Charmed Thirds (34 page)

I stopped talking because it was all getting too personal. Bridget’s mouth was pinched shut. Kieran’s hinted at a smile.

“J wants to be a swinger,”
ALF
said, apparently having eavesdropped on my diatribe.

“She’s very polyamorous,” Pepe said, slapping him on his furry back. Percy was ALF’s new best friend.

“You should move to Japan, where hardly any women want to marry,” suggested Kazuko, setting down a brown bag full of beer. “But I don’t think they’re having much sex, either.”

“And we all know how much J loves cock,”
ALF
joked.

“I was being hypothetical!” I shouted over the laughter. Then I downed the rest of my nasty plastic jug vodka.

“Let’s play a game!” Tanu suddenly proposed, much to my relief.

“POKER!” shouted
ALF
and Pepe simultaneously, which delighted them both to no end.

“I’m so sick of Hold ‘Em,” Kazuko said, referring to the tournaments that have become a significant part of social life on campus. “Let’s play a
girl
game.”

ALF
and Pepe looked at each other for a split second before responding, again, in unison. “
STRIP
POKER!”

“Forget it,” replied all the females in the room.

“Beirut?” suggested
ALF
.

Kazuko yawned, then addressed the ladies. “You’d think these boys would’ve gotten beer pong out of their system in high school.”

“How about Shut Up and Drink!?”
ALF
suggested.

“How do you play that?” Bridget asked.

“You shuffle a deck of cards. You take one off the top. If you can read what it is, you do a shot.”

“I don’t get it,” Bridget said.

“You keep taking cards and doing shots until you can’t read the card anymore.”

“Or until you die of alcohol poisoning,” Pepe added.

“Or that,”
ALF
concurred.

“Let’s play Truth or Dare!” Bridget offered.

Her suggestion was met with a chorus of excited
ooooooh
s. Self-conscious regression is very popular among otherwise sophisticated college types. Nowhere is adultescence more popular than in Manhattan, where everyone’s got the jihad jitters. This goes double when cheap alcohol is involved.

But I had another idea. A better idea. The best of all.

“Why don’t we just cut to the chase and play Spin the Bottle?”

“What do you mean ‘cut to the chase’?” Bridget asked.

“Well, Truth or Dare is really all about kissing,” I said.

“Go on,” Pepe said.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“We don’t know what you’re talking about,” the room said simultaneously (or at least it seemed so at the time).

“Okay. You start off with nonkissing-related Truths or Dares. Like, ‘Have you ever run outside naked?’ Or, ‘I dare you to run outside naked.’ But that’s just so you don’t seem too eager. Because all everyone is really thinking about is kissing. As in, ‘Who in the room do you want to kiss?’ Or, ‘I dare you to kiss so-and-so.’ It always goes that way. Always! So why don’t we just skip over the preliminaries and just play Spin the Bottle, which is all about kissing.”

The room was silent.

“She’s right, you know,” Pepe said.

“She really is,” Bridget said.

And then the room got quiet again and my body buzzed with anticipation.

“Well,” Kieran said.

He picked up an unopened bottle from the bag and pointed it in my direction. He flip-flopped toward me, framed my cheeks with his hands, and gave me a delicate kiss on the lips.

“How was that?” he asked, his lips lingering on mine, tickling me with his words.

It was a kiss that left me wanting more. But that’s not what I told him.

“There was one thing I forgot to mention about Truth or Dare and kissing,” I said, still pressed against him.

“And what’s that?”

I pulled away so I could whisper in his ear. “It’s really about
fucking.”

He reared back in astonishment before saying, “That’s . . . so . . .”

“What?”

“True.”

I can’t say I have any clue what the rest of the room was doing during this exchange, because I wasn’t paying attention. I can only suspect that they were doing what I would have done in the same situation, which is make silent, immature, “OH MY GOD!” hand gestures behind our backs because I knew what was going to happen next—SEX!!!—just as Bridget had predicted. This automatically put us in an embarrassing situation because when everyone knows you’re rushing off to hit it, there’s a certain pressure to make it really hot because you already know that they will ask you for details the morning after, something they feel at liberty to do since you so publicly made your coital intentions known.

But this sex was not hot.

Oh no, it was not.

I’ll spare you the inelegant in-the-act details. But here’s a watershed moment:

Kieran slipped off his boxers.

“Oh my God!”

“What?”

“I’ve never seen one before!”

“You’ve never seen a
penis
before?”

“Not one that looks like . . . like . . . a pig-in-a-blanket!”

“It’s uncircumcised.”

“I know that. I just wasn’t expecting to see one.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s so . . . ethnic. And you’re, well . . . from
Connecticut.”

“Do you want to get a closer look?”

“Uh, not really. Can we just get under the covers now?”

“Okay.”

“And turn out the lights.”

“Okay. Do you want a blindfold, too?”

“Uh, no. Just a condom, thank you.”

This exchange pretty much set the tone for what would follow, which can be best described as the clumsy rearrangement of unfamiliar limbs and the execution of signature moves (the shocker!!!) that would only work with partners who were far, far away from the mattress on which they were being performed. And it got worse.

In the moments after the act, when his penis was retreating back into its fleshy burrow like a groundhog, Kieran started talking and wouldn’t stop.

“I just gained at least forty-odd sex partners in about ten minutes,” he said.

It was more like two minutes, but that wasn’t worth quibbling over when the statement as a whole was so ludicrous. “How so?”

“Well, I just had sex with you. And you’ve mentioned that your ex-boyfriend had sex with forty-something girls before you. And they say that when you have sex, you are having sex with every person your partner has ever had sex with, which is kind of a beautiful concept, when you think about it, all of these people bonded through what Socrates referred to in the
Phaedrus
as the blind, unreasonable eros . . .”

“Is this your idea of pillow talk?” I asked, my neck muscles strained with incredulity.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m out of practice. I haven’t had sex with someone new in more than two years. Usually my girlfriend and I would hurry up and get dressed so I could get her home before her curfew.”

“Well, that doesn’t apply here, now does it?”

“We could just roll over and fall asleep,” he suggested.

“I think that’s a very good idea,” I said, turning away from him.

Should I have expected any better? I’ve only really known Kieran for a week, and I’m not sure I even like him very much, yet I had sex with him. I’ve become the type of person who has sex with someone she’s only known for a week. When did I become this person? Casual sex isn’t unusual for most college students, but I’ve never been most college students and sex has never been casual for me.

I think that final postcard fucked me up. (Ha. In more ways than one.)

the tenth

This afternoon Kieran came knocking on my door.

“We owe it to ourselves to try again,” he said.

“No offense,” I said, waving him away with a
National Enquirer
with Vanna White on the cover, “but why would anyone want to relive what happened yesterday?”

And then he launched into his argument, about how the sex was so awkward and so bad because we were still thinking about our exes when we did it. And the only way we would ever stop thinking about our exes during sex is to have more sex.

“Besides,” he said. “What else is there to do?”

I looked down and out my window. Faces on the sidewalks were obscured by umbrellas, hats, and hoods. I could tell from their hunched-over hurrying that no one was happy to be outside, dodging the icy rain plunging down like minidaggers from the sky. There was nothing interesting on TV. I’d read all my
National Enquirer
s. My Internet access was inexplicably hosed.

He had a point. And hadn’t Dexy prescribed the same remedy?

So we went for round two.

And three.

And four.

And I’m happy to report that it
was
better, and not only because it couldn’t have been any worse. I guess we’re getting used to each other, which kind of makes an argument for monogamy. Or serial monogamy at least.

The way I see it, Kieran and I are helping each other. It’s only practical for me to get out of this love limbo—this pur
guy
tory, so to speak—I’m in right now. There’s no point in pining over Marcus. My relationship with him was bound to meet its end, and not only because his newfound New Ageyness would always be at odds with my innate nihilism. No, it was doomed because every relationship ends. The only notable exception is the one you happen to be in when you die, in which case it only ends for the lonely soul left behind. You, on the other hand, are unaware that it’s over because you’re very conveniently dead. This isn’t pessimistic, but pragmatic.

So it makes sense to move on, bringing myself one guy closer to, not The One, but The One I’m with When I Die. Kieran is the perfect candidate for the job—attractive enough that hooking up will be fun, but youngish and annoying enough that I won’t try to turn him into The One. Likewise, I’m that girl for him. It’s really quite simple. To be even more sensible about it, I’m only going to let this last as long as winter break. When it’s over, we’re over.

Done.

the eleventh

Kieran’s annoyances are becoming, well, if not less annoying, then something else . . .

Arousing?

One minute we’re fighting, the next we’re fucking. Psychologically speaking, arousal is arousal is arousal. But I never knew how true that was until Kieran.

the twelfth

We’re
really
getting the hang of this now. It’s almost a shame that it, like all romance, is doomed.

the thirteenth

Must stick to the plan: Break over, break up. Period.

the fourteenth

The unthinkable is happening:

I’m falling for an assclown.

the fifteenth

Marcus who?

June 1st

Kieran:

“Nomen et omen”
was the first of many things you said that annoyed me. But perhaps there’s truth to this aphorism after all. If only I had looked up the definition of your name sooner, I could have been warned about the “small” and “dark” nature of your heart. Because I waited until it was already too late, here are . . .

Some Things I’ve Always Wanted to Tell You

1. Wearing
AXE
deodorant body spray is
not
funny in an ironic, po-mo kind of way.

2. Ditto listening to the Grateful Dead every single time you smoke up, or shouting, “We’re fuckin’ to ‘Truckin’’! We’re fuckin’ to ‘Truckin’’!”

3. And don’t even get me started on your obsession with
I Love the 90s.
Guess what? We
all
fucking love the nineties because we are
all
complete narcissists when it comes to the commercialization of pop cultural nostalgia and we
all
want to think that our own appreciation of “our” decade supersedes everyone else’s so just
GET
OVER
your need to prove that you know more than anyone about Furbies and Soul Asylum and
Beverly Hills 90210.

4. I never minded your problem with premature ejaculation. In fact, I appreciated that sex was over before it ever really began. Intercourse didn’t interfere with my studies, which enabled me to make the Dean’s List.

5. You play your heartache like a party trick, don’t you? You’ve been damaged in some profound, important way. You need to be helped. Fixed. Made whole again. And as a result of your deep, deep suffering you can’t be blamed for the pain you inflict on fools like me who make the mistake of trying to be your savior. We are
both
victims here, so you
can’t
be the bad guy. Oh no, not a sensitive soul like you, who waxes poetic about “feeling” but is, in fact, too much of a selfish little boy to be capable of feeling anything real at all. As someone who knows the difference between “love” as an amusing abstraction and genuine love, I can only feel pity. And that’s because I never cared enough about you to hate you.

Respectlessly,
 J.

the first

Kieran cheated on me.

And I’ll be homeless next fall.

I’m not sure which is worse.

Like too many couples in Manhattan, I think I’d be willing to shack up with someone I despised if the apartment had a doorman and adequate afternoon sunlight. The small but furnished, off-campus-but-not-too-far-off-campus one-bedroom sublet that Kieran and I agreed to share this summer and next year had both the doorman and the sun, plus a ridiculously low rent (thanks to his parents’ generous housing subsidy), so neither of us had any reason to enroll in the university lottery. This is the same apartment that he will now share with his ex-girlfriend, now his re-girlfriend, who just turned eighteen and will be attending Barnard next September. They reconciled during her campus interview in late January and continued reconciling on the weekends, on the sly, while I was working two jobs to pay for the twenty-two credits I was taking. I’d only seen Re-girlfriend in pictures on his laptop, but I was never intimidated by her plain-faced, dishwater-tressed ordinariness. What
should
have bothered me was Kieran’s unwillingness to drag every last pixel into his desktop trash can.