The Interview

I was in my junior year in college, majoring in museum studies. Everyone in my class—and undoubtedly every museum studies major in the city—was applying for internships that summer. The New York City—and especially Manhattan—is filled with world-renowned museums, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Museum of Natural History to the Guggenheim to the Whitney to the Cooper-Hewitt to the Museum of the City of New York to the Museum of the American Indian, as well as lesser-known ones such as the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Skyscraper Museum, and the Museum of American Finance. And I applied to intern at all of them. But the museum I most wanted to intern at was the Museum of Sex.

I sent in my fledgling résumé—really little more than a summary of the classes in museum studies I'd already taken and a couple of irrelevant summer jobs—and what I hoped was a persuasive cover letter, as I'd done with all the other museums on the long list, and at first didn't give it much more thought.

A couple of days later, I got what I assumed was a form email from a woman named Jane Williams, a curator at the museum, acknowledging receipt of my application.

I spent some time on the Internet trying to find out something about her, but her name was too common for me to find her. If she was one of more than one hundred people with that name on LinkedIn in the New York area, she wasn't one of the few LinkedIn members who admitted to working at the Museum of Sex.

But somehow that email—even though I assumed it had been sent to everyone who'd applied to become an intern at the museum—was all it took to make me spending every waking moment having a fantasy about the curator.

My fantasy went something like this:

I get a call. The woman at the other end of the line identifies herself as Jane Williams. She has a polished and professional but friendly voice, and we set up an appointment for an in-person interview a few days later.

At the appointed time, I show up at the Museum's office entrance. A pretty young woman opens the door. When I identify myself and the reason for my being there, she takes me down a narrow hall and has me sit down while she make a phone call. After a few moments, a woman comes down the hall and greets me by name, identifying herself as Jane Williams.

She's not at all what I'd expected. She's on the young side—in her mid-twenties, I'd guess—and she has a pretty face with a cute little upturned nose, but she's awfully heavy—I estimate her at over two hundred pounds at no more than about five feet four. Her low neckline shows a lot of cleavage between her ample breasts, a gold cross nestling between them, and she has a delicate tattoo of a rose toward the top of her right one. Her dress is black and short and tight, and she's wearing black fishnet stockings and black shoes with low heels.

She puts out her right hand for me to shake. Hers is small and delicate, but her handshake is firm and emphatic. "Thank you for coming in. Come to my office," she says, turning and leading me back down the hall. Her bottom is much larger than usually attracts me, but I find myself fascinated by its rolling roundnesses as she walks.

She opens the door to her office—her name is on a plaque to its right.

"What makes you want to intern at the Museum of Sex?" she asks—a little abruptly, I thought, although I'd expected the question eventually. "Your museum combines my two greatest interests," I say, as I'd rehearsed innumerable times. "As you can see from my résumé, I'm majoring in museum studies and I'm going into my senior year. It would be a great opportunity."

"You realize that it's not like interning at the Met or the Modern," she says. "It doesn't have the same cachet. It's not necessarily going to help you get a job after you graduate."

"Like everyone in my class, I've applied to intern at the Met and the Modern and Museum of Natural History and the Whitney and the Jewish Museum and the Museum of New York and the Museum of Holography and pretty much every other museum in the city. I assume that you haven't gotten quite as many applications as all the others."

She gives me a smile. "Well, actually, we've gotten more than you might think."

"But you invited me in for an interview. I assume that means that I'm at least under consideration."

"Yes, of course. But I'm telling you as much for your benefit as for mine. I don't want you to be disappointed by what we do here. You don't study restoration or provenances or any of that kind of thing. Most of what we do is cataloging contributions to our collection, maintaining our website, and planning and mounting shows."

"That's fine with me," I say. "I've studied cataloging special collections, I know how to design and build websites and I've done a few practicums of shows of student work at school."

"And we deal with material that makes many people uncomfortable. It's important that everyone who works here can tolerate all aspects of the subject matter."

"I think I'm pretty tolerant," I say. "Nowadays on the Internet you can see almost everything."

"I suppose you can," she says. "But, nonetheless, it's imperative that I personally confirm your comfort level."

"Fine."

"I have a small screening door," she says. "Come with me." She stands and comes out from behind her desk to open a door to her right. I enter the room and she follows me in and closes the door behind me.

The room we're in is windowless and dimly lit. I can see a large flat-screen monitor on the opposite wall. Facing the monitor is a single overstuffed couch.

"Sit down," she says, taking a remote control from a small side table and pushing a button.

I sit down on the left side of the couch, not too far to the armrest and not too close to the center. She sits down on the right, about the same distance from the right armrest. We're about two or three feet apart.

The monitor, which looks to be about ten feet in diagonal, is showing the Museum of Sex logo. "Are you ready?" she asks.

"I don't know what to be ready for," I say.

"That's right, you don't," she says, and clicks another button on the remote.

The monitor displays the title "Softcore Pornography of the 1960s" for a few seconds, and then fades into a montage of grainy, dated footage of naked people—mostly female, but occasionally male—kissing and touching but not quite having sex. Many of the young women are very attractive, and many of them are kissing and fondling each other—one of my favorite subjects. If I wasn't sitting next to a prospective employer, my reaction would almost certainly be more enthusiastic and less restrained, but under the circumstances all it does is make me feel awkward.

After another minute or two, a new title is displayed "Softcore Pornography of the 1970s." Now the women look less like flower children and more like Playboy models. The film is less grainy and the photography is more polished. The women mostly have larger breasts, look at the camera more seductively, and behave more sexually. I'm becoming aroused, and I cross my legs in an ineffectual attempt to rearrange my privates.

"How are you doing?" Jane Williams asks me. "This is the sort of material you'll be working with here every day."

"Fine. I'm doing fine. I like this sort of thing."

"Let's just skip ahead," she says, pressing a button on the remote. A menu is displayed on the screen, and she scrolls down to "Current Hardcore Pornography." When she selects that, a long list of topics is displayed. She selects "Shuffle All."

A moment later, the screen is filled with two young men lying on a rug fellating each other. I swallow hard. As far as I know, I don't have the slightest interest in having sex with another man, and the sight is fascinating, repelling, and incomprehensibly exciting all at once. But I have barely enough time to register what I'm seeing before the scene is replaced by one of a beautiful young woman on a bed on her shoulders and knees driving a large, realistic dildo into herself. I love watching women masturbate, but I don't particularly like seeing them use toys, yet once again the sight is almost unbearably exciting. I squirm in my seat, trying to rearrange the hard-on in my pants.

On the screen the picture has changed again. Now it's two half-naked women on their knees in the center of a couch. They're kissing deeply, and their breasts are pressing against each other as they fondle each other's buttocks in tight-fitting bluejeans. This is closer to my usual preference, and I squirm more.

Somehow my squirming has moved me closer to the center of the couch, and I find that my right knee is touching Jane Williams' left leg. I jerk my leg away, but to my enormous surprise I feel her hand on my leg just above the knee, pulling it back to touch her leg again.

And it doesn't just pull my knee back against her leg. It stays there, and after a moment, it begins to move gently up and down along my thigh.

The situation is so confusingly exciting that it almost no longer matters what's being shown on the screen before us: a woman pleasuring herself, or a man; two women with each other, two men, a man and a woman, or a larger group of people.

On the couch in front of the screen, I'm sitting next to a woman who's my prospective employer, and she's sighing as she caresses my thigh with increasing emphasis.

The screen is filled with an infinite variety of explicit sex, and Jane Williams moves her hand all the way up my thigh to my crotch. Her fingers find my fly and pull it down and free my aching, overengorged, rigid penis. I gulp as her small firm fingers caress me with almost fastidious delicacy.

Her other hand finds my right hand and directs it to her own crotch. Somehow her short skirt has ridden up to her waist, and she presses my hand to her panties, which are completely wet. I slide my fingertips beneath them and find her labia. She sighs and spreads her legs further apart. Her clit feels as hard as my cock.

On the screen, a man is fucking a beautiful woman in the ass, and she seems to be delighted. Next to me, Jane Williams shudders under my fingers and groans deeply. It sounds like she's having an orgasm.

The scene on the monitor changes to a woman eating another woman. Still holding my cock with her left hand, Jane Williams slides off the couch and positions herself on her knees in front of me. Using her teeth and her free hand, she tears open a condom and unrolls it onto my cock. I'm watching a woman tongue another woman's pussy as Jane Williams envelops my cock with her mouth.

I glance down from the scene on the monitor to the scene at my crotch. The sensations merge with the images and I'm overwhelmed. I hear myself groaning as I come again and again into the condom in Jane Williams' mouth as she sucks and sucks, gently fondling my balls with her right hand.

Carefully, she lets my cock slip out of her mouth, wipes her mouth against the back of her wrist, pulls her skirt back down over her legs, and sits back down on the couch. The screen is still displaying an infinite variety of sexual interactions. She pushes a button on the remote control and the screen goes blank. She turns a switch on the table to her right and room lights go on. I see that there's a box of tissues on the side table to my left, and I use one to remove the condom. I put my now-flaccid penis back into my pants and zip up. I see a wastebasket below the table and toss the tissue.

"Well," Jane Williams says. "I see that you can handle this material quite well." She stands up, and I do the same. "We'll be giving you careful consideration, and if we decide that we want you as an intern, we'll call you within the next week." She opens the door and leads me through her office and down to the exit.

I was entertaining myself with that fantasy—or one of its several variations—when I got a call from a woman who identified herself as Jane Williams, from the Museum of Sex. She said that she'd found my cover letter and résumé impressive, and that she'd like me to come in for an in-person interview. Just hearing that nearly made me come.