Kelly, a sturdy, freckled redhead, had been training as an Olympic diver, but decided to go to college instead. From Nebraska, she was a study in feminine contradiction. On the one hand, an accomplished athlete who had already demonstrated considerable leadership qualities. On the other hand, she believed that a woman should always be subservient to her man. She would periodically give me and my roommate massages. Nothing sexual. She just thought it was something that she, as a woman, should do.

As a Freshman, she was already our dorm president. And when Carrie’s roommate, Nancy — a plain, serious, wisp of a girl — became morally outraged when she saw me naked in the middle of the night, Kelly was brought in to arbitrate.

Since Carrie and I both had roommates, we had no good options when we felt the need to act on our libidinal urges — which, at that point, took the form of oral sex. It had never occurred to me, during my adolescent fantasies, that there was such a thing as a bad blow job, but Carrie was quite terrible at it, all tension and teeth. But I never said anything. In my seventeen years on the planet, I had found exactly one woman willing to take me in her mouth, and I wasn’t about to be critical.

Nancy self-righteously declared that she didn’t want to have a roommate with such low morals. Carrie, at first, tried to Jedi mind-trick her. “He wasn’t even naked,” she claimed.

But Nancy wasn’t falling for that. “I saw his... thing hanging down.”

I now live in a society whose understanding of sexual harassment is far more enlightened than it was then, and I also have daughters, so I realize that I was rather callous in my indifference to Nancy’s emotional distress, but I have to admit that, at the time, I thought this was hilarious. 

“Nancy,” I said, suppressing a laugh, “I know you’re upset, but...”

Before I could finish that sentence — “...on a scale of one to ten, what did you think?” — Kelly grabbed my arm and dragged me out of the room. And not in a metaphorical way. She bodily dragged me out of the room, my sneakers squealing as they skidded across the floor.

In the hallway, I tried to explain myself, but Kelly, with impressive upper-body strength, kept slamming me into the wall. “Carrie...” (slam!) “...can fight...” (slam!) “...her own battles!”

Slam!

Ultimately, Nancy decided to move out, the upshot being that Carrie and I had the room to ourselves. So, basically, a win.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

On our first night of genuine privacy, Carrie’s boom box was playing a cassette of Lionel Richie’s Can’t Slow Down. I know this because, as far as I can remember, it was the only thing she played. It would get to the end, there would be a brief respite of soft tape hiss, then the auto-reverse would kick in and Lionel Richie would once again assure us that we would fiesta forever.

That night, I told Carrie I was falling in love with her. These were words, I knew, that she had been hoping to hear. And she started to cry.

I wonder if I meant what I said or if I thought that saying it would make it real. We were, at that point, the dorm’s fantasy couple, the one that had discovered the formula for everlasting happiness, the one that other couples aspired to. We reveled in the idea, felt superior. Marriage at the end of college seemed a foregone conclusion. 

My parents had married young, my mother seventeen, my father twenty-one. I had always idolized their union as eternal, unbreakable. There would come a time when that complacency — theirs and mine — would crack, when they would each spend hours on the phone with me, complaining about the intolerability of living with the other, when I thought my mother would leave my father and he would be found dead on the carpet, a heart attack. They would survive that period, and would eventually downplay its significance, but for me the myth of their invincibility was shattered.

That, however, was all in the future. At the time, the idea that I would be married at twenty-one, like my father, seemed like destiny.