She Poured Out Her Heart

by Jean Thompson

  She didn’t dislike this, exactly, but she wasn’t transported by it either. She wished everything would slow down so she could take her time with each different sensation: hair, tongue, and so on. But she was losing track of the sequence of events, there was a blinking, staticky quality to her understanding, because her pants and underpants were now off, and Tim was tickling her down there in a way meant to be pleasing, she guessed, but was perhaps too energetic for that, and anyway it was embarrassing, like a doctor’s appointment. Her sweater and her bra were still on, which seemed like a mistake: perhaps she should call it to his attention?

  “You ready?” His fingers were inside her. At least that made sense. Ready? Excuse me, I don’t understand the question. He didn’t wait for her to answer, but rolled away from her and put her hand on his penis, which felt like a skin-covered tube with a doorknob on the end. It was so comical! How did men walk around with this branch sticking out of them? She’d only seen pictures before, not the actual item, and it could be argued that she wasn’t really seeing this one now, it was too dark in the room.

  She had no idea what she was meant to do with it. “How . . .” she began.

  “Medium hard, and fast,” he directed her, moving her hand up and down, and then she did get the hang of it, a little, and he began breathing and blowing in a loud, alarming way, and then he’d landed on top of her, impossibly heavy. She had to try and reclaim different parts of herself and wiggle loose. Really, there was such a great deal of him, so much in the way of flopping legs and smothering chest. She felt sorry for him, having to inhabit this big, unworkable body.

  “Almost forgot.” He caught his breath, laughed a little, swung his legs over the bed, and started feeling around. “Give me a sec here, I need my party hat.”

  Had he gone crazy or something? A hat? A small crinkling, tearing sound and God she was so dumb. She hadn’t given one thought to precautions, or all the dire consequences, the warnings that were meant to scare you off, well, too late. She could just barely make him out, sitting and working away at getting the condom on, and she would have liked to see that part, just from curiosity. “Uh, thanks,” she said. “It’s very . . .” She wanted to say something like chivalrous, but that was stupid. “Cooperative of you,” she finished, which was also pretty stupid.

  “Safety first,” he said cheerfully, and then he was back on top of her, prodding at her with the doorknob end of his thing, and at first it wouldn’t go in and then he took hold of himself and it did, a little, and she yelped.

  “S’OK,” he said, but it wasn’t, it hurt, it didn’t seem to fit right, and this was beginning to seem like an all around bad idea, shouldn’t they talk about it first? He pushed in farther and Jane went Owowow, and he raised himself up on his elbows and said, “How about you make less noise and move more?”

  He didn’t sound mad or anything, more like he was trying to be encouraging. As always when given instructions, she tried to follow them. Moving made it a little better, at least he wasn’t just poking at her, but it still didn’t feel that good, not something you would do for fun or because of overwhelming passion. Maybe she was frigid. She’d worried about that and now she was pretty sure it was true.

  How long was this supposed to go on, anyway? He kept on lifting and spreading her, and she didn’t want to be rude or anything, but it really did hurt, she was getting chafed, and she had to pee, she’d been having to for a while now, all that beer. Just when she was about to tell him he had to stop, he snorted and sped up like he was trying to turn her inside out and then he made some of his own noise and that seemed to be it.

  She waited a minute, then two. He was flopped on top of her, not moving. “Hey,” Jane said, from underneath the dead weight of him. “I have to get up.” She felt messy down there, something was leaking out of her. She wondered if she’d already peed. “I have to go to the bathroom. Sorry.”

  She’d imagined it would be just as tricky for him to get himself out of her as in, like a cork in a bottle, but of course that wasn’t how it worked. His penis had deflated in amazing fashion. “Lemme . . .” he said, and she guessed he was holding on to the rubber so it wouldn’t come off or spill. There really were a lot of purely awful things you had to think about. He said, “I don’t guess there’s any Kleenex or anything, oh well . . .”

  “I could bring you some,” she said, wanting to be helpful.

  “No, I got it . . .” He rolled over and tended to himself. “You don’t want to let that thing dry on you. You only make that mistake once.”

  “Oh yeah, ha ha.” One more hideous piece of new knowledge. “I really do have to get up now.”

  “Sure.” He leaned down and gave her a brief, smacking kiss. “Hey, this is going to sound really awful, but would you tell me your name again?”

  “Shannon,” Jane said. Shannon was her roommate’s name.

  “Hurry on back, Shannon.”

  It took her a fumbling long time to find everything: pants, underpants, shoes, and another spell to get it all together and find the door. It was one more embarrassment, still sitting there after she’d said she was leaving. “If you need a light . . .” he offered, but that was the last thing she wanted, “No, I’m OK,” she said, and in the end she escaped with her underpants wadded up in one hand.

  The hallway was darker than she remembered, although the music was still going on, had been playing the whole while. Her legs were shaky. She felt ravaged, and she was going to have to decide if that was anything you might eventually feel good about. It was at least better than deflowered, which was a completely ignorant word. You might be able to put ravaged on a T-shirt, like the ones you saw people wearing, bragging about how drunk they got at such and such a party or a bar crawl. I got ravaged at the Pike Fall Frolic! She had no idea where the bathroom was, but it wasn’t going to matter in about two seconds.

  Here it was, a wall of urinals and three stalls, each with the doors half torn off and hanging loose. She didn’t even want to think about the kinds of things that went on here.

  She was lucky, the bathroom was empty. She checked herself, found only a small amount of pinkish blood. Washing her hands at the sink, there was a bad moment when the mirror made her wonder if she had been permanently marked or disfigured, but no, it was only the unaccustomed mascara, which had smeared into black, vampish rings. She scrubbed at them with a brown paper towel.

  Back in the hallway she hesitated, not remembering which way she’d come, or which door was the right one. Why hadn’t she tried to wear her contacts? She was bat-blind. There was some commotion ahead of her on the staircase, voices shouting, an argument or a good time, and she turned and retreated, still lost. A door opened behind her and a boy stuck his head out. “Hey, where you going?”

  She fled. Down a back staircase that led to an empty, institutional kitchen, dim lights above the stainless steel tables, a door marked EXIT in glowing red. Beyond the door, a wooden landing with stairs leading down to a line of dark green rubber trashcans, and that was where Jane came to rest.

  No one had followed her. No one was watching. She had ejected herself cleanly. Music still beat beat beat from the party. Other music from other parties boomed, a dull noise, like detonations heard at a distance.

  She might have felt bad for Tim, still waiting for her to come back, but decided he really didn’t have anything to complain about. She walked to her dorm, feeling cotton-mouthed from the drinking. . . . Beyond worrying about whether or not what she’d done had been success or disaster or brave or idiotic or totally out of character, well yes it was, loomed the fact that it had happened and could not be undone. Actual, if not rational. She found herself thinking of Allen in an unexpected and sentimental way. He’d gone off to college at the University of Chicago. Jane hoped some kindly girl would take him to bed before too much time went by.

  Her dorm wasn’t far. But once she reached the front door, she didn’t
go in. It wasn’t likely that her roommate was back yet, she might be out all night, but Jane wasn’t in the mood to see anybody she knew, not just yet. She circled around to a small sunken garden, bare now except for a ring of boxwoods around its dry fountain. Jane sat down on one of the stone benches, and only when she heard the scratch and saw the flare of a cigarette lighter did she realize she was not alone.

  She jumped to her feet. A girl’s voice said, “Easy there,” and Jane tried to make her feeble eyes work in the gloom. “Didn’t mean to startle you. Sit back down, jeez.”

  Jane sat. The girl was across from her, on the opposite side of the fountain, and Jane couldn’t make her out. “Or if you want to be alone, I can split,” the girl offered.

  “No, that’s all right.” She did want to be alone. She’d get up in a minute and go inside.

  They sat in silence for a time. The girl was smoking some kind of tobacco with a heady smell, and she was using . . . Jane squinted. “Is that a corncob pipe?”

  “Uh huh.” The little orange fire glowed when she inhaled. A corncob pipe was just one more bizarre thing.

  More silence. Jane shifted on the cold stone of the bench. Her invaded parts felt sore and unquiet. She couldn’t have said that she missed Tim, but it was a sadness to be alone after being so, whatever it was they’d been. Some version of together. But not entirely together, which was another kind of sadness.

  “Rough night?”

  “Oh . . .” She had forgotten that she was not, technically, alone. “I guess. I lost my virginity tonight.” Why say it? Because she wanted to say it out loud, to somebody, so she could believe it herself.

  “Really? Wow, congratulations.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Thanks.”

  “So, not like it’s any of my business . . .”

  “No, that’s OK,” Jane said. “I guess I’m still processing it.”

  “Uh huh. Boyfriend?”

  “No, just, more like, a date.” That sounded pretty bad. Well, maybe it had been pretty bad. “It wasn’t all that much fun.”

  “Never is, the first time,” the girl said, making it sound like she was some kind of expert, a sex researcher, maybe, who went around interviewing people. “Too nervous.”

  “Yes,” Jane agreed, though she’d been more bewildered than nervous. It was reassuring to think that it was just something you had to get through. “It didn’t feel especially . . . sexy.”

  The girl tapped the pipe bowl against the bench and a piece of glowing ember fell out, flared, then darkened. “Oh let me guess, he didn’t exactly care what was going on with you. Most of these guys, they’re just intervaginal masturbators.”

  Jane laughed, a squawking sound that she tried to make more ladylike. She sniggered and giggled and hiccupped. “Inter . . . vag . . . oh boy.” Perhaps it was something you could laugh about.

  With the pipe gone out, the girl’s face was easier to see, or at least to locate. A pale, nodding shape. “Yes, just a collection of supercharged, wriggling sperm.”

  More giggling and squawking. Jane tried to get herself under control. If she kept on laughing, she might end up on some kind of jag, laughing or crying or both. “So, not like it’s any of my business, but when you, you know, the first time . . .”

  “He was my high school boyfriend. And we’d already spent so much time messing around in all sorts of different ways, I mean, we’d arranged and rearranged our parts so much, when it finally went in it was, whoa, did we just do it? It wasn’t like the earth moved or anything. That’s from Hemingway, isn’t that dumb? What a big barrel of crud that guy was.”

  Jane didn’t say anything. They hadn’t gotten to Hemingway yet in class.

  “Anyway,” the girl went on, “promise you won’t buy into the notion that it’s some tragic loss. That’s just more patriarchal bullshit and commodification of women’s bodies.”

  “I won’t,” Jane said, feeling as if she had sworn a kind of oath, although to what she was not entirely certain. “Thanks, it helps to talk to somebody who’s . . .”

  “Depraved?” the girl suggested. “Ah, you just needed a little pep talk.”

  Had it all really happened? She knew it had, but the very unlikeliness of everything made it hard to fathom, as if she was still up in her dorm room, padding around in sweatpants, and had never gone out and had sex with a stranger. And then talked all about it with another one. Maybe she’d been smarter than she knew, picking a boy she’d likely never see again, keeping it separate from anything fond or emotional. She’d give the borrowed sweater back to her roommate, and if asked how she liked Tim, she’d come up with something about how he seemed nice enough but she’d lost track of him as the evening went on. She stood, ready to go upstairs and get on with it. “Hey, my name’s Jane.”

  “I’m Bonnie,” the other girl said, and she stood up also, close enough to a streetlamp for Jane to see her sharp, vivid face, and Jane felt the peculiar inner thrum and hum that told her something else was going to happen here, though she did not yet know what it was.

  bonnie

  By her senior year of college, Bonnie took to saying that she couldn’t wait to get out of the playpen of school and into the real world, even though she did not have any particular destination in the real world.

  She had begun college as a Spanish major, since she’d taken Spanish in high school. She thought that perhaps she could go to Spain or South America to study, end up living an expatriate life. That sounded dangerous and glamorous, like Ava Gardner in The Night of the Iguana. But her Spanish was not really good enough. Her accent twanged, forever Midwestern. In literature classes, she found herself having to read everything in English to keep up, and even then she didn’t much like Don Quixote.

  Sophomore year she changed her major to psychology, but that disappointed her also. It was mostly behaviorism and statistics, and trying to predict what a rat in a box might or might not do. She had expected to learn about primal drives, the unconscious, dreams and archetypes. But Freud and Jung were now the grandfathers installed in comfortable chairs in the back room while the party went on without them. The courses Bonnie took were all about experiments, and stimulus and response, and, although this was left unsaid, the application of these findings to make more people buy more things.

  She found a home in anthropology, where anything and everything human could be studied. She liked the expansiveness of it, trying to figure people out from every conceivable angle, archaeology and biology and culture and linguistics. She liked the assumption that you actually could figure them out.

  “You’re never going to get a job,” Jane said. “There are no jobs called ‘anthropologist.’ You’ll have to go to grad school.” Jane was six credit hours away from a degree in public health. There was a clear answer to what you did in public health: improved population-based health services and worked to eradicate disease. “Syphilis and gonorrhea,” Bonnie suggested, when she wanted to annoy her. “Pants down for Nurse Jane!” But Jane had interviewed with nonprofits and AIDS organizations and public health programs. She would use her critical thinking and writing skills to craft proposals, grants, public education campaigns. Soon, no doubt, she would be getting job offers, deciding between different rollouts of the Real Job gravy train and functional adulthood.

  Clever Jane. Feckless, unemployable Bonnie. Jane, industrious ant, Bonnie, fiddling grasshopper. That was her, yup. But she wasn’t ready to give in without an argument. “I can do historic preservation. Environmental issues. Museum work. I’m a generalist.”

  “You could still do something with computers.”

  “I’m not one of those business guys.” They were class of 1999. The dot-com bubble was still bubbling.

  “I didn’t say start a business. I said learn a few things about programming. Add to your skill set. They always need people who know computers.”

  “And when I was heading
off to college, one of my aunts told me I should advertise on the dorm bulletin board to do people’s mending and alter hems, because people always needed that.”

  “You’re not the mending type,” Jane agreed.

  “I don’t think I’m the computer type either.”

  “Well you better figure something out, if you don’t want to have to move back home.”

  “Now you’re just being mean,” Bonnie said.

  It was the beginning of their final semester, and they were sitting in the living room of their campus apartment. Outside it was bright and snowless January, the nothing-landscape of the Midwest in winter, brown grass, sticks of trees, pavement. Their apartment was on the third floor of a midrise building of tan brick. An identical tan brick building was visible across a courtyard. Both buildings, and all the other apartment buildings on the block, were occupied by students. Twenty minutes before classes started, the street doors opened and lines of students hitched to backpacks filled the sidewalks.

  Bonnie and Jane had lived here more than two years, and although they had put a lot of enthusiasm into decorating and arranging the space, by now it was overfamiliar to the point that neither of them really saw it anymore, and with its stacks of books and CDs and plants and candles and the framed Gauguin prints leaning against the wall so as not to violate the prohibition against putting holes in the walls, it looked a great deal like the apartments of everyone else they knew.