Love at a Tender Age (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  Eventually things just died down. That’s what’s the hardest for me to believe. I’ll think about that time in my life and try to bring it into sharper focus, but there really isn’t anything to bring into focus. It was as though things went back to the way they had always been with no sexual element existing between us. I went on doing the housework and cooking our meals and everything was the same as before and there was no sex between us. We didn’t talk about it at all and just acted as if it had never happened. The only difference was that we were spending less time together, and each of us felt a little bit awkward in the other’s presence.

  He started seeing a woman. She was a widow about his age with a boy a year younger than me and a girl several years younger. I don’t know if they were having sex or not. I would assume that they were. I wondered if they were going to get married or not.

  I got a scholarship and went to college. At this stage I was glad to be moving away because I thought it would give me a chance to start over.

  Halfway through my freshman year he was killed in an auto accident.

  I had some kind of a breakdown. I was in the hospital for two months. I had shock therapy and some sessions with psychiatrists, but I never told any of them about the scene with my father. After two months they said I was all right again and I went back to school. I had been doing well, and even with two months in the hospital I managed to pass all my courses.

  There was a lot of insurance, plus the equity in the house, which I had them sell, so money wasn’t a problem for me.

  I had a couple of affairs with boys in college. They were completely unsatisfying for me and didn’t last long. I was not able to respond sexually at all, let alone have an orgasm. I would lie there and feel completely isolated, as if my mind was miles and miles away.

  During my sophomore year I had an affair with a professor of mine. He was fifteen years older than me and had a wife and four children. I don’t know which of us seduced the other. I suppose it was mutual. He was a very brilliant man. He had had one novel published years ago which got good reviews but didn’t sell well, and he had never been able to finish a second novel. He was an alcoholic. He didn’t resemble my father in any way, but I knew even at the time that the attraction was largely because he was so much older than me and a father figure.

  His wife found out about us but we went on seeing each other. It was an on-again-off-again affair that lasted for almost three full years. He talked about divorcing his wife and marrying me but we both knew this would never happen, and neither of us wanted it to happen. I’m sure we would have broken up permanently within a week if he had actually left his wife. But as long as he was married, it was safe for both of us in that we knew it couldn’t lead to anything, and so we didn’t have to worry about it.

  I was the one who finally broke it off. I was proud that I had the strength to do it. I moved to New York and got a job. I had a couple of brief affairs, also with older men, and I saw how they were all in the same pattern and determined to break that pattern. I did so by making the mistake of jumping straight into a bad marriage with a boy my age. It didn’t work. We were all wrong for each other and had married each other for all the wrong reasons. I was trying to escape and he was trying to prove he wasn’t homosexual, and after a year we looked at each other and shrugged and I got a divorce. I’ve had a couple of affairs since then but nothing serious.

  I can only enjoy a sexual relationship when it’s with an older man, preferably married.

  I don’t know how I feel about what happened with my father. Sometimes I blame everything that has gone wrong on the fact that we slept together. Other times I’m glad that we had the opportunity to love each other so completely. I really don’t know which extreme represents how I really feel about it.

  The one thing I wish over and over again is that he hadn’t died when he did. I still have times when I am convinced he committed suicide. Not in the obvious way of taking pills or jumping out a window but by driving carelessly because of a desire to end it all. According to the accident report, the other driver was entirely at fault, but I still sometimes feel that he could have saved himself at the last minute and decided not to out of guilt over having had sex with me.

  And I think that, if he had lived, everything could have worked out. That time and distance would have gotten us over the past and we could have loved each other as father and daughter without having memories of our sexual relationship cluttering up things. I suppose this is wishful thinking. I don’t know.

  I would say that I’m fairly well adjusted right now. As well as can be expected. I never had a breakdown except for that one time, and my moods are usually on a fairly even keel. I enjoy my work and am making progress in my career. My life is ordered in a comfortable routine. I’m sure I’ll marry again some day, and I suppose the man I marry will be a father figure in certain respects, but if the marital relationship is a good one for both of us I don’t think that would make any real difference. It’s where you wind up that counts. Not why you happened to get there.

  A few years ago I was thinking about converting to Catholicism. My family was not religious and I was at a stage in my life where Catholicism held a lot of attraction for me. But I decided against it.

  It wasn’t the prospect of confession that bothered me. If anything, I’d say that was the strongest attraction, because I had been carrying around this secret for all these years and it was eating my insides out. The idea of being able to confess all of this and receive absolution was tremendously appealing. But then I realized I would be confessing it because it was a sin, and I thought about it, and I realized that I did not want to regard what we did as a sin. I don’t know whether deep inside I really feel that it was or wasn’t a sin. I’m not sure. But I don’t want to think of it that way, and I think that’s what kept me from converting.

  I’ve never loved anybody the way I loved him, and I don’t think he ever loved anyone the way he loved me. And for all the bad that may have come of it, you can’t take away from the fact that our love for one another was a very beautiful thing.

  A Letter from Wes

  Dear Mr. Wells,

  I am seventeen years old. I will tell you the whole story.

  I went with this girl for three months and broke up with her. Then a boy I know went with her on and off. They did this for about six months.

  She then wanted me back. By the way she is a virgin and I was the first person who she really liked. She doesn’t know much about sex.

  Well I got a date with her and double-dated with her old boyfriend. We went parking and I was kissing her all over.

  I later got a date with her and when we got out in the woods, every time I went to kiss her she would blow the horn or flash the lights or something. Well I got another date with her and she did the same thing. She is very immature for her age. She is sixteen. I cussed her out.

  So she started liking the other boyfriend. He was going into the army and him and her had a last date. He came up to see her and she told him to get lost.

  Well he said that on their date that he kissed her breasts but with a shirt on.

  Well a few days later I called her up and told her that I wanted to come back but she would have to loosen up. She said that she had. A few nights later I asked her for a date. She went and we went parking but she wouldn’t kiss me. I got to feel her breasts.

  With her old boyfriend she always made out.

  I asked her for another date. Well we got out in the woods and she wouldn’t do nothing. She had a good time but I didn’t. She wanted me to kiss her goodnight but I didn’t.

  I am much better off in all aspects than the old boyfriend. Explain it to me why she won’t kiss with me if she likes me? Why with him and not me?

  I am also developing this complex about kissing and how good I do at it. Tell me how to stop this.

  About to go crazy,

  Wes

  I Thought My Parents Were Cool

  When i was a kid, I always t
hought of my parents as terribly cool. Being in the theater, they were automatically hipper than the parents of friends of mine. And a lot of their friends who would come over to the house were people with unorthodox life-styles different from the usual middle-class scene. Like one couple they were friendly with was a stage manager and his mistress. He was married and cheating on his wife, and he and his mistress would come to our house together, and everything would be very up front. There was no hype laid on me and my brother, and I thought my parents were very cool and respected them for it.

  Then when I got old enough to date I found out that all of this surface hipness doesn’t really mean a thing. As far as their darling little daughter was concerned, they were determined to be Heavy Parents. It really pissed me off. If they had been generally straight to begin with, all right, at least it would all be consistent. It would be wrong, but it would be consistent. But instead they were very broadminded about everything in the world as long as it didn’t happen to involve me, and then they had this special straight attitude which applied to me only, and I could only read that as hypocritical neurotic bullshit.

  Especially my mother. My father is generally more easygoing. I always thought she was, too, and I used to groove on how close the two of us were, and then she just changed. Or circumstances changed, meaning I started to grow up, and she revealed where her head was really at.

  • • •

  Megan is seventeen, a tall and willowy girl, intelligent and soft-spoken. I have known her parents since before she and her brother Owen were born. Falling as I do between the two age groups (too old for the Pepsi Generation, too young for the Geritol for Lunch Bunch) has supplied me with an interesting perspective on this particular case of Generation Gap.

  I had always thought of Meg’s mother and father as ideal parents, far more broadminded and aware than the vast majority of their contemporaries. Meg’s observations show, though, that one’s attitudes are apt to become far more rigid when one’s own offspring is involved.

  I did not interview Megan in any real sense of the term. Her remarks in this chapter represent a sampling from our conversations over a period of several months.

  • • •

  One thing that kills me is the double standard. I thought that thing went out years ago, and my parents talk as though they don’t believe in it at all, but their actions show them up. It’s really weird.

  You know how close Owen and I have always been. He’s just two years older than I am and we’ve always gotten along beautifully. Well, his second year of college he moved out of the house and took an apartment of his own. There was no big bitch raised when he announced that he was going to do this. After all, he was originally going to go out of town to college, and he would have been living on his own, so there was no argument about him having his own place here in town.

  The reason he wanted a place of his own was he and Jan wanted to live together. There was a little static when Mom and Dad found out about that, but not on moral grounds. They were afraid he would wind up neglecting his studies. Then his grades went up immediately and they realized you can get a lot more studying done when your living situation is stabilized and you don’t spend ten hours a day chasing around looking for somebody to ball or a safe place to do it, and at that point their objections vanished. They would have Owen and Jan over to the house for dinner and it would be openly acknowledged that the two of them were living together and that the whole thing was cool.

  Beautiful, huh? But get this—my mother announced one day that I wasn’t permitted to visit Owen and Jan at their apartment. I just about fell on the floor when she laid that one on me. It didn’t make any sense at all. At first she wouldn’t explain her reasons or anything, and then she finally said that it just wasn’t proper for a young girl like me to be visiting an unmarried couple, that the atmosphere was not proper.

  It was all right for them to come over and visit me at our house, but not for me to visit them at their apartment.

  And it was all right for her son to live with a girl openly, but it wasn’t all right for her daughter to go over to the house and see them.

  I really can’t relate to that kind of bullshit.

  It was last year when all this happened. I was sixteen then. Now the rules are relaxed, I can visit them, but it took months of arguing to change their minds. What it obviously all amounted to was that my mother thought I was a virgin, which I hadn’t been for two years, for Christ’s sake, and that she didn’t trust me. She was worried that by visiting Owen and Jan I would be meeting their friends, meaning boys in college, and I would be in a private place where I could have sex with these boys, and she didn’t trust me.

  Sometimes when we had shouting matches I came very close to letting her know where it was really at. “Mother, I’m not a virgin, I haven’t been a virgin since I was fourteen, and sometimes I smoke grass and sometimes I drink wine, and whether or not I go to Owen’s place isn’t going to make any difference one way or the other to my sex life.” I should have come right out and said it.

  I think people my parents’ age are a lot more hung up about sex than we are. They make such a big deal of it. When Owen and Jan started living together, my parents’ immediate reaction to the relationship was that they were sleeping together. Having sex. Well, they had been having sex for months. The decision to live together actually had very little to do with sex. It may have made sex a little more convenient, but Jan had an apartment of her own at the time, so sex was never inconvenient for them. Living together meant that they felt committed to each other in a certain way and that they wanted to spend a greater portion of their time together, that they wanted to have breakfast together and study together and all that.

  As a matter of fact, Owen told me that they probably have sex less frequently since they started living together. Before, there was this compulsion to take advantage of opportunities whenever they came up. Now in certain ways they’re like an old married couple, they don’t have to do it every night, they don’t have to prove anything.

  The thing is, it galls me to know that my mother doesn’t trust me. She could trust me. Not to adhere to her particular values, because I can’t see any point in being true to someone else’s moral code. That’s just hypocrisy. I’m true to my own moral code, though, and all in all I would say I’m a pretty straight kid.

  Drugs, for example. I smoke grass, but not in what you could call an intense way. I like to get a high once in a while. Especially when I’m listening to a piece of good music for the first time and I want to be able to get in there between the notes and experience the sound in a meaningful way. Or I’ll like to get high with another person if we’re grooving on each other, becoming aware of each other. Grass can make it easier to get into another person’s head. It’s a perspective thing—you see the other person from several angles at once, like a cubist painting. Picasso—I always thought he was sort of far out, but one time I went to the art museum stoned and for the first time I really and truly dug what he was into.

  Just about everyone I know smokes dope. But of all the people I know, I would say there are no more than half a dozen who are into it in a heavy way, like smoking day in and day out. I know one girl who was into that scene for a few months because she was going through changes, and then things worked out in her head, and now she smokes like once or twice a week like everybody else.

  So my mother couldn’t trust me not to smoke grass, because that’s ridiculous, it’s harmless and everything and I happen to dig it. But she could trust me not to let grass take over my head completely, and not to fuck around with any heavy drugs.

  With sex, she couldn’t trust me not to ball, because I think that’s my decision to make and I think when two people relate to each other in a certain positive way it would be more immoral for them not to ball. But she could trust me not to get pregnant and not to be a tramp, which I would think would be what she’s really concerned about. I’m sure she doesn’t expect me to be a virgin when I get marr
ied. She’s not that insane.

  What puts me really uptight is the feeling that she must not know me very well to be concerned about these things. If she did, she would know I’m not the kind of person who is going to get fucked up with drugs or sleep around compulsively or anything like that.

  I haven’t really had all that much sexual experience. I enjoy sex very much but it has to mean something to me in order for me to relax and get into it. Sometimes I fool myself in this respect. I think that I’m just generally horny and it doesn’t matter who I have sex with just so I have it, but before anything can get started I realize I’m not built that way, that I have to feel something for the person. This has led to awkward situations once or twice when I started to get it together with somebody and then backed out, so I suppose there are a couple of guys walking the planet who think I’m a tease, which I’m basically not.

  Actually I have only had sex with six guys. If my mother heard that she would probably have a cow. I don’t think six guys in three years is really very much, especially since none of these was what you would call an affair. I have bad luck in relationships. The guys I like don’t care about me, and vice-versa, so nothing ever lasts very long.

  The first time was with a friend of Owen’s. He was a guy I had known practically all my life and we were always close. I was very friendly with him and the girl he was going with, and then he broke up with her and it left him terribly depressed. He had thought they were like a permanent thing and she all of a sudden split with him and he was really down. I went over to his place and we got stoned together and he talked about her and about himself for hours. It seemed perfectly natural for us to start necking. He was older and more experienced than the boys I had been dating. Being a virgin had been on my mind a lot at the time. It’s an awkward thing to be, a ridiculous thing in a lot of ways. We necked for a long time, stopping now and then to have a cigarette and talk a little, and he asked me if I wanted to go to bed, and I said sure. Partly because I did want to and partly because I felt very sorry for the way he was feeling and didn’t want to reject him.