MY FIRST FAKE TITS

What can I tell you about Vanessa Daws?

She had a pretty, impish face, a secret cigarette habit, a bosom of astonishing—and ultimately fraudulent—provenance. She was a southerner through and through, raised on peach cobbler and good manners, elaborate in her makeup protocols. She also had literary aspirations, which gave her one unfortunate thing in common with me.

Vanessa was the first woman I slept with during my two-year tour of duty in Greensboro, North Carolina, where I had come to study writing and alienate everyone on the face of the earth. It began like this: I walked into the office of Triad Style and saw a babe standing by the bulletin board. Triad Style was the weekly fishwrap (published by the daily fishwrap) for which I wrote freelance pieces under the nom de dork S. B. Almond. On balance, these pieces sucked ass. They were supposed to be wry accounts of various local attractions (the gun show, the monster truck show). I recall reviewing the local dumps at one point. All quite glamorous.

Nonetheless, within the Triad Style milieu the name S. B. Almond radiated a certain tragic cachet. This meant that Vanessa had heard of me. I know this because I sucked around the office long enough one afternoon to secure an introduction.

“So you’re S. B. Almond,” she said. Her accent was a smoky, teasing drawl. “What’s the S.B. stand for?”

“Stupid bastard,” I said. (It was my standard line.)

“Your mother must be proud,” she said.

All our conversations were like this: the forced wit of the minor sitcom.

If I’d been a little brighter, I would have figured out that Vanessa knew who I was, that she’d already done a background check and decided I was her next Prince Charming. In the event, I was astounded when she invited me for a home-cooked meal. I spent the next week in a not-unpleasant tizzy of coital anticipation.

And I can remember driving south for that inaugural dinner, past the town of Climax, North Carolina, where I wished her to live, as this suited my slobbering poetic intentions. I remember, too, the nervous shuffle of my blood as I walked up the flagstone path to her door. She was dressed in an outfit I associated with debauched debutantes: the plunging velvet neckline, the tight mini.

Her house was fantastic, a Southern Living demo, down to the matte-and-copper accents. As it turned out, it wasn’t her house at all. It was her mother’s, but her mother was out of town and her dad had died when she was a young girl and so it was just us two and a meal of boggling proteinous complexity. I should note my habitual diet: Apple Jacks, cheese and crackers filched from readings, Progresso soup if I was feeling flush.

Vanessa lit candles and poured wine and praised my appetite. She ate little, drank much, and laughed politely at my horny-boy patter. The wine helped. By the time we were through dessert—some kind of viscid pudding—it was nearly midnight. I couldn’t be expected to drive home in such a state, could I?

She led me upstairs. And I remember her pausing on the stairs to show me a photo of herself as a girl. Actually, it was a series, a kind of devotional gallery. In each, Vanessa was dressed in a leotard, flat-chested and beaming. She had wanted to be a dancer, but a bum ankle had done her wrong.

We proceeded to the bed in the guest bedroom, shared a cigarette. Vanessa asked if I needed to be tucked in. Then we were kissing, smashing our ashtray tongues together and grabbing for the junk. The tenor of these initial moments—lunging, impatient—seemed sexy enough to both of us. We’d seen enough movies in which such hostile incompetence passed for passion. It wasn’t long before her shirt was peeled and her bra snapped open and there they were—great buoyant rondures in the Playboy register.

They really were something to see; my limbic brain went into an immediate suckling frenzy. The problem was they didn’t feel right. Not to tongue, nor fingertip. They felt, rather, like croquet balls that had been upholstered in a thin layer of adipose and skin. Strangest of all was their appearance, the way each breast rose perfectly round from her chest, the skin so taut, all but her nipples, which drooped a little, as if suffering from poor self-esteem.

I couldn’t figure it out. Were her pectorals really that toned? Did she have calcium deposits? I put the question aside for the sake of our unfolding sexual drama, which now proceeded to the damp lower regions and culminated in a panicky, partial fuck session, our bodies striking quick blows that knocked the breath out of us. Every few minutes, Vanessa informed me that her womanly virtue was in question, she wasn’t just going to fuck me like that, in her mother’s bed (we’d relocated), then she bit my shoulders and fucked me some more.

How was it, all this fucking? How was the fit? Did I come? Did she?

I don’t remember. It is the hallmark of such doomed affairs: The sensations—ecstatic as they might be—have no emotional grounding, and one is left, years later, with a residue of peculiar detail. I do remember waking up with bruises on my shoulders, pale purple gnaw marks, and I remember strutting around for the next few days wishing it were summer so I could wear a tank top that would announce to my classmates the sexual abandon to which I might inspire a woman.

Instead, I arranged to meet her at the local dive bar. She showed up in a gauzy top that left no doubt as to her size, shape, and miraculous heft. The other guys in my program were stunned, and I was full of that heady pride that permeates guys who have not quite discerned that they are fucking for the esteem of other guys.

I managed to cajole the one fellow who could stand me into coming back to my place, which meant he got to watch me and Vanessa neck, poorly. So this was nice. I had myself a trophy. She dressed well and flirted like a champ and tolerated my anxiety, which I suspect she confused with ambition.

The problem was those tits. I couldn’t get past them. They were so big and so hard, so pushy for worship. But touching them sort of freaked me out. This wasn’t any sort of political issue, merely an intuitive, tactile objection. It felt wrong to be groping at something inorganic. I’m sure we could trace this back to the fact that I was never breast-fed as a baby. But the truth is I’ve never been much for tits. In the end, they are secondary sex characteristics that have been elevated to fetish objects by our motherless consumer culture.

Vanessa didn’t see it this way. She wanted me to regard her breasts with the reverence they deserved. They must have cost her (or someone) plenty, because I could never find any scars on the underside of them; I spent hours looking.

There were other problems. Conversation, for instance. Vanessa fancied herself something of a small-town rebel. She had all these ideas about herself. She was going to become a major magazine writer, head up to New York City. I was mixed up in all this—the restless Yankee novelist who would serve as her getaway driver. But the more she recited these dreams, the more hollow they sounded. Plus she had a flat ass and couldn’t give head worth a damn.

And what of me? I was convincingly furious, but not in any compelling way. I sucked in bed, too.

We began to bicker.

I would assail her with my pathetic little list of enemies and plunk my elbows on the table and Vanessa would lecture me about manners, how they were in place to help people feel more comfortable. She had the whole Southern passive-aggressive thing down to a science. She had a favorite saying, too: Fake it till you make it. All I could think about was her hooters.

Within a month, we had hit the skids. We needed booze to bear one another, and started meeting up late, after a few drinks. The term “fuck buddies” might apply, except that we weren’t buddies. Our physical relations took on a cruel velocity. I called her once, toward the end, stoned out of my mind during a snowstorm. She was drunk and I was such a gentleman that I made her drive to my place. A little later, Vanessa climbed on top of me and pretended to enjoy my cock. She smirked and stage-whispered her dirtytalk. Then she took my hands and placed them on her breasts and my palms met that strange buttressed flesh and I thought of the photos of her as a lithe teen, spinning on her toes, how lovely she had been, how unadorned, and snowflakes floated down past my window and she saw the disappointment in my eyes as I gripped those sad saline mounds.

It would take a few more weeks for us to exhaust our shame, and a few more weeks for her to take up with a classmate of mine, which is about what I deserved. In my single surviving photo of Vanessa—taken on one of those chilly winter evenings when we were still enamored—she is dressed in black, grinning gamely from beneath the brim of a bowler hat. Her rack looks great.