For You, The Stars
Chapter Nine: Installment 4
In the middle of the night, I woke as Diane slipped out of the bed and left the room. It was dark in the room but my eyes gradually adjusted. On the opposite wall I could see her roommate’s empty bed, with its stuffed animals piled on top. Right above my head I could see an award Diane had won for some race she ran with her cross-country team. The middle of the room had two desks in it and next to Diane’s bed was the boombox she had played her mix tape on. What was taking her? I kind of had to go myself but I wasn’t too keen on stumbling into a women’s-only bathroom in the middle of the night. Who knows who’d I run into. I figured I could wait.
After a while I must have dozed off but I came awake again when Diane quietly opened the door and slid back into bed. She was shivering or something, because her shoulders were heaving gently. Then I realized she was crying again. i decided to admit I was awake. I rolled over toward her and put one arm around her.
“What the matter?” I whispered.
She told me. The doctor in the infirmary who’d fitted her for the diaphragm had reminded her that she needed to keep it in for six hours or more, I forget, after intercourse. (She said the doctor, a woman, had been amused by her urgent desire to get her birth control arranged before this weekend.) She’d been feeling uncomfortable in there, though, so she went to the bathroom stall to remove the cap. When she did so, a flood of menstrual blood poured out, which had horrified her. I had to admit it wasn’t the sort of image I would have wanted to associate with my first time with a new lover.
Not that I was squeamish about menstruation and stuff like that. I had an older sister. That was all just bodily functions to me. I didn’t really understand the guys who made such a big deal about things like that, but who’d be just as likely to eat a bug or hawk a loogie. It was hypocritical, I thought, or worse. Some sign of how women were always treated as strange and creepy by men, even as we were addicted to them.
I told her that it was probably normal. The diaphragm had held back her normal flow and when she released it of course there had been an unusual amount of fluid. She thought this was probably true but still wanted to see the doctor the next day. I said I’d be happy to go with her. I also said that I realized it wasn’t just a medical question but that it had freaked her out and that that was ok. I held her as she fell asleep.
In the morning I had to take a shower in the girl’s bathroom. Fortunately, they were more civilized than we men and had a separate stall for each shower. You’d go in in your bathrobe, hang it on a hook on the door, and then move over to the showerhead at the opposite end of the stall. I ran into one girl on the way in but she just kind of winked at me. I gathered that men sleeping over wasn’t that unusual. It was a far cry from the parietals of the ’50s that my parents had told me about.
The doctor agreed it was no big deal but said that if it bothered Diane she should probably hold off on the sex until after her period. Since this would be after I left I was kind of against the idea but I didn’t say anything. We still had Saturday night to look forward to, and then I had to hook up with my ride to get back down to New Jersey on Sunday.
We ate some terrible brunch in her dining hall and then she showed me around the campus, pointing out her favorite buildings, where she took her classes, the track, and various trees and groves and benches and such. She took me down to a little pond where there was a bench swing and told me this was her favorite place to come and sit by herself when she felt lonely. She started crying again. Why was she crying so much? I wrapped my arms around her and rocked her gently. I didn’t try to say anything.
That night we danced at her dorm mixer to Thomas Dolby and other cheesy hitmakers of the moment. Something felt not quite right but I put it out of my mind. We were having fun. We both had a few beers, but not too many, and when we went to bed she insisted that we fuck even when I said I didn’t mind if we skipped it.
In the end the relationship foundered on the long-distance rocks. She came down one more time and we made love in my bunkbed with my roommate away in his girfriend’s room. I figured out that women don’t automatically climax the moment you enter them and learned a little more about how to help her along. I thought we were doing just great until a letter came from her in the mail. It was nicely put but it basically said she was ending it. Somehow, she said, when she had showed me her favorite places on the Wellesley campus, and especially the pond and the swing, she had realized that she felt very vulnerable with me. She thought that I was going to leave her eventually so she wanted to end it now before she got hurt.
I thought that was insane. I wrote her a letter pledging to stay with her for, well, a long time at least and telling her it wasn’t really fair for her to break up with me preemptively, but in her reply it was obvious that her mind was made up. I’m not sure why we weren’t having these conversations over the phone. I guess on some level we were both incredibly romantic and were playing out even the most painful part of a relationship in a somewhat traditional way.
I moped around for weeks and never had another girlfriend in college. In fact, I doubt Bella would have gone out with me even if she hadn’t been with Paulie. She liked me. I think she liked me a lot, but as a close friend. “I like you as a friend” was just about the most painful words I ever heard a woman say, and usually it was b.s. since most of the time that was the end of the friendship too. Most of the time there wasn’t much of a friendship at all. In fact in those days I hadn’t yet figured out to be attracted to women I actually liked. I was responding to looks and grace and status and pheromones.
With Bella it was true. We definitely were friends. We were close like girlfriends. We told each other everything. We spent hours together, sometimes not saying anything. There just wasn’t any chemistry, no spark. At least not for her. I would have jumped in bed with her in a hot second if I had had the slightest sign of encouragement.
I never mentioned any of this to Cecilia. I was sure she didn’t want to hear me mooning over her older sister. Plus maybe she knew already. I had no idea what Bella had every told her about me, except that somehow I had earned her endorsement and had a kind of credibility in Cecilia’s eyes when we first met that I never ordinarily would have had. I had no doubt the Cecilia would herself have never given me a second glance if I hadn’t been Bella’s best friend Daniel from college. So be it. If I couldn’t have the original I was content with the knockoff.