Three Nine Five: Hierarchy

 A young lady of my acquaintance called me up late the other afternoon and asked me to meet her for drinks at a place by the river. What she wanted was advice, or at least a listener. So we sat and ordered up Aperol-and-orange juice and she told me that her latest Gentleman Admirer had fled her apartment an evening or two before, and she was perplexed by it all.

Okay, fine. I'm her designated interlocutor-- the Older Gentleman who'll listen to her stories and offer up comments without judgment. She knows me well enough to know that I have very, very little room to be judgmental, and that the judgments I do make are aesthetic rather than moral. 

She explained to me that her Gentleman Admirer (himself a gentleman of a Certain Age) had taken her for dinner, and drinks, come home with her, and then left suddenly. She was unclear as to whether he planned to see her again. He hadn't called, and she was worried that she'd been ghosted.

They'd gone out several times, and she liked him. She thought he was fun and bright, the sex had been good, and she enjoyed his company. She'd spent some time trying to read his tastes in bed, and that, she said was where she'd gone wrong. 

I've known her long enough to know that she has very, very good gaydar and kink-reading skills. She's good, from what I can tell, at intuiting what a partner wants or needs or likes. I think what happened was that she was just a bit too good at reading her Admirer-- great intuition, but no sense of context.

She told me that she'd watched her Admirer and paid attention to how he looked at her. And, well...her intuition told her he was into her feet. Okay, then-- her first foot fetish guy. She told me that she was fine with the kink. She thought it might be fun to try. She already knew that she liked having the small hollows behind her ankles kissed and caressed, and having her toes sucked sounded like it might feel really good. I'm also reasonably sure that she was looking forward to him paying for lots of expensive pedicures. But when she did stretch out on her sofa and showed off her legs and pointed her toes and told him that she'd be very much into whatever he'd like to try and that if he was into foot fetish games, all he had to do was ask...he went white, grabbed his jacket and tie, and stammered out that he had to leave. She hadn't heard from him since.

What, she wanted to know, was going on? She didn't think there was any way he could've thought she was somehow kink-shaming him. She looked at me and told me that this guy was about my age-- so was this some weird generational thing? She was annoyed about losing the chance for all those free pedicures (and the inevitable free spa days that would go along with them), but more annoyed that her kink-reading had gone wrong.

I just shrugged. I told her that she was probably right about his interests. The problem, though, was that he didn't want her to know about his kink. He would've been fine with doing something-- sucking her toes, licking her ankles --so long as it was just part of "having wild sex". But once it was named, once it was categorized as a kink, he couldn't face it. She'd told me once that a certain person we both knew was "so far in the closet that he could see Narnia"-- the same, I said, applied here. 

Moreover, she'd made him aware that his kink could be read. It was something a very attractive late-twenties girl could just read about him. She had, I told her, picked a kink he was ashamed of.  If she'd read him and intuited that he liked, say, BDSM, he'd probably have been fine, no matter if she'd told him she could see that he was either a top or a bottom. He probably wouldn't have fled her apartment if she'd told him her gaydar read him as bi. Those things are ordinary enough-- maybe even fashionable enough --in the here-and-now to barely be treated as out of the mainstream.

What she'd intuited, though, was a kink that might have been pleasurable for them both, but was nonetheless a kink that's regarded as very, very...what? Declassé? Contemptible? Laughable? Pathetic? Something like that, anyway. Pathetic may be what I'm looking for here. What she'd done hadn't been taken as an offer to experiment or an invitation. She'd made him feel unmasked-- had left him feeling that someone he was attracted to knew that something he liked or needed was regarded as pathetic and contemptible.

There are hierarchies in kink, of course. There are social rankings attached to everything. Always. Wanting to tie my friend up and whip her-- or wanting her to tie him up and whip him --is something that films and music videos and novels have taught us to see as stylish (and involving lots of cool outfits). A foot fetish...isn't. My friend is someone who's very open about being experimental and adventurous with her lovers. Her focus was on the shared thrill and the pleasure. Her beau, on the other hand, assumed that he'd been revealed as someone pathetic, someone who did things that only sad and pathetic men did. He fled her apartment because he thought she'd look down on him-- and was probably terrified that she'd tell people that he was into something sad and pathetic. He'd lost his class status in the eyes of a beautiful younger girl.

My friend ordered more drinks for both of us and shook her head. This, she said, was the thing about men she'd never understand. So much insecurity, she said, so much fear that invisible strangers will laugh at them, so much energy wasted on arranging rank-ordering. So much male fear of ever being seen as less.

What could I say? She's right about all that. She's known me long enough to know that one reason I'm usually available for drinks or coffee or long telephone conversations is that I'm afraid to go anywhere that would involve being judged socially and rank-ordered. I could see her looking at me across the table and reading my own social fears about age, looks, and status. The joke here is that I would never have fled her apartment because I was ashamed of being judged for my kinks-- those are very, very carefully curated and crafted --but I would've fled at the first sign that she (or any other girl) was judging me as a body. At the first hint that a potential partner saw me as a "mediocre white male" or as someone who could only (at best) have "mediocre sex" I'd have dived out the window. I'd even have left my necktie on the floor. 

 

Three Four Four: Boxes

I have been going through Escort Twitter these days. It's springtime, and the FMTY Girls are going on spring/summer tours. I do envy them: a working vacation in a posh resort or a four-star hotel is still not a bad thing. I suppose I do wonder, though-- is it hard to enjoy yourself when part of your job is enjoying yourself-- being seen to enjoy yourself  --in a swank setting? 

These things are beyond me. I take no pleasure in travel, since I'm likely to be traveling alone these days and of course since I'm a gentleman of very limited means.  I have to wonder if I'm even capable of pleasure when traveling with a lovely young companion. I'd probably spend my time being far too anxious to experience pleasure. If I were with a lovely, long-legged, panty-free young companion, I'd compulsively worry about all the things that could go wrong while traveling. I'd worry about whether she was having anything approaching a good time, about whether I'd reveal myself as a provincial-- a rube --in my choices for a hotel, for dinner, for wine. I'd be far too likely to paralyze myself with those anxieties. 

The FMTY girls post photos of gifts clients and patrons have given them. So many of the photos show the gift boxes as well as the gift. I can recognize some of the brands-- usually expensive lingerie. I understand that Agent Provocateur is an expensive line of slinky lingerie, although lingerie is never a gift I'd choose. I'm not fond of girls in lingerie. I prefer girls panty-free, after all. The stockings-and-garters look hasn't appealed to me since the start of the Nineties. Long, sleek, taut, tanned bare legs attract me more than silk stockings. I'm far more attracted to a girl in just a man's dress shirt than in lingerie, and of course I prefer my young companions to sleep naked. All I can do is look at the boxes and try to gauge what the price might be and what statement each gift-giver is trying to make. 

I'll admit that I do like some of the boxes-- elegant things. 

I have limited resources, so I'm not likely to give Agent Provocateur lingerie or jewelry. Books-- I do give books. And I have been known to buy my young ladies men's shirts or pullover sweaters. My gifts have been hand-delivered in New Yorker tote bags, but never in boxes from exclusive boutiques in NYC or London Town.

One of the FMTY girls did hint at her fee schedule. A gentleman admirer, she noted, was flying her somewhere for a long weekend. The fee, she noted, would pay her rent for two months. Based on rents for the city where she makes her home, that's probably half again my salary for that same period. Far and away out of my league. 

Well, I wouldn't know what to say to a high-end escort anyway. I know nothing about business-- and so many girls at Escort Twitter do say that they love talking about "entrepreneurship". Many are basketball fans, too. I know nothing whatsoever about sports. And I'd be far too scared to attempt anything with a menu or a wine list. 

These days, I'd feel the same about some young companion here. I'd be too anxious to go anywhere outside of a few small, hip places. I'm not even sure I'd risk a good sushi bar. I'd certainly never risk anything with a wine list. Doing anything where I can be seen to fail in public, where I could be seen to fail at being the person I used to believe I was, is far too much of a risk these days.

Three Zero Four: Balconies

 I still have my crushes, even at my own advanced age. 

Last time I spoke about Kenna James and Kristin Scott and the crushes I've developed on the two of them from watching their interviews on YouTube as much as their video clips on PornHub. 

Right now I'm listening to Duran Duran do "Come Undone", which seems like a lovely song to listen to on an October night while you're thinking about crushes on distant girls.

Every crush has its speculative side, of course. You sit at night with a drink and you wonder how the crush would play out in real life. How would you meet? How would you interact? How would you make the transition to flirtation and seduction? What would you say afterwards?

Somehow my visions of all that always involve balconies. Somehow the initial meeting is random enough. Usually we turn out to be neighbors whose apartments had adjoining balconies, and we end up talking to one another in the afternoons. Eventually one of my crushes will come next door and we'll get used to spending time on my balcony with tea or a glass of wine. We'll...talk. It always comes down to talking. She--- Kenna or Kristin ---will tell me that I should be in a good mood, that an actual porn star is knocking on my door to come hang out. And we'll laugh about that. 

There are apologies involved, of course.  When in my visions there is flirtation and kissing involved, I'm usually apologizing for my age and my looks. There's no way around that. In real life, I'd be doing exactly that. What I can't decide is whether either girl would be amused or a bit exasperated by my apologies. I'd like to think that the girl would put a finger to my lips and tell me to hush, that she'd made a decision and was well aware of my age and looks and wasn't really bothered by either. 

I'd like to believe that could happen. In my own life here these last few years, I've had girls tell me that there was nothing wrong with me. I've never believed them, but I have been grateful to them for saying that.  

I've always said that the two hardest genres to write in are biography and erotica.  To do biography well, you have to know not just your subject but the whole world around him, the world that produced him. And erotica...? Well, you have to know how to present a set of fantasies that don't devolve into either slapstick or obvious narcissistic wish-fulfillment. That last part worries me. The best I can do is imagine that the girl chose me because the things I said were interesting or that she had her own wishes and fantasies and just found me...potentially useful. I still have to parse out what "useful" might mean. Ambiguous and dangerous word, really.

My fear with either Kristin or Kenna wouldn't necessarily be fear of systems failure, fear of performance. It would be fear of trying to talk to either girl and making a fool of myself. I'd like to think that I can carry on a conversation, that I have things to say. Having that come crashing down would be far worse than systems failure.

Three Zero One: Kits

 Once upon a time, back in the later Noughts, I went mad one summer. That's easy enough to say now, and it would make a good opening for a story or a Spalding Gray kind of performance monologue. I wish I could be telling a lovely young companion about the story tonight, but this is the best I can do.

I went mad that summer--- a small bit of high drama. And what it was about was simple enough. It started off with travel toothbrushes.  Girls had written me about their Morning-After Kits, about the things they put in their purses before going out on Friday or Saturday nights, about the things they took with them just in case, just in case they ended up sleeping over with a handsome stranger. A travel toothbrush was key to everyone's list. Girls sent lists of items, but not one of them wrote to say that she'd bring a toothbrush or a change of clothes on a date with me just in case. None of them indicated at all that I was worth bringing a toothbrush for--- which may have been the one thing I think I wanted or needed. Make a list of cities--- NYC, Atlanta, SE Texas, Oregon, Baltimore, Montreal, Seattle: no one thought to say that to me. Not any of the girls I have longed for and cared about. Which told me all I needed to know. 

That summer I wrote that:

I will be checking purses in the doorway. If there's no toothbrush, no little vial of deodorant, no change of clothes...she doesn't get in the doorway. I will toss the purse or backpack onto the upper walkway and slam the door in her face. No toothbrush, no Mornings-After Kit, and I don't want her around me.

Be clear--- I don't necessarily expect her to use the toothbrush or the change of clothes. I don't necessarily expect her to stay over. That isn't the point. Not at all. The point is that she'd have the toothbrush with her--- just in case. Whether or not she stayed over, I'd want her to have the kit with her. Just in case. If she didn't toss the toothbrush into her purse, it means that I'm not Valuable enough even for the possibility of a first-date morning-after. It means that she'd already decided that I wasn't fuckable. So I will check for a toothbrush and slam the door in her face if it isn't there. 

It was that kind of summer. And that summer I bought two small travel toothbrushes and kept them on my work desk as magical items. I believed that if just had the two toothbrushes--- the kind that lovely co-eds would keep in a Morning-After kit,  then somehow, magically, girls would want to take Morning-After supplies with them when were with me. 

I still have travel toothbrushes with me-- I think that now I have a total of eleven travel toothbrushes, pristine and unopened. They have multiplied over the years. They're still here as magical items. Each of them is a talisman of some kind, a small futile frozen invocation of hope. Girls still haven't brought Morning-After Kits with them when they've gone out with me. 

Again, it's not the idea of the girl staying over and needing the Kit. It's the idea that she'd bring the Kit just in case,  bring it because I was Valuable enough to be someone she might need it for. The toothbrushes mean a lot--- they're still here as magical items, as ways to pray to be just-in-case Valuable.  I wish now, a dozen or so years later, that I'd never asked anyone about Morning-After Kits and what lovely twenty-something girls brought with them in case they hooked up with someone.

Two Nine Nine: Tasks

 Tonight is a midsummer night where I feel a sense of foreboding and a sense of exhaustion and hopelessness. There are things in my daily life that are going very badly this summer--- even beyond this endless Red Death season of quarantines and limbo ---and there's also a sense of impending mortality. 

Last time I wrote here, I wrote about preludes, about wondering how affairs and encounters and adventures begin. Those things have always intrigued me--- how and when people make the decision to have sex, or to have a particular kind of sex, or to have sex with a particular person. I've lost any real sense of those things. I've no sense any longer of how these things happen, and it gets harder and harder to imagine being part of those decisions.

I can't recall tonight whether it was Sophocles or Aeschylus who gave thanks to the gods for freeing him from desire--- a cruel taskmaster ---in old age. Sophocles, I think. You're free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I do think it was Sophocles.  I'm not sure tonight what to make of the saying. Desire can be a cruel master, no question about that. And it's ever more cruel as one grows older and watches desire fade.

At some point, desire becomes a mockery. You know that you're no longer thought of as entitled to feel desire, let alone find any satisfaction. At some point, acting on desire, even feeling desire, makes you an object of derision. 

It's easy tonight to think that I've run out of time for desire, run out of time to have desires. 

A friend in Scotland wrote to tell me that she is appalled at the way The Discourse seems to be turning age-disparate affairs into signs of evil and exploitation. She's always preferred her lovers to be older and experienced--- "worldly", she says ---and has acted on that for half her life. She feels awkward and apologetic not for having the affairs she's had since she was sixteen, but for putting men who taught her so much and meant so much to her into the role of the villain. She tells me that she's called and written lovers from her past  from her quarantine house near Edinburgh to reassure them that she cared about them, learned from them, and will treasure them in her memories. Do not, she told them, ever be ashamed of being with her. I do admire her for that. I really do.

I keep thinking that my usual haunts have less and less appeal for me. There seems to be less and less reason to be out. Certainly flirting with lovely girls at small bistros seems to be something I have less and less social standing to do. And I can't really decide whether that's based on fear of being mocked or treated with derision or on fear of being seen to fail at desire. 

I do walk through downtown on summer evening--- properly masked, mind you, here in the time of the Red Death ---and think of myself as a ghost. I will not, now or ever after, look at myself in a mirror or allow myself to be photographed. I certainly won't look any photos of myself.  I walk along not looking into shop windows, not going in to any of the few places open, and knowing that I'm less and less likely to be speaking to anyone again. I've spent my life telling stories, flirting, trying to be an interesting figure there on the edge of things. Those parts of the story seem to have come to an end.

Desire drives, desire obsesses. We know that. But seeing desire fade away is a cruel set of moments.

Two Nine Six: Poster

I've probably written about this before, but today one of my social media accounts sent me a notice that a girl I'd corresponded with for a bit back in the Long Ago was having a birthday. She must be thirty-two or thirty-three now. She's in London Town now, highly successful in her field and quite married.

What I'm remembering about her tonight is that she once had a blog where she posted a photo of a poster reading "REMEMBER: You Are Someone's Reason To Masturbate". That would've been in her early or mid twenties, when she'd just moved to London. She was a gym rat girl in those days, and a party girl with an eating disorder.  I remember seeing the photo of the poster and grimacing. Depressing thought, really.

It's not hard to intuit that she was using the poster as inspiration to hit the gym more, to run and stretch and pump weights. An inspiration to starve more, too. But it was all an attitude that was so alien to me.

I'll note that another expat girl I knew in London Town in those days laughed when I told her about the poster. She waved a hand and said blithely that Everyone is someone's Reason. Well, yes...for her, that was (and is) true. She has a long list of conquests--- always older, inevitably distinguished, often married, usually moneyed. She's been used to being in the upper demimonde since her late teens.  She can take it for granted that she's always been someone's Reason. Being part of admirers' fantasies is something she takes for granted.

Again--- that's utterly alien to me. I can't imagine ever being someone's Reason. I can't imagine that in the past, and I certainly can't imagine it now. I find it increasingly difficult and shameful to admit to having any fantasies of my own, and it seems highly, highly unlikely that I could ever be anyone's Reason.

My blonde friend down in NZ told me once that of course she'd fantasized about me. I looked at the screen and felt an odd rush of disbelief and anger. I couldn't imagine what I'd done to make her lie to me or why she'd want to tell me such an obvious lie.

I can sit and listen to lovely young companions tell me stories of their adventures and encounters. My life is constructed of stories, not atoms--- you know that saying. But I have so very little to offer them in return these days.  I'm not foolish enough to think that I have anything physical about me that would inspire fantasies, and I can't imagine having stories of any value these days.

I could never put that poster on a wall in my rooms. It's not something anyone male could do, really. Put something like that up and you'd be open to both derision and political attacks. And you'd have no defenses. None.

And...even if you were someone's Reason, you'd have no control over who that someone might be. I can't escape the belief that having someone themselves unattractive fancy you or fantasize about you means that you have done something wrong. Let's always make a note of that.

There's no chance that I can identify with either of the two girls in London Town about the thought in that poster. There's no chance that here in these latter days I could ever tell a girl that she was my Reason--- even we were in a very sexual relationship and I was offering her a compliment. There's no way to say that to a girl these days, and there's certainly no way that any girl would take me as a Reason.

I'm a very good listener, and I used to be a good storyteller. I used to be good at crafting stories and bringing lovely bookish girls into fantasies.  But I'm of no value whatsoever at being part of anyone's fantasies as a player.

Two Eight Nine: Disclosures

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.

Two Seven Four: Threads 8

My lovely, long-legged, posh blonde friend down in the Land of the Long White Cloud wrote me once upon a time to answer questions about her adventures in her teens. Her life as a posh bad girl has always fascinated me, and I did send her a master list of questions about the things she did when she was a self-described wicked schoolgirl.

I asked her the obvious question about encounters and adventures with teachers--- something that's the stuff of any number of coming-of-age films (right now I'm thinking of Mischa Barton and her teacher in "The O in Ohio" or Kat Dennings in "Daydream Nation").

This was her response to my question about whether she'd ever had sex with one of her teachers back at her posh private school in Lower Hutt:

I slept with a teacher a few times...but he was sort of a family acquaintance. But he was also my science teacher, so it totally counts! (I was sixth form, so 16 when I did it) 

She also wrote me to say that

At 15, i sucked a maori trainee-teacher's cock behind the school gym... just sucked him that one time...i would have loved to fuck him though!

I'm wild to know all the backstory for each encounter--- how it happened, what she thought and felt during and after, if she discussed doing either thing with her circle of close female friends. I'd love to know if she was ever discovered--- by parents or staff ---doing schoolgirl-teacher things. 

I'd like to know much, more about other stories she's mentioned in passing. One of her close friends was a girl named Sarah who was a competition fencer--- good enough to have competed on a national  level and to have gone abroad to study sabre. Sarah is supposed to have gone to some kind of high-level fencing camp in Shanghai at 16/17 and had a notorious affair with a well-known and much, much older fencing coach. My friend tells me that Sarah is now a physiotherapist in Sydney, but the two girls are still in touch and still remember the volleys of emails they sent one another about their exploits when they were 15-18.  

There was also mention of a girl called Kelly, who my friend looked up to as a role model for wickedness with Maori or Islander boys:

Kelly at 14! She was so advanced for her age...and she loved all the islander boys. She was very hot...tall, blonde, skinny. I think she got pregnant to an islander at 17 or 18 & moved to Australia.

I'd love to know so much more. There are two questions here, of course. 

1. How much of her past is real? Her stories over the last dozen years and more have been deliciously hot and wicked, but how much of any of them can I believe? 

2. What happens if ever she becomes monogamous and domestic-partnered? Will she stop telling stories from her past? Will she reject her Bad Girl days? Will she regret them. And...will she regret telling me stories?

Two Six Five: Memories

I thought today of a girl I hadn't seen in half a lifetime. The year is ending-- the decade, too. That may have put me in a sentimental mood.

I was at a small deli near my lakeside flat and the young girl behind the counter reminded me of someone from my own past. I took the sandwich I'd ordered and smiled and tipped her well on my debit card and walked home in the cold with a lost name and face in my mind.

The girl I'm thinking of was named Toni. She lived next to me for a while just after I'd finished university. She looked like...hmmm...a young Aubrey Plaza. Dark brown hair in a short bob, blue eyes, glasses. Yes, the girl at the deli today had the same look.

Toni was maybe nineteen when I first ran into her. She was a neo-hippie girl. I do remember that, and I remember that she almost always had a guitar with her. She was always very serious and solemn, and she'd sit out on her porch and play guitar or read. There were always boys over there at her house. She had, I discovered, a reputation as an easy armful, but somehow she always looked quiet and introspective. We'd run into each other walking places along my street, and we'd see one another at the tiny coffee shop on the corner.  Lovely eyes, lovely legs. The sort of girl who always had a sketch pad and a novel in her backpack.

The first time we went out was impromptu and awkward. I asked her to join me for a drink. The place was painfully hip, back in the day when date bars were transitioning from fern bars with lots of brass to a more exposed-brick look. The place was called...either the Square Peg or the Brass Button. I can't recall which, though eventually we were at both often enough. It was late spring, and she wore a longish peasant skirt I remember that. Drinks, yes, though I can't recall what we drank. Vodka, probably. We drank, talked, and flirted. I think maybe I was the one who was flirting--- she was always too serious for flirting, even when she was deciding to sleep with someone. We walked down to one of the city parks and went out by a lake. I remember undoing her skirt and kissing my way along her legs. She wasn't talkative during sex, though she liked stroking my hair while I talked and undressed her. I do remember her wearing a small ankle bracelet she'd bought in Belize, and I remember that she was bra-less that night, with a necklace of some kind that lay between her breasts. When she rode me and leaned down, the little locket on the necklace would fall into my face and I held it in my mouth. She did have underwear on, and I tossed them at the lake and told her she should never wear any when she was out with me. She came back to my house that night and stayed over. She did make a point of never wearing underwear when she and I went out.

We saw each other sporadically; we were never really a couple. Sometimes that summer she'd call and ask for a ride to places across the city--- open mic nights, poetry readings. She always made it clear that  she'd trade me sex for a ride.  She made a point of being transactional. She liked my company, I think, but she disliked emotions and expectations.

I remember a photo I took of her once. She was standing by her bed with her arms crossed. Tiny, faded denim cut-offs. A cropped blue-and-white halter tee. Deliciously barefoot. That pensive expression that I did fancy.

It's not much of a story--- an affair that lasted off and on from a May through mid-autumn. She stayed over a few nights; I stayed at her place after a few parties. Around my birthday that year she moved across town to share a house with her sister. There were highlights--- Toni bent over someone's car parked by the lighthouse park while I slid her denim mini up over her hips, Toni swimming naked at a motel pool while I handed her a bottle of vodka, Toni and I in a bathroom stall at Square Peg. Highlights, but nothing I suppose that's quite as good as any of the stories I posted here over the summer and early fall. Certainly nothing as good as anything my leggy blonde friend in New Zealand may have done in her own early twenties.

I have no idea whatever became of her. It's all half a lifetime ago. I hadn't thought of her in forever, or not until I was chatting today with the girl at the deli. I need to call up more memories. Toni isn't a bad one at all. A good mid-twenties affair, simple and uncomplicated, and one I had long before sex became something baroque and  fraught.

Two Three Seven: Reminiscence

I read a week or so ago about the Nineties electronica musician Moby--- a long string of mocking and hostile pieces about his just-released memoirs. I hadn't thought of Moby in years and years. I recall liking a song he did called "South Side". I liked the video, too--- Gwen Stefani made a great appearance in it. But I hadn't heard anything he'd done in...well...easily a dozen years. Likely more. But his memoirs have just appeared, and he was attacked all across social media.

It seems that Moby had some sort of relationship with the young Natalie Portman when she was eighteen and he was twenty years older. He described it as "dating". She responded that they hadn't "dated", that he was just some creepy older man who'd hung around her.

It also seems that he dated the young Lana Del Rey a few times, and she spent time mocking him as just another middle-aged white man who was too moneyed, too creepy, and too old. At some point she laughed at him and told him that when the revolution came, he'd be amongst the guillotined. I had to laugh at that, of course. The young Lana Del Rey telling me she'd have me guillotined? That's an unexpectedly hot image. LDR threatening me with the guillotine? I'd count that as a successful dating moment.

What bothers me is the sheer rage out there about age differentials. So many women on social media were savagely angry at Moby for daring to feel desire for someone younger. Any attention from anyone older, they insisted, was by definition creepy and disgusting.

My own tastes run to Young Companions. That's been true since ever I was in my later twenties. It's true now and it'll be true when I'm eighty. That won't change.

Now I have been lucky. I've known a fair number of lovely girls who've found my age to be either irrelevant or a plus. I've been fortunate about that. I have no idea how many girls out there are members of what a friend at McGill in Montreal used to call the Secret Tribe. I'm all too aware that it's a niche thing.  Nonetheless, I've had young companions in my life, and I hadn't been exposed to any of the anger and disdain showered on Moby. Girls have said yes or no, gone out with me or not, slept with me or not. But none of them ever looked at me with anything like the hostility and contempt in the tweets and blog entries about Moby and Ms. Portman.

I did phone a couple of the girls I knew when they were beginning undergraduates.  Both were a bit exasperated. Both told me that if I'd been repulsive or creepy when they first met me, I'd have been made very, very aware of it. One made it very clear that I'd been her choice exactly because of my age, that she expected me to do certain things--- teach her things, bring her places, make her feel daring and wicked ---and that it was my age that enabled me to do them with her. Both reminded me that they'd known me since the early Noughts and that they were still speaking to me, which should be a clear sign that I had some value then and now.

That should've made me feel better, but somehow it didn't. It wasn't that I didn't believe them. They're both fiercely bright and straightforward and  self-aware, and I should've been proud that they thought of me even now as a good memory. I'm somehow not, though.

It's probably some complicated cocktail of vanity, self-loathing, and fear for the future. I've had lovers who were amused and intrigued by my age and the things that went with it. That's luck--- it really is.  And right now I'm terrified that my luck will run out, that the niche girls I've met and loved all these years will vanish. I'm terrified that any time I speak to a lovely girl at the next table or the next barstool she'll recoil in disgust. I'm terrified that from now on, my touch will be regarded with derision and contempt.

I can't imagine life with the ability to flirt and play, the chance to move through the rituals of romance and seduction. But in some access of sexual hypochondria, I can't imagine that my presence and touch aren't as appalling as the women attacking Moby believe. I don't know what to do about that except give up any belief that I might have value to niche girls, any belief that I might be a valued lover.

One Eight Two: Thrill Rides

The other night I went back and re-read a blog entry from three or four years ago--- an American expat girl writing about her life in London. I know the girl a bit, or knew her once, when she was shuttling between the Pacific Northwest and DC, a self-destructive, hyper-aware, ghostly-beautiful co-ed. The entry itself is an  account of her No-Names-Please encounter with an English guy she picked up at a club in Camden Town.  I can't tell you much about the setting or the club life she wrote about.  London's not my town. I'm a creature of cities out on the Donau and not the Thames. Anyway, the story did call up memories of my own.

When the expat girl took the English guy home, she shook off the warning of a girl with her at the club not to do it: I never heed warnings.  When he fingered her in the taxi (a £35 ride? Bloody hell--- a long way back to her rooms at LSE) and told her very graphically what he's going to do to her, she thought---

You're thinking this is horrible, but the horrible part is that I only smirk. I'm not offended or scared. I feel calm and cool...

In bed, he did hurt her, and when she was loud he bit her nipple hard enough to draw blood and said, Stop making noise, you fucking slag.  What she thought was---

I'm terrified but I'm enjoying this.

I'm terrified that I'm enjoying this.

Oh, the story never goes very much farther into anything dark. Don't think that. There's rough sex all night, and some fairly gentle sex and conversation the next morning, and then he charged his phone (nice touch), dressed, told her that he did have a girlfriend, and left. She wasn't even really annoyed about that; she liked being hot enough to entice a stranger to cheat on his girlfriend. The next day she was too sore to walk much, sore from no-lube anal, and her left breast was bruised and the nipple erect with a smeared ring of dried blood all around it. No regrets, though, or only the dim and tired awareness of how much she likes courting danger. It's a very hot story, and I'm...well, envious of her for having it to tell. I can't wish I'd been the guy, though. She likes her men tall and handsome and with the whole rock-hard abs thing. And she always did strike me as a girl who's harsh enough to comment on a male partner's looks and...ummm...endowment to his face. Not anything I'd risk. There's no point at all in wanting to be the guy. I meet none of her criteria, and probably never have or will.

What I am thinking about tonight is her  whole elision of arousal and terror:

I'm terrified but I'm enjoying this.

I'm terrified that I'm enjoying this.

I envy that--- I envy anyone who has that said about them, who can evoke that in an attractive girl.

I have no idea if anyone has ever thought that around me. Or thought those things in any serious way. I've always been the Theme Park Thrill Ride for a certain kind of co-ed. They can do things that they've been taught were Bad, or at least risky, and they can do them with someone like me, who really does meet all the criteria for a Lifetime Movie of the Week villain. They can do those things--- go home with the much-older man who's certainly a predator of some kind and just might be dangerous ---and still know that it's like getting aboard the much-hyped thrill ride at the theme park. Faux-danger--- you get the adrenaline rush and get to pretend to be terrified, and you know that in a few minutes you'll be able to walk away from the ride and feel like you've had an adventure, like you've done something, like you have a story to dine out on for weeks.

I've played to that image, of course, the image of being dangerous and depraved. It's all part of roué-hood, isn't it.  I used to laugh about it. Work the creepy, I'd say. Tell the girl that, yes, you are everything Lifetime Channel and her parents and Dr. Drew and Women's Studies 101 told her to be afraid of, and is she up for the risk? It works a fair amount of the time. It really does. Faux-danger is an alluring thing. Horror films and theme parks make piles of money off the idea.

And people do dine out on stories. I've done it myself for years--- sought out experiences specifically for their value as stories. I've known many a posh girl, many a girl with a professional degree and a serious career, who's deployed stories to suggest that she had a wicked, interesting, intriguing past, one that got pretty heavy, one that endows her with a hint of danger still, one where her tales of escape will leave friends and dates begging for more.

It's still a bit exhausting for me, of course--- being the dark lover. And unsettling, too. A lovely, vodka-fueled co-ed stretched out on a bed late one night, back arched, thrusting sharp hipbones up at you and begging you to hurt her raises problems. There's always the morning-after regrets issue. There is always that. And as incredible as it is to have some lovely girl yielding herself up to you and asking you to go further, to not have any limits with her, it does put you in an awkward position. You have to be pitch-perfect at things. The girl can be telling you to do all these things she's read about or fantasized about or seen in films, and you have to get them exactly right. There's no room for error. I've said no to things, which has surprised girls. I've said no to choking girls when they've asked--- that's not something where you can make a mistake. (Scarves. I might do it a bit with a scarf, if a girl asked, but never with my hands. Not that way. Never.) There was a flat no to the one seriously MDMA-dreamy girl who asked me to cut her. That I wouldn't do; that I won't do. That's not something I ever want to have to explain to anyone later. That particular girl had faded scars on her hipbones and thighs--- she'd cut herself in high school ---and she wanted to have a lover do it for her. That was her fantasy, she said. Be clear, now: I had no moral objection. It wasn't even that I distrusted myself or thought I'd turn into Patrick Bateman. But I wasn't going to become the target and the Bad Guy if she had morning-after regrets.

I do suppose there's another kind of Thrill Ride that's easier. It's one that girls I have loved wanted. I don't have to be faux-terrifying. I only have to be older and attentive and literate. There are girls who want the experience of an Older Lover, who want what an Older Lover can offer: booklists and conversations and an introduction to things they've wanted--- being part of a world that's mannered and bookish and intellectual. They want an Older Lover who can show them things, teach them things. A lovely girl at McGill in Montreal wrote me once to say that the exchange seemed perfect to her: youth and beauty and sex exchanged for knowledge and instruction. That's easier to do. I have no especial problem with the idea of whips and candle wax, of masks and silk scarves around slender wrists. I have no problem slapping a girl at the moment of orgasm. But this latter way is just...simpler. I can be the kind of Greying Lover that my Montreal friend always wrote about. I don't know that I can teach a lovely co-ed anything about Life, but I did work in a bookstore all through grad school, and I stood up in front of classes and lectured for years. I can always talk about books and ideas. That's easy to do. A different quality of Thrill Ride. I could do it for the girls I have most loved over the years. It's not something I could do with the expat girl in London, though. It's not even something she'd want.

There's a strange lull in life these days, a strange kind of exhaustion in my life. There's maybe one girl in my life right now who'd appreciate both poses--- who'd ride the thrill ride, terrified as part of being wet-and-breathless, but who'd want the long conversations later, who'd never worry about rock-hard abs and how many miles one could run. Alas, though--- she's eight thousand miles away, living on the beach at Wainui. At the moment, the best I can do is put ink to paper and offer her tales of books and ideas alternating with thrill ride scenarios. I'd like to think that she'd say what the expat girl told the English guy:

I'm terrified but I'm enjoying this.

I'm terrified that I'm enjoying this.

I want her to say other things, too--- Have you read this? What do you see out there in the dark, in the waves? Let me tell you all the things I see in my city.  That's part of being older, I suppose: fear that you can't evoke either thing in lovely girls any more.

One Six Three: Brown Leaves

There's a blogger at Wordpress who calls himself Romantic Dominant, and who calls his blog A Faded Romantic. I rather enjoy reading him, and I do follow him on social media. He's a fine writer, and I suspect that he and I are much of an age, although I'll add that I'm sure he's been far more successful in life than I've been.  I enjoy reading his thoughts on age and loss and his valedictories to those who've been his friends and mentors down the years. Here on a night in a month of fallen leaves, I will recommend him to you.

November is a birthday month for me. I'm far past the stage in life where I could conceivably look forward to birthdays, mind you. November is a time for reflecting on losses and how faces and names recede into the mists. November is a time for walking down city streets at night and looking at empty shop windows and hoping that you won't see your own reflection, and that ghost girls won't appear in the glass and fade away again.

Novembers so late in one's life make you all-too-aware of loss and decay. A lovely young friend wrote me from somewhere in Great Britain the other night to tell me she'd dreamed of dancing with me on a hotel roof looking down on city lights. She wanted, she said, to wake up in my arms in  beach house somewhere on the coast of Portugal. Lovely thoughts, and I do treasure her. But in November such things make me look in the mirror and realize that I've lost the ability--- or at least the will ---to do those things.

I no longer trust my body. I no longer have faith in it. I no longer think I can be touched, or allow myself to be touched or seen. I've never thought of myself as handsome or physically attractive, but I have thought I could make myself seem at least acceptable. Or that I could employ enough distraction to have my physical self go unnoticed. Tonight, here in what may be a bleak November, I can look in windows as I pass and think that I'll never feel safe again in any situation where flesh and touch are required, or where I have to believe that the fleshly me isn't open to derision.

Kissing ghost girls, or offering caresses: those things I'd do. But I can't allow my flesh to be seen, touched, tasted. I can't allow anyone close to unclothed flesh. I can't allow it; I can't risk it. Flesh, or at least the flesh I'm inside, would be repulsive and unclean.

Here in this November, so close to my birthday, I can't risk being touched or seen.  Standing on city streets, looking into windows, all I can hope is that the ghost girls won't appear, that the creature in the glass will be able to hide away from his own flesh and all things fleshly.

One Six One: Gardens

I ran across an article a few days ago about a floating party in London called Torture Garden. Like the Killing Kittens parties, Torture Garden pops up at various upscale venues and caters to a posh crowd. It's older than Killing Kittens, though. Torture Garden has been around for a quarter of a century, it seems--- all the back to the lost world of the Nineties.

It's a fetish party for S/M, of course. The article (at the Tatler.com site) tells us that the girls there are mostly rogue debs and young professionals, and that the female participants seem to be having much more fun than the males. I'm not sure about why, mind you. It may be the fancy dress thing, the chance for rogue debs and junior solicitors to wear spandex and leather. I've always found upper and upper-middle class English to be far more thrilled with fancy dress than Americans. Americans aren't good at costumes or playing dress-up, though the why remains an essay someone needs to write. Fancy dress, then, and a chance to explore being a bit of a domme--- the article emphasizes that the girls are enjoying giving orders as to how they're to be pleasured, both by hapless males and by other girls. 

Torture Garden--- that's from the Octave Mirabeau novel, of course. The novel came out in 1899, and it's been around and in print ever since. There have been expensive editions for erotica collectors, and there was at least one graphic-novel version in the 1990s, done in some faux-Aubrey Beardsley style. There's some irony here, since by all accounts "The Torture Garden" was intended as an attack on European colonialism and the hypocrisies of justice and punishment, and it's remembered only as erotica. 

I'll admit to not having read the novel. I've always liked the idea of collectible erotica and classic s/m, and I'd known the title for years when I first saw a card catalog card (yes, that long ago) for it in the library at university. Somehow, though, I never got round to reading it. No particular explanation, no clear reason. "Torture Garden" is one more of those books (like, say, Louis-Ferdinand Celine's "Journey to the End of Night") that I've always meant to read...someday. 

Well, at least I knew the literary reference in the Tatler article about the Torture Garden parties. Years of expensive education have left their mark. What I must do, though, is ask a friend in London Town if ever she's been to a Torture Garden party. She'd have connections in the right social set, and she does rather fancy bondage. I'd be interested in hearing any stories from the garden.

Oh, you can hear a sigh there. The Tatler article made it very clear that even if I had the entry fee, I'd be no more welcome at Torture Garden than I would be at Killing Kittens. I quite realize that whatever happens at those venues would very likely never live up to my hopes and fantasies, but there is something depressing in realizing that after a lifetime of imagining stylish and darkly elegant sex, you're simply not good enough to be allowed into the parties. I'm almost certain--- dreadfully certain  ---that I'd be overcome with social anxiety and body shame at any such parties, but it's still depressing to think I'd never be allowed inside. 

The worst of that is the nagging feeling that somehow reading the novels and seeing the films that gave me a sense of what sex and the erotic could be was all a waste. 

I will have to ask my London friend if she has any stories from Torture Garden, or if she knows anyone who's been. I'll never go to Torture Garden, so (much like with Paris), I'll have to rely on travelers' tales.

One Three Eight: Fears

I'll put this out to you, wherever you are. If you're reading this, take a moment and leave a comment with your answer.

I'm interested--- I really am.

Tell me what you're afraid of.

No--- not spiders or clowns or mysterious robot insects writhing under your skin.

Not those things at all.

I've been writing here for the last few years about things sexual--- sex itself, sex as a concept, sex as a battleground in the gender wars, sex as aesthetics. But always about sex and its derivatives and social grounding. So that much should be obvious. Tell me about sex--- sex and what you're afraid of.

I'm a gentleman of a certain age. I do define myself as an aging roué.  My own fears begin with those things. I'll certainly admit that. Age and entropy and decay. I live with all the fears of anyone male of a certain age. Hair falling out, eyes and teeth going bad,  my body--- my companion in so many campaigns ---turning on me. It's not all about performance failure, though that is a key fear.  I'm afraid of my body these days--- not just of performance failure, but afraid of being inside it, and certainly afraid of letting anyone see it or be near it. Sometimes it is hard to see even a glimpse of myself in a mirror. Sometimes I think I smell of death, or of something worse. I'm afraid these days of what a young companion would discover if she touched my flesh with fingers or lips.

Those are my fears these days.

Tell me about yours. What terrifies you more--- death or the mirror? What leaves you more paralyzed with shame and fear---- what you might see in a potential lover's eyes or what you might see if you examined your body all on your own? What fears do you have when you think of love and romance or of being next to someone else in bed?

Tell me what goes through your mind on nights like this.

Eighty-Eight: Nightcalls

Halloween is coming in a few days. It'll be a Thursday this year, which is an awkward day for a holiday. Whatever anyone does on Thursday night, there's still Friday (work, classes) to get through.  Thursday night parties lead to Friday hangovers with no chance to sleep late, and a Friday morning post-Halloween Walk o' Shame is awkward indeed. Sitting hungover at a coffee shop in last night's Halloween costume on a Saturday or Sunday morning at least guarantees you'll be in good company. Coming home in last night's costume through crowds of office-bound day-dwellers is just a bit embarrassing.

Still and all, I like Halloween. I like it because it's an autumn holiday, one with lots of memories of childhood autumns. I like it because it opens the holiday season that takes us to year's end. And I like it because it's one of the trio of holidays that are about sex and delights.

Halloween as a holiday for children is one thing--- that's ghost stories and candy corn and candles inside jack o' lanterns. But Halloween for university girls and twentysomethings is about throwing off inhibitions. It's about slutty costumes, and well it should be. Halloween is a chance to give yourself to the night and to physical desire.

New Year's Eve and Valentine's are about sex, too, but in very different ways. Valentine's is about structured romance and the rituals of romance, and it's about romance as social display. New Year's Eve is about a kind of elegant, melancholy abandon. Kissing a beautiful stranger at the tick of midnight on New Year's Eve is about saying goodbye to another vanished year and about hoping the kiss will be a kind of magic for the new year. Halloween is something much more immediate, something much more basic. Halloween is about physical desire. It's about lust, and we need holidays that celebrate lust.

We've forgotten about lust, and about how powerful and exhilarating it can be. Or maybe not forgotten--- maybe we've become afraid of it. Lust and desire aren't about a cost-accounting view of life. They aren't about rational planning, or about understanding the "deeper context"  and "genealogy" of things. Lust and desire are immediate. They're about immediate pleasure and immediate need. We're afraid of that now. We're afraid of the irrational in pleasure, afraid of risking our carefully-constructed social selves for pure adventure and physical delight.

We do need more of that, though. We need a holiday that is about slutty costumes and adventures and losing oneself in the night. We need holidays that proclaim that just for the night, the rules are suspended and that you're free to just seek out pure physical delight.

It will be a bit awkward this year. Friday may be a bit awkward--- hungover, yes, and an odd kind of speed bump before the weekend. But I think that Halloween needs to be valued as one night when you can dress up as someone seeking immediate pleasure, one night where you can shed a daytime identity and take up new masks...or throw away the mask you wear all day.

There are three days in any year where we celebrate the different aspects of sex and romance. Halloween isn't about chocolates and champagne, or about sympathetic magic under the ticking clock. It's about something much about pure id, pure adventure. Value that--- value that and go explore. You can stay home later and watch "Arsenic and Old Lace" or "The Trouble With Harry". Take Halloween night and go explore physical delights and all the things you can be or create.

Eighteen: Sleeping Beauties

I read Kawabata's "House of Sleeping Beauties" years ago, and I have seen the German film version done a few years back. There's a new version out this season--- "Sleeping Beauty", with Emily Browning. The reviewer at New Yorker was very much taken with Ms. Browning--- certainly understandable ---but less than taken with the premise of the film.

The reviewer despised the clients in the film--- the older men who pay their money for the chance to lie there next to a beautiful girl who's been given a sleeping draught. "Foul and foolish" he calls them.  Kawabata's novella and the German film both had more sympathy for the elderly clients. Foolish, yes, in those versions. But also deserving of sympathy. Kawabata wrote the novella in late middle age, and he understood that age not only takes away one's own beauty and power, it disqualifies one from being around youth and beauty. I identified with his hero, just as I identified with the main character in the German film. A film made for Australian and American audiences here in the new century can't show any sympathy for the older men who purchase nights next to Emily Browning' s character. The politics of the day don't allow for sympathy for older men who'd buy time with a sleeping girl.

The reviewer at New Yorker disdained the whole idea of ritualised sex as well. He dismissed high-end, high-fashion s/m costumes as looking "like Victoria's Secret had been bought out by the Freemasons". He also found something distasteful in all efforts of males (meaning especially older males) to make sex seem "grand and sinister", efforts that he claimed only and ever emphasised how ridiculous ritual sex is and how pathetically ridiculous the men are.

We're back to Andrew Holleran's claim that "intelligence leads directly to s/m", I think. That's a phrase I've agreed with all these years. Well, more specifically, being literary and bookish leads to s/m, or at least to ritualised sex. I came to sex through books, and expected that all the actions and settings for sex would be like those in books I'd read. My young companions over the years have all shared that. The lovely girl sitting across a table and kicking off a ballet flat under the table to graze an ankle or a bare foot along her lover's leg learned that from somewhere--- a book, a film ---and is re-enacting a scene. And the seduction, the conversation, going on across the table is its own re-enactment of scenes read or viewed.

I have to have sympathy for the older clients in "Sleeping Beauty". After all, who am I but one of them? Though it is hard to imagine what I'd do with a girl--- however naked and lovely ---who'd been given a sleeping draught. Sex for me has always been based on conversation, on building up stories and exchanges as my young companion and I create scenes and try particular things. I can imagine kissing a sleeping girl--- lips and eyelids and all the places I've loved ---and I can imagine brushing fingertips over her. But penetration at all wouldn't appeal to me without conversation, without stories being exchanged. Paying for the services of a lovely girl is beyond my resources, but I have no moral or political problems with the idea. What I'd pay for, though, is the stories as much as the flesh or her skills with mouth and hands and hips.

I've always sought young companions who can tell stories with me, who can create worlds with me. A sleeping girl is a beautiful nullity. She's not even the girl in fashion/erotica photos. Talking to a sleeping girl isn't sex. It's only emptiness. I need voices to catalyse beauty, to bring beauty to life, to metamorphose beauty into stories and rituals.

Do I expect sex to be "grand and sinister"? That's not a bad idea, though I expect things less "grand" than simply crafted and literary. I can't imagine sex that isn't at least those two things. As far as I can tell, even sex that's nominally purely carnal and wordless and only about physical urges and acts is all mediated through what we've seen in films or read in novels about raw, overwhelming passion. I haven't been able to imagine sex that isn't about the artificial and ritualised and mediated since I was...in my teens? None of that dispenses with love or affection, mind you. But it does mean that we have a repertoire of acts and costumes and poses and words in our memories and imaginations that's based on books and films and photographs, a set of tools and references that we use to build up the worlds we need for love and lovemaking.


I want to see Emily Browning in "Sleeping Beauty". She's a lovely actress. But I'd want her fully awake across a futon from me, fully awake and going through a set of shared rituals. Costumes like "Victoria's Secret bought out by the Freemasons"? Well, why not? We'd both be aware of having constructed a world for intricate games. And I'd want her to respond to my touch and kisses with stories and carefully choreographed shared moves.

My age may make me ridiculous, though there are young companions who've found it an asset. I do have stories and a sense of craft to offer. I have a sense of safety in the dance to offer a young, literary companion. All sex may be foolish, though sex and love are always examples of where a bit of foolishness or even madness is welcome. But there's nothing "foul" here. I won't give the reviewer at New Yorker that.