For the good old USA, the winter of 1968 was a placid time relative to the violence and turmoil that was to come in the ensuing months. In April came the assassination of Martin Luther King, followed by urban riots. In June, an assassin's bullet felled Robert Kennedy; and in August, police beat up demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
But relative calm prevailed that winter when "The Graduate" played in theaters around the country. The movie was based on the novel about a young man (Benjamin Braddock) just out of college, socially awkward and confused about his future and naïve to the ways of the opposite sex. Enter Mrs. Robinson, the middle-aged, burnt-out, alcoholic neighbor who seduces Benjamin into a summer sex fling.
The movie became a template for horny, virgin boys who wished for their own Mrs. Robinson. Wendell Perdofsky was one of those boys—shy, eighteen year old Wendell and masturbator extraordinaire whose sex life existed in only one place: his mind.
Enter Janet Wilcox, his sexy, chestnut-haired, forty-one year old neighbor, married for close to twenty years and bored to the point of concocting fantasies of seducing young men (years later, women like her would be called cougars) like Wendell, her reveries influenced after she too saw "The Graduate." No alcoholic she, just a bored housewife looking for adventure, thinking of ways to do Wendell the way Mrs. Robinson did Benjamin.
Why Wendell? Because for Janet, he personified the "right" image, the somewhat nerdy looking, horny youth who craved female intimacy but was clueless about how to get it. Wendell, a college freshman who lived with his parents, was no stranger to the Wilcox household. Nathan Wilcox, Janet's tubby hubby, was a coin collector, a hobby he shared with Wendell, a newbie to the process. Nathan mentored Wendell, giving him tips on what he should look for, what to buy, what to sell, what coins were likely to become valuable in the future, etc.
If Nathan failed to notice Wendell leering at his wife (and he didn't let on if he did notice), Janet sure didn't. No surprise to her, for men of all ages had been leering at her ever since she began menstruating. Even at the gateway to middle-age, Janet Wilcox stirred many a guy's sexual appetite, young guys, old guys and those in between. She was pretty, and how (!), with big green eyes, full sensuous lips and shoulder-length, chestnut hair that swirled around her face on windy days and when she shook her head, a habit she picked up ever since she sensed its value as an aphrodisiac. She stood five-foot seven, with proportions favoring her legs, long, shapely and still smooth owing to the right genetics and daily applications of body lotion—a leg man's dream one might say. But even boob men, ordinarily unimpressed with her "average" sized bust, could not help but admire those beautiful, eye-popping extremities, often exposed in short dresses and skirts.
Wendell's own fantasies involving Janet Wilcox became more vivid after he saw the movie. Anne Bancroft didn't exactly look like Janet Wilcox, nor did Wendell look like Dustin Hoffman, almost thirty when cast in the role of Benjamin Braddock. Still, he could picture himself and Janet in that scene where Mrs. Robinson, sitting at her home bar, spreads her legs before a startled Benjamin: "Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me." The movie furnished Wendell with weeks of masturbatory material. Ultimately, though, it left him frustrated, for he wanted the "real thing." How to get it was the question. He had enough trouble approaching girls his own age; never mind conveying his desires to an older married woman. What would he say and how would he say it?
He needn't have worried, because Janet had a plan. With her daughter away at college and her husband at work during the day, she'd invite Wendell over when he didn't have class at the local college he attended. She'd need a pretext, but that shouldn't be a problem. She'd ask him to help her move something or simply have him over for tea and a friendly chat.
And so, on a clear, blustery morning in late January 1968, Janet Wilcox made her move. She could see from her window Wendell's car in the driveway, a good indication that he had not yet left for class.
"Hi Wendell, Janet Wilcox."
"Hi. What's up?"
"Not to impose, but would you be so kind as to come over and help me move a piece of furniture? I really would appreciate it."
Wendell said he'd be all too willing to help, never suspecting what his conniving neighbor was up to. It didn't take him long to get an idea when she let him in wearing nothing more than a pink negligee with matching panties and silver-toned slippers with one-inch heels. He gawked, ran his hand through his Beatle-length, sandy colored hair and then shook his head.
"Please pardon the way I'm dressed," she said, "or undressed, but I got up not too long ago. Would you like some coffee or tea? Have you had breakfast?"
Wendell, still in his blue ski jacket, said, "Um, ah, no thanks. I just had breakfast. You said something about moving furniture?"
He followed her up the stairs with his eyes fixed on her luscious gams and sexy butt, half of it hanging out of her panties, her gluteus maximus flexing, revealing just a touch of cellulite. She led him into her daughter's room to move a desk into a spare bedroom that Nathan used as a home office. "Juliana's away at school, so she won't need this," Janet said. "Take your coat off, Wendell, and stay awhile."
Wendell did, and then gripped one end of the desk while Janet took the other end. He backed out of the room and into the hall, looking both ways, backward to avoid crashing, forward to focus on his neighbor's boobs, half exposed by her garment's plunging neckline and paper-thin material.
The desk was light enough where Wendell could have moved it himself. Heck, light enough for even Janet to have moved it alone had she wanted to. But she had a plan and was sticking to it. "You WILL stay long enough to have tea with me, won't you?" she said. "I'd like to hear about your school, the classes you're taking and so forth."
Wendell didn't argue. His first class wasn't until one in the afternoon and it was just past nine. He followed her downstairs and into the den, a cozy, half-carpeted room lined with bookshelves and furnished with just two pieces, a plush sofa and black leather, Eames-designed lounge chair. Nathan had his fancy stereo in there too: AR turntable, Marantz amp and tuner combo and speakers built into the bookshelf. While Janet went to the kitchen to make tea, Wendell sat on the Eames chair, reading the titles of all those books and also catching sight of a photograph, a family portrait shot months ago on the Wilcox lawn. Janet and Nathan flank a smiling, very pretty Juliana, not exactly a spitting image of her mother, though one would have to be blind not to see the resemblance, the long legs and coloring alone being dead giveaways. "She's out of our league," one of Wendell's nerdy buds once told him, and Wendell hadn't disagreed.
"There you go," Janet said, handing Wendell a cup and saucer, and then easing on to the sofa and crossing her legs. Every few minutes she would alternate, crossing her left leg over the right, then right over the left, her crotch fully exposed when she did so, with nothing to conceal her mons pubis but pink panties, thin enough to where Wendell could see "all the way to China," as the expression went.
Janet listened with detached amusement as Wendell talked about his classes, watching him squirm in his long sleeve Polo shirt, his brown loafers and green, cuffed Farah pants, struggling to avert his eyes from her privates but hardly succeeding. Fully in the driver's seat, she took a detour, steering the conversation toward his social life, such as it was. "So, do you have a girlfriend?"
"Not at the moment," he said, his fair complexion reddening from the warm tea and Janet's leg crossing act. "I've never really had a steady girlfriend," he added. "Still looking."
"Yes, I see that you're looking," Janet said, seizing Wendell's comment as a convenient means to her naughty end. "And do you like what you see?" She crossed her legs again, this time pausing a few seconds with legs akimbo, before hanging her left leg over the right.
