My Three Jessicas

Jessica G.
It is a few months later, spring, when Jessica G. and I cross paths. We had been at college together, where I’d also met Kate, and knew each other casually, but neither friends nor lovers. Her father is a well-known novelist and screenwriter — in fact, he beat out Kate’s writer-brother for an Oscar; a very small shtetl indeed. Jessie G. and I bump into each other at an alumni function at a downtown club, and talk shop, writing and theater. We make a date for a drink to continue the conversation; how silly that I do that without for a moment thinking of where it is absolutely going to lead. In retrospect, we both knew exactly where we were headed.

Especially when she suggests we meet her at her apartment, and order in Chinese for dinner. We talk; we eat. We also talk about our shrinks. This is a normal New York thing, talking about shrinks and psychotherapy just like you would talk about restaurants or movies, comparing notes, what you like and don’t like about your own, but of course how you cannot conceive of not going.

At some point, we also talk about the obvious attraction between us, how we are lying on her floor, drinking wine, and what does that mean. Whether it is right, or good for us to sleep together. She thinks it is probably not a good idea and I do my polite best to suggest otherwise, convincing myself that this is all okay. I do not quite win and I do not quite lose, either.

By now, it is nearing midnight and it is a workday in the morning. She walks me to the door, and before she opens it, we linger. We’re very close, her back against the wall. I ask if I can kiss her goodnight. Okay, she says. I kiss her, she kisses me back. It gets hot. Hands are involved. She stops us. Then lets me kiss her again and kisses me back, and then stops us again.

“You have to go.”

“Okay”, I say. I lightly run my hand up the inside of her thigh, stopping ever so briefly between her legs, before pulling away. I am saying goodnight, making a promise for the future, not pressing for more. She says, “That is an unfair move you just pulled. What you just did down there.”

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I had not really thought of it as a “move”, although it is gratifying to know it had a pleasurable effect, which makes me wish I had done it sooner. She kisses me once more, says, “Let”s talk tomorrow,” and opens the front door for me to go.

Here is another way that New York can be like Anatevka, a village with people living in very small circles and curious coincidences that drive the course of daily life and the shape of relationships: The shrink I go to is just four blocks from Jessie G.’s apartment. She and I had laughed about that. We also laughed about my having an appointment with him at 8:30 the next morning, and won’t I have something to talk about.

However, at my appointment, I break the first rule of therapy, and do not talk about what I am thinking: That Jessie G. is in her bed so nearby. Before the 50 minutes is up, I know that I will turn the opposite way out the office door and walk to her place.

I push the buzzer for her apartment, just as I had the evening before. After a bit, her sleepy voice says, “Yes?” “It’s Jonathan.” “I thought it would be you.” She buzzes me in, and I go up the stairs two at a time.

She is still in her nightgown, hair mussed. “I’m glad you came,” she said. A kiss, as we pick up right where we were the night before, in the very same spot. “Only one thing,” she says. “I have my shrink appointment at 10. Stay here and I’ll be back in an hour.”

She goes off to her shrink, and I spend the time perusing her bookcases, having some cereal, and considering this amusing situation. To have come from my shrink to her apartment in the morning, eight hours after an aborted tryst there the night before, and now waiting alone there while she is off to see her shrink: what kind of foreplay is this? I even wonder if her shrink might be one of the others in the same suite as mine.

An hour later, she is back. Hearing her keys in the lock is like feeling her fingers unzip my fly. Jessie G. can be very reserved, not giving away exactly what she is thinking or wants. So I am not sure whether I am staying or leaving. She tells me that her entire session with her shrink was about the guy waiting back in her apartment, and whether she should sleep with him or not. She tells me more than that, but that is the gist. I am in suspense, for some reason not wanting to press for her answer. Then she says,

“Want to take a shower?”

Yes, I do. Yes, we do. The shower is long, wet, soapy. We dry each other and make our way to her bedroom. Before we reach the bed, though, she stops and steps back.

“Do you like my body?”

As a matter of fact I do, and I say so. I don’t say that I don’t generally go to bed with people I do not find attractive, whose bodies I do not like. Then Jessie G. tells me there is just one other thing: She has a problem with blowjobs. She can’t give them because one time, when she was in high school, she ended up in a car with some Puerto Rican guys who drove around the city, making her give them all blow jobs, and she was traumatized.

This is not the most seductive, right-before-sex story I have heard, but I listen with genuine sympathy and understanding, even though the way she tells the story leaves it sounding not quite plausible. But I don’t care. No matter, I tell her. We can take that off the menu.

Now, I certainly love getting head; it is just not essential, certainly not during the first time. It is a woman’s desire to give head, to give that pleasure, that really gets me hot, almost as much as the actual sensation.

I repeat to her, no worries, there’s plenty else to do, and I will happily fill the time giving you head. Which I do.

After a while, she lifts my head up and rolls me over. I expect a kiss. Instead, she slides off the bed, drops to her knees and takes me into her mouth. I detect no anxiety or difficulty, with either her desire or her technique. That is the beginning to a great morning of first-time sex: A little bit of everything, a lot of some things. She moans a lot, and when I slide myself inside her she pushes back against me with her pelvis, hard.

I don’t generally go for morning sex, and that may have been the last time, and certainly the only time I had it right after breakfast and a shower and shrink appointments. Jessie G and I continue our dalliances in her apartment, in daylight post-therapy and at night, for a few weeks. It is hot, the sticky hot of a late Manhattan spring, and our bodies are often covered in sweat before we even touch each other. We slide and stick at the same time, and afterwards we lie spent and dripping. There are lots of showers.

I like Jessie G. She and I have far more to talk about than I did with Jessie O. As happens, though, we too eventually drift. I go out of town for several days, and during that time I don’t think about her at all. Or about Kate either. Maybe I am finally feeling guilty maybe I am just not into either of them anymore.

When I get back to the city, Jessie G. calls me, asks if she can come over. I have recently moved and she wants to see the new place. Despite my misgivings, I say, Sure. She comes over, and she is sexy in her easy, ordinary way and quickly we are making out on the couch. Then we are pulling clothes off, just enough to fuck, which we do. It feels great, as always, but something is definitely off, at least for me. So I make a mistake, a big, stupid, guy mistake, and do a hurtful thing. A minute or less after we both come, as I am still lying on her, I say, “I can’t do this anymore.” She cries. I feel shitty, try to apologize. But the damage is done. We say little, get dressed, and it is over.

I still regret that ending, even all these years later. If Jessie G. and I ever cross paths, I wonder if it would be the right thing to apologize once again.

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