“Please don’t go away, don’t be a Helen,” Maud said bitterly, biting her lower lip. Her eyes were still tightly closed—she was still grimacing. My mother’s preparedness notwithstanding, I didn’t have a presentiment that this might be a six-condom night. Surely one condom will suffice, I imagined, proceeding slowly and uncertainly—having only Swedish and French films, with subtitles, to guide me. I’m guessing that the missionary position was never as conventionally or boringly upheld, but I was determined not to deviate from the norm. I was opposed to taking a position even remotely reminiscent of Caroline’s gymnastic penis bending. Of course I fully understood the risk I was taking—namely, that of providing poor Maud with good reason to follow her lesbian inclinations.

I expected Maud’s first-time experience might be conflicted, but how Maud manifested her sexual turmoil was somewhat surprising. I was unprepared for her to wrap her long legs around me, and arch herself into me. She certainly appeared to be enthusiastic—she was humping me harder than I was humping her. Yet Maud was also beating me, in the area of my head and face, with her clublike cast. She wielded her cast like the mace of a knight-errant in the throes of battle, and the words she grunted—with each thrust and blow—were more explicit and contradictory than anything I could recall in Jane Eyre. “Yes! No! Yes! No!” Maud kept grunting—as she arched her body into mine, as she clubbed me with her cast.

It was my mom who unwrapped Maud’s legs from around me, and pulled me off her. Molly managed to get hold of Maud’s arm in the cast, gently pinning it to the futon. More slowly, Maud managed to stop arching her back—to stop humping. Maud’s yes-no mantra trailed away to a sorrowful memory.

“That wasn’t the next time I had in mind, Kid,” Molly told me, while my mother was attending to my facial wounds at the kitchen table; Maud was in the bathroom, recovering from her conflicted experience. When Maud joined us at the kitchen table, I’d waited too long to tell Molly my thoughts: my bleeding face and ears aside, having sex with Maud had been much better than the penis bender with Caroline; the next time truly had been better, as Molly had predicted. But I said nothing. My mom didn’t know Caroline had hurt my penis, and Maud didn’t know about Caroline at all.