Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

“Are you a vir­gin?” I“d been try­ing to ask Jen­nifer this ques­tion almost from the moment our rela­tion­ship had become physical.

She looked sur­prised, but not – as I had feared – offended. “Are you?” she asked back.

“Yes.”

“So am I,” she said, “and I want to stay that way.”

“Me too!” I laughed out loud with relief.

Jen­nifer tilted her head back and looked at me with a gleam in her eye. “Do you trust me”

“Yes,” I said, and she undid the cir­cle my arms made around her, took me by the hand, and led me through the quiet of a mid­night snow to the far end of the yard behind the build­ings where we lived. We climbed into a large foun­tain that hadn’t been used in years, the walls of which were high enough that you couldn’t see us once we sat down and, obliv­i­ous to the cold, tasted at each other’s lips while the snow con­tin­ued to fall around us.

Jen­nifer climbed into my lap and unzipped my jacket. She was two years older than I was, eigh­teen to my six­teen, but almost half my size, and she fit neatly inside the front of my parks, which I zipped half-way up behind her. We sat like that for a few min­utes, let­ting the heat between us build, and then Jennifer’s breath, warm and sud­den, was in my ear. “Do you trust me?” she whispered.

When I nod­ded my head, she told me to unzip my jacket. Then she pushed me till I was flat on my back, knelt between my legs, undid my pants, and made love to me, slowly, with her mouth. The plea­sure – it was my first time – seemed to fuse my flesh to hers, and for those moments I felt like were both me and we were both her, and I was open and vul­ner­a­ble, grate­ful and shy, and I wor­ried that maybe Jen­nifer hadn’t liked what she saw when she drew me out of myself, but her eyes were ten­der when she was done, and she held me in her hand, warm­ing me against the cool night air till I grew soft. Then, the smell and taste of me still on her lips, she kissed my mouth and said, “You know, that took a lot of courage.”

“Yes,” I answered, choos­ing to hear in her words that courage had been required of both of us. She smiled and climbed on top of me. I wrapped my parka around her one more time, and we stayed like that until it was too cold to be out­side any longer.

“I’ll see you tomor­row,” she said as we got and kissed good­bye, and, just lie in a movie, I stood in the falling snow and watched her walk back towards her build­ing until the white cur­tain of flakes closed behind her. Then I too went home to bed.

A month or so later, Jen­nifer vis­ited me on a night my mother wasn’t home and I was babysit­ting my two younger sis­ters. She arrived just min­utes after they’d gone to bed, and so we sat in the liv­ing room lis­ten­ing to music and talk­ing, wait­ing until we were sure they were sleep­ing. Then we moved into my bed­room, where on thing led to our usual other, but this time, after I had made love to her, when Jen­nifer rolled me onto my back, instead of tak­ing me in her mouth, as she usu­ally did, she climbed on top of me and began to slide her vagina up and down the length of my erec­tion. The warmth and wet­ness of com­ing so close to “going all the way” was tan­ta­liz­ing, but I still didn’t want actu­ally to do it, and I assumed, since Jen­nifer had not told me oth­er­wise, that she still felt the same way as well.

At one point, my hips jerked invol­un­tar­ily, and since the bed was very nar­row, I grabbed Jennifer’s waist to make sure she didn’t fall. In response, she swiveled her own hips and, with­out warn­ing, the tip of my penis slipped inside her, and all I was was plea­sure and flesh, flesh and plea­sure, alive to the slight­est nuance of her touch, and there was no way I was going to sep­a­rate from that, and so I moved myself slowly into her.

Much too soon, it was over. Smil­ing, Jen­nifer asked me how I felt.

“A lit­tle strange,” I said. “It was fun, but I didn’t really want to go that far.”

“Then you should’ve said no!” An edge was creep­ing into her voice. “You should’ve made me stop.”

“I’m not sure what it was – maybe the tone of her voice; maybe the sud­den hard­ness in her eyes – but as soon as the words left her mouth, I began to sus­pect she’d lied to me about being a virgin.

“I thought you’d want to think that you were my first,” she said when I got the courage to ask her some min­utes later. “That’s what most guys want any­way.” She hadn’t told me the truth, she explained, because she was afraid I’d think she was a slut. The truth: She’d lost her vir­gin­ity a few years before, when two men she barely knew got her drunk and fucked her sev­eral times each in a sin­gle night. “And don’t bull­shit me! You’re no dif­fer­ent from any other guy. You wanted to do that. You’re just not man enough to admit it!”

Given what I know now about rape, it wouldn’t sur­prise me if Jennifer’s story were indeed true, but at the time I was so angry and so hurt that I couldn’t imag­ine she was doing any­thing other than try­ing to make her decep­tion it some­thing I might accept and for­give. I didn’t care that she wasn’t a vir­gin. I cared that she hadn’t believed me when I said I wanted to stay one, and I cared that she’d lied to me about her­self. I felt manip­u­lated and dirty. How could I trust her after this?

I told Jen­nifer I didn’t want to see her any­more, and I didn’t care that she didn’t believe me when I said it had noth­ing to do with her vir­gin­ity or how she said it had been taken from her. I hoped sin­cerely that when she left my house that night, she’d be walk­ing out of my life for good. Some months later, though – I don’t remem­ber who called whom – she ended up at my house one after­noon when my mother and sis­ters weren’t home. We were sit­ting on my bed talk­ing, try­ing to find a way to patch things up, and then were were kiss­ing, and then our clothes were off, and it was as if I’d never bro­ken up with her; but then the urge came over me to be inside her again, and I climbed between her legs, clumsy with my own inex­pe­ri­ence, and despite the fact that Jen­nifer tried to help me, what I had expected to be as smooth and effort­less as it had been the first time became a strug­gle that embar­rassed me, and I began to loathe myself for want­ing her, this girl whom I real­ized I still didn’t think I could trust, and yet the humil­i­a­tion of giv­ing up, of not being able to fuck her, of not being able to get back from her what she’d taken from me – and I do not know why I felt that fuck­ing her would accom­plish that, but I did – was more than I thought I could bear and so I kept pok­ing and push­ing until, at last, I entered her.

I went into Jen­nifer that after­noon with anger and shame. There was no plea­sure in it; it was over almost before it started; and the smile of cyn­i­cal tri­umph I saw on her face when I pulled back made me feel like I might never want to have sex again – though of course I have. Some­times it was great, tran­scen­dent even. Other times, it was sim­ply fun; oth­ers, mun­dane; and some­times it came close to being as bad as it was that last time with Jen­nifer; and it is a les­son I have learned over and over again that the qual­ity of our erotic rela­tion­ships, if not of our lives as a whole, often depends on our will­ing­ness to roll with the sex­ual punches thrown our way, hurt­ing, being hurt, for­giv­ing, under­stand­ing, learn­ing, hop­ing, and then, against all odds, mak­ing the effort once more to unearth the life-sustaining con­nec­tion that lies wait­ing in the bod­ies of those who offer them­selves to us, and that we in turn offer them, using our own bod­ies to make them welcome.

And so I have a wife and a son. And because sex is also always about so much more, is so much more, than what hap­pens when two peo­ple make love, I also have had two female stu­dents whose trust in me, if only because of what they were writ­ing about, was sex­ual by def­i­n­i­tion. For it mat­ters that I was a man and that they were will­ing not merely to tell about the abuse they suf­fered at the hands of men, but also to let me help them find the lan­guage with which they could give the mean­ing of that expe­ri­ence back to them­selves, and to their read­ers, as some­thing they chose. It mat­ters because, just like sex, teach­ing and learn­ing are about desire and the ful­fill­ment of desire. It might be true that the trust my stu­dents placed in me – and, to be hon­est, that I placed in them when I decided to share my expe­ri­ences – inverts the trust that lovers bring to the bed they share, i.e., we trusted each other not to sex­u­al­ize our rela­tion­ship. Nonethe­less, it is a mis­take to think  that our rela­tion­ship was not of the body. For to help those two women to under­stand them­selves was, by def­i­n­i­tion, to help them under­stand how to live in their bod­ies.