CHAPTER 18

The First Time Having Sex with John

After her experience with Alex, Leda decided that she wanted to wait before she had sex with anyone else. She’d express this idea to John at an Indian restaurant on their fifth date.

“I think it’s better if we wait to have sex.” She didn’t look away from her piece of naan as she spoke.

“I think that’s a good idea,” he said.

“I knew you would,” she said. “I just really wanted to be clear about everything before it gets too serious.”

“Are you worried about things getting too serious?” he asked.

“No, I’m not worried.”

John smiled. She watched him scoop saag aloo onto his rice and take a bite. She admired how thoughtless he seemed in the motion. He ate in a way that was abandoned of all self-consciousness. She always found herself eating meticulously when in front of friends or dates, taking small bites, covering her face with her hand as she chewed, obsessively wiping the corners of her mouth with her napkin. Later she’d notice John maintained the same type of disregard about his bathroom habits. Her whole life she struggled with the fear that people would take notice of how long she was missing after excusing herself. They’ll think I’m pooping, she’d think as she tried to poop as quickly as possible. John, on the other hand, never seemed to worry. Sometimes he’d be in the bathroom for a short time and then other times he’d be gone for longer. She’d ask him about this soon after their six-month anniversary. She had a meeting with a professor in the morning. John waited with her outside of the professor’s office.

“I really have to go to the bathroom,” she said.

“Then go.”

“No, I don’t want to be in there for too long. It’ll be weird.”

“Who cares?”

“But she’ll be waiting for me.”

“Then she’ll wait.”

“No! That’s crazy.”

“You’re the one being crazy. If you have to go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom,” John said.

“Don’t you care if people are waiting for you when you’re in the bathroom?”

“No, why would I care?”

“Because then they’ll judge you that you’ve been in there for a long time.”

John shrugged his shoulders. “It seems insane. It’s not like they don’t go to the bathroom too.”

Leda considered then that maybe neurosis over bodily functions was a purely female trait.

“I won’t be able to go anyway,” she said.

All the fear went away eventually. Soon she ate wildly and ravenously in front of him. No longer concerned that he’d judge if she ate too much, no longer needing to eat a second dinner at home after the date, the silent leftover spaghetti and its guiltless indulgence as she’d stand by the fridge still dressed up from going out. The bathroom habits would also break down after living together, and eventually she wouldn’t even worry about pooping with the door open. No longer afraid to be human or unfemale. Real intimacy estimated by audible farts.

It wasn’t easy to abstain from sex with John. Of all the men she’d made out with (there had only been five), she never felt like she did when she was with him. With most of them she needed to convince herself that this was good, that their tongues and all that saliva were somehow what it was meant to be. This is kissing. This is just what it’s like, she’d think.

One of the boys told her she was a good kisser. His name was Neal. He had red hair and a swollen-type face. She knew she should return the compliment, but all the while, as he kissed her, and touched her face with his roundish, feminine hands, and put his tongue delicately this way and that, as if he had written out a plan for kissing her years before they had ever met, she had been thinking that she never, ever wanted to have sex with this person. She imagined his roundish, feminine penis and him delicately thrusting it in her this way and that. So she said, “Thanks, you’re something too.”

The other boys were similar to Neal in the sense that they always seemed to be thinking of ways to impress her. They seemed to kiss with so much thought, so much pressure on themselves to get it right, as if she would pull away from them and say, “Wow, you really are as amazing as you wish you were in your head!” Leda wondered if sex was something that burdened men in the same way bathroom habits had burdened her.

John was different. John was rough. He was uninhibited, unthinking. He held her and dove for the things he wanted. It was as if his body were responding to her body without any conscious effort or control, an abandonment so rich and unyielding that she felt almost shocked by it. Never had she considered that this is what she could want from a man. There was in her a person who would emerge in these times that was so different from the person she had thought herself to be. She could hear her own voice, pale and fragile like a squeak or a listless cry. How frightening to love being so small, she thought.

Leda decided to have sex with John soon after she realized she was in love with him. It was raining and they had been in the Public Garden. They walked along the center pond and saw ducklings. It was warm but not hot, and John held her hand. How good she felt with her hand in his. If she had drawn a picture of her hand in John’s it would have looked as if her hand was so enveloped that it hardly existed. But if she could have expressed the feeling of it, she would have drawn her own hand large and raised up, bigger than the pond, bigger than anything else; she may not have even drawn him at all.

They sat on a bench for a while and watched the day pass. John told her about having never been on the Swan Boats, and she thought they should take a boat ride together sometime.

“Let’s ride the Swan Boats next weekend,” she said.

“That would be great,” he said.

The rain picked up, and they ran for cover in a nearby Starbucks. John grabbed her arm.

“We have to outrun the rain,” he said, weaving her through trees unnecessarily. I wish I could outrun the rain forever, she thought.

He ordered an espresso and she ordered a tea. They stood together and waited for their drinks. He made fun of a man wearing a fedora with a feather.

“Look at that asshole,” he whispered, nudging her to the direction of the man.

Her tea was made first, and John handed it to her.

She walked over to the milk and sugar in a viscerally hurried manner. The tea clouded with milk as she poured it. She couldn’t find a stirrer, but she didn’t care. She was thinking of something he’d said earlier in the day.

As she headed back to the counter she saw a couple standing beside him. She couldn’t hear what they were saying through the noise of the café, but she knew they wanted directions because of John’s gestures and pointing and then leaning in with his phone to show them a map. As she walked closer his voice became audible only by pitch and she heard him say, “Boylston Street.” The moment was so small, so unimportant. It could have passed by like so many others. It was like blowing the seeds off a dandelion or waking up in the morning, so much of it was nothing, and then Leda thought, I’m in love with him, and suddenly it wasn’t nothing at all.

That weekend they went out for a fancy dinner at a restaurant that had live jazz. She wore her pinchiest high heels and sexiest red dress. It was so low-cut and fit her so perfectly that she didn’t even need to worry about being linear in it. Men all stared at her, and John said that it was like walking around with porn. She took offense until he explained:

“What I mean is I feel like every man in this room wants you.”

She pretended to still be annoyed, but she loved hearing him say it. Feeling like that was some kind of burden and some kind of freedom and little could she distinguish which was which, so she ordered a sundae for dessert, and she ate the cherry languidly, but when she saw a group of men at the table next to them watching her, she slouched forward, put the stem down, and chewed it up fast.

She and John had sex for the first time that night. It was the best first-time sex she’d ever had. It was a little painful, and she certainly did not orgasm, but she was relaxed, she was herself, and she loved him. They did it twice that night and once in the morning after she stood up out of the covers and John said, “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

Afterward they went and got brunch. She had to wear her dress to breakfast, and as she buttered a scone, she sensed that the lady at the next table was saying something bad about her.

“…pregnant…” was all she could hear.

“That woman is talking about me. She thinks I’m a whore,” she whispered to John as he ate eggs.

“Aren’t you?” he said.

Leda smacked him across his forearm.

“I hate you,” she said, but it wasn’t true. Not even a little. Not even at all.