When he was in the men's room, I calculated. We had been leading up to this point for a while. He had asked the only question that would act as a restraint. I'd told a lie and it appeared I'd told it successfully. The next day he would take off for a ski weekend and I'd be alone with myself and with Lila for a few days.
He returned to the table. "If I get any drunker I can't drive home," he said. "Are you coming with me?"
I got up and we walked outside. It was snowing. The fresh bite of snowflakes pelted our booze-warmed skin. We stood and breathed in the cold air. Snowflakes gathered on the tips of Jamie's eyelashes and across the ridge of his ski cap.
We kissed. It was wet and sloppy, different from Steve, more like Madison. But I wanted this. I willed myself to want it. This is Jamie, I repeated in my head. This is Jamie.
"So, you coming home with me?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said.
"Well, it's cold as a witch's clit out here, I'm going home. Come or don't come."
"I have my contacts in," I said.
He was smooth and drunk and had done it all a thousand times before. "Well, you've got two choices. You can walk home and you can sleep alone in your bed, or I can drive you there and wait for you while you take your contacts out."
"You'd do that?"
He stayed outside in his car. I hurried up the elevator in Haven, went to my room, and removed my lenses. It was late but I woke Lila anyway. I knocked on her door. She answered it in her Lanz nightgown. Her room was dark. I had woken her up. "What is it?" she asked angrily.
"This is it," I said to Lila. "I'm going home with Jamie. I'll be back in the morning. Promise you'll have breakfast with me."
"Fine," she said, and shut the door.
I had wanted someone to be in on it with me.
It was snowing heavily now. To stay focused on the road, we were quiet. The heat rushed out of the dash onto my legs. Jamie was my guide on a mission to a place I'd never been. I had one last chance to make it before the walls closed in. His random promiscuity now seemed glorious to me. In the way he had talked about it, I knew there was as much bravado as there was real joy. I realized even then that he'd been drunk during so many of these encounters. He was drunk now. But all of this was detail work to me. Drinking. Promiscuity. An undirected life. They were all, to my mind, a product of his own choice. No one had made him drink or fuck or run. Now, I can look and see that it may have been otherwise; then, I stared out at the road. The wipers were going. Snow built up on either side of them and formed a white widow's peak in the middle of the windshield. I was going home with a normal man-by most standards an attractive one-and he was taking me there to make love to me.
I had spent time imagining his place. It was less than fabulous when we arrived. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment. The living area had no furniture, just milk crates jammed with albums and tapes, and a stereo that sat on the carpeted floor. He walked in and threw his school bag down, took a leak with the bathroom door open, from which I looked away, and reentered the kitchen. There was a let's-just-get-to-it attitude now that we were in his apartment. I stood in the hallway between the darkened kitchen area and the unfurnished living area. His bedroom was near the bathroom. I knew that was where we were going, knew that was what I had come here for, but I hesitated. I was afraid.
Jamie said he guessed I was new enough so he should offer me a drink. He had an open bottle of white wine in the fridge and two dirty wineglasses. He held the glasses under the tap and then filled both with wine. I took my dripping glass and sipped.
"You can put your bag down," he said. "Music would make this easier, huh?"
He walked into the living area and crouched down over a milk crate of tapes. He picked up, scanned, and tossed back two or three. I put my book bag near the front door. He chose Bob Dylan, the kind of slow, stalling melodies that always made me feel as if the dead were rattling their chains. I wasn't a Dylan fan, but I knew enough not to say anything.
"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.