Then Came You (18 page)

In the hospital, with my husband in surgery, with a ring worth more than my grandparents’ house on my finger, I stared out the window and thought about slicing up that pie: Trey and
Tommy, Bettina and the baby. What would be left for me? Then I pictured Marcus waking up, how I’d lean over him, backlit by the sun, looking like an angel as I whispered in his ear,
Honey, I want us to have a baby.
I was ready now. I’d be a wonderful mother, not like Raine. If I made promises, I would keep them.

“Miss?”

An older woman in a Yankees T-shirt had tapped my shoulder. When I turned, she smiled, showing teeth that could have been improved with a few visits to a dentist. I recognized her from the waiting room where we’d sat that morning, me next to Marcus and her beside her husband, who was, from the sound of it, having his hip replaced. “I just want to tell you,” she said, hands clasped at her waist, “that it’s lovely, the way you’re taking care of your father.”

H
ave you ever . . . you know?” Kimmie ducked her head shyly. It was ten o’clock on a hot August Saturday night in New York City, eighty degrees and still humid in spite of the darkness, but the window air-conditioning unit chugging away kept Kimmie’s place deliciously cool. We’d gone to a screening of
Blade Runner
all the way downtown at the Angelika, and now we were sitting on the futon that took up most of the space in her grad-student-housing apartment, a studio on 110th Street and Riverside with a doll-size kitchen, a refrigerator the size of an orange crate, and a single window that afforded her a delightful view of the brick of the apartment building three feet away. It was a vast improvement over my place, in a no-name neighborhood in midtown, a fifth-floor walk-up that I shared with two other girls, where the single bedroom had been chopped into three prison-cell rectangles by particleboard walls that didn’t make it all the way to the ceiling.

Every morning I took the subway down to Wall Street, to my job as a junior analyst at Steinman Cox, the investment and securities firm, which had recruited me with a six-figure salary and the promise of rapid advancement. One hundred thousand dollars a year had sounded like untold riches, but the money didn’t go as far as I’d hoped, not when I was dealing with New York
City rent, paying off my loans, and trying to send a little something to each of my parents every month. The egg money had already gone to pay for rehab . . . and “junior analyst” turned out to be finance-speak for “slave.” I worked for an analyst named Rajit, a dark-haired guy with deep-set eyes and bristling eyebrows who came to work every day in a suit and tie, with a gold chain-link bracelet on his wrist and an eye-watering amount of cologne clouding the air around him. Rajit advised clients on investments in the Eastern markets. Every day I’d spend endless hours “building a book,” putting together research about the tin trade in Taipei, or automobile manufacturing in Hong Kong. Once a month I’d be traveling with my team for client presentations, not to the glamorous destinations featured on the firm’s website but, usually, to the Midwest.

Kimmie’s place was tiny, but it was all hers, and she’d filled it with colorful touches. There were brightly colored prints, Kandinsky and Frankenthaler, thumbtacked to the walls, an aloe plant in a dark-blue glazed pot on the windowsill, a jade elephant that she’d bought on our recent trip to Chinatown centered on the coffee table.

“Have I ever what?” I asked her. “Had sex?” I’d let Kimmie talk me into a glass of cold white wine. After the week I’d put in at Steinman Cox, a few sips were enough to get me feeling loose-limbed and a little loopy.

“No, no. Have you ever orgasmed?”

“Orgasmed?” I giggled. Kimmie looked at me sharply.

“Am I saying it wrong?”

“No. Well, I guess most people say ‘had an orgasm.’ And yes, I have. I figured out how to do that by myself when I was thirteen.” Kimmie looked impressed. I shrugged modestly. “We didn’t have cable TV.” I didn’t mention that I’d never had an orgasm during intercourse with any of the three guys I’d been with. I’d never been relaxed enough, and, honestly, I’d always
felt a little revolted at the sight of each of them with their clothes off, with their strange, drippy protuberances and unexpected clumps of hair.

“Can you show me?”

“Can I...” I looked at her. She was staring at me seriously.

“I can’t figure out how. It’s very frustrating.” She pointed at her computer, set up underneath the window on the smallest desk IKEA sold. “I went on YouTube to watch, but it didn’t work. I get close, I think . . . but then...” She pursed her lips and blew a small, disappointed raspberry. “Nothing.”

My tongue felt heavy, and my cheeks were burning. “You went on YouTube?”

“You can learn lots of things on YouTube,” Kimmie said, unperturbed. “The
Times
had a story about makeup tutorials.”

“Well, okay, eyeliner, that’s one thing. But masturbation . . .” I shuddered, imagining what horrors Kimmie’s computer had disgorged when she’d typed her keywords into Google.

“If you’d show me, then I’d know how.” Her eyes were shining. “I read on a sex-positive blog that women need to take responsibility for their own orgasms.”

“That’s true,” I said, gulping the rest of my wine. “Hey, Kimmie, you’re not looking at sex-positive blogs at school, are you?”

She looked at me disdainfully. “I’m not stupid!”

“No,” I said. I was getting the giggles again. “Just orgasm-challenged.”

She got stiffly to her feet. “Never mind.”

I felt bad. “No, no, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“So you’ll show me?”

I picked up my glass again. In college, I knew people who’d done, or at least claimed to have done, all manner of wild sex-things. Same-sex experimentation, particularly among the members of certain eating clubs, was practically a graduation
requirement. The two girls down the hall from me junior year had let it be known that they were in a polyamorous relationship with a guy who lived in the vegetarian co-op and wore skirts to his visual-arts seminars. And, I liked Kimmie. She was the best friend I’d had in a long, long time . . . and going through life, or even just the rest of her twenties, not knowing how to have an orgasm was a significant handicap. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

“Excellent!” She waved me off the futon, which she quickly shifted from its upright to its reclining position, then turned down the lamp and lit a vanilla-scented candle, which she set on the coffee table, next to the jade elephant.

“Romantic,” I said, starting to giggle again. Kimmie ignored me.

“Where should I sit? Right here?” She lowered herself and sat cross-legged on the edge of the futon, fully dressed except for her shoes. All she needed was a pen and a notebook and she could have been attending a lecture.

“Wherever you want.” I thought for a minute, then lay on my back on the futon, squeezed my eyes shut, and pulled my jeans and my panties off over my hips. If I’d been by myself, I would have just unzipped my jeans and slid my hand down the front . . . but Kimmie wouldn’t be able to see anything that way. I lifted my head, squinting through the half light.

“Can you see okay?” I felt strangely out of breath, giggly and awkward and surprisingly aroused. The whole thing was so weird, by far the strangest sexual situation I’d ever been in, a world away from my grapplings with Dan Finnerty.

Kimmie nodded. I took a deep breath, stretching out my legs, positioning my hands the way I normally did, the left one pressed against my belly (for some reason, I liked the feeling of pressure there), the fingers of my right hand resting against my cleft. I took a quick peek and saw Kimmie sitting back on her heels, watching intently as I started stroking myself with my
index finger. I closed my eyes, wanting to squirm away from her scrutiny, wishing I’d shaved. “It’s kind of like this,” I said. “But I don’t know how helpful this is. Probably it’s different for everyone.”

I opened my eyes, enough to see her make an impatient gesture—
keep going.
I turned my head to the side, concentrating on the sensation, trying to ignore the strangeness of doing this with someone watching. Kimmie was so close that I could feel her breath on my belly. For a minute, I thought that nothing would happen, but it had been a little while, and maybe I was hornier than I thought, or maybe it was the wine, but I was already wet, the muscles in my belly and inner thighs fluttering in the anticipation of release. I wriggled around, getting comfortable, and arranged my fingers the way I normally did, my index finger tapping, lightly and rapidly, then nibbling more firmly against my clitoris. I couldn’t keep from sighing, and Kimmie sighed, too, in approval, I thought, a little cooing noise.

“Ooh,” she whispered. The futon shifted as she leaned closer. I could feel her breath on my belly, her long hair trailing against my thigh, and suddenly this went from being an academic exercise to the most exciting thing I’d ever done. I felt like a porn star, or the way I imagined porn stars must feel, desirable, sexy, controlling their audience even as they lost control themselves. I spread my legs slightly, strumming my finger faster. My voice was strangled as I said, “Watch . . . I’m close . . .” My back arched. My toes curled. I felt Kimmie’s breath against my face, then her lips against mine, and her tongue slipped into my mouth as I came.

When I could breathe again, I opened my eyes. She was looking at me, a pleased smile on her face.

“Oh my God,” I said, feeling stunned and dizzy, my nerve endings still jangling with pleasure. “What
was
that?”

“An orgasm,” Kimmie answered promptly, like the excellent student she’d been all her life.

I sat up, reaching for the light down comforter Kimmie kept folded in a basket next to the futon, and pulled it up over my legs. Then I flopped back, feeling delighted, but with a new fear dimming my afterglow. Did this mean I was gay? I’d never even considered it. I’d never looked at a woman with anything resembling desire, just evaluation, and envy of specific body parts—this one’s breasts, that one’s legs. Besides Kimmie, I’d never even considered kissing a girl . . . but now, I found, I was very interested in kissing Kimmie again.

I rolled onto my elbow. She was still dressed, in her jeans and her button-front Henley tee shirt. “Let’s see if you got it,” I said, and reached out, brushing her hair behind her ears. She gave me her trickster’s grin, wriggling out of her clothes. Her body, I discovered, wasn’t so boyish after all . . . and when I took her in my arms and kissed her, first her forehead, then her faintly freckled nose, then her lips, it felt like I’d been waiting my whole life to end up with her in my arms.

After Kimmie fell asleep, I lay there, sated and content, at ease in my own body in a way I hadn’t been since I was a little girl, wrapped in a towel and warmed by the sun after a morning bodysurfing in the ocean with my dad. Physically, I was at peace, but my mind raced, looking for labels, asking questions about what had just happened, how it would work and whether it could last. Finally, I tried to turn my thoughts to where they usually went at night: to the eggs I’d sold.

They’d warned me about this at the fertility center. The material they’d given me included the number for a counselor to call if I found myself “dwelling” on my donation, and had mentioned that some donors had benefited from talk therapy or the short-term use of antidepressants. I didn’t think I needed any of
that yet, but I had definitely found myself thinking about it—dwelling—more than I’d expected.

The process had gone smoothly: I’d donated my eggs in late May and deposited my check when it arrived ten days later. Six weeks after that, my father was in Willow Crest doing a twenty-eight-day inpatient stay, which would include a physical and psychological evaluation, group therapy, individual therapy, music therapy, and art therapy. He’d made me a collage full of pictures cut from magazines—girls running, girls leaping, girls laughing over their bowls of salad—and he’d smiled when I’d told him, straight-faced, that I would cherish it forever.

I knew I wouldn’t be hearing from him for a while. The counselors had explained that residents weren’t allowed to have cell phones or send e-mail. There was one pay phone that was made available for an hour each day, and usually there was a very long line. As my father worked through the twelve steps, they said, he would make amends to those he’d wronged, but I should be patient, should “manage my expectations.” When I’d gone out to Pittsburgh to take him to Willow Crest, he’d come to the door of the apartment to meet me. I’d peered down the dark hallway and glimpsed Rita in the bedroom, but she’d shut the door before I could call “hello.” His hair was clean, cut short, combed back from his forehead, and in the new shirt and jeans he wore he looked better than I’d seen him looking in years.

We had lunch together in the place’s cafeteria, a loud, lowceilinged room that reminded me of a school, with posters on the walls (covered in AA slogans, instead of warnings about Stranger Danger or invitations to the Summer Reading Program), flimsy paper napkins and square cartons of milk. The food, too, seemed intended for children: mac and cheese served on segmented plastic trays; cheap metal spoons and forks, no knives. I’d chattered about my job, turning my pig of a boss into a charming character, telling my dad about the three meals a
day they had delivered and leaving out the part about how we got free food because our corporate masters didn’t want us taking longer than twenty minutes for breakfast or lunch. I made much of the Friday-night happy hours, where the analysts would gather in an Irish pub around the corner from our office, a place so generic it could have been plucked from a mall in Minneapolis. In truth, these were grim affairs, marked by too many drinks and ill-advised hookups, and they rarely began before eleven p.m. because all of us worked so late.