Alef: The NEXT Conversation

The Virgin Chronicles

By Ruvym Gilman

It was a cold December night. The girls were out in far too little clothing, hugging themselves and shivering as they walked around in their clackety heels. The wind, never overly sensitive to the sentimentalities of pedestrians, played coy, reclining just long enough to convince them to relax the tensing of shoulders and scrunching of necks before reappearing to lash at exposed skin. But one young man, just days shy of his 21st birthday, wasn’t suffering with the rest of them on the street. He was indoors, in the warmth of an East Village apartment, finally losing his virginity.

By 20, his virginity had gone from being that annoying family member your mom forces you to speak with during Passover dinner to the unwelcome friend you have crashing on your couch who traces your movements with sleepy eyes every time you walk into the kitchen to get a bowl of cereal in the morning.

“Dude, when are you going to find your own place?”

“What? I’m bothering you? You already want me to leave? I thought we were friends. We’ve known each other since we were kids man.”

“No, sorry, listen, that came out wrong, it’s just that-”

“You’ve changed. It’s really sad.”

He poured out his Honey Bunches of Oats/Cocoa Krispies mix and retreated back into his room.

–

Things with the girl had started off innocently enough. They met during the relative innocuousness of Taekwondo practice. Convinced by a friend to join the team, he showed up ready to find something new to occupy the waning days of senior year. She was a law student who looked nothing like someone called to mind by the word “taekwondo.” Basically, she was attractive, a girding-of-the-loins sort of attractive, and watching her kick and sweat and grunt for that first 2-hour practice didn’t necessarily alleviate any notions he started developing immediately upon meeting her.

But he was a good guy at heart, and he had a hard time reconciling the innate animalistic tendencies we all feel with the desire to be a gentleman. So after he finally left practice and got himself away from her physical presence, he started thinking less about how much he wanted to have sex with her and more about how he really just wanted to ask her out and, if he was lucky, maybe she’d become his…(giggle, giggle)…girlfriend.

Then again, who was he kidding? He was a kid next to this 23-year-old, law school-attending, “mature” woman. He didn’t think he had a chance, he didn’t even think she knew he existed outside of the awkward introduction during the first practice when he stuttered his name and quickly turned red. But on the other hand, there was nothing to lose, and having just climbed out of his post-pubescent years of acne and bad haircuts, he was finally feeling a little more confident in himself.

So, after a few weeks of holding kicking pads for her and accidental glances in each others’ direction, he finally asked her out. He had thought over in his head, a million times, about the least-stress-filled date environment he could find, and finally decided on something that was liable to make her feel totally at ease and score him some “nice Jewish boy” points – a dinner with a Chabad Rabbi and his family.

She came in clothing that made him look twice, at her legs, at her chest, at the line her neck made in its slide down towards her clavicle. During dinner, as the Rabbi’s kids bounced around between the dinner guests and tipped over hummus plates while reaching across the table for soda, the Rabbi’s wife smiled in their direction and nodded as if she was approving of this particular combination.

After dinner he suggested – offhandedly, thanks to the wine – that they visit a friend’s birthday party at a bar near Union Square. But it was only during their walk to the bar that he panicked from the realization that she didn’t actually know his real age, and that as the go-to-responsible one among his friends, he didn’t even have a fake ID.

“IDs please.”

He froze and stared up at the bouncer timidly. His mouth had gone dry.

It was at this exact moment when he was prepping himself for social disaster that the girl touched the bouncer’s arm and cooed in his ear – “He’s with me. Is that OK?”

A smile and a nod later, he was shocked to see the doors thrown open for them. Inside, he quickly wished the friend a happy birthday and proceeded to buy her a drink. She would only take whiskey, on the rocks, and he was too inexperienced at the time to fully understand what this meant. As she sipped on the drink, she pulled him onto the dance floor and drowned him in the deep twisting of her body in candle-lit corners. His head began to spin and he closed his eyes. His hands reached for her hips, desperate to get some grounding as the world seemed to slip from under him. And then, somehow, in the accidental turning of his head, his lips caught themselves on a spot just under her ear and she let out a light moan.

She didn’t invite him back to her place so much as tell him he was coming. And of course he followed her obediently, dragged by hand through that same winter lashing he would, in a few moments, be casually observing from inside her apartment. His feet moved methodically, stepping down from icy sidewalks onto icy streets and scraping their edges against the mesh metal webbing of overflowing garbage cans.

It all seemed surreal that this was actually happening. After all this time? He nodded to himself incredulously. As she led him into the 300 sq. ft. studio and shut the door, he felt the old shell of his world coming apart, sliding onto the floor. And even though he didn’t know all that much at 20, he knew that this was him, finally melting into manhood.

Photo by Mangui, licensed under Creative Commons.

Read more articles from Issue 08: “The Sex Issue.”

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