possible. In the diner, I wished I could increase the speed of my conversation with Isaac, not because I wanted to get it over with but because I wanted both of us to cram in the maximum amount of words before I started my shift, because I felt we had such an enormous amount to say to each other.
The great luck of my entire life is that twelve years have passed since Isaac and I had breakfast, and I still feel that way. We live outside Columbus, Ohio, where he is an English professor and I practice internal medicine at a clinic that serves uninsured immigrants. We have a daughter who is now ten and a son who’s seven. When we can, we like to go for family walks after dinner in our suburban neighborhood; often our children dart ahead of us, or discuss their own matters with each other, and when Isaac and I chat about our days, or the news, or movies we probably won’t end up seeing, I am filled with gratitude at the astonishing fact of being married to someone I enjoy talking to, someone with whom I can’t imagine ever running out of things to say.