"Don't stand there like a statue," he said, turning and coming closer. "Kiss me."
Something in my kiss displeased him.
"Look, you wanted this," he said. "Don't clam up now."
He suggested I go and brush my teeth. I said I would but I didn't have a toothbrush.
"Haven't you ever stayed over at a guy's place before?"
"Yes," I lied, sheepishly.
"What did you do then?"
"I used my finger," I said, thinking quickly. "And brushed my teeth that way."
Jamie walked past me and into the bathroom and found a toothbrush. "Use it," he said. "If you fuck someone you should be able to use their toothbrush!"
Frightened and drunk and bumbling, I grasped on to this logic. I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth. I threw water on my face and worried, for just a second, if I looked pretty. But as soon as I looked in the mirror, I looked away. I could not watch what I was doing. I swallowed hard, breathed in, and left the bathroom.
Jamie was moving dirty laundry off the mattress on the floor of the bedroom. His sheets were soiled and various blankets lay twisted in knots and balls where they had landed when kicked away. He had turned Dylan up. His ski boots lay outside the door on their sides. He'd brought my wine into the bedroom and put it by his clock radio on the milk crate next to the mattress.
He pulled his shirt off over his head. I had seen very few men's bodies before. His seemed scrawnier than I had imagined, and freckled. The waistband of his long underwear had lost its elasticity and spilled out over the top of his pants.
"Are you planning to keep your clothes on?" he asked.
"I'm self-conscious."
"There's no time for that," he said. "I've got to get up for Spanish in the morning, and then I'm long-hauling to Vermont. Let's get the show on the road."
Somehow we did. Somehow I lay under him as he fucked me. He fucked me hard. It was what I later heard girls call "athletic sex." I held on. When he came, he came loudly and snorted and bellowed. I wasn't prepared for it. I wept. I wept louder than I ever could have imagined. I shook with it. He stopped his noises and he held tightly to me. I felt humiliated but I couldn't stop. I don't think he knew that he was what I considered my first, but he was smart enough to know where the crying stemmed from.
"Poor baby," he said. "Poor, poor baby."
Soon after, he passed out on top of me. I stayed awake all night.
In the early morning he wanted to have sex again. But first, after kissing me, he pushed me down near his penis. Once there, I didn't know what to do.
"Haven't you ever done this before?" he asked.
I tried but gagged.
"Come up here," he said, releasing me. We kissed some more and, concerned with a look he saw in my eye, he grabbed me by my hair and pulled my head away from his. "Look," he said. "Don't do that. Don't fall in love with me." I didn't know what he meant or how to respond to the reprimand. I said I wouldn't but I didn't know how not to.
He drove me back to Haven. "Take care of yourself, kiddo," he said. He didn't want responsibility. He'd had enough of it nursing his father. He went off to class and then to ski.
"Well, I did it," I wrote on Lila's memo board hanging on the outside of her door. I knew she was asleep and was thankful for it. I hadn't slept in over twenty-four hours. I went to my room. I needed time to make it sound good. When I woke in the late afternoon, it was over. I had lost my real virginity. Everything had functioned, if not exactly perfectly, and I had been accepted by a man.
Of course, I did what he told me not to do. I fell in love with him.
I did make a good story out of it. I laughed at myself, my fumbling. I got drunk. I called Chris and told him. He loved it. He screamed, "You bagged the prize!" I acted experienced and wise around Lila while we ate Swiss Almond Vanilla Hàagen-Dazs.
Jamie didn't call me. I reasoned I would see him after Easter, that cool people like the two of us didn't need things like rings or flowers or phone calls. I packed for the trip home to Pennsylvania. I hid a bottle of Absolut in my red bottom-of-the-line Samsonite. I was fine.
ELEVEN
In late April, a month after Easter break, I was on Marshall Street. It was midafternoon. Spring had finally come to Upstate New York in that peekaboo way that it does. There was still old snow on the ground. Each winter, the snow made Syracuse beautiful; it covered the gritty, Northeastern browns and grays of the buildings and roads. But by April, everyone had had enough of it, and the warmth was celebrated by the students. They wore shorts, despite the fact that goose bumps rose up and down their arms and legs, and the girls showed off their Florida tans. The street was crowded, and with the anticipation of the end of classes that meant the start of good times, students were smiling and laughing and buying SU paraphernalia in the stores on Marshall Street.
I had gone shopping for my sister. She was graduating magna cum laude from Penn. As I walked up Marshall, a group of fraternity boys and their girlfriends were coming my way. They were all bright spring smiles. Two of the boys flaunted their toughness by wearing white starched boxer shorts with the standard no-sock Docksiders on their feet. I looked at them because I had to; they were covering the sidewalk and begging for attention. But there was someone trying to get by them on the other side.
I grew up watching Bewitched, in which the Elizabeth Montgomery character was able to snap her fingers and freeze everyone but herself and her husband, Darrin. They continued talking while the frozen people stayed still in their awkward, formerly animated poses. That was how it felt that day. I saw Gregory Madison blocked by this crowd, and then, he saw me. Everything else stopped.
I don't know why I hadn't thought that this could happen. But I hadn't. I still envisioned him in jail, or, at least, not stupid enough to come back to the university area before the trial. But there he was. In October he had been cocksure when he spotted me. Now we saw each other, recognized each other, and nodded. No words. It was a split second. The happy frat boys and girls stood between us. We passed by them on either side. His eyes told me what I needed to know. I had become his opponent now, no longer merely his victim. This he recognized.
Lila and I had begun, sometime that winter, to call each other Clone. We both gained from it. By being my clone, she could seem a bit more daring and wild than she really was; I could pretend that I was a normal college coed whose life revolved as much around my classes and food runs to Marshall Street as it did a rape trial. As Clones we decided to room together off campus. The two of us, and a friend of Lila's named Sue, found a three-bedroom apartment in an off-campus area where many students lived. We were excited about living in a real house, and, certain the trial would have to be over by then, I saw this as a fresh start. We would take possession in the fall.
By the first week of May, I was packing to go home for the summer. I'd gotten a B in my Shakespeare class and said good-bye to Jamie. I had no illusions that I would hear from him.
I had taken a course called Cervantes in English in which, for the final paper, I took my revenge on the myth of La Mancha. I reinterpreted Don Quixote as a modern urban parable and made Sancho the hero. He was street smart where Quixote was not. In my version, Quixote drowns in a curbside puddle, unable to realize it is not a lake.
Before I left, I called Gail to let her know my schedule. All spring, the office of the district attorney had given me an "any minute now" rap and this time was no different. She thanked me and asked me about my plans.