Eighteen in the Attic

When I was 18, I'd touch my girlfriend where she wanted to be touched, in about three places that I rubbed hard, like they were cold and she’d asked me to sand them off. I touched her lips, her breasts, and, overwhelmingly, between her legs—a simple sex formula I abused the same way a teenager abuses a new piece of slang. It worked or it didn’t, and usually it worked. She was the same age and handled me in the same kind of way, saving up kisses and delivering them like punches. She forced my clothes off haphazardly so that a sock or pant leg was always left; I looked more like I was getting dressed.

We were in Chicago and it was always apocalyptically hot or cold outside. She rented a small room in an attic, with a roof that slammed diagonally through the middle. There was nowhere to be but on her bed.

When the sex formula didn't work she talked. She raved about sad songs by weathered black women and about stories, grave as a grandfather clock, by seriously dead writers. I wanted to understand both but could never talk about either. Her likes were all love and loss and pain, the kind of word-resistant examples good art gives and grad students have been beating around for centuries. The talking would turn to silence, the silence to a hasty grab at a thigh. We'd gulp kisses again, tightening ourselves to each other with slow, anxious muscle. I would look down at myself going into her, then up at her head, the whole time in disbelief. She, her face quite stiff, would concentrate on what was happening within, slowly opening and closing her eyes. We loved each other but knew we wouldn't always. This knowledge wandered around in a space vast as sky, disappearing whenever we had sex. The relationship lasted one great year.