The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race by Sara Barron Page A

other seven?”
    “It alternates between Leah from Level 1 Emotional Arcs, k.d. lang, and Tilda.”
    “And no men? Not ever?”
    “Not really. Maybe like once every few months John Stamos pops in. Or an anonymous set of broad shoulders.”
    “But have you ever munched box?” he asked.
    “No,” I said.
    “Kissed another woman?” he asked.
    “No,” I said.
    “And so, do you, like, want to?” he asked. “Do you genuinely want to?”
    I thought for a moment. I said, “I guess it’s more that I, like,
want
to want to.”
    Glen nodded.
    “Right,” he said. “You’re straight. As for the masturbation business, I think it’s just that you’re, like, connecting with female arousal. So it’s sort of like, you don’t
want
the box so much as you’re identifying
with
the box.”
    “That sounds … right,” I said.
    “Because it is,” he said.
    My conversation with Glen left me feeling disappointed. I would’ve liked to have had my lesbian streak confirmedas lesbian-
ism
. Or, better yet, to have been deemed that rarest, most magical of unicorns: the True and Genuine Bisexual. Alas. Now I had the sense that I was neither.
    TIME PASSED, AND I accepted the reality. I had infrequent, exclusively hetero engagements. I made a point of having full-on intercourse again. This second time and second partner made the experience, as a whole, seem less traumatic. It led to more times with more partners, each one of whom fell along a spectrum: from
good-to-the-point-of-obsession-worthy
to
just-do-it-so-they’ll-go-away
grotesque. Despite where along the spectrum each occasion fell, they did all feel … right. And that, again, is talking in terms of biology. It was not my dream scenario, but there wasn’t much that I could do about it. I rarely met a woman in person to whom I was genuinely attracted, and on the biennial occasions when it actually happened, the lady in question wouldn’t pay me any mind.
    Such was my real-life situation. As for my fantasy-life situation, Tilda, k.d., and Leah had, by this stage, all started feeling out of date. Ineffective. Stale. I let them drift further and further away until they reached the hinterlands, the Island of the Misfit Masturbation Fantasies, that sad but special place where out-of-use erotic dreams go to pass their final days. I replaced the old standbys with visuals and/or other fantasies that felt more current: Matt Damon as Jason Bourne. Some random stuff I’d seen on HBO’s
Real Sex
. The
Real Sex
stuff did involve women sometimes, but by now I knew better than to attach much significance to that. I had grieved the loss of my potential lesbianism, lowered my standards, and hoped for something new. Something less:
one
evening’s worth of experimentation at
any
point before I died. The prospect of lesbian experimentation was not as exciting to me as true,authentic lesbianism, for I was older now and out of college. I had absorbed the information that experimentation would never prove as attention-getting as lesbianism itself.
    A painful truth, yes, but not insurmountable. One just adjusts her expectations: If you cannot have the whole hog, well, then you take what you can get of her vagina. If only just once. If only for the night.
AGE 5
    The Justice
    By the fall of my twenty-fourth year, I had graduated college and was in the midst of a three-month stint as a glorifled busboy at an upscale restaurant. I wore a bow tie while employed, and shouldered the primary responsibility of serving rolls to customers. This sounds easy enough, but in the spirit of upscale service, I was expected to serve these rolls with fork and spoon, and the challenge this posed to my physical dexterity was on par with serving a tray of tennis balls with a pair of chopsticks. In any given shift, I’d catapult two to three into the heads of paying customers.
    I was always being glared at by my coworkers, who seemed to think I’d been set down on this Earth for the sole purpose of cramping