Amy Bloom - Love Invents Us

“Meet you at the bike rack at five.”

We were very private and very proud. We met at the furthest bike racks, the ones shunned by the jocks and the hippies; we nodded to each other in the halls, and on the weekends we walked down Bleecker Street, kissing at every street corner and looking into the eyes of people who looked at us. I expanded Yolandas tutoring sessions, which was a good thing anyway, and I watched Huddie’s practices like someone with a little time to kill, sitting down so my legs wouldn’t shake. In all our months together, we saw one local movie and ate pizza by the slice at the revolting train station pizza joint, run by an Indian family who seemed not to notice that all successful Long Island pizza joints were run by Greeks, and the diners by Italians, and that the only exotic food anyone wanted was eaten on Thursday nights at Bruce Ho’s and included canned litchis and large blue tropical drinks. The Patels served watery ham, green pepper, and pineapple specials and flat Coca-Cola, and the drunks and tired women waiting for the Flushing and Bayside trains were the only people we ever saw. The pizza was so bad we started ordering the curry, mentioned only in apologetic small print at the bottom of the menu; astonished and happy, the Patels phased out the worst of the pizzas. We liked rogan josh and chicken vindaloo and the yogurt shakes, which separated us once more from everyone we knew. We made ourselves invisible. We never said why.

We used every private place a small, affluent town has, every well-kept wood, every wintering swimming pool, every empty boathouse, and even the seven-foot-wide granite boulders that some people in Saddle Rock Estates put in to make their quarter-acre backyards more interesting. Huddie brought us sodas and Twinkies from his father’s store. One night we painted all the little black jockeys in Kennilworth white and made out until dawn, watching for the first homeowner to discover the new ornament on his Ivory Rose-spattered lawn as he picked up The New York Times . We lay in the shadows of the boulders and boats and in the big blue bathtubs of empty pools and talked. Big things were happening around us, the Revolution was under way, even here, and when the older kids and decent adults finished changing the country, we would step in and carry on their work. We assumed we knew what we thought about politics, and we assumed we agreed. Brushing and braiding each others hair, unbuttoning shirts, idly running a toe along a bare leg, we talked about our families, about our school and idiot teachers, of our great luck, of his future with the Celtics and mine with The Village Voice .

I forgot Max. Every day with Huddie erased him further, until the only truth was that I had had a student crush on him years ago, that I used to babysit for his kids, that he had been kind enough to teach me how to drive a stick-shift, and that I guessed (and I could even smile at this part, flattered but sort of embarrassed) he seemed to find me attractive now that I was grown up. Did anything happen? Huddie asked. No, are you kidding? I said, and put my hand on the jumping muscle in his arm. Every time Max appeared in the parking lot across from the high school to lead me toward his car for our lunchtimes, I was completely surprised. And then I said that Mondays were no good, and then Wednesdays were no good, and I would only do it once in a great while, to cheer him up, and when I couldn’t anymore, I just gave him a little kiss and Rachel stood on the school steps for a whole week, her arms folded, daring him to ask where I was. He didn’t belong near my body now that it was Huddie’s.

Love and desire slammed us into each other, giddy and harmlessly wild as bumper cars. We were separated only, and only occasionally, by my terror of pregnancy and Huddie’s inability to maintain an erection while wearing a condom, a combination that made both of us sneakily skillful and ashamed. My passion for him flooded up like white water, immediately drained away by anxiety whenever we took our clothes off. Standing in the gym locker room, surrounded by normal girls with normal desires and normal condom-wearing boyfriends, I was amazed to learn that they found, or said they found, the erect penis itself exciting. To me, it was a dull, treacherous companion to be greeted with warmth and secretly plotted against. Huddie’s penis was stupid, but Huddie was not. I had to seem so carried away by excitement that, apparently unawares, I would make Huddie come, maneuvering not to let him near me until he was done. And since we were both seventeen I had to do it a lot. To keep Huddie and his little friend distracted, I learned how to bow and stroke like the Perlman of penises; I could lick, nibble, or hum Huddie to orgasm from any position in no time. As soon as he was soft, I’d fondle him gently, my hand and his penis nuzzling as sweetly as two bunnies. As soon as he got hard again, I’d slide my fingers around the slick, ridged surface and hold tight, working steady as a piston, pumping his come against the backseat or onto the blanket we carried with us.

One time, as we lay naked in the green depths of Wadsworth Park, his slim brown back formed one arc, the spray of his semen another, a dark and a white crescent against a background of thick ferns and the violet evening sky; I had to twist my two hands deep into our blanket to keep from leaping on top of him, holding that beautiful, bucking power inside me.

The last sunlight came through the leaves overhead, and Huddie looked up from between my legs and flung himself forward, sliding between my wet thighs so quickly I couldn’t roll away, as I always did.

“I want you to feel me,” he said, pressing down on me heavily, from chest to thigh. “Baby, please, just a little. Just the head, that’s all.”

It was wonderful. Better than fingers or tongues, this perfectly shaped, perfectly smooth and full plum flesh, moving into me, moving me right to the edge of my skin.

Leaning back for one wet, mindless moment, I felt his penis move forward, balanced with me on an inner fulcrum. Instantly I saw myself weeping in the girls’ room like poor Celia Sheehan, and I pushed at Huddie’s hips and slid him out of me, feeling the awful cool narrowness where he had been. He came on the blanket and cursed me and began to cry, fists to his eyes, like a little boy.

“I don’t want to fight about this, I don’t want to fight with you. You want to, don’t you? I know you do. I know it. Can you take the pill or something? You know I’d take care of it if I could.”

I did know. He spent a week wearing a condom, trying to get used to it. He put one on before he went to school and he wore it all night long, but at the first grip of latex, his penis softened into a scared purple curl cruelly swallowed by a big yellow dunce cap. “No condom, no sex” took care of my pregnancy fears, except for the ones about armed and fanged sperm, swimming and gnawing through my cotton underpants, but it drove Huddie crazy. He’d started having sex when he was fourteen and wasn’t planning on giving it up just three years later.

Huddie dropped me off at the Planned Parenthood above the A&P, where I met with a series of enthusiastic, slightly disapproving women, happy to have the business, not at all pleased that I was it. I filled out forms and took off my clothes and handed the forms and a Dixie cup of urine to a woman who looked so much like Greta Stone I accidentally splashed her with half the contents. I held my breath during the internal exam and wondered how a woman could put cold metal into another woman without even flinching. The speculum clicked inside me, opening me up to the nurse’s eyes and fingers, not unkind, just saying “This is what you want? This is how it is.” The birth control counselor gave me a free first month’s supply of tiny yellow pills and a row of little pink ones to be taken during my period. I couldn’t remember anything she told me that wasn’t about killing sperm, and I didn’t listen to the part about side effects. Breast cancer and blood clots don’t mean much to teenage girls. Social ostracism and pregnancy were the only real disasters for us, and I had lived through one and was planning to outsmart the other.