I was sitting outside with a lovely neighbour here at the lakeside flat the other night, talking and working our way through a bottle of Belvedere vodka with iced tea. How Deepest South is that, do you think? I'll note that we were in separate deck chairs on the upper deck, and that we were properly socially-distanced. This is the time of the Red Death, and I've been socially-distanced and properly masked throughout. My neighbour herself is a lovely girl. She's been here in my apartment complex for almost four years now. She has long, toned legs, a mass of reddish hair, and is something of a party girl, though she's no one's fool. The night itself was good. Cool for the season here, with the scent of earlier rain still in the air.
At some point she confided in me that she was and always had been "a total sexual deviant". I hadn't heard the word "deviant" in twenty years, and I was immediately intrigued. She reached out one arm and tapped her glass on mine and drunkenly repeated that she was "such a deviant". Of course I asked. How could I not ask? She told me that she'd lost track of how many people she'd had sex with, and asked me if I remembered my own body count number. I do, of course, but that's because I've always written such things down, all the way back into my teens. Everything is written down, everything is annotated. I did become a trained historian, after all. I didn't ask whether she didn't know her own number because it was so large or simply because many of her encounters had been drunken couplings that she barely remembered. Please note that I'm not imposing any moral judgment here, and I never would. She's lovely and probably thirty or thirty-one. I can make a guess at what the number might be, but the only significance it would have is if she and I laid bets on whose was higher at her current age.
She then told me that she felt like a deviant, too, because she'd had girls in her past. She'd always loved girls, she told me, though she hadn't had the nerve to hook up with more than a few--- which of course is very much like my friend Jill in NZ. How odd that she finds being at least occasionally bi to be so wicked that she can only admit it after several large vodkas.
She looked at me and shook a finger and told me that she just knew I was someone who tied girls up and whipped them. I had to laugh at that. Good guess, I told her. Very good guess. But of course I do love playing with blindfolds and silk scarves and riding crops and candle wax with lovely young companions. My neighbour told me that I was just so obvious, that that was something all men my age who had "all those bookshelves" liked. I did shrug and tell her that with age you learned to rely to technique and style rather than raw physicality. That was all okay, she said. Older men came up with interesting things to do. And you, she said, I'll bet you're really good at doing scenes and telling stories with girls. That's something I was proud to hear.
This does not--- let me emphasize that ---end with the two of us in bed, or with her on my couch being whipped. It doesn't. It ended with us clinking glasses and just talking until two or three in the morning. In a non-plague year, it would've ended with a long hug and maybe--- maybe ---a goodnight kiss. But it wasn't a night that was going to end in bed. It didn't need to, and while I love flirting shamelessly with her, I'm not going to step outside any bounds.
But it did make me think. During the night out on the deck, we talked about our respective experiences and pasts. I've usually been someone to whom strangers in bars or on trains confide their secrets, and my neighbour found me to be a good listener and a safe confidant. I'm glad that she does. Importantly, she hasn't been embarrassed or nervous around me since. That matters, too.
Nonetheless, it is an odd thing. She told me that she hasn't had anyone who'd understand about her secrets in years. I've been feeling the same thing lately. Confidantes are hard to find lately. Certainly harder than when I was, say, twenty-five or thirty. It seems much less safe these days to admit anything to anyone. In the time of the gender wars, admitting anything to anyone seems like putting a weight on their shoulders or, worse, like some kind of demand or threat.
I've always loved the whole experience of drunkenly telling one another secrets, about disclosing one's past and interests and fancies. There's a delight in that, in the sharing. Sharing fancies and obsessions is very often better than sex-in-the-flesh. Mutual surprise, the moment of laughing with someone at shared things, the electricity of being on the borderline between flirtation and seduction--- all those things make disclosures fun.
Yet it feels less safe now. Not just because the other person might be turned off, but that they might be angered. I'm less and less sure these days about such things. It's hard to offer up compliments, of course, although my neighbour is fine with my obviously appreciating her legs. But it is harder to tell the stories girls and I would've talked about twenty years ago, or maybe even ten. The world has changed around me and sometimes I haven't followed along with it.
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