A Part of the World

He took an astronomy class his first semester at SF State in the spring, after taking four years to get through junior college. He was bored, and had been since middle school, so it didn't matter much to him what classes he took.

It would be simplest just to picture him as eleven. His first grade teacher had once described him as "delightfully immature." The redeeming modifier had long since ceased to apply. He dressed indifferently, bathed occasionally, and did not dance or look directly at other people. At the occasional party he was invited to, he would go into the kitchen and wash the dishes. He had never kissed a girl. He was quite talkative on any subject unrelated to intimacy. He sometimes imagined other people either couldn't hear him or weren't listening, and compensated for this by talking loudly. He craved attention, and was oblivious to the fact that, when he got it, it was usually for the wrong reasons. He was actually better off alone, not constantly having to reconcile his own idea of himself with everyone else's. He hadn't learned this yet.

The class was called Stellar Astronomy. It was an upper-division class for astronomy majors. There was a lot of math, which he had avoided since high school. He bought a scientific calculator and learned how to use it, or at least most of it. Stellar magnitudes were exponential, so he needed to familiarize himself with the power and log keys. He remembered powers and roots, and eventually figured out that logarithms solved power equations where the power was unknown. He had trouble with trigonometric functions. Most of the class was in the same predicament he was.

He sat next to a woman in the class. She was more than quiet; she was self-possessed to the point of being eccentric. She sat like a stone idol, never speaking to anyone or looking around or even turning her head. She looked at the teacher when he spoke, and down at her desk when he didn't. She was wrapped in a shawl that seemed intended to discourage attention. It didn't work in his case; he noticed her mainly because she looked so out of place, which he knew he was. He thought at first that she wasn't bad looking, but because of her hair he couldn't really tell. She had collar-length blonde hair, which she refused to tuck behind her ears, and so it hung down, screening her face when viewed from the side. For this reason, and because she never turned her head, and because he was afraid to look at her, he only got an occasional glimpse of her face.

The teacher was a pleasant man in his late twenties. He was knowledgeable about astronomy, but less so about teaching. One day the teacher wrote a series of calculations on the blackboard, which he called the Stefan-Boltzmann law. The teacher said they could be used to determine the energy radiated by a black body, given its size and temperature. The calculations covered half the blackboard. Everyone looked at the board. No one said anything.

He raised his hand and asked the teacher what a black body was. The teacher said it was a star. He asked why a star would be called a black body. The teacher said it was just a technical term having several applications, one of which modeled a generic star. He asked what was the long curved diagonal line in the equation with the infinity sign at the top and the zero at the bottom. The teacher said it was the symbol for an integral. He asked what an integral was. The teacher looked around the class, perhaps hoping to find a consensus of scorn for the question among the other students. Not finding it, he looked at the blackboard, thought for a moment, and then said not to worry, the class wouldn't be required to know the calculations. The teacher then erased the blackboard. In the hallway after class, two other students came up to him and thanked him. At the next class the woman asked him if he wanted to study with her.

She was taciturn, unaffected, unsentimental, and almost humorless. She was seven years older than he and had been married, but now was alone with a child. He was unable to make her laugh on purpose, but occasionally did inadvertently. She told him that he said out loud what other people were thinking. The more he looked at her, the nicer looking she got. She really was lovely, way out of his league, and he could tell she was aware of it, although she didn't act anything like a woman who knew she was attractive. She seemed to regard beauty as a burden she was tired of carrying. He couldn't decide if she liked him or was just putting up with him in order to get the study help. She wasn't even pretending to be nice to him, did not disguise her occasional annoyance at his behavior, and yet she obviously preferred having him around at times. He assumed she associated with him because she thought he was useful to know.

Once, while discussing relations between a married couple, she said the situation would be tolerable unless the husband wasn't taking care of business. It took a moment for him to realize what she meant by this. She was saying that the husband was not fucking his wife enough, or well enough. She had said this without inflection. It startled him that she could think of sex as a business to be taken care of, and refer to it in the sort of dismissive, phlegmatic tones a plumber might use in describing a leaky faucet. It served to remind him that they had much less in common than he had supposed.

He went to her apartment one evening to study with her, and they ended up spending the night on her couch, talking and sleeping. The next day in class, she asked him why he hadn't tried anything. Caught off guard by the question, he was able to respond, with some hesitation, that he was shy. He had never admitted such a thing before. She said she understood. He changed the subject.

* * *

A week later, they spent a Sunday together and then went to her apartment to spend the night. When they arrived, he sat in a straight-backed chair in the middle of her living room. He didn't know what to do when they came into the room, and sitting in the chair seemed like the safest choice available to him. It would at least relieve him of the burden of making any more choices about where to stand, or whether to approach her. He was becoming frightened. What had been, for most of the day, some uncertainty about how things were going to go, had very quickly evolved into an avalanche of anxiety. In other situations he'd been in with women, there was always enough ambiguity attached to the circumstances to allow him to deflect any tension towards small talk. But here, he was certainly going to be expected to touch her face with his own. There was no passage through this circumstance that was not traumatic. He was simply scared to death. He could not even have described what it was that frightened him so much, other than that he would be exposed as a fraud for ever pretending not to be afraid.

She came into the room and looked at him without betraying a sense of anything being out of place. She asked him, in a voice that a secretary might use, whether he had brought contraceptives with him. He said no. She said she was going to put on her diaphragm, and left the room. He sat, frozen to the chair. Eventually she came back into the room wearing a bathrobe and sat on his knee.

He looked down at the floor. He couldn't look at her; he was having trouble controlling the muscles in his face, and he knew she would see this as soon as he turned towards her. She would know exactly what he was thinking. Not just the thoughts he would intend to share, but even his private thoughts; the ones he was having right then and would never want revealed. He would lose control over his presentation of himself, and become completely transparent. She would know immediately how scared he was, how this mindless, implacable fear was enveloping him. There would be no explaining. There would be no time or opportunity or point. It would already have been made plain what he was. He wouldn't be able to tell her about his feelings, rationalizing and justifying himself and putting things in a favorable light, as if his cowardice could be an interesting topic for conversation. She would see his fear for herself, written all over his face. She would realize at once what a phony he was, nothing at all like the detached, normal, rational grown man he was pretending to be. Anything would be better than that. So he kept looking at the floor.

She was sitting on his leg, so he couldn't go anywhere. She waited patiently, and didn't say anything. Thirty seconds ticked by. The sense of awkwardness in his not looking at her became acute. By now he could feel himself breathing, his mind was racing but to no effect, just thoughts stumbling over themselves. He couldn't think of a thing to say, and in any case trying to speak to her while looking at the floor would only make things worse. It was as if he was slowly being pushed off a cliff. Every choice was unbearable. There was to be no escape from this, from being so cruelly exposed. She still wouldn't say anything; by now she must already know, it must be so obvious, if only he hadn't come here at least she wouldn't know. All this trouble to get to this point, years trying to climb out of the cave he lived in, only to be seen through by some pitiless woman who would of course demand first of all some demonstration of his courage when in fact there was none. It was over. There was nothing left to be done that would make any difference. Slowly, almost as if being forced against his will, he turned his head and looked up at her.

She immediately kissed him. He opened his mouth a little, and she put her tongue inside. He reached up and put his hand on the back of her neck. Six years late, he passed through the membrane separating acquaintance and intimacy. It was the strangest thing. It was like taking off in an airliner on a rainy day. The acceleration, the roar of the jet engines, the bouncing, the clouds rushing by as the plane climbs, and then the sense of calm as it clears the overcast and levels off. Suddenly it's quiet and peaceful, with light everywhere. It was just like that. There was no noise. The only disconcerting part was his sense of detachment. He had expected there would be something more to it than what he was experiencing. He could do this, it wasn't hard, but there was nothing like sensory overload, and no great physical pleasure. He was relieved it wasn't difficult, and supposed that, after some time, it would become enjoyable. It was strange having her face so close to his. She smelled funny, and he kept thinking he should excuse himself, as if they'd bumped into each other on a crowded bus. He wasn't in love with her, and didn't know her well enough to feel entirely comfortable touching her in this way. His strongest sensation was the recognition that he was making out and it wasn't at all traumatic or difficult. The thought passed through his head that, for the first time in his adult life, he wasn't acting normal around a girl. What he was doing wasn't acting normal; it was normal. What he was doing was normal. And if that were true, then by extension he must be, at least for the moment, normal as well.

She was in charge. He was just going along, with no idea of the protocol, and too grateful to be of any use in making decisions. After a few minutes, she got up and prepared the bed by stripping off everything above the fitted sheet. She placed a single pillow in the center of the bed. The rest went into one corner, and a small towel into another. She turned out all the lights, leaving only a small amount of light coming from the kitchen. Of course, he thought, things have to be a certain way: this has to go here, and that has to be just so, or else things might not go as well later. It reminded him of groundskeepers before a baseball game.

She came back and they kissed some more, and then they undressed and got on the bed. He had some idea that he should go down on her, but he was acutely aware that he was putting himself forward in a way that would demonstrate how ignorant he was. This hesitation was obvious, and his clumsy attempt succeeded only in annoying her. From her abruptness in cutting him off, he suspected she must have figured out that he had no idea what he was doing, but he was nonetheless happy to forego the opportunity of demonstrating his incompetence.

She had him sit on the edge of the bed, and then got on her knees and put her mouth on his penis. This was a shock. He actually shuddered; it was all he could do to refrain from stopping her. Fellatio had always existed in his mind as a fantastic visual feast, breasts and tongues and lips and testicles and cascading hair, all the wonderful sleek dangling things that sex was made of summing to an ever-blossoming profane dream of it as being the absolute contravention of feminine modesty. But this, what he was experiencing, was far removed from all of that. She was somebody he knew. He didn't want to witness her ruin; he wanted to be close to her, and she was down there. All he could see was the top of her head. She was servicing him; for all that he was feeling, she may as well have been shining his shoes. He already had an erection, so none of this was necessary. After a minute or so, he'd had enough to overcome his natural reluctance to assert himself. He reached down and grabbed her under her arms, lifting her towards him to kiss her and change positions.

It wouldn't go in. He thought at first that he was, yet again, doing something wrong, but then she used her hands to direct him to the right spot, and that didn't help. She must have had the wrong size vagina. This was a calamity. He'd read every book about sex ever written, and there had been no mention of this. It didn't occur to him at the time that she'd already had a baby. She wasn't particularly upset by this development, and seemed determined to see the thing through. This was a relief; maybe things weren't as bad as he thought. He was sure she wasn't reluctant; apparently, she wasn't able to relax her muscles enough for him to enter her. After several attempts, he finally just put his weight on his penis and waited. He hoped he wasn't hurting her, but he couldn't imagine how that could be. It started in, but slowed to a crawl after an inch or two. He was inside of her. Even if everything else went wrong from this point, at least he could comfort himself with the knowledge that he'd had sex.

It was not possible to move comfortably. Each thrust took three or four seconds; they were making love in slow motion. If he were to go any faster, he would certainly hurt her. After a few minutes, they rolled over, so she could control the movements between them. He liked that better. She wanted to sit upright, but he wanted her face close to his, so he pulled her down and started kissing her. She supported herself with her elbows on either side of his head. He realized he was quickly getting over the strangeness of her face being so near his. Her hair, hanging down beside her face, was becoming tangled up with their kisses. After what seemed like about five minutes, she began to lubricate inside, and they were able to move more or less normally.

With her moving more rapidly, he gave up trying to keep his mouth on hers. It became a kind of face mashing, more like rubbing garlic into a steak than kissing. He wanted his face to touch the greatest possible surface area of her skin. Her hair, caught between their faces, was getting damp from their sweat and saliva. He was surprised to find that he was able to think in a detached fashion about what they were doing. There was nothing overwhelming about the sensations he was experiencing. The thought struck him that this was a lot more work than he had expected. If he'd been by himself, he'd have been done and in the shower by then. There were no covers, and after a while she said she was cold on top of him. She stopped and got off the bed. She went to get a rubber band for her hair, and then put her bathrobe back on, leaving it open in front. With her unkempt hair stuffed up underneath the rubber band, she looked like a badly dressed sumo wrestler. It really didn't matter; by that time, he was more feeling her than looking at her.

They finished. When she pulled off of him, there was a small mess on his stomach. She used the towel she had left on the corner of the bed to wipe them both up. Then she recovered the sheets and blankets, disrobed again, and lay down next to him on her side. He turned towards her. She was smiling. She was looking right at his face. She was not glancing, or offering any expression that would have conveyed some additional meaning. She was just smiling at him. If she had not been so close to him, he would have turned around to see what she was smiling at. Without thinking, he smiled back at her and put his hands on her face, suddenly unafraid of the wondrous light she was shining on him. He had not experienced this, or anything like this, since the last time his mother had given him a bath.

Finally came something like the euphoria he had been expecting earlier. The sex had been a distraction. Up until then there had been a plan, a way things were supposed to go, which she knew and he didn't, all leading to a goal at the end, and they both had to stick to the plan. But now they were relaxed, just lying next to each other and touching for no reason at all. He could do this as well as anyone. There were no rules that he was unfamiliar with. He didn't have to keep up, or wonder what was supposed to happen next. For the first time since they'd come into the apartment, he wasn't looking to her for cues as to what to do. He thought she'd think he was a baby for holding her this way, but she obviously didn't mind. The thought occurred to him that she must have been as lonely as he was. It seemed a miracle to him that something that felt so wonderful could have given pleasure to someone else. It was just heart-filling, there was no other phrase he could think of to describe it. This, the two of them lying together after making love, touching and talking, would always be his clearest memory of their time together.

They made love again, and then lay and kissed for awhile, and then again, and finally at about 1:00am they slept. He migrated to the far end of the bed before falling asleep. He couldn't be touched when he was sleeping, he just wasn't used to it. He slept fitfully, his restless wanderings back and forth across the bed interrupted repeatedly by the shock of bumping into her. At about 6:00am they woke, immediately came together on the bed and kissed for a while, and then made love. By this time it was he, no longer so concerned about what the rules were, who was reaching for her, making clear by his actions what he wanted, without looking to her for permission or guidance before each step.

The sun rose over the buildings across the street and now there was light flooding into the apartment. This changed everything. His eleven-hour-old sex career had, so far, been played out in the dark. But now he could see her so much more clearly. She looked different, the light on her illuminating her features and bringing her curves into relief. They weren't really excited in that way, but it didn't matter; at this point they were just a pair of delirious three-year-olds in a sandbox. It was completely pointless, a celebration of some elemental joy which, having been denied them for so long, was now within reach. They could have as much as they wanted. They were both smiling at the thought of it, smiling and rubbing each other like a pair of contented cats. It wasn't even sex.

He didn't have a change of clothes, so it would have been pointless to take a shower. He got dressed and left, the smell of her all over him.

* * *

They would meet again at her apartment Tuesday night. He hadn't seen her for a day, but he had slept, and had spent much of his waking hours reflecting on what they'd done. The result of this day's worth of reflection was that the parts which had before felt strange and mildly disconcerting now felt much more like the most wonderful thing ever, and could this wonderful thing be made to happen again as soon as possible, and how might that be accomplished.