I am not now nor was I ever a true suburban sexual revolutionary. But before I grow too old and antique to still get a bit wet between my thighs in the telling of this story, I'd like to get in down on paper. Perhaps someday, some yet unborn descendant will come across it in Granny's ancient computer files, will read it with shock and wide-eyed amazement that even way back then, women were wanton.
As I said, never was, not even back in the sexually unrestrained days in the 1970's, back when AIDS was still a weight-reduction pill, when active membership in the sexual revolution was almost a must, particularly for chic young marrieds who, if they turned down a friendly little fondle on a Saturday evening over a bubbling fondue, risked being branded by contemporaries as hopelessly passé, even worst-of-all, reactionary Republicans.
It wasn't because we ... Richard and I ... weren't tempted. We were, hundreds of times. Richard ... nobody calls him Dick ... had a sexual appetite which can best be described as avaricious, even on its off-days. And my own glandular secretions could hold up to the best of them. It was just that we had to be so careful.
Richard was the Director for the Department of Properties Management of the Board of Education of a small, none-too-prosperous upstate Pennsylvania school district where any taint of scandal, any suggestion of lascivious living would have been viewed by the Superintendent of School as negatively as a charter membership in Hell's Angels. And with our suburban split-level mortgaged for thirty years and a car with a bigger monthly payment than the total cost of my first 1947 clunker, we had to maintain our conventional image at all costs. Directors of Departments of Property Management don't even have the job security and tenure of a teacher. They're just hired year-to-year by the school board. So like it or not, we had to conform.
And it wasn't because our up-tight neighborhood and the Lutheran-Evangelical-dominated school board had driven sex to some dim and obscure corner of our minds. Far from it. Sex was up there boldly in front every day. By conservative count, Richard and I had orgasmed in virtually every possible spot in every room of the house including the top of my Steinway grand piano before we'd lived there through our first year. And sometimes, a passionate roll around the living room floor on a hot, stormy August evening when all of our friends were at the beach or taking themselves off to the mountains was about all we could afford. Cash was tight.
Which was really the reason that this story came about. For reasons which I could never understand, an elderly aunt had offered to pay my college costs if I'd major in music. I did and even became rather a good pianist, not good enough to perform, you understand, but certainly, as the cliche goes, good enough to teach. I'd applied to the County for a position as a music teacher at the same time that Richard, freshly degreed in Business Administration, applied for his job. He got his and the county figured they'd done enough for the two of us. The man ought to earn the wages.
So a few years back I'd placed an advertisement on the bulletin board of our supermarket. The furnace blower which had never really worked since we moved in decided to die in January just as the holiday bills were coming in, leaving our bank account embarrassingly low. "Wanted", my ad said, "piano students, beginners or advanced, for lessons in my home." I might as well, I thought, turn my expensive degree into some sort of income.
The phone wasn't long in ringing and within a few months I'd managed to take on a dozen or so pupils. It was fun and I enjoyed it. They ran the gamut from the little six-year old Zabriski twins, to the Baptist minister's wife who had an exasperating proclivity to improvise on Bach, to old Mr. Kennerly who waited until he was sixty-seven to uncover an amazing musical talent.
But there was one above everyone else. Joyce. Joyce was the only one with an innate feel for the piano. Joyce worked part time as a computer graphics specialist for the town's single architectural firm and attended the local liberal arts college in the evenings. She was working toward a music major just as I had done. The difference was that, while I was certainly more experienced, she played with a born-in talent and had a technique that turned me green with envy every time she touched the keyboard.
I liked her the first time she came in, a tall, slender, strong- jawed angular girl with dark eyes that flashed with animation when she looked at you and straight darkish hair cropped close as though she scissored it herself in a moment of total absentmindedness. She was dressed in a nondescript shapeless dark blue pullover sweater and a grubby pair of Addidas sneakers. The jeans she wore weren't designer, not by any means. All in all, Joyce was the sort you'd not notice twice if you passed her in the supermarket unless you had an opportunity to talk to her. Then she'd emerge as a warm, purposeful, self-contained, and very communicative person, the little trifle of superficial stiffness and formality melting away as soon as someone opened up and was outgoing with her.
And after a few sessions at the piano with her, I felt as though I'd known her for ages. Joyce had that almost studied informality and plain-as-grass honesty that reminded me of the girls in my college dorm back in the 'seventies. She was a refreshing change from some of the O-so-very-proper Yuppies of the up-tight Eighties who, for God's sake, started to wear white gloves on a movie date all over again, if you can believe it.
And she liked me. I could tell. Unlike many of my other students, Joyce would find some excuse or another to stay and talk for an extra few minutes after our session. She had two passions, the first being the piano. I wasn't surprised. Given her native talent I could sense that she poured a lot of suppressed creativity into the keyboard. After the lesson, we'd find ourselves lingering over a cup of coffee, comparing the keyboard chromatic progressions of Chopin to those of Schubert or some other equally obscure piece of musical esoterica. She had an good, sound, creative and first- rate mind.
Her other overriding passion was sex.
I found out about this during one of our first post-lesson coffee- klatsch sessions. It all started innocently enough ... a girl-to- girl question about, as I recall, spotting between periods or something equally glandular and innocuous. "Don't worry about it," I told her. "unless it gets persistent. It's not too uncommon, they say, if you're on the pill. Just try a little less strenuous sex during that part off your cycle." I don't know why I assumed it, but it seemed logical to me that Joyce was sexually quite active.
She laughed a wry little laugh. "I wish it were that simple, Irene," she said and then looked at me straight on with those dark and serious eyes. "Truth to tell, living in this town for me is like living in a convent. I live by myself, I go to work, I come here twice a week in the afternoons, go over to class in the evenings. I go home. If I'm not too tired, I masturbate once, go to sleep and do the same thing the next day." I was surprised just a bit and I almost blushed. Our friends and acquaintances in town just don't talk to Richard and me about their masturbatory habits. But it was totally refreshing. Again, it took me back to my college days where absolutely no subject was off limits.
Joyce told me a little of her life and it was a study in contrasting lifestyles. Two years after graduation from a dinky midwestern junior college with an associate in fine arts, she found herself living on the West Coast, writing reviews of heavy-metal rock concerts for pretentious little literary magazines and I-hate- industry exposés for starry-eyed ecological journals which paid her nothing but promises and a pat on the ass, passing judgement on the quality of the latest marijuana strains, swimming nude at night in the Pacific and participating in sex orgies involving, by her admittedly foggy estimate, as many as twenty-five men in the same evening. Not once in those two years had she encountered a piano worthy of the name. Everyone played guitars, an instrument which she, as a musician, found hopelessly declassé when played chords-only.
After waking one morning with an incredible headache and a citation for possession of less than two grams of a Class II controlled substance, Joyce had said to hell with it all, took a job as a waitress and sent herself to computer programmer's school with an end-view of earning enough to send herself back to college for a bachelor's degree in music. She took the very first job the placement people had offered her ... here in town ... and resolved to leave in the past those things of the past. That is, everything but the sex part. She liked that too much.
Now if Joyce had an outgoing, glamorous personal style which was half the equal of her musical ability, she'd have been mobbed with dinner invitations and would have been granted a complimentary membership in that local institution for the geriatric and incompetent which its inmates fondly refer to as "our country club." But she didn't. She was too gray looking, too colorless, too angular for the few younger studs in town to give her much more than an indifferent glance. But then, nobody ever believed that that bunch was overly bright. If they'd known Joyce as I did, this story would have had a different ending.
By the next time Joyce came, a Tuesday afternoon, I felt that there wasn't much we couldn't talk about, given the intimate details of everything which she'd already discussed with perfect candor. And liking to hear a good first-person fuck story as much if not more than the next gal, I'd laid in a supply of bakery Danish to go with the coffee. That, I figured, would keep her for an extra hour or so.
