When I was fifteen, I slept with this woman I knew. I’m not sure how old she was at the time; probably not over thirty-five. She was a friend of my mother’s, and I have never known, then or to this day, what was in it for her. I was a newly thin, undistinguished-looking kid with acne and aviator glasses. My long hair was cut and styled in the “wings” that render hilarious contemporary photographs of Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett. Though I was smart, verbal, and took an interest in the world around me—and had recently felt stirrings of some kind of new grasp on the nature of my life to come, derived from reading The World According to Garp and watching Annie Hall—that interest still quickened most keenly in proximity to things like Dune, Jim Starlin’s Warlock, and the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. I have devoted many passing moments over the intervening years to observing interactions between thirty-five-year-old women and fifteen-year-old boys, and I have found that all the mystery in the business lies on the older and wiser side of things.

My mother threw a party, and there was dancing that ran late into the evening, with the tempos slowing as the night wore on until, in the end, my mother and her boyfriend went off someplace to do whatever they did, and I found myself alone in the arms of this woman—divorced, single, sweet-smelling—subject to her languid, teasing conversation, to the pressure of her belly against my hips, and to the tender mercies of Willie Nelson singing “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”

Maybe the solution to all the mystery lies in the title and lyrics of that song—and in the ache of the voice that was singing it. I am certain the woman was pretty drunk.

“Are you a virgin?” she said in an offhand tone.

“No,” I said. I was happy to see that my reply surprised her. It was the truth, and I was hoping it would be enough to persuade her to extend the invitation that I thought she might be contemplating.

“Does your mother know that?”

“Well, I didn’t tell her,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“I don’t think so, either,” said my mother’s friend.

My virginity had been no particular encumbrance to me, and it had not lingered very long beyond the time that I started hankering to be rid of it. I was in the tenth grade, a year younger than most of my fellow sophomores, and the girl who had done me the favor was a senior: a sophisticate of seventeen, in possession of a keen mind and a tremendous American automobile of the period (an LTD? an Olds ’88?) that she used to drive herself responsibly to museums, film retrospectives, and concerts. She was a serious reader (I still have her paperback copy of The Wreckage of Agathon, and I plan to read it someday), a musician, an artist; an incipient adult, embarked on a history of unfolding adventure, both intellectual and physical, in which I was to rate barely a footnote. Her long-term steady boyfriend, to whose own brilliant incipience, as I was all too aware, I offered nothing in the way of competition, had left for college earlier in the fall with an exchange of vague promises of fidelity. She may have been lonely, missing him, looking for ways to strike back or strike out on her own. I didn’t care in the least. He was the first ex-boyfriend whose shade was ever invoked in the memories and pillow talk of a girl I was fucking, and just as great a fool as all who followed him.

She was not much to look at—raw-cheeked, long-nosed, tall, and deceivingly prim—but that was okay with me. She had as much to forgive as I did, and in any case, I have never found anything more reliably sexy in a woman than a passion for 1) reading difficult novels and 2) me. We had been selected by the casting director of destiny to play Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus in the school production of The Skin of Our Teeth, and in time-honored Dick-and-Liz fashion, one thing led to another. I got her to laugh at something I said, and then she passed me a note in the hallway, ornamented with a star of glitter and glue. After the elapse of a gratifyingly brief interval she brought me home to her bedroom in the basement of her family’s town house, and she bestowed upon me the magic of her permission.

I will try as hard as I can not to exaggerate here: I estimate that I spent merely forty-three minutes of the prolonged episode that followed in conducting a detailed and glorious survey, a USGS mapping expedition, complete with aerial reconnaissance and depth soundings, of the young woman’s vagina. I would not affirm that I was more interested in studying it than in introducing my penis therein, but it was awfully close. I had spent years looking at doubtful (and in the end worthless) photographs of vaginas in scrounged copies of Penthouse and Hustler. In the end these proved to bear as much relation to the wonder of which I found myself that night—the unchallenged and loving custodian—as the portrait of a daube of beef in a cookbook bears to the fragrant, homely, hard-earned stew that presents itself, steaming on a plate, to the nose and eyes of a hungry man.

That was a Saturday night; the next day my mother took my brother and me out to Falls Church, Virginia, to visit our grandmother. I had not showered or washed my hands, and I spent the whole day dreaming over the smell of her on my fingers. I was a traveler returned from a fabled land. I wanted to tell everyone—my brother, my mother, my grandmother—what splendors and vistas I had encountered. The next weekend there was a dance, and my first lover invited me afterward into the great dark wastes of her backseat, where there was no time for science or exploration. And then on Monday she dumped me.

She had done me so many favors—had indulged, with a tenderness that even at the time I recognized as a kind of grace, all my exclamations over and examinations of her body, especially that astonishing evolutionary feat of origami between her legs—and now she did me the final one of being honest. She liked me, she said, and she liked having sex with me, but I was too young for her. I would not talk to her in the hallways of school when my male friends were around; I would not hold hands or hang out on the blacktop or in the cafeteria. In short, I was not comfortable with all the essential ancillaries of having a girlfriend. I could not handle it. I was—somehow she said it without hurting my feelings or inspiring any kind of attempt at denial from me—too immature.

No such compunction or misgiving seemed to trouble my mother’s friend. As in a letter to Penthouse Forum, my mother and brother conveniently left town on the weekend following the late-night party, and I was by myself. My second lover came over around nine that Saturday night, much later than I would have liked, since by the time she arrived, looking pretty and smelling very good and carrying an impossibly adult bottle of wine, I was already wishing, with a fervor that shocked me, to get the whole thing over with.

I led her into the living room, and we sat down on two chairs. I managed to get the wine open, and she drank a little, and I pretended to drink a little, and then with the quenching heat of the wine against my dry throat, I took a long dark swallow. Here I am, I thought, pretending to care for wine, pretending to speak wittily of inconsequential things, pretending to be the kind of kid whose mother’s girlfriends decide to come over and throw him a fuck. I guess at some point we must have started to make out. I employed the careful, phased techniques, starting at the top of one’s partner and working ritualistically down, that I had been taught by my seventeen-year-old ex-non-girlfriend.

“We don’t need to do all that teenager stuff,” said my mother’s friend. “Where should we go?”

I suggested that we do it right there on the floor, on the green-and-blue shag rug, and that was what we did. When it was over, I rolled off and instructed her, in very plain terms, to go home. I felt none of the rapture, the stunned cartographic joy I had felt during and after my first time. Though objectively, she was much better-looking—soft and shapely—I had no desire to make a study of her. I had wanted to get the thing over with, and so I had.

“Go?” she said, and I saw to my horror that I had hurt her feelings. “But I—”

I actually employed the words “I just remembered that I have an appointment,” which is how I know for sure that I was fifteen. “I have to go see a friend.”

“Oh,” she said, and her eyes resumed their customary sly-eyed coolness. “Okay.”

She sat up and pulled on her underpants, rolled her tights back up her white thighs, shivered herself into her wool jumper. I wanted to tell her, to explain to her, that I was not ready, that I was too immature, that I just couldn’t handle it. She stood up and gathered her purse and her coat, and I saw her to the door, where she turned to me, her eyes looking vulnerable again, wondering, maybe asking me to help her make it through the night. And suddenly, with the smell of wine and cunt in the air between us, I wanted to do it again, in a bed, all night and with science and art.

“Good night,” she said. She kissed me in a final kind of way. I stood on the doorstep until she got into her car, started the engine, and drove home, leaving me one regret, one empty house, one night closer to being ready.