The ear-bone's connected to the clit-bone and the ....

Earlier this week Marie visited me for a couple of days. Like last time, she visited mid-week. (She works in retail so Tuesday and Wednesday are her weekend.) She cooked dinner for me two nights, which was a luxury. (Although she also broke my cut-glass butter dish. Oh well.) And we talked a fair bit when I was home from work. As always. But the biggest drama was in bed.

Marie no longer laughs her way through each orgasm. So I assume her laughter burbled up out of astonishment and relief after decades of believing herself incurably anorgasmic. And, like my uncontrollable laughter during my Second Date with D, she may have felt partly "Oh my God, this is really happening!" Anyway, her vocalizations are no longer restricted to laughter. But they are loud and gratifying all the same.

Marie's clitoris is neither large nor prominent, and it has a tendency to recede into the surrounding flesh. If I didn't know what I was feeling for, I could easily lose it. Could this explain part of her chronic anorgasmia and sexual dissatisfaction before now -- that her lovers were perhaps inexperienced and therefore clumsy? She tells me that -- before me -- she hadn't had sex in twenty years. That would have put her in her early thirties at the oldest. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that her other lovers were inexpert at their job, though she assures me they were always kind and gracious and considerate.

In any event, her appetite for sex these days is almost adolescent in its intensity. The night she arrived she warned me that she didn't want to do much more than cuddle: she had had a trying week at work and disturbing results from her most recent mammogram, so her libido (she went on) had flown straight out the window. Fair enough. Her flight got in about 11 o'clock at night. I met her at the airport, we drove to my apartment, I held her for a few minutes, and we went to bed. By that time she was already wet and fully aroused. So yes, we made love after all.

Marie never seems to tire of stimulation, of my giving her one more orgasm. Wife used to stop me pretty quickly because she said she got too sensitive after the first one and it hurt. Debbie got sensitive too, although she was more ready than Wife for a repeat. Even D would -- occasionally and after a while -- push my hand away and turn to kissing. Marie will pull me up to kiss her, if my attention has been too exclusively on her vulva. But if, as we kiss, my hand traces its way back down again, she's always willing. At one point she even told me, "I get to where I feel like I really need a breather; but then ... well, you start to distract me again and I forget all about it."

But what seems to have surprised her the most was the fantastic interconnectedness of her responses. I suckled her ear, running my tongue behind it and into all the little whorls; she came. Then it was her neck; then her shoulder. (She didn't come when I suckled her shoulder, but she enjoyed it.) Later on I suckled her toes, running my tongue between them intently. And she responded again. She was on a roll, and it didn't take much to push her from one peak to the next.

Later she told me about a book she had read, where the woman cuts her toe and the man has to bandage it; so to clean the toe first he licks it, and the woman "feels it between her legs." Marie said she had always scoffed at that line as impossible. But she's not scoffing any more.

By the end of Marie's visit the sheets were a bloody mess. Marie was puzzled: she was sure she had reached menopause by now ... hadn't she? I told her not to worry. I didn't add that the same thing happened to D when we first started fucking, though she too was sure she had hit menopause. It must have been a last hurrah by all the parts of her reproductive system: out of work, past their time, but called into action for one last glorious orgy. Not to drift gently into that dark night, but by God to go down fucking. As they should.

We didn't discuss her mammogram a lot, nor some other things that had been on her mind and that she e-mailed me about soon after. But it was a good visit.

Elly at home

This story continues from the post “Hil at home”.

 

Two days later, after more meetings plus an afternoon of beer with former colleagues (and dinner with a new one), I left Germany. But instead of flying directly home to America, I stopped over in the UK to visit Elly. Now Elly and I were never romantically involved either. Twenty years ago we were colleagues, at another company. Then for a while I worked for her. Elly is sweet and not terribly aggressive, but she’s smart and systematic. These days she works as a technical writer; but back when I worked for her there were a hundred others who did as well and she managed annual budgets near a million dollars. A few years ago I started e-mailing her again, and these days (she says) she and I write each other more often – and at greater length – than she and any other ex-colleague from that company. (For many years it was a small startup, so on the whole we were a very close bunch. That’s where I met Debbie too, come to that.)

 

I said we were never romantically involved. But in fairness I have to add that there was a time – recently, I mean, while we have been e-mailing – when I was trying to flirt with her. The flirting was subtle, so that I could always deny it; but my idea was to see if I could nudge her in a physical direction. I never really wanted an emotional relationship with her; besides that she lives on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean, so the whole exercise was always kind of theoretical. But back when I worked for her there were certainly plenty of nights when I whacked off to thoughts of her, and for a couple of years now (before Marie came back on the scene) I’ve been without somebody. So it was a private game – and as I say. I never said anything to her that couldn’t have been taken innocently – but there’s no question that I entertained a couple of lascivious fantasies in the back of my head.

 

At the same time, it was always really clear to me that they were fantasies. I was trying to nudge her in a physical direction, at least in her mind, but she remained resolutely un-nudged. This is in contrast to (for example) Marie, who proved remarkably easy to nudge. I assume Elly never noticed that I was trying to nudge her; in any event she never showed the slightest indication that she had noticed. My two-sided comments just went sailing past her.

 

Still, we hadn’t seen each other in something like 15 years, and here the company was prepared to send me as far as Germany – clear across that Atlantic Ocean. So why shouldn’t I stop and visit?

 

Actually I had thought of that originally a year ago, when I had another trip to Germany to make. But there wasn’t time to make the plans and she had other things going on. Then I was supposed to go in the fall, let her know, she made time in her schedule … and the trip was cancelled for budgetary reasons. So with this trip – thirteen months since I first floated the idea – she made sure to clear her schedule. Even though I was arriving the weekend of Mother’s Day (that’s in March in the UK) she arranged for her ex to have the kids so she could spend the day with me. It was flattering.

 

Elly met me at the airport. Middle age doesn’t make any of us look better – the skin around her face sags today and she has a pot belly – but it was clearly her and she was in a good humor. “Gosh, Hosea, you sound so American – haven’t you lost that accent yet?” We made our way to the airport hotel where I had reserved a room, left all my luggage there, and then found her car. In all our pre-visit discussions we never quite figured out “What should we do with the time?” so she drove me back to her place. And as we were leaving the airport and about to merge onto the highway, we were rear-ended.

 

It was a low-velocity impact; probably neither of us was going over 30-40 miles per hour. And we were traveling the same direction. But it was a real jolt, and Elly had to get out to exchange insurance information with the other driver. Our conversation was a lot more subdued after that, until we got to her house. Then she went into the bathroom to throw up. She came out and offered to make me some coffee, but was clearly jittery. “Elly, it’s OK. You can relax now.” I touched her shoulder. “I think I need a hug.” “I think you do.” And so I held her for a couple of minutes.

 

It didn’t get any steamier than that. In fact, that was probably the tenderest moment of the visit. But it was good. After that she called her insurance company. Then we walked to a local pub for a late lunch and a beer. We talked about our kids, our divorces, and the coworkers we used to share – who’s doing what now, who’s still in touch, who’s disappeared. We took a long walk through her neighborhood on the way back, still talking. A few hours later we drove to dinner, and then she sent me in a taxi back to the airport – not wanting to risk that particular drive again the same day. I gave her a kiss on the way out the door, but demurely on her cheek. I texted her when I got to the airport, and she texted back that she had had a wonderful day.

 

I’ve said nothing about her house, but in fairness I have to. When I talked about Hil, I suggested that the state of your living space is a mirror of sorts, that it says something about the people who live there. Elly has primary custody of her two children – an autistic son and a daugher, aged (I think) 16 and 14 respectively. So it’s not just her who lives there. And – unlike Hil – she didn’t know we were goi ng to end up at her place. But it was even more cluttered than Hil’s house. The dining table was covered with papers, old dishes, and empty (but unwashed) food containers. The sofa had things all over it: some were papers, some were in bags, … I don’t remember what all was there. The counters of the kitchen were covered with dirty dishes. I don’t know quite what I expected, but that wasn’t it.

 

Some of my expectations were met. As in Hil’s house, there weren’t a lot of books: I’m fond of Elly and can fantasize about her sexually, but she’s no intellectual. She’s even smart, but she doesn’t live in her mind and her ideas, the way I do. That’s part of why I can imagine sex with her but never an emotional commitment – we don’t speak the same language. We don’t live in the same world. In the longest run we would always focus on different things. And so we can be friends – even good friends – but never real friends, not in the deepest sense.

 

There were movies – Elly likes movies. Tellingly, her taste is more like that of Son 1 and Son 2 than it is like mine: she likes James Bond and Star Wars – adventure movies – but doesn’t have much interest in art house movies. I recommended “Brooklyn” to her months ago, but she hasn’t seen it yet. “Carol” or “The Danish Girl”? I didn’t bother to ask. (Now actually I like Star Wars too; but I’m at best tepid on James Bond.)

 

Elly had cupboards full of nice dishes. I didn’t see anything similar at Hil’s place, though it’s possible she kept them elsewhere. But then, I would have expected Elly to like nice things. She also had alcohol: bottles of wine sitting out, cordials, gin in the cupboard. Beer.

 

But the dirty dishes with old food scraps? I don’t know what to make of those. Elly recently took a new job, one that is demanding crazy long hours from her. And she is a single mother. But her job, for all that it is demanding, is at nothing like the level she where used to work. She dresses more sloppily than she used to. I wonder if she has given up, … or is starting to give up?

 

Sometimes I wonder the same thing about myself, especially when I think about my career. I don’t dress like an executive – even an executive wearing casual clothes. And the barenness of my apartment cannot look any snappier than the clutter of Hil’s house or Elly’s.

 

But maybe I can make a point of doing the dishes a little more regularly.

 

 

Hil at home

I’m on my way home from a business trip to Germany, during which I was able to visit two friends at home.

 

The purpose of the trip was to attend a workshop for all the people in my division who do the kind of work I do. (You remember I work for a big company.) Hil put on the workshop, which means she was mostly pretty busy during the whole week. But Thursday night she invited six of us to her house for dinner. “The last years we worked together very often and very close and for me our relation changed from ‘just’ colleagues to friends. It is great to have you here in ---- this week and I thought it might be a great chance to invite you to my home, sitting together and enjoying the time.

For this reason I would like to invite you for Thursday evening – after we finished the workshop - for a small dinner at my house.”

 

You remember that my friendship with Hil has never been romantic, and clearly there couldn’t be anything romantic about an invitation to six people. But it was kind and personal. Everybody says invitations like this don’t come easily in Germany. So naturally I was happy to accept.

 

Is a home a self-portrait? In some ways yes. Unless you live alone, your home won’t reflect you exactly; but surely it reflects the collective personality of your family or housemates, of the corporate entity that lives there. My apartment, for example, is very spare: there’s a dining table and a bed but no other furniture; bookshelves and art, but no other artifacts. And this somehow fits with my living so much in my head rather than in the tangible world – except for food and sleep, food and sex. On the other hand the house I shared with Wife was chronically cluttered and usually dirty: dominated by Wife’s obsessive need to hold onto things (heirlooms, artifacts, memories, grudges), by her depression and indolence, and by my resentment of her expectation that the rest of us lived to serve her.

 

Hil’s house is very cluttered. She explained that “In Germany we don’t have family rooms, so we put those things in the living room instead”: this would explain, I suppose, the exercise machine and large television in the living room. And she has two little girls, aged seven and nice. (She is divorced from their father; and while she has a boyfriend, he has his own house down the street.) Does all this explain that there were no empty level surfaces except the dining table? Maybe that’s just the clutter that comes of single motherhood, plus Hil’s busy worldwide travel schedule. There were bookshelves but not a lot of books – not real books, anyway, except for a huge number of glossy coffee-table books about ancient Egypt and the secrets of the Pharaohs. Somebody in the family really loves this one subject, but nobody in the family is an all-around intellectual. There were a lot of Disney princesses, and a lot of family photographs. Hil clearly dotes on her two girls. I already knew this from the way she talks about them every time we work together, so I wasn’t surprised to find it in her house.

 

How often does Hil entertain? Maybe not a lot. She sat us all down at the dining room table, and offered us drinks: apple juice, water, or non-alcoholic beer. It sounded like she keeps no alcohol in the house. Then she left us to go work in the kitchen making pizzas, until the time she could put them in the oven and join us: this meant we were on our own for – what was it? – half an hour? More? I remember when my father used to make pizza at home for guests, and he always invited everyone into the kitchen to talk and socialize as he worked. Not Hil. To be fair, her kitchen isn’t large so there’s not much space for company. But it felt a little awkward to be left to our own devices for so long, especially as we didn’t all know each other. We’re all in the same line of work, but what we have in common is Hil. And we didn’t even have any alcohol as a social lubricant ….

 

Even when the pizzas were ready it felt a little awkward at first: she made three pizzas but they were done at different times, so we each took a slice of each pizza in turn, a little self-consciously, rather as if we were following a schedule. By this time Hil was with us, though, and the conversation picked up somewhat. But then, somewhere between the second and third pizzas, it all began to click into place. The magic of sharing food began to do its work; we told stories, we laughed, we melted together as a single party rather than just a group of people who all know Hil. By the time we were done and going back to our hotels it was late and nobody was ready to leave. It was fun. In the end, it was fun.

 

I continue this story in the post “Elly at home”.