Agorafabulous! (23 page)

I wasn’t actually certain how to go about doing it on the first date. I assumed someone invited someone else home, and maybe a stop at the drugstore for condoms was involved. I wasn’t uptight, but I’d never really enjoyed the non-oral type of sex—I was usually too tense, even after many months with Tom. I suppose it was a holdover from my seventeen years as a devout Catholic, when I regarded the prospect of a dick near my pussy with the same enthusiasm an ordinary human might reserve for a gun pressed to the back of her skull.

With Andrew, it was easy. We had a lovely dinner at a tiny French café on one of those Brooklyn streets where all the shops are aggressively adorable and the people look like the cast of a deliberately multiethnic GAP commercial. I avoided alcohol but encouraged his consumption, as I’d heard that getting the other person intoxicated was a good way to ensure that sexytime would ensue. We strolled along the promenade and held hands, and finally we sat on one of the wrought-iron benches and started making out. He was a good kisser, and I had flashbacks to when I’d thought he was so cute in college in Boston, long before I’d even heard of the town where I’d eventually meet Tom. I’d noticed Andrew in the fall semester then and it was the fall semester now, six years later. The air was crisp with the scent of dying leaves—my favorite smell in the entire world. Leaves are possibly the only things on earth that smell better as their corpses decay.

After kissing him for about twenty minutes, I pulled back and looked at Andrew conspiratorially.

“Would it be weird,” I began, “if I asked you if we could go back to your—”

“Not weird at all!” he said quickly, and we both laughed. He stood up and offered me his arm like a gentleman. I took it, feeling like a genteel Victorian lady or at least a really classy fin-de-siècle whore. Together we paraded down the streets of his precious Brooklyn neighborhood, pausing casually to point out extravagantly useless items in cutesy shop windows (“Look at that pink unicycle!”) as if we weren’t totally on our way to a hot grown-up fuck session. I finally understood the modus operandi of those aging anorexics on that show with all the shoes and handbags and Detective Mike Logan working deep cover as a millionaire douche. I was going to have sex, and this was the city! I felt alive and vibrant and reasonably attractive. And I had shaved my legs, even
above my knees.

Andrew shared an apartment with two good-looking guys who had been in a few of my classes in Boston. I’d been intimidated by them back then, because they were part of a very cool circle of writer-boys who wore slouchy vintage garments and wrote interesting poetry and short stories. They did hilarious things like invade Old Navy en masse and commence reading aloud the works of Richard Brautigan until they were asked to leave. They worked hard in restaurants and bars and spent their savings to self-publish their work, which they sold in bookshops around the city.

Andrew and I exchanged greetings with his roommates, who were polite enough to appear happy that I’d come home with him. Perhaps they genuinely were glad for their friend—he’d gotten out of a stressful long-term relationship sometime in the past year, and I didn’t get the impression it had been an easy breakup. At some point the roommates made their way to their respective bedrooms, and Andrew and I got on with the business at hand.

His room was small and had lots of books. I think I remember banging my head on a bicycle that was hanging from the ceiling. It was dark and not at all unpleasant, and we had gotten all the way to the part where he was actually inside me before I realized that something very terrible was happening.

It wasn’t the sex that was bad. He seemed perfectly capable in that realm, and I probably made a reasonable contribution. But in that moment, I was privy to a great revelation, and I suppose revelations always arrive at rather inconvenient times. Moses probably had something on his daily agenda other than standing around listening to some fiery bush, and Mary likely had some weaving to finish when Gabriel interrupted her with the announcement that she was knocked up. And so it came to pass that I was in the middle of my very first grown-up pre-appointed New York City fuckfest when I was struck by The Truth: I had never felt lonelier in my entire life.

There I was, twenty-four going on twenty-five, a woman of reasonable intelligence and sophistication, with a funny, sensitive, artsy, non-sociopathic straight boy doing very adult things to my nether regions, and I felt horribly alone. Because as kind as he was, he didn’t love me. And as desperate as I was, I didn’t love him. I probably could have gotten there quickly, if he’d asked me on second and third and fourth dates and told me I was beautiful and held my hand in front of his friends, but none of that was going to happen. I’d been having sex for nearly four years, but this was almost certainly going to be my first-ever one-night stand.

There is as yet no book of etiquette on behavior during a one-time romp betwixt the sheets. Emily Post never addressed it, and I’m fairly certain Judith “Miss Manners” Martin would turn her nose up at the question. But I am positive that I broke one sacred (if unwritten) rule of conduct: I began to cry.

Picture, if you will, the tableau: a reasonably cute, consenting, single twentysomething brunette in missionary position beneath a reasonably cute, consenting, single, dark-haired twentysomething fellow on a reasonably non-squeaky IKEA bed in a reasonably clean apartment in a reasonably hip neighborhood in a reasonably legendary borough in a reasonably immortal city. Nothing in this scenario begs the question, “But which person will sob uncontrollably in the midst of the other’s orgasm?”

Andrew paused in his labors, justifiably alarmed at my sudden change in demeanor.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, horrified. “Oh no, did I hurt you?”

I thought about Tom, and how much I missed him and still loved him. I thought about school, and how much I didn’t want to be a teacher. I thought about writing and how I hardly ever did it for fun anymore. I thought about my body, and how I still hadn’t lost the burrito weight I’d gained in Texas. I thought about how I hadn’t had a panic attack in a long time and how I (mostly) wasn’t afraid to leave the house or get on an airplane, and how I was living on my own—something that had seemed impossible back when I was learning how to eat an entire meal again—and how I was still unhappy.

I sobbed, “This . . . just isn’t . . . how I thought it would be.”

I’m pretty sure he thought I was referring to his dick. Which, incidentally, he promptly withdrew from my undercarriage. We both looked at it at the same time and saw that it was wearing what appeared to be an Elizabethan ruff. And while my vagina is a cave of many wonders, it does not contain a Shakespearean costume closet. The condom, it seemed, shared my poor sense of timing.

“Oh my God,” I said. “That is so fucking broken.”

I’d had that happen before, back in college. I’d gone to Planned Parenthood and taken Plan B. It had been a frightening thing, and my Papist programming was so strong that I wasn’t entirely sure I hadn’t committed an unforgivable sin and paid for an extremely early and gentle abortion. But at least I’d had a boyfriend to support me through it. This was an entirely different challenge.

On the upside, I immediately stopped crying. I inherited my mother’s ability to snap into crisis-response mode. On the downside, I think Andrew began to fight back tears.

“Let’s not panic,” I said in the voice I reserved for dealing with hysterical adolescents. “This is entirely fixable. May I use your computer?”

He looked at me blankly. I suppose my rapid transformation from emotional wreck to proactive project manager was rather unsettling.

“May I use your computer?” I asked again. “I need to see what time Planned Parenthood opens. I’ll go and get the morning-after pill.”

“Are you—are you sure that’s necessary?” he asked hesitantly. “I don’t want you to—I mean—I just feel so bad about all this. You were crying, and then the condom, and—”

“Well, it’s better to be safe than sorry, right?” I patted his arm. “Don’t you worry about a thing, Andrew. Everything is going to be all right.” I rose, naked, and sat in front of his laptop at his desk. “And I do apologize for my earlier outburst,” I said over my shoulder. “You’re really very good at sex. I’m just in a weird place right now, emotionally speaking.”

“I guess . . . I am, too,” he said faintly. He watched as I went to Planned Parenthood’s website and looked up New York health centers.

“The Margaret Sanger Clinic opens at seven thirty on Saturdays,” I said. “That’s, what, four hours from now? It’s in the East Village. I’ll get a car service. Totally convenient.”

Andrew looked at his hands. “What are we going to do until then?”

I lived on the Upper West Side, a good hour-long train ride away. I could call a car service, but I didn’t relish the idea of riding around in a random town car with a stranger in the middle of the night.

“I’ll stay here, if that’s okay,” I said. “I know it’s weird.”

“No, it’s not weird at all,” he said. Nice people tend to lie in these sorts of situations. “Let’s go to bed.”

As I lay beside him in the dark, with sleep utterly out of the question, I heard him begin to gently snore. Some guys will sleep through anything.

After a few hours of staring at the ceiling and wondering what would happen if the morning-after pill didn’t work this time, I got up and shook him gently awake.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

“Good luck,” he whispered. I knew it was the last time I’d ever see him. I nodded and walked toward the door.

“Sara?”

“Yeah?” I turned around. He looked so cute there in the blue morning light, his eyes only half-open. I remembered how I’d giggled to myself back in Boston when he recognized me and said hi in the library.

“The front door locks automatically. Just make sure it’s really shut.”

I left.

As it turned out, I didn’t even need to call a car service. A yellow cab happened to roll by as soon as I left Andrew’s building, and I hurriedly flagged it down.

“Bleecker and Mott,” I said.

As we glided through Brooklyn, I took the opportunity to assess the situation. I was exhausted, emotionally spent, and hungry. Everything seemed to whiz by quickly and crawl by slowly, all at once. And yet, somehow, I didn’t detect panic anywhere inside me. Mostly I just felt confused and increasingly disoriented.

By the time we arrived at the Margaret Sanger Center, I was carsick, overtired, and glumly resigned to the fact that I was pregnant with three dark-haired triplets. On some level, I had always known that God would punish me for having sex outside of marriage. He’d allowed me to take the morning-after pill with success once before, but this time I was shit out of luck. Even if I took it, it wouldn’t work. And then I would have to do the most terrible thing in the world and literally kill my babies, all three of them. Well, I’d pay some doctor to actually do it, but the fault would be mine and mine alone. I’d probably bleed out on the operating table like Penny almost did in
Dirty Dancing,
only Patrick Swayze wouldn’t be around to ask Jerry Orbach to save me. And then I’d rot in the Hell I pretended not to believe in but still totally knew was real.

When I paid the cabbie and stepped out of the car, I was surprised to see a Santa Claus doppelgänger standing on the curb. He didn’t have the red suit or the big sack of toys, but he did have the white hair, robust white beard, and round jelly-belly. He was wearing a pair of denim overalls and a plaid workshirt, and he looked just like one of the older farmers who sold his wares at the farmer’s market outside the French Broad Food Co-op back in Asheville. There was something else familiar about him, too, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. I felt relieved when I saw him. It was like he was waiting there just for me. And God, did I ever need to have a nice, normal interaction with a man.

“Good morning, sir,” I said with a small smile.

Then I caught sight of his Bible.

However long this interaction was going to last, it was not going to end well.

The sad reality is that when you run into someone with a Bible on the streets of New York City, chances are your day is about to take a turn for the uncomfortable. The Mormon kids are usually nice, but I think they carry the Book of Mormon, which is a bit of a different game. Plus, you know they’ve chosen to do their mission year in New York City, so they’re probably the weird, artsy and/or secretly gay ones from their synod back home in Utah or Missouri or wherever. They’d probably make nice dinner companions and would lend you money if you needed to get on the bus. But the folks with the Bibles aren’t interested in selling you a membership to a modern desert cult with a kickass show choir. The folks with the Bibles—the
men
with the Bibles—want to tell you about Hell and why you deserve to end up there.

Have you ever been on the receiving end of authentic hatred? I don’t mean resentment or rage. Anyone who’s ever taught or raised a teenager has gotten those dirty looks. I’m talking about real-deal, genuine, wish-you-were-mauled-to-death-by-bears hatred. It’s the kind of gaze that carries a physical force. It’s palpable. Over the course of my life, I’d made plenty of people angry, exasperated, and unhappy, but I realized in that moment that I’d never truly known hatred. His eyes bored into me like a pair of drills. For a split second, I wondered if he was going to hit me.

Instead, he opened his mouth and let out the angriest sound I’d ever heard.

“MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWDDDDDDDRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!”

I couldn’t even make out what he was saying, so loud and deep and uncontrolled was his rage. He sounded like a demonically possessed grandfather clock. His hateful wail bounced off the buildings around the Sanger Center and echoed back in the early morning light.

Then he did it again, his eyes burning into me, and this time I caught his meaning.

“MMMMMUUUUUUUUURRRRRDDDDEEERRREEEEER!”
Murderer
. He was talking about me.
Me.
Me, who hadn’t even gone into the center yet. Me, who hadn’t even taken a pregnancy test yet. Me, who hadn’t even paid for the Plan B pill yet.