She Poured Out Her Heart (3 page)

She had no idea what she was meant to do with it. “How . . .” she began.

“Medium hard, and fast,” he directed her, moving her hand up and down, and then she did get the hang of it, a little, and he began breathing and blowing in a loud, alarming way, and then he'd landed on top of her, impossibly heavy. She had to try and reclaim different parts of herself and wiggle loose. Really, there was such a great deal of him, so much in the way of flopping legs and smothering chest. She felt sorry for him, having to inhabit this big, unworkable body.

“Almost forgot.” He caught his breath, laughed a little, swung his legs over the bed, and started feeling around. “Give me a sec here, I need my party hat.”

Had he gone crazy or something? A hat? A small crinkling, tearing sound and God she was so dumb. She hadn't given one thought to precautions, or all the dire consequences, the warnings that were meant to scare you off, well, too late. She could just barely make him out, sitting and working away at getting the condom on, and she would have liked to see that part, just from curiosity. “Uh, thanks,” she said. “It's very . . .” She wanted to say something like chivalrous, but that was stupid. “Cooperative of you,” she finished, which was also pretty stupid.

“Safety first,” he said cheerfully, and then he was back on top of her, prodding at her with the doorknob end of his thing, and at first it wouldn't go in and then he took hold of himself and it did, a little, and she yelped.

“S'OK,” he said, but it wasn't, it hurt, it didn't seem to fit right, and this was beginning to seem like an all around bad idea, shouldn't they talk about it first? He pushed in farther and Jane went
Owowow
, and he raised himself up on his elbows and said, “How about you make less noise and move more?”

He didn't sound mad or anything, more like he was trying to be encouraging. As always when given instructions, she tried to follow them. Moving made it a little better, at least he wasn't just poking at her, but it still didn't feel that good, not something you would do for fun or because of overwhelming passion. Maybe she was frigid. She'd worried about that and now she was pretty sure it was true.

How long was this supposed to go on, anyway? He kept on lifting and spreading her, and she didn't want to be rude or anything, but it really did hurt, she was getting chafed, and she had to pee, she'd been having to for a while now, all that beer. Just when she was about to tell him he had to stop, he snorted and sped up like he was trying to turn her inside out and then he made some of his own noise and that seemed to be it.

She waited a minute, then two. He was flopped on top of her, not moving. “Hey,” Jane said, from underneath the dead weight of him. “I have to get up.” She felt messy down there, something was leaking out of her. She wondered if she'd already peed. “I have to go to the bathroom. Sorry.”

She'd imagined it would be just as tricky for him to get himself out of her as in, like a cork in a bottle, but of course that wasn't how it worked. His penis had deflated in amazing fashion. “Lemme . . .” he said, and she guessed he was holding on to the rubber so it wouldn't come off or spill. There really were a lot of purely awful things you had to think about. He said, “I don't guess there's any Kleenex or anything, oh well . . .”

“I could bring you some,” she said, wanting to be helpful.

“No, I got it . . .” He rolled over and tended to himself. “You don't want to let that thing dry on you. You only make that mistake once.”

“Oh yeah, ha ha.” One more hideous piece of new knowledge. “I really do have to get up now.”

“Sure.” He leaned down and gave her a brief, smacking kiss. “Hey, this is going to sound really awful, but would you tell me your name again?”

“Shannon,” Jane said. Shannon was her roommate's name.

“Hurry on back, Shannon.”

It took her a fumbling long time to find everything: pants, underpants, shoes, and another spell to get it all together and find the door. It was one more embarrassment, still sitting there after she'd said she was leaving. “If you need a light . . .” he offered, but that was the last thing she wanted, “No, I'm OK,” she said, and in the end she escaped with her underpants wadded up in one hand.

The hallway was darker than she remembered, although the music was still going on, had been playing the whole while. Her legs were shaky. She felt
ravaged
, and she was going to have to decide if that was anything you might eventually feel good about. It was at least better than
deflowered,
which was a completely ignorant word. You might be able to put ravaged on a T-shirt, like the ones you saw people wearing, bragging about how drunk they got at such and such a party or a bar crawl. I got
ravaged
at the Pike Fall Frolic! She had no idea where the bathroom was, but it wasn't going to matter in about two seconds.

Here it was, a wall of urinals and three stalls, each with the doors half torn off and hanging loose. She didn't even want to think about the kinds of things that went on here.

She was lucky, the bathroom was empty. She checked herself, found only a small amount of pinkish blood. Washing her hands at the sink, there was a bad moment when the mirror made her wonder if she had been permanently marked or disfigured, but no, it was only the
unaccustomed mascara, which had smeared into black, vampish rings. She scrubbed at them with a brown paper towel.

Back in the hallway she hesitated, not remembering which way she'd come, or which door was the right one. Why hadn't she tried to wear her contacts? She was bat-blind. There was some commotion ahead of her on the staircase, voices shouting, an argument or a good time, and she turned and retreated, still lost. A door opened behind her and a boy stuck his head out. “Hey, where you going?”

She fled. Down a back staircase that led to an empty, institutional kitchen, dim lights above the stainless steel tables, a door marked
EXIT
in glowing red. Beyond the door, a wooden landing with stairs leading down to a line of dark green rubber trashcans, and that was where Jane came to rest.

No one had followed her. No one was watching. She had ejected herself cleanly. Music still beat beat beat from the party. Other music from other parties boomed, a dull noise, like detonations heard at a distance.

She might have felt bad for Tim, still waiting for her to come back, but decided he really didn't have anything to complain about. She walked to her dorm, feeling cotton-mouthed from the drinking. . . . Beyond worrying about whether or not what she'd done had been success or disaster or brave or idiotic or totally out of character, well yes it was, loomed the fact that it had happened and could not be undone. Actual, if not rational. She found herself thinking of Allen in an unexpected and sentimental way. He'd gone off to college at the University of Chicago. Jane hoped some kindly girl would take him to bed before too much time went by.

Her dorm wasn't far. But once she reached the front door, she didn't go in. It wasn't likely that her roommate was back yet, she might be out all night, but Jane wasn't in the mood to see anybody she knew, not just yet. She circled around to a small sunken garden, bare now except for a ring of boxwoods around its dry fountain. Jane sat down on one of the stone benches, and only when she heard the scratch and saw the flare of a cigarette lighter did she realize she was not alone.

She jumped to her feet. A girl's voice said, “Easy there,” and Jane tried to make her feeble eyes work in the gloom. “Didn't mean to startle you. Sit back down, jeez.”

Jane sat. The girl was across from her, on the opposite side of the fountain, and Jane couldn't make her out. “Or if you want to be alone, I can split,” the girl offered.

“No, that's all right.” She did want to be alone. She'd get up in a minute and go inside.

They sat in silence for a time. The girl was smoking some kind of tobacco with a heady smell, and she was using . . . Jane squinted. “Is that a corncob pipe?”

“Uh huh.” The little orange fire glowed when she inhaled. A corncob pipe was just one more bizarre thing.

More silence. Jane shifted on the cold stone of the bench. Her invaded parts felt sore and unquiet. She couldn't have said that she missed Tim, but it was a sadness to be alone after being so, whatever it was they'd been. Some version of together. But not entirely together, which was another kind of sadness.

“Rough night?”

“Oh . . .” She had forgotten that she was not, technically, alone. “I guess. I lost my virginity tonight.” Why say it? Because she wanted to say it out loud, to somebody, so she could believe it herself.

“Really? Wow, congratulations.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Thanks.”

“So, not like it's any of my business . . .”

“No, that's OK,” Jane said. “I guess I'm still processing it.”

“Uh huh. Boyfriend?”

“No, just, more like, a date.” That sounded pretty bad. Well, maybe it had been pretty bad. “It wasn't all that much fun.”

“Never is, the first time,” the girl said, making it sound like she was some kind of expert, a sex researcher, maybe, who went around interviewing people. “Too nervous.”

“Yes,” Jane agreed, though she'd been more bewildered than nervous. It was reassuring to think that it was just something you had to get through. “It didn't feel especially . . . sexy.”

The girl tapped the pipe bowl against the bench and a piece of glowing ember fell out, flared, then darkened. “Oh let me guess, he didn't exactly care what was going on with you. Most of these guys, they're just intervaginal masturbators.”

Jane laughed, a squawking sound that she tried to make more ladylike. She sniggered and giggled and hiccupped. “Inter . . . vag . . . oh boy.” Perhaps it was something you could laugh about.

With the pipe gone out, the girl's face was easier to see, or at least to locate. A pale, nodding shape. “Yes, just a collection of supercharged, wriggling sperm.”

More giggling and squawking. Jane tried to get herself under control. If she kept on laughing, she might end up on some kind of jag, laughing or crying or both. “So, not like it's any of my business, but when you, you know, the first time . . .”

“He was my high school boyfriend. And we'd already spent so much time messing around in all sorts of different ways, I mean, we'd arranged and rearranged our parts so much, when it finally went in it was, whoa, did we just do it? It wasn't like the earth moved or anything. That's from Hemingway, isn't that dumb? What a big barrel of crud that guy was.”

Jane didn't say anything. They hadn't gotten to Hemingway yet in class.

“Anyway,” the girl went on, “promise you won't buy into the notion that it's some tragic loss. That's just more patriarchal bullshit and commodification of women's bodies.”

“I won't,” Jane said, feeling as if she had sworn a kind of oath, although to what she was not entirely certain. “Thanks, it helps to talk to somebody who's . . .”

“Depraved?” the girl suggested. “Ah, you just needed a little pep talk.”

Had it all really happened? She knew it had, but the very unlikeliness
of everything made it hard to fathom, as if she was still up in her dorm room, padding around in sweatpants, and had never gone out and had sex with a stranger. And then talked all about it with another one. Maybe she'd been smarter than she knew, picking a boy she'd likely never see again, keeping it separate from anything fond or emotional. She'd give the borrowed sweater back to her roommate, and if asked how she liked Tim, she'd come up with something about how he seemed nice enough but she'd lost track of him as the evening went on. She stood, ready to go upstairs and get on with it. “Hey, my name's Jane.”

“I'm Bonnie,” the other girl said, and she stood up also, close enough to a streetlamp for Jane to see her sharp, vivid face, and Jane felt the peculiar inner thrum and hum that told her something else was going to happen here, though she did not yet know what it was.

B
y her senior year of college, Bonnie took to saying that she couldn't wait to get out of the playpen of school and into the real world, even though she did not have any particular destination in the real world.

She had begun college as a Spanish major, since she'd taken Spanish in high school. She thought that perhaps she could go to Spain or South America to study, end up living an expatriate life. That sounded dangerous and glamorous, like Ava Gardner in
The Night of the Iguana
. But her Spanish was not really good enough. Her accent twanged, forever Midwestern. In literature classes, she found herself having to read everything in English to keep up, and even then she didn't much like
Don Quixote
.

Sophomore year she changed her major to psychology, but that disappointed her also. It was mostly behaviorism and statistics, and trying to predict what a rat in a box might or might not do. She had expected to learn about primal drives, the unconscious, dreams and archetypes. But Freud and Jung were now the grandfathers installed in comfortable chairs in the back room while the party went on without them. The courses Bonnie took were all about experiments, and stimulus and response, and, although this was left unsaid, the application of these findings to make more people buy more things.

She found a home in anthropology, where anything and everything
human could be studied. She liked the expansiveness of it, trying to figure people out from every conceivable angle, archaeology and biology and culture and linguistics. She liked the assumption that you actually could figure them out.

“You're never going to get a job,” Jane said. “There are no jobs called ‘anthropologist.' You'll have to go to grad school.” Jane was six credit hours away from a degree in public health. There was a clear answer to what you did in public health: improved population-based health services and worked to eradicate disease. “Syphilis and gonorrhea,” Bonnie suggested, when she wanted to annoy her. “Pants down for Nurse Jane!” But Jane had interviewed with nonprofits and AIDS organizations and public health programs. She would use her critical thinking and writing skills to craft proposals, grants, public education campaigns. Soon, no doubt, she would be getting job offers, deciding between different rollouts of the Real Job gravy train and functional adulthood.

Clever Jane. Feckless, unemployable Bonnie. Jane, industrious ant, Bonnie, fiddling grasshopper. That was her, yup. But she wasn't ready to give in without an argument. “I can do historic preservation. Environmental issues. Museum work. I'm a generalist.”

“You could still do something with computers.”

“I'm not one of those business guys.” They were class of 1999. The dot-com bubble was still bubbling.

“I didn't say start a business. I said learn a few things about programming. Add to your skill set. They always need people who know computers.”

“And when I was heading off to college, one of my aunts told me I should advertise on the dorm bulletin board to do people's mending and alter hems, because people always needed that.”

“You're not the mending type,” Jane agreed.

“I don't think I'm the computer type either.”

“Well you better figure something out, if you don't want to have to move back home.”

“Now you're just being mean,” Bonnie said.

It was the beginning of their final semester, and they were sitting in the living room of their campus apartment. Outside it was bright and snowless January, the nothing-landscape of the Midwest in winter, brown grass, sticks of trees, pavement. Their apartment was on the third floor of a midrise building of tan brick. An identical tan brick building was visible across a courtyard. Both buildings, and all the other apartment buildings on the block, were occupied by students. Twenty minutes before classes started, the street doors opened and lines of students hitched to backpacks filled the sidewalks.

Bonnie and Jane had lived here more than two years, and although they had put a lot of enthusiasm into decorating and arranging the space, by now it was overfamiliar to the point that neither of them really saw it anymore, and with its stacks of books and CDs and plants and candles and the framed Gauguin prints leaning against the wall so as not to violate the prohibition against putting holes in the walls, it looked a great deal like the apartments of everyone else they knew.

Bonnie was bored with saying she was bored, and waiting for her jobless future to land on her. If nothing else came through, she was going to move to California, where exactly she did not know, and get a job in a bookstore or a coffeehouse or more likely both. The prospect was mildly panic-inducing, but it was a talisman against the used-up feeling of college life.

Bonnie's mother and stepfather, who had paid for her education, wanted to believe it had all been worth it, if not in a strict dollars and cents calculation, at least so they would not have to keep worrying about her. Bonnie's stepfather was a sculptor of large, landscape-sized, beaky-looking metalworks, the kind commissioned by enlightened corporations and civic bodies. Bonnie's mother handled the business end of things, keeping the books and wheedling clients. They wanted Bonnie to have some tangible accomplishment, not just be a student of the human condition, which was the unfortunate flip answer she'd given them the last
time they asked. Bonnie liked to make fun of the stepfather's sculptures; she considered them ugly and overpraised. But they were kind of a big deal, getting respectful mention in art journals and bringing in handsome amounts of money. It was confounding, it put her into a false position to be sniping at something massive, tangible, and successful when she had nothing of her own to set against them.

At any rate, she would not be moving back home after graduation, inhabiting a spare bedroom and listening to everybody else's ideas for what she should do with herself. Grad school would be better than that. Of course she had not applied to grad school, so that wasn't an option either.

Jane said, “I don't suppose we could clean the place up some while we're waiting to graduate, you know?”

Meaning, it was Bonnie's turn to vacuum and dust and scrub the toilet. It always seemed to be Bonnie's turn, but that was because Jane was so tidy. Jane wore an apron and rubber gloves to do the dishes, scrubbing away like a housewife on speed. She wiped down refrigerator shelves and even cleaned the top of the refrigerator, which Bonnie regarded as something like the free space in bingo.

“It doesn't look so bad.”

“There may not be standards around here, but there are limits.”

“All right, fine, memsahib. There shall be clean.”

“You know, one reason to get with the program on jobs is so you can hire a maid.”

“But most elevated memsahib, do you not understand? Maid will be my job.”

“So funny,” Jane said. She stood up from the couch and started straightening a toppling pile of magazines. “Jonah's coming over tonight.” Jonah was Jane's boyfriend. They were probably going to get married sometime, if she could get Jonah to go along with it.

“Really not much point in cleaning up ahead of time, is there.”

“Just do it, please?”

Jane was stomping around the room, or Jane's version of stomping, and looking all furrowed and put out, and Bonnie ventured to ask, “So how is Loverboy?”

“He's just great. Rolls out of bed in the morning, watches SportsCenter, shows up in class, goes home, plays video games, shows up here, eats whatever I put in front of him, and then we go to bed.”

“Yeah?” Bonnie prompted her.

Jane gave her an irritated look. “Not everything is about sex, you know.”

“My mistake.”

“I really do love him, I just wish he was more . . .”

“Don't look at me, I don't want to get in trouble.” Jonah had a body like a teddy bear and a halo of dark curly hair. He had trouble with his aim when using the toilet. There were any number of things Bonnie might wish he was more of, or less of, but it was not always wise to express these.

“We're really comfortable together.”

Bonnie waited for it.

“Maybe too comfortable,” Jane added, after a beat or two.

“You mean, bored. So all right, what do you want to do about it?”

“I don't know.” Jane stopped her pissed-off circuit around the room and stood, swaying a little. She was wearing a pair of unfashionable, waist-high jeans. She had a boy's meager butt and hips. She'd cut her hair short, a blond fringe. It made her look like a Scandinavian athlete who excelled in some minor winter sport. “I guess when we graduate, we'll end up going off in different directions anyway.”

“Leave it up to inertia,” Bonnie suggested.

“I thought I wanted to marry him.”

“No, you just thought you wanted to get married. Uh oh, here it comes. Don't give me the look of loathing. Don't tell me this stuff if you don't want to hear my opinion.”

Jane sat down on the orange tweed chair they'd bought for a joke, no longer funny. “You think I should go ahead and break up with him now?”

“I think we need the wisdom of the elders here,” Bonnie said, getting up and going into her bedroom.

“Oh God, not the stupid comic books again.”

Bonnie returned with a handful of tattered and gnawed-looking magazines. “Here we go. ‘From the strange turmoil in a woman's heart comes the question, “Can I Forget You?'”

“Crap.” Jane slid deeper into the orange upholstery.

“This is from ‘Love Diary,' January 1950, Quality Romance Publications, illustrated. Here's one about a lumberjack. Do we know any lumberjacks? ‘Though I shrank from the look in his eye, in my heart I desired his kisses, and I knew that I was . . . Afraid to Love!'”

“I'm begging you, stop.”

“‘Dear Diary, I can't understand what's happened to me! I thought I had my emotions under rigid control . . . that no one could turn me away from the kind of life I chose for myself! But then along came Jack Banton . . . a big, burly galoot . . .' Do people say that anymore? Galoot? ‘. . . and all my plans were blown sky high!' You should see this guy, he looks like a gay pin-up. And she's got these pneumatic tits. She's yelling at him ‘Did you hear what I said? Take your hands off me!' Then he says, ‘Take it easy, sister! I guess they forgot to tell you in finishing school that up here in the north woods, women don't give the orders!' Now honestly, doesn't that give you a little retrograde thrill?”

“Sure. Domestic violence always does.”

“See, she thinks she's in love with her city-slicker boyfriend, but then Jack dives into the river to rescue her from a log jam.”

“What's she doing in a log jam?”

“Unclear. So he pulls her out of the river and takes her back to his cabin, and would you believe he has a bookshelf full of Shakespeare and Thackeray. He's a self-educated diamond in the rough!”

“The Thackeray is overkill.”

“Agreed. Well, you can guess the rest. She breaks up with the city slicker. His name is Jonah.”

“It is not.”

“Now, what have we learned from this story?”

“We should head for the north woods and jump in a river.”

“Correct. OK, here's another: ‘Office Cinderella.' ‘Just be patient, Sally. When we're married I want to support my wife! I don't want to share her with a boss!'”

“It's hard to find great guys like that nowadays.”

“How about this one: ‘Gee, Ruth, I thought you understood. I'm crazy about you, but well, a guy doesn't like it when a girl is smarter than he is about everything.'”

“Sound of vomiting.”

“This is from ‘Western Love Stories.' ‘Can a girl be a sheriff and forget that she is a woman? Lucy performed her duties very efficiently until she had to arrest Dave Ringo, and then she was all woman.' Dave Ringo! I bet you money that's not his real name.”

Jane wriggled herself upright again. “Maybe you could get a job as a sheriff.”

“I think I'd like that. These comics have some great ads. The ‘Up-And-Out Bra,' with a testimonial by Miss Doris Harris, Wichita, Kansas. Her new, attractive bustline has given her poise and confidence. Or perhaps, Jane, your problem is tormenting foot itch?”

“Why did you buy these wretched things?”

“I swear, the only thing that's changed in fifty years is reliable contraception. Don't get me wrong, that's not nothing. Why aren't there any romance magazines for men?”

“They're called pornography.”

“Seriously, don't men fall in love? Are they embarrassed about it? What about love poems and love songs, do they write them just so they can get laid? It's very discouraging.”

“Don't forget to take the garbage out,” Jane said, getting up.

So Bonnie resigned herself to cleaning. After Jane left for class, she started in on the bathroom, clearing away all the shampoos and styling
products and skin scrubs and toothpaste, the eyelash curlers and lip gloss, all the products with hopeful names, meant to evoke, variously, meadows, jungles, deserts, breezes sultry or fresh, innocence or ripeness. Vanity vanity vanity. Would she be any happier with blotchy skin and fuzzy hair? No. It was one more discouraging thing.

Bonnie took a sponge and Comet to the shower, and yes, there did seem to be more of her own hair clogging the drain than Jane's, as Jane often noted. She had thick, coiling dark hair, always falling forward into her eyes. There was too much of it, just as, it sometimes seemed, there could be too much of Bonnie.

“You're like, a sexual predator,” Jane told her once, meaning it mostly, but not entirely, as an insult. “Why thank you,” Bonnie had answered, because what else could you say, really. By now she knew she was different from most women, not even necessarily more juiced up, because how did you measure such things anyway, but willing to go to greater and more outlandish lengths, have the wrong kind of boyfriends and the wrong kind of sex and go about things all wrong so that more often than not her romances ended in wreckage and despair.