The glass slipped out of the hand that was drying it and shattered on the formica floor.
"Fuck, fuck, FUCK!" bawled Tres, "Fuck it backwards, fuck it sideways, fuck it into next week and then fuck it some more!" She headed for the entry way closet, where the vacuum cleaner lived.
"You gotta get lai-aid," Nina chanted from the sofa without looking up from her magazine. Tres checked, Hoover in hand, and glared at her roommate.
"Don't start with me, Nin, or I swear to God I'll disembowel you with a salad fork."
"You see? This is what I mean," said Nina. "Abstinence makes the heart grow grumpy." She folded her
Newsweek
and came to stand at the kitchen door, watching as Tres stooped to plug in the vacuum. "Seriously, T, when was the last time you had sex?"
"I don't know; VJ Day." Tres was slogging through a dissertation on "The Economic Recovery Occasioned by the Advent of the Second World War," and references to the subject had a way of invading her quippage. She stood for a moment, poised over the "on" switch, and then: "A year anyway. Since Darren."
"Well for Chrissake," said Nina, who had nothing good to say about her Tres' most recent long-term boyfriend, "so how long since you've had
good
sex?"
Tres turned on the vacuum and began sucking up the shards of glass. Her knee-jerk reaction had always been to defend Darren, the grad-student-cum-teaching-assistant whom she had, until the previous November, dated since the fall of her junior year. But now, as the remains of the glass tinkled in the plastic tube, she found she couldn't summon the energy. He had, she supposed, been her first real love, but if she were absolutely honest with herself, the bloom had begun to fade at least a year before they had actually split. He was intelligent, but pompous; courteous, but pleased with himself for his courtesy, and, although she didn't know for sure, she suspected Nina was right: the sex had been ordinary, not to say by-the-numbers.
Darren was attractive, in a loose-limbed gangly sort of way, and when he was discussing some point of history—his specialty had been Revolutionary France and the Napoleonic period—his green eyes blazed, and his face seemed almost handsome. But although he took inordinate pride in his intellect, he took less than none in his personal appearance. Convinced that she found his thin limbs and long face as unattractive as he did himself, he would only make love in the dark. Then he was almost painfully gentle with her. "I want to
cherish
you." had been a refrain with him. At the time she'd thought it sweet and sensitive. As time passed however, the phrase had taken on the cadence of a bleat, as if she'd been sexually involved with a more than usually intelligent sheep.
As she vacuumed, she continued to consider Nina's question. How long
had
it been since she'd had really good sex? Had she ever? Pre-Darren there had been several men, well, ok, four. Perhaps the best had been the first, her co-editor on her high school newspaper: Benjamin, short, wiry and whimsical. Sex with Ben had been fun, in a goofy kind of way. They hadn't been in love, but they'd been easy with each other, and since both were determined to discard virginity before they got to college, they'd decided to experiment. They'd set up weekend "study sessions," sometimes at their homes, if their parents were out, occasionally at some suburban motel. Once alone, they tried everything they could think of, with mixed results. Intercourse: initially quite painful; eventually pleasant and companionable. Oral sex, receiving: yes indeed! Oral sex, giving: upside—fun to give pleasure, and hear efforts appreciated; downside—peculiar taste and potential soreness of mouth and jaw. Anal sex: freaking ouch! Mutual masturbation: always fun. Sex in public: kind of thrilling, kind of freaky. Being tied up: scary and exciting. Tying him up: same, with added small sadistic thrill—Tres worried about that one a bit.
When they'd run out of inspiration, they had poured over some of the less skeavy porn magazines. Neither of them had a thing for feet. Tres enjoyed wearing lingerie, but not nearly as much as Ben liked seeing her in it. He'd adored spanking her, and, to her surprise, she'd enjoyed being spanked more than spanking him. Dirty talk had given them some trouble. The notion of it excited both of them, but they couldn't seem to pull it off. In retrospect, Tres suspected it had been a lack of the appropriate vocabulary. Ben's best effort—"Suck on my manhood, you hot Momma"—had them both laughing so hard that he couldn't maintain an erection, and her ribs ached too much for anything much more erotic than a quick finish with her vibrator. Their one attempt at roleplaying—a hooker/john scenario—exposed Ben as the least convincing actor since Elizabeth Berkeley in
Showgirls
or Keanu Reeves in, well, pretty much anything.
Post Ben, Tres had had a drunken one-nighter with an improbably well-endowed utility infielder on the Junior Varsity squad. That had been really unpleasant. He'd been so proud of his equipment, and so disinclined to do anything more original than hammering away at her with it, that she'd sworn off dating for six months. She'd tried a brief affair with a professor, but guilt over his repeated adultery made his company depressing and the sex only sporadically successful. Looking back over that dismal few months, Tres felt that what the poor man had really needed was either therapy and a forgiving wife, or a genuine scarlet woman, a real amoral home wrecker. She had never seen herself that way, and even if she had, given the potential pay off, she'd have been disinclined to summon up either the inclination or the energy.
It wasn't that Tres didn't have a pretty good opinion of herself, both mentally and physically. In Ivy-league doctoral program was not geared to the intellectual shrinking violet. And, she liked what she saw when she looked in the mirror. She was neither tall nor particularly short, around 5'5", with long legs, a short, trim waist, and what she thought of as "proportional" breasts, which is to say ample enough to give her some curves, particularly when combined with what Ben used to call "a nice plump rump", but not so big as to make her look either freakish, or surgically enhanced. She occasionally envied Nina her tea-cup tits, which looked equally perky with or without a bra, but just as often, she took some half-acknowledged pleasure from the looks she could get at the local hangouts with a couple of undone buttons, or a clingy sweater.
