|
Prolog: Lucky Young Men & Women
Into many a lucky young man's life comes a just slightly older woman—and into her life comes a younger man. It is a unique and important relationship that leaves its tender mark on each for life.
He is around 20, a Spring. She is two to ten years his senior, still quite young. If he is Spring, she is Summer. He thinks of her as older—forbidden fruit, the Establishment, the possessor of knowledge and rituals he has not even dreamed of. She brings a wisdom and erotic experience (or curiosity). Each is a lock, and the other the key.
He steps through a mysterious door into the delightful garden of that amazing, more mature angel and her secret knowledge. She does much to initiate him into full adult sexuality when younger girls had not a clue—or, having escaped an pleasureless marriage, maybe she comes to him like an innocent, an empty cup thirsting to be filled with the wildness of the young berry.
All the doors are open to a carefree, lusty involvement with virtually no strings attached. For many a Summer it is a flawed relationship that she will remember through rose-colored glasses as the most romantic and lustful of her life. For the Spring, it is often the wildest sexual experience of his life, and he will never forget her. She may be a cool and skilful player, or she may fall in love and get hurt when he runs. There are risks for both, but anyone who has had a good relationship of this nature knows how special and unique it can be.
If she is wise, she will avoid getting involved with an abusive Spring. The last thing she needs is more sadness or ugliness in her life. If she picks carefully, she will have, however briefly, a sort of giant teddy bear toy she can hop in bed with, in a relationship where she is largely in control. She will first put her Spring through a testing process before getting too involved—she may invite her Spring to dinner with friends, and get some third-party opinions. She may walk with him down a dark street or a remote corner of the mall, to see if he displays any predatory or undesirable traits. If she intends to sleep with him, she'll adhere to the not-on-the-first-date rule, or maybe a rule that says goodnight kiss on the first date, light petting on the second, romp on the third. A Spring worth his salt will respect her pacing, and show some class by being patient and not pawing her.
This book is my erotic memoir. Both I and my Summers, seen in these pages, are still in the blush of youth, a seen from the perspective of the now much older man I have become, who looks backward in time at a very different person he was long ago. I'll have more to say about this, later, but briefly. I make no excuses for who I was, nor how I lived. I am grateful I could share those wonderful long-ago moments with the Summers who allowed me in their most intimate gardens.
Summer is often the most alluring, primal, and sexually gratifying event in a Spring's life. The affair may last a few months, or a year or so at most, but it leaves its imprint on both for the rest of their lives. In a sense, she is the standard by which he gauges all his later amatory experiences. He may leave her, for any number of reasons—he often does love her, truly and deeply, in his muddled manner, but he may dump her because society still does not readily accept the older woman/younger man commitment—or she may decide to move on, when she has tired of playing, when she has healed from her bad time, when she starts to need a man of means who is ready to commit.
My stories are from a period in my early to mid-twenties, when a year or a few years makes her the 'older woman.' Maybe there are guys who go on living in this mode beyond their mid-twenties, but I know nothing of that, and I know nothing of May/December.
During that phase of my life, I was still living life in a chaotic, primal fashion. I lived from day to day, month to month, job to job, place to place, woman to woman. I had finished college—had a B.A. in Liberal Arts, was beginning to pick up the thread of Graduate School. I chose not to teach, and stayed out of academe. There was not a ready paycheck for what I had studied. I could not offer to Summers any prestige or high pay—usually she did better in those things than I. The mere mention of such matters might make one Summer laugh, or another nod sympathetically.
Aside from some amount of immature self-centeredness, I was a charming and kind enough guy. I didn't have a car, being an urban animal adept at getting around the city on foot or by public transportation, although I worked as a taxi driver at some points. I was a rather lost soul. I careened from one affair to the next. I was blessed by a reasonably cheerful nature, a certain quiet confidence, a mixture of integrity tempered by total cowardice in the face of any sort of commitment. I had the blush of youth on my cheeks and the taut, trim lines of a twenty-something body. One Summer told me I was the youth in her dream who bicycles, sails, plays guitar on the sea wall while his hair flies in the wind. She, as a rather typical example, did not let me take over her life, nor did she take over mine, but she made a niche between child care, work, and social commitments for a certain amount of candles-by-the-tub, walks-in-the-park, romps-in-the-hay romance.
This is a loving memoir of a time and its women. I was never intentionally unkind or thoughtless (although the nature of being the younger man in a woman's life makes it almost inevitable). Nor is this a series of prurient titillations, though it fondly recalls, in explicit detail, the minutiae, the sounds, feelings, and smells, of each relationship. I remember each woman with love and respect, although in varying degrees and ways. Some deserve more than others. Some cannot be thanked enough. In each case, it is a true portrait of a moment in time, of lives entwined however briefly, and deserves to be captured on the photo film of memory.
There was a short story I once wrote. It was called 'Piano Music.' It was about a young man living in a large house with many other boarders in a New England city. It was a story about how the young man was lonely and drifted from job to job, from one lone meal to the next, just to be close to the pretty waitresses for a short while. Lest you think this is a rake's tale, think again. The younger man lives his own life, most of it actually separate from his dalliances with the older woman. The story 'Piano Music,' is dry and autumnal as one of those Swedish movies in which the actors do nothing but talk and make bored or tragic faces while walking along dismal canals under black and white skies.
In that house lived a piano player I never saw, probably a university student, who practiced night and day. He or she was quite good, and on some days the concertos just rolled out under the hammered keys in great swirls, while on other days the notes were as sparse as the distances between crows on a telephone wire in winter. It might be Chopin or Satie or Pharao Sanders. Those poignant arpeggios and solo notes rolled around the bleak corridors of that great empty house the way October leaves roll and circle on gray streets. The younger man is attracted to his older young woman because it is the intersection of his hunger and thirst with theirs, maybe in a house just like that.
|
