Three One Nine: Closed Door

 My lovely friend Miss Ginny in Montreal wrote me once upon a time with this story. I found it utterly delightful. She'd have been seventeen at the time, having just acquired her own first boyfriend, an Older Man of...I think...thirty-two. The story is so perfectly Ginny:

I only remember this.

At a friend's party, her stepfather hand-picked me, I suppose. "I always noticed you," he said. We left the teenaged voices and skateboards and gangly limbs by shutting the door on it all. And just-like-that it was quiet. It was so quiet, but we were only down the hallway. Only a wall separated us from all of that.

Oh yes-- one thing. My boyfriend was out there in that room. My first boyfriend, and an "older guy" himself, incidentally, but not in the way I was looking for I suppose. This was complicated by a boy (a "peer") who was also in attendance, who liked me for a couple of months. The boy and the boyfriend were in conflict. The boy was hurling all sorts of unsavory insults ("child molester", etc) at my boyfriend, but for a few moments I was away from all of that. Remember? We shut the door on that.

So what was different about my boyfriend, old enough as he was, and The Stepfather? When the boyfriend said I was pretty, I was surprised. "You're a doll, a real living doll." "Really?" I had never thought of myself in that way. I didn't see myself as a younger girl, but as an Equal, maybe. I didn't feel any delicious imbalance in power. I wasn't aware of my youth, maybe. However, with him I felt it. It was full in the air. There seemed to be a Game going on that I didn't understand.

I understood that somehow, I had something he wanted. I never thought of myself in those terms. So he shut the door on the party: "I want to show you some art books." I remember that some Game was going on, something that required rules, because I remember thinking about the way I'd sit. About the way I'd arrange myself. (Prostrate, by the way. Bare legs bent at the knees, calves criss-crossed) Our arms were very close. "I always noticed you. Slavic eyes." (A thrill-- all those afternoons coming home to my girlfriend's schoolbags flung on the floor, had he been watching me? I'd never noticed.)

And then the most delicious sense of touch, ever-- he trailed one finger down my profile. "I want to paint you. You should sit for me. You were meant to be painted nude." "I will, I will!" It was hard to understand him because of his accent. I made a bold move-- threw out the pretense: "Do you like Nabokov?" Yes, he did. Lolita was brought up. (When I had given a copy of Lolita to my boyfriend-- he hadn't read it, nor heard of it --he complained, "There's too much French!") He ran his finger over my bare knee and thigh. But we were taking too long...our absence would be noticed. Books gathered up. Hair smoothed, skirt straightened. I kissed him on the cheek and returned to the living room.

He had given me his card, and once I worked up enough courage to walk by the studio, but I couldn't go in. I think I saw him at the art supply store. There is such a sense of regret. I know my friend's mother eventually threw him out of the house. I wonder if he would still like me if he saw me now.

I still remember that finger on my profile and on my leg. I don't know if I've felt something like that since. Why didn't my boyfriend do something like that? Maybe I felt that I could outsmart him-- unlike the painter.

A lovely story. Just the kind of thing Miss Ginny would tell. I remember asking her about it on the phone one night and hearing her do this major sigh. She'd passed up the chance to be a muse, she said. She told me that she imagined posing nude for him, imagined feeling like one of the young would-be models in "Blow-Up". I do hope she finally saw "La Belle Noiseuse" sometime.

Levin posed nude in high school for a couple of people-- not posing for phone camera nudes, but formally posing to be sketched and painted. That made all the difference, she told me, that it was a formal thing. I of course am thinking right now of the young Liv Tyler in "Stealing Beauty", posing topless under a Tuscan olive tree. That's something I can use as a template for both Levin and Miss Ginny. Not that I can draw, mind you, let alone paint.

This makes me think, too, about a new memoir that's appeared in France-- Vanessa Springora's "Consent: A Memoir".  The book is about her affair at fourteen or fifteen with the much older writer Gabriel Matzneff, who was fifty. I haven't read the new English translation, but I probably will. Miss Ginny, Levin, and Liberty all liked older men, and Miss Ginny and Levin sought out Older Admirers who were literary or artistic...though of course Miss Ginny's high school experiences were mostly unrequited crushes and daydreams of European cities and literary parties. I seem to have known a great many girls in my life who were attracted to age-disparate relationships (none like Ms. Springora's, mind you) and who had stories to tell that were often romantic, usually complex, generally over-intellectualized, and sometimes very, very hot. 

There's always the question of what comes after, yes? There's very much the question of how the girl reacts, ten years later, when she's in her later twenties and runs across the man for whom she was a muse. There's awkwardness built in, but also the possibility of something not unlike friendship. A possibility--- and that's a relationship I'd like to put into a story. I'd like to think that the male character (my voice, of course-- how could it not be?) would have the intelligence never, ever to say anything that approximates "I taught you well" or "You turned out like I knew you would."  Those things would deny her own agency.  What could you say, though? I'm thinking about something Dr. Lecter says in an episode of "Hannibal": With all my knowledge and intuition, I could never entirely predict you. I can feed the caterpillar, I can whisper through the chrysalis, but what hatches follows its own nature and is beyond me. That's a brilliant quote, but it has to be said in a way that isn't creepy-- it has to be said in a way that makes it mean that she is something you may have helped along but didn't claim to create, that she's become herself in some brilliant way.

Does that make any sense?

Three One Eight: Springtime

 Here we are--- one full year into the time of the Red Death. For many of us, it's been a year of empty streets, empty storefronts, working from home, masks, and social distancing. More than half a million dead in the US this last year. Something like 530,000 lost to the Red Death as of today.

No one has been thinking much about sex this last year, or at least no one has been thinking about sex-as-pleasure. Quarantine Porn exists, but there's something so desperately forced about it. And everyone seems too tired for pleasure, let alone for flirtations and Adventures. I'd thought that the plague and the lockdowns would lead to a revival of phone sex and erotic letters, but that doesn't seem to have happened. More's the pity about phone sex, I must say. Phone sex was always something I liked--- I'd always been told I was good at telling stories and creating scenarios ---but not even lockdown boredom and frustration seems able to make people talk on the phone these days.

My friend Jill down in NZ wrote me once about her best teen memories of oral sex:

Best memories... God, so many nights...I was able to practice on boys just a few years older than me, so when I started spending time with much older men I was very good. And I like to think I returned the favour -- teaching 16 year old boys just how to eat pussy.

I do remember one night...when I sucked two boys off while the other one watched... I loved that, and so did they. After I'd sucked off both of them and we smoked a joint, they did each other, which made me so wet... We were in the back of a car, and later I did ride one of them... But I still wish I could have had them both at the same time.

Those stories-- stories like that --are still out there, but everyone seems too exhausted and depressed to tell them, let alone to create more. I have a friend-- I always call her the Other Melissa, a nickname that dates back a dozen years now --who's in Vienna tonight. Vienna was always my city, and I envy her being there. I should be back in my old flat in the IX. Bezirk, and I should be at Zum Schwarzen Kameel with her, listening to her stories of being a young professional domme in late-Noughts New York. She phoned me once from a cab going to Brooklyn to meet a client to say that it was amazing to think about how much pleasure (and money for pleasure) was being exchanged on any given night in the city. I'd so love to hear her stories, to hear about the adventures she's had since she was nineteen and at Juilliard. 

There is a compliment I received once. One gets so few in one's life that they're important to remember. A lovely five-eleven girl of twenty in Asheville wrote about me in her escort blog:

Sugaring is dangerous for obvious reasons. I was going to a top secret meeting with a person who, for all I knew, would turn out to be someone who collects human female hides and would force hydration upon me. So I texted a good friend--- the only friend to whom I could ever reveal this sort of information ---to be concerned if I didn't give him an update by morning. 

Coincidentally, the friend I texted was my first Older Man, but more of a mentor and certainly not a Sugar Daddy. If he had been such a thing, I hardly think we could've considered it sugaring. He says I'd have been his mistress, a sort of extended affair between compatible souls. We are very much alike, my first Older Man and I, and because of that, I do wish it were him instead.

That's a compliment I've treasured these last seven or eight years. Talking with her late at night, telling stories back and forth 'til dawn--- that mattered more than I can say. 

If anyone's thinking about sex at all these days, it's not about sex as pleasure. Blogs and Twitter timelines are filled with angry exchanges in the Trans Wars, and I intend to keep well away from that. The Gender Wars of the early and mid 2010s morphed from being about male-female skirmishing into being about whether gender and sex are related, or if either really exists in the ways we've believed these last few thousand years. The Gender Wars were ugly; the Trans Wars are vicious and brutal. I don't want any part of them.  

I will note that I, as an aging roué, am what one side in the Trans Wars would disdain as a "genital fetishist". I'm attracted to female bodies--- female in the older definition. I won't say that others shouldn't have the right to present themselves however they wish, but my own tastes are fixed, and have been since a long ago day when I discovered a box of high-end "glamour photography" magazines and realized that, yes, one life question had just been answered. But just as the early Gender Wars and #MeToo made it impossible to talk about male desire or present heterosex as anything but coercive, intrusive, and always both unwanted and mediocre, the current Trans Wars have made it difficult to talk about desiring bodies-- desiring what I define as beauty. So we will stay away from that.

Throughout the time of the Red Death, we've been pulling back from sex and from talking about sex as something we want or miss. The predicted lockdown baby boom hasn't happened. There doesn't seem to be a spasm of post-pandemic hedonism building up. We're all just too exhausted and glumly empty for that. 

It's springtime now, one year into the Red Death. I wear my mask almost everywhere and I have a small Plague Doctor stuffling who sits on my writing desk. But on days like today, I wish there were lovely voices on my phone or lovely Young Companions sitting across a streetside table from me and telling stories. 

I don't want it to come to a world and a time when there are no new stories to share, or (worse) no new adventures and encounters generating stories. Stories matter, and it matters that you're able to share them with lovely companions, to create narratives about adventures to share over the aether late at night. Having adventures and encounters matters, and so does being able to craft those into tales told in the dark.

Three One Seven: Salle D'Armes

 My lovely long-legged blonde friend Jill in Wellington NZ told me once about her high school friend who became a nationally-ranked fencer. The girl was good enough to get invited to fencing competitions and fencing master classes all around the Pacific. The girl's name-- I think --was Sarah.  My NZ friend knew at least two other girls named Sarah when she was at her posh private school, so I may be wrong about the name.

But what I do know is the fencer girl (we'll call her Sarah anyway) went off to a fencing training camp in China and had a very hot, fairly public affair with a "much older"  and rather famous German fencing coach. Some things remain unclear in the story. Was the man her coach or just one of the coaches at the camp? I can't decide which would be hotter--- having a torrid affair at 16 or 17 with her mentor at fencing (foil? épée? sabre?) or meeting and hooking up with an internationally-rated German coach while in the Mysterious Orient. So-- I know she was sixteen or seventeen (Jill was just turning seventeen when she and Sarah were emailing about Sarah's adventures in China), but I don't know if she was in Shanghai or Beijing. I don't know what "much older"means here, although given Jill's own tastes in those days, I'd suspect that "much older" means that the man would've been in his forties. 

The story (or as much as I know of it) really is hot. And I would love to know more. Backstories matter, mind you, just as Details Matter. Context and setting are always key. It matters how they met, and how the flirtation began. It very much matters who made the first move. 

My friend at McGill in Montreal told me that she'd gone to university very much in order to have affairs with distinguished and literary older academics, but she was always brought up short by the feeling that she didn't know the correct procedure for initiating an affair with a distinguished Older Man. Was she supposed to look young and vulnerable and wait for him to be predatory? Was she supposed to drape herself on his desk in something slinky and offer herself up as muse and sacrifice? What, she asked, were the procedures in these matters? Who was supposed to initiate? What costumes and poses did she need to know about? Importantly-- which of her female friends should she tell, and how dramatic should her announcement be?

The athletic world-- and especially something like fencing, which strikes me as a fairly incestuous community --might be a place where physical affairs were carried on fairly openly. After all, as an athlete, everything you do is about your body: you're focused on the flesh, and on competition. It may also be a place where mentor-mentee relationships are common. Maybe. I have no idea how age-disparate relationships are seen in China, or what age gaps are regarded as acceptable. And...what are are rules for overseas training camps? Remember the old naval saying: No sin below the equator? Did something like that hold true? If you're a few thousand miles from school and home, training and competing amongst foreigners, are all the usual rules suspended? My Montreal friend laughed once and told me that at Comparative Lit conferences in New York or Vancouver or London, the accepted thing was that quick affairs and gender experimentation were perfectly fine. Distance made everything seem permissible...and hotter.

I do wonder about whether Sarah and her coach spent whole nights together, or whether they sneaked off to dorm rooms or offices or showers for sex. What were the mechanics of the affair. Jill in Wellington had given up underwear by seventeen, but had Sarah? Could she be wickedly panty-free in a fencing costume? How easy would it be to get out of fencing togs for impromptu sex? These are the things I wonder about, after all. And...was the man married back wherever home was? Did he laugh over drinks and tell other coaches about Sarah?  How did Sarah tell her fencing companions...and what did they say? She fired off dozens of emails to Jill about what was happening, but did the fencing authorities in Beijing or Shanghai know what was happening? I'm under the impression that Sarah's affair with the coach was fairly open, that she loved being on the man's arm in public, or at bars. Jill's circle at school did love shocking their audiences, so there may have been some of that.

I have no clue as to how long the affair lasted, or if Sarah ever saw the man again. All I know about Sarah is that she lives in Melbourne these days and has a practice as a physiotherapist.  Before the pandemic, Jill would fly over to see her once or twice a year. 

I wish I knew more, and that I had photos of both of them from those days. There's a very hot tale to be crafted from the story of Sarah and the fencing coach...and a very hot film to be made. I might suggest casting Kenna James and Mick Blue in the video...or maybe Riley Reid and Mick Blue.

Any thoughts?