My Daughter's Vagina, Part 9

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

It’s funny how memory works. When I wrote before that I could not identify at all with Walter’s fantasy about fucking a woman to death, I was referring to my own inability to imagine myself into, to imagine into myself, whatever went on inside him that resulted in his fantasy. I glossed over completely a sexual experience I had when I was an undergraduate that, while not resembling Walter’s imagined experience in the least, should nonetheless have come immediately to mind. 

I’ll call her Vanessa. We knew each other from I-don’t-remember-which class but I do remember that it was on the pretext of talking about this class that we stepped away from the crowd into an out-of-the-way corner of her dorm lobby, which was where the party was being held. We were both drunk, both relatively new to the college—I as a first semester sophomore; she as a returning older student—and it was she who pointed the corner out, nudging me ahead of her so that I was standing against one wall, while she stood in front of me, leaning against the other wall with her arm, a pose no doubt very familiar to any woman who has had a man come on to her by trying to cordon her off.

I wish I could remember what she said while we stood there, because instead of talking about the class we had in common, she started feeding me such stereotypically male lines that even through the fog my drinking had pulled down around my mind–I was not wasted, but I’d drunk enough that I was happily and absurdly illogical in my thinking and talking–I was amused at how gender-role reversed the situation appeared to be. Then we were making out. In my memory there is no transition, no clear picture of who made the first move, though if you asked me to lay odds, I’d say they were in favor of her having been the one to get things started. Not only had I never been the one to make the first move–this happened not long after my encounter with Maria–but I recall thinking to myself that I was not all that interested in Vanessa physically, except for the fact that she was almost as tall as I was, and once we started kissing, I enjoyed very much being able to do so without bending down.

After what felt like an hour but was probably only about fifteen or twenty minutes, she put her hand to my crotch, cupped my erection through my jeans and led me by the hand to the room in her dorm’s basement that, she explained, had been set aside for just this purpose. As we stepped inside, she looped a red rubber band around the doorknob so others would know someone was in there, I reached for the light switch. “No,” she whispered, “it’s better in the dark.”

What happened next is very hazy in my memory. I know she refused to take her clothes off completely, and I remember kneeling naked between her legs, her pants still around her ankles, and trying unsuccessfully to find an angle at which my penis would slip into her. I know she told me it would be better if she got on top, which she did, with–I think–her pants still around her ankles, and I know she managed at last to find an angle she could fuck me from, that she did so until I ejaculated. I don’t remember if she came, though I have a vague sense that I asked her if she wanted more because I didn’t think she had. I am fairly sure that her answer was no, because the next image I have is of us getting dressed pretty quickly and heading back to our respective rooms, hers upstairs and mine on the opposite end of campus. When we said good-bye, the only words I remember us exchanging consisted of Vanessa’s insistence that I promise I would not avoid her if we happened to run into each other on campus or walking in and out of class, and my promising not to do so.

When I got back to my room and undressed for bed, I found myself covered in what I assumed–since it did not occur to me that Vanessa might have been a virgin–was menstrual blood. The blood itself did not disgust me, but I remember thinking it fit perfectly as a coda to how awkward and unsatisfying my whole encounter with Vanessa was, so I took a shower, went to sleep, and thought no more about it until some months later–it might have been the beginning of the following semester–Vanessa called to tell me she’d been in the hospital. She didn’t hold me responsible, she said, and she didn’t expect me to pay for anything, but she’d almost bled to death after we’d had sex. If she hadn’t woken up later that night, found herself and her bed covered in blood and gotten one of her suite mates to call 911, the doctors told her, she would have died. I don’t remember which part of her insides she said had been ruptured, but she said the doctors also told her the most likely explanation was that I’d “put a hole in her.”

I was, as you might expect, speechless, but I was also afraid. Not only did I not know what to say to Vanessa–what do you say when you’re 19 years old and someone with whom you’ve had a one night stand tells you the sex you had with them almost killed them?–but I also felt this very clear sense of alienation from my own body. I never would have expressed this to myself by saying my penis was a weapon, but I did feel myself immersed in a pervasive guilt. Clearly there was some aspect of intercourse I had not been aware of, some potential danger in my body that I had neglected to take responsibility for, that I had not known I was supposed to take responsibility for, and how could I not have known?, and this woman–because it never entered my mind during this phone call that Vanessa might not be telling the truth or that she might be presenting me with a very carefully shaped version of the truth–this woman had almost died because of my negligence. I did not want a body that could do this to another person, though of course I did not say that; I did not, I could not, put words to any of the feelings that were coursing through me, except for the ones I finally found to say that I was glad she was okay and to reassure her again, when she asked me, that I would not avoid her when I saw her on campus.

The entire phone conversation could not have lasted more than five minutes, but I have no memory whatsoever of what I did when I put the phone down. I don’t remember if I told my roommate, who was also one of my closest friends at the time; I don’t remember if I went for a walk to clear my head; I don’t remember if I went to get information on female anatomy so I could better understand what Vanessa said had happened to her. I do remember the conviction growing in me–prompted by I-don’t-know-what–that what she’d said didn’t make sense. Surely if I had with my penis unintentionally put a hole in her, once of us would have felt something, if not outright pain, then some more-than-usual discomfort at least; and it seems to me (though I could be misremembering this) that I eventually asked a friend of mine, a senior, who’d studied medicine in his home country, and he explained that while what Vanessa claimed was theoretically possible, as was the fact that it could have happened without either of us being aware of it, the odds were so high against it that I should stop worrying. I tried, but I couldn’t. It did not make sense to me that Vanessa would lie about something like this, and so for years I was haunted by the possibility that I had, truly, with my body, reached into her body and almost killed her.

Vanessa and I ran into each other on campus twice after that phone conversation, but it was so unavoidably clear that first time that we had nothing to say to each other beyond my asking how she was doing and whether she was healing the way she was supposed to–all she could muster were two monosyllabics, “Fine,” and, “Yes,” and she did not ask me anything about myself–that the next time we could’ve stopped to chat, we turned in silent but mutual agreement and walked away in opposite directions.

The fundamentally alien universe that the female experience of intercourse is to me. It is true I can be, I have been, penetrated; it is true that my body is, in its own way, as vulnerable in being penetrated as a woman’s body is; it is true that the metaphorical penises I have taken into myself–I have not been fucked by a man–demonstrate, as does the practice of fisting (which I have also never experienced), that there is nothing essentially male or female about the being the penetrator or the penetrated; and yet, when I meet a woman, and we  are naked, and we have with us only our own bodies, and we are going to have intercourse, it is going to be, always, always, my body inside hers; and we will bring to our fucking our experiences, the meanings we have given to our experiences, of living in bodies with genitals that are designed–for purposes, admittedly, that have nothing to do with non-procreative sex–to fit together in a particular way; and I am not suggesting that either those genitals or that design have, or should have, only one meaning to anyone; nor am I suggesting that any single meaning attaches, or should attach, to the fact that men and women fuck recreationally in the same ways that we fuck in order to procreate. I mean, simply, that while I can try to imagine the experience of having a female body–and I would assert that such imagining is necessary and valuable for men to attempt–I cannot know, in the sense that I know my own flesh and blood, what it is to have been born in a body the genitals of which define the procreative space that mine are designed to fill; I cannot, in other words, possess the body-knowledge that a woman brings to the fucking she does with me.

I never could have said this when I was nineteen, standing in my dorm room and staring out the window as Vanessa told me about what she said I had done to her, but it was, I think, a sudden and intuitive, and therefore wordless, awareness of the difference I am talking about here that sat at the root of the fear that I felt; and it was this difference that I thought about again, just a few years ago, when a relative of my wife’s told me that the same thing that had happened between me and Vanessa had happened to a high school friend of hers who’d almost bled to death after an int
ernal rupture she did not feel while having sex with her boyfriend–which was the first time in the more than twenty years since I last saw Vanessa that I had told this story and someone said to me, “Yes, it could have happened just the way Vanessa said it did;” and it is this difference that makes me think there is something wrong with saying two people have sex, as if sex were something outside themselves, like a lunch that they agree to get together to have. For the sex they have, that we all have, is always already in our bodies–regardless of gender, regardless of how many of which kinds of genitals are present, and so on, because all lovers bring some version of the distance I am talking about to their beds; it is, in part, or it is at least rooted in, what resides in us on the other side of this difference I am talking about, and so what happens when we take off our clothes and move in and out of and over and under each other in search of whatever our desire for sex has sent us in search of is more accurately described as sharing–can you imagine saying, “I want to share sex with you?”–a giving and taking and giving back, which means you are never the same person when sex is over as you were before it began. Vanessa and I certainly weren’t. The question is, and sometimes I think it is the only question that matters, is whether you’re willing to admit this and to live honestly and honorably with the consequences.