"Are you a virgin?" I'd been trying to ask Karen this question almost from the moment our relationship had become physical.
She looked surprised, but not offended. "Are you?" she asked back.
"Yes."
"So am I," she said, "and I want to stay that way."
"Me too!" I laughed out loud with relief.
Karen tilted her head back and looked at me with a gleam in her eye. "Do you trust me?"
"Yes," I said, and she undid the circle my arms made around her, took me by the hand, and led me through the quiet of a midnight snow to the far end of the yard behind the buildings where we lived. We climbed into the large, long-unused birdbath fountain that was there and sat, oblivious to the cold, tasting at each other's lips while the snow fell around us.
Karen climbed into my lap and unzipped my jacket. She was two years older than I was, eighteen to my sixteen, but almost half my size, and she fit neatly inside the front of my parka, which I zipped halfway-up behind her. We sat like that for a few minutes, letting the heat between us build, and then Karen's breath was warm and sudden in my ear. "Do you trust me?" she asked again.
When I nodded my head, she told me to unzip my jacket. Then she pushed me till I was flat on my back, knelt between my legs, undid my pants, and slowly made love to me—it was the first time anyone ever had—with her mouth. The pleasure fused my flesh to hers, and for those moments I felt we were both me, and we were both her, and when it was over I felt open and vulnerable, grateful and shy, and I worried that maybe Karen hadn't liked what she saw when she drew me out of myself, but her eyes were tender when I looked into them, and she held me in her hand, warming me against the cool night air till I grew soft. Then, the smell and taste of me still on her lips, she kissed my mouth and whispered in my ear, "You know, that took a lot of courage."
"Yes," I whispered back, choosing to hear in her words that courage had been required of both of us. She smiled and climbed on top of me. I wrapped my parka around her one more time, and we stayed like that until it was too cold to be outside any longer.
"I'll see you tomorrow," she said as we got up and kissed good-bye, and, just like in a movie, I stood there in the falling snow, my knees weak with pleasure and happiness, and I watched her walk back towards her building until the white curtain of flakes closed behind her, and it didn't occur to me that she'd just done what the old man in my building had said that he wanted to do, and I couldn't wait to see her again.
A month or so later, Karen came to visit me on a night that my mother wasn't home and I was taking care of my two younger sisters. They'd just gone to bed when she arrived, and we sat in the living room listening to music and talking. Once we were sure they were sleeping, we moved into my bedroom, where one thing led to our usual other, but this time, when Karen rolled me onto my back, instead of taking me in her mouth as she usually did, she climbed on top of me and began to slide her vagina up and down the length of my erection.
The warmth and wetness of coming so close to going all the way was tantalizing, but I still didn't want actually to do it, and I assumed—since Karen had not told me otherwise—that she still felt the same way as well. Karen was watching my face very closely, however, and I did not know how to read her expression. Then, she rubbed herself against a spot that made my hips jerk involuntarily, and I put my hands on either side of her waist to make sure she didn't fall off. As if that were a signal she'd been waiting for, she swiveled her own hips slightly, and, without warning, I was inside her, and all I was was pleasure and flesh, alive to the slightest nuance of her touch.
Much too soon, it was over. Smiling, Karen asked me how I felt.
"A little strange," I said. "I didn't really want to go that far."
"Then you should've said no," she responded, an edge of contempt creeping into her voice. "You should've made me stop."
As soon as those words left her mouth, I was sure that she'd lied about being a virgin.
"I thought you'd want to think that you were my first," she said. "That's what most guys want anyway." She'd been afraid to tell me the truth, she explained, because she was sure the truth would make me think she was a slut. The truth: She'd lost her virginity a few years before, when two men she barely knew got her drunk and fucked her several times each in a single night. "And don't bullshit me," the sarcasm dripped from her words.. "You're no different from any other guy. You wanted to do that. You're just not man enough to admit it."
Given what I know now about rape, it wouldn't surprise me if Karen's story were indeed true, but at the time I was so angry and so hurt that I couldn't imagine she was doing anything other than trying to make her deception into something I could accept. I didn't care that she wasn't a virgin. I cared that she hadn't believed me when I said I wanted to stay one, and I cared that she'd lied to me about herself, and I felt manipulated and dirty and cheap. How could I trust her after this?
I told Karen I didn't want to see her anymore, and I didn't care that she didn't believe me when I said it had nothing to do with her virginity or how she said it had been taken from her. I hoped sincerely that when she left my house that night, she'd be walking out of my life for good. Some months later, though—I don't remember who called whom—she ended up at my house one afternoon when my mother and sisters weren't home. We were sitting on my bed talking, trying to find a way to patch things up, and then we were kissing, and then our clothes were off, and it was as if I'd never broken up with her. Then the urge came over me to be inside her again, and I climbed between her legs, clumsy with my own inexperience, and despite the fact that Karen tried to help me, what I had expected to be as smooth and effortless as it had been the first time became a struggle that embarrassed me, and I began to loathe myself for wanting her, this girl whom I realized I still didn't think I could trust, and yet the humiliation of giving up, of not being able to fuck her, was more than I thought I could bear and so I kept poking and pushing until, at last, I entered her.
I went into Karen that afternoon with anger and shame; there was no pleasure in it; it was over almost before it started; and the smile of cynical triumph I saw on her face when I pulled back made me feel like I might never want to have sex again—though of course I did. Sometimes it was great, transcendent even. Other times, it was simply fun; at others, mundane; and sometimes it came close to being as bad as it was that last time with Karen, and at those times I came away feeling guilty that I had played the role of the piston and the woman had been the casing it was my task to move in and out of. Sex is nothing if not unpredictable and inconsistent, and it is a lesson I have learned over and over again that the quality of our erotic relationships, if not of our lives as a whole, often depends on our willingness to roll with the sexual punches, hurting, being hurt, forgiving, understanding, learning, hoping and then, against all odds, making the effort once more to unearth the life-sustaining connection that lies waiting in the bodies of those who offer themselves to us, and that we in turn offer them, using our own bodies to make them welcome.
And so I have a wife and a son. And because sex is also always about so much more, is so much more, than what happens when people make love, I also have two female students whose trust in me, if only because of what they are writing about, is sexual by definition. For it matters that I am a man and that they are willing not merely to tell me about the abuse they suffered at the hands of men, but also to let me help them find the language with which they can give the experience back to themselves, and to the readers they imagine, as something the meaning of which they have chosen, not the men who abused them and not the culture that forced them into silence about the abuse. It matters because, just like sex, teaching and learning are about desire and the fulfillment of desire. Certainly it is true that the trust my students have in me—and, to be honest, that I have in them—inverts the trust that lovers bring to the bed they share, i.e. that we will not sexualize our relationship. Nonetheless, it is a mistake to think that our relationship is not of the body. For to help someone understand themselves is by definition to help them understand how to live in their bodies.
To Section Two
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