Virgin and Other Stories

by April Ayers Lawson

  * * *

  Then to her satisfaction returning to her, rearranging himself in his seat, leaning forward: “I have some pot in my desk drawer we could have but when I smoke it I become amorous. I might make an advance.” He smiled at her. He seemed happy to look at her.

  “So I think I probably shouldn’t get it.” He watched her face. “That is, unless you don’t mind.”

  * * *

  The boy who when she was eight surprised her by after asking if he could see her hand, kissing the back of it before dropping it, running away; the boy she made out with at a movie theater in eighth grade who the next week made out with her best friend; the college-dropout construction worker she stayed with on weekends as a junior in high school who lived above an old woman’s garage in what they call a “butler’s apartment” who spent a lot of time going down on her with various techniques he’d read about in books, none of which made her feel anything but that she should feel something that he wanted to keep practicing despite this anyway; other young men who touched her, bought her food, said she was pretty; the one in college who after having on-and-off sculpted her for a year—she has made an impression on him and so now he makes an impression of her in the clay that will when he is done make her cry because it looks exactly like her (it is for some reason, she knows, so hard to make what you see; why?)—claimed he’d done it because he’d known he’d ask her to marry him all along; the way she learned to recognize him from across campus when he was barely recognizable except for his gait and the vague dark slash of his form; waking up with this man, the sound of him turning the water on and off and on again when he is getting ready in the morning in the bathroom as she stirs; the rumble of his car engine in the drive that she’d wait for every evening; the patter of his footsteps climbing up the stairs to the porch, the surge of happiness in her body stirred by the click of his key in the lock, the swoosh of the opening door; he is home, finally; the way at night she watches him in his sleep loving him more than she could stand when he was awake, thinking she will have to kill herself if he dies; the way her entire being feels suddenly fragile when he in a new suit of which he is proud steps out into the world; the way when she is not expecting it he reaches out to stroke her hair, her neck, I still love you, I still want you, I haven’t forgotten who you are even though it seems that way sometimes, but all of this in her twenty-eighth year obliterated by the problem of the first man, by the sense of incongruity in the darkened childhood bedroom, so that all the others seem nothing more than versions of the same thing that she can’t get back inside of as experiences of significance, that seem to be missing something important she can’t understand, that run: Once a boy I liked liked me back and he bought me food, maybe we danced, we touched, each of us said the other was good-looking and that we liked to see each other and we confessed and promised things to each other and—

  * * *

  “That he couldn’t see me was part of it, I guess,” she told her art dealer of the artist she’d written to, his friend H., whom she’d come to the city to meet, with whom she was and was not in love. “It turned me on that we couldn’t see each other.”

  Though she wasn’t used to being “turned on,” she said it not like it was a mysterious and (to her) fantastical thing that had upended her world as she knew it by occurring, causing her to feel compelled to touch herself like other people did: How strange to want to touch yourself like you are more than yourself, to become the object of yourself that you by touching can give pleasure to; oh that is what they mean; it makes sense now; pleasuring yourself, she thought in bed with a book showing good prints of his paintings, gotten through interlibrary loan from a college, for which she’d had to wait a month, as she stared into the paintings, feeling down there, attempting to block out the self-consciousness of her hand being down there.

  Turned on by the paintings made with his hands. His voice. His hands. What his eyes that could not see her typing in front of a computer screen in another state saw.

  They couldn’t see each other. He couldn’t see her. They could see a few photos of each other, but she couldn’t feel him seeing her, this man whose vision compelled her. There was no sense of being watched by a man as the gallerist in that moment watched her, as if he could with his eyeballs stroke even her innards; his eyes; the pressure of his gaze; the narrowed feeling in the air; his eyes.

  Yeah, it turned me on.

  In that dumb way other people said it. Dumb in that people feeling lust had up until then seemed to her like drunken people, drunk on something that was to her unavailable.

  “Writing H. was like the sky blowing open,” she told him. “Everything looked different, even. The whole world seemed to have a pulse that I could feel through anything. It was like I was connected to everything somehow.”

  “Yes, it sounds like you got quite carried away,” he replied, leaning forward to refill her glass.

  * * *

  The sexiest man she’d ever seen. On a bicycle. Something about the way he held his shoulders, his profile, his posture atop the bike, the shape of his bald head—she wasn’t accustomed to seeing grown men on their way to social engagements riding bicycles, how odd, sweet; is it him or is this just how it is in the city?

  “That’s him. That’s the art dealer,” she said to her friend whom she’d begged to wait with her at the restaurant. He looked like the photos from the Internet but also not like them; much better somehow. “It’s okay for you to leave now. Go on and leave, okay?”

  * * *

  And at home in a bungalow in Georgia she shared with the man to whom she was married, the painter in the guest room/studio studied photos on the Internet of the famous artist with whom she corresponded, her paint-stained hands typing into the keyboard intermittently a curious sight to her, as if the hands of someone else. (Should she paint these hands? This for the first time considered.) A tall bald man with a beard he wore a dark suit among other sophisticated-looking people in fine clothes, and this was from seven years ago—but how did he look right now? she wondered—and mostly partially blocking the figure of another famous artist she recognized was another tall, bald man with a beard, a good deal younger, who to her was no one of name or consequence but simply the body of a man dressed nondescriptly, whom she’d never have noticed had he not been blocking the visage of the famous artist, who didn’t really seem to belong there but was nevertheless there in the way.

  * * *

  Meek and shy and very quiet but there was a tendency toward destruction of personal artifacts—words she’d written on paper and pictures she’d painstakingly painted and twice her hair that she’d with her mother’s sewing scissors lopped off into the sink. Taking a baseball bat to the piano is only a silly fantasy but when no one else is in the house if you bang very hard against the keys until your hand aches it falls out of tune and all the notes that would usually when played together make a song bleed a strange half melody that—

  No, not sad. Quite perversely happy when the only photo in the living room in which she as a girl posed alone fell into the toilet and she for her mother had to create the most absurdly plausible story to provide an explanation for how the photo had come to be needed to be taken into the bathroom and then by accident become drowned in the water.

  * * *

  And then a pale pink sliver of trout fell from her fork into her lap. The skirt onto which it fell was on this night sporty and cheap, soft and gray, as was his plain button-down shirt (all of the buttons except the top closed this time, the shirt a dove-gray, a much paler gray than her skirt, causing him to rather look more like the adjunct art history instructor he’d once been than the glamorous character she’d followed around all afternoon).

  And when she moved the sliver of meat from her lap to the surface of the table he, watching, always watching, picked it up and put it in his mouth, and she was happy in a way she hadn’t known before.

  * * *

  Her first—the first man—would say his head hurt, would she p
lease turn out the light because it was hurting his eyes which was causing his head to ache?

  Already he would’ve reclined onto the bed from which he’d cleared the extra pillows and stuffed animals, exposing the bare flat surface of the bed that when she was alone frightened her, so that she’d crowd the animals with whom she conversed when alone around on either side. He was a very big man the tallest she knew with thick dark hair his thighs nearly as thick around as her girl waist. In college he played on the basketball team and when others were around and he wished to interact with her he’d style her hair. A movie-star hairstyle he called it, brushing her long hair from around her shoulders, from off her back, and pulling it into a ponytail that was pretty much like the one her mother made yet in his hands didn’t seem to be the same hairstyle at all but truly the hairstyle of a celebrity, which is better than the hairstyle of a normal person—

  You know (stereotypically, as this sort of thing often goes): in addition to being a family friend, the babysitter.

  The wet, she believed, the unmentionable embarrassment of a grown-up having let his bladder go.

  Mainly just a sense of incongruity. The feeling that something beyond her understanding that was strange and uncomfortable but that pleased the man who was her admirer had occurred and in truth she was happy to be with him because he seemed to like to be alone with her more than anyone else she had up until that point in time known.

  * * *

  “Have you done this before?” says the man in the hotel room. Before she can speak, taking his answer from her face, he says, “How many times?”

  Not knowing whether he will find the number too high (making this seem less significant) or too low (causing her to seem inexperienced), she replies, “This is the first time I’ve done it in a hotel room like this.”

  “I hope it’s the last,” he says. “You shouldn’t have followed me in here alone.”

  His concerned and curious face is something like paternal.

  He watches her like he doesn’t trust her, like she might be up to something more than drawing, but he can’t figure out what it is.

  “Are you going to let me draw you, or did you just invite me in here to admonish me for not being afraid of you?”

  On the couch she shifts her legs, opens the sketchbook to a clean page. From the pouch in her purse in which she keeps her drawing utensils she extracts a special graphite stick her husband ordered from a French website and presented to her Christmas morning.

  That he would be angry and alarmed about her being here occurs to her, but it also seems of only mild significance, like a scene in a movie that pulls at the emotions but has nothing to do with real life.

  “But you are afraid of me,” he replies incredulously.

  She has begun to draw. She doesn’t answer.

  Am I? she thinks. And, as she studies his face studying hers, How do I look to him? She wears one of her better outfits (tall black leather boots with silver buckles, a wool skirt, a snug white cashmere sweater with a low V-neck, and beneath that a white lace push-up bra). She has put on makeup.

  With graphite she blocks in the dimensions of his face.

  “Did you follow me to that restaurant?”

  “Do you hope I followed you?”

  This comes out more flirtatiously than she means for it to, as it has on other occasions over the past few years; with her husband’s boss, for example, at a buffet table at a Christmas party, soon after which the man “accidentally” brushed up against her, infuriating her husband, who could not until they were safely out of earshot of any of the other employees, in the car, vent his rage. Do you want to fuck him? he snapped, his eyes hateful, vigilant for any reaction from her he might use as confirmation. She ignored him, stayed quiet, still. As he drove he described under his breath the things he believed she wanted to do with his boss that if she’d confronted him about he’d deny having said. This had happened before—him saying things he later denied. It made her feel crazy. An hour later, at home, the anger turned to lust (the lust, as she understood it, having as much to do with his boss as her), and afterward her husband seemed to love her again; it was just a bad night.

  “No,” she tells the man she is drawing, before he can answer the question she posed in return, in case he attempts to flirt back with her. “No, I didn’t follow you. I just recognized you at the bar and thought, This is the second time I’ve seen him now, so I just have to draw him. Your face stayed with me. You have that kind of face.”

  This devoid of flirtatiousness. Said clinically. Authoritatively.

  He seems to accept it.

  The fantasies of what they might do instead—of him reaching out to place his hand on her knee, of him rising up in the middle of the sketch to push away the sketchpad and put his mouth on hers—flash intermittently as if on a movie screen at her periphery, a movie she isn’t watching but doesn’t have the power to turn off. Sometimes she doesn’t know the men are handsome until afterward, studying the sketches that, though not flattering, accurately show the structure of the faces, the eyes.

  “I want to see it,” he says after.

  And it is this moment she both anticipates and fears; she can’t very well not show it to him.

  The book in his hands makes her anxious because she imagines him ripping out the pages, tearing them up, even though this has never happened with a sketch she’s shown to anyone.

  He stares at her as if seeing her now for the first time. Looks back at the sketch. His fingers go up toward his temple, hover there without quite touching it before curling, pressing briefly against his mouth. He looks back up at her.

  “I don’t know whether I should be flattered or offended.”

  Both, she thinks. But she says nothing. Waits.

  “Let me take you out to dinner.”

  “You just ate dinner.”

  “I know,” he says, flustered, amused. “I mean—”

  “I’m married,” she replies.

  * * *

  But by then I had changed my mind. We were so drunk.

  Or I was, at least (the beer before dinner and then the bottle of wine during it and in the office of the gallery the cognac that had been given to him by a collector that I continued to drink even with the feeling of it being impossible to take in any more because my voice talking sounded better to me when intoxicated), and I’d started to lose the light and the light coming off him was fading too; and when he asked if I wanted to smoke the pot that would make him amorous, I said that was fine, it didn’t matter I was married anymore as nothing seemed to matter there high up above the city in the dark; and now all the lights were off in the office too, us being able to see by the security lights shining out from the windows of rooms of the building opposite and from streetlights below and from the front part of the office in front of the wall that was almost all glass; and we moved toward the other way into the darker area behind us, toward his personal office space where he’d told me the story about the woman from the library who’d disappointed him with her dullness and lack of intelligence; and fortunately there, there was another big window through which emitted faint light that kept the office from being entirely black inside and by this faint light I was enraptured by the sight of the fingers of his long graceful hands nimbly unbuttoning his shirt—

  Oh, wait, I forgot to say we smoked the pot. By now he had rolled the joint and we’d passed it back and forth and had become high.

  My first time since high school.

  I coughed. Briefly I struggled. (How unattractive did I become coughing? At least it was dim.) But then it worked: I was high.

  More talking. Not the kind that matters. Just something to do until he works up the nerve to kiss me, and then—

  I want you. Baby, I want you. I want you so—

  A firm, deep kiss; no playing around before he shoves in his tongue.

  This goes on for a minute before he abruptly pulls away, saying he needs to roll another joint.

  “I think the music i
s playing again.”

  “Is it? I think it might be you.”

  “I’m surprised you keep that in here,” I go on, not wanting the silence.

  “Oh, it’s not a big deal,” he says, just as casually. It’s more like the kiss has interrupted our conversation than the other way around. He stands bent over his desk but it’s too dark for me to see his expression. “We call and someone brings it here.” But then after the fact, the addendum, voice more pointed and emboldened: “I’m a risk-taker. I don’t think you’re really doing your job unless you’re constantly risking the loss of it,” he said, I comprehending he was no longer talking about the pot.

  While he’s rolling the joint, watching his hands, I begin to undress.

  He turns.

  Oh.

  Facing me, he lights the joint, inhales.

  He passes it to me; after I’ve taken another hit, he takes one; and then after I’ve taken my second he, crouching down so that he’s level to me on the couch, again presses his mouth against mine, hungrily shoves in his tongue.

  “You too,” I say, my fingers at the buttons of his shirt. “Take your clothes off.”

  “Not yet,” he whispers, brushes my hands away.

  Then we’re standing, him leaning down to me for another kiss, even more forceful, as he shoves his hand up my—

  Jab

  Jab

  Jab

  The fingers not forming an actual fist but held straight and as close together as possible, beaklike, forming what is also referred to as “the silent duck.”

  Briskly, matter-of-factly, with also each time a jerk.

  (Warning: can cause laceration or perforation of the vagina, resulting in serious injury and even death; also sexual activities that cause air to enter the vagina can lead to a fatal air embolism.)

  But at this time I don’t even know the name of it, won’t until I read about it later—just let it happen as it comes to my knowledge that I don’t know who he is but a strange man with whom I’m entrapped in an office building in an unfamiliar city.