I was not completely honest before when I said Walter's experience of his genitals as a weapon felt to me as inaccessible as the interior experience of femaleness: I'll call her Vanessa. We knew each other from I don't remember which class but I do remember that it was on the pretext of talking about this class that we stepped away from the crowd into an out-of-the-way corner of the dorm lobby where the party was being held. We were both drunk, both relatively new to the college—I as a first semester sophomore; she as a returning older student—and I think it was while we were comparing reactions to that day's lecture that we started making out. She was only an inch or so shorter than my six-foot-one and not really attractive to me, but I was clearly attractive to her and when she made the first move, being able for a change to put my arms around and kiss a woman without bending down was a new, strangely erotic experience.
After what felt like an hour but was probably only about fifteen or twenty minutes, she put her hand to my crotch, cupped my erection through my jeans and led me by the hand to one of the dorm's basement rooms. She looped a red rubber band around the doorknob so others would know someone was in there. I reached for the light switch, but she whispered, "No, it's better in the dark." What happened next is a little hazy in my memory. I know she refused to take her clothes off completely, and I remember kneeling between her legs, her pants still around her ankles, and trying unsuccessfully to find an angle at which my penis would slip into her. I know she told me it would be better if she got on top, which she did, with her pants still around her ankles, and I know she managed to find an angle and a rhythm at which to fuck me till I came. It was the most awkward and unsatisfying sex I've ever had. I don't know if she had an orgasm; I don't know if she cared; but when we said goodbye, promising at her insistence not to avoid each other if we happened to meet on campus, I know I was grateful the odds were against that happening.
When I got back to my room and undressed for bed, I found myself covered with what I assumed—since it did not occur to me that Vanessa might have been a virgin—was menstrual blood. I took a shower, went to sleep, and thought no more about it until two or three months later when Vanessa called to tell me she'd been in the hospital. "I don't hold you responsible," she said, "and I don't expect you to pay for anything, but I almost bled to death after we had sex. I thought you ought to know." I don't remember precisely which part of her insides she said had been ruptured, but she said there was no question—according to her the doctors thought it the most likely explanation—I'd put a hole in her that night.
Too shocked even to wonder if she was telling the truth, I stood there thinking, So this is why she stopped coming to class. What followed was not more than three or so minutes of small talk—"I'm glad you're okay…Of course I remember. I won't avoid you. Really, I won't."—and we said goodbye and hung up. For the next few days, I walked around not knowing how to feel about myself. I wasn't smart enough yet to see how profoundly manipulative Vanessa's method of telling me had been, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that if I had punctured her, one of us, certainly she, should have felt something unusual, discomfort at least, if not outright pain, and yet, except for wanting to be on top, she'd given no indication that she'd felt either. And yet on the other hand, why would she lie? To this day, I am haunted by the possibility that she didn't, that I had, with my body, reached into her body and almost killed her.
We met on campus twice after that phone conversation, but it was so unavoidably clear the first time that we had nothing to say to each other—beyond my asking how she was healing—that the next time we could've stopped to chat, we turned in silent but mutual agreement and walked away in opposite directions.
The fundamentally alien universe that the female experience of sex is to me. To this day I have no idea if Vanessa was telling the truth, though I have recently learned that it's possible she was. One of my wife's relatives told me that the same thing happened to friend of hers who'd almost bled to death after an internal rupture caused by having sex with her boyfriend. What I do know is that I have tended to think of intercourse ever since as an activity fraught with danger, in which I had to be especially careful lest I do serious damage to the woman I am with. For there is no way to escape the fact that it is always, always, my body inside hers—whoever she is—and that this arrangement of flesh and blood and muscle makes her physically vulnerable in ways that, by definition, I will never be; and so it occurs to me that there's something wrong with saying that two people have sex, as if sex were something outside themselves, like food, that they agree to share. For the sex they have, that we have is always already in our bodies, and so what happens when we take off our clothes and move in and out of and over and under each other in search of whatever our desire for sex has sent us in search of is more accurately described as sharing, a giving and taking and giving back, which means you are never the same person when sex is over as you were before it began. The only question is whether you're willing to admit it and live honestly with the consequences.
Check out Richard Jeffrey Newman's web page at http://www.richardjnewman.com/.