Alas, a Blog

What first attracted me to Maria was the way she had no reservations about saying she didn’t like Walt Whitman’s poetry, even though our freshman-year professor in Introduction to American Literature had made Whitman’s work central to the course. When I told her one day as we were walking out of class that I admired her honesty, she smiled, said something about how most literature professors had more hot air in them than substance, and walked off to wherever she had to go next. A few days later, when I saw her sitting alone in front of the library, the hello I stopped to say grew into an hour-long chat, and after that, for the next month or so, we met every few days at a table in the back corner of the Rainy Night House Café, where we sat for hours drinking tea, eating bagels, and talking. One afternoon, just as we were getting up to leave, Maria said she’d been given a bottle of good wine as a gift, and she asked if I would come to her room that evening to help her drink it.

She was already several glasses ahead of me when I arrived, and while I played catch-up with the wine, our talk turned to a subject we’d never before discussed, love and relationships. We circled the question of our own budding involvement warily, letting it drop in and out of the conversation, each of us waiting for the other to risk saying, or doing, something first. Then Maria asked me, “Richard, do you like your body?”

“Yes,” I answered, “why?”

She got down from her chair and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me, “No, I mean do you really like your body?”

“Yes,” I said again, but before I could ask if she liked hers as well, she leaned forward and asked her question even more emphatically, “Are you truly satisfied with every part of your body?”

Confused, and beginning to feel a little threatened, I allowed a small edge of anger to sharpen my voice, “What are you talking about?”

Maria smiled to herself, put her hand warmly on my knee, and said, “You know, do you think you measure up physically?”

Finally I understood, but what I understood only confused me more since the challenge implicit in Maria’s words–or at least the challenge I felt to be implicit in Maria’s words (she might not have meant them as a challenge at all)–seemed to shift the basis of what was happening between us from the mutuality of friendship to the adversarial stance of performer and critic. I knew that bigger penises were supposed to be better when it came to having sex, but I was inexperienced enough that I didn’t really understand how “better” was supposed to work. How big did “big” have to be to make a difference, I wondered, and what precisely was the nature of “better?” More pleasure? For whom? These were questions I’d asked myself and been unable to answer every time the subject of penis size and sex came up, and now that Maria had asked me the question directly, I was speechless, caught in what felt to me like a damned-if-I-did-damned-if-I-didn’t situation. Anything I said—yes, no, maybe, let’s find out—seemed to me a picking up of the gauntlet I thought Maria had thrown down, and since I didn’t think I knew enough to compete, my first impulse was to remain silent. On the other hand, to say nothing was probably to lose my chance to be with her, and I really wanted to be with her. So I decided to turn the tables. “I don’t know. Do you measure up?” I asked her.

Maria’s face changed immediately. The gently mocking anticipation with which she’d been waiting for my response vanished, and she searched my face with eyes that were suddenly sad and deeply suspicious. She kept her hand on my knee until she found, or didn’t find, what she was looking for and then, so softly that I almost couldn’t hear her, she said, “Sometimes,” and for a moment I thought she was going to cry.

Maria got up and went back to her chair. We talked a while longer, trying to recapture the easy banter from earlier in the evening, but she was suddenly unable to look me in the face, and when I finally stood up to leave, all Maria did was wave a silent good-bye from where she was sitting. We saw each other on campus a few times after that but never said more than hello, and Maria only had once to turn and walk the other way as I approached for me to understand that she didn’t want to talk to me again.

When I went home at the end of the semester, I told this story to my mother, asking her what Maria’s reasons might have been for trying to seduce me in the way that she did. My mother’s answer only added to my confusion. The size of a man’s ego, she explained, could be measured by the size of his penis. To illustrate her point, she told me a story about a man who tried to pick her up in a bar she’d gone to with her friends. At first, she refused him politely, but as he grew more and more insistent, she grew more and more annoyed until, having had enough, loudly, so that the people around them could hear, she told him that unless he had a “baseball bat” between his legs, she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He, of course, protested that he’d “never had any complaints,” but my mother slapped her palm on the bar and told him that if he had what it would take to have her, she wanted to see it right then and there. If he didn’t, well, he knew what to do.

Needless to say, the man walked away.

It was hard to know how this story answered my question, so I asked my mother if she thought Maria’s challenge about whether or not I “measured up” had been intended to put me in the same position as she had put the man in the bar. My mother’s response confused me even further. “Only small men,” she said, “say size doesn’t matter.”

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“Next time,” my mother is laughing—but the smile on her face is a thin line of contempt, and when she leans forward to tap the polished nail of her right index finger in rhythmic emphasis on the wooden surface of the dining room table, her eyes smolder—“Next time, tell your father you don’t have such problems. Tell him you wear a steel jockstrap.” I am sixteen, four or five years younger than I was in the story I told you above, just home from a visit to my father in Manhattan, and I have just shared with my mother his first and only attempt at a father-son talk with me about women and sex. Walking from the restaurant where he’d taken me for lunch to the subway where I would catch the train home, he’d put his arm intimately around my shoulder, leaned his head in towards mine, and asked, “Do you have a girl friend?” I told him no, which was a lie. “Well,” he responded, “you will soon, and once you start dating, you’re going to run into situations you won’t know how to handle.” He moved a few steps ahead and turned to face me, searching my eyes to make sure I knew what he was talking about. “I just want you to know you can call me.”

“I know,” I said, and the look of relief on his face as he quickly changed the subject to how I was doing in school made me want to laugh out loud. There was no way he could’ve known that I’d already lost my virginity, but knowing that he didn’t know and realizing how easy it had been to deceive him made me feel superior, and it was this feeling of superiority that I brought to the table when I told my mother the story. “What does he think he’s going to teach you, anyway?” she asks, letting her smile loosen into a softer, more conspiratorial grin. “You probably know more than he does already.” She laughs again, but something in her tone makes me uneasy, and so, when I laugh with her this time, it’s more because I think she expects it than because I think what she’s just said is really funny.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.