brain has already taken over. Even with my dearth of experience, I’d seen the little brain take over before.
“Please, Jane,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to be with you ever since the first moment I saw you on the mountain.”
I found that hard to believe. People don’t look their best in goggles. His enthusiasm eventually swayed me and I told him he could come in if he behaved himself in the lobby so we wouldn’t look suspicious.
Inside, Guy kept his hands at his sides as we walked toward the stairs. For all anyone could tell, we were a tired married couple ready to go upstairs to twin beds.
I thought about my sister Miranda and whether I should be doing this at all. She claimed to be over Guy and I believed her, but I felt that people who are really in love never do get over it, not completely.
I unlocked the door of my room and turned on the light.
“Were you in love with Miranda?” I asked Guy.
Guy sat on the four-poster bed.
“You sure know how to deflate a guy,” he said.
I wasn’t sure whether he meant physically or mentally. Either way, it probably wasn’t a good thing.
“No, I was never in love with her,” he said.
“But you acted like you were.”
“You weren’t there. She read too much into it.”
I went into the bathroom and got us both a glass of tepid water from the tap. We sat on the edge of the bed. I looked at Guy’s profile. As beautiful as Guy was, there was something about him that did not appeal to me and I couldn’t figure out what it was. Who knows what makes people attractive to each other? It could be something as simple as smell. Guy’s cologne was strong and sickly sweet.
He put his glass down on a side table, then took mine from my hand and put it down beside his. He pushed my shoulder until I was half lying, half sitting, and he started to unbutton my blouse. If I closed my eyes, I could pretend he was someone else, someone I liked more. I closed my eyes, but when I opened them, he was scrambling out of his pants as if his feet were on fire. He wore jockey shorts and I think men in briefs look a little vulnerable, more boy than man.
His penis was purplish and rather enormous. Max wasn’t what you’d call diminutive, but Guy was the stuff of which porn stars are made, not that I’ve seen many porn stars, or any really—but I could imagine. Then I thought of Miranda again, and if I’d had a penis myself it would have collapsed like an empty balloon. I think maybe it was Guy’s unbridled delight in the whole process that made me wince. He was like the character Peter Sellers played in the
Still, I didn’t stop him. It was as if I was fascinated into shock, and it wasn’t until he was on top of me and his penis was knocking about in an attempt to find the right door that I decided I’d had enough.
I pushed him away. This, at first, had no impact. The mini-brain is so far from the large one that the ears can’t easily send it signals. I understood this with a sort of clinical patience.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. His voice was husky, almost a second voice, like a science fiction character with an alien living inside him.
“I want to stop,” I said. We learned this at Wellesley in our Health and Feminism class. “I want to stop” were magic words, known the world over to mean that if you continue, you do so at the peril of a criminal record.
Guy stalked into the bathroom, closed the door, and in a minute came out with a towel wrapped around his waist. He hadn’t lost his tumescence and his penis entered the room before he did.
I had put on my bathrobe, a new one, not the pink terry cloth. This one was black silk, and I don’t know why I bought it if not for a moment like this—whatever this moment was. This wasn’t going to be a moment of passion. It was more like a moment of passion denied, and you hardly needed black silk for that.
“I’m embarrassed,” I said. “Completely embarrassed.” And I was, partly because I was ridiculous enough to let this begin and then stop it—what thirty-eight-year-old did that? And the other more compelling reason for my shame was that he had seen me naked. Except for a few extra pounds, I wasn’t any more or less lumpy than your average thirty-eight-year-old. It wasn’t my body I was ashamed of, it was that I’d allowed him to come so close. The problem was that I didn’t want anyone, any man at all, to get that close to me unless I loved him. That was the embarrassing thing. I was a complete failure at promiscuity. It didn’t matter how drunk I was or how attractive Guy was. At that moment, I was constitutionally incapable of having sex with someone I didn’t love. Only hours ago I hadn’t even wanted him to hug me, and now here we were.
I tried to explain it to him—to somehow paint myself out of the picture of prude extraordinaire and into something more along the lines of a woman of great discrimination and dignity. This was made harder by the fact that we had already rubbed around naked.
“You think it’s too fast?” he asked. He sat beside me on the bed and massaged my neck. It felt so good I almost reconsidered, but then I thought about the next morning—waking up with him, drinking coffee with him, trying to pretend we were more to each other than we were just because we’d performed a biological function in the night. It was better to stop now. What I didn’t know then was that Guy’s plans were long term, and his desires, as far as I was concerned, weren’t going to be satisfied by a hasty night of sex. “I like you, Jane. I think you’re smart, attractive, talented…and tonight I found out you were funny.”
“You think this is funny?” I asked. He laughed as if I’d just delivered a punch line.
“Not this. Not us, right now. You were funny at the college. You’re full of all kinds of wonderful things, and the problem is, you don’t seem to know it.”
That was a problem, and because I knew he had read me correctly, my heart flipped over. There is something enticing about a man who professes to know you better than you know yourself.
I had to get away.
When I told Priscilla that I’d be leaving for the Vineyard the next day, she tried to talk me out of it.
“Why would you do that? The Vineyard is horrible in winter. I thought you’d stay here until at least May. I was looking forward to it.”
She seemed to have forgotten that in the five nights I had been staying with her, she’d been occupied with Jason for four of them.
Still, it’s hard to remain angry with someone who likes you well enough to want you to stay with them for four months. Someone who is willing to provide you with a safe haven is as good as family (and in the case of mine, better).
“It’s silly. You don’t need to go to the Vineyard so early. Let me show you my new outfit,” Priscilla said. She was trying to distract me, but she knew me well enough to know that clothes were a bad way to get my attention.
I used to like how Priscilla dressed, but I saw her now with a different eye. Her obsession with Talbots looked less like good taste and more like a lack of imagination.
“Very nice,” I said about the outfit, “but I’m still going to the Vineyard.”
“I’ll see less of Jason. Would that work?”
“I need my own home, even if it’s a little box in the wind.”
“You’ll be very alone there, Greta Garbo, that’s for sure.”
“There’s my friend Isabelle. I’ve already called her.”
“Who?”
“Isabelle from college. The one with the long wavy hair.”
“Didn’t she leave before graduation?”
“Yes.”
“Because she was pregnant.”
“You do remember,” I said. Priscilla’s lack of memory was a ruse. Everyone remembered Isabelle. It was because she had been so promising. She came from a first-generation Portuguese family in Bridgewater. Her father had a bakery and made the best sourdough bread in Massachusetts, but they didn’t have much money. Still, Isabelle had won a full scholarship to Wellesley, then, right before graduation, she got pregnant, left school, moved to the Vineyard, and opened her own bakery.
Jimmy, Isabelle’s son, was almost seventeen now. He was looking at colleges himself. I saw them often
