The Education of Lisa

Six weeks after I started seeing Will, I moved in with him. It just sort of worked out that way. My landlord was selling the house I was renting, so I had to move out of my place. Will and I were together nearly every night anyway, so it made sense that I move into his.

I was completely in love with him by now. In my admittedly limited experience with men, I had never before met anyone who treated me with as much kindness and respect. Will was witty, romantic and above all, fun to be around. We always had fun together, no matter what we were doing. As icing on the cake, Will was a gourmet cook, intelligent and well-read and, incidentally, independently wealthy. Perfect, right? Well, there was one problem.

You'll notice that I haven't mentioned our sex life. That's because, for the most part, it wasn't worth mentioning. Will had almost zero sex drive. In those first six weeks, when we should have been going at it like bunnies, we fucked exactly four times. I wanted it practically every night, but Will would claim to be tired, or simply "not up for it." I'd never even heard of a man not being in the mood before.

He did enjoy going down on me, and would do so any time I asked for it. That was all right, but sometimes a girl just wants to be fucked, you know? Even if he did get me off orally, I still wanted cock. And get this, he didn't like me to go down on him at all. He said it made him feel self-conscious. What kind of a man doesn't like blow-jobs? Every guy I'd ever been with has said that I give incredible head, but I couldn't even get Will to come in my mouth.

Will was all about cuddling and fondling. He especially loved spooning in bed and playing with my breasts. All this only got me worked up. I would sometimes masturbate right in front of him so he'd get the hint, but Will was content to watch. "You look so beautiful when you touch yourself," he'd say. A wonderful sentiment, but I wished he'd do something about it.

I actually broke down in tears once, begging him for it. I said that him turning me down made me feel ugly and unwanted. Will insisted that it was just him, he'd always had a low sex drive, it was just how he was. He confessed that this had been a bone of contention between him and his ex-wife, too.

"You can always do what she did," he said, cautiously.

"What's that?" I said.

"You can have sex with other people," he said not, looking me in the eye. "It doesn't bother me."

I didn't want to sex with other people, though. I wanted to have sex with him. The man I loved. And the fact that the idea of me cheating on him didn't bother him, bothered me greatly.

So yeah, the sex thing was an issue. A big issue. But I was patient, and willing to try anything to bring him around. I borrowed some pornos from my friend Carrie, but Will said porn was ugly and degrading and refused to even watch. I tried to get him drunk, but alcohol only made him sleepy. Secretly slipping him a potent combo of yohimbe and horny goat weed seemed to have no effect whatsoever. There had to be something that would turn him on, though. It was just a matter of finding it.

In the midst of this, I was laid off from my office job. Will said that I didn't need to look for another job if I didn't want to and for a while I didn't. I was content to stay at home and work on the house, which needed a lot of work.

My God, the house.

Will's house had been in his family for six generations. His great-great-great grandfather Lucius Jacoby built the original structure in the 1880's and the next three succeeding generations had added onto it, usually in strikingly incongruous ways. The various wings and additions were ill-fitting and the whole structure had a schizophrenic look to it. The original building was gothic, dark and foreboding with columns and shadowy porticos. The West wing (built by Lucius's son Donald Jacoby around the turn of the 20th century) by contrast was a sunny, Victorian cottage-style addition. The rear of the structure was Art Deco, built in the 1920's under the direction of Lucius's grand-son (Will's great grand-father) Christopher Jacoby, which to this day looks as futuristic as something out of a Fritz Lang movie. Not to be outdone, Will's grandfather Royal Jacoby had built a section while under the spell of Frank Lloyd Wright. This section connected the all the others in a complete circle around an enclosed courtyard.

The interior of the house was as chaotic as the exterior would suggest. The connecting halls were labyrinthine, as I found out the hard way when I got lost and wandered in little circles for hours until I screamed for Will to find me. There were rooms which had probably not been opened in forty years or more. The decor was a cacophony of disparate styles, reflecting more than a century of interior design fashions. The job I had volunteered to do for Will, which turned out to be a task of Herculean proportions, was to redecorate, room by room, until at least the main living sections had some kind of unified look to them.

Needless to say, the house was haunted. I found this out one night when, laying awake in sexual frustration, I very distinctly heard a whispered conversation coming from the ceiling. Two voices, a man and a woman, talking in low, confidential tones. Lover's bed-talk, too quiet to make out the words. I shook Will awake.

"There's someone in the attic," I whispered to him, forgetting in that moment that the attic didn't extend over our bedroom.

"Wha?" Will barely opened his eyes.

"There are people talking up there," I said, growing more alarmed by the second.

"Just the ghosts," Will muttered sleepily.

"What?"

"Ghosts," he repeated, then rolled over and went back to sleep.

Will had grown up in the house and was accustomed to its quirks. It was all new to me, though, and more than a little disconcerting. The furniture in distant wings had a disturbing habit of rearranging itself at odd hours of the night. Doors would slam violently closed no matter what was done to prop them open. Black smudgy fingerprints mysteriously appeared in impossibly high corners. Faint music could be heard on very quiet evenings, seeming to come from inside the walls, a spectral music box playing some long-forgotten tune. The entire house moaned and creaked. Sometimes I heard a baby crying.

There was one room, in the rear section of the house. I only went in there once, and was filled with nausea and dread, such a cold sinking feeling of despair I had never felt in my life. Will later casually told me that his great (or was it great-great?) Uncle Lawrence had hung himself in the room.

The house seemed to invade my dreams, too. Living there, I dreamed almost exclusively of its dark hallways, which were often patrolled by shadowy apparitions. I would wake up breathless with terror from one of these nightmares, dismayed to find that I was still in the dreadful house.

This was all going to take some getting used to, to say the least. Will kept telling me that, although the house was perhaps a bit spooky, it was certainly harmless. The house was so rich in family history and tradition that he couldn't bring himself to sell it, or even to move away. It was clear that if I was to remain with Will, I would have to make some kind of peace with the place. Maybe that's where the idea of redecorating came from. If I could make even a slight impression on the house, it would become in small way mine. In the back of my mind, I might have even thought that fresh coats of paint and new carpeting could exorcize the spirits which haunted the place.

One day when Will was at work, I was going through the rooms, making notes and sketches. (I didn't mind being alone in the house during the day, but on no account would I be alone there at night.) That was the day I stumbled onto the library. It was a circular room in the old section of the house, the walls of which extended up through all three stories and up into a turret. The bookshelves covered the walls, spiraling up to the ceiling. It made me dizzy just looking at it. I dropped my sketchpad to the floor and forgot about it as, for the next several hours, I immersed myself in a bewildering and fascinating array of literature.

I soon learned that the books were arranged chronologically, and that none were less than fifty years old. Christopher Jacoby (Will's great grandfather) was a fiction enthusiast and a serious collector. I'm no expert, but in his section I found first edition Hemingways and Fitzgeralds which were obviously valuable. I even found a signed edition of "Great Expectations" which was certainly so priceless I was afraid to touch it. Donald Jacoby (Will's great-great grandfather) was more interested in scientific literature, and among his collection was a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica dating from 1900.

All pretty amazing, but none of it compared to the oldest section of the library, the collection of Will's great-great-great grandfather Lucius Jacoby. Lucius's collection was entirely devoted to forbidden literature; erotica and books on the occult. Copiously illustrated ancient editions of the "Kama Sutra," "Arabian Nights," Casanova, De Sade. Even more obscure and antique pornography, so perverse and explicit that it made me shudder with a mixture of revulsion and arousal. The occult literature was even more disturbing. Arcane tomes devoted to demonology and witchcraft, much of it in Latin, some of it I think so forbidden it was written in code. Grotesque and horrible illustrations of human suffering and demonic delight.

In the midst of all this was an entire shelf of matching leather bindings, thirteen editions with the covers stamped in gold-leaf, "The Memoirs of Lucius Jacoby." I pulled the first edition off the shelf and tried to read it, but the handwritten script was small and the light from the windows was failing. I realized with a start that I had been in the library for nearly six hours. With this realization came others; I was ravenously hungry and had been suppressing the need to urinate for so long my bladder felt close to bursting. Taking the first two editions of Lucius's memoirs with me, I left the library with regret.

That night, after yet another fruitless attempt to persuade Will to fuck me, I turned on the bedside lamp and opened the first volume.

"Oh, I see you found old Lucius's memoirs," Will said. "I tried to read those once. I couldn't get through them. The man was crazy. I remember when I met him, he scared the hell out of me."

"Wait," I said. "How could you have met him? He was your great-great-great grandfather."

"Yeah," Will said. "I must have been five years old. He was, I think, a hundred and five. He'd outlived all his children and most of his grandchildren. Mostly blind and deaf, in a wheelchair, but still really imposing, especially to a little kid. He lived for a few years after that, even."

"My God," I said, even more impressed.

"Anyway," Will said. "I wouldn't really recommend reading that before bed. You already have nightmares."

With that, he rolled over and went to sleep.

I regarded the leather book for a while with apprehension before opening it up against Will's advice. Curiosity killed the cat.

The first volume was devoted to remembrances of Lucius's childhood on a tobacco plantation in Virginia. I had not read very far when I received the first of many shocks. Lucius made several references to his father's slaves and something about this didn't add up. I flipped around a bit until I found mention of his birth date. November 21, 1849. I did the math. If Will had indeed been five years old when he'd met his ancestor, that would have been in 1974, which would have made Lucius 125 years old. Surely that was wrong. Either the date in the memoir was incorrect or Will was confused and had in fact met his great-great grandfather Donald. People simply don't live that long.

Putting this incongruity aside, for the present, I dove into the memoir. Lucius's interest in the occult, it seems, was already present in childhood. He tells of a fascination with the "hoodoo" stories of the slaves, their tales of "ha'nts" which lived in the woods, and of a visit at age ten to an old black woman whom he claims was a very powerful witch.

The latter part of the first volume dealt with the Civil War. Lucius enlisted in the Confederate Army when he was thirteen, lying about his age, and graphically described the brutality and horror of war. "War gives license for man to fulfill his most evil desires," he wrote. "Surely the Devil is delighted."

The war also occasioned Lucius's sexual awakening, both with the whores who worked the front lines, and also with an older soldier with whom Lucius had an extended affair. (The further I read, the more it became clear that Lucius was completely bisexual.) Each sexual encounter was described with the same graphic attention to detail to which Lucius had paid the battleground scenes. Reading them, I was flushed with desire. I reached under the sheets and pulled my panties off, so I could touch myself with one hand while I turned pages with the other. By the time Will woke up in the morning, I had finished the first volume and started on the second. I had not slept at all and had brought myself to repeated orgasms.

"You've been up all night reading that?" Will asked me.

"Yes," I said, irritably. I was reading a particularly juicy section and the interruption rankled my nerves. I was actually happy when Will went to work so I could be left alone with Lucius's words.

The second volume, I found, dealt mainly with Lucius's days as a cowhand out West in the years following the war. It read like an X-rated version of "Lonesome Dove." In addition to descriptions of the day-to-day life of a working cowboy, there was an exhaustive survey of the prostitutes Lucius encountered in his travels. Descriptions of each woman, her specialties, her prices, a ranking of her skills and beauty. He also mused at great length about the sexual merits of women of different races. His conclusions are, in today's light, dreadfully politically incorrect and unprintable, but I can say that he had a preference for "negresses" and "squaws."

There was also this passage: "We had been on the trail for nearly forty days without a woman when it was decided that Salton should fulfill this role at least until we make Denver. Salton was not pleased at first, but after a few scuffles with the boys he finally consented to wear the dress we'd brought along. ‘Sally,' as our new woman was named, entertained several of us in turn in her tent. Being the senior hand on the drive, I was given the privilege of breaking her in. With a little lard, she was made as soft as any whore's pussy and a good deal tighter."

I finished Volume 2 late that morning. Eyes bleary and red from lack of sleep and from more than twelve hours of squinting at Lucius's small, precise script, I wandered back down to the library for another volume. I didn't even consider going to bed. I'm not sure why I was so obsessed. The sex was part of it, I'm sure, but I think more than that it was the simple force of Lucius's personality. Vital and potent still, even though the man was long dead. So unlike, it should be noted, his mild and meek ancestor. It may be somewhat mean to think it, but if I had been Lucius's woman, sexual frustration would have been the least of my problems.

I replaced the two books back on the shelf and that was when things started to get very weird. Further down on the shelf, the last of the memoirs, Volume Thirteen, fell to the floor. Actually, "fell" is not accurate. As I watched, it slid from the shelf, slowly, as if pushed out from behind.

The book landed on the floor with a soft thud and I leapt backwards, my heart pounding in my chest. There was a presence in the library, heavy and unmistakable as a scent. I felt eyes upon me. His eyes. I felt naked. Adrenaline racing, I grabbed the book from the floor and fled from the room.

Back in the relative safety of the front of the house, I was still afraid to open the book. I wished that Will was home. I had never felt so alone, so vulnerable. I went from room to room, turning on all the lights even though it was a bright and sunny day. I turned on the television and the radio, just for the company of living human voices. I even said a few prayers, something I hadn't done in years.

Finally, exhausted, I fell onto the living room couch. The leather-bound book rested on the coffee table, exuding a terrible talismanic fascination. Even sitting there unopened, it had power. I put a newspaper over the book so I wouldn't have to look at it. Then, though I tried to fight it, I sank into a heavy drowning sleep.

I dreamed of Lucius. In the dream, I was laying on the same couch I was in fact sleeping on, a fact which lent the dream a disturbing air of reality. I was paralyzed, completely unable to move or even make a sound above a whimper. He came to me. Lucius came to me. He was a big man, broad and imposing, bearded and wild-haired, dark-skinned with blue eyes so piercing they seemed to glow. He towered above me, grinning down at what I knew he saw as just another woman, just another whore. The worst thing about this was, I liked being looked at that way.

Big hands, roughened by years of hard work, tore my shirt open, ripped away my bra like it was made of paper. Those calloused hands were all over my breasts, rough and scratchy. I loved it. I loved his rasping touch on my tits. I wanted to writhe into his hands, but of course I still could not move.

Then he rudely yanked down my pants, impatiently ripped my panties to tatters. One hand plunged into me like I was a glove. Lucius's thumb jabbed at my clitoris, just gouged it. Three thick fingers invaded my cunt. Lucius's pinkie plunged into my ass and in my dream even his smallest finger was the size of a lesser man's cock.

I came so hard I woke up screaming.

Will had come home at some point during my "nap," and he ran into the room when he heard me cry out.

"Are you all right?" he said.

I was breathless, shaking all over. So wet down there it felt like I'd pissed the couch. The pain and pleasure of Lucius's rude touch still vibrated through my entire body. I did manage to nod, though, in response to Will's concern.

He glanced down, saw the volume of Lucius's memoir resting on the coffee table.

"Oh," he said, understanding. "I told you not to read that."

Later that night, I had for the most part recovered from the day's shocks. I still couldn't bear the thought of being alone in a dark room, and I hadn't yet worked up the courage to start in on the final volume of the memoirs, but I had at least progressed to the point where I wasn't jumping at every sound and shadow.

As casually as I could, I said to Will: "Do you have any pictures of Lucius?"

"Yeah," Will nodded. "In the big bedroom in the East Wing, there's an old photograph hanging on the wall."

"Can you show me?"

"You know where it's at."

Will was watching "Law and Order" and did not want to get up off the couch. I, however, had no intention of wandering the halls alone at this time of night.

"Please show me," I said, tugging at his sleeve.

Will, with great reluctance, stood up and led me to the East Wing.

I felt chills run through my body when I saw the picture in the oval oak frame. Though I had never before seen a picture of Lucius, it was obvious at a glance that this was the same man from my dream. The same wildness, the same laser-sharp eyes. The photograph was black-and-white, obviously, but it had been hand-tinted, and the eyes were painted with this unnatural, electric blue which made them seem alive. As in many old photographs, the intensity of the pose held for so long lent the subjects an eerie life. Lucius watched me from behind the curved glass. He saw right through me. I thought of my dream, of his calloused hand inside me, and I literally swooned.