I Don’t Know How to Make Love to You

I don’t know how to make love to you. But first, let me explain.

A lot of time has passed since we were teenagers, over twenty years. Can you believe we used to fool around like that?

I remember sitting with you on your couch, in high school, only weeks after we danced together. It was the spring of my junior year and your sister was upstairs. Waiting for your parents to come home, we studied each other and began to wonder.

When it happened, Scream was playing on the television. We had rented it from Blockbuster, since I was already eighteen. You pressed your lips against mine and the ease made me think someone was looking out for me. It was a type of kindness. Someone decided it was time for me to grow.

I did the action back to you and felt the heat of your skin, tried to grasp what you were saying with your body. It seemed like only seconds passed, but in reality, it was hours, an entire evening. We did nothing but watch movies and make out, though I did not know to call it that. Truthfully, I could not call it anything, either then or later, because of the pureness of it, the invisible whisper.

I’ve never called it much beyond a moment where I learned something: I learned how to hold someone. I wanted to keep learning.

What came after? What did others do next?

For me, it was college, and using my imagination. I went to military school and could not participate like you.

As I understood it, people did more than kiss at this age. They got together in dorm rooms and houses, on weekends, or at parties. When they did, they undressed each other. They learned something of the other side.

It made sense that things would happen there without parents or older siblings. We could vote, so why shouldn’t we pick favorites? The time was meant for exploration, but in a good way. Like an astronaut training for the moon, one must put themself through rigor.

During this time, a friend asked me if I had done the deed yet — if I had gone all the way — and when I said no, I listened to him describe an encounter with a woman he met about an hour from campus, in the heart of the city. The way he told it, I imagined the two of them in a dimly lit room, a hotel of some kind, but since I had only kissed, the description of their intimacy confused me. I put no faces to the act.

The following year, I met the woman after she became his girlfriend. The three of us spent time together. I assumed there were more like her and that I would meet one on a weekend pass.

When I did, I shied away from anything beyond a kiss and part of me wonders, Did I even touch a woman? as each winter vanished and the snow melted toward the Hudson.

Texas followed, but as I would later learn, you were not there, but back East, the place I had just left. This was the age of jobs, saving money, and more jobs. Our friends were working, and becoming engaged. For me, it was the former. I did not have many girlfriends to speak of.

At this time, I imagined the act occurred less frequently than college if outside a relationship. The phrase hooking up was used, but sporadically. I only heard what people divulged to me in confidence.

Once, after having lunch with my boss’s daughter, I decided to ask her on a proper date. She rejected me and the sting of it sent me back to my desk, back to my apartment, opening my laptop in search of pornography. There, I remember thinking how unnatural it was to view the female body with such ease and how, despite the intensity of what was depicted, a self-soothing quality was attached that existed nowhere else, certainly not daily life.

I never spoke to the woman again and certainly never kissed her. Instead, I watched what I found on the internet. While my friends dated, I drank from a different source.

When I saw you, that summer night in Houston, I was with a group from high school, one of whom had developed a crush on me. You spotted me and we spoke away from the room where everyone sat waiting. You looked beautiful. Your smile was unchanged.

Later that night, I held hands with the woman who liked me, and we kissed by her swimming pool. Things went no further and your face appeared as a bridge to cross, an invitation to wait for. You were something from the past made more child-like with age.

You may have heard that I played music in Houston, but became injured and by the time I left for Kansas City, was in rough shape.

The time period, my thirties, was filled with opportunities to go further, to discover what happens in private. Only with age do I see life rising and spilling over, my hand reaching to refill the glass.

Once, only months moved into a new apartment, a woman I worked with kissed me and asked, “Should we go to your room?” and it placed me back to when you and I were on your couch. It never occurred to me to ask that question then, nor did it to you. With its direct cadence, it was reserved for adults, and yet there I was, all of thirty-three years old, not knowing how to answer it.

I made up an excuse that night and owed it to fear mixed with pornography use. I’m not sure which was stronger. This is only a guess, but I remember the confusion and disappointment in her eyes. Only two years later, on a return trip to Houston, I went out with someone and she asked the same question at the entrance to her apartment –Do you want to?– and though I wanted to say yes, I was still afraid my inexperience would show like cracks in the stucco wall. Inside, she was half undressed when I asked for a glass of water. She paused; the door to her room was open. We sat on the couch and watched television until we became sober again.

I don’t have to tell you about the time the following year when, for the first time in many years, I met someone. It was in a grocery store in Santa Monica. I remember the connection was strong and, though my habit had increased, I did not objectify her. Rather, I pursued her. I thought of her constantly and called her up to go on dates.

The evening I wrote about — and that you read about — happened after a day at the beach at the end of summer. We had picked up some food on the way back to her apartment. We cooked dinner for her friends and for a few hours it was like a marriage: two strangers under a roof for a common cause. I enjoyed playing host and the idea of the deed only crossed my mind as guests filtered out like grains of sand, each one inching me closer to what lay beyond a kiss. I could sense it, the ensuing nakedness. To me, it was the great unknown.

The morning brought proof that though I tried, I had failed, or rather my body failed me. I slid away from her half-covered body toward the bathroom, closing the door and pleading with my member to wake itself. Somehow, in the same fleeting moment, I realized that the pornography had left me impotent. The battle was over that day. I was too blind to see the destruction.

In the ensuing weeks and months, my thoughts returned to you. I never saw the woman again. I was too ashamed to admit to her what happened.

The experience left me lonely, afraid and longing to go back to when I could be with someone in the safety of my youth. When you’re older, people turn to strangers in daylight. I believe, by that year, you were already married. Perhaps you had a child and maybe the second one was on the way.

You had already experienced so much more than me by then. I wish you could have held me. I wish you could have said, We’ll try again.

These days, I am still in California and my injury has worsened. The pandemic slowed my recovery. If I had the money, I would take my car and head back to Texas across the desert.

At 42, I would still like to experience what so many people our age have experienced, some married, some proudly single. Whatever group or circle they belong to, the odds are they have been with someone all the way. One assumes that anyone over the age of twenty has tried it at least once.

Every so often, on social media, I’ll see the quote about how doing that is easy, but finding a relationship is difficult. It makes me chuckle. I have experienced the opposite: I have found the deed quite difficult to arrange.

Have I told you that even for someone with an imagination like mine, it is difficult to picture myself? The arrangement, the mechanics of it all. I know about the positions: missionary and so forth. Some sound like carnival rides — which one is best? And not to be crass, but how long do you do them for? I wonder if there is a manual to consult.

I spend my time dreaming of the experience while trying to recover. My neck hurts. My back pain has turned chronic. I’m in my forties with the spine of an old man, but I stay vigilant. I keep fit at the off chance I may still go there with someone.

What is it that, if I did see you in Texas, or on the coast, or anywhere past the borders of our neighborhood, I would say to you now? Not to get your attention or make you question things, but rather to remind you — and by that, myself — that our experience was both the beginning and an end?

For you, the start of what I know were experiences along the path to making love. For me, the end of what was then an easy life I took for granted like a sunny day in Houston.

It is: I’m still fooling around. In the dark and empty spaces and I am not ashamed to try. Everyone starts somewhere. I wish we could go together, but you now know so much more than me.

I don’t know how to make love to you or any other woman for that matter. Please, wish me luck as I remember this.

The not knowing is what I still remember most.

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Thanks so much for reading.