We didn’t Do Anything Wrong.
But we did just about everything else.
You know something? I’ve thought about it, and I’ve come to the conclusion that if only I hadn’t been a virgin at the time, I would have been the happiest man on earth. Because from a physical standpoint there was nothing frustrating about the relationship we had. I was getting there, and not in the therapeutic massage way I had made it in the photo studio, either. We weren’t playing that little game at all. It had been strictly for Gregor’s benefit, and now that we were on our own, we didn’t try to hide the fact that the name of the game was Getting Kicks.
Sometimes we spent five or six hours in a row on that couch, and by the time we stopped I had made it so many times that I didn’t have the strength to lift a finger, let alone my unhard core. So in simple terms of the amount of sex I was getting I was in the class of a man on a honeymoon with a nymphomaniac, for Pete’s sake.
So in that sense it was really great. The more I got the more I wanted, and the more I wanted the more I got, and it looked as though it could just go on that way forever and it would keep getting better all the time.
Here’s a comparison that you might want to pass up if you’re very heavy on religion. Not to offend anybody, but I think it fits. It was like being Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, with Paradise there, just everything you could want all spread out for you, except for these two trees that you couldn’t go near. You could eat anything else in the world but the fruit of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, so naturally what did you want? Right the first time. Well, so did I. The fruit was a cherry instead of an apple, and I wanted to get rid of it, not take a bite out of it, but otherwise it added up to about the same thing.
(Incidentally, suppose Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Life instead of the Tree of Knowledge. Or from both of them. They’d still be alive, and the earth would be up to its neck in people. That doesn’t have anything to do with anything else, but it’s been bothering me ever since I was a little kid so I thought I would put it in. I’m supposed to be writing this straightforward, keeping to the subject and everything, but I was also told that the book ought to let the reader know how I feel about things and the kind of person I am, and frankly I think if I have to just tell everything absolutely cold and straight without putting down other things that come into my head while I’m sitting here, then the book might as well have been written by a machine. When I read a book, I like to have the feeling that a real human being actually sat down and wrote it, and that reading it will let me know something about him. Some books give you the feeling that the sheets of paper came out of the paper mill with the words already on them, for Pete’s sake. Untouched by human hands, like the plastic food in turnpike restaurants.)
Well, to get back to what I was saying, if you’re still with me, I sort of wish I could have rearranged my schedule so that I could have met Aileen five years later in life. That would have been perfect, I think. By then I would be twenty-two and years past being a virgin, but still young enough so that she would be the older woman showing me new ways to be the happiest kid on the block.
As it was, maybe I should have gone out and spent my fifty dollars (Gregor paid off in full, although he did make a halfhearted effort to make me settle for forty) on some professional prostitute. If I just could have crossed that barrier I would have stopped brooding about it. Or maybe I wouldn’t. I guess not, really. I guess it would be impossible for anyone in his right or wrong mind not to want to ball that woman in every way there was.
I got to Chicago in late February, I was at the Eagle Hotel for about two weeks, I moved in with Gregor and Aileen about three weeks before we had the picture-taking session, and it was Memorial Day weekend when I got out of there. I just worked it all out with paper and pencil to save you the trouble, assuming you’re interested, and the way I figure it there was a stretch of about six weeks between the night we took the pictures and the morning I left Chicago.
When I think back on it, sometimes it seems as though it couldn’t possibly have been that long, and other times it seems as though it must have been closer to six months. They were six fantastic weeks no matter how you look at it. In all that time we never once crossed any of the cruddy lines she had drawn, and Gregor never got any idea of what was going on, and I don’t think we once went as much as thirty hours in a row without having a shot at it. It wasn’t always a five hour stretch on the couch (although that happened plenty of the time) and sometimes it was just a fast fingering at the kitchen sink or a quick hand job at the breakfast table. But it was as steady as a pension from the Federal Government.
I remember one night when she slipped out of the bedroom after Gregor had zonked out. She did this quite a few times, and since she and Gregor generally knocked one off before going to sleep, the goods I was getting weren’t exactly untouched by human hands. Sloppy seconds, I think they call it. (Not really sloppy, because she would wash up first, but even so it used to bother me. At first, that is. You might be amazed the way a person can get used to things, and can stop being bothered by things that used to bother him.)
This one particular night a couple of winks and hand signals during the late movie had given me the message that I could expect company. So I was waiting for her from the minute she and Gregor closed their bedroom door, and the sound of their bedsprings was background music while I thought of all the things I wanted to do to Aileen. I was developing a pretty wicked imagination along those lines.
Then the door finally opened, and she tiptoed across to the bathroom, and I heard water running. And then she tiptoed some more, from the bathroom across the floor to the couch.
I pretended to be sleeping. We both knew it was a pretty transparent act, but she liked to find ways to wake me up. She kept finding ways, and they always worked. I’ll bet she could do the Indian rope trick just by touching the rope with those hands of hers.
Well, not to go off on tangents, I woke up, and she got on the couch with me, and we did things. Between her thighs, or under her arm, or in her hands, or between her breasts, or in the cleft of her buttocks, or — well, you name it. We made it, and I stretched out, and she curled up in my arms, and I felt like the King of the World.
“Oh, baby,” she said. “You’re so good for me.”
I said, “Purr.” Or something along those lines.
“You know what? I feel like a girl.”
“You sure do.”
“I’m serious.”
I ran a hand over her. “You feel like a girl, all right. I’m glad, too, you know. I don’t think I’d get as much of a kick out of all of this if you felt like a boy. I like these, see, and this, and—”
And a little later, when we came up for a breath of fresh air:
“Hey, I meant it before, clown. You make me feel like a girl again.”
“You’re not so old.”
“Thanks a bunch.”
“You’re not that much older than I am, for Pete’s sake. You do this mother bit all the time, but you’re not exactly in the category of an antique.”
“Keep saying it, baby.”
“How old are you, anyway?”
“A hundred and ten.”
“Shit.”
“You know why you make me feel so young? Hey, that’s a song. No, it’s because of what we do. Necking and petting and fooling around like a couple of kids. It takes me back to when I was, you know, younger. And a virgin.”
“I didn’t know you ever were.”
“Don’t be a sharp-tongued son of a bitch, Chip. Your boyish charm is your biggest asset. Don’t piss it away.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
“Please do.” She put her hand between my legs and gave me a reassuring pat. “Yeah, I was a virgin once upon a time. Isn’t that remarkable? And when I’m with you I’m a virgin all over again, and the whole sex business is, I don’t know, cleaner and hungrier and hornier and everything rolled into one. It takes me back, it really does.”