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The problem was they didn't . . . feel . . . right. Not to tongue, nor fingertip. They felt, rather, like croquet balls that had been upholstered in a thin layer of adipose and skin.
Strangest of all was their appearance, the way each breast rose perfectly round from her chest, the skin so taut, all but her nipples, which drooped a little, as if suffering from poor self-esteem.
I couldn't figure it out. Were her pectorals really that toned? Did she have calcium deposits?
I put the question aside, for the sake of our unfolding sexual drama, which now proceeded to the damp lower regions and culminated in a panicky, partial fuck session, our bodies striking quick blows that knocked the breath out of us.
Every few minutes, Vanessa informed me that her womanly virtue was in question, she wasn't going to just fuck me like that, in her mother's bed (we'd relocated), then she bit my shoulders and fucked me some more.
How was it, all this fucking? How was the fit? Did I come? Did she?
How was it, all this fucking? How was the fit? Did I come? Did she? I don't remember. |
I don't remember.
It is the hallmark of such doomed affairs: the sensations — ecstatic as they might be — have no emotional grounding, and one is left, years later, with a residue of peculiar detail.
I do remember waking up with bruises on my shoulders, pale purple gnaw marks, and I remember strutting around for the next few days, wishing it was summer, so I could wear a tank top that would announce to my classmates the sexual abandon to which I might inspire a woman.
Instead, I arranged to meet her at the local dive bar. She showed up in a gauzy top that left no doubt as to the size, shape, and miraculous heft of her boobs. The other guys in my program were stunned, and I was full of that heady pride that permeates guys who have not quite discerned that they are fucking for the esteem of other guys.
I managed to cajole the one fellow who could stand me into coming back to my place, which meant he got to watch me and Vanessa neck incompetently.
So this was nice. I had myself a trophy. She dressed well and flirted like a champ and tolerated my anxiety, which I suspect she confused with ambition.
The problem was those tits. I couldn't quite get past them. They were so big and so hard, so pushy for worship. But touching them sort of freaked me out. This wasn't any sort of political issue. It was merely an intuitive, tactile objection: it felt wrong to be groping at something inorganic.
I'm sure we could trace this back to the fact that I was never breastfed as a baby. But the truth is I've never been much for tits. In the end, they are secondary sex characteristics that have been elevated to fetish objects by our motherless consumer culture.
Vanessa didn't see it this way. She wanted me to regard her breasts with the reverence they deserved. They must have cost her (or someone, anyway) a pretty penny, because I could never find any scars on the underside of them; I spent hours looking.
There were other problems. Conversation, for instance. Vanessa fancied herself something of a small-town rebel. She had all these ideas about herself. She was going to become a major magazine writer, head up to New York City, or at least Chapel Hill. I was mixed up in all this — the restless Yankee novelist who would validate her getaway. But the more she recited these dreams, the hollower they sounded.
Plus she had a flat ass and couldn't give head worth a damn.
And what of me? I was a wretched writer, convincingly furious, but not in any compelling way. I sucked in bed, too.
We began to bicker.
I would assail her with my pathetic little list of enemies and plunk my elbows on the table and Vanessa would lecture me about manners, how they were in place to help people feel more comfortable. She had the whole Southern passive-aggressive thing down to a science.
She had a favorite saying, too: fake it till you make it. All I could think about was her hooters.
Within a month, we had hit the skids. We needed booze to bear one another, and started meeting up late, after a few drinks. The term "fuck buddies" might apply, except that we weren't buddies. Our physical relations took on a cruel velocity.
I called her once, toward the end, stoned out of my mind during a snowstorm. She was drunk and I was such a gentleman that I made her drive to my place.
A little later, Vanessa climbed on top of me and pretended to enjoy my cock. She smirked and stage-whispered her dirtytalk. Then she took my hands and placed them on her breasts and my fingertips and palms met that strange, buttressed flesh and I thought of the photos of her as a lithe teen, spinning on her toes, how lovely she had been, how unadorned, and the snowflakes floated down past my window and I'm sure she saw the disappointment in my eyes, as I gripped those sad, saline mounds.
It would take a few more weeks for us to exhaust our shame, and a few more weeks for her to take up with a classmate of mine, which is about what I deserved.
In my single surviving photo of Vanessa — taken on one of those chilly winter evenings when we were still enamored — she is dressed in black, smiling gamely from beneath a bowler.
Her rack looks great.
n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Steve Almond's new essay collection is (Not that You Asked). It is, like much of his work, filthy.
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©2006 Steve Almond and Nerve.com.
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