Sex Object (7 page)

BEFORE PAUL AND I BREAK UP, I HAVE A DREAM THAT I'M FLOATING
slowly upward into the sky, able to do so because of a small green olive in my hand. Paul is on the ground, beneath me, and I keep handing him pieces of the olive, bit after bit, so he can float with me. Soon, though, all I have left is the pit—Paul has all of the small green pieces crumbling in his hand. But still, he stays grounded.

I met Paul nearly four years earlier through my drug dealer, a tall rich kid who lived in my dorm in Albany—my second-try college—and sold ecstasy and weed. I was with a friend, dancing in the basement of a bar that had been turned into a “club” with thrown-up dance-floor lights and some palm leaves to cover the walls as you walked down the stairs. My friend wore a light blue velour shirt because we thought it would feel good to the touch once we started rolling, and it did, and soon after we ran into Lou to ask him for more pills.

He introduced me to Paul, who was almost exactly my
height at five foot five, and had reddish hair. I joked that I had never met a redheaded Italian before and he showed me how if he held a lighter under a Vicks inhaler and then blew the smoke in my face, I would bliss out for a few seconds as the menthol hit my throat and eyes.

We slept together that night, talking until four a.m. and eating Oreo cookies in the dorm room he shared one floor below my own. Later he would move into a room on my floor, taking the place of a guy I let go down on me once to prove he was as good as he said he was. (He was fine.) Paul came to see me the next day at my job at the dorm building administrative office, bringing Gatorade and more Oreos. We became a couple immediately.

Paul is from the Bronx but his parents moved him to Westchester when they thought he was getting into too much trouble in New York City. We connect over transferring to a new college, our Italian borough backgrounds, and being smart but not knowing quite what to do with ourselves.

We drive constantly and spend more time in Paul's car than anywhere else: from Albany to New York, New York to Westchester, Westchester to Woodstock, Woodstock to Albany. One night the engine of his car seizes and we have to stay in a motel off the throughway that takes Paul's mom's credit card number written on a napkin as payment. We have no cash on us and the only thing we have to eat is the candy necklace I bought at a rest stop, so we take the pieces off the elastic string and make a tent in between the two beds in the room because
sleeping on the floor seems more fun, and clean, than sleeping on the sheets in this motel.

On another ride we are on the Taconic and I'm giving Paul head as he drives and we get pulled over by a cop because he's swerving, but we don't get a ticket, we never get tickets, because Paul keeps his dad's business card—he's an NYPD carpenter—on the dash. He also managed to pull up his pants, but not button them, before the cop came to the window. We laugh about it for the rest of the trip.

His mom collects ducks and apples and one night while we are high on either weed or E we decide to count the number of apples—on the wallpaper, as salt and pepper shakers, as magnets, and as fake fruit in a bowl. We get to one hundred before we give up.

By senior year we move in together, into a five-hundred-dollar-a-month one-bedroom apartment on Albany's Madison Avenue, in between a run-down bar and the state museum. Paul gets me a kitten that we name Neidra after mishearing our yoga teacher talk about yoga nidra. In the summers he works at a grocery store and I stay in New York as a teacher's assistant for preschoolers in summer camp. During the school year, we work at the Albany mall in adjoining stores to help pay the bills: me at the Body Shop, selling lotions and perfumes to older women and nervous boyfriends, him at Lids, selling baseball hats to other college students.

We inadvertently buy the same pair of New Balance sneakers and even though his are “men's” and mine are “women's”
our shoes sizes are similar enough that we sometimes mistake one pair for the other and wear each other's shoes. When I start taking women's studies classes, and loving them, he is happy. We take Shakespeare classes together and he tells me he would like to be a teacher though his family wants him to get a business degree. He spills his coffee on himself every morning. We do coke with one of my women's studies professors in her house when we cannot get ecstasy.

I am in a rhythm where I feel I have found my place, finally.

I ONLY WENT TO CLASSES EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE AT MY FIRST
college, Tulane University in New Orleans. I was seventeen years old, away from home for the first time, and not quite sure what I was supposed to be doing. I followed the girls on my hall to parties and the classes we shared, wondering why they wore pajama pants outside and wishing I was home.

My only experience with what college was supposed to be like came from movies, so I was shocked when the new friends I made on my dorm room floor started to rush sororities. I thought this was only something that super-wealthy snobby girls did. They came home from rush activities complaining that their faces hurt from smiling so much and that they were behind on studying. But still, they hoped that they would all get into the same sorority. Paying for friends, I said, seems pathetic. Besides, it was more money than I could afford. Still, even though my
parents had helped me to set up a job for a few hours a week on campus to help pay for books—working at a day-care center—I gave up when I couldn't find the building that first week. I was too embarrassed to ask anyone for help.

I wrote a letter to my mother and father on my roommate's computer, printing it out and mailing it, telling them that this place didn't feel like the real world. That when you walked into the cafeteria, it was racially segregated by table and that some of the girls in my dorm didn't even live there—that their parents were renting apartments for them close by. I wrote to them that most everyone drank every night and that the classes were harder than I expected. I told them it was clear to me that I didn't belong there. That maybe I should come home. Years later, I found this letter tucked away in a box of my father's along with birthday cards I'd given him and drawings from when I was a child.
We thought all kids at college were homesick
, he said.

Kyle wouldn't have been my first choice for a boyfriend. His smile was more like a sideways smirk, his thick Boston accent was grating, and—as if he'd walked off the set for a nineties frat movie—he was always wearing the same dirty white hat. But he also had big arms and a great sense of humor, so when he asked me to see a football game I said yes. I was happy to be included in something that seemed so college-y.

Just as friends,
he said.
You're not my type.

Getting an official date for the party before Tulane's game was part of his fraternity's rush activities. Each pledge needed
to show up with someone and since we joked around with each other in Latin class, both sarcastic East Coasters in a private Southern university, he thought it seemed like a good match.

I borrowed a brown spaghetti-strap dress from a girl down the hall, pinned my hair back with a pink rhinestone bobby pin, and teetered over in terrible black pumps to the ATM near the center of campus where we planned to meet, even though we lived in the same dorm. I could tell, when he looked at me, that he was pleased.

I don't recall much about the date other than he got wasted and spilled nacho cheese all over the borrowed brown dress as we sat in the bleachers. I rode back to campus on a bus with some other girls whose dates had gotten similarly obliterated. It occurs to me now that the bus must have been there for just that reason.

Kyle taught me how to throw up when I got too drunk early in the evening so I could continue to drink more, and brought me to the fifty-cent drink nights (Tuesdays) and “penny pitcher” nights (Wednesdays), so we were out nearly every night drinking and, soon, fucking.

I had never met anyone who wanted to have sex so often, a few times a day at least—most of the time in his dorm room, just a floor down from my own, and sometimes in the boys' shower, where he had to go in first to check to see if anyone was there or if someone had, as they had more than once, taken a shit on the shower floor. I also had never met anyone whose penis was so large that when he got an erection it didn't stand straight up, but
instead stood out perpendicular to his body, too heavy to make it all the way up.

I knew that he kept porn in several shoe boxes under his bed—magazines and tapes, most of which had to do with asses and anal sex—but he assured me that all men had this amount of pornography and it was all for fun anyway, even though I did not like the pained look on some of the women's faces.

His roommate, a boy from Pennsylvania who went to boarding school with Kyle, drank the most out of any of us. He also smoked pot quite a bit in the room, rolling up towels to line the crack at the bottom of the door so the RA wouldn't catch on and sometimes blowing the smoke through a toilet paper tube with a dryer sheet rubber-banded to the end. One night Kyle and I woke up to his peeing on us, sleepwalking. I could not stop laughing but Kyle was furious, and wet—the urine soaked through the egg-crate mattress topper and so he needed to sleep in my room. He hated coming to my room.

Kyle had a hard time rushing his fraternity. He wasn't really keeping his grades up enough and though he wanted to be part of the frat that was known on campus as the heaviest drinking, the hardest partying, he was more aggressive than most of the men there. He got in fights more often. The other guys on his floor were afraid of him; they avoided him when he got drunk. One asked why I would want to date him.

My friends were skeptical of Kyle; at one point a girl on my floor sat me down with her roommate to tell me that a few nights previous, while drunk, he had tried to kiss her. When
confronted, Kyle simply said she was a lying slut. Another friend made a similar claim but I insisted he was too drunk to understand what he was doing. Soon he started to pick at me. I cursed too much; girls shouldn't curse that much. Why did I expect to have an orgasm every time we had sex? That seemed greedy.

One night, when his roommate had some friends over, I was joking around with them—being sarcastic, silly. Kyle was furious and accused me of humiliating him by not showing him the proper respect a girlfriend should. When I asked if he was actually saying I shouldn't talk to other men, even as friends, he answered quickly:
yes
. He got drunk most nights, tried to start fights with other men often. Still, when he crawled into bed with me, he wept about missing home and his family, and told me about being adopted—something, he said, he had never told anyone. He told me he felt weak.

But when we went home for Christmas break, he didn't call. Even after my father had a heart attack and I called him at home, crying, he only stayed on the phone for a few minutes before telling me he needed to do something for his mom. We broke up the first day back from break, and I found out he had invited another girl—a girl in a sorority—to his first official fraternity trip to Florida. He wanted to have sex once more before we made our breakup official, which I was fine with, and when he was done I asked him if I was ever really his girlfriend.

One of his friends who lived on our floor told me that he broke up with me because I got too fat over the course of the
first semester, and because I was too “mouthy.”
He said you had anal sex too
, this friend said, smiling. I insisted that was a lie, which it was, but his friend replied that it was okay if I didn't want to admit it—
it was a pretty nasty thing to do
.

Despite my best efforts I had not been able to get drunk the first two nights of Mardi Gras week—just barely buzzed despite drinking as much as Kyle taught me to. So my friends and I bought Boone's Strawberry Hill and each drank a bottle and then funneled Jack Daniel's until we were spitting it up onto the gray dorm room floors.

We went to a bar called the Boot that was so close to campus it might as well have been on it, beads on our necks, carrying whatever was left of the Jack Daniel's. I don't remember much. I know the crowd was huge and that I saw Kyle's roommate there. As a song was ending he kissed me, and I let him. I know we had sex, that I asked him to please not tell Kyle, and that he answered by laughing.

I made it back to my room somehow and woke up a few hours later when I heard Kyle screaming outside of my door for me to come out. I didn't want him to wake up my roommate and so I went into the hallway in my pajamas and sat with my back against the door to my room. He stood over me, telling me I was the dirtiest piece of trash he could imagine.

You're a piece-of-shit garbage whore, do you understand that?
I didn't answer, but I didn't think he was really looking for me to.
I can't even stand to look at you because of how filthy you are. You're a garbage person, you smell, do you know that? You're fucking trash
and I don't want to ever fucking see you again because I don't fucking associate with whores.
He went on like this for a while, maybe five or ten minutes, before leaving. I didn't say anything, I just sat. I remember being surprised that no one came out of their room, if not to help, then because of the noise.

In the middle of the night I heard multiple men outside of my door.
Open up, whore!
one said. I recognized one of the voices as a friend of mine who also knew Kyle. I put my pillow over my head. In the morning I found a condom taped to the front of my door with what looked like semen inside of it.
WHORE
was written across the door's dry-erase board in marker. It may have been
SLUT
. I don't remember the word, just the definition. As if the condom wasn't clear enough.

A few days later when I was walking across campus one of Kyle's fraternity brothers, someone I had never met but knew by his reputation for hooking up with freshmen, stopped me as I was crossing a piece of grassy field in front of one of the ivy-covered buildings.
I hear you like it in the ass
, he said. I stayed silent and tried to move around him, but he shifted his weight to one side so I couldn't.
Maybe you'd like it from me.
As I walked away he spat on the piece of grass I had just been standing on.