The Reluctant Exhibitionist

by Martin Shepard

  She is always putting off her children’s requests for almost anything.

  She is a lady who will flirt with you all evening and then offer you her cheek to kiss when you try to bid her good-night by kissing her lips.

  She is always saying “No” to life.

  When Tamara arrived, she unpacked some house gifts that she brought along. Eivor was grateful for her generosity and took it as a sign of Tamara’s affection for her. I saw it as nothing more than a habit—part of the ritual in playing the part of the Queenly Lady. Then she opened her large shoulder bag, removed the bottle of gin that was her traveling companion, grandly gave it to me, and commanded “Darling, fix us a drink.” Dutifully, I poured what she asked for.

  It was as though a cloud had settled over our Eden. Vincent started to wince at the hubbub of her dealings with her children: “Mommy, can I go to the beach?” “Wait.” “Can I have lunch?” “Not now.” “Can I play outside with Marc?” “Later.” “Where’s my swimsuit?” “Don’t bother me now.” He and I quickly left for the ocean.

  Within an hour, Tamara and her brood walked down to the beach to join us.

  “Where are Eivor and the boys?” I asked.

  “She went to visit her friend Carol. I thought I’d come to the beach instead.”

  It wasn’t long before Vincent and I decided to leave Tamara on the beach and visit Eivor’s friend too. And what a contrast it was. Eivor, Carol, and another friend of Carol’s were sitting about quietly at the house they had rented behind the dunes. Their children were off playing contentedly. Carol had been a friend of Eivor’s before our marriage. They hadn’t seen each other for many years until meeting, inadvertently, on the beach last week.

  Eivor had told me that Carol was pretty and that I would enjoy meeting her. It was more enjoyable than I expected. Carol was not pretty. She was beautiful. A woman in her early thirties, with long, black, pony-tailed hair, the liveliest, most intense and flirtatious green eyes I have ever seen, and a figure that matched Eivor’s for its excellence: long, lean, well-carved legs, and breasts so firm, erect, and full that a seventeen-year-old maiden would properly prize them.

  The sight of Eivor, Carol, and her nearly equally attractive friend Janet—all sitting and standing about in the briefest of bikinis—revived both Vincent’s and my spirits. We looked at one another, smiled simultaneously, and then began to laugh, so completely shared were our wave lengths.

  Janet broke the charged silence that followed our introductions.

  “What do you do?” she asked Vincent.

  “I’m a writer.”

  “What sort of things do you write?” she asked politely.

  “Pornography.”

  She blushed. Carol and Eivor smiled.

  “Everything he writes about he lives out first,” I ventured. “If you like, you can be a chapter in his next novel.”

  More blushes and more lusciously provocative smiles.

  We kept escalating the conversation, Vincent and I, throwing sexual balls out to whomever would catch them. We were most provocative in discussing our roles in leading psychologically oriented touch-and-feel weekend groups. We made ribald philosophical comments about the meaning of life itself. I explained my interest in Tantric Yoga, jokingly concluding that “even if you don’t achieve eventual enlightenment, the trip itself sure feels good.”

  We left finally and returned home only to be brought down once more by Tamara. The pleasant sexual vibrations were replaced by her strutting one-upsmanship, arid sensuality, and the three-ring circus of all those children in one small place. The normal affectional gestures that Vincent, Eivor, and I might have rightfully shared were cut off by Tamara’s chilling presence. I took some grass out of the refrigerator and rolled myself a joint, hoping to clear my head of its gloominess. The net result was that Vincent and I decided to leave once more and see an early movie.

  During the drive to the theater, we talked of Tamara.

  “What she needs is a good fuck, but it would require an artist to slip it in. You’re a sexual guru. Why don’t you try?”

  “Uh-uh. She’s your friend. I couldn’t take wading through all that crap in order to make it. It would be too much of an energy drain. It wouldn’t be worth it.”

  And so it went. Each of us feeling that her shutoffness to life was turning her into an embittered, impossible shell of a woman, but neither of us feeling self-sacrificing enough to try to change things.

  We saw Beneath the Planet of the Apes, an uncanny and phenomenally interesting film. It had enough horse-shit in it to appeal to every hick and his cousin—actors in ape suits, space travel, and a beautiful, mute, half-naked woman. Yet it was also the perfect parable of life in our times. It was Sartre’s No Exit updated. John Kennedy once said that we needn’t choose between being Red or dead, that we could instead elect to be alive and free. Lao Tse talked of staying in the middle of the Way and avoiding the excesses on either side of the road. Both men presumed a third sane choice aside from two forms of idiocy. Beneath the Planet of the Apes made it crystal clear that the third way is equally mad, and those who follow it are equally damned. There are no differences. All roads lead to oblivion. We are all doomed.

  Driving back home we were strangely silent at first, recovering from the shock of the film.

  “Do you realize,” said Vincent, referring to the Doomsday bomb explosion at the end of the movie, “that we may be the generation born to witness the end of the world?”

  The feeling of finality was so heavy in the car that we were both soon caught up in discussing the death experience. For a moment I flashed that everything I would do for the rest of my life would be merely a repetition of something I had done before: posturing, preening, healing, crying, laughing, working, playing, even fucking. So what if I could fuck in different groupings? A fuck was, after all, still a fuck. A pleasant way to pass time, but nothing of real significance. The only new experience to look forward to was death itself. For an instant I was tempted to twist my car off the highway and know death—the last remaining novelty—then and there. But the finality of the act was too awesome, and the impulse to do this—which I shared with Vincent—scuttled away, leaving us both chilled and somewhat shaken, so real had the possibility briefly seemed.

  We arrived home scared and trembling, eager to be touched and reassured. When we told the women of the film, Vincent and I cringed, making a mockery of our real fearfulness. Eivor came over like a mother bird, putting her arms/wings about us and saying “There, there.”

  Dinner with Tamara was more tolerable than our other meetings. Partly because the children were asleep. Partly because my need for human contact was heightened by the experience at the theater and all that it touched off. Also, it was becoming increasingly obvious that Eivor, my shy Eivor, coasting off the ripeness of last evening, was trying to turn Tamara on to a foursome.

  I first noticed it when Eivor suggested skinny-dipping after dinner at the pool next door. This invitation Tamara deftly ignored. Eivor then went to our room, returned with a deck of cards, and like a little girl with a new interest said, “Let’s do something interesting tonight. Why don’t we play strip poker?”

  “If you want to play strip poker, my dears, that’s quite all right with me. I’ll watch.” Yet although the game was Eivor’s idea, she wouldn’t play without Tamara.

  “But Tamara says she wants to watch. Maybe that’s her thing,” I said. “So let’s play without her.”

  “No,” said Eivor, her eyes cast at the floor and her voice trailing off. “I only want to play if Tamara does.”

  “Go ahead,” said Tamara grandly. “Don’t hold back out of feeling I’m against it. You do what you want to do. It’s not my cup of tea, but everyone to his own. I’ll watch you.”

  To break the impasse, I cut the cards and started dealing to Vincent. “If she wants to watch, let’s give her a show. Five-card open.”

  I lost the first game and took off a sandal. Tamara was amazed that w
e were really starting. She lit a cigarette. Her face flushed.

  I lost the second game and the other sandal came off. “My God. Boys will be boys,” said Tamara, walking to the liquor cabinet.

  I lost the third hand and took off my polo shirt. Tamara’s face reddened still more and she poured herself a drink. “I want to find out how far they’ll go,” she said to Eivor, and then peered intently at me. I had nothing left to lose except my pants.

  Then Vincent lost a hand or two. Eivor took it all in quietly, half smiling, no longer prodding her intractable friend. Finally I lost my pants. With a ceremonial flourish I removed them and stood up from the table to make sure that Tamara could view my flaccid cock. Her face turned beet red, she stared with embarrassment, poured another drink, downed it, and poured again. She ill hid her fascination behind her pseudo-contemptuous, “Well, I hope you’re happier that way.”

  At this point even Eivor could see through her. Eivor now laid her figurative cards on the table, suggesting to Tamara that undressing and joining together might be a joyous experience.

  “Those group mechanical things aren’t for me,” she responded coldly. “I have to have something more in it. There has to be some feeling.” Then Eivor told her about our threesome and of the feeling flow that had existed last night. But it was obvious that Tamara was not listening.

  “If you three want to just go through some mechanical scene, be my guests. I prefer something with real love, real feelings. But go ahead if you like. I’ll watch.”

  I was tempted to simultaneously shock and titillate Tamara by doing just that, but her haughtiness quickly chilled Eivor, and I suspect Vincent as well. Tamara had another drink.

  By now, this play with Tamara had tired me. Tamara was tipsy. Vincent had withdrawn into himself. Eivor looked at me most tenderly. We bid our good-nights and went to our room. Vincent stayed up to talk with Tamara some more before retiring, separately, himself.

  While I missed having Vincent under the covers with us, the full sense of Eivor’s femininity was comfort indeed from the bleak realizations of this night. She kissed me full on the lips. We said not a word, but breathed, one into another, each getting higher and higher from the warmth and richness of the other’s breath. The pajama barriers were not present tonight.

  My chest rubbed lightly against her breasts, which felt as full and as ripe as they ever had. My hand slid over her belly (bronzed from the sun, softened from bearing three children, yet all the lovelier for it), over the neatly sown field of black pubic hair, and into the cleft of her soft and ample cunt.

  I rolled over on top of her. My prick pushed the folds easily aside, and I was safely home in my moist, snug, death-denying harbor.

  “Eivor. I love you Eivor.”

  She moaned, nuzzled her lips against my ear, and with her arms and her legs and her cunt squeezed me more gently inside her.

  VIII

  “Do you tell all this to shock?” my alter ego asks.

  “Certainly,” I reply.

  “Is that the reason you carried on that way?”

  “Not at all. I did what I did ’cause I did it. And enjoyed the doing in the process.”

  “I’m not so sure I trust your answers. They’re too quick. Too cocksure. Even impertinent,” alter ego responds. “Tell me, are you proud of these adventures of yours?”

  “I’m not ashamed, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Stop this verbal constipation. Elaborate. Stop teasing me. Stop trying to shock me with curt, smug responses.”

  “Okay. Okay. Provided you stop trying to discredit me. Yes. I am proud. Not of the specifics of each event so much, but proud of finding myself able to act as I wished. Proud of being free of the conventionality, arbitrariness and uptightness that had been drilled into me in the course of my upbringing. Proud of being matter-of-fact about my sexuality. And satisfied that I needn’t surround it with shame and secrecy.”

  “Well, frankly, I think you may be headed for trouble. Other people aren’t going to see it that way, necessarily. Do you really not give a damn about how others react to what you’ve been saying?”

  “If I had my ‘druthers,’ I’d prefer that they accept me as I accept myself. When they reject me, they also reject that part of themselves that they see in me. I would like people to accept my version of things as what there is and all that there is. Some will, I know. Others won’t. But that can’t be helped. For I am what I am what I am.”

  “I think you’re taking a big risk in telling your story this way. Many people will find these intimate details of your life offensive.”

  “If you think I’ve been offensive thus far, just wait until you begin the next chapter. Anyone who is on the verge of discarding me now will almost certainly do so after reading my July 12 entry. Unless, of course, they just want to follow me as some sort of ‘curiosity’—the way one might stare at the freaks in a circus sideshow.”

  “If your next entry is that offensive, why present it at all?”

  “Because it happened. It’s as simple as that. Because I learned from it. And because I feel that people, myself included, should be allowed their imperfections. I took a chance, a risk, in running that session as I did in the first place. I take another in presenting it in print. But how else does one grow and learn other than by risk-taking?”

  “Today you talk of growing and risk-taking. The other day you said free choice is an illusion. You contradict yourself.”

  “You’re right. I do.”

  “Can you offer no more than that?”

  “No.”

  “Will you retract yesterday’s remarks, or today’s?”

  “Neither. Yesterday was yesterday. Today is today.”

  “Just what are you trying to do?”

  “Live what I preach. Freud said that sex was healthy and acceptable, yet he led the most restricted sex life imaginable. He apparently never fucked until he was married (and nearly thirty years of age), balled only his wife, and as far as anyone reliably knows, stopped fucking her while in his early forties. Many of his disciples talk a sexually respectable game, but fail to live it.

  “I’m a psychiatrist—a teacher. How can I help people accept their sexuality unashamedly unless I am willing to accept mine? How dare I ask them to reveal their private lives to me if I am unwilling to reveal mine to them?”

  “But showing your cock to Tamara. Perhaps you had fun in the doing of it. But why, why, why, why, why report it?”

  “You are dense sometimes. I’ll try to tell you the same thing in another way, although I doubt you’ll be any more receptive to the message.

  “I was driving my kids back from Bridgehampton to their home in Rockland County over the weekend, when the song (ironically enough) Break on Through to the Other Side began playing over the radio.

  “‘That’s Jim Morrison, of The Doors,’ I said to Judy.

  “‘Who’s Jim Morrison, daddy?’ asked Marc, alert and curious about everything as usual.

  “‘He’s the man who is singing this song. Once he pulled down his pants while giving a concert in Miami and showed everyone his wiener.’

  “‘Why did he do that?’

  “‘Just to play—to tease people. Just for fun. And they wrote about it in all the newspapers.’

  “‘And I think he had to pay a fine or go to jail,’ Judy added.

  “‘How come, daddy?’

  “‘Because in this society, son, it’s against the law to show people your wiener.’

  “‘Is it very bad?’

  “‘I don’t see why it should be. If you’re a cat or a dog or a duck or a horse, nobody makes a fuss about your wiener showing. They only bother people about showing it. But if your daddy has his say, everyone will be as free to show his wiener as are any of the other creatures on God’s earth.’”

  “Okay. Enough, already,” said my more cautious self, succumbing to the argument. “Get on with your tale.”

  IX-Tantric Road (continued)

  Sun
day, July 12

  Some months ago I set up and tape-recorded a select group to see whether people on exclusive sexual trips could get in touch with their denied sexuality. My premise was—and still is—that everyone is, as Freud contemptuously put it, “polymorphous perverse.” I presumed that since we all had our own balance of heterosexuality/homosexuality, people who failed to admit some measure of both were out of touch with themselves. For that taped session I assembled a group of eight serious and articulate people, including one lesbian, one homosexual, a superstraight man and woman, and four people from the sexual middle.

  During the twelve hours of talking, touching, and risk-taking, interesting things happened: the lesbian turned on to men for the first time, the homosexual went through some exotic masturbatory acts with one of the women, the straight girl suckled from a bisexual girl’s nipple, and the superstraight guy gave me a bath, washing and touching every nook and cranny of my body. The participants left with a richer appreciation of their own sexuality, and I left with material for another book.

  The session was so successful that I decided to list a similar program in the Anthos brochure, thus offering these insights to the general public. I still feel shaken and at odds with myself for having led such a tawdry and tasteless group this past weekend.

  Anthos is a “growth center” in New York, modeled after the Esalen Institute of Big Sur, California. I am one of its founders and frequently lead theme-oriented groups that they publicize. This weekend’s group was held at Anthos’ country retreat some two hours’ drive northwest of New York City. The announcement in the catalogue was clear enough. It read: