Audrey ran back to my room, hoping for a sleepover. She was sobbing, terrified that the burnt note was just a precursor to serious bodily harm, and also pretty sure I was alone, finishing the cheese, so she flung my door open without knocking—only to find Jonah on top of me. She immediately understood the magnitude of the occasion and, through her tears, cried, “Mazel tov!”
I didn’t tell Jonah I was a virgin, just that I hadn’t done it “that much.” I was sure I had already broken my hymen in high school while crawling over a fence in Brooklyn in pursuit of a cat that didn’t want to be rescued. Still, it hurt more than I’d expected and in a different way, too—duller, less like a stab wound and more like a headache. He was nervous, and, in a nod to gender equality, neither of us came. Afterward we lay there and talked, and I could tell he was a good person, whatever that even means.
I awoke the next morning, just like I did every morning, and proceeded to do all my normal things: I called my mother, drank three cups of orange juice, ate half a block of the sharp cheddar that had been sitting out since the night before, and listened to girl-with-guitar music. I looked at pictures of cute things on the Internet and inspected my bikini line for exciting ingrown hairs. I checked my email, folded my sweaters, then unfolded all the sweaters in the process of trying to decide which sweater to wear. That night, lying down felt the same, and sleep came easily. No floodgate had been opened. No vault of true womanhood unlocked. She remained, and she was me.
Jonah and I only had sex once. The next day, he stopped by to say that he thought we’d done it too soon, and we should take a few weeks to get to know each other better. Then he asked me to be his girlfriend, put on my hot-pink bicycle helmet, and proclaimed it was “the going-steady helmet,” giving me a manic thumbs-up. I “dated” him for twelve hours, then ended it in the laundry room of his dormitory. Over Christmas break, he sent me a Facebook message that read, simply: “Your Hot.”
Sex was clearly easier to have than I had given it credit for. It occurred to me that I had, for the past few years, set my sights on boys who weren’t interested in me, and this was because I wasn’t ready. Despite all the movies about wayward prep-school girls I liked to watch, my high school years had been devoted to loving my pets, writing poems about back-alley love, and surrendering my body only to my own fantasies. And I wasn’t ready to let go of that yet. I was sure that, once I let someone penetrate me, my world would change in some indescribable yet fundamental way. I would never be able to hug my parents with the same innocence, and being alone with myself would have a different tenor. How could I ever experience true solitude again when I’d had someone poking around my insides?
How permanent virginity feels, and then how inconsequential. After Jonah, I could barely remember the sensation of lack, the embarrassment, and the feelings of urgency. I remember passing the punk girl arm in arm with her boyfriend senior year, and we didn’t even exchange a survivor’s nod. She was likely having sex every night, her ample bosom heaving in time to some hard-core music, our bond erased by experience. We weren’t part of any club anymore, just part of the world. Good for her.
Only later did sex and identity become one. I wrote that virginity-loss scene almost word for word in my first film, Creative Nonfiction, minus the part where Audrey busted down the door, afraid for her life. When I performed that sex scene, my first, I felt more changed than I had by the actual experience of having sex with Jonah. Like that was just sex, but this was my work.
* * *
1 Name changed to protect the truly innocent.
FOR A LONG TIME, I wasn’t sure if I liked sex. I liked everything that led up to it: the guessing, the tentative, loaded interactions, the stilted conversation on the cold walks home, looking at myself in the mirror in someone else’s closet-sized bathroom. I liked the glimpse it gave me into my partner’s subconscious, which was maybe the only time I actually believed anyone besides me even existed. I liked the part where I got the sense that someone else could, maybe even did, desire me. But sex itself was a mystery. Nothing quite fit. Intercourse felt, often, like shoving a loofah into a Mason jar. And I could never sleep afterward. If we parted ways, my mind was buzzing and I couldn’t get clean. If we slept in the same bed, my legs cramped and I stared at the wall. How could I sleep when the person beside me had firsthand knowledge of my mucous membranes?