Sugar in My Bowl (27 page)

I keep caressing him back and it’s all instinctive. I haven’t any idea what the end result will be, but I didn’t seem to need a lot of instruction. “Look at me,” he whispers. “Look at me. I love you. I want to be inside of you.”

And so—it happened. Most virgins report poor results for a “first” time. Not me. I know we didn’t use any birth control; didn’t think about it. (What fools we sexually uneducated mortals were!) I don’t remember if I had an orgasm; I was so ecstatically having “something” special happen that I didn’t know if I was missing something else.

When all this passion and friction and mind-blowing was going on, time passed, unnoted. Finally, gasping like fish out of water, we lay back and looked at the stars. Then he said, “That was stupid of me. Next time, we use a rubber.”

Next time? Light began to dawn. He was my cousin. My first cousin. There was to be no “next time.” And, it never happened again though he tried and tried and I began to do that thing females do. They say no when they mean yes. I just knew that down the road we would create such a mess between our families, it wasn’t worth imagining.

Fortunately he soon went off with my older brother to join the air force because the Selective Service Act would happen anyway and they’d be drafted as buck privates. Temptation was removed in the form of patriotism, and the war lasted a long time. But I stayed half in love with him for years and years. He wrote me wonderful letters, and in time, after 1945, he returned to Fort Worth and we became “just cousins” again, seeing each other seldom and off and on in others’ company. We met socially at family reunions. Marriages ensued, children, years passed—I grew up. I read Masters and Johnson,
Playboy,
Helen Gurley Brown, and I experienced the Swinging 1960s and every other kind of sexual freedom they had to offer. I developed my personal tastes.

But nothing ever thrilled me like that one night under the stars. He was my “college education.” When X was retiring, not too long ago, he wrote me a letter. We had always corresponded without mentioning “it!” “I have never stopped thinking about you and about our night. My marriage is over. I am old now but I am still thinking about you. You need to stop working. Retire and come live with me in Arizona. The best is yet to be!”

He died alone shortly after this. But he has dominated my sexual reveries through all these years. That little experience was so surprising and so wonderful, I’d have to give it an A plus.

I wonder what would have happened if I had retired with him to Arizona.

The Man in Question

Rebecca Walker

T
he best sex I ever had was sex I never had. I was young, younger than I am now. I was twentysomething, and beautiful. Yes, I say that about myself because it is true. My skin was smooth and unlined. My body was unblemished, fit from Pilates and regular shots of liquid oxygen. I moved with certainty from my strengthened core. My hair, a natural rich brown, shined. I believed in exploration and having fun. My entire life was before me. I was young, much younger than I am now.

I lived in New York. I owned a beautiful apartment. I had a book contract. I had lovers but was in between several at the time. One lived in Russia on a Fulbright. He sent postcards. Another was truly and hopelessly wrong for me. She was poor, or should I say, less well off, and she liked dogs. Big ones. And I did not like dogs. Well, I liked her dogs, but not when they scratched the wood floors of my apartment. I did not like her dogs that much. And anyway, she was wrong for me. But the sex, now the sex, was very, very good. Until that point the best I’d had.

It was sex during which I had to do nothing but recline while she stroked and devoured me, licked and turned me over. She asked for nothing but my satiety. She liked to sneak out just after, leaving me asleep in my bed without herself ever being touched. I woke up the morning after in a daze, stumbling around the apartment, trying to recognize ordinary things like my hairbrush or a pair of running shoes. But she was wrong for me. It is not possible to describe how many ways she was wrong for me. But the sex was so good it is not possible to describe how good it was except to say that I kept having it after realizing she was wrong for me. Except to say we stayed together longer, much longer, than we might have, at least in part because of the sex.

So that is the sex I was having during this period in which I had the best sex I ever had, which was, in fact, sex I didn’t have. It was sex I imagined, sex that came frighteningly close to happening. It was sex I wanted but didn’t have; I did not let myself be taken.

The man in question lived in an apartment building close to mine and his body was quite appealing—a gentle form, not hard, and yet undeniably masculine. His member, his penis, his dick, was something I imagined I saw even when he wore jeans, and when I did rub myself against it one night, I felt its size and girth and wanted it inside of me. I wanted it inside of me like a girl wants a Popsicle or a piece of dark chocolate, or a fabulous piece of clothing that makes her gasp when she sees herself in the full-length mirror outside of the dressing room. I wanted him and his dick like that and I imagined it countless times.

We were not an item, although he lived one block away and he came over sometimes and we made out hot and heavy in my living room, a room devoid of furniture. And he liked to rub against me, too, and kiss standing up even though I always thought about Robert Doisneau photographs of French lovers at the train station and how cliché they were when we kissed this way. To make it bearable, to make it hot, I pushed him against the wall when we did it that way. I pushed him hard against the wall to feel the flap of his jeans and the tiny copper buttons underneath press against me in the spot I liked, the spot that made me want to fuck him there, in my living room, on the floor with the scratches the dogs made that I was not happy about and which I had called a buffer about because when I thought of fucking this man, I wanted to do it on a smooth floor. I did not want to turn over and see scratches on the floor that would remind me of another person’s sex, the way they took me and gave me orgasms that knocked me senseless and left, smug and satisfied by their own proficiency, in the morning.

I want to tell you his name but I can’t. He is married with kids now. They live in Santa Barbara, a place I imagine could be sexy, but never as sexy as New York, and in any case, never as sexy as the floor of my apartment in New York on cool autumn nights when the sky turns that exquisite cobalt and all of the city is alive with lights and movement and you are lying beneath a heavy body that you want to devour but you cannot because it is not yours to devour and there is something, something ineffable that keeps you from eating, partaking of the meal.

It was apprehension. Alarms went off in my head when we were together, or when I dialed his number, or met him at a bar. I knew I would like it, his dick, I suppose. That it would be delicious and thus it would ruin me because he was not right for me either, but if I fell in love with his dick, if our fucking became something I could not, or would not, control or do without then I was doomed. That, and also he had been in a relationship with someone I knew. I didn’t know her well but still it seemed unethical, wrong somehow, even though I knew she wouldn’t mind. She was off to other men, other lands.

The breaking point was this: I was at his house. I was on his bed. These were the days before iPods and he was playing CDs. They were jazz CDs, CDs I liked. He had dimmers on his lights, which I also liked, and which bathed the room in just the exact kind of sophisticated soft, yellow glow that made me feel beautiful. We had come from a small bar deep in the West Village. Did I mention I was young, younger than I am today? I was taut in the right places. The proportion of my curves was just so. His bed was like a woman’s bed—perfectly appointed for sex. For luxurious sex. For staying. For never leaving.

He gently coaxed me down onto the bed and it was as lovely as it looked. Down duvet, lovely high-thread-count sheets, soothing colors. It was a cloud of loveliness and then he lay on top of me, reaching up my sweater and pressing against me. He moved slowly, which I liked; he was not a boy you see, he was a man. He was not afraid to go after me, what he wanted, but he wanted also to make me happy, to give me pleasure.

What can I say? I wrapped my legs, still in jeans, a well-fitting pair I had gone to great lengths to find, around his hips and opened my mouth and let his tongue slide against mine. The lights, did I say, were dimmed. Jazz, did I say, perhaps Miles Davis’s
Kind of Blue,
played on the CD player. There had been a bit of drinking. Not too much to induce sloppiness, just enough to create a languid sensuality to which we both gave way, because it seemed completely counterintuitive not to, because it felt so good, so fucking right.

I cannot remember why we stopped. A well-intentioned blocking out of an event I didn’t want to happen, let alone to relive. I remember only a sudden and abrupt breaking of the closeness, a brutal rent created by something foreign, and intrusive. Was it his brother ringing the bell? Was it my other lover paging me on a tiny beeper, the little black precursor to BlackBerrys and iPhones? Was it again my fear of it being too good, of this man actually being the right fit in bed, in my body, even though he might not be in my life? Was some part of my own life going to be revealed through our fuck? Through the orgasm he did or didn’t give me? Through the size of him and the expression on his face when he came? The way he lay with me after? The breakfast we might have? The movie we might then go see, which we may have both liked, at the art house that no longer exists.

Was it too much for me to have something so good: the beautiful boy next door? Perhaps he was not complicated enough because I was beautiful and young and very attached to drama. And there were so many, many things I wanted to do, and this man, I could not be sure where he was going any more than I could be sure where I was going and if I ended up wanting him well then my whole life would change, wouldn’t it, and did I really need yet another direction to add to my list? He was the ex-boyfriend of a friend, I was in love with someone else, I was sleeping with another someone else, and I was trying to write a book. All of those things flashed through my mind, which is surprising, because I was young and generally followed my bliss wherever it wanted to take me, no matter how much trouble it caused.

The point, though, is we did stop, and we stopped suddenly. The music went off and the lights went up and I adjusted my top and he said he would walk me home. Yes, yes, I remember it now. His brother came home—they lived together in a postcollege family-dorm kind of way—and there was no privacy. It was a floor-through of a brownstone, and the door between the bedroom and the living room was made of glass. It was, I can see it now, a French door. There was a covering of some sort, but we both decided, silently, each on our own, that to close the curtains would be awkward at best; the brother would know we were inside, on the bed, making love, fucking, having sex, together.

When we reached the door of my apartment building I felt as if every cell in my body pined for release. He could have come upstairs with me. There was my floor, after all, and with or without scratches, it would receive us. I had a Navajo blanket didn’t I? I could spread it out and light candles and put on my own music, some women from Mali singing, or from France.

Instead we stayed on the shore. He kissed me in front of the mailboxes. It was a hot and steamy kiss full of promise. All of the signs were there: it would happen. He would penetrate me and I would like it and we would be bound up like that until we were no longer. It was just a matter of time and place and opportunity. We thought this because we were young and did not know the signs. The signs said I was tied up with others and he lived with his brother who came and went and gave him no privacy. The signs said I was afraid to fuck him because I was afraid I would want to fuck him again and again and then what would I do? Would I move in with him? Would we add scratches to my floor with our own lovemaking? And then perhaps he would leave me, or I would find out he wasn’t very bright. I had this notion one night as we talked. Here was someone who knew many things but was not terribly smart. I was a person, I thought at the time, who knew very little but was exceedingly, exquisitely observant. I knew something about the way people moved and what they said with their movements and I knew there was a difference between us, the way we each moved through the world, and I thought to myself yes, this would be an obstacle.

And so we didn’t do it. We never did it. But I wanted to do it. I did, I wanted to do it. It was the best sex I ever had, it was the best sex I never had. It is the sex I have replayed over and over in my mind. It is the sex that still sits perched on a ledge, disallowed the jump, the satisfying release, and the rapturous freefall into recovery.

And I think about that man and that bed and that dimmer and that music and that way he pushed my shirt up over my breasts and sucked my nipples until they were harder than they’ve ever been. I think about the roughness of his clothes brushing up against my bare skin, against the nerve endings there, the ones that made me wet and grab the back of his neck and pull his mouth closer to mine. I think about all of that and I think yes, that is the best sex I’ve ever had, the sex that lives in my mind, the sex without the messy aftermath, the decisions to be made the next day, the weighing of implications, the ecstasy and then the bitter disappointment. My best sex is the sex that didn’t happen, the sex that saved me from opening one door too many.

They Had Sex So I Didn’t Have To

Molly Jong-Fast

M
y mother fought for free love and the right to sexual expression. I fight the traffic as I squire my kids up and down Madison Avenue. Both sets of my grandparents had open marriages. I have a closed marriage (that’s where you only sleep with the person you are married to). My mother’s mother tells stories of sleeping with my grandfather in the woods and smoking “grass.” There are not a lot of woods where I live in Manhattan. If it is every generation’s job to swing the pendulum back, then I have done mine.