A tall lovely girl in North Carolina told me once about a story from the spring when she graduated high school. The story is simple enough. She was driving home one night to her parents' house in the countryside and she decided to do something transgressive, something daring and wicked. I thought I knew where the story was going, that either she masturbated while driving or else picked up a stranger and had sex in her battered old SUV. I might have raised a wary eyebrow at the latter possibility-- too trite, really, and really not her. I would've doubted that story. Masturbating while driving would have been seriously sexy, but of course that's been done in lots of late-night "erotic thrillers" on cable. Twenty or thirty years ago, Joan Severance would've done that while driving some Italian sports car in a Cinemax late-night film or a Red Shoe Diaries episode. She didn't do either, though.
She did something else. She was in a long sundress, she said, and she just stopped by the roadside and got out of the dress. She was braless, and she'd been experimenting with being panty-free in spring and summer. She settled into the car seat and drove home naked the last couple of miles. Late at night, country road, tree-lined. Very much a fun image-- she's a beautiful girl now, and at seventeen she'd have had a deliciously coltish beauty. I did have to admire her courage and her defiance. It felt good, she said-- a spring night, her window halfway down, the feel of the wind and the upholstery, the rush of doing something risky.
Unlike my NZ friend and her posh Wellington set, my NC friend hadn't spent her teens as a party girl with an array of older lovers. She told me that she always felt very sexual, but that for her sex was less about having a lover than it was about finding out about her own body and her own dreams. Yes, she's another bookish girl in my circle--- a lovely girl who (like me, too) lived inside her head and inside books. Being naked driving home down some dark road would've been just the sort of thing she'd do, just the sort of thing she'd have recalled from some novel. It's an amazing image, though, and one I've treasured since ever she told me about it.
I'll offer her up one other compliment here, one other thing she did that's always meant the world to me. Once upon a time, one long-ago November-- my birthday --she called me late at night and sang Neko Case's "Hold On, Hold On" to me. An unexpected gift, and one that left me breathless and near tears. "Hold On, Hold On" is a favourite song, one that's meant a lot to me down the years. She had-- has --a lovely voice. Lots of years singing in school and church choirs. So...she sang for me and I felt for once that I did matter, that someone lovely and clever thought I was valuable. That night, that call, has been in my memories ever since-- one the best birthday moments in my life.
She offered me one other lovely comment a couple of years after she sang for me, and it's something I want to keep. She was trying to use sugar baby websites to help support herself as an art student, and she kept a blog about it for a while:
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.
Well, that is a compliment. I'm glad that I she trusted me and that she saw me as someone who cared about her. And, yes...she would've been a perfect mistress in the eighteenth-century usage. In a better world, I'd have been able to take her into keeping: a flat near university, an allowance, having her as my companion at small dinners or at concerts, long conversations over good wines. I'll note that she loved "demimondaine" and "demi-rep" as terms. Wrote them down in her Moleskine. And..."compatible souls"... That does mean a lot.
These are all memories I want to keep. She was (and is) very much a girl I treasure. I still do dream of finding a gallery opening of her paintings one day and walking in to congratulate her.
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