There’s never been a study done on the locations of virginity loss in Ohio, but I’d bet most of my paltry bank account that more human beings native to the state have lost their virginity in cars than in any other location. Before fake IDs, before vacant basements and ambivalent parents, before the few short months of warm weather, there are cars. Out of sheer necessity, a greater amount of crucial moments in Ohio relationships take place in cars than would ever be permitted in a truly romantic world.

I went to college in New Jersey, but I returned almost every summer and winter, every Thanksgiving and spring break, to a job waiting tables at an Ohio sports bar. Returning to the restaurant meant returning to a man who worked there year-round as a short-order cook. He was three years older than I was, and we had a reliable holiday relationship, though I did not and never would have considered referring to him as my boyfriend, not even when I was home. Our relationship was constricted by a number of limits, and to either our credit or our stupidity, we never attempted to transcend any of them. Our families were never to know about us because in our part of Ohio familial knowledge was equivalent to a pre-engagement. The only friends we had in common were a handful of people at work, and only one or two of them had any inkling that we were hooking up.

We didn’t want a traditional label for our relationship, I think, because we knew that our relationship could never end up as anything traditional. We had nothing in common. We didn’t care about the same things and we didn’t want the same things for our futures. The freedom of my open-ended liberal arts life baffled him as much as his high school diploma hunting-is-a-sport mentality depressed me. But we were great talkers and great listeners both, and in all of our talking and listening we found a common ground, a similar way of looking at the most basic components of life. And we learned from each other. He brought me back to a world that I always harbored guilt over leaving and I brought him into a world that he always harbored regret over not entering.

Physically, too, we were limited in where we could spend time with each other, which we only did at night, always at night. We spent time in local dive bars, but always with people from work, which prevented us from doing the two things we most enjoyed doing together: talking and making out. Houses were out of the question; I was only home on break and he lived with his parents. We had neither the money nor the commitment for hotels. He loved the Indiana casinos, but he cut himself off from them as part of one of his many twelve-step programs. So we drove. We drove for hours, until the sun came up sometimes, through the suburbs, out to the country, for miles and miles along the Ohio River. We drove, we talked, we parked. Always alone, and always with me behind the wheel, as he was perpetually without a license due to some DUI or possession charge or driving infraction (much as I would have been loathe to admit it at the time, there were, perhaps, other reasons why I never told anyone about him).

As chauffeur I awarded myself radio rights, partly because I felt I deserved it and partly because our musical tastes were thing number sixty eleven hundred that we did not have in common. To him, my musical choices were pretentious and obscure, and I saw his point, but apart from six glorious minutes when I finally understood the gut-wrenching Midwestern power of John “I’ll Make You Never Want to Watch the World Series Again” Mellencamp, I saw “pretentious” as infinitely more tolerable than “trite and awful.” There was no way I could maneuver southern Ohio’s dark, twisty roads and listen to Matchbox Twenty or Jewel at the same time. And he understood this.

Invariably, though, my attempts to lure him osmotically by playing my favorite bands’ CDs at low volume were interrupted, over and over, by the same barked question: “Who the hell is this?” We had this conversation several thousand times.

“This is Crowded House.”

“Wow, they sound gay.”

“This is Blur.”

“I can’t understand a word they’re saying.”

“This is Radiohead. Please don’t say anything bad about Radiohead.”

“I won’t, but this is some weird-ass shit.”

“This is Dmitri Shostakovich.”

“This is fucking scary.”

And on and on. I switched my tactic and tried to find decent bands that he would like; catering to people’s musical tastes was an ability I had prided myself on to that point. I failed several times, but finally I came home from college armed with Chris Bell’s I Am the Cosmos, an album — vaguely American, lyrically straightforward, ineffably sad — that I believed would appeal to all the things he loved in music. He hated it. After that, I gave up. I played what I wanted, he stopped commenting on the albums, and we both accepted the fact that, of all the things we had to talk about, music would never be one of them.

We were driving on a state route out toward the countryside at two in the morning when the fat lady finally sang. We were talking about our grandparents when he interrupted with the old question again, but with a softer tone than I remembered. “Who is this?”

I was taken aback. “This is Van Morrison. Astral Weeks.”

“This is actually all right.” We were at Cypress Avenue. He paused to light a cigarette, oblivious to my shock. In a million years I never would have pegged him as a Van Morrison fan. “That name sounds familiar. Did he do anything I’d know?”

“‘Moondance’?” I da-da-daed a couple of bars for him, helpfully.

“What’s that?”

“No? Oh. ‘Brown-Eyed Girl.’”

“Oh, sure.” He took a drag off his cigarette. “That’s this guy? Is that on here?”

“No, this is a different album. Very different, really.”

“It’s good to know you like some American singers once in a while. None of that weird British stuff.”

“He is British. Well, Irish.”

“This guy? No way. ‘Brown-Eyed Girl,’ that’s an American song. Like the ‘American Pie’ guy.”

“Don McLean?”

“Yeah, him.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I don’t know.”

We were quiet and I could hear him listening from across the emergency brake. Once upon a time my delight would have bubbled over. I would have told him all about Morrison, how he had been in the band Them, how he had moved to Boston and was living in a dilapidated one-room apartment with his wife and baby when Astral Weeks was made, how it was a misunderstood album whose mystical connotations and sheer beauty weren’t recognized until years later. But now I was silent, letting the music fill up the car. He didn’t complain about the length of the songs, didn’t question the vibraphone as a legitimate instrument, didn’t scoff at the sentiment. We listened for a while, and finally he spoke again. “I really do like this, Annie. Now see, this is something I could listen to in the house.”

And we let the words linger in the air with the cigarette smoke. We both knew this would be the only time we would ever make reference to life outside the car. He put his hand on my knee, and when the album was over, we turned around and headed back to the lights of the city, back toward the impending day.