Up until the time I was married I would have never believed that there were two disparate Americas coexisting side by side forming unequal parts of the same whole; one of unbounded privilege and the other of implicit, soul-deadening servitude. To think that the vast majority of Americans were no more than indentured slaves to banks and corporations that ruled over them was not immediately apparent to my naïve mind. The idea that my country's class system was as rigidly hierarchical as any other current or former world power was foreign to my sheltered, middle-class existence. I had always believed that America was the land of opportunity; a land in which an intelligent, talented person could elevate herself to the highest echelons of society via hard work, determination, and dogged persistence. But once I had married into a formidably wealthy family, I began to see that my previous perceptions of reality had been skewed by years of societal indoctrination invented by an elitist class to keep its lowly brethren ignorant and malleable to forces beyond its control. I slowly began to realize that the accumulation of vast amounts of money that preoccupied the greater portion of the elite's waking hours was not an end result in itself, but only the means by which great power could be achieved. And, ultimately, with that power, the control of humankind and the precious earth that we inhabit.
America has been described recently by various pundits as an empire in decline, and I see no good reason to deny their assertions. At present we face the dubious prospect of entering into another world war, this time in the Middle East, promulgated by psychopaths determined to impose Western hegemony upon all those who refuse to accept the proffered gift of freedom and democracy; a misnomer since America has long said goodbye to its Constitution and Bill of Rights, those relics of an ancient and obsolete Republic sacrificed at the altar of the omnipotent executive branch, which itself is only an instrument of the banking cartels and the avaricious, conscienceless marauders of Wall Street. We now stand at the edge of a precipice. If the insanity of our politicians cannot be held in check, then life on this fragile planet may end sooner than we think. As one idiotic politician recently remarked, "Why have nuclear weapons if you can't use them?" With this intellectually and morally feeble mindset, is it any wonder that Armageddon might be right around the corner?
Now that I am married, I have been given a splendid opportunity to view life from the tip of the societal iceberg, so to speak. I am now part of the social elitist class, having married into an old English family of great wealth and power. My husband, Nathaniel West, the current British Ambassador to the United States, is a kind and decent man of noble lineage who can trace his ancestry all the way back to Henry IV. However, he is also very zealous in his pursuit of personal fame and glory, which has sometimes led him to put his job before me. More than once I have been subject to his displeasure whenever things did not go his way in the realm of foreign relations. Fortunately for us both, my equanimity had always been a bulwark to his mercurial temper.
Being the wife of an ambassador means spending the greater part of my life separated from my husband. Although we have only been married six years, I often feel lonely and sexually frustrated due to the inordinate amount of time he spends travelling around the world. I suppose I shouldn't complain since Nathaniel has provided me with all the wealth and luxury I would ever need. But these material things, as comforting as they may be in a physical sense, do nothing to assuage the longing of my soul to engage in life's more transcendent experiences. I feel as though I am swimming around in a fishbowl, cognizant of the existence of a greater reality surrounding me but helpless to partake of it.
Before I met my husband I had already established myself as a successful novelist, and my works of romantic fiction provided me with enough money to support myself. However, my middle-class existence came to an abrupt end once I was married. We now live on vast estate in the town of Amagansett, New York, on the eastern part of Long Island. Many famous celebrities live here; Paul McCartney and Billy Joel being our nearest neighbors.
To alleviate some of the loneliness and boredom I suffer when my husband is away, I have sought out the company of other women who live in the neighborhood; women who, like me, were anxious to move out from behind the shadows of their famous, and often absent, husbands to pursue their own interests. Over the years I became friends with quite a number of such women, and I eventually became part of a clique who met regularly to participate in one social event or another. I soon discovered to what heights of prurience extreme wealth and privilege could engender in even the most seemingly prim and austere women. And, with that revelation, my life would change forever.
One afternoon during a ladies' social tea at Millicent Friedman's house in early September, she began to recount in a most florid and candid way her recent visit to the Red Light district in Tokyo where she and several of her friends went to a bar where only women were allowed. In this bar many men from different countries would serve the women drinks while being scantily clothed or fully naked. The women would have the men masturbate for them in various ways until they reached orgasm. The women would then drink the men's sperm. She laughed merrily as she described how she forced one handsome young stud to send his ejaculate flying into a salad bowl ten feet across the room. Notwithstanding the fact that the feat she described would have been impossible for any man to achieve, the women seemed to accept it verbatim, and most found it quite amusing.
At first my reaction to this seemingly preposterous tale was one of both shock and disgust, but her account was hotly corroborated by two of the women seated next to me who had accompanied Millie on her trip. Despite their strident approbations, I was loathe to believe the lurid story and merely looked at them with an incredulous stare.
"I swear, Lydia, I am telling the truth," Millicent said, her limpid blue eyes focusing intently upon me.
Millicent, or "Millie" as she liked to be called, was an intellectually formidable and aggressive woman whose outspokenness was only superseded by her glaring sense of humor. Her tall, majestic frame was capped off by a crown of short, copper-red hair that lent a hint of juvenility to her athletic, middle-aged body. She had been married to a plastic surgeon for almost twenty-five years before they decided to call the marriage quits. She had one daughter who was off at college.
As she continued to stare at me waiting patiently for any sign that I might buy her story, the woman sitting beside me grabbed my arm and shook it violently.
"Don't believe a word she says, Lydia!" she said mockingly, denying her friend's admission with a demonstrable sneer.
"I don't," I answered, keeping my eyes on Millie.
Dorothy Gianelli was a stunning aburn-haired beauty with green eyes and an angelic face. She was in her early thirties and married with nine-year-old twins, both girls. Her husband was the CEO of a major architectural corporation in Manhattan that had built many of the tallest skyscrapers in the city. Like me, she had established herself as a successful interior designer long before she had met her husband, and retained her streetwise cynicism despite all the trappings of wealth. She was a daydreamer of the highest order, finding discontent in the supposed benefits of materialism and thirsting after a more profound and liberating life beyond the blatant opulence and conservatism of the elite social order she had been thrust into by marriage to her husband. Although demure, she projected a sunny, positive attitude marked by a distinctly kinky interest in all things sexual. Millie's story had made her laugh, but I could see that it also turned her on.
"Well, you should!" Millie retorted. "And it's about time we brought you up to speed."
"Oh, come on, Millie!" Dorothy whined. "Do you really think we should be telling her this?"
"Why the hell not? She's been in the loop for a several years. She's one of us now."
"I agree," Charlize Templeton said, raising her tea cup in salute. "We've got to tell her some time."
"Tell me what?" I inquired.
Charlize, a tall, thin aristocratic woman of forty-seven years, smiled at me and took a sip of tea before letting the cup down gently into her saucer. She had four children—all of whom had long since left home years ago to pursue their various careers. Her husband had died several years ago and she now lived alone in a beautiful mansion that had once been the summer resort of a wealthy and powerful senator from Oyster Bay. Her brown hair was pulled back into a bun and her fashionable glasses framed a face whose beauty had not diminished with age.
"We're a bunch of drinkers," she said brusquely.
"Drinkers?" I asked, with a puzzled look on my face. "As in alcoholics?"
"As in sperm," said a voice from the other end of the room.
Yumi Kawasaki, a lovely, black-haired, Japanese woman with huge brown eyes and flawless skin, shifted uncomfortably in her seat as she looked deferentially at Millie. The woman was in her late thirties but looked ten years younger. She had been married to a Japanese businessman for almost a decade and had one child, a boy of ten. At five feet two inches tall she was a powerhouse of intelligence and wit who tempered her proclivity toward unforgiving bluntness with a substantial amount of smiling and joke making.
"Sperm?" I felt myself laughing as I said it.
"Yes, sperm," she replied tersely. Call it what you will, sperm, semen, jizz, cum, splooge, baby batter...we love to drink it."
I looked from one face to the next hoping that what I had just heard would have provoked either exclamations of incredulity or amusement, but I was met only with blank stares.
"Are you telling me that you, all of you, actually drink semen?"
"Not only do we drink it," said Ann Pulaski, a pretty, short-haired blonde in her mid-40s with hazel eyes and a robust personality, "but we go hunting for it."
"That's right," Millie said. "We're what you might call sperm aficionados. And we're all part of a club—a 'semen hunters' club if you will."
I couldn't stop myself from laughing derisively at this point. "A semen hunter's club!" I cried, shaking my head in disbelief. "Stop it. You're going to make me puke!"
"This isn't a joke," Ann said, unamused.
Sharise Jackson, a tall, elegant, and stunningly beautiful black woman with huge breasts, impeccable fashion sense, and a singing voice that was on a par with her idol Whitney Houston, looked at me with a disapproving smirk. Her black satin Valentino dress caressed her hard, voluptuous body like a second skin. As the president and CEO of JET magazine, she had made friends with some of the most prominent black artists and politicians in the world. She was divorced with three kids, two boys and one girl, all of them in their teens. Her hair was short but styled very sexily, which made her look at lot younger than her forty-four years. "Well she seems to think it is!" she said to Ann while never taking her eyes off me.
"Oh please!" I said to Millie. "You're putting me on!"
"No, we're not," Millie replied. "We just happen to share the same fetish, that's all."
"Drinking cum?"
"Yes, drinking cum."
I threw up my hands in disgust. "And all of you are into this same perversion?"
"And what's so horrible about it?" Grace Allenby asked in her high-pitched Aussie voice. "It's not a bloody crime you know. And it's not like we're doing something illegal."
A recent immigré from Perth, Australia, Grace was a woman of medium height with long blonde hair and soft blue eyes. The creator of her own line of women's cosmetics, she had made a fortune in the ten short years since forming her company, which now had branches throughout the world. She was in her early thirties, and married with an eight-year-old girl. She normally possessed an even-tempered disposition but the subject matter seemed to provoke a surprisingly robust response from her.
"I didn't say it was illegal, Grace," I replied. "I said it was perverted."
