Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [56]
This would be a tricky scene to direct because it would somehow need to visually convey how mechanically Brad made what I don’t think you could really call love: how he moved like an alien who had never experienced what the earthlings called “emotions.” How he touched like an animatronic statue, perhaps Abe Lincoln on Main Street in Disneyland or one of the mechanized Santa’s helpers from the Macy’s Christmas window display.
Throughout the several minutes of the actual event, things were far too quiet. I knew I should be making gasping noises of some kind, but I didn’t dare try because I wasn’t sure how a real-life version of these noises needed to sound. So at the very juncture where Natalie Dylan was probably fantasizing about how much of her windfall she would spend on an amazing new back-to-school wardrobe, I was lying there embarrassed and disoriented, not even sure if the whole thing had officially ended.
Had it gone badly?
Had it gone well?
On what basis was this experience supposed to be evaluated?
When Brad rolled off me this time, I figured I’d better follow his lead. After all, it was his house. So when he got dressed, I got dressed too. That I couldn’t think of anything to say only matched the fact that neither could he. Clearly I had done something wrong. Why else would he be acting so cold and aloof?
It was then that I noticed that there was blood on the sheets. I had either started my period or it had been Mission Accomplished. In either case, I felt bad about causing him an extra trip to the Laundromat. So I apologized as he wordlessly stripped the sheets off the bed. Then we stood around for a few minutes while he made some coffee. After that he walked me to the bus stop and left me there to wait.
Sitting alone on a cracked green Naugahyde bus seat, headed back to my dorm, I stared out the window and watched the streets of Berkeley go by. Where, I wondered, was the emotional center in this for me? I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t have a sense of accomplishment. But mostly, I was unable to decipher what all the fuss was about. What was it about sex that people liked so much? A million musicians, a million writers, a million paintings and poems and stories and songs, all rendered completely incomprehensible. I’d always thought that when I arrived at this moment, the magic they were all describing would be revealed. Had it been, but I missed it? Or was sex one of those things that everyone else agreed was great but I would never understand, like, say, orange Slurpees or Red Skelton? What part of what had just happened was supposed to have been the good part?
Here’s what else was weird: in all my meandering thoughts during what might have been my moments of basking in the afterglow, as the bus made its way down College Avenue toward my dorm, I never once wondered if I should have waited for the right guy to come along. Like Natalie Dylan, I had turned my back on acting like one of those naïve teenagers who bought into that romantic crap. Those myths were for people who weren’t part of the solution because they were part of the problem.
Yet unlike Natalie Dylan, who’d said she was seeking “a combination of a great time with a good connection and a financial agreement that I can be happy with,” I had asked for nothing from anyone and had succeeded one hundred percent.
So puzzled was I by what had or had not just happened sexually that a couple of weeks later I went back for seconds to clear a few things up. Maybe some circuit would light this time, now that I knew what to expect? At the very least, a second visit would allow me to amortize the cost of my new birth control pills down to just pennies a serving.
Unfortunately, nothing that happened the second time—or the truly unnecessary third time—taught me anything more about sex or human relations, except that I could accurately predict each of Brad’s moves in his never-changing sequence, based on the one that had preceded it.
By winter quarter, I was seeing Brad only intermittently. The awkward