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 PERSONAL ESSAYS


Sex, Love, and the Married Girl
by Amy Keyishian


I always knew I was supposed to be good in bed. I just wasn't sure what that meant.
     It was the mid-'70s, I was in grade school, and looking at Bo Duke gave me a funny feeling like I had to pee. The sitcoms were sex-soaked, what with the drooling Jack Tripper and the sexcapades on The Love Boat. Everyone was having sex except the people on The Newlywed Game, who were making whoopee. From day one -- I was born in the Summer of Love, after all -- I was aware of sex, and of being good at it. Love I was less aware of.
     Time wore on. As the spazzy loudmouth of Jersey's Morristown High -- swarthy, frizzy-haired, brown-eyed and about as far from prom queen as a girl can get without actually being Ani DiFranco -- I learned that while sex wouldn't make me popular, it would get me a measure of attention and some kind of affection. And it felt good too. In college I honed my skills; I get a little embarrassed now when I think of the many, many little tricks I tried in my enthusiasm, garnered from serious research in the pages of Forever and Cosmopolitan. My favorite was a well-practiced gasp of awe at the first sight of a new penis, guaranteed to induce more pleasure than any amount of deep-throating or nipple-nibbling. It got 'em every damn time.
     I thought I was pretty hot stuff until after college, when I had my first really awesome lover: a blond-haired, bass-playing, Irish Catholic whose watery blue eyes promised the wide vistas of pleasure I'd been hearing about since Fantasy Island. We tried all sorts of things -- not from books or magazines, but from our own heads. His roommates used to giggle and imitate my shrieks of pleasure the next morning. I didn't care. In fact, photos from this phase of my life show me looking stupefied and possessed of a permanent, foolish grin. And he gained my life-long adoration by declaring loudly, at a party, that ours was the best sex he'd ever had. Maybe it was the same trick as the one I used on new penises -- if so, I don't want to know.
     I was head-over-heels for him, literally and figuratively, until he broke my heart. But after I wandered, dazed, into my next relationship, I quickly discovered that, with the experience I had gained, I could reproduce that magic pleasure. No, I couldn't have a shrieker anytime, with anyone, but it dawned on me that I wasn't dependent on that one man to give me a good ka-powie. The early-to-mid '90s, then, were a riot. I still can't hear a Right Said Fred song or watch Herman's Head without getting flushed.
     My heart was getting restless, though. I know there are super-cool girls out there who can leap gracefully in high heels from boy to boy without ruining their mascara, but I was turning out to be depressingly traditional. I wanted love. My first clue was that I'd burst into tears right after orgasm. (I didn't say I was subtle.) My second clue was that I was losing interest in the constant chase and was really feeling the pressure. If I was to continue being Little Ms. Sex-O-Lympics, I really had my work cut out for me; the competition was fierce. The day came when my friend Gordon was kvelling about a recent conquest, and said, "Man, those German women -- they're so nasty, you could stick your shoe in it!" I found that I didn't know what it meant, to be so nasty that someone could stick his shoe in it. I wasn't even really sure where one would stick said shoe, or why. The very fact of which meant that I was no longer top bitch. Not to mention that I wasn't even particularly curious. The time had come for Josh.
     We'd been friends in college, when I had dismissed him as "too nice" -- meaning not Aryan, not frighteningly powerful, not guaranteed to break my heart . . . not my type. Josh was as Semitic as I was. In fact, he looked exactly like me, except with a goatee. What did I need to date him for? It would be like treading water in my own gene pool. Like copulating with my clone. Like making out with a long lost cousin at a family wedding.
     But when he popped up in my life again, I started to look at him differently. He was skinnier than the meaty gearheads of my past, but lithe and quick from years of soccer-playing. He was less threatening -- a fact that ceased to be a liability when I realized I liked being able to sleep next to someone without wondering if they'd be there in the morning. And his tongue worked like the textured attachment on my Venus Vibe.
     Then there was the fact that we had, like, things to talk about. He read books, he was psyched to start graduate school. And he actually found my irritating quirkiness and short temper amusing. In fact, he thought I was the shit. I was derisive of his love of basketball until I realized he was completely non-derisive of my lack of knowledge about it. Then, miraculously, I found myself drifting into the room while he watched games, asking a question here and there ("What's a field goal? Can you show me how a pick-and-roll works? Why is Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf so twitchy?"), questions he answered without calling me a moron. Not that our relationship revolved around basketball. It's just that he had . . . oh my God, he had respect for me -- as a person. So this was what Aretha Franklin had been talking about.
     The road from dating to living together was just over one year long, and the wedding was a year after that.
     Now, I had lived with boys before. Twice before. Well, three times, if you count the six months I camped out in a fourth-floor walkup on the Lower East Side, going home once a week to switch outfits. Before that was my college guy, with whom I jammed myself into a succession of tiny one-room apartments (with or without kitchens) that, due to our exactly matched housekeeping abilities, were always overflowing with clutter and crap. Trapped, I'd gaze out of those rooms, usually into an air-shaft, and wonder how I'd gotten myself into this suffocating relationship and why my boyfriend didn't want to get engaged. The last live-in loser was a blue-eyed rockabilly ectomorph, a pudgy brillo-haired womanizer who, though skilled in the sack (I hate to admit), kept me in a constant state of self-doubt. He'd been everywhere, done everything, and his constant comparisons threw me into fits of inferiority. How could I compete with the legendary frisky stewardess, unlikely as his story now, in hindsight, seems? Oy!
     When my dear Josh moved in, though, things were immediately cozy and nice. We were already engaged, so I didn't have to wonder when he'd propose or whether I was wasting my time or why he didn't really love me. He moved into my place, so I didn't feel adrift or homeless. It was just plain groovy. I thought, "This is the deal. This is my home. I feel secure and happy."
     But wait. It gets better.
     I'm not going to lie and say that the wedding night was magical, that I knew unparalleled joy the first time I had licit sex and wished only that I had saved my virginity for the father of my future children. Please! And anyway, we didn't even bother doing it that night. There was no porn in our hotel room, and we were exhausted and starving. I took off my dress and burst into tears and we ordered a pizza and that was our romantic wedding night. The end.
     It wasn't until a few weeks later that I began to notice the change. How to explain it without sounding corny? My life suddenly had a quality that I hadn't felt since -- well, that I couldn't remember feeling. Maybe it was the feeling of being a little kid before my older sisters started going to college. Maybe it was the feeling of sleeping in the back seat on the way home from my grandparents' house with a pack of butterscotch Life Savers clutched in my paws. I told you it would sound corny. But I was suddenly safe again.
     There was a closeness between Josh and me that wasn't about being forcibly, brutally honest, revealing every deep, dark secret or sharing every perverse fantasy. It wasn't about speaking at all. It was about belonging to each other, and knowing neither of us had to wonder about the other's intentions. We had gone through with it. The thing. The scary thing. The scary marriage thing.
     The sex didn't change much. It was the same stuff as before: rollicking, giggly and warm. Except now it was, like, lawful or something. I noticed a different look on my parents' faces when we stayed at their house and went up to sleep in our room: before the wedding, their eyes said, "Oy vey"; after the wedding, their expressions read, "Aw, cute." Is that all it is? Acceptance in the eyes of society? I was still being violated seven ways 'til Sunday in my childhood room, my Boy George poster still smirking benignly down on me. But there was a difference. Maybe it was in The Afterward.
     The Afterward, when I used to feel a palpable loneliness in my hands, my heart, and behind my knees. Round and painful, like hot Spalding balls. The Afterward, when I'd once felt bored to tears, literally. When I'd felt absent (though never ashamed).
     But now The Afterward felt . . . unmoored. Like I was the Casper the Friendly Ghost balloon at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade and someone had cut me loose and let me bob away, over Central Park, uptown past the Bronx. But not in harm's way. Just blown along by the warmest breezes to eventually land gently in the trees somewhere in Westchester.
     There's this pain scale I read about one time. Ten is the worst pain possible, like having your leg ripped off or sitting through The English Patient. One is the minute amount of pain associated with being in the earth's gravitational pull: the pain of feeling the chair against your back, your hair against your head, a watch on your wrist, spinach in your teeth. There's no way to feel less pain than that, not physically. Not in the world as we know it.
     But that's what I thought of, as I found myself floating in The Afterward with my new husband. The absence of pain I hadn't even known I felt. With the person I hadn't realized I wanted. Corny? Apparently. Traditional? Not given the national divorce rates.
     Nice? Yeah. Really nice.



©1998 Amy Keyishian and hooksexup.com

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