IN THE KNICKERS OF TIME CH.06: PRIMAVERA
By Norma Jane
1
In the mid-1908s, I met Edith, widowed after a long, loving partnership with Ailsa. As someone accustomed to regular sex, she was frustrated, and needing to grieve through 'the lovely feeling,' as she expressed it. I was able to help, and sought to extend her sexual education. A man ejaculated on her breasts, in the studio of Corinne, who had a side-line in painting erotic pictures. Edith's experience was next widened through love-making with Corinne and me. In Chapter 4, Edith met Cynthia, a transwoman who had never had sex, but who needed to lose her virginity with a virgin, which Edith technically was. They bonded at once and consummated the liaison. After which, fired up to frenzy, Cynthia needed to make use of Corinne and me, and the chapter ended with Edith and Cynthia leaving together in each other's knickers and me giving Corinne clitorylingus. In Chapter 5, however, first Edith and then Cynthia came to ask my advice, because Cynthia's priapic demands on Edith were causing strain in the loving relationship. I advised that a better balance in the active-passive roles should smooth the way. Whether this was effective is now the topic of the last instalment of their story.
2
Several weeks past and Corinne and I trusted the couple was happy and settled. She hoped, too, that they would be available for some intimate portraiture, because she was planning to depict them at the point of mutual orgasm, including every minute detail, though it was to be not simply erotic but moving and romantic.
Meantime she was exploiting the Arcadian, pastoral nymphs and shepherds theme, although in her large canvas it is shepherdesses, some trans, nymphs, some trans, and satyresses, all trans. I suspect this scene of prodigious coupling, set in a sunlit landscape of fields, woods and meandering streams will lead to a future fantasy by Norma Jane.
Eventually, there was a call from Edith and Cynthia, asking to come to discuss a special service they hoped we would undertake. And what they wanted was, in effect, for us to marry them. This was years before same-sex marriage was legalised, and, of course, unions involving transwomen are still legally problematic. But they wished to devise and move through their own ceremony, or 'enactment' would be better, because the concept was to move through the successive scenes so wonderfully portrayed in Botticelli's 'Primavera,' extending and adapting them after the manner of Corinne's pastiching other works of art. They also aspired to having Corinne paint their version of the great work. And since she was to participate in the enactment another artist would be needed to make the sketches for Corinne to work up. What follows is, therefore, an account of the event. But first I must give a little lecture on what is going on in that magnificent symbolical-allegorical painting. Which may readily be called on screen by any search engine for you to follow my elucidation.
It is a grand strip-cartoon, but with all the frames shown at once, and while superman and wonder woman begin their exploits in the leftmost box, Spring (Primavera) begins on the right. Where (1) Zephyrus (the Spring Wind) is fumbling the Nymph Chloris, causing her to issue flowers with her breath and become (2) Flora (Goddess of Spring), and she in turn scatters blossoms and blooms of the season at (3) Aphrodite (Goddess of Sex and Fecundity), attended by (4) the Three Graces, dancing in joyful celebration, in their diaphanous shifts. To the left stands (5) Hermes, representing the spiritual dimension of the succession of the seasons, being the Psychopompos, who conducts the souls of the dead to the afterlife. Overhead flies Blind Cupid, firing his dart at the Grace showing her bum.
The Graces are the subject of thousands of paintings and sculptures, usually depicted naked, hands or arms linked, dancing, bottoms and breasts akimbo.
This was, then, the story we were to act, and through the acting solemnise and celebrate the union of the loving couple.
3
It was a warm August day and Corinne and I prepared the studio, tidying away all painting equipment but one easel and sketching gear, sweeping and polishing the floor, then spreading it with as many carpets and blankets as we could muster, and throwing over them green sheets on which were stitched as many flowers cut from fabric as we had been able to make. We scoured out the adjacent shower cubicle. We laid ready on the couch, pushed to the wall, the costumes we would wear, and as we finished, the artist who would record the occasion, arrived. That she was Sandra, to copy Sandro (Botticelli), seemed appropriate, although she probably did not resemble the great Florentine artist, since she was six feet three inches tall and sinuously lean in build, with tumbling curls and ringlets of iron-grey hair.