Only Love Can Break Your Heart (10 page)

8

TO THE FEW
people I’ve told about Patricia over the years, I have described her as a mysterious older woman who, through chance and circumstance, took me to bed and stole my innocence. To men, I would treat the whole experience as a naughty little conquest. To women, I would relate it as a dark secret that had marked me with a lingering, melancholy vulnerability. The truth was something more complicated.

Up in the hayloft, Patricia spread out a couple of quilted plaid horse blankets across a square of hay bales. Given my complete lack of experience, I had no expectations or plans for what was about to happen. I assumed at least that she’d make me work my way around the bases. Instead, Patricia simply pulled her sweater over her head, unfastened her bra, and unbuttoned the top of her jeans while I looked on, agape. In a series of deft movements, she stepped out of her slip-on ankle boots, pushed her jeans and panties to the floor, and spread herself out on the blankets. The skin of Patricia’s face and arms and neck was darkened somewhat by the amount of time she spent in the sun, but the rest of her flesh was almost alarmingly pale. In the faint light from the open window, her skin seemed blue, like the color of a robin’s egg. My eyes traveled up along her legs and past her knees, pausing at the predictable places. She let me study her there for a moment before pulling one of the blankets up to her chin.

“I hate my breasts,” she said, in a surprisingly coy and vulnerable tone.

“I think your breasts are perfect,” I said. It was true—I did.

“Come along, darling,” she said.

Darling!
My heart swelled with ardor. I undressed hurriedly, afraid that, if I hesitated any further, she might change her mind.

When I was ready, she lifted the blanket so I could crawl underneath with her. She let me kiss her, whispering instructions on how she preferred the movement of tongues. I grasped at her breasts clumsily but with a fervor she must have found touching, if not flattering.

“You brought something, didn’t you?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“A condom,” she said. “You brought one, didn’t you?”

Of course I hadn’t brought one. The idea that I might need one had never occurred to me. My fantasies about riding the waves of bliss with Patricia had never included the practical step of unwrapping and applying a prophylactic. The irony was, back in Paul’s room, at home, I had a whole box of them: a twenty-four-pack the Old Man had unceremoniously dumped on my desk not long after I started at Macon.

“What do you expect me to do with these?” I had said to the Old Man, holding the box as if it contained radioactive material. I couldn’t remember whether I was aware of Paul’s having needed rubbers at the beginning of the ninth grade. Perhaps he had.

“If you need any more,” he said, “just ask.”

A year later, when I might actually have made use of one of those rubbers, they were back across the field in my closet, stashed away under a stack of baseball cards in an old shoe box.

“I can go get one,” I said. “It’ll take me five minutes. Ten tops.”

“Oh, Rocky,” she said, with a greater measure of whimsy than exasperation.

“Please,” I said, almost whining, my unrelenting hard-on throbbing against her leg.

“There will be another time,” she said. “For now, we’ll just have to make do.”

Before I could speak, she had me in her hand, and then her mouth. I had just long enough to be astonished. Patricia was surpassingly gracious.

“Control comes with practice,” she said.

Rolling on to her back, she took my hand and guided my fingers into her, helping me to find her rhythm.

“There,” she said.

Her movements quickened; she threw her head back onto the blanket and bucked her hips into the air, holding them there trembling for a moment before she gasped and fell back to the bed of blankets beneath her.

“Oh, my,” she said with a sigh.

The next time, I didn’t forget the rubbers.

The weeks that followed were a prolonged, exquisite torture. Even before we started sleeping with each other, I had felt both the pull of deep longing and a not-so-subtle uneasiness toward Patricia. Quite abruptly I had gone from having never so much as kissed a girl to doing
everything
, and with an older, experienced partner—every adolescent male’s fantasy fulfilled. But I also knew how horrified my mother would be by what I was doing in that barn when I snuck out at night or, sometimes, in the middle of the afternoon, when Patricia felt confident we wouldn’t be interrupted or was tipsy enough to be a little reckless. I vacillated between regarding the whole business as a secret stain on my soul and thinking it was the greatest, most thrilling thing that would ever happen to me.

It wasn’t just the sex either. Patricia listened to me in a way no one ever had. She confessed her own vulnerabilities in a manner I took to be truthful and sincere. I began to believe that we were in love: that we were soul mates, destined for each other, even if only for a short while. Some of these delusions were due to Patricia’s constant talk of tragic literary love stories from the likes of Shakespeare and the Brontë sisters and D. H. Lawrence and Kate Chopin. Quite a bit of it came from the notion that she was herself wounded and thwarted by her circumstances—namely, the misfortune of being Brad Culver’s daughter.

Indeed, our pillow talk consisted almost exclusively of complaints against the people who were supposed to love us most. Through Patricia, I discovered a theretofore untapped contempt for my parents: The Old Man’s mindless pursuit of money and his constant sucking up to those who had it, the way he never stopped grinding for the next big deal, the way he loved Paul more than he did me. My mother’s prudery and moral hypocrisy. Who was she to act so righteous, I thought, marrying an old man for his money and driving off his first son? And what about Paul? He’d ditched us, after all—didn’t I deserve to hate him too?

Would I ever have felt this way about my family without Patricia’s encouragement? Probably. But a shared sense of indignation seemed to be the one thing Patricia and I truly had in common.

Compared to Patricia’s, my own childhood seemed mundane. She had lived all over the world—Venezuela, Austria, France, Singapore, Guam. When Patricia came of schooling age, the Culvers were living in western Africa, where her father was supervising the construction of a mining facility. There was considerable labor unrest in the area, and threats of violence had been made against the company executives. This gave the Culvers the excuse to send Patricia off to England, rather than to one of the nearby English or American schools, which the Culvers considered substandard.

“Both of my parents are insufferable Anglophiles,” Patricia explained. The peculiar English accent she clung to despite having lived elsewhere most of her life seemed calculated to appeal to her parents’ pretentions.

Patricia was sent to the Blaine School for Young Women in Cheltenham for the express purpose of gaining admission to Cambridge or Oxford. The trouble was that, unlike in the United States, where most students are free to major in whatever subject they choose upon being admitted to a university’s college of arts and sciences, British applicants must select a major in advance and sit for a series of related subject tests called A levels.

“My father wanted me to be an engineer, like he was,” Patricia explained. “He thought it was the only worthy subject. But I didn’t care a whit about engineering, then or now. I wanted to study literature. ‘What are you going to do with a degree in
literature
?’ he said. ‘
Teach
?’ ”

I thought Patricia would have made a very good teacher—assuming that she wouldn’t have slept with her students.

Patricia felt she could have earned perfect scores in history, literature, and French. Instead, at her father’s insistence, she sat for exams in engineering, mathematics, and geology. She managed Bs in math and engineering but earned a dismal C in geology.

“Geology. I was undone by the earth itself,” Patricia lamented. “Only the Prince of Wales could get into Cambridge with a pair of Bs and a C on A levels. And for my father, the difference between Oxford and, say, the University of Edinburgh is like the difference between Harvard and Harvard on the Hill.”

Harvard on the Hill was the nickname for the local community college.

With Oxford and Cambridge out of the question, her mother suggested she throw herself into a bid for the Olympic equestrian team. Hence they’d be able to tell their friends Patricia had reluctantly declined admission to the world’s most elite universities to pursue her true passion.

She lived like that for most of a decade, long after it became obvious that she had neither the skill nor the quality of horse necessary to make the Olympic team. Her parents never complained—on the contrary. If Patricia was never going to do something
worthwhile
, Jane Culver argued, supporting her lifestyle on the horse-show circuit was, at least, preferable to seeing her graduate from a
second-rate
college to become a
teacher
.

“That way, Mummy reasoned,” Patricia said, borrowing a phrase from Jane Austen, “I would be thrown ‘in the way of other rich men.’ ”

But Patricia had no interest in Europe’s most eligible bachelors. Not that she was a stranger to the company of men—or women, for that matter—nor was she shy about sharing details, real or imagined.

She refused to identify herself as bisexual; instead she characterized her sapphic adventures as a “natural phase.” Temporary lesbianism, according to Patricia, was “an ordinary by-product” of the all-girls boarding environment, as was “buggery,” as she referred to it, in the all-male schools. I’d seen no evidence of similar conditions at Macon Prep—on the contrary, Macon seemed to be as hypermasculine an environment as one could conceive. My classmates bartered issues of
Playboy
and
Penthouse
and
Hustler
the way kids of the Old Man’s generation traded marbles and baseball cards. All anyone ever seemed to talk about was “getting pussy,” though as far as I could tell, I was one of a scant few who had seen or touched a flesh-and-blood vagina.

Given the staggering ubiquity of every variety of pornography that has overtaken American culture since then, the extent to which Patricia’s erotic fantasies astonished me when I was fifteen seems almost comical now.

“Do you want to watch me with a woman?” she might ask.

“Yes,” I’d reply without much hesitation.

Once, when I was behind her, she reached back and, withdrawing me from the familiar place, guided me into the little aperture above it. “Pretend I’m a boy,” she said; I trembled and swooned.

Another time, with her legs resting high across my shoulders, she reached up and around and plunged an unwelcome finger into my own little orifice.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What you want me to do,” she said.

I didn’t agree at all. But I didn’t stop her either.

It’s difficult to comprehend even now the power Patricia had over me in those weeks when we were making regular trips up to the hayloft. I couldn’t concentrate on anything at school. I spent most of my classes daydreaming about Patricia or napping, exhausted as I was from all the sleep I was losing. I avoided my parents as much as possible. I gave up caring about Leigh. If I thought of Paul, it was to assure myself of how impressed he’d be that I was carrying on an affair with a sexy older woman. Nothing mattered but getting over to the barn, where, after finishing my work, I could follow Patricia into the tack room to make out and arrange a midnight tryst or even do it right then and there, while the horses snorted and stamped on the other side of the wall.

SEPTEMBER PASSED INTO
October, and the week of Charles and Leigh’s wedding was upon us. The house and the stable became overrun with guests and visitors, drawing Patricia into a whirl of cocktail parties, champagne brunches, and group outings. I saw her in the afternoons when I came over to work, but there were too many people coming and going for us to spend any time alone. Afterward I retreated in misery to Paul’s room, from which I could see the swirl of activity around Twin Oaks from the windows, having nothing to distract myself with but piles of neglected homework assignments and the consolation of old love songs on vinyl. Two weeks from Saturday, Patricia would be leaving for Florida with Reggie to prepare for the winter equestrian circuit. What would I do with myself then?

On Thursday afternoon, Patricia made the rather daring gesture of calling me at my house. My mother was out running errands; the Old Man, as usual, was at the office.

“They’re all gone,” Patricia said.

The wedding party was at yet another reception, this time at some lake house just out of town. Patricia had begged off because of the horses.

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

Reclined on the blankets up in the hayloft, I studied the part in the center of Patricia’s scalp as she drifted down to perform her delicate ministrations. I closed my eyes and wished that it could go on forever—that life could be a perpetual blow job from Patricia Culver, naked and musky on a bed of hay in the warm glow of early fall.

To my vexation, Patricia abruptly sat up, cocking her head toward the partially opened hayloft door.

“What is it?” I asked.

As soon as I spoke, I could hear it too—the sound of a car drawing closer to the stable.

“Get dressed,” she said.

Patricia leaped up and reached for her clothes. I kicked into my jeans, imagining Brad Culver coming for me with his pistol.

“Rocky,” a voice called. “Are you in here?”

It was Leigh Bowman, of all people.

I looked to Patricia. She shook her head.

“Rocky,” Leigh called again. “I’m coming up.”

I scrambled to the hatch and descended the ladder, almost falling from the ceiling to the floor right on top of Leigh Bowman, who was preparing to climb up in a russet cocktail dress and black patent heels.

“Hi,” I said, smoothing my disheveled clothes. “How’s it going?”