Caroline undressed me like I was a child. She undressed herself.
We lay side by side on my parents’ bed. We stared at each other. Looked over each other’s bodies. Our bodies were foreign planets, newly discovered.
We didn’t talk.
I had already guessed the outlines of her breasts and predicted the flat stomach. But I was still shocked by her neat-but-bushy mound. It was the same mousy colour as the hair on her head. It seemed very exotic. She looked nothing like the hairless women from the nudie magazines full of pneumatic lips and tits.
She pulled me on top of her and aimed my dick at her little vagina. She moved her hips. I figured I had to move along with her, and as I did I penetrated her. She was soft and wet inside. Hot like breath. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. It was eternally comforting. I was falling into her softness. Too fast, too recklessly.
I came.
She laughed with delight and then wrapped her arms around me, hugging me; she was bigger than me. After we fell apart, she snuggled up to me. She breathed “I love you” into my neck.
Immediately, I started to develop a headache. It was the sort of headache you get from running for too long or some other strenuous physical effort. I was in no way exhausted from the sex. Yet the headache was creeping in regardless. Something else was happening, too.
I felt it first physically. It started with her arm. Her arm around me got heavy, as if it was her leg instead. Her body next to me became too long. There seemed to be no escape from it.
Still, her heat and smell made my own body respond with an intensity that terrified me. I gripped my dick. I held it, feeling it get hard. I wondered if by sleeping with Caroline I had unleashed something bad. Was I now capable of violence? Murder? I felt capable of it. I didn’t know where it came from. I didn’t know what to do but to lie still until it passed. I kept thinking of fucking: her, the women in nudie mags. My mother too, or someone who was like my mother. My homeroom teacher.
I wanted to run. I wanted to push my dick right back into Caroline. Her heavy arm kept me pinned to the mattress. I imagined that the arm pinning me down was capable of protecting me from whatever was happening inside me. I kept still. I waited. I let go of my dick.
Eventually, I fell asleep and dreamt of being covered in thick, dense blankets.
After that weekend, things were different between Caroline and me. I developed other acquaintances in the neighbourhood: boys. I spent my afternoons playing video games in their basements, or smoking in the garbage-infested park by the river that ran through town.
One evening, Caroline accosted me on my way home. The meadow near our house was loud with buzzing insects. She came out of the darkness and threw herself at me.
I did nothing. I let her hold me with my arms at my sides like a doll. I imagined myself to be a doll. Like a doll, I waited patiently for it to be over, to be put back in my box. Instead, Caroline tried to kiss me.
I moved my face away until she stopped trying to kiss me. She needed to leave me alone. I said that. I thought she would understand – it would free her up too, to have more time to spend with friends.
“You little piece of shit.”
I felt my dick stir. It confused me. “I’m sorry,” I said.
I noticed then that she had changed her look. She was wearing makeup. Her hair was blonder. She dyed it, like my mom. She was trying to make herself pretty. If I had been a little piece of shit, I would’ve said something to her about it – how it didn’t work – but I wasn’t even sure that it didn’t work. Maybe she was prettier now?
“Do you love me?” Her voice sounded small and angry, like an ugly little animal that peeped after being stepped on.
“No. I don’t think so,” I said, truthfully.
“I hate you.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?” She pushed me away. She lifted her hand as if to slap me. She stroked my cheek instead. And then, for a brief moment, I felt what I had felt before, the longing.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t mean it. But her face softened.
“You don’t even know,” she said.
She said other things after that. Things I’ve heard again many times. Not from her, but from others: that I had opened up something in her, that she had changed because of me, that I made her feel beautiful.
How?
I didn’t know.
“I’ll be okay,” she said, finally, and I thought what happened was a good thing, that I had done a good thing. I knew then I would do it again. I’d get better at it. I knew that I was capable of changing someone, someone plain and insignificant like Caroline, of turning her into a person who could light up from inside, if even for a moment.
It was like magic. I wanted to make that magic again (and again!) because that was what I seemed to be good at. I wanted another Caroline, another devotion like that. I believe I became instantly addicted to it. You cannot fight addiction. It installs itself in your head and doesn’t leave. You can try to control it. But it’s always there, a faint whisper somewhere behind you.
Caroline ended up dating a senior from her high school. He didn’t knock her up. She didn’t drop out of school to do drugs. She didn’t become obese. She finished school and went to college to become a nurse. She became a nurse and eventually renewed friendship with my mother when my mother was dying of cancer in the hospital where Caroline worked. I felt proud of how well Caroline turned out.
3
AFTER CAROLINE, DESPITE MY NEWLY DISCOVERED PASSION, the post-sex repulsion happened almost every time. I’d sleep with a girl and then I’d want her gone. Instinctively, I’d pick the girls who were used to having to go. I suppose it was exactly like addiction: excitement, remorse. Confusion. Compulsion.
The girls I fucked asked no questions. They carried condoms in their purses. They always seemed happy if I asked them to stay the night, but they were also prepared to pick their clothes off the floor in the dark and let themselves out before dawn.
In college, these were the girls who published articles about how much they loved themselves and their curves, but they’d show an absolute disregard for themselves if I suggested a blow job in the back of the car. The next week they would march around campus with signs, screaming about men raping them with their eyes, about wanting to go topless and so on.
I ignored the hysteria. It didn’t exist. It had nothing to do with me. I was not going to politicize my sex life. Sexually, I had my own interests. My neuroses were my biggest concern. I carried on my usual internal battle: one hour I’d be obsessing over some ridiculous trait like the way a girl hooked her ankle around the other ankle; the way she would defend it, later, that gymnastic feat, like she didn’t mean it. She meant it. They meant it. It was meant to impress me.
There were so many girls, and many didn’t even leave more than a wisp of memory. Their artifacts: two moles beside each other on a face; a fat back; cellulite-ribbed thighs; stretch marks on flat breasts; inverted nipples; a hairy stomach; a row of small, even teeth; teeth with too much gums; red, round knees like heads; very long labia minora; etcetera. They had their smells: mint, burnt sugar, cigarettes and candy, vanilla, cookies, old books, cinnamon, Korean noodle shop, alcohol, perfume that brought tears to my eyes, shit, spit, urine, formaldehyde.
Yet, I was never able to maintain interest for more than a few dates.
“Should I call you a cab?”
She, they, always said no. And then she, they, would go.