Two Nine Three: Lessons

Last night I watched "Altered States"--- a film from c.1981 that I've always rather liked.  If you haven't seen the film, I will recommend it.

There's a moment in "Altered States" where Wm. Hurt has the first physical symptoms of regressing into some kind of archaic hominid. He's in bed with one of his students at the time (she calls him "Dr. Jessup" when he leaves bed and dashes to the bathroom to look at his transformation in the mirror). The actress is named Ora Rubinstein; her character is billed only as "Young Medical Student". I like that...and wonder if you'd still still have that character if you re-did the film in the Year Twenty. Could you still have Dr. Jessup sleeping with one of his students? The film takes it for granted that he'll have affairs with students, and one of his senior med school colleagues says off-handedly earlier in the film that he has to go, that he has a date with one of his students,

Which once again takes us back to Levin and her painting professor. That affair was something that happened long ago, and certainly long before #MeToo. Levin had no objection to sleeping with her professor, and no particular thought that she was being exploited. She found some of his stories pretentious and self-involved, but that just went with being in the art world. What I'd like to know is the full backstory. At what point did she sense that his interest in her was a seduction? How did she react to the discovery--- surprise, amusement, excitement? Did she ever think she was being exploited or used (in a bad way)? Did she laugh at how cliched it all was--- art student and her professor? Did she decide to sleep with him early on, or did she make a quick decision that night in the studio when he asked why she wasn't naked yet?

I asked her once when she made that decision about me, and she shrugged and told me she'd decided early on, when I was telling her what films and books I liked. Just seemed like you'd be interesting, she said. I mean, I'll take that as a compliment and a perfectly valid reason. But I did wonder when she'd made a decision and what criteria she was using. 

Levin was a fine arts major. I do wonder how her criteria compare to Liberty's.'s criteria. Liberty was a coastal ecology major--- a science girl, albeit in what was regarded as a "hippie science". From what I could infer, all the "soft" sciences--- the ecology programs, anthropology, biology ---were very sexually active. Funny thing--- "Altered States" gives the same impression, that the physical anthropology students and faculty are more sexually active than the hard sciences or even the liberal arts. I need to look into the accepted mores of various academic departments. 

I of course was a History major--- a department not noted for carnality. Fine Arts and Comparative Lit were of course notorious for both ambisexuality and teacher-student affairs. Neither Levin nor Liberty ever seemed to find sleeping with faculty to be anything out of the ordinary, mind you. And both seemed to have accepted bisexuality as perfectly ordinary since their teens. Okay, yes, great--- I'm now thinking about a survey and analysis on sexual criteria by academic major back to the Sixties. Somebody get me a research grant and a Netflix deal.

What I'm also thinking about is what each of them--- Liberty, Levin, even the Young Medical Student in "Altered States" ---wanted from the experience. We'll learn things, Liberty said to me. When Levin first stayed over in my rooms, she spent time prowling through my bookshelves and asking about books and authors. My friend at McGill told me that she expected any older lover she took to have a bedroom full of books and a whole fund of knowledge about 1960s French and East European films. 

Though I suppose it's possible that they wanted the idea of "experience" more than any particular concrete experience. Levin was part of the art world, and there's still a strong master-pupil attitude there, the idea of learning by transmission from some older figure with talent. That may be part of it all.  Levin and Liberty (and my friend in Montreal) liked the idea of having experiences,  of collecting experiences that they could use to form themselves. I suppose I felt the same way in my own late teens and undergraduate days. The idea was to be able to say that, yes, I did this, or that I'd read that, that I had a range of experiences (all approved in novels or films) that I could use to become (or become seen as) the sort of character I wanted to portray.

Liberty told me that all through her teens and into her twenties she'd collected experiences and kept a journal about what she was learning about the world and about lovers. She claimed to have kept a separate "Older Men" chapter with notes on what men in their thirties and forties had taught her and on how to deal with them. Did she really? I'll never know, though I hope she did. I hope she'll find that notebook when she's forty herself and read it through and see if she agrees with Liberty-at-twenty's observations. 

I wish I could have both Liberty and Levin write down the things they'd learned from older lovers. My friend at McGill--- I know how she'd answer. She'd list the names of authors and directors, the titles of books and films. Reading Deleuze, she'd say: that was a big thing. Not quite the physical things Liberty claimed to have learned (light s/m, foot fetishes)...or how she learned to paint Southwest desert light. Not quite those things...but still lessons that my Montreal friend saw as crucial to her constructed self.

Now I do recognize that I've been a source of some kind of lessons and experiences for girls like Levin or Liberty. I'd like to know more about what lessons and experiences they'd been looking for, and how they did use them (whatever they were) to construct selves later. I'd like to know what counts as a lesson, too.  And I'd especially like to know how each girl sees the older men they were with all these years later.

Two Nine Two: Procedures

I was looking through Alexander Maksik's "You Deserve Nothing" yesterday evening--- a rather powerful teacher-student romance. Yes, I know, we're not supposed to read those any more, or consider teacher-student romances as anything other than nonconsensual and exploitative. I rather like the genre, or at least the possibilities in the genre. I've been fortunate, too, in knowing girls who've been attracted to the same set of fantasies and have been willing to construct scenes in the genre with me.

My lovely friend in Montreal always told me that she'd gone to McGill as an undergraduate specifically to have affairs with older and knowledgeable men. She wanted to be someone's dangerous muse. The problem, she told me, was that she didn't know the procedures involved.  If she found an older admirer, how was the affair supposed to progress? Who was supposed to make the first move? What were the recognized ways in which she could make it clear that she was available as muse and mentee and bedmate? What she needed, she said, was a checklist. Or at least access to a covey (coven?) of co-eds who shared her tastes and could impart secret knowledge to her.  She showed me her notebooks with drafts of checklists she'd assembled, largely based on novels like Maksik's "You Deserve Nothing" and lots of memoirs by young female French writers who had tales of affairs with teachers and professors. She was--- and is ---like me in some things: checklists and rituals always matter.

Levin told me that the affair with her painting instructor had opened exactly like she'd expected it to--- lots of long conversations about art, lots of tales over coffee at the student union about the man's past in the art world, eventually a flask of vodka in the painting studio one night. She said that she was used to boys at school who never knew how to ask anything directly, and when her professor looked at her that first night and casually asked, "Why aren't you naked yet?" she just laughed and pulled off her singlet.  What she liked, she said, was that he had a whole checklist of his own in his head: things to do with and to her, places to do things in, a list of things to show her. She liked it when he asked her to model for him--- that was so very clearly supposed to be a sign that he wanted her for more than just a night or two ---and she knew that it was a sign that she was doing well.

Liberty was always a direct girl, and her procedure was to just ask for whatever she wanted.  She ended up in that sleeping bag with her instructor on that kayak trip by just asking, by putting down the joint she was smoking by the campfire and asking him if he wanted her to ride him or wanted her on bottom. That's the same kind of directness she'd used at sixteen with the kayak store owner. I admired her directness--- admired her ability to just be direct. Her own set of procedures worked on me, mind you. I liked watching her take charge of starting the affair. That first night at the oyster bar when we met, we'd talked for a while and then she very casually asked if she'd be sleeping over at my flat after she got off.

Sometimes these days I think that I've lost my own ability to work through a checklist or even know where I am among the items. I miss the sense of self-confidence that Liberty had, and I miss thinking that I had the ability to craft the checklist points and guide a young companion down the list: places, positions, discussions, games. I miss the idea that a lovely girl could intuit the key checklist points and enjoy the idea of ritual and procedure.

One night during their affair, her painting instructor painted on Levin herself--- outlining her areolae and nipples in blue, tracing red along the sharp lines of her hipbones. She told me that she'd had a hard time not laughing--- that he was willing to be playful rather than simply mentor-mentee with her meant that he trusted in her not to mock him after he'd put some of his authority aside. I do like that image.

Liberty I'm sure knew that I wanted to do certain things in certain places with lovers, and she was willing to work my list with me so long as I understood that she was someone who liked simple, direct questions and straightforward answers.

I suppose I could leave examples of a checklist here, but somehow I don't feel quite comfortable or safe doing that.  Lists tell others what you want, what you desire, what you think you need. That's information that's never safe to have lying about.  It's so easy to be mocked for those things, whatever they might be.  And it's just no longer simple to ask anyone to work through a list with you, even if you're more than willing to work through hers with her.

I suppose it's harder, too, to know what you should put on the list--- harder to know what you actually do want.

Two Nine One: Stage Sets 2

Stage sets matter.

I said that last time, and I'll stand by it.

I can't do a vacation or a trip of any kind without a lovely Young Companion at my side. There's no point in travel to new cities, new locales, without someone who'll use those places to create stories of adventurous or risky or well-crafted sex.

There is a question, though--- what kinds of places make the best stage sets?  What kinds of places would you want to be having sex in? There's always something to be said for hotel beds, since hotel sex has something wonderfully louche about it. But...where else?

My friend Marta in Houston had the gym of that cruise ship off Alaska.

I'd love to be with Jill in a Pure Pod somewhere in the Otago hills. There's something very sci-fi film set about Pure Pods--- great architecture that suggests waking up in a film set c. 2035. I need to ask Jill about that, about what sex in a Pure Pod calls up in her mind's eye.

I suspect that for Jill, sex in a Vancouver hotel elevator with her faux-uncle ("second cousin once removed") is a stage-set memory that she does treasure. Or maybe her favourite locale was the backseat of that Range Rover with the two water-polo boys when she was sixteen.  Both would make very good sets for a film version of her adventures.

For Liberty, the kayak shop always mattered. I do imagine her there often...and imagine her on that field trip where she hooked up with her professor, imagine her naked on the dock, a sleeping bag draped round her, watching the lights of boats in the distance.

For Marsha, maybe the hills above Thessaloniki, there in the parked MG convertible with the Greek boy.

For Levin, her painting professor's studio. Or a shadowed bedroom in Charleston.

I have my guesses about Miss Ginny, but she was always very canny about how much of the details of her past she revealed.

For a girl named Morgan, one of the bartendrix girls I flirted with a couple of years ago.... Maybe an Amtrak sleeper car, or maybe (oh, yes) the catacombs in Paris. She told me once that the cost of the flight would be worth it if she could have sex in the catacombs.

Well...if you're reading this, tell me about your own favourite locale-based stories. Tell about the cities and buildings and hotels and sailboats and rooftop bars where you've arranged encounters.

I won't say anything about my own past and the places that have meant something to me. After all, I'm a gentleman of a certain age. Males don't get to tell stories like that. Accounts of adventures and locales are either taken as pathetic bragging or pathetic lies. All I will say is that there are places I'd love to have as stage sets--- places I'd keep on a list, however unlikely it is these days that I'll be checking anything off it.

One of the Pure Pods? Oh, certainly. I can go to the website and find a favourite.  One of the two remaining sleeper trains in Japan? Again, certainly. Though surely there's a way to do something on a shinkansen from Tokyo to Hokkaido...yes? A seaview villa in Rabat? A cabin on the Skeleton Coast? Yes, of course.

But I suspect I won't be adding any new places to the list I've kept in my paper journal all these years.  I have visions, but no time or money or energy--- let alone a Young Companion. So I'll just keep a list of what-should-be places. And hope that you'll send me your own lists of places where your encounters and adventures were amplified, valorized, shaped by architecture and decor.

Two Nine Zero: Stage Sets

Someone asked me yesterday why I'm not taking vacation time this summer. I told them that the Red Death had ruined everyone's vacation plans, so that I might wait 'til fall. I think I also implied that my finances weren't up to a vacation right now. That last part is certainly true, but it's not the key reason why I'm not going anywhere this year.

I'm a gentleman of a certain age, yes. A vacation for me would require certain amenities. At my age, I'm not going camping or whitewater rafting or rock-climbing. I'm usually bored at the beach, and I have no interest in any place like, say, Las Vegas.

My idea of a vacation can be urban. It can be about spending a week wandering streets in Manhattan or Montreal. Or I suppose it could be about renting something like one of the Pure Pod cabins my friend in New Zealand told me about. It could even be about sailing somewhere, though it could never be about being on a cruise. But whatever sort of vacation it would be, it would require  a lovely young companion to be with me.

I have been on vacations alone. I've ridden trains alone across Central Europe and wandered solo through towns in Slovenia and Hungary. Those things happened long ago, and while they're good memories, these days I have no interest in vacationing or traveling alone. I need a young companion to be there with me. I see no purpose, no purpose at all, in travel without a lover.

A vacation of any kind is expensive, and I live in genteel poverty. But a vacation should also be a romantic adventure, a time spent together with someone with whom you share passion and wickedness and dreams of creating stories. Right now I have no one in my life, and I have no destination in mind.

A city, a Pure Pod, a sailboat... Those things mean nothing to me in and of themselves. They're settings--- stage settings ---only. A hotel rooftop pool,  a sailboat deck at twilight, a Pure Pod deck--- those things have value as stage sets for sex and romance. Settings matter. Settings are the stuff underlying stories--- sneaking into the alleyway behind the bistro, watching a lovely companion swim naked off a moored sailboat, watching the city skyline from a hotel bed. The settings matter. You might think that you can have amazing sex in any ordinary bed in any ordinary room in any banal town or city. But it's not the physical act itself that matters. It's the setting, it's doing it in someplace out of the ordinary, it's collecting stories to be remembered years later.

I can't begin to imagine going anywhere without a lovely young companion who'll help me christen locations and create stories for later. I can't go anywhere without adventures and encounters that will match or out-point things girlfriends have done in their lives before me.  I want to be able to say that the stories and locations and adventures they're having with me are as good as those they've had with other men.

Financial limits are always are good excuse. Right now I can't afford an extended weekend in Savannah or Vancouver. But the real difficulty is that I have no lover in my life right now. And I'm not going any place where we won't be christening risky or stylish or amazingly visual spots together. I can't travel without a leggy, literary girl who'll see a vacation as a chance to create erotica together.

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 Eight Eight: Compliments

Well, I am still afraid to be seen on a dance floor, and I'm still afraid to use the pool where I live. But tonight's worry is about compliments.

Yesterday evening I was down in the courtyard talking to one of my neighbours, a lovely red-haired girl who's been here for almost four years now. She had friends over to use the pool, including one girl whom I'd seen before and was very hot indeed. My neighbour told me that she'd an awkward conversation with our property manager about the girl.

The property manager had been talking to my neighbour when the visiting girl climbed out of the pool. The manager looked at her and commented that the girl had "really come into her own". My neighbour shut the conversation down by crisply saying that, yes, the girl had become a grown woman at some point in her life. She told me yesterday evening that she found the comment "creepy and inappropriate".

I had to partially agree with her, at least on general principles. I'm not sure I'd go as far as "creepy", but it was an awkward and very odd comment. "Come into her own" sounds just a bit too much like saying "well, she's in her prime breeding years". I suppose it also sounds like "well, she's finally inherited that five million from her rich uncle", but that's really not any less odd and awkward,

Now, yes, the girl is very attractive. Late twenties, maybe five-seven, very slender, long light brown hair, lithe and lissome in a very high-cut maillot. I've exchanged a few words with her in passing. I know her first name, and that she works (I think) at Sephora. That's all I know, really. She doesn't have a local accent,  but I know nothing about her origins or life.  She's certainly attractive, and she's been pleasant to me. I told my neighbour that if I wanted to compliment the girl, I'd just say that she was very attractive and let it go at that. My neighbour assured me that saying that would've been fine, but the whole breeding-years implication wasn't.

Now my neighbour has been someone I've chatted with and had courtyard drinks with these last few years, I'm sure that I've walked by her, raised a red Solo cup or a wineglass, and said something like, "God, girl, you have long legs!" or just said, "Great legs, girl!" when I've seen her in short shorts on her balcony. She's always just smiled, raised her own drink, and nodded her thanks. We're on good terms, and she's never been annoyed by anything I said. I've always made any compliments part of my persona as an aging roué, and she's responded to the persona. I may be lucky in that she and I are born natives of a region where that particular persona still has some currency. We both know how the ritual works.

I'm no longer sure what I'd do in terms of complimenting a lovely girl in, say, Manhattan or Wellington. Tonight I'm thinking that it's like being on a dance floor. At some point you lose the belief that you have any skills, that you might have something to do or say that would make you feel like you're doing things right. Offering up compliments is always a risky thing, but I think I've lost the ability to do it any place that isn't...here in this city or this downtown.

Two Eight Seven: Dance Floors

I always loved being on a dance floor. But I think we've reached the stage where I won't risk that here. I'm not about to risk the mockery that's reserved for anyone past his early thirties who takes the dance floor. Oddly, I'd still dance all night in Europe (excluding Britain). That may be because standards for dance floor skill are much lower in France and Germany than in. say, NYC or LA. Or because one assumes that Euro club culture is less appalled by age-disparate couples. Or just because I might not be able to understand the mockery when it's in the local dialect of Foreign. Nonetheless, as much as I miss dancing, I think that stage of my life is done.

I will miss it. I think of girls like Liberty or Levin or Jill in New Zealand and think of dancing at rooftop bars in distant cities. But that won't happen again. To be seen on a dance floor at my age--- even dancing to music I love, even (or especially) dancing with a young companion, leaves me open to mockery. I'm not at a stage in my life where I can deal with that.

If there's anything positive to be said about my life this spring, it's this. 

Someone left me this message:

"I just want it noted (preferably in the preface to your book, when it's published) that i thought your posts should be a novel before it was cool to do that (scroll down your comments). an epistolary novel about an aging roue with a wasted phd, stuck (for hinted at but never fully explained reasons) in the deepest south, stewing in the heat, spinning and re-spinning his stories out over the aether and late into the night about a debauched but well-traveled past ... until one night a voice answers back, a sharp hip-boned girl of inappropriate age from an impossibly hip city on a different continent. they go back and forth, flirting, testing each other, telling their stories, but there are cracks and neither he nor she (nor the reader) know if they are what they present themselves to be. she says she's bored and wants danger, real danger, but is afraid she doesn't have what it takes to go all the way. he wants to be dangerous again, really dangerous, but is afraid of the same thing. they talk themselves into an assignation, he forces himself out of his southern lair to make the trip to new york (montreal? prague?), and texts her the room number at a boutique hotel ... he's pacing the room, waiting, drinking ... she's hours late, will she show? is she real? or (a cold, sinking feeling) could it it be someone from the past, from the time of those unfortunate misunderstandings? and then there's a knock on the door ... i'd read it, is all i'm saying. "

I'll be living on the energy in this for a long while. It's like survival food to a lost Antarctic traveler.