Tuesday, February 3, 2009

It's A Fairy Tale Romance

I've told you bits and pieces in posts and comments about Cal, the boy I met at his brother's coffee house in 1960. I was barely sixteen, he was barely eighteen. It was his older brother (married and with children) who hit on me, but it was Cal who I chose to drag home to my parent's empty house for the purpose of having sex with a very sweet real boy. He was gentle, kind, patient, willing and in the end probably in a great deal of pain, if the stories of blue balls are true. I was the first girl he'd been naked in bed with. He was the first boy I'd been naked in bed with. (My daddy did not count and it was because of my experience with my daddy that I so wanted to have a normal experience of sex with a real boy) I was not the first girl Cal had sex with, but the first girl who really wanted to have sex with him but who wasn't able to have sex with him.

It was the very early trauma of those years of sex with daddy that made sex with Cal impossible. I eventually had to get medical help for the problem for the clamped down muscles that would not allow me to even use a tampon. My body did not want to be penetrated by anything. My body had a mind of it's own and was determined to remain virginal if not technically a virgin.

Now, 49 years later the boy is an old man and the girl is an old woman. He has been married twice, raised two of his own children, and two of his second wife's children. He's lived in the same house for thirty years. Prior to that he lived within a few blocks of me and used to see my photos in the newspaper modeling. He recognized me. This in itself amazes me. So close and yet so far.

Then a year ago he read my letter to the editor in the newspaper and googled me where he found my blog. He started reading and read for a full year before he emailed me. That is a patient man. That is a loyal man. And of all the men I've ever known, he is the first to read my novel. And at breakneck speed. He finished it the day I took it off the blog.

We have been talking on the phone now for weeks. I am again the aggressor in this odd relationship. But he seems fine with that. I ask very personal questions and he answers without thinking for the answer I might most want to hear. He says he can't lie to me. I'm hoping that's true. I believe that intimacy is impossible where honesty is withheld.

I thought I was through with men. I thought I was again impervious, sexless, disinterested, over it all. I might be wrong about that. There might be a bit of romance left in this old woman's heart. I'll keep you posted.