Anita

By John Verion

I met Anita when I was sixteen. She was in her twenties. I was a virgin. She was not.

She invited me out for coffee -- it seemed an incredibly adult thing to do at sixteen and I was not inclined to refuse. I remember riding in the car with her on that first day and making her laugh so hard that tears rolled down from the corners of her eyes. It was the first time I was funny.

It was a ten minute car ride that somehow stretched to forty. I was driving and she was giving directions. I had no idea that would become the template of the first part of our relationship. We were unequal that way. She was the adult, I was a child. We weren't twenty minutes down the road before she decided that I was an adult too, after a fashion. Perhaps not as adult as her, but I was "funny and mature for my age."

Anita was hispanic -- dark eyes and hair. Not beautiful, but she had a smoldering sex appeal that burned through her conservative dress and modest hair. She had a way of wearing clothes that made them seem better than they were, sexier than they were. I can't explain it further than that.

She also had a way of looking at you when you talked. She would open her eyes just a bit wider and lift her chin ever so slightly -- there was no doubt that she was paying attention to you, and intently. She smiled at the right times, laughed softly when words called for it and could tear up on demand. She was the consummate listener, the perfect empath.

I had known her for all of forty minutes when she touched me. A light grab at my arm on the steering wheel to tell me to turn. But she didn't move her hand. It stayed there for five minutes or more and it seemed like electricity flowed from her fingertips into arm. I found my mouth getting dry and my eyes seemed to click audibly with every blink.

I had another reaction, too. One common to young men in new and exhilirating experiences. She noticed it and was properly condescending in a isn't-that-the-cutest-thing way. Then she "took care of it" with no more passion than a mother might use to absently button her child's coat on a cold winter day. That was it. In less than an hour after meeting her I had been deflowered.

Anita expressed surprise that I had never been treated to that before. She was incredulous at my lack of experience as though a boy of my age should have been around the block a few times, at least. I didn't mind her condescension or her mock outrage at my inexperience, I was practically comatose.

And a pattern emerged there and then. The next time we were alone, conversation returned to that event -- as though it were something that just happened and volition played no role in its occurence. Was I okay with that? Was I frightened? Did it bother me? None of those were words I would have chosen. I was sixteen. Not too much could be wrong.

After expressing concern for my emotional state she would refer to some other activity and when I confessed ignorance she would express incredulity. Incredulity would lead to an offer to rectify my sorry state -- as though it were inevitable or somehow necessary. I never complained.

In fact, I remember feeling so grateful for her patience with me. I remember that as things progressed I was so lucky to have found someone to show me so much, and show me the "correct" way without anything more than a teacher's common pity. And of course, I fell in love. Or what passes for it when you are sixteen and clueless.

The lessons came more frequently and so did her laughter. After a lot of intimacy we began "dating". In that way our relationship was built backwards. Sex was not the acme of the hunt, but dating became a justification of it ex post facto. She was still very much in charge. I still drove and she still gave directions.

We were at least a year in to this thing we had before I came to the realization that all of the "lessons" benefited her at least as much as they did me. Anita was having a good time -- this wasn't an act of charity afterall. I followed her directions carefully, to the very word. I did what I was supposed to, when I was supposed to, for as long as I was supposed to. It just never occurred to me that there was another way to do it.

The day came when I broke from her careful script to create my own, in my own order, with my own designs. The end result was the same for both of us, but she had lost something that afternoon -- she had lost "the power".

After she lost her sense of control she began to use the L-word. She loved me. She was in love with me. I was flattered and puzzled. Why wasn't she at the very beginning -- wasn't I? Somehow this love frightened me. I realize now that for her "love" became the new instrument of control. I was just a boy who had never known "love" and I needed to rely on her to teach me what it was and what it demanded. Once again, I became the student to her tutelage.

By the time I was eighteen I had grown tired of lessons. What I thought had been love had waned long ago and I began to understand that the truth of our relationship could be boiled down to five or ten seconds of climactic bliss. However, her love for me had not waned in the least. In fact, it had become a new thing -- a thing of presents and audio tape compilations. A thing of poetry and surprises left on my windshield.

It became something else, too. It became a place of secrets for her. The kind that come with tears and unintelligible words and confessions that horrify. It became the sort of thing that was required to keep her "sane" to keep her balanced and focused and without me she didn't know what she would do -- of if she would "make it".

The responsibility was too much for eighteen. I began to loathe my trips to see her. I resented that I used her. I resented that she had used me. I resented that I was somehow powerless to stop.

We broke up twenty or thirty times easy. Each time it was the same. Each time I was invited over to discuss something or to pick up property or hear something dreadful and new that had developed. Each time I backslid from the break-up in a tangle of sweated sheets and gentle snores.

I hated me. I almost hated her. I hated the both of us together. Finally the pain of remaining with her exceeded the pain of youthful celibacy and I managed to quit the entire dance we had practiced for so long.

After our last break-up she came to watch me fight. Flagged me down from across the arena floor with shouts and cheers that showed no understanding of what we had argued about so bitterly until three that morning. I was tired and unfocused. I paid the piper with a knock-out and some missing teeth.

If you are unconscious, the smell of ammonia reaches into your very lungs and pulls you awake as though you are swimming up from the bottom of a pool. When I splashed to the surface of consciousness I could hear her voice challenging my coach and him inviting her strongly to leave. She left and I only spoke to her once after that -- by telephone. Somehow with the taste of blood in my mouth and bits of tooth riding on my tongue, I knew it was really over.

Somedays I wonder about Anita. I wonder if she ever got the help she needed. The help that no boy of sixteen, or even eighteen, could ever offer. I hope she did. I hope she is well.

Talkback: Post Reply | View replies (6)