The first thing my mother did after her father died was buy a house. It wasn’t a very nice house and it wasn’t in a very nice neighborhood, but it was our own and we were both very proud of it. There was only one bedroom, but we had a nice little futon set up in the living room that we’d fold out for me to sleep on, and I was fine with it for the most part. For the most part, I liked the idea that anyone coming or leaving would have to get past me first.

In terms of privacy, there was an unfinished rec room in the basement, and when I needed some time to myself—for reasons any adolescent boy might need some time to himself—that’s where I’d go. Mostly there were just extra boxes down there, my old crib that my mom was saving for some reason I’d only understand years later, some broken furniture leftover from the previous owners, and also an oversized couch in a waffled pattern of pea-green and burnt orange. Underneath the cushions of the couch is where I’d keep my magazines. On top of the couch is where I lost my virginity.

It was the winter of my junior year of high school, the winter of what everyone remembers as the great flood. This was about a month before the flood, I remember, because we’d just returned to school from Christmas holiday, and I’d brought Lydia over to show her the Radiohead album I’d gotten for Christmas. Lydia was my first girlfriend not counting Sarah Lynn in the fourth grade, and since the farthest Sarah Lynn and I ever got was holding hands three afternoons in a row before we broke up so she could go play Doctor with Jeremiah Hughes, I’d just as soon count her out.

We listened to the album in the living room where the stereo was, sitting on the futon that would turn into my bed at night. She said she liked it. She said, “Remember that song they used to play on the radio all the time?” I did, I said. She said, “I never really liked it. I remember thinking, in a year, I’m not even going to remember they ever existed. But this is good,” she said. “I like this.”

“I like you,” I said.

My mother was scheduled to get off work within the next half hour, so we went down to the basement. I saw her see my old crib and I smiled, embarrassed, I guess, that I had ever been small enough to fit in a crib. We sat on either ends of the couch and undressed, keeping our heads down, respecting each other’s privacy. It was cold so we both kept our socks on.

“Do you want to smoke?” she asked me. “It’s better if we smoke.” Okay, I said, because I wanted it to be better, I wanted it to be as good as it could possibly be, though I wondered how she knew it was better if you smoked. Had she heard that from someone? Did she know it from personal experience? Had she had sex with someone and then smoked and then had sex again and compared the two?

She said she had a joint already rolled in her pants pocket so she stood up to fish it out, and I guess because she was focused on finding the joint and then finding a lighter, she didn’t really realize that she was bent over with her ass right in my face. I stared at it. It didn’t really look anything like the asses I’d seen in the magazines I was sitting on top of, but then I wasn’t so naive to think that girls like that really exist. I imagined Lydia in one of my magazines. Miss December. I imagined reading about her turn-ons and turnoffs: “Turn-ons: a sense of humor and a guy who’s not afraid to take control. Ooh la la! Turnoffs: stinkers and lima beans. Wearing socks with sandals.”

I took control. I grabbed her hips and pulled her down onto my lap. She giggled a little but I could tell she was just humoring me. We both knew who was still in control. She pushed herself off me and stuck the joint between her lips and lit it with the lighter. I watched her cheeks tense as she inhaled; her eyes closed as she blew out the smoke. “I got this from Amy Friedman,” she said. “Her uncle grows it in his bathtub.”

She handed me the joint and I took a drag. I could feel the smoke burrowing down in my lungs, I could feel the cough coming, and I tried to suppress it. Just one more minute, I thought. I’d never smoked before and I wanted to inspire confidence in her, but it was no use. I coughed. She giggled a little and patted me on the back. “It’s not like a cigarette,” she told me. “You have to take it in and hold it as long as you can, and then slowly let it out.”

Okay, I nodded, but I was still coughing.

“Is there any water down here?” she asked.

I shook my head no.

“Do you want me to get you some from upstairs?”

No, I shook my head again, because to go upstairs she’d have to put her pants back on, and it seemed like it’d be asking for too much to have her take them off in front of me twice in the same day. “I’m okay,” I said. “I am. I’ll be fine.” I put my hand on her leg and I kept it there. Maybe this was what she’d meant when she’d said someone who’s not afraid to take control. “Thanks,” I said. I took the joint from between her thumb and her middle finger and stubbed it out on the concrete floor, and then I kissed her.

I don’t know what I’d imagined, but it wasn’t like that. There was a lot of friction and rubbing and fumbling around, but it hurt. It felt like an Indian burn on my legs. I had always imagined that I would be a very sensitive and gentle lover who made every effort to put his partner’s pleasure above his own, so I was very conscious all the while of making sure she was comfortable. “Are you okay?” I asked. “Does it hurt?”

“Fine,” she said. She looked like she was about to yawn. I thought again of her picture in the magazine, the centerfold. “Ambitions: to be a veterinarian. To one day buy a house in the country with chickens.”

Suddenly she said my name. “David,” she said. “Oh, David.”

“What?” I asked. Was I hurting her? Did she want to ask me a question? Did she want to know if I loved her? Because if she did, the answer was yes.

“Shush,” she said, and then she repeated, “David!”

I wondered if I should try faking an orgasm. Would she know? You hear all the time about women faking orgasms, but you never hear about a man faking an orgasm. I imagined a woman faking an orgasm and then a man faking an orgasm and then both of them falling back into the dampened sheets with mock-satisfaction, lighting a cigarette, maybe, thinking to themselves at least they got the other one off; at least they hadn’t been selfish. I looked down at Lydia and she wasn’t moving or saying anything. Then I heard the front door open. “David?” my mom called. “Are you here, honey? I’m home.”

I froze. We looked each other in the eyes for the first time. Our eyes were saying, oh shit! We both sat up and stared at the ceiling. We could hear her footsteps directly overhead us now. Clomp, clomp, clomp, like a horse. I was embarrassed by my mother’s shoes. I wished I had a mother who wore espadrilles or ballet flats instead of heavy, black waitress shoes. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s fine,” said Lydia. “I guess we should get dressed now, though.”

I nodded, but I just sat on the couch, naked, and watched her get dressed. I watched her put on her underwear and then I watched her put on her jeans with the little red heart sewn into the back pocket. I watched her put on her green tee shirt and her red sweatshirt and I had been so close. It was like I had gone to a restaurant and ordered the triple chocolate cake with raspberries and nougat and dark chocolate shavings on top and then waited hours, days, months, years, with nothing to stave off my hunger but stale oyster crackers and water, and then finally the waiter had brought it out, my glorious cake, and after only one bite, it was taken away again.

Eventually I got dressed myself, and after we were both dressed it didn’t matter anymore that my mom was upstairs, that she could come down any moment and catch us, because we weren’t doing anything worth catching anymore. We laid down on the couch again and didn’t care if my mom suddenly found us with our arms around each other because we had our clothes on now, so it was fine. Lydia looked up at the stairs and said, “How did you ever get this couch down those stairs?” For whatever reason we were still whispering.

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “It was here when we moved in.”

“But it’s wider than the stairway,” she insisted. “And if you put it on its side it’s taller than the ceiling. It’s impossible.”

I shrugged. “Maybe they built the house around the couch, then. Maybe they saw this couch sitting in the middle of an abandoned lot and they said, that’d be a good place to build a basement, and then after they built the basement they built a house on top, because a basement without a house is just a cellar.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe it’s a magic couch.”

I wasn’t really very interested in the couch just then, but I did think that maybe within the suggestion she had hidden some romantic sentiment, as in magic like a honeymoon bed, like the backseat of a Chevy Malibu. It wasn’t until later, after she’d gone and in the following days, when I found myself with an unexpected excess of time on my hands and no one to spend it with, that I considered the couch again.

It reminded me of one of those clipper ships you see in a glass bottle with no plausible, readily identifiable explanation for how it could have gotten inside. Of course it wasn’t magic, of course there was a way it could be done, but before you understood the trick, the sleight of hand, before you realized the mast was only pulled up once the ship was already inside the bottle, it really was magic.

A week later I went downstairs with a measuring tape, though I took to this task afraid of what I might find—afraid of proof of an impossibility just as much as the simple, logical explanation to a mystery that I expected. I set the measuring tape on the cushion and pulled out the magazines from underneath, only they felt naive and anachronistic now. All the centerfolds were named Tiffany and Brittany and Jordan. They were not named Lydia. They did not aspire to own a house in the country with chickens. They were probably fine with men who wore socks with sandals. They probably ate lima beans by the bucket.

The doorway to the basement was seven feet tall by three feet wide. The couch was eight feet long by four feet wide by four feet tall. I made a diagram on a piece of paper and I went over it for days, but no matter what angle the couch could have been tilted, there was no way it could have fit; not if it was tilted on its side or rolled end over end or if all the cushions were taken off. It was impossible. It was magic.

By the time the flood came, a month later, Lydia and I had broken up. When the levees broke, the water came up to the tops of the street signs in some parts of town. I opened the basement door and to my surprise, the couch floated. The water came halfway up the stairs and kept rising, as if the couch wanted out. Still the water rose, and on top of the water, still rose the couch; to the fifth step down, the fourth step, the third; we shoved blankets and towels and sheets up against the door. The water came up to the second step down before it finally began to recede, and then we rented a sump pump to get out what didn’t drain away.

It pumped for days. When we were finally able to climb down the stairs, everything in the basement had turned into mush. The cardboard boxes we’d used to move were mush. The broken furniture was bloated. The first thing I looked for were the magazines under the couch cushions; they were still there; they were mush. You could pick up a cushion and squeeze it between your arms and wring out at least a liter of brown water. Eventually we were confronted with the task of getting the couch out of the basement because it had begun to stink, but of course it didn’t fit through the doorway. This was obvious. My mom looked up at the doorway and then back at the couch and asked, “How in the hell did they ever get this couch down here?”

I didn’t tell her it was a magic couch. I didn’t say anything. I just shrugged. One day a friend of hers who owned a chainsaw came over and cut the couch into four sections. I was at school when it happened. Lydia didn’t talk to me at school anymore; she’d begun dating someone else. When I came home I saw my mother and her friend carrying up the quarters of the couch from the basement, and then they carried them out into the front yard where they were waiting for another friend who owned a truck to take them to the dump.

Just getting the couch out of the basement had never been the question though. You cut the couch up into little pieces. You smash the bottle against the counter and pick the ship up out of the shards of glass. You destroy it. I knew how to get the couch out of the basement. The question was how they had gotten the couch down there in the first place. The question was whether or not it was possible to get it back out intact.