Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,27

that much. His delivery was controlled, his voice made richer by the lack of inflection.

“Couple years ago, I found a stash of creepy love letters in the basement ceiling rafters. I run to my mother, thinking, She’s free. But she refused to read them, saying that I was mistaken, that I was out to demean my father, that I needed more therapy. Even if I could have gotten her to admit the affairs were true, she probably would have taken the blame for the failed relationship, for her frigidity—that’s his descriptor of choice. Frigidity? More like common sense. Who knows who he’s been with?

“I admire his originality,” Jack said sarcastically. “Instead of being grateful that my mother and sister give him the fucking time of day, that worthless piece of shit wakes up and says, ‘I have an empty apartment, an absent family, a high-paying job, and I live in a city full of desperate women—What damage can I inflict today?’ It’s like a criminal with a loaded gun and a full tank of gas, or a plantation master with a whip and a horse. They’re all thinking the same thing: if I don’t use these conditions to my advantage, what a waste of weapons.”

I put my hand on the back of his neck and swept aside his hair. He had beautiful white-blond hair to his shoulders. He never brushed it—it just twisted and tangled softly.

He looked from his hands to my face. His ice-blue eyes worked in earnest, as though taking in more of me than I could present. The fireworks were still popping, but the finale would soon be coming. “C’mon. Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

As we mounted the first and second flights of stairs to his room, I felt somewhat like a trespasser, especially after Jack’s story. But the third set was thinner and steeper. It had a curious turn at the top and a feeble light at the end, giving it the feel of a tunnel leading from one world to another. With each step we detached ourselves further from everything and everyone we had ever known. The privacy we felt was unlike any other, coming as it did when we needed it most. Ours was a very lucky privacy.

Jack was before me, we were near the bed, we were kissing, we were lying back, descending. The smell of his bed was the smell of him, only multiplied. It confused me to be initiated into his aloneness; it confused me to know such a place existed, such a repository of untried masculinity and pathetic virility, such a site of self-love and self-abuse. The quilt bubbled around my body and the weight of Jack was good, reminding me of the times I have been buried in sand. I pressed my hips into his because it seemed like the right thing to do, although the part that longed for pressure was farther down and deeper in. My muscles raised me, uncertainly at first, in a practicing way, each time squeezing more expertly, each time tightening an invisible tube inside.

I thought we might have been waiting for something. I thought maybe it was me. My hand journeyed from his shoulder, drifting fitfully down, and he lifted himself so I could reach where he seemed to know I was going. He was leaning and supporting his body on his left knee, making room. His head hung to watch, his hair cascading around my face like a paper waterfall. With my finger I traced the teeth of his zipper upward from its base to its flap, and as I started to draw it down, the zipper pushed itself open from pressure. Everyone knows about the parts of a woman, but you never hear about the parts of a man, not in any specific regard. Even in great artwork, men’s genitals are under-realized, scribbled or shadowy, as if the artist wanted to be courageous, but only sort of. As if there were some incentive to keeping men mythic, as if the part and the man were the same, and preserving the mystique of one meant preserving the power of the other.

But in my hand was a contradiction of skin and muscle, something solid but fragile, potent but meager, something both majestic and vile. Jack seemed helpless to the way it stood parallel to his belly. It occurred to me that grown-up men such as teachers and coaches know but keep secret the way erections make boys defenseless. Maybe women know, but maybe