My Three Jessicas

We spend the night together several times over the next few weeks, and while we both know it is, and even talk about it being, all about the sex the sex the sex, we add other things as well: movies, dinners, more performances in experimental spaces. We laugh a lot. She is very observant and funny. One morning as we are leaving together to go our separate ways to work, a street sweeper drives by, and Jessie calls it an Urban Slug, “because it doesn’t clean anything, it just leaves behind a disgusting trail of slime.” That becomes a running joke for us.

So we are out and about, having fun, not just staying in bed and fucking each other and then going our ways. Our sex is so intense there are times I feel as if the lust is shaking my whole body from the inside out. When she is near, I truly cannot keep my hands or any other part of me off her. I almost feel possessed, with no control over my own body.

Our sex is epic. Like many epics, it can is best told in tidbits:

1. She has never seen ‘The Godfather, Part II,’ so we rent it, order a pizza, get a good bottle of red wine, and head for her parents’ town house, while they are away for the weekend. About 20 minutes into the picture, we pause it to fuck on the floor of the living room. As we do, she tells me about playing on this very carpet when she was a kid.
2. She is on top of me, her hands on my chest, moving slowly and deeply. She moans sharply, stops, says “God, I can feel you all the way up to my chin.”
3. As I am moving up from eating her, I keep on sliding up until I gently rub her breasts and nipples with my cock. Instantly, she is the embarrassed sophomore again, blushing and covering her eyes with her fingers.
4. Once I hold her hands down over her head, and she whispers delightedly, “Am I your prisoner?”
5. She is on her back and I bend and move her right leg up and across her body, and slide her left one between my knees, all while staying inside her. She is in a sort of bicycle position, so that we are fucking half in front and half from behind. She has never done this before, and it feels great; her eyes go wide, then squeeze tight; surprise and ecstasy and discovery are all over on her face and in her sounds.
6. The next time we do that we are at my place, and she says, “Ah, the Brooklyn Position.” In just a few days, she has gone from never having done something, to giving it a name as if she is Dr. Ruth. This time, after a few minutes, I gently move her the rest of the way over on her stomach. “Oh, J.” she moans. “This is really dirty.” But that is all she says, and it is not a complaint.
7. We are getting ready to go out, putting on jackets, and I affectionately slide my hand onto the back of her neck, and run my hand just once through her. “That just made me wet,” she says. We don’t go out after all.
8. The extra bedroom in Jessie’s apartment is vacant for a time, she is between roommates, and one afternoon she grabs me and whispers, “I want to do it on the floor of the empty bedroom.” And so we do, and we had the rug burns to prove it.
9. With Jessie S, I am able to control my coming better and longer than ever. I can get myself right to the edge — and then stop us both just at the crucial moment. We don’t move a muscle, feeling the pulsing gradually subside. Then, slowly, we start again, and work our way up. We repeat that several times. Sometimes it feels like I am inside her for an hour.
10. Then there is the time when she wants a quickie, and almost as soon as I finish she says, “Let’s go. I came, you came, now get off me.” And then laughs in her childish way, as she firmly pushes me off and heads to the bathroom.

That is the thing about Jessie S. She is funny, sexy, quick, and witty. She comes out with wonderfully original turns of phrase. Once, we were on the roof of her building, enjoying the sunset over the Statue of Liberty. It is early autumn, and the air is crisp and smoky. Out of nowhere, Jessie says, “The thing about fall is every day reminds you of some other day from your life.” That was a beautiful, perfectly capturing the feel of that moment, of so many autumn moments.

Yet Jessie S. is not always so nice. She can be cutting, and condescending, and she goes too far in making fun. She manipulates. She gets upset about my unavailability, yet claims to not want me to break up with Kate either. One Saturday morning, after a typical late night for us, she decides this can’t continue, it was fun at the beginning, now it’s wrong, there’s no future, a guy called her for a date, and she wants to go out with him tonight – to a large birthday party at a club she and I have both been invited to, for another college friend. So she calls it off between us. Not while we were still in bed, like I did with Jessie G., but delivered in a similarly abrupt and heartless manner. She is more calculating than I ever was. I am not one for arguing, however, and I certainly have no case to defend. Kate may still be away, and we have hardly spoken; yet she will be back soon. I guess you could call it a break-up. It sure hurt like one.
I wander most of the day, failing to take my mind of it. I briefly contemplate not going to the party, but it is for a friend, and there will be other friends there, and I’m not going to hide just because Jessie will be there with another guy. Plus, the only alternative is a whole night alone.

I go late, hoping she’ll already be there. She isn’t. Or at least I don’t see her. Some time later, there she is in a crowd. Our eyes meet and I am expecting her to turn away. Instead, she smiles and bounces over to me. “Hi,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about you all day,” and then she kisses me just a bit too long on the cheek. That is it, though. I never meet her date.

A month or so later, she calls me. She has a new job, at Lincoln Center, do I want to come by and maybe we will go to dinner, just dinner she says. Of course, I say. We go out, it is the same fun time. We have only very generally discussed “the situation.” After the meal, we are out on the sidewalk and it is the moment of decision: are we going somewhere together or in separate directions? Jessie has made it clear she does not want us to go to bed together. During dinner even when my foot accidentally nudged against hers, she said sharply, “Don’t touch my leg! Don’t do that!”

So I lean in to kiss her goodnight, intending to give up and be on my way, and the moment our lips touch I can feel her melt. It is just like melting, her lips and then her whole body go limp, and she opens her mouth to me, and reaches around my neck almost to hold herself up. And then we are in a cab heading to Brooklyn, making out and more in the backseat, and Brooklyn is a long ride from the Upper West Side.

The sex is great, but feels more formal, and it seems as if we both notice. This is the last night we spend together. Jessie even sends me home early, almost as soon as the sex is over.

I mope around vaguely for a few weeks over Jessie S, even as Kate and I bumble through our endgame. Now every fall day does indeed remind me of that other fall day on Jessie’s roof. The slightest things bring her to mind, strip me naked and put me in her bed, common things that are everywhere. On morning radio, during the traffic and subway report, every time “Brooklyn” is mentioned I not only think of her apartment and her, I see her under me in the “Brooklyn position.” Even worse, whenever I see an Urban Slug? lumbering by, spreading filth in its wake, to this very day, I think of Jessie laughing and Jessie moaning. That such a foul mechanical beast can conjure up déjà vu of sensual pleasure is laughable; I am not however laughing.

Eventually, time does its job and I am free of the heartbreak or whatever break. Not so free of doubt and confusion about other areas of life: I left my theater job back while I was still seeing Jessie O., and the independent film jobs I am picking are leaving me wanting more. Another close college friend of mine, a New Yorker, has been telling me how much fun Los Angeles is, there is a whole network of people working in the film business and I should come visit. Ironically, she is the person who introduced me to Kate in the first place. As fate would have it, I get a shoot job that calls for four days in L.A. I go and I immediately know that I will move there.

Shortly after I get back to New York, I tell Kate I am moving to California. I am through with New York City, and am ready to light out for the territory, or at least for Hollywood. Even though Kate and I both know it is over, know it has been over for months, we still do not “officially” break up; both of us likely clinging to the notion that maybe we can just continue to drift apart without having to actually pull the plug; or maybe neither of us ready to abandon the life raft. I am gone within two months.

I do come back to New York after a while, to pick up a car my father is giving me to drive across the country. While I am in the city, Kate invites me to stay with her. Or maybe we both just assume that is what will happen, because that is what does happen. That week turns into our entire relationship in miniature: The first few days, we laugh, revisit favorite places, see movies, rediscover the familiarity of each other’s bodies. Then, three lazy days of comfortable tedium, of reading and television and silently making dinner, and of routine sex. Finally, we stop having sex and we fight, once at a Mets game even, which had been our most precious shared enjoyment. Minor disagreements mushroom into recriminations over the past six years. This time we do end it, partly in anger, partly with affection.

My drive back to California, across plains, mountains, and deserts, culminating in dangling my legs over the rim of the Grand Canyon at sunrise, severs whatever ties to my New York life remain. The three Jessicas also recede in my rear-view mirror, remnants of both intoxicating pleasure and stumbling turmoil. Somewhere in the wonder of the Mojave Desert, all of the past year, the past years, blows off me with the wind. I am determined to reinvent myself, and as soon as I pull into Los Angeles I begin finding production work and script work, and I book job after job, keeping myself busy and learning all I can about this new, bizarre, and wonderful city.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5