“Just what I was thinking of. I’m going to bring some people with me. We were all sitting around, smoking some marijuana, and decided we’d like to have a bit more excitement. Somehow your name came up and I thought I’d call and find out if the invitation was still on.”
I told Eivor of the call, got in my car, drove down to the beach and started walking, flashlight in hand, over the dunes toward her house. Halfway there I met her party, weaving and laughing, picking their way along the lightless drifts of sand toward my waiting car. We met; I was introduced to Carol’s friends—Andrea and a French couple—and then I ferried them to my house.
We arrived after midnight. As we entered, our last dinner guests left. Carol introduced her friends to Eivor, who greeted them properly, but with the obvious fatigue of a hostess who has been serving and drinking all evening.
“Do you have any pot?” asked Carol.
I filled a water pipe and passed it around. Andrea sat down next to me. She was a petite, elegantly coiffured redhead, with freckles, a fair complexion, and large, almond-shaped eyes. The prototypical wholesome, decent girl next door.
She began to tell me how charming the house was, while she edged her foot alongside mine, slipped off her sandal, and started to stroke my ankle with her toes. I was astounded at her audacity. “Glad you like it,” I replied, and placed my hand carelessly down on the sofa against her thigh.
“Yes,” she smiled, with perfect innocence, twisting her foot around mine, “I really do.” She then began to chat about pleasant nothings with Eivor.
Too much, I thought.
In spite of the smokes, our newly arrived friends sensed Eivor’s exhaustion and, before an hour was gone, decided to leave.
I drove them down to the dunes. There was no moon. The beach was deserted and we were enveloped in total blackness. I went to get my flashlight.
“Why don’t you come back with us and have a drink or another smoke?” asked Carol, holding on to my left arm. The invitation fit my needs perfectly. Eivor had been in another of her untouchable moods for the past week, treating all of my overtures for closeness in her haughty “there goes that bothersome little boy again” way. Andrea’s phenomenal outfrontness and Carol’s sudden interest were just the tonic I needed. Yet in honesty I suspect that even if Eivor and I were fully attuned to one another, the attractiveness of this emerging adventure would have been irresistible.
We walked along the beach, Carol on one arm and Andrea on the other. My left hand held the flashlight, my right kept squeezing Andrea’s small, firm buttocks. The French couple walked alongside us.
The walk on the darkened beach allowed for a closeness that was riot readily re-established in Carol’s softly lit den, in spite of Andrea’s engaging me in another mutual foot massage. We smoked some more, but the conversation became banal and forced. Could the electricity have spent itself so rapidly? I decided to test reactions.
“I have an encounter game I’d like to play if you’re all willing. It’s called the Truth Game. What we do is go around the room and say truthfully what is really on our minds. Each person should feel free to ask anyone or say to anyone anything he really feels.” Yes, they all agreed, interesting idea. But why don’t you start to give us an idea of what you mean?
“Okay. I’ve been sitting here,” I began cautiously, “listening to the flow of conversation for the past half hour, and thinking that it is all irrelevant and has nothing to do with the energy flows and real desires within us. And I suggested this game to see if that were true or not.”
Andrea went next and asked people whether they were optimistic or pessimistic about man’s future. Was this more bullshit or did she really care? Was. I the only sexual animal in the room?
After everybody had their tediously profound say concerning man’s fate, the French girl’s turn came.
“I can’t really think of anything,” she said, looking bored and uninterested.
Just as I was considering going home, her husband hit the nail squarely on on the head.
“I’m thinking that if the orgy doesn’t start in five minutes, I’m leaving.”
Bingo! Shrieks of delight from Carol, whose turn was yet to come. “The first honest thing that’s been said all evening. There’s an honest man.” Andrea blushingly nodded her assent. The Frenchman’s wife continued to look bored and uninterested. He and Carol turned and faced each other, exchanging looks of great intensity.
“Well,” I said, “if an orgy’s going to start, we might as well take our clothes off,” and with that I began to undress. The others seemed hesitant to join me, so I stopped short of removing my briefs.
Still, the effect of my nakedness was enough to prompt the Frenchman’s wife to say that it was time for her to retire. Her husband tried to talk her into staying, but in the end he dutifully took her home. Not, however, before Andrea stripped down to her panties and shirt and Carol to her briefs and bra.
So here I was, left with two of the loveliest women any man could desire. What more could I possibly ask for? Less, was the unsuspected answer, because the scenario that followed was more reminiscent of Molière than of sexploitation.
I sat down again on the sofa flanked by the two half-naked women. I turned my face toward Carol and started nibbling at her ear. She smiled softly but stared straight ahead and continued to puff on her cigarette. I turned toward Andrea next and tried with my right hand to unbutton her shirt, while my left hand stroked Carol’s passive thigh. But Andrea pulled away and said, “No.”
Carol left the room for some water, and immediately I was upon Andrea, who in turn started dry humping against my strengthened cock. Her mouth opened and I plunged my tongue deep into her throat. She sucked it in still deeper, and began to run her tongue under mine. I removed my shorts and opened her blouse. Her breasts were small, but firm and hard. “Oh, if only I had met someone like you before,” she said, as my fingers glided over her blue panties and pushed into the mouth of her moistening slit. By then Carol returned and Andrea, at her approach, pushed me off, sat bolt upright and pulled the borders of her shirt together.
Next it was Andrea’s turn to leave, and she too went to the kitchen to fix herself a drink. Carol now turned to me, and the two of us rubbed mouths and tongues and chests and hips in a long, slow, undulating, and fond embrace. What Andrea gave with frenzied intensity, Carol offered with slow, measured gentleness. Yet at Andrea’s re-entry, Carol, too, pushed me away.
I was becoming increasingly confused, and left for the kitchen to pour myself a Coke. Carol followed me and we kissed again.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why do you push me off in front of Andrea?”
“I don’t want to offend her. I think she’d be shocked.”
“But it’s not true. I can assure you she’s as interested in having a scene as you are.”
It was no use. When Andrea came out to see what was happening, Carol stepped out of my arms.
“I’m going upstairs to check on the children,” she said, and left.
Andrea and I then went through an identical conversation. Yes, she wanted to go to bed with me, but no, she wouldn’t because she was afraid of offending Carol. Try as I would, she refused to believe that Carol was operating out of the same preposterous misconceptions.
The three of us settled down together again, when there was a knock on the door. The Frenchman’s wife had gone to bed, he had slipped out of the adjoining guest house, and now, with a twinkle in his eye, he undressed. He was obviously quite fond of Carol, and he took her hand, led her to the center of the room, and began to dance, slowly and sensuously.
Not one to miss an opportunity, I led Andrea out to the living room, laid her down on the rug and removed her remaining clothes. The only problem was that now that she was willing, my prick wasn’t. I would have a semi-erection, she would be all too eager to get it inside of her, and each time I tried to enter her pushing, grasping cunt, my hard-on became a soft-on.
To complicate matters
still further, she kept talking about it and blaming herself for my lack of engorgement.
“I wish I didn’t have this problem,” she’d say. “It always seems to happen. If only I could get over it.”
I tried to reassure her. “Don’t be silly. You’re a lovely and desirable woman. The prick has a mind of its own. Sometimes it rises and sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve given up trying to figure it out or apologize for it. But you’re not to blame. Honestly. Let’s just enjoy whatever stroking or touching we do and not make a great tragedy out of it.”
And with that I started to lick her neck, her breasts, and then down her belly into the rich, heady aroma of fresh cunt. She began to tug insistently on my prick with her mouth, and again, when I started to erect, she wanted to fuck. Again the same problem and again her self-reproaches. It was becoming sillier and sillier.
Reassurances were once more followed by our mutually eating one another. At long last, with a firm and sure erection I twisted about, quite sure of entering her now amply moistened cunt. Just as I started to press home, Carol entered the room to escort the Frenchman to the front door. Simultaneously my tumescence subsided and Andrea pushed me embarrassedly off her.
I bade my good-byes shortly afterward and started home. Dawn was breaking on the beach. A few figures huddled on the dunes, blankets wrapped about them, were watching the sunrise like Bedouins in the desert. It was nearly six in the morning. Out of respect for Carol’s wishes and Eivor’s desires that we stop sharing tales of outside intimacies, I knew that when I returned I would slip quietly into bed. And it made sense. Because even though Eivor didn’t want me, she would be hurt and even more prickly knowing about my abortive affair. When Eivor would ask me what had happened, I would tell her that I passed out from too much drinking. She wouldn’t question it further.
But as I continued walking on the sand, transfixed by the morning sea, my mind kept spinning over the absurdities of the last several hours. Water, water all around and not a drop to drink. A surplus of riches. One jewel alone would have been more than sufficient.
X
“You certainly have had your share of good experiences,” my dad says, a touch of delight and envy in his voice. He puts the manuscript down.
In two days he will have exploratory surgery.
“Has your publisher read it yet?”
“No.”
“I’m interested to hear what he thinks of it. I like it. I really do … I wonder whether he will want you to rewrite any of it.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it. I wouldn’t necessarily mind adding things to what I’ve said, but rewriting, to me, is an attempt to doctor up the past—to put a better face on it. Like rewriting history. It would become a lie. It’s not my style, not my message.”
I am feeling better. His tranquility, his concern for those who love him, strengthen me.
“Give mother a call when you can, will you? She’s feeling sort of blue and lonely.”
“Sure.”
It pleases me to please him, and so I write whenever I can; between patient hours, during cancelled appointments, when I have a free moment at Rikers Island. I bring my dad the manuscript to read as it develops. He is both concerned and excited by my growing reputation (or is it notoriety?). But he has unalloyed admiration for my candidness, my basic integrity, and whatever minor talent I have as a chronicler of events.
He has started reading an unfinished final novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon. He shows me notes Fitzgerald made for completing the work. A blueprint of what was to come so exact that it even contained the number of words Fitzgerald intended to write for each chapter. I perceive it as well-intentioned, soft-spoken advice.
“I can’t work it quite that way. There are certain things I want to work in around the Tantric Road—like my feelings about my psychoanalytic training, something more about Judy, about professional integrity, about the Human Potential Movement, about life, sex, and death. But I’ll just have to see where to make my breaks as I reread that account of last summer. And see, also, what happens to you.”
The pace of my writing has quickened. He can never finish the Fitzgerald book, but I would like more than anything else to give him the pleasure of finishing mine.
Earlier this week I showed him the chapter I wrote about him while I was out at Bridgehampton.
“I hope you don’t take my medical opinions of your case too seriously,” I nervously cautioned. “My remarks about the likelihood of cancer—things like that.”
“Don’t be silly, honey,” he smiled. “Do you think you’ve written anything in there that I haven’t considered myself?”
It was a gentle admonishment. We doctors go so far out of our way to “protect” people from the knowledge of their likely demise.
“I’d like to know what I have. If it’s cancer, it’s cancer. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve had a three-and-a-half-year reprieve from death. Any additional time they give me now, I’ll be equally grateful for.”
But when this sixty-four-year-old man asks his doctors for information, they “reassuringly” try to discourage him from realizing what it all means. How frustrating for him.
I’ve told him whatever I knew as best I could.
“What do you plan next in the book?” he asks.
“Some break from the Carol/Andrea incident before going on to the next episode. I’d like, in some way, to deal with the impact of such adventures on my marriage.”
“How so?”
I tell him of my intent to explore the question of who did what to whom.
In April, 1963, I took a two-week vacation from my psychiatric residency. Not knowing what to do or where to go, I decided to visit an artist friend who was teaching at the University of Miami. Yet when I arrived, I found Miami so vulgar that within two days I was aboard a plane for the half-hour flight to Nassau.
I had no particular expectations of this visit, nor was I looking for a permanent relationship with anybody. Indeed, at twenty-seven years of age I felt that the world lay at my feet. I was doing the sort of work I liked and seeing the women I wished to see. I was so enjoying my bachelor’s existence and was seemingly so able to get from life what it had to offer, that I was about to terminate a four-year psychoanalysis.
Such contentment had not always been the case. When younger, I had longed/pined/died for a dream woman who would make me complete. The paradox was that the more I wanted, the less likely I seemed able to get it. For in truth, no person could make another complete. And the burdens such expectations place on the so-called “beloved” doom any such relationship from the start.
But my analysis (for reasons too elusive, complex, concrete, and simple to elaborate on) had helped me to rely on myself more, to believe in myself more, and to enjoy relationships for what they had to offer and not for some fairy-tale ending that I desired from them.
So I went to Nassau as a content and carefree young man.
The day after my arrival I stopped on the beach to make conversation with an attractive blonde stranger, when, out of the sea, walked this incredibly beautiful brunette, wearing the briefest white bikini I had ever seen. There was little left for the imagination.
My conversation with the blonde ceased. A new one began with this surf maiden. Her name was Eivor.
She was a Norwegian national, working as an airline stewardess. She was on vacation herself, and within four days would return to her base city, which happened to be New York.
We spent the next several days together. She had this tantalizing quality of acceptance/remoteness about her. The fact that she spent so much time with me was encouraging. Yet try as I might, I could not draw her into bed.
It surprised me that I saw so much of her those four days. Usually, if I was attracted to someone, I either found myself intimate by the second or third date or I tired of the chase. And yet Eivor held my attention.
It was a combination of things, I suppose. Her voice was melodic. The Nordic-accented singsong En
glish was like the sound of some sweet bird. Her dry sense of humor added another element of attractiveness. Once, I recall, when bicycling around the island, we stopped at a gas station to buy a Coke. When the attendant came out to see what we wanted, Eivor, her bike resting against the gas pump, with a twinkle in her eye but the straightest face imaginable, purred, “Fill her up.”
And finally there was her quietness. She asked me how I felt about it and told me that some of her former suitors had complained of her reticence. I found the quietness reassuring. I took it not for the shyness it was, but as a mark of wisdom, and maturity. Let others cackle and cluck and verbally strut about to “prove themselves.” I had seen far too many of that type in my life already. And so I anticipated seeing her again when I returned to New York.
The day after she left Nassau, I experienced a particular emptiness inside of me (this same me who had presumed himself to be happy, unneedy, and complete), an emptiness so strong and unnerving that I knew I could not be happy again unless I married this woman.
Upon my return to the city, I pursued her and pursued her and pursued her. I told her that I loved her. I told her I wanted to marry her. We became intimate. It was sublime. I asked her away on another vacation. After some hesitancy, she accepted. I enjoyed watching men turn their heads to look at her when we passed down a street, knowing that she would share my bed that night, not theirs.
Yet my marriage proposals were always gently turned aside, with soft, long, drawn-out “n-n-n-o-o-o’s” that, because of the inflection in her voice, always felt more like questions than declinations.
Then, one day, some three months after we met, she said, “Yes,” And at the end of August, 1963, we were married.
It is interesting how differently people view the same events. I once thought of doing a book with Eivor in which we would alternate, chapter by chapter, our conflicting views of shared experiences. An American Rashomon. For in that first year of our marriage, I was divinely happy. Yet she was later to tell me that that first year of marriage was her worst. From my point of view our interests, passions, and desires were complementary. From hers, she was “play-acting” at being an accepting wife but never really feeling comfortable in the role.
The Reluctant Exhibitionist Page 7
