"I want to see a pornographic movie, Peter. Will you take me to one?"
I'd met JB through her friend Alice, who in turn came into my life at breakfast one morning with my roommate Jeff. They attended the Institute of Fine Arts where he was cutting a wide swath, partly because he was one of the few heterosexual males there but mostly because he was attractive, energetic, and fun to be with. He'd told me about her but we'd never met, because I had to be at work by 9 and they were horny graduate students with no classes before noon.
When Jeff and Alice parted, I took up with her. We slept together mostly at her apartment, to avoid running into Jeff. We ended it within a couple of weeks but decided we liked each other enough to remain friends.
Jeff and I liked to give 8-person dinner parties. We served buffet and sat on the floor because we didn't have enough chairs. We tried for a mix of his student and art-world friends and my political and governmental friends. In June, Jeff invited Alice and she brought her friend JB.
Unlike Alice, JB had a job, at the Metropolitan as a junior curator. Also unlike Alice, JB had a clear complexion. They both stood around 5-feet-6, had nice long brown hair, and their chests were small.
JB dressed well for work, in fashionable dresses or blouses and skirts, depending on the demands of the day. At 27 she was reserved, scholarly, and loved talking about her work in the prints department, which thanks to Jeff I knew enough about to carry on a conversation.
"You can do that on your own, you know."
"And be found dead in a stinking alley off Times Square? No thanks."
"Do you have any particular subject matter? There must be thirty theaters on Forty-Second Street and more on Eighth Avenue. They all specialize. There are male theaters, there are bikers, places where they do whips and chains, there are —"
"Thanks for the information, Peter. Men and women, please, just normal stuff."
We met at the TKTS booth north of Times Square and walked down Broadway to Forty-Second Street, then west to the theater. I'd chosen a theater with decent air conditioning and where your feet didn't stick to the floor. I don't remember the title of the movie, but its action was pure heterosexual porn.
A beautiful English nobleman's daughter is alone at her father's country estate with just the butler and footman to take care of her. They conspire to rape her but she turns the tables on them and has them completely exhausted within hours. She makes them call a dozen of their friends to continue the fun and forces them to line them up with their rampant cocks sticking out of their pants. One by one she strokes them off, blows them, or makes them masturbate as she walks down the line. Think water fountains at Fontainebleau. It was pretty hard core.
"Well, that was fun. Want to go to another one? The place across the street is doing that golden oldie, 'I Am Curious, Yellow.' "
"Thanks, Peter. That was more than enough." She gave me a curt peck on the cheek and headed for the uptown train.
Several weeks later, when she called to ask if I could come for a dinner party on Saturday, I was surprised. I'd figured the movie was a lot more than she bargained for and I'd never hear from her again.
The four other guests were vivacious, entertaining, attractive, and very gay. The two women were a couple who worked at the museum and the individual men worked for a dealer and an auction house. When it slipped out that I knew Jeff I was accorded a status well beyond my workaday standing as a bureaucrat.
I stayed to help clean up and wash the dishes. JB dried.
"That was fun. Thanks so much for including me."
"Did you enjoy it? I know most of it was shop talk and I was afraid you'd be bored."
"Well, it helps that I've known Jeff since we met in college. I took a class in prints and bookmaking from the same professor who got him interested in fine prints. I like the craft of printing: type, engraving, ink, and presses. Jeff's more interested in the artists, so I've absorbed just enough to not make a fool of myself tonight."
"You did pretty well. A lot of people think Jeff has a real future in the New York art world."
"He's got a parttime job with Herman Schenkman, the dealer, and wants to either go into the business or into one of the auction houses. If he could find the time to finish his thesis, he'd be launched. But the women keep throwing themselves at him." I looked carefully at how she responded to my teasing.
"Poor guy! But yeah, that is his problem, he does have to get his degree pretty soon or they'll start wondering if he's serious."
We finished putting the glasses and silverware away. I thanked her again for the lovely dinner and moved to leave. JB brought out a bottle of Drambuie and two glasses and motioned me to the couch.
"I should have been more appreciative to you for taking me to the movies that day, Peter. I was pretty appalled at what I saw. So thank you very much" and she kissed me, now on the lips.
I kissed her back. When we broke apart, she shifted backwards slightly, then brought her legs up under her and faced me.
"Was there any reason why you wanted film?" I asked. "There are images in your collections at the Met that are as graphic as what we saw, and all sorts of bookstores have good stocks of literate erotica."
"I can't rummage through the prints that way. They're catalogued by artist. And the bookstores aren't much better than the theaters. If I'm going to learn about sex it's going to be with film."
"Did our excursion help?"
"Yes."
"Are your friends happy for you?" I said, meaning the four who had left not an hour ago.
"They're ambivalent, but Alice isn't."
"Alice?"
"Yes. We've talked a lot about my locked-up life. My therapist says that there's nothing wrong with me that a decision, followed by acting on it, won't cure. My problem is not being able to come to a decision."
I knew better than to follow that up, so I waited.
