Joe’s voice is calm. “Did I misunderstand you back at the Slaughtered Lamb when you put your hand on my ass and whispered, ‘I’ve got at condom with your name on it?’”
That had been my friend Bett’s idea. Not mine. It had worked, yes, but—
“Hey.” He pulls a towel from the rack and covers himself before stepping toward me. He reaches to push my hair over my shoulder. “I thought it was what you wanted. It’s what you said you wanted.”
I can’t argue with that. I’d like to put the blame on him, make it his fault, but the truth is clear. The burden of my virginity had been lifted from me in a pretty spectacular fashion. I was only being a fool if I expected more.
“I did.” My voice still sounds thick, as if I might cry. But I know I won’t.
“You knew what you wanted and you went out and got it,” Joe said. “What’s so wrong about that?”
“Nothing!”
“Sure I can’t convince you to join me?” Joe backs toward the shower as he drops the towel. His grin is quite tempting, but I shake my head. “Okay. You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine.” I think it’s only half a lie. “I have to go.”
“Drive carefully,” he says again.
When the shower curtain rattles closed, I almost change my mind. Instead, I finish dressing and flee the hotel room, leaving behind the stranger who made me into a woman.
“That’s a nice story,” I said. “I like the part about how you made her a woman.”
Joe reached for his paper cup of soda and took a long drink, as though talking had made him thirsty. “Didn’t I?”
“What I find interesting is the idea that a woman has to have sex to become a woman.”
He shrugged and tore open the paper wrapped around his sandwich. He always waits until after he’s told me the month’s tale before he eats, then falls to with gusto as though the telling has given him an appetite. He has turkey on wheat, the usual, but this time with tomatoes. I watch him pick them off, one by one. Joe hates tomatoes.
“Doesn’t it?”
I say nothing, content to sit and watch him eat. I needed time for my body to ease back to the real world, for my heartbeat to slow and my breath to follow. I pulled my sweater around me, feigning a chill, to hide the fact my nipples had gone stiff. Later, at home, I would recall his story, the small details of it, and I’d touch myself until I came. For now, I played the cool observer, the same as I did every month when we met on this bench in the atrium or the one outside in the garden.
“I don’t know what her problem was.” Joe chewed and swallowed. A pearl of mayonnaise clung to the corner of his mouth, and I pushed a napkin toward him.
“She’d just lost her virginity to a stranger. Maybe she felt awkward.”
Of course, I had no idea what Mary felt, any more than I knew what any of Joe’s women thought or felt. My imagination filled in the details of their coupling, taking what he told me and painting a picture from the feminine point of view.
“She was on me like butter on a biscuit. How was I supposed to know she was a virgin? She didn’t act like one.”
“How’s a virgin supposed to act?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know. But she acted like she knew exactly what she wanted. So why was she so upset when she got it?”
I didn’t answer for a moment, thinking. “Maybe she was disappointed.”
He gave me the grin, the bad boy smile. “Sadie, I did not disappoint her.”
“Oh, that’s right. You made her a woman.”
Joe frowned. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“No. Losing my virginity didn’t make me a woman. Did it make you a man?”
His one-eyed squint shouldn’t have been as enchanting as it was. “I lost my virginity to Marcia Adams, my mother’s best friend. It made me a man pretty fast. I wouldn’t have survived it, otherwise.”
This is a story I’d never heard and my face must have shown it. Joe laughed, one eye still squinted, face tipped up toward the atrium’s glass ceiling.
“Are you going to tell me about it?”
He looked, for one strange moment, shy. I hadn’t thought him capable of it. He shifted on the bench, and I was sure he was for once not going to tell me.
“I was seventeen. She asked me to take care of her garden. Money for college. She told me I could use her pool every day, when I was done mowing the lawn.”
“Sounds like you did more than mow her lawn.”
He rubbed a hand along the back of his neck. “Yeah.”
“And you really think that’s what made you a man?”
I watched him curiously. He turned to look at me, his face solemn and nodded slowly.
“Yeah. I think it showed me what to expect, anyway.”
“I’m not sure that’s the same thing.”
“Well, if losing your virginity didn’t make you a woman,” he said, “what did?”
I said nothing to that, a topic into which I didn’t wish to delve. After a moment, he shrugged. “Mary acted like I was handing her a twenty and kicking her out.”
“Maybe she assumed you were the sort of guy who picks up women in bars and sleeps with them, then expects them to leave.”
“I’d have let her shower first!” He cried, indignant. “Jeez, I’m not a total asshole.”
Yet he didn’t deny he was, indeed, the sort of man who picks up women in bars and sleeps with them, perfectly satisfied with one night.
I didn’t respond, just sipped my drink. Joe set his sandwich down. The sun shining through the glass overhead cut through the giant Boston ferns hanging above us and striped shadows in his dark blond hair. His frown pulled his full mouth into thinness.
“Say it.”
I pretended not to know what he meant.
“Say it,” he repeated. “You want to. I can see it in your eyes.”
“Say what?” I relented. “That you are the sort of man who does that?”
“Keep going.” He sat back against the bench, his arms crossed.
I smiled. “That you’re a cheater? A rogue? That you don’t know the meaning of fidelity? That you go through women like wind through lace?”
“Don’t forget that I’m
