She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one’s attention caught by another, take it down…saying “I must read that, too, when I’ve the time…” — Evelyn Waugh
Chapter 47: Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes
Reviewing my narrative I realize belatedly Harrisburg was one of my life’s lodestones: the last place I was a real newspaperman, with friends there who remembered. We used to say our town was central to everything from Yankee Stadium and Broadway to Mencken’s Baltimore and the Block, from DC’s monuments to Boston’s Scollay Square. It became my portal to the East Coast.
DC highway conferences sponsored by the federal government allowed me time for visits to the Pennsylvania copy editor I invited out for elk season after his son’s suicide, and the woman I recruited straight from college as first female in our newsroom. She had moved on to TV news, been in the thick of Three-Mile Island coverage. The three of us would eat crab cakes at an old hangout and catch each other up. She asked how it felt to be Big Brother’s vassal. I said hey, show a little respect, I’m his spokesman, and they laughed.
After I lost my career and Hollis found an agent for my books, I met the triple-doc in Harrisburg. When that ended with the New Jersey debacle, I returned there to catch my cross-country train. My copy-editor buddy, like Hollis already on his third wife, seemed happy. VDTs had replaced typewriters and copy pencils in the newsroom. Those still there from my time had grown old. Hell, so had I. The former college-girl was a mature TV executive who said she no longer counted years by remembered headlines. When I alluded to my bewilderment about the behavior of the triple-doc, she offered a keen insight: writers expect real people be consistent as characters we create, and should know better.
When I broke my trip home from Florida in Harrisburg, I thought of her insight about real people versus characters when I drove down to Gettysburg to see the vegan poet. Her online persona was romantic, but in real life she fancied bondage. Home in her farmhouse she had a third personality: mild-mannered bucolic in straw sun hat. We talked writing, baseball — she was an Orioles fan — and the Civil War; she had a Yankee-general ancestor. She fed me vegan food my brother would approve. With kinky sex off the menu, her near-virginal diffidence in bed wilted John Thomas again. But we parted on friendly terms.
Once home I bore down on my novel, and sought online writer’s forums where the literate banter reminded me of newsroom days. A British Columbia woman changing careers — accountant to romance writer! — told me secrets she said she’d never told her husband. She sneered at romance-book guidelines as dully formulaic, and her erotic plots blended secret yearnings with Venusian hunger for the zipless fuck immortalized by Erica Jong. Upholding the partying reputation of Canadian wives, she organized a Seattle drinking party for forum participants within driving distance, and talked me into attending.
When we gathered at an open-air beer garden, mostly young females outnumbering males, she seemed aloof introducing her husband about whom I knew more than he’d guess. She invited me to a Ballard house party later that day, saying we’d have time to really talk there. But her strange aloofness made me uneasy, and I didn’t go.
All of which is preamble to the woman with Elizabeth Taylor eyes. Dark-haired, closer to my age, wearing a silky violet jumpsuit displaying serious curves, she had a predatory air — focused on the young women. She noticed me notice her, and turned those violet eyes on me — like being zapped with a laser. Her attire perfectly complemented those amazing eyes. And you knew she knew it. This was Natasha, whom my Canadian friend called “interesting…”
“Tell me who you are — your screen name,” she commanded. I did.
“Ish! I hoped you’d be here! Get a look at the real deal.”
“Dis is de real Ish, not Virtualish,” I said. How juvenile.
But she flashed a smile. “Biiig Ish! Satisfactory. Better than satisfactory!” Her erotic force was a headwind strong enough to lean into. The same force she directed at the nearly hypnotized young women. She linked arms with two of them. “Ish, we’re off to have some girl time. Stella says she’s got you dated up for a house party. But see me online — I really want to talk to you now.”
I caught hell from Stella online for skipping the second party. Natasha commiserated in her unique fashion: said she didn’t think the Canadians were into wife-sharing parties like she once enjoyed in Olympia…wait, Olympia?
My Olympia, where I worked fifteen damn years with no clue about such things? Yep, Olympia. Maybe, she teased, it was because I was not yet into computers. Group-sex participants were primarily data-processing types. Not all computer people are nerds, you know. Remembering a sociopath redhead with a drug-dealing sideline, I did know. But still…plain-vanilla Olympia?
“Data processing, DP!” she said reminiscently. “In more ways than one…” Did I want to hear about when her husband gave her to two men and lovingly spread her cheeks for the top guy? Let me call you — so you can hear how excited I got with the whole group watching when my husband claimed my mouth for the trifecta…I did hear. I couldn’t believe it. But her seductive voice resonated with truth as she masturbated in the telling.
She sent me logs of cyber-seductions of bored wives looking for a new thrill. It was hot stuff. She was a damned good writer who left them swooning. Then she invited me to lunch at a remote crossroads cafe equidistant between us. In person our conversation was circumspect, while those Elizabeth Taylor eyes twinkled. She was working on a fictionalized autobiography of her escapades — long before I envisioned my own Iliad — and would like to read some of it to me. She surprised me by reaching across the table to squeeze my hand. “Let’s go somewhere I can kiss you without causing a scene…”
We wound up on a park bench in a small logging town. I really hadn’t known what to expect. Now I wished I wasn’t jaded and depressed. That I’d known her in Olympia, back when I actually had a libido.
Rascal memory offered up my first violet-eyed woman — the newspaper heiress in Georgia I never fucked thirty years ago. This one’s kisses promised a different outcome. No damn wonder Burton never got enough of Taylor.
She surprised me again by being reluctant for me to go home, and asking reassurance that not consummating on a first date didn’t mean I wouldn’t come back. First uncertainty she’d shown. She wistfully said it was youthful fear of rejection she’d never been able to shake, something I remembered all too well.
Eventually she did read me passages from her book — both of us naked in her bed. Literately and erotically, it dripped sex from a liberated woman’s view: sexy as Grace Metalious, candid as Ms. XX Pizan’s feminist icons. She detailed the spider-like preparations of Modern Woman ready to prowl: ensure the web (home) is clean and organized for seduction. Polish and anoint the body. Select attire (like the violet jumpsuit) to titillate. Patrol likely venues…
She described the approach of the hapless fly, who thinks the whole thing is his idea. The “accidental” touches. The adoring glances. The compliments on his wonderfulness, nay uniqueness. H’mm, she was describing our first lunch.
Her writing was worth gold to any male fly chancing to read it. The finesse required to land him in sporting fashion so he takes the hint and steps up. The loss of feminine patience if the fly dilly-dallies trying to work up to the overwhelming question. The nag of doubt: was this a dry run on a prospect who wimps out? Must she discard finesse to move this dithering clown to the end game? (As she had moved this dithering clown.)
For all the erotic poetry of her language, her book was a fist in the face of romantic pretension. It dramatized the difference between reality and male fantasy about thoughts behind the makeup, beneath the perfume.
For the first time since Paris, I received instruction in cunnilingus. Accomplished that way herself, she’d hiss: ”once you have your lips on the little man in the boat, don’t let go! Stop teasing me and get to it!” She was undeterred by the recurrence of my inability to maintain satisfactory erections. With her talented mouth she unselfishly coaxed eruptions from my flagging member.
Her experiences had left her, if anything, more jaded than me. Sometimes her only release came with furious self-pleasuring as I held her and nibbled her nipples. It was a melancholy joining of two jaded souls past their prime. Her writing certainly rounded out my Venusian education. Later I was accepted for a prestigious summer-long writing seminar, and lost touch with her but for an occasional email.
The one I remember was a year after the writing seminar. Viagra had hit the market. Never one to mince words, she asked if it helped. When I said yes, she suggested using it with an appreciative woman my age — her. But she had secured a live-in lover, another writer. She seemed content, and menage a trois was not my style. I never learned if she found a publisher. I hoped so. The male world could use her candid writing.
