In Chapter one our heroine, Kate, a successful businesswoman turning 60, has asked herself a troubling question. Is she a slut? Thus began a series of chapters in which she describes to her husband Henry (her fourth husband) her life beginning with her late teen years and her sexual activities at each stage. The portion in italics in each story is her recollection of some memorable sexual experience from her past. In this chapter Kate, now employed in an entry-level position with a major publisher, takes an author to a book signing and they squeeze in a nooner before the signing.
"So what did the Professor and Halili think of your new love? Or was it a one time thing?" asked Henry.
I stood and walked naked over to the counter in our loft to refill our coffee cups. "Oh, I never told them about Howard, and I never told Howard about them."
I laughed as I walked back. "I just fucked all three of them for the whole school year. I was a very busy girl. It was a miracle I graduated."
"Now, correct me if I'm wrong," Henry asked, but didn't this Howard fellow become your first husband? How did that work out with the Professor and Halilli?"
"Oh, they left for Harvard about the time I got married, so they never knew. The Professor was a really big deal in English literary circles, and lots of universities were willing to bid for him. "Besides," I laughed, "I have to admit, getting married was a bit of an accident. It certainly wasn't the great white wedding. I don't think my mother ever forgave me for the way I got married the first time."
"What? Were you pregnant? I thought you told me you couldn't get pregnant?" There was a tone of panic in his voice.
"Relax Henry. There is zero chance that I was pregnant then and less than zero chance that I am going to get pregnant now. For God's sake, I'm sixty-two years old. It was the marriage that was an accident."
"So how did that work?"
"Well, Howard liked to gamble, and he fancied himself a card counter. One day about six months into our relationship, he announced that he and some friends were going to Las Vegas for a long weekend and that they were going to make a fortune playing blackjack by counting the cards. One of his buddies had a big Cadillac convertible—you know the ones with tail fins that had as much metal in them as a Mini-Cooper has in the whole body today. I had never been to Las Vegas, so I thought, what the hell and agreed to go.
As it turned out, they wanted me along as the designated driver. The guy who owned the Caddie had a baggie of drugs that would have made a pharmaceuticals salesman feel inadequate. So I found myself behind the wheel of a '68 Caddie convertible tearing across the Nevada desert at something slightly in excess of 100 mph, with three guys in the back seat who were hallucinating.
Sounds like "
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
," said Henry, referring to Hunter Thompson's best-selling book about a drug-addled trip to Vegas.
"Exactly," I said. "The first time I read that book, I wondered if Hunter Thompson had been one of the three amigos with me in the Cadillac. I never could remember who the other two were besides Howard."
"So you were partaking from the magic drug baggie, too?"
"No, no. But I drank a shit load of beer as we rolled across the desert, and once we got to Vegas I pretty much killed a fifth of good Scotch. No drugs, but enough booze to make my memory at best highly unreliable and, for some parts of the trip, non-existent."
"So okay, you went to Las Vegas and tied one on. Hardly an original strategy. But how did the marriage thing work?"
"Well, the guys were so fucked up that they could hardly play blackjack, much less count cards effectively, so they didn't take long to run out of money. But somehow, on what should have been his last few hands, Howard scored big. He raked the chips off the table and announced to the world that he was going to marry me."
"The rest of what happened is a bit of blur, but when I woke up late the next afternoon, I had a gigantic fake diamond on the third finger of my left hand and a fully signed and apparently valid and enforceable wedding license and certificate of marriage in my purse. The honeymoon consisted of a painfully hung over drive back to Berkeley with three guys in the back seat who were slowly reconnecting with reality. Howard didn't figure out he was married until we got back to Berkeley."
"I don't think Howard was quite ready for marriage. He just got heavier into drugs, and about six months after the Las Vegas trip he announced he was quitting law school and going to India to join an Ashram. I never heard from him again, so after a couple of years of waiting, I divorced him. Even in those days California had lovely no-fault divorce laws. There weren't any assets to divide, and asking for alimony would have been silly, so it was a pretty simple procedure. One of Howard's law school buddies handled the whole thing for me."
"Wow," Henry said. "Everyone says you should have an interesting story about your wedding, but that one tops any that I have heard. So what did you do for sex after Howard bugged out to the Ashram?"
I looked at him over the top of my coffee cup with a smirk and said, "Oh, I learned to do without."
Henry laughed and said, "Oh bullshit. I can't imagine you going a week without having sex with someone."
I smiled and said, "You know me too well, lover. Let's just say that I returned to my pre-Howard habits. After all, it was Berkeley before the AIDS scare. If you couldn't get laid, you just weren't trying."
"So have you got any good stories you want to tell me about your sex life after Howard left?"
I took a long sip of coffee and thought for a moment. "Yes, one especially good one, but first I have to get dressed and go to a meeting. As far as my accountant is concerned, I am here in New York to do some work, not just tell you lewd stories about my past and let you fuck me until my ears ring. Time to go earn some money."
When I returned at around 7:00 that evening, Henry had prepared a marvelous Provençale-style beef sauté that we enjoyed along with a good bottle of vintage Burgundy I had picked up from a nice little wine store located a couple of blocks from our loft. It as a remarkable Gevrey-Chambertin, a Clos Saint-Jacques, as I recall.
The beef and the accompanying vegetables were gone, and we were nearing the bottom of the wine bottle when Henry asked, "So what can you tell me about your post-Howard love life?"
I smiled and thought for a moment or two. "Okay," I said, "let me tell you about the Anderson twins:"
A few months before Howard left, I had graduated and, by some miracle (helped I'm sure by the Professor's recommendation), landed a job in the San Francisco office of a major publishing house, A.H. Robards & Co. I was, of course, at the absolute bottom of the food chain in their San Francisco office, getting coffee, cleaning up meeting rooms, making copies. You know, all the menial shit. But it was a job in the publishing industry. I was sure that Truman Capote was going to walk into the office any day and demand that I be his editor (I think the house did publish his books, but I'm sure he never saw the inside of their offices except maybe in New York).
One day, the managing editor for San Francisco called me into his office and told me he had a job for me that didn't involve coffee or making copies. There was an author, Lars Anderson from Minneapolis, coming to town the next day and he wanted me to take him to a meet and greet (book signing) at a bookstore out in Orinda. I guess he figured that since my mother lived out there I could get the author out there and back without getting lost. My job was to pick him up at the airport drive him out to the bookstore and then back to his hotel in the City. The signing copies for him had already been delivered to the bookstore.
"What's his book about?" I asked, assuming it was a murder mystery or some such.
"Uhh, . . . I'm not sure. Let me look for a minute." He shuffled around in some papers on his desk and finally pulled up a sheet of paper. "Yes, here it is, '
The Art of Woodworking
.' His plane gets in at 10:30, and the signing is scheduled for 2:00. Make sure he gets there on time. Oh, and I guess you can buy him lunch on the way over there, but don't spend too much."
Oh shit. A manual, I thought. Well, I knew I was starting at the bottom of the heap, but woodworking, really? I'll bet he's about 70 years old.
None the less, he was a real author, and the company was going to let me represent it, so I grabbed the sheet of paper with the details of where and when and got out of the boss' office before he changed his mind.
The next morning, I put on a nice dress and blouse with a wool blazer and headed down to SFO in my little Volkswagen. I had even made a little sign that said "Mr. Anderson."
I stood waiting at the gate (yes, you could still go out to the gate in those days) with my little sign, focusing on the older gentlemen getting off the plane, when I suddenly heard a deep sexy voice asking, "Excuse me. I'm Lars Anderson. Are you from Robards?"