I kept up a voluminous correspondence with my DC friends, and to a lesser extent, with my family. Among my correspondents was a slightly younger woman that had been at the fringes of my group. Her name was Heidi Walker, and inexplicably, I sent her a Sturm und Drang confessional from the men's dorm. My earliest memory of Ms. Walker was framed by the circle of chairs in the classroom where we met to vote on each other's literary products for the school literary magazine. Her brother was in that circle. He was an intellectual giant among us pygmies: he was going to Harvard. (Though maybe it was Yale: I don't remember him in Boston.) So Heidi, frozen in memory in her winter coat all pale blue and her wool cap all decked out with a pom-pom ornament ,was a wunderkind from a wunder-family. Perhaps her father was an Englishman, but her mother was a Swede. She looked like a young Viking, her features sharp and her cheekbones high. She was, if the cliche could literally apply to anyone at all, "cute as a button." We crossed paths from time to time at parties and coffee houses, but I don't remember saying more than a sentence or two to her in High School. She was perhaps a few years younger, and when one is a teen, a few years makes quite a difference. Another factor in my reticence involved the mistaken impression that she was the subject of a friends' infatuation. In the tradition of honor among thieves, I felt constrained about asking her out. Such constraints evaporated in the first Winter I spent in Boston. We sent a pair of flirtatious letters back and forth.
Of course, I also corresponded with Goode. His letters arrived rimmed in airmail trim as he traveled in Europe researching one of his books. We had the topic of Davis' death, which hit the whole gang pretty hard, and he was concerned about Hillary Smith's state of mind. I reported, of course, that Smith had been upset that one afternoon, but had reverted to form immediately as far as I could tell. He immediately began to assert his desire to visit me in the dorm. This idea of his began to seem alarming, since I was becoming a confirmed heterosexual at a rapid clip.
Not to underestimate the time taken up by the box, not to mention Harmony and Solfege, it was the sexual revolution that provided a contrapuntal course of study. Here's what I remember: I was working on writing a letter to Goode, delicately soft-pedaling the fact that my roommates had the routine of heading to their remote homes for the weekends, when Xenia entered my dormroom unannounced.
"Help! Can I hide out in here?"
Giggles, mostly hysterical.
"Why? Who from?"
"Oh God! That actor, Aldrich!"
"The red head? What's he done?"
"Oh nothing. He's got it bad. Undying protestations of love."
"How terrible."
"So...what are you up to?"
"Writing letters."
"Home?"
"To my...music teacher."
"That's dedicated."
"That's complicated."
"How so?"
"He wants to come up here and sleep with me."
Silence.
"Shocked?"
"Absolutely."
"Well, you've gotten away from Aldrich, but you're out of the frying pan and into the fire."
"This music teacher. Is he...cute?"
"No. He's...just odd. Odd looking."
"And he wants to come up here and do the nasty. Wow. Does that mean you don't do girls, I mean, women?"
The next thing you knew, Xenia and I were in the priest's bed, making out. Yet, despite this promiscuity, I was still a technical virgin. We did all sorts of licking and sucking (back in the day), and each encounter yielded more delights, but we did not "go all the way." As a result, it was sometimes hard to tell what the end was. There were no sweaty bodies. Sometimes, we never took off our clothes. Sometimes, the ache in the groin was enough to double me over. Sometimes, we got plenty sticky. With Xenia, barging in in the middle of a period of high sexual tension (Mara), she got very sticky. This made her laugh hysterically. She got up off the bed and picked up the letter on my desk from Goode.
"I think you can see my problem."
"Actually, I think this guy is brilliant."
"He's brilliant, I'll agree."
"Can I see more of these letters?"
I handed over a pile. Xenia sat on the floor and read them all. I sat, bored, watching her. At long last, she glared at me over the last piece of foolscap.
"You are an ass if you don't let this guy come up here."
While Xenia and I, as it will be seen, continued as friends long into our lives, we never again attempted sex. Well, there was that one other time...
An astonishing coincidence that proved a game changer was the presence in Boston that winter of Linda Litman. She, too, started out as a correspondent. She, too, had floated around the High School literary scene. She wrote from Boston that she was in Boston. She'd been accepted at Northeastern. Did I have a phone?
Linda and I shared a history.
[We know.]
She had a room in another dorm. It was, she thought, high time we went all the way. She was on the pill. She was having her period. She had it all figured out. We had a bottle of white wine. White wine was much more palatable than her parents' Burgundy. Liebfraumilch was actually sweet. It didn't take much for us to be toasted. We sat together on her bed, our fingers twining, rediscovering that make-out magic we'd found before in all of those tight spaces. She stopped me when I moved to put her hands on the erection that was tenting my jeans. She took off her shirt and unhooked her bra. She knew what she was doing. She undid my belt and pulled my jeans and underwear down to the floor. I was before her in all my glory, and she was on the bed looking at me, her eyes wide pools of riveted interest. All I had to do was step out of my pants, and while I did this, she slid hers off and wriggled free. We were, as my Dad would say, "in our birthday suits." She guided me all the way down as I prepared for the first time to experience the forbidden fruit. On my elbows above her, I felt the wet warmth envelop me and...
I ejaculated into her immediately. I had lasted less than fifteen seconds.
"Did you just come?"
"Sorry. I just totally lost it."
"I blew your fuse."
"You blew my fuse."
"Let's have more wine."
"Whine not."
Linda was easy, a beautiful spirit. She knew that in half an hour, she could try it all over again and still be less frustrated than she'd been in High School. She had the whole winter. I trusted her completely and took care to satisfy her. This meant finding her pleasure, getting under her rhythm, and getting good at whatever I could get good at. She wanted a relationship, I knew. In a sense we had one, but I was still out walking the fens, going to dance concerts, writing poems, and becoming increasingly and most incoherently obsessed with Mara. It was wife/whore Boston edition.
That first Boston Winter, my body had some adjusting to do. Coming in from outside, the blood vessels in my nose would burst and I would have wicked nosebleeds. That was how it came to pass that I learned how to fuck properly. Having dashed up the many flights to Linda's room, I was already bleeding when she opened her door.
"Christ!"
"Get me a napkin or something!"
She nursed me with a wet towel. As soon as my nostrils settled down, we were undressed and at it. As I lowered myself I had the thought, 'what if I have another nosebleed?' The thought distracted me just enough that I lost the thread of sensation that had always escalated to immediate orgasm. I got a second wind right off the bat, and as I indulged in the pleasure of fornication, my nose did begin to bleed. I didn't realize it at first, so involved was I in lovemaking. I rose up on an elbow and saw the red pool forming on the pillow beside her head. For a moment, still very erect but continent at last, I pondered what to do. My thrusts trailed off.
"Oh God, Calbraith, don't stop!"
OK. Not stopping, I continued until, for the first time, we came together as well-tuned lovers.
"God! that was amazing."
"God. I think we have a problem."
"Oh. Christ."
The bed looked like something out of Macbeth, and we were covered in my blood, our hair matted and sticky. She went for another towel. She sat on the edge of the bed.
"I can't believe it."
"Amazing."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"About the nosebleed? I didn't realize it until I was having too much fun."
"Christ."
It was quite awhile before we got together again, and our intimacy was never quite the same. I'll always think that the bloodbath was all too much. Years later, I learned that that wasn't it. She just got fed up with playing second fiddle to a woman that wouldn't put out.
It wasn't true that Mara didn't "put out." It was true, she wasn't on the pill. One evening, on one of those walks along the Fens, now with the Spring making the outside doable again, She suddenly turned and said,
"Would you eat me?"
"What?"
"I want you to go down on me."
"Here? On the Fenway?"
"No. We can go to my room. I'm roommate free just now."
In tow, hand in hand, up the steps we went. Nothing is as sweet as the consummation of a love that has been an ache for months. Let the pagans rock, but maybe the Puritans are on to something. Make a ritual out of abstinence, and you are into Karezza territory, flirting with the Tantrik Yoga. We weren't at that level. We were young and clumsy. We'd proceed in fits and starts until my foolish childishness blew it up.
I had managed to put Goode off until Spring. Xenia's words about him haunted me, and I eventually relented. About that encounter, I have nothing but shame. Let one's own conscience be the guide in life. The judgment of another does not have to endure the ill fit of one's own shoes.
