Love at a Tender Age (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  As for my interest in this topic, it is a result of my own experiences. Namely, having sexual intercourse at the age of fourteen with a woman who was old enough to be my mother. I say “old enough,” but actually she was several years older than my own mother. At the time this started, I was fourteen as stated, my mother was thirty-seven, and this woman was about forty-five. (I found this out later, as she claimed to be seven or eight years younger than her true age, which I discovered through other circumstances.)

  You may be interested in some of the details—although I don’t know why, as you have already written your book on the topic! In any case, let me go on, as for some time I have had an urge to discuss this with someone, but do not have the sort of relationship with anyone at present with whom such a discussion would be possible. Also it seems to me more natural to write about such things than to speak of them; if you were here in person I would no doubt “clam up” and have little or nothing to say . . .

  Up until meeting this woman, whom I will call “Jane Doe” for lack of being able to make up something original, and not wanting to use her actual name, I had little in the way of sexual experience. I was by way of being shy and what you might call a loner, having recently moved with my mother from a small town to a larger city. My father was deceased and I had no brothers and sisters. I did not mingle well with schoolmates and actually did not mind being left out, being more concerned with my hobbies, which included reading, stamp collecting, and nature study. I was quite industrious as a boy, perhaps more so than I am now, and, needing money for my stamp collection, was constantly mowing lawns, raking leaves, and otherwise doing chores for various neighbors, depending on the season.

  Mrs. Doe lived in our neighborhood in a two-family house similar to the one in which I lived with my mother. I originally thought she was a widow but later learned she had been divorced, her husband having custody of their children. She had never claimed to be a widow. This was just an impression I had. I had a more or less steady job cutting her small lawn one summer, and continued to work for her when school started, raking her leaves periodically, then shoveling her walk after it snowed. As she had no car and thus did not use her driveway, nor did her tenant in the upstairs flat, it was just a matter of shoveling the small front walk and the path to her door, for which I was paid, as I recall, fifty cents . . .

  It was during that Christmas season when sex first entered the picture. Before this, my experience was limited to masturbation, which I practiced frequently but felt quite guilty about. I knew it to be harmless, unlike countless boys who had heard all sorts of horrible stories about its results, but nevertheless regarded it as unmanly, filthy, etc. Since I still rarely went an entire day without doing it, I don’t suppose my reservations had an inhibiting effect upon my behavior.

  Mrs. Doe—I am beginning to regret having called her that, but let it lie—was clearly the initiator of our sexual contact. I can now recognize that she behaved seductively on several occasions before actually seducing me, though I did not appreciate this at the time. She would behave in a flirtatious fashion, rub against me, hold my hand while paying me, etc. Also she would make double intenders which I did not notice, naive as I was. Nevertheless in her defense it must be admitted that I was already sexually attracted to her, regarding her as very pretty and desirable (she could have passed for more than seven years younger than her age, had she desired, on the basis of her youthfulness of appearance). While I never regarded it as remotely possible that we might have sex together, she was frequently my partner in my masturbation fantasies. I never believed those fantasies had any more chance of fulfillment than others involving movie stars!

  During that fateful Christmas vacation, on the day after a heavy snowfall I, as usual, went to her house and offered to shovel her walk and path, and was as usual accepted. I performed these tasks, then rang her bell to request payment. She paid me and offered me a cup of chocolate. She had done so before, and as usual I accepted.

  In her kitchen she asked me quite a few personal questions involving my own sexual experience. Such as did I go out with girls, did I have a special girlfriend, etc. (It has since amused me to learn—through the printed word, I hasten to say—that such an approach is commonly made by mature homosexuals seeking to entice adolescent males.) I replied to the effect that I “didn’t have time” for girls. She then asked if I didn’t find female bodies attractive—I said I did—and if I didn’t have physical desires. I don’t recall what I said in reply, if indeed I managed to blurt out any answer at all.

  She then said: “Your problem, Peter, is that you are too mature for girls your own age, and that is why you cannot waste time on them. We are a great deal alike. I am youthful in my mind for someone my age, but to someone like you I must seem like an old lady and not desirable.”

  I managed to say something along the lines that she was attractive.

  Then she said, “Have you ever seen a woman’s body unclothed?” I said no. She carefully drew all the shades, then removed all of her clothing and stood there stark naked before me, and I can still recall the expression on her face, part teasing, part passionate, part fearful of my reaction.

  I thought she was the most beautiful thing in the world and managed to put some of my feeling into words. To show you the extent of my naiveté, a part of my mind was looking forward to holding this picture in my mind while masturbating before going to sleep that night—it had still not dawned on me that I was actually going to be able to fuck her!

  And fuck we did. She took me into her bedroom and helped me undress. She smelled deliciously of a perfume she always wore and of her own special scent, the woman-smell I had never breathed before. I had gotten a painfully intense erection when she undressed and I got inside of her almost immediately, and ejaculated after but a few strokes. If this disappointed her, as well it must have, she did not show it, and I had no concept of making the act last so that the woman could obtain satisfaction. All I could think was how much an improvement was her splendid cunt over my hand for inducing orgasm and how much sweeter a feeling it did induce. In no time at all her hand had excited me a second time, and this time she got astride me and rode me very slowly, having a powerful orgasm of her own that finally spurred me to climax after a long and joyous bout of fucking.

  When it was over and I was on my way home, I hardly believed what had happened. In a sense, I was quite terrified, not that anything ill would come of it but that my mother or school classmates of mine might find out. As far as my mother was concerned, there was very little chance of her finding out, as she was quite withdrawn into herself and took little interest in any of my activities. By this I do not intend to suggest that she was not a good mother, but rather that she tended to go her way and let me go mine. And, as far as my classmates were concerned, I wonder now why it worried me that they might have found out, as their reaction would certainly have been one of admiration, and they paid little or no attention to me anyway. But such was my feeling, and it certainly worked to Mrs. Doe’s advantage, for throughout our affair I never confided in another soul and took great pains to keep everything a secret, with the result that no one ever did find out what was going on . . .

  After that first time, I went to sleep that night praying it would snow so that I could see her again. It did not occur to me that I could go over on virtually any pretext, and several days passed before it did indeed snow and give me the excuse I was looking for. Mrs. Doe—I’ll call her Jane now, for by this point we were, not surprisingly, on a first-name basis—asked why I had stayed away for so long, and suggested in the course of our time together that day that we meet on a more-or-less regular basis. She proposed that she “hire” me to do certain chores at her house twice weekly, which would explain my regular presence there, and further insisted that she would pay me five dollars a week for my non-existent services. It somehow did not seem odd to me to be taking this money from her, and it was not until long after our relationship had ended that I saw myself as h
aving been paid for “stud services.” Perhaps the idea of paying me appealed to her in that it established her dominance in the relationship, or let her feel less that she was exploiting my youth, but that is guesswork on my part . . .

  I continued to see her on a regular basis for almost four years, or until I went to college out-of-town. She never mentioned the word “love,” nor did I. I did not consider myself in love with her, although I did have a great deal of affection for her which was not exclusively sexual. Although the majority of our time together was spent in bed, we did have conversations, and in more than a sexual sense she did far more to further my education than the hours I spent in class. I had always been shy and awkward, and still remained shy and awkward in front of other people, but with her I was able to bloom as far more mature and worldly than the rest of the world saw me.

  I don’t recall the specific subjects of many of our conversations. We rarely talked about our own personal lives, and it was as if there was an unspoken agreement to the effect that our relationship was wholly apart from our outside lives. She did encourage me to develop an interest in classical music, which has never faded, and suggested many books for me to read.

  Well, I have gone on at greater length than I intended, and no doubt bored you to tears in the course of all this memory-sifting. I would appreciate any comments you might care to make on my relationship with Jane, whether it is typical or atypical in your opinion, whether its effects are good or bad, etc. If you have questions on any points I’ve mentioned, or anything I have left out that would be of interest, I will do my best to answer them in a useful fashion . . .

  Sincerely,

  Peter

  I made some comments in my reply, concluding by suggesting that the question as to whether the relationship had been good or bad for him was one to be answered not by me but by Peter himself. And I added that I would be interested in the answer, and in how his affair had influenced his life away from Jane, how his sex life had developed in respect to other partners, and whether he had had any contact with Mrs. Doe after going away to college.

  Dear Mr. Wells:

  Thank you so much for your very thoughtful reply. Since last writing to you, I was successful in picking up a copy of The Mrs. Robinson Syndrome, incidentally, which I very much enjoyed . . .

  You are correct, of course, in noting that it is my place to evaluate my relationship with Jane. Your words to that effect provoked me into a great deal of thought on the subject, and if you’ll permit me I’ll share some of those thoughts with you.

  First of all, I would say that the relationship was unequivocally beneficial to me in two extremely important respects. It endowed me with superb sexual education and provided me with a convenient sexual outlet in those years of adolescence so commonly marked by unremitting frustration and anxiety. For these two aspects alone, I would say that Jane did me infinitely more good than harm.

  In terms of sexual technique, I did not keep a copy of my last letter to you and hence do not know how much I may have said about Jane’s sexual performance. I’m sure I mentioned that she was attractive and enjoyed sex immensely. She was also highly skilled and inclined to experiment, so that at an age when most of my contemporaries were engaging in guilt-ridden masturbation and trying to comprehend theoretically the precise mechanics of coitus, I was adept at sexual intercourse in a dozen positions, the full gamut of oral and anal sex, and a variety of other techniques most men learn only after several years of marriage if at all. I knew precisely how to excite a woman and could readily bring Jane to orgasm in a great variety of ways. I say this not to pass myself off as a great lover; I’m sure I learned nothing that most men don’t learn eventually, so that those contemporaries of mine have probably caught up with me by now. I was surely ahead of them at the time, however . . .

  And this gives rise to an interesting point which I did not have brought home to me until I was in college. My college experience generally was a complete turnabout in terms of my personality. Shy and indrawn as I had been, I became quite the reverse almost from the moment I arrived at the campus. It was as if, by being away from the school and town where I had been a loner and misfit, by being at a college where not a single person had ever laid eyes on me before, I was gifted with the opportunity of a completely new start.

  That I was able to take advantage of that start is, I am confident, the result of my affair with Jane. In a sense, I became the person I had previously only been able to be with her. (That sentence is awkward, but I trust you’ll be able to decipher it.)

  As part of my “new personality,” I took an immediate interest in girls and dating—and here is the interesting paradox. I had no idea how to behave in dating situations! I had never had a date of any sort before, had never had any more intimate verbal contact with a girl than perhaps to ask to borrow a pencil in class. In simplest terms, I knew a lot about fucking—but nothing about girls!

  Thus I was very unsure of myself on dates, and quite unaware as to the manner in which one knows how to proceed sexually with a girl. I was quite unprepared for the nuances of social dating and courtship. Because of my “new personality,” however, I managed to seem fairly well at ease in social situations, however ill at ease I might be underneath, and once I did manage to initiate sexual contact, things generally went well enough.

  I had brief affairs with several girls during my first year at college. I think the experience with Jane, the freedom I had in that relationship, made me very wary of getting overly involved with any of the three girls I had relations with. They expected an affair to be accompanied by emotional commitment, which I was unwilling to make . . . At times I found relations with these relatively inexperienced girls unsatisfying in comparison to what I had had with Jane. They were unskilled in technique and very timid about performing fellatio, etc. However the charms of female bodies close to me in age offset this lack of technique, and in addition they provided the pleasures of seduction and instruction, allowing me to play the role of the experienced lover, a complete reversal of course of the role I had played with Jane.

  You asked me if I was at all tempted to renew my acquaintance with Jane after I went away to college. There were times, to be sure, when I missed her. But I had changed, and regarded her as a part of my former life—a life I was determined to escape from entirely. In my mind, she was a part of my childhood, and I had become a man upon arriving at the college . . . When I returned home for vacation, I did not make any immediate attempt to see her. I was avoiding it but knew I had to see her, and in a way I longed to so that I could obtain assurance from her that I had grown up, that I was a man, etc.

  The meeting—it was the last time I ever saw her—is hazy in my mind, and I suspect I have learned to repress it over the years. It was not so much that it was unpleasant. In fact it was not unpleasant but that we were no longer interested in each other. She was friendly enough but not warm. Eventually I took her arm in a way to indicate that we should go to the bedroom, not because I wanted to, I don’t believe, so much as because I felt an obligation to do so. She shook her head determinedly and confided that she had a lover—a high school boy three years my junior.

  Incredibly, I had not only never taken it for granted that she would find a replacement for me, but the possibility had never even entered my mind. I had the selfishness that most young people had, the total egocentricity, so that I thought of people only in respect to the way they were involved in my life, and somehow I took it for granted that Jane would be waiting for me and remaining quite celibate while I was off seducing college coeds.

  You asked, also, how my sexual life has developed since those days. I would characterize it as basically normal. I am 47 years old and have been married for almost twenty years. I don’t really feel like going into details of my sex life, or of any other aspect of my present life, however willingly I seem to write about the past! Suffice it to say that I am happily married, that with the exception of a few generally insignificant affairs I have been
faithful to my wife, and that I look back on those adolescent experiences with Jane with nothing but fondness. I’ve often wondered how the years would have changed her—she was struck down and killed by a hit-and-run driver during my sophomore year at college.

  I think every young boy should have an experience such as this, an introduction to love at the hands of a gifted, desirable, understanding older woman. I understand that this is considerably more common in Western Europe than it is in this country, although I’m sure it is by no means all that uncommon here. There must be untold numbers of boys like myself who went through such experiences and profited immensely from them—and never confided their experiences to anyone else . . .

  Sincerely,

  Peter

  I didn’t expect to hear further from Peter, but this letter arrived several months later.

  Dear Mr. Wells:

  . . . I am writing to you because of a preoccupation which has been on my mind constantly lately. It has occurred to me to go to a psychiatrist, but I have never done so before and have some reservations about doing so now. Besides, it occurs to me that you already know a great deal about me which I would have to waste time telling a psychiatrist, so rather than spend twenty-five dollars telling my troubles to someone else. I’ll spend eight cents on a stamp and tell them to you. I don’t expect any reply from you, but in the past it has helped me to clarify things in my mind by writing to you, and I am hoping this will again be the case.

  To put it plainly, I have the ever-recurring desire to have my wife emulate the woman I called “Jane Doe” by having an affair with a teenage boy. This has been on my mind for months and was in the back of my mind when I first began writing to you, although I was reluctant to mention it at the time. Reading your book on the subject and delving into my own past, both mentally and in my letters to you, only served to sharpen my interest in having this come to pass.