What first attracted me to Maria was the way she had no reser­va­tions about say­ing she didn’t like Walt Whitman’s poetry, even though our freshman-year pro­fes­sor in Intro­duc­tion to Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture had made Whitman’s work cen­tral to the course. When I told her one day as we were walk­ing out of class that I admired her hon­esty, she smiled, said some­thing about how most lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sors had more hot air in them than sub­stance, and walked off to wher­ever she had to go next. A few days later, when I saw her sit­ting alone in front of the library, the hello I stopped to say grew into an hour-long chat, and after that, for the next month or so, we met every few days at a table in the back cor­ner of the Rainy Night House Café, where we sat for hours drink­ing tea, eat­ing bagels, and talk­ing. One after­noon, just as we were get­ting up to leave, Maria said she’d been given a bot­tle of good wine as a gift, and she asked if I would come to her room that evening to help her drink it.

She was already sev­eral glasses ahead of me when I arrived, and while I played catch-up with the wine, our talk turned to a sub­ject we’d never before dis­cussed, love and rela­tion­ships. We cir­cled the ques­tion of our own bud­ding involve­ment war­ily, let­ting it drop in and out of the con­ver­sa­tion, each of us wait­ing for the other to risk say­ing, or doing, some­thing first. Then Maria asked me, “Richard, do you like your body?”

“Yes,” I answered, “why?”

She got down from her chair and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me, “No, I mean do you really like your body?”

“Yes,” I said again, but before I could ask if she liked hers as well, she leaned for­ward and asked her ques­tion even more emphat­i­cally, “Are you truly sat­is­fied with every part of your body?”

Con­fused, and begin­ning to feel a lit­tle threat­ened, I allowed a small edge of anger to sharpen my voice, “What are you talk­ing about?”

Maria smiled to her­self, put her hand warmly on my knee, and said, “You know, do you think you mea­sure up physically?”

Finally I under­stood, but what I under­stood only con­fused me more since the chal­lenge implicit in Maria’s words – or at least the chal­lenge I felt to be implicit in Maria’s words (she might not have meant them as a chal­lenge at all) – seemed to shift the basis of what was hap­pen­ing between us from the mutu­al­ity of friend­ship to the adver­sar­ial stance of per­former and critic. I knew that big­ger penises were sup­posed to be bet­ter when it came to hav­ing sex, but I was inex­pe­ri­enced enough that I didn’t really under­stand how “bet­ter” was sup­posed to work. How big did “big” have to be to make a dif­fer­ence, I won­dered, and what pre­cisely was the nature of “bet­ter?” More plea­sure? For whom? These were ques­tions I’d asked myself and been unable to answer every time the sub­ject of penis size and sex came up, and now that Maria had asked me the ques­tion directly, I was speech­less, caught in what felt to me like a damned-if-I-did-damned-if-I-didn’t sit­u­a­tion. Any­thing I said — yes, no, maybe, let’s find out — seemed to me a pick­ing up of the gaunt­let I thought Maria had thrown down, and since I didn’t think I knew enough to com­pete, my first impulse was to remain silent. On the other hand, to say noth­ing was prob­a­bly to lose my chance to be with her, and I really wanted to be with her. So I decided to turn the tables. “I don’t know. Do you mea­sure up?” I asked her.

Maria’s face changed imme­di­ately. The gen­tly mock­ing antic­i­pa­tion with which she’d been wait­ing for my response van­ished, and she searched my face with eyes that were sud­denly sad and deeply sus­pi­cious. She kept her hand on my knee until she found, or didn’t find, what she was look­ing for and then, so softly that I almost couldn’t hear her, she said, “Some­times,” and for a moment I thought she was going to cry.

Maria got up and went back to her chair. We talked a while longer, try­ing to recap­ture the easy ban­ter from ear­lier in the evening, but she was sud­denly unable to look me in the face, and when I finally stood up to leave, all Maria did was wave a silent good-bye from where she was sit­ting. We saw each other on cam­pus a few times after that but never said more than hello, and Maria only had once to turn and walk the other way as I approached for me to under­stand that she didn’t want to talk to me again.

When I went home at the end of the semes­ter, I told this story to my mother, ask­ing her what Maria’s rea­sons might have been for try­ing to seduce me in the way that she did. My mother’s answer only added to my con­fu­sion. The size of a man’s ego, she explained, could be mea­sured by the size of his penis. To illus­trate her point, she told me a story about a man who tried to pick her up in a bar she’d gone to with her friends. At first, she refused him politely, but as he grew more and more insis­tent, she grew more and more annoyed until, hav­ing had enough, loudly, so that the peo­ple around them could hear, she told him that unless he had a “base­ball bat” between his legs, she wouldn’t have any­thing to do with him. He, of course, protested that he’d “never had any com­plaints,” but my mother slapped her palm on the bar and told him that if he had what it would take to have her, she wanted to see it right then and there. If he didn’t, well, he knew what to do.

Need­less to say, the man walked away.

It was hard to know how this story answered my ques­tion, so I asked my mother if she thought Maria’s chal­lenge about whether or not I “mea­sured up” had been intended to put me in the same posi­tion as she had put the man in the bar. My mother’s response con­fused me even fur­ther. “Only small men,” she said, “say size doesn’t matter.”

///

“Next time,” my mother is laugh­ing — but the smile on her face is a thin line of con­tempt, and when she leans for­ward to tap the pol­ished nail of her right index fin­ger in rhyth­mic empha­sis on the wooden sur­face of the din­ing room table, her eyes smol­der — “Next time, tell your father you don’t have such prob­lems. Tell him you wear a steel jock­strap.” I am six­teen, four or five years younger than I was in the story I told you above, just home from a visit to my father in Man­hat­tan, and I have just shared with my mother his first and only attempt at a father-son talk with me about women and sex. Walk­ing from the restau­rant where he’d taken me for lunch to the sub­way where I would catch the train home, he’d put his arm inti­mately around my shoul­der, leaned his head in towards mine, and asked, “Do you have a girl friend?” I told him no, which was a lie. “Well,” he responded, “you will soon, and once you start dat­ing, you’re going to run into sit­u­a­tions you won’t know how to han­dle.” He moved a few steps ahead and turned to face me, search­ing my eyes to make sure I knew what he was talk­ing about. “I just want you to know you can call me.”

“I know,” I said, and the look of relief on his face as he quickly changed the sub­ject to how I was doing in school made me want to laugh out loud. There was no way he could’ve known that I’d already lost my vir­gin­ity, but know­ing that he didn’t know and real­iz­ing how easy it had been to deceive him made me feel supe­rior, and it was this feel­ing of supe­ri­or­ity that I brought to the table when I told my mother the story. “What does he think he’s going to teach you, any­way?” she asks, let­ting her smile loosen into a softer, more con­spir­a­to­r­ial grin. “You prob­a­bly know more than he does already.” She laughs again, but some­thing in her tone makes me uneasy, and so, when I laugh with her this time, it’s more because I think she expects it than because I think what she’s just said is really funny.