A was the first June in my life—almost a July, really at 10 years older. I was utterly inexperienced in matters of love, and much else, until instructed by A. I was 23 years old, just out of college with a B.A. degree in Liberal Arts, and no idea how to live a practical life. I had pretensions of being recognized for a minor poetic gift I did in fact possess, but this (ahem) cruel world offers little reward for such things. I was driving a taxi for a living, and I soon discovered, to my amazement, that many women see the young taxi driver, with his slender body and long, flying dark hair, as a kind of doctor, artist, shrink, authority figure, what have you. For a few fleeting minutes as you navigate the streets, you are the captain of the ship. To be honest, only one or two liaisons came from this source, but the few that did were firecrackers. So, one day, I was taking this 33-year-old woman home. She was divorced, had a child I never met (as was often the case in these affairs, amid their juggling of people and times to give us space), and lived in one of those huge apartment blocks that smell of Dry-Fluf and carpet cleaner.

How did this come about?

I recall the swirls of snow on the darkening streets as I took her from the school, where she taught Music (if that's not ironic; and maybe it's what made me think of the title of that dreary short story). How did it happen? She talked animatedly all the way. She was Italian, and beautiful in an understated, 'cute' girl next door kind of way. Oh, and this you must realize: once a young man finishes college, the blender of constant young chicks vanishes overnight. If he is smart and studies something for which society pays, and he makes a nice salary and circulates among offices in which many women work, then maybe a newer, lesser blender begins. After all, he is now more responsible, and his event horizon goes from 'the next moment' to 'tomorrow,' 'next year,' or even 'when I retire someday.' I was driving a taxi, and at a loss to share with anyone the meaning of the circles in Dante's Hell, or the underlying Weltschmerz of Waldo Gassoff, poet and longshoreman, and all the other important things on which I had written papers during my undergraduate years. When people asked, I sort of fibbed and said I had applied to graduate schools. I hadn't yet, at that point. A young man could not be more lost in life than I was during those years.

A was in control of the situation. She had a wry mouth and a sense of humor to match, and brazen brown eyes in a smooth oval face. I can still see her as she leaned over the seats with her arms crossed and her chin in her hands as she asked: "Would you like to have a drink with me?" Her insouciant grin gleamed in her olive skin.

It took me a moment or two to close my mouth, which had dropped open. I had several working hours yet to drive, and I couldn't think of having anything on my breath.

"You are a good responsible man," she said (was she teasing me? Of course).

"How about later?" I asked.

Blah, ...di Blah, ...di Blah, ...di Bloody Bla-Bla.

Skip to eleven o'clock that night. By now she knew more about me than I knew about her. Actually, I cared less about her background than she did about mine, to be honest. I was flying blind. She seemed like a nice person, and I had nothing better to do. She seemed 'older,' and I wasn't interested in her for that. So I was surprised when we were in this lounge around eleven. I got carded on the way in. She laughed. "You are tall, and thin, and good looking of course, but that thick dark hair and those wavy, flying curls, you look so damned young that it makes my mouth dry."

Skipping ahead some more to save time: We had one drink each, beer for me, some mucky looking ladies' thing with chocolate in it for her. We danced to this absolutely horrible band of Mediterranean-looking men in Mongolian-looking suits, playing the worst kind of lounge music imaginable. Understand that this was near a highway on/off ramp, and all sorts of brief encounters flickered on the movie screen of this hotel's existence. For her, it was a convenience because she lived within walking distance.

It was good to hold her, and I became interested. She had a body under that dress, a figure that was as smooth and soft as any girl's. I think I had an erection and a wet spot soon after, because part of my left pants leg stuck to my thigh. She cut us off after that one drink, and nursed us out into the lounge, which was less intimate. She told me once after: "Don't you get it? A woman tries you out. Sees how you act. If you're an animal. If you can't keep your hands off. If you are a wild man, and she's smart, you won't see her again." With that, she touched my nose, brushed a kiss on my lips, and swished away. She wore a purple ski parka which made her look athletic and young, and she wore a dark skirt that came to just above the knees, with some kind of grape-colored hose and then mahogany loafers. Very high school music teacher. There was, of course, the never-on-the-first-date rule, of which even I was aware, so I had patience and got a sense of where the game was headed. I mean, I had an inkling, or maybe let's say a hope. Here I was, just past 22, a veteran of plenty of college adventures with girls as young and inexperienced as myself. I was still experiencing things like blue balls and unplanned, early erectile launch. Smooth I wasn't.

Third time around, she adjusted the rules. We were dancing a slow dance that squeezed like toothpaste out of the sound system—a slow motion mazurka with yak butter. It was dark in there, and a ball twirled slowly in the ceiling sending glitter in all directions. I found myself looking into her eyes and falling in love, and starting to panic. This wasn't supposed to be happening.

I had a few friends in town, and I couldn't tell any of them I was seeing a woman with the earliest signs of crows' feet around her mouth and eyes. All I knew was, I had not gotten laid in months, and my loins were like panthers running across the veldt—directly at her. Here eyes were full of glitter and veiled desire, not to mention the lead singer's unintelligible moaning. I did what I had done each of the previous times—I slid my palms down the narrow isthmus of her waist, to feel the branching out of that river delta in whose channel I longed to blow my steam whistle—loudly, and often. On previous occasions, she would shove my hands away—no, roughly place them back on the fine and proper line of her waist. Don't think there weren't jaded and cynical eyes watching our every move like snipers across the rims of whiskey glasses in the dark recesses with their red plastic (torn) bench seats studded with brass tacks. This time, she responded by saying, "Let's go have one more drink."

Surprised at this change of vectors, I allowed her to lead me back to our own dark nook, where she ordered a 'little bit more interesting drink' for me. It was a Rusty Nail, which is a Drambuie with Scotch (insist on Chivas). One of those will rattle your yurt. Two... She looked at me with those amused, calculating eyes, and the pink lipstick on her wry mouth glistened: "You can't drive home yet. Why don't you come up to my place and I'll fix us coffee?" Good strategy, A. If I was aware of being finessed, I suppose I calculated and ended up not caring.

The equation was loaded in my favor (and hers, each for our own reasons). There was that long, brisk walk arm in arm, with chattering teeth, for neither of us felt fit to drive. It was cold, and wisps of dry snow swirled on frozen asphalt. The street lights looked Arctic and distant. By the time we reached her apartment block, our ears were numb and our lips blue. That's when I first smelled the Dry-Fluf and the carpet cleaners, which remain sexual excitants to this day. I'll skip the coffee and conversation. Actually, she made tea and put a little shot of rum in each. More strategy. We sat on the couch together, watching some musical variety show. Then the TV was off, and she was sitting closer. All I had to do was reach over and put my arm (hesitantly) over her shoulder, and she scooted close so she could snuggle against me. It amazed me that so ancient a woman could be so much like a college date.

The only sounds in her apartment were those of the refrigerator dropping ice cubes now and then, and distant movement of water in pipes. Oh, and grit hitting the windows as an occasional snow flurry kicked in. I like this part. The fumbling. The trembling. The ache and the desire. The help from her. Oh, but first, the kissing. It is a long meeting of tongues. We find that we are compatible kissers. This is important. It has to be just right, and this was.

We were in tune, in rhythm. Maybe her being musical helped. Our tongues worked against each other, left, right, top, bottom, as our bodies grew more horizontal and I maneuvered more on top. My hands wandered over the sweatered contours of her body, her small breasts, her taut stomach and full hips and thighs. She was voluptuous, ripe, needing. She maneuvered me like a big boat and got my anchor caught in her harbor.

So it turned out—a glance at the clock, which was close to one a.m., and the fact we both must be at work early—and she said something like "Let's relocate." That brought us to her bed, and, tired as I was, a stubborn insistence on getting under her flimsy (pink) silk night gown. "You have so much energy," she said as she pulled up her nightie, and I plunged upon that wonderland like a swimmer into an Olympic pool. And here's the critical thing, which makes this memoir worth telling. The woman had passion. After preliminaries—which included licking the soft pink nipples of her small, uneventful breasts—I pushed her knees back and rose against her like a bus parking.

She pulled me to her at the same time, hands around my buttocks, then helping my pointing prow through the gate. There was a momentary dryness, before her labia sweated themselves wet, instantly, and she barked with passion as she urged me on, or in. I slipped into that good sweet container that fit me like a body glove. I exulted as if I'd just been erected president. We were a great fit, A and I. We went to work the next morning, each of us with barely a few hours of sleep.

We met again the next evening (she was getting her little one babysat by grandma) and, after a nap, started in again. We could not get enough of each other. Understand that, until now, making love had seemed to me a matter of thrashing, passionately, yet, but thrashing like a swimmer who has not learned the strokes. You figure out the basic steps, if this were a dance, but you don't get past the bit of clinging together, swaying slowly, and turning eventually until you've gone 360. She had almost ten years on me. In that time, she had wed and divorced, and undoubtedly had more than one relationship. So it was now that she introduced me to a few new things. She brought out the rumba, the passion, and the poetry in me. When she lay there on her back, pulling her knees to her breasts to open the gate wide for me, I developed a kind of rock 'n roll of the hips, a mechanical jam-bam action like a windup toy. I loved the wideness of that basin under me, the richness from thigh to thigh, the wealth that opened before me.

She liked to play. She had fire and imagination, and she enjoyed letting me look up her skirt as she did dishes. She had a leather skirt she liked to wear for that.

We had fun together. I remember crawling into the kitchen and looking up her skirt and playfully biting one buttock that was palely visible in the shadows.

In the same vein, I remember walking in from a trip to the grocery store, blowing her a kiss, and starting to telephone a friend. Meanwhile, she was on her knees before me. She got my cock out and was sucking on it while massaging her breasts. Soon my conversation with the friend petered off as my voice grew faint and he said "are you okay?" while I said "call you later" and hung up. I closed my eyes and just stood there, enjoying the sensations while she licked my cock and my balls and pleasured herself.

When she couldn't stand it any longer, she pulled me down on her by my cock. As I got on my hands and knees over her in the small hallway containing the phone, between kitchen and living room, she held her labia apart with thumbs and forefingers and whispered "Get in, fuck me, get in, fuck me..." until I was in and fucking her and then she held me tightly by my buttocks and moaned, "Fuck me, Peter, fuck me," over and over again until she came. A few times, she told me she momentarily passed out as she came. I believe it. A and I were a recurring item for several years. We became what one calls 'fuck buddies' in time, when the initial passion cooled. It's more than that. We cared about each other a great deal, although her temper and my immaturity and the age difference wreaked their inevitable havoc.

Sometimes, when I was unable to come visit her, she would call me. I was always glad to talk, so she only had to ask a question or two about the arts, about history, and I would recite all that I had read. She would listen quietly, and sometimes even cry out in wonder. One time, I asked her a question, and she was silent. I grew impatient and said something unkind. She said, "No, no, just talk, talk to me, Peter, I want to hear your voice. You have the most wonderful, soothing voice. It's like listening to music..." So I went on talking, and pretty soon her cooing noises and gasps told me finally that she called me to masturbate to the sound of my voice. Now who could feel slighted by such a compliment?

She had an absent habit of lying on the couch watching television, and lifting her dress slowly to rub her clitoris with her middle finger. At first, in my naïveté, I thought she was just scratching an itch; well, she was, but a different kind. I don't think she was aware of doing this most of the time. She would be engrossed in watching some handsome man on television, and start rubbing herself. When she then held her breast, and sighed heavily, and occasionally licked her finger, I understood that she had become very turned on. She liked it when I would come over, lean over the back of the couch, and help her with my finger. Sometimes our fingers took worked together on opposite sides of her clitoris. Sometimes together we brought her to a little shuddering climax that way. We enjoyed each other's company for many months and played together every time we got together.

Since this is a celebration, I won't dwell on how or why relationships sour. Leave that to the sociologists and anthropologists who study us as if we were a race of chimps wearing designer clothing. I was at that time intent only on hopping on her bones, as they say, and the bones were more than eager to get hopped on.