Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

—

Dan and I had a lot of classes together in ninth grade, but I didn’t really notice him until he started calling me with questions about math homework. He wore very uncool turtlenecks and never made jokes. But he laughed a lot and said quietly smart things in class. His presence was calming. I went to his house for the first time during a hailstorm. There were about ten people from my grade there. One of the girls had an older brother with a fake ID, so we had two fifths of vodka. I had never been drunk before. After my third or fourth shot, I sat down on the bed next to Dan. “This is a new life,” I said. He wrapped me in his long arms. I giggled against his chest, a little kid again, unburdened by implications: Everything happening was just what was happening. We started kissing, oblivious to the other people making out and talking around us. A shirtless girl fluttered into Dan’s room. “Dan!” she cried, unhooking her bra and dangling it from her finger. She ran toward the bed. A beam from the low A-frame ceiling took her out cold. Torrents of laughter. Dan helped her up, rolling his eyes at me.

A few weeks later I was in Dan’s twin bed, wearing only my underwear. He was propped up on his elbow beside me, holding my hip with one hand. “I’m not going to let you put your clothes back on,” he whispered. “You’re so beautiful.” His were the only thoughts about my body that existed. There was a guitar on the floor beside us and I asked him to sing to me. He sat on the edge of the bed. I curled myself around his back, my head resting on his corduroys. I was still too nervous to take off his pants. He sang about ripplin’ still water and free fallin’. He glanced at the Bob Marley poster above his bed and lowered his face to mine. “Is this love is this love is this love that I’m feeling?” I added my voice to his. This was the reason people did not erase themselves from the universe. Dan’s parents yelled up the stairs that it would soon be dinnertime. I phoned my dad. I glided into the passenger seat of his truck. Words came out of his mouth. Short, silvered ribbons of light came out of mine.

When Dan and I lost our virginity to each other, I never considered that sex would get far better and far worse than this. “We fit together,” he said. I clutched his back. My body traced the letters of the perfect sentence that was sex. A saccharine image because that’s how it felt. I was fifteen. I stared out the frosted-glass windows during Spanish class and math class and while taking a history test. There was nothing else to think about.

One Friday afternoon some months later, Dan and I were lying on his bed after school. Warm air, weary from a long summer, stewed in his room. I was wearing a long, silky skirt that made me feel adulthood as a sensuous promise. He ran his fingers through my hair. I turned my lips to his. “I think we should break up,” he said. “I’m just not attracted to you anymore.” I rolled and jumped at the same time, landing near his doorway. It seemed then that those words had appeared suddenly in the air around our intertwined bodies, and Dan had snatched them up on a whim. But once I was alone again, trudging through the activities required to be a person, I understood that his words had been hovering over us all along.

—

This is the romantic advice I got from my father: “If you cut off a hen’s head and then dangle it in front of a rooster, the rooster will start doing the mating dance. All it takes is a bloody gizzard. Keep that in mind when the boys ask you on dates.”

But boys never asked me on dates. They invited me into closets and bathrooms at parties in dark basements. They invited me to come over when their parents were out of town. I remembered the gizzard, and if I went — I usually went — it was not because I wanted to feel special or loved or chosen. I wanted to feel good, the way I had when I was in bed with Dan.

A boy from my English class — nice enough, cute enough — invited me over to watch a movie. I said hello to his mother and younger sister, working on math homework together at the kitchen table, and followed the boy to the basement. He put on Fight Club and we watched the first fifteen minutes. He suggested we go into the adjoining guest room and lie down. I agreed right away; the movie was disturbing me. We kissed stiffly for a minute or two. He pulled off my shirt and inhaled my nipples. He pushed me to his waist. I never said no to their demands, stated or implied. I was there to lose control, to be surprised by another person, to share an interaction entirely unlike the dull, inane, faintly mean chatter of which most of my interactions consisted. I wanted to be roused. And the boy’s moans did arouse me, so much that I could hardly wait to pull off my jeans. Maybe I’d even have sex with him that night. But arousal did not lead to pleasure. It led to millions of sperm dying in my mouth. Two minutes of dutiful cuddling. Buckling of pants. Ejecting of movie (how it enraged me to see the care with which he returned the DVD to its container). That was fun. See you around.

There were many encounters like this. They taught me a new kind of pain. In bed alone afterward, I would lie on my back with my arms clenched at my sides, heart crashing against my ribs, stupid hope pecking my skin. My body did not know to stop waiting.

You could say I was a slut. You could say the boys were assholes. You could say we were hungry people who had been led to a buffet and informed that the only way we could eat was to lie on our backs under the table, blindfolded, openmouthed. When I complained to a friend with a lumpish, flat-chested body about unsatisfying hookups, she said, “But you’re so pretty! I always thought the only reason guys would treat me that way is because they found me disgusting.”

A few years later, when I was living in Paris, I was bored and lonely and looking for something sexy to read on the Internet. I stumbled on a chat room of seemingly college-age boys describing the blow jobs they’d gotten. One of them described going to a girl’s room to “watch a movie.” The phrase was in quotes, followed by a smiley face emoticon. He got the best BJ of his life. This girl was mad skilled. She invited him to come over again the next night, but he’s like set on BJs for at least a week, dude. Smiley face. He didn’t even try to pick up the hot chick giving him the eye in the elevator as he left the skilled girl’s dorm room. Smiley face. Instead he went straight back to his room to write about the BJ to a bunch of strangers. He was still fuckin’ high on life. Exclamation point.

The girl had invited this boy over; she had lowered her head to his waist, swallowed his semen, displayed no need for reciprocation, invited him to come over again whenever he wanted. Who wouldn’t take such pleasure freely offered? I got so wet reading the boy’s post that I had to touch myself, imagining his perfect selfishness.

Like the girl with the mad BJ skills and the girl eyeing the satiated dude in the elevator, I kept on giving away what I wanted for myself. I wanted to come in some pretty slut’s mouth. Pull up my pants. Walk home — mind clear, body light. But my body refused me this ease. When a boy got naked with me, he ejaculated. When I got naked with a boy, my body became a shapeless vibration of erotic feeling building slowly until — he grunted and rolled away and I remained frozen for hours in the wide-awake vibrating place.

The more I gave away what I wanted for myself, the hungrier I became, filled with the loud idea of sexual release, never the reality. I began insisting on my own orgasm, however perfunctory; I often had to move the boy’s hand with my own. Only an orgasm dulled the anxious clamor of needs aroused and abandoned. With Dan — whose twenties whittled him into a slack-haired, overweight, jovial real estate agent whom I am glad I didn’t marry — I’d had no expectations of the form my pleasure would take; every good feeling was a surprise. After Dan, orgasms were a salve. They separated my longing from the man who had aroused it. He had fulfilled his purpose; I could want him to leave and enjoy the desire for his absence.