I'd known I wanted to have sex since I was 12. However, with me the gap between wanting and doing was about as wide as any adolescent could make it. Even through college my sole sexual experience was with my left hand. There were no girls at the men's college I went to, and at the mixers I never got much more than a sweet kiss. After graduation I got a job in New York City and was really on my own, with an apartment and some money, I decided that I had to start living.
I took an evening assertiveness training class and learned one major truth: it is easy to get where you want if you ask.
Harriet and I worked in the same ad agency, me in graphics, she in creative. While we weren't on the same end of the floor, we met occasionally in the lunch room. A couple of times we stood in line at the microwave and exchanged small talk.
At the weekly accounts meeting, my boss said he was shifting me to a message campaign.
"The account needs quick response, and that's your strength," he said. "It's going to be an evolving campaign, so you and the creative team will have to work quickly when the time comes. There's already a creative team in place. I want you to make this campaign sing!" He always talked that way but he was serious.
Harriet was the head of the creative team. She outlined the problem.
"The client wants subway ads, but what she needs is a print campaign. The budget is the same but media buying gets us more eyeballs for a lot less money in the free weeklies than in the subways, because they deliver the target more efficiently. So we can spend some of the budget on a rough-and-tumble PR person."
It took her almost two weeks to convince the client, but she came around. The PR guy got the client the free press that set up the print ads, and we had a winner.
The night we finished the last ad, everybody crashed and went home, except Harriet and me.
"Man, that was rough," she said. "Let's relax tonight. I'll buy dinner and you can do the movie." She knew that I was new to the city while she was a native. Since she had worked at the agency for three years to my eight months, she also knew I made less money. I was grateful, both for the attention and for the split.
The conversation at dinner wandered from business to my newness in New York. By the end of the meal she had volunteered to show me around the "real" New York, the neighborhoods, the jazz clubs, and the little theaters.
The next two Saturdays she wore me out going from museums to galleries to theatres. I learned the difference between the East Village and the West Village, the East Side and the West Side. She always made a point of ending the day with my buying us dinner at a small, inexpensive ethnic restaurant.
On the third Saturday we ended up in a Greek restaurant in her neighborhood. As we got up to leave, I asked her if I could go to her apartment. A soft expression came over her face and she said, "You're a nice guy and if I weren't gay I'd like to have a relationship with you."
I was stunned, both by her directness and by the concept of a woman homosexual, which was not something I'd even ever thought about.
"But we'll go there and talk."
She had a nice two-bedroom place in an expensive building. Plied by drambuie and kind but persistent probing, I unburdened myself about my life, a conversation I'd never had outside the walls of my head. Before long I was telling her everything about my not-so-interesting past and my yearning to start living, including having a relationship, love, and sex.
I finished up in a flourish.
"Since you like women," I said, "will you to teach me about how to attract and please a woman?"
"That's so sweet, but how I attract a woman and how a man attracts a woman are two very different things.
"But I like the idea of being your cicerone. It would be a real challenge. So many men are pigs about how they approach and treat women, gay or straight.
"How can I help?" she mused, out loud but to herself. She straightened herself on the couch and leaned back.
"My personal history may get in the way. When I was in college, I struggled about whether I was gay or not, I had sex with two guys. There was the thrill of the chase and the giving in, but ultimately I didn't find it fulfilling. Only with another woman have I really begin to know my body and find enjoyment in pleasuring and being pleasured."
"Look," I said, "consider me an act of charity if you want to, but I've got nowhere else to turn. I've gone to bars, attended college alumni mixers, wandered through the big museums looking like I cared. I appear needy, and I am, but I don't know what to do." This was the boldest I'd ever been.
"Let me think about it. Pencil me in for your place on Saturday after lunch. I'll let you know by Wednesday if I think I can do it."
She arrived around 2, armed with a shopping bag. She explained that she had thought a lot about what I needed to know and how she was going to teach me.
"Let's get started. Take off your clothes."
While this was the opening scene of one of my fantasies, it quickly dissolved as she made it clear that I was the only one getting naked. I stripped and she looked intently at me, walking in a circle around me.
"You don't take very good care of your presentation," she said. "You have a nice enough body but your pubic hair is overgrown, your pits are raggedy, and you need to keep your beard and head trimmed better. Also, change your underarm deodorant."
She took a bedsheet out of her bag, spread it on my bed, and brought out a pair of barber scissors and a comb.
"Lay down," she commanded. Harriet then proceeded to correct all the hair imperfections she had noticed. I got an erection, which she completely ignored, and it went away.
As she barbered me, she kept up a running commentary, telling me that a woman makes decisions about her companion from the beginning.
"No one's perfect, except in our ads, right? And we know how much trouble we go to airbrush out any imperfection. Your responsibility is to take advantage of what you have and package it in the most appealing way you can.
"Okay, now get dressed."
She checked out my closet and dismissed most everything in it except for my jeans.
"I've made a list of important characteristics and rated you honestly. Your conversational skills are good. Your posture is excellent. Your manners are excellent. Your work habits are good, though you keep a messy desk. But your self-confidence is weak.
"You can't have self-confidence if you don't have experience. From what you told me the other night, you have little experience with women and what you have had was pretty lame.
"Soooooo," she strung it out, "I'm going to assume that you need to start all over again, as though you are in junior high school.
"Which means learning how to kiss."
I had assumed that we would not be getting physical, but that turned out to be wrong. She sat down next to me on the bed and told me to kiss her the best way I knew how. I started out with a lip lock, sucking in. She said that was fine. Then she kissed me on the neck, flicked my ear lobe with her tongue, and returned to my lips and stuck her tongue in my mouth! I responded with my tongue and we tongue-wrestled.
"You're an okay kisser," she said. "Now I want you to undress me."
As my hands rushed to unbutton her work shirt and yank it out of her pants, she smacked me on the side of my head.
