took a scented pine bath and then sat naked in his lap in an armchair with a view of Park Lane and Hyde Park. He kissed me, fondled my breasts and stroked my thighs. Then, after I had stretched out on cool sheets, he unbuckled his thick leather belt and dropped his jeans to reveal a healthy erection. Lying down beside me he gathered me to him.
I whispered, “Please, let me do this my way.”
“Sure, baby,” he murmured. “Anything you want.”
I flung my leg over him and pounded my clitoris against his muscled thigh, moving slowly at first and then gaining momentum. It took a long while. Sweat ran from between my breasts and under my armpits before the tiny organ exploded and a feeling of relaxation flooded my thighs. Although I had virtually masturbated myself to orgasm, this was the first time I had ever come with a man. I felt exhilarated. “I did it,” I cried as I fell back panting.
“Good for you,” he laughed as he turned me on my back. Opening my legs, he put his cock inside me and galloped until he came.
The musician was the first of many men I knew that summer. My experience with him freed me. I became regularly orgasmic and my appetite for experiment sharpened as I wandered through Europe, in Rome, in the elevator of a hotel, I got off on the same floor with an American doctor and returned to his room with him. Straddled above me with his cock deep in my throat, he gently peeled back my labia and licked me to orgasm.
In Milan I showered with a Italian financier who had me bend over the sink while he inserted a soaped index finger into my anus and massaged my clitoris until I came. I learned to come in every position with a French poet (who could stay erect for long periods) simply by rubbing my clitoris against the base of his cock. By the time I left Europe I was a different person—no longer the unskilled housewife I had been when I arrived. But even though I liked all the men I knew that summer, I didn't want to continue seeing any of them. I had done what I needed to do and wanted to take a break from sex for a while. But that September, a week after I returned from Europe, Max Perry began calling me.
In the beginning I told him I wasn't interested. Over the years I'd seen him with dozens of women, never with any one for very long. The detachment that made him so sexually exciting carried over into the rest of his life and made him an unreliable lover. In an affair with Max Perry two things would be certain: it would be good, and it would be short.
“Max,” I repeated in November, “I'm really not interested.” I said the same thing in January and then, on an evening in February, he answered me back.
“Oh, for God's sake,” he exclaimed, “I'm not interested in you either. But we're old friends. I've known you for years. Why can't we have dinner?”
I hesitated for a moment and then decided he was right.
“Okay,” I shrugged. “Why not?”
I met him at a small French restaurant not far from his club in the Village. We sat side by side in a banquette. The sleeve of his velour shirt brushed my arm, and beneath my silk skirt I could feel his thigh pressed against mine. He had just returned from a week of fishing in the Caribbean and his face was deeply tanned. Involuntarily I began to wonder who he had taken with him. After dinner, outside in the cold air of Bleecker Street, I did not want to leave him. With a wet snow falling I leaned toward him with my fur coat unbuttoned and my mouth open, but he hailed a cab and kissed me chastely on the forehead. “Just friends,” he gloated as he paid the driver and gave him my uptown address.
I waited a week before I gave in and called him. “I don't want to be your friend anymore,” I confessed.
He lived in a penthouse apartment in the West Village. After he let me in he stretched out on the velvet sofa with his hands clasped behind his head. I sat opposite him in an armchair.
“So you don't want to be friends,” he