Second Virginity, Third Virginity

More time passed. It was my third week at Erla’s. I call it Erla’s – even though Seymor owns the deed and is carpentarily responsible for the unfinished remodel in the back – because Seymor is a ghost in the house. He haunt’s it. He haunts his plate at the head of the table at each meal, he haunts the backporch so constantly, whittling sticks, that the wood of the deck is still dark where he sits. At the end of the day he disappears into the shed, in the back of the yard, he’d moved into when his wife Eleanore died and her mother Erla moved in. It was Erla’s house now and no one challeneged it. She made it a better place and so when any decisions had to be made she was consulted.

In my last conversation with Erla she’d told me I was an Aries and consulted an astrological chart on her computer.

I’d gotten in the habit of waking up early so I coulf sit with Erla at the kitchen table when the sun cut, flat and honey colored, across the face of it. Maria didn’t wake up until 10 or 11 and Erla was always sitting at the table at 7. I’d told her everything about Estelle – from start to finish, and then I went back to the places where it was complicated and retold those from start to finish. I know I’m obnoxious.

This morning I brought Erla a letter I’d written for Estelle.

I made my coffee and sat across from Erla, it was smooth and creamy. Erla had her black tea with milk and it always looked so pale and silken, like her old hands.

“I wrote Estelle a letter.”

She snapped out of looking out the back door, “Thats sweet. She’ll probably like to recieve a letter.”

I handed it to her.

“You want me to read it?”

I nodded.

“Okay then.”

She picked it up and unfolded the seven pages, “all of this?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

I watched her as she read. I turned out the back door and sipped my coffee. I could hear her turn each page. I could hear Seymor, already on the back porch, his knife more constant than the second hand.

“You want her to read this?” Erla said closing the last page.

I nodded.

“And what do you hope she will say?”

“I hope—” what did I hope, “I hope she sees that it wasn’t all my fault. That I’m in pain.”

Then Erla looked at me and I questioned what she saw.

“That’s pathetic isn’t it?”

“There’s no need for that Corin. Young love is always somewhat pathetic.”

“But will she see the pain I feel?”

“No. No, she won’t. She’ll feel attacked.”

“How?”

“How?” She laughed, “How would a young girl not feel attacked, is a better question.”

“She’s not a young girl.”

“Oh isn’t she?” Erla was twirling her white hair around her finger, kind of unnerving me cause it made her look like a young girl herself.

“No, she’s — she’s a woman. I mean she has her immaturities, God knows she does, is that what you mean?”

Erla hummed, “Maybe,” the sun had traveled six inches down the table as it rose into the sky, “you two are both young. You can’t make her to be the understanding one soo that you can be the reckless emotional one. She must be allowed that too,” She paused, “and if you want to reach out to her you must be the one to allow her that.”

“Okay, then what do I change? Is there anything I can keep? What about the second virginity part?”

Erla laughed hard and it sounded like a witches cackle, “Second virginity – yes yes, you should take that out. It all has to go Corin, it was written with the wrong intention, it dwells too intensely on her actions.”

“But,” I leaned forward, “I think she’ll see what I’m saying if I bring up second virginity – if she sees that in my eyes when you enter a new relationship you effectively regain your virginity, then she might see why what she did is especially devestating to me… not consciously of course, but subconsciously that’s exactly what happened and – I know Estelle might hate to hear it, but if she’d just listen to it then she couldn’t say it’s not true. Right?”

Erla hummed again, “So, do you want her to be a virgin? That matters to you?”

“No. Of course not. I’m not – I’m not controlling. I’m not sex obsessed. I can see her as a person separate of her sexuality.”

Erla smiled and sipped her tea with her old shriveled lips, “Well that’s good and mature of you. Some men can’t come to that revelation their whole life.”

I smoothed my hand on the table where the sun had just been. I could separate her from her sexuality. At least for some stretches of time, at least as I thought of her by the river, where the air is open.

“Then I’m just a little curious why you care about her second virginity? If, like you explained, it is a person’s mental recreation of her first virginity,” her saggy eyelid sank and looked like she was scrutinizing me, “which makes me think that you value virginity to some degree – I’m not here to judge – if you go as far as to mentally recreate it.”

“No no no. You have it all wrong. I don’t care if she’s a virgin or not.”

“Can we just call it second purity then?”

“No. It’s entirely sexual,” I was starting to get upset. Why can’t people admit how sticky and twisted sex is, “its second virginity - not second purity. Everyone strives for it: men women old young. It’s a—” I drew a circle with two fingers in the air, “it’s a protective thing. They would like to imagine their partner has never loved, has never felt what they feel with them now,” Erla opened her mouth to speak or maybe to stop me from repeating the word virginity and to use purity instead, “there’s a little piece of everyone that wants to believe in true love. That’s why a girl might say to a boy, ‘I’ve never done that before’, ‘I’ve never felt this before’. She might go as far as to say ‘I was never in love before’. But it’s not only past love that a new couple will deny - they will try to erase the physical expressions of love like a stain left behind by something untrue. A man would like to imagine - maybe a woman too - that because there was no love there was no sex. But sex is physical; it happened in reality - not in the mind. When things happen in the mind they can be changed at will. Thats because they cant be authenticated, can’t be proven or disproven. Lovers will deny the love they had before, saying it was a dream. To uphold such a delusion in the face of a physical expression of love they say they forget it - they forget sex. They don’t talk about it. They say they forget, until they actually do. Thats why it has to be called second virginity. The mind denying reality so that love can live after love.”

“What about third virginity? Do you believe a couple who’d parted, found lovers and reconnected would still try to ignore their lover’s previous partners?”

“There is no third virginity. It couldn’t work. Once you open up the protective sphere of second virginity and reality seeps in,” I drew a circle in the air again, “the dream is seen to be delusion. You can’t recreate it.”

“There is a way. Have you never heard stories of love after love and heartbreak?”

“Thats an optimistic fiction thought up by lonely romance novel readers.”

“When I met my husband I was young. He was six years older than me and had many girlfriends. We met when I was back from Catholic boarding school. I was 17, I lived in a dusty nowhere town. He was visiting his sick father. I didn’t know him but I knew about him from my friends. I became his girlfriend that summer. He was my first. Those weeks passed slowly, like a sweet dream,

she paused,

Then one night I found out he was engaged to another girl. I left my town that night and went back to Boston and stayed with my friend Lydia in the empty convent. We met a lot of boys that summer and I forgot about Octavio. Seven years passed - seven years! - before I heard from him again. Beto, my friend from home, called me and asked if he could come visit me in Portland - that’s where I was living at that point - I told him he could come stay in my flat. The next day I got a call; the voice said ‘Erla, don’t you remember me?’ I remember how that voice made me feel like a ghost stood in front of me— like it shivered up my neck. I hung up. He called and called and I didn’t pick up. When Beto came Octavio stood there at the door with him. I was mad at him and I sent them both away. They stood there that night until I let Beto in. It was 2am and Octavio was still outside. Of course I had to let him in eventually. He stood in the corner and I ignored him, I talked to Beto as if he weren’t there. I made him sleep on the floor. He never said anything except when I asked him about his wife, and to that he told me they’d divorced a few years in. He had a broad face now and his torso was a slab, unshapely under his shirt. He was not the boy I had spent the summer with. Maybe that was all I needed to see. When I tried to remember who I had been with him it was gone. I had utterly left her behind. I saw her in my mind’s eye as a girl passing me on the street. She wore a pink dress and locked arms with a young man whose torso was lean and whose smile was cocky. Her thoughts were foreign and mysterious to me as I watched her pass. She’s in love I thought. And maybe she was. But it seemed like foolish love. Something I wouldn’t wish on myself again.”

I finished my coffee. The sun had slipped off the edge of the kitchen table as it rose above the window in the back door.

“It happens,” Erla said, “when you love someone and they leave, that they become nothing but an effigy. They become a nothing: a blur on which you place everything you know and hope for about love. Small memories that flash before your mind’s eye are warped to fit the blur. Because love is, afterall, an idea. It lives in your mind and in most cases cannot survive outside of it. It is rare that there is a person who can provide enough sustenance to another’s person’s idea of love to allow it to leave the mind and attach to them. This is because love - the idea – is picky and ravenous. I worry you have made an effigy of Estelle - and you no longer think of her anymore; instead, you have confused who she is with your own ravenous idea of love.”

She kept going,

“You have an outdated memory of her. It’s as if you copied her and she moved off into time, into reality and you hid your copy of her from all - under your hunched form. You’ve put your resents and fondness on the copy. You’ve put your loves and your hates on it. But that’s not Estelle anymore and you will eventually have to let it go as I did of Octavio – which is hard, because letting go of the puppet feels like letting go of Estelle, but that’s not her. You are holding a dead entity forcefully in existence – that’s why you’re so exhausted. Your despair is that you are trying to live in the past. Living with the dead, not the living – you are living like Seymor although there is still hope for you. It is possible that if you can let go of the puppet you may one day be able to meet the real Estelle and see her as she has been existing in reality; Seymor will never meet my daughter again, there is no hope in him that can justify letting her memory go. He holds my girl’s memory with a death grip, and as she leaves further from reality so does he, and he resents reality for the exhaustive effort it forces him to exert to keep her.”