I’m Still Trying to Figure Out What It All Means — Part 3

Or, when it rains, it pours.

So, during this period after I returned from England, Lesley and I happily fornicated for about four months. I was skeptical about her characterization of our relationship as ‘friends who fuck’. I did get the distinct impression that an eventual marriage was her hidden agenda and that she was using the sex as a strategy to get me to the altar.

Her easy-going willingness to provide physical pleasure at any time and without any fuss seemed to me to be designed to somehow prove to me she was a woman worth having and that this kind of behavior would always exist if I went all the way down the garden lane with her. That I doubted very much. As an old Japanese proverb puts it, “A caught fish needs no bait’.

The only act that she objected to and that only after the fact, occurred one night at my parents' house in the kitchen. I undid her jeans, pulled them down, turned her around, bent her over the sink, and took her from behind. It was all part of my revenge for High School. Yeah, I know it’s petty, but boy, did it feel good to take her in that way. Her objection stemmed from the potentially embarrassing situation that would have arisen if either of my parents would have walked in on us and not to the actual act, so I had to promise not to fuck her in my kitchen again.

However, I knew her strategy wasn’t going to work because I knew her to be an artful and not very transparent liar. She lied about many many things and did so with great facility. I really had a sense of mistrust about her and was very wary of what exactly might or might not have been going on in her mind and its potential manipulations.

Things were going along in this vein until the week of my birthday and as I subtitled this chapter, when it rains, it pours. On the Friday before my birthday, I ended up having a highly diverting one-night stand with a graduate teaching assistant from the economics department. She was seven years older than I was, so that got a high score in my male lizard brain.

Then Lesley gave me a nice birthday fuck on the following Tuesday. We also got together on Wednesday, but things seemed a bit stale and a little stilted. As I had mentioned before, she had some guy that she knew coming from England for a month and wanted to spend the time fucking him. She asserted that I’d certainly be able to get plenty of action from girls at the university and would do just fine in her absence.

And that was almost correct. A couple of days earlier, outside the Howard Johnson on US 1 and Guilford Road, I had run into another girl that Les and I had been with in German class in High School. I hadn’t seen her in five years, and she suggested I should get in touch. She lived in my neighborhood, a simple walk from my house. Let’s call her Kate.

So, on Thursday evening I went to call on her. When she opened the door, she said, “Hi. My parents are in Michigan, come on in”! I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I’m getting laid again tonight’. And sure enough, that’s what happened, although she had to work through a certain amount of angst first about whether her sister would be able to hear us or not.

After we had had sex, I was contemplating going down on her and then having a second round, but something held me back. It was just a feeling, a little bit of intuition creeping in. I thought she may be too vulnerable to engage in a casual relationship, so I refrained. We spent a lot of time together that summer before I left for Colorado, but didn’t have any further sexual intimacy. Unfortunately, she concluded I didn’t think she was any good in bed.

I felt I was being responsible towards her emotional wellbeing by not taking full sexual advantage of her. I could have continued fucking her as much as I wanted that summer while juggling the other women in my life because she had that giving personality that so many women get brainwashed into, that if you are a nice girl, you need to do what the man asks and accommodate his desires, even if as a good Catholic girl you’re not really supposed to be having sex outside of marriage. But that drive to be giving and empathetic and to care trumps considerations of unlawful intercourse and besides it’s only a venal and not a mortal sin, so God will forgive her for that particular transgression.

We had an argument about this evening many years later. She said that I had used her. My position was that I could have used her all summer if I had wanted to and didn’t. She said that I should have come to that conclusion before I had fucked her. I said that I didn’t get the insight into her personality and emotional makeup until I had been intimate with her and that it was unreasonable for her to expect me to have 20–20 foresight.

We had been good friends in High School and afterwards and ended up having an on again and off again affair that lasted over 40 years, so I think I was right not to have continued having sex with her at that time. In any case, what happened on the Friday and Saturday night following our brief encounter intervened, otherwise we might have ended up together.

That’s another story. Ultimately, forty-three years later, she betrayed what we had built between us over the better part of our lifetimes for a very selfish reason, which will have to be the central narrative of another story.

Before I get back to the main story, I have to digress briefly. I did do a couple of wicked things with Kate and Lesley and bearing in mind that I had had sex with Lesley on Tuesday and Wednesday and Kate on Thursday that week in 1979 when we were all 24 years old, I was able to do the reverse with both of them 12 years later on subsequent days. And they were both married at that time. I know that a lot of you might think that was terrible and unwarranted egotistical behavior on my part, but I don’t care. It was a tremendous coup and a strong affirmation of the ongoing desire that existed in the relationships that I had with these women. Either one of them could have ended up as my wife, but as it turned out, we all married other people. And this whole post is about roads not taken.

Sunday night, Kate and I were parked in her car drinking wine, and she said that she was very much at loose ends and didn’t know what to do with herself. I thought of saying, “Dr. Glenn has the medicine to cure that. Lots and lots of oral sex”! Although it didn’t happen that night, I was her first. As I said, two roads diverged in a wood.

Find all chapters here.