“This is the slowest hookup ever.”
“Christ,” I said, “it’s two in the afternoon, and we’re already bunked down ten miles from anything. What’s your hurry?”
“I just figured,” he said, “that when you wanted to get a room, you really wanted to get a room.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe I just wanted to hang out.”
“Obviously that’s fine, too,” he said, nineties guy that he was. “But are you, like, sure you don’t want to do anything?”
“First things first,” I said. “Where are your condoms?”
“Uh,” he said. “I didn’t bring any.” (Never mind. Worst nineties guy ever.)
I sent him out for a box, and while he was gone I made a list.
Pro: My first one-night stand! How grown-up and cosmopolitan and European and glamorous!
Con: I wasn’t sure I liked this guy enough to have sex with him.
Pro: BUT, this guy liked me enough to have sex with me!
Con: Isn’t that threshold really low?
Pro: Praha, the Czech name for Prague, also means “threshold”! And wouldn’t that be a beautiful name for a baby girl?
Con: Jesus H. Christ, Schuman, concentrate for one second. Do you want to have the sex with this stranger out of some sort of misplaced Before Sunrise longing or no? You can back out and he’s not going to be mad.
Pro: Dylan Gellner didn’t like me anymore, but this guy did. How would I be sure another guy would ever like me again? This could be it!
Con: You have some serious problems with self-esteem, did you know that?
Pro: You came to Europe for adventure, and this is an adventure, so do it. Do it! Do it.
I stared around the room, which was bereft of all décor save for a single pot of artificial flowers on the tiny table in the corner. I paused in my stare-fest to scribble, with immense seriousness, in my artisanal journal: “I cannot believe what I am about to do.”
The door opened.
“Got ’em. The guy at the cigarette kiosk winked at me, I’ll have you know.”
The consummation that ensued was epic in its badness, due, I am sure, to both parties’ inexperience. At that point I boasted a full history of three sexual partners, thus making me the undisputed Wilt Chamberlain of the encounter: the train-station guy revealed to me that he’d only had sex with one other person, and only one time. This in and of itself is nothing to be ashamed of—except, in my wizened old age, I now know that when a guy tells you he’s “only done it once,” what that means is that he is too ashamed to admit to full virginity. In the end it was academic whether he was an actual virgin or just mostly a virgin—the result was an encounter that felt orchestrated by a seven-year-old who thinks he knows how sex works holding forth on the playground.
“Did you, uh…?” I asked, when, after about fifty seconds, the train-station guy’s herky-jerky force continued but his tumescence did not.
“Yeah,” he said. “I was trying to again.”
“Um,” I said, gently pushing down on his back to bring the motion to a merciful halt, and grabbing with terror at the base of the condom. “That’s not how it works. Did they not have sex education in Connecticut? You could get me pregnant that way.”
Why, why, why did I even think that thing about naming a baby girl Praha? Schuman women are notoriously fertile! Shit shit shit.
The train-station guy rolled off me, and I grabbed my dress to mop his sweat off my stomach. “That was…”
I pretended to be extremely busy procuring a glass of water.
“It was like we were two ill-prepared dancers using different music,” he said.
Excuse me? All I’d done was try my level best to respond to his paroxysms in a manner that might allow me to experience any pleasure—an attempt, by the way, that failed. To top it off, critical or not, the train-station guy had become flooded with postorgasmic bonding hormones, and I had not.
“You know,” he said, “it wouldn’t be impossible for us to continue a thing. You know, travel on together, and then maybe visit at Christmas and breaks and such. Write letters. I love correspondence. It’s a lost art.”
“What happened to have you ever just hooked up with someone?”
“Have you ever just looked at your forearm?” he asked. “It’s a beautiful forearm. I’m going to draw a snail on it.”
“Must you?”
“Yes.” The ball point pen tickled and the snail looked ridiculous.
“Do you know what?” he asked.
“I definitely do not.”
“I just want to sleep.”
Hallelujah. “Oh God!” I said. “Me, too. Those youth hostel beds—”
“No,” he said, “I wasn’t done. What I wanted to say was: I just want to sleep with you in my arms.”
“Uh,” I said. “Aren’t these beds a little small for that? I mean, it’s so hot.”
