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.
Corinne and I rehearsed the postures and movements, the choreography, of the vernal ceremonial, thus briefing Sandra on the succession of images she would be recording. Then we took off our shoes, left them in the hall outside, partook of a light repast, as Sir Walter Scott would say, and awaited the arrival of the bridal pair. We were excited and eager, our romantic aspirations aroused, determined to imbue the occasion with meaning and love.
4
We heard Edith and Cynthia came in through the front door and leave their shoes in the hall. Then in they came, hand in hand, dressed, as planned and as Corinne and I were, in summer frocks, without underwear. The four of us crowded into the shower together and began our thorough ablutions. Each of us washed and rinsed the others, soaping all breasts, probing all crevices and cracks. The one foreskin was eased back and the organ gently laved. It did not erect, because that would have been premature, and despite all the handling of nipples and vulvas there was no arousal. We were too intent on fulfilling the marital mission.
We emerged to stand on the towels Sandra had laid down and dried each other off. Then we put on the costumes for the first tableau and took up our positions. Cynthia, in dark drapery, Zephyrus, or Zephyra, breasts exposed, her was holding onto Edith's, Chloris's left breast, beneath her arm, her body clearly exposed through the sheer muslin we had mocked up and lightly amped to cling. To her right I was posed as Flora, clad in flowery curtaining, and to my right stood Corinne in the nightdress we had engineered to fit her breasts as Aphrodite's are held in the Botticelli. Draped over her right arm and across her thighs and pudenda was a swathe of red material. We held the pose while Sandra sketched and then we varied it a little, for the fabric concealing Zephyra's lower body and thighs parted to show her half-hard cock forking at Chloris's left bum-cheek. This was obviously erotic, but it was as much aspirational as sexual, the Spring Wind instigating the metamorphosis of Nymph to Goddess.
It was time to move on. Edith, Cynthia and I came off the set to change into our Three Graces filmy nylon, as sheer as we could find, and move into our dance formation. It was my bottom that at this stage was on display, somewhat larger than the original. Corinne remained as before, posed with right hand raised in blessing. Again, Sandra's pencil captured our essence. Then Corinne moved away to change into the Hermes pose, the red material now his costume, gathered over his right shoulder and draped across his lower body and thighs, but open across the chest, magnificently bosomed. We held the postures while Sandra sketched, completing the first part of the operation. We were now to extend the allegory, to move through the sanction of the union to the consummation.
5
Corinne resumed her Aphrodite costume and her central position, while we Graces began to circle, so to first Edith's, then Cynthia's bottom held the central spot and our breasts began to be visible, and, as Sandra sketched, we became more explicitly naked and sexual. And at the agreed moment Aphrodite threw the red drapery over us, and as she swept it away again we whisked away each other's diaphanous covering and held the pose for Sandra to depict.