My Daughter's Vagina, Part 5

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.