03

AUTHORS NOTE: What follows are two of the first four completed chapters in a longer series, "Lucy's Erotic Education." These are a trial run to gauge reactions to the layered framework I have used to enable Lucy to reveal her prior sexual experiences to her husband Will.

Introduction:

"Lucy's Erotic Education" is about the sexual experiences of my wife-to-be before we met. She has finally agreed to share these with me only after I have long pestered her to do so. I had hoped that we would both find that her recollections of earlier sexual adventures would provoke excitement for us — Lucy in the telling and me in the listening. And that ultimately proved to be the case.

Most of Lucy's highly descriptive recounting is from her nearly two year relationship with a wealthy older man who guides her through a series of highly erotic episodes. These build in her an ardent craving for more sexual stimulation and leave her at times feeling corrupted, dissolute, even addicted. Much of this lustful hunger was provoked by her frequent exposure to very special erotic films and photographs created or acquired by her older confidante and mentor. Lucy describes these and her reactions to them, as well as her own sexual acts, in shameless and lewd detail. She does this in a long recording she made for me based on her diary and notebooks from this period.

The sexual experiences Lucy describes leave me with much to try to understand — and accept. Now I need to better comprehend my wife's deepest, partially hidden from me until now, sexual predilections and needs and to consider how our relationship, and especially our sexual lives, might be enriched in the years ahead.

Chapter one: Lucy begins

Two or three months ago my gorgeous strawberry blond wife Lucy finally agreed to describe for me her sexual experiences during the years before we met. I was eager to hear about these. For a year or more I had pestered her during our own love making to recall for me several early sexual experiences that had been especially meaningful to her. While I long had enjoyed fantasizing about her with other men, I wanted to hear her describe earlier relationships that were real and that she found sexually rewarding.

I had noticed five years ago as soon as we began to date how many men simply could not resist eyeing Lucy's lovely face and luscious body and, as we became intimate and then after we married, I often imagined watching her grant one of them her sexual favors. That was easy to envision because I realized that if my comely Lucy, a Nicole Kidman near look-alike, flirted in even a slightly provocative way no man would be able to resist her breathtaking sexual allure.

Perhaps I was picturing such situations more often now because I had noticed that recently Lucy had begun to dress more suggestively and I was certain that other men found her as sexually stirring to look at as I did. And I was certain that Lucy knew exactly what reactions she was stimulating.

So one evening while we were sitting together after dinner, Lucy recounted for me her wonderful first summer of lovemaking with a boy named Daniel just before she left for college in Chicago. I was moved as she described very frankly her memories of first tender but then very hot sexual intimacy with this more experienced college student home for the summer in Lucy's upscale neighborhood in Indianapolis. Almost everything sexual then was new and exciting for Lucy, and Daniel was the perfect teacher, thoughtfully introducing her to memorable first time pleasures. I knew from photographs how captivating and sensual young Lucy had already become and it excited me to hear her describe how sexually responsive she soon became as well. Daniel was rewarded well for his mentorship.

And then a week or two later Lucy shared her memories of a relationship during her junior year in college. She described her sexual enjoyment during a semester with Marcos, a Latino boyfriend from New York. But she recalled for me a very brief but all-consuming sexual time with Romero, Marcos' charismatic older friend visiting from Brazil. She described Romero as exotically handsome and strong, skilled, and of unmatched sexual endurance. He gave Lucy multiple rounds of pleasure with multiple orgasms for her along the way while he held his own climax for long periods. Lucy said she had certainly never had before so many strong orgasms as during her several days with Romero. She also told me how erotic she found it to listen when Marcos described for her later in exquisite detail how Romero, on a previous visit, had seduced both of Marco's sisters, one older and married, the other a year younger than Marco. He could describe this all so vividly for Lucy because Romero had arranged for Marco to watch as he fucked each of his sisters.

Lucy clearly was very turned on by reliving this experience. In fact she told me that what Marcos revealed to her was the first time she found high excitement in listening to someone describe other people having sex and she found the same excitement when she thought of watching something like that herself. She said she wondered then if such possibilities might become part of her own erotic life, in fantasy but even for real.

Once Lucy began to share these early experiences with me she found that talking about them them let her feel again some of the passion they had involved. For some weeks I would encourage her to recall them again and again while we were having sex and I took advantage of how hot she became while revisiting those times. They seemed to fuel a lustfulness, even a raunchiness in her that I had not heard or felt from her before.

[NOTE: The two experiences described briefly above are explored in detail, though with different names, in the two chapters of my earlier story, "Nora, Before We Met."]

Then, one recent night just after we had gone to bed, Lucy said to me, "Will, there is one more part of my sexual past I am almost ready to share with you. In fact I believe I owe it to you to tell you about it; maybe I need to do that most for my own peace of mind. I am not proud to admit that this experience was very important to me. What I have to share with you is about a longer relationship involving an older man who, for over two years, led me through sexual experiences I had not even imagined. This was a much more complicated relationship. 'Advanced' might be one word for it. Or decadent. Or corrupting. Or addictive. All of those. And even now I feel some guilt and some embarrassment as well. I have been reluctant to tell you about this time because of the questionable activities in which I took part. As you learn about this, you might conjecture how what I am going to describe for you might relate to sexual desires that I have been feeling in recent months. We will need to talk about all this very soon.

"Will, because I am concerned about your reaction to what I am going to describe, I have thought hard about how to go about this. I don't want to be careless in what I say and how I say it. So I first reread a daily calendar and a diary that I kept during the time I will tell you about. I also have made some new notes recalling other things I did or felt or said or thought then, things I remember now but that I did not write then in the diary. And I have decided to leave out a few things. Maybe I will share them later depending on how you react to what I will reveal now.

"Based on my notes I decided that rather than tell you about this while we are together I would record my comments so that you can listen sometime when I am not with you. I don't want to be interrupted to explain things further or to defend myself or to apologize as I am sharing these memories. I want you to have time to listen and to then consider how you feel and what you want to then say to me or ask me about. Will, I want to be honest with you as I recount this time. You should know that I have found it exciting to recall many of these experiences, even the ones I am ashamed of. Much of it was vey erotic then and still is for me in remembering it and describing it for you. During this time I often felt myself very alive, very aroused, desiring sexual experience — and I felt desirable myself. Sometimes I would look at myself in the mirror and I could bring myself to think: Lucy you really are beautiful, even stunning, seductive, ravishing, almost sexually irresistible. I don't often feel that way now, Will. I was enriched by that experience even as I let some things go much too far.

"So here is the recording, Will. If it becomes deeply upsetting to you, destroy the recording and forget as much of it as you can. I have tried to make the dialog as close as I can come to words that were spoken during this relationship. But it also frightens me for you to hear me saying these things. I am showing great confidence in your love for me. But I also tell myself and I remind you Will that, after all, you have asked for this over and over. "

I waited for some days before I began to listen to what Lucy had recorded. I did so when she was away spending a long week end with her parents in Indianapolis. Later I used software to translate the recording into text. This is the transcription of Lucy's recollections:

Chapter two: Lucy meets Arthur Beri Davis

Dearest Will, what I am going to describe for you here is the way a very attractive older man, drawing initially on my interest in art and photography, patiently and skillfully led me through a series of unexpected and unusual erotic experiences. These were new and exotic to me and I came for a time to crave more and more of them. Gradually I became addicted to the thrill of them.

When this began I was working on my Master's thesis at the Kellogg School at Northwestern I was spending a lot of time talking with directors and staff of art galleries in Chicago. I attended many exhibit openings so that I could ask artists about their relationships with galleries and to meet board members and other supporters of the galleries, deciding then which of them I wanted to interview later. All of this was to help me better understand the operations of the galleries, especially their financial management, the subject of my thesis.

Will, I was not having a romantic relationship and almost no sex at all during this time. I was very busy; my mind was on finishing my degree and on what I might be able to do with it career-wise in Chicago where I hoped to stay. Perhaps subconsciously I was also waiting for something out of the ordinary to come along in my personal life. Maybe I was overdue for an intense sexual relationship. Unfortunately, this was still three years before I met you.

It was at an opening in a gallery in the West Loop, a show featuring Edward Weston's nude photographs, that I met an older man, Arthur Beri Davis. He was standing beside me as we stared at one of the photographs. He asked me whether I liked Weston generally and particularly his nudes. I told him I did but I then mentioned several other photographers from the same period whose work I preferred. We began to talk and found we had shared interests in photography and film and in our opinions on several of the then "hot" young Chicago artists. Beri, (pronounced "Barry") which he said is what his friends called him, made a remark about the gallery we were in that led me to tell him about my thesis, then in first draft. He immediately told me that he would be very interested in hearing my ideas and the conclusions I had reached. The financial management of galleries interested him, he said, especially as a board member of several of them and a supporter of quite a few others. He knew well, for example, the owner of the gallery we were in and he explained that over the years he had gotten to know the directors and staff of many of the interesting private galleries in Chicago.

I told Beri Davis that I would be pleased to discuss my thesis findings with him and would welcome his reactions. So we agreed to have coffee a few days later at the Art Institute coffee shop to continue our conversation. I had lived in the Loop for several years by then to be near the Art Institute School while I was an undergraduate there and I had continued to live there while I commuted a couple of day a week to Northwestern in Evanston. Beri said he lived not far from my apartment. When I looked later at the address on his business card I knew that in addition to having an interest in art and photography he must have considerable wealth as well. I had often walked past his elegant art nouveau building which I learned had been an apartment hotel that had been converted to condominiums some years ago. His apartment number, 2001, indicated to me that he lived at the very top of that striking historic register building.

It was clear to me, Will, that Beri Davis was considerably older than me, I guessed in his early forties. It surprised me that at age twenty three I immediately found him attractive as well as engaging. I had never had a sexual relationship with an older man or even a platonic one. Beri was of medium height with a strikingly handsome face, deep brown eyes, a dark closely trimmed mustache and beard with just a few flecks of grey, and a perfect posture. I remember that when we met that first time he was tastefully dressed in black slacks and a stylish grey sweater over a white shirt, even then one of my favorites combinations. As you know, I like it when you wear those together. Beri Davis obviously was someone who took himself seriously and expected that others would too. Initially I thought that he might be something of a poseur. I had met many of those in art school, both faculty and students. Beri Davis was much more than that. I guessed that he came from a moneyed family, probably not a self made business person. Those were my impressions after our first conversation.

During our coffee I learned more. Arthur Beri Davis was fifty years old, twenty-seven years my senior. He had grown up in New York City, went to Bard for his undergraduate degree, then to Princeton for a Master's in Art with a focus on photography. He had moved to Chicago from New York about a decade ago. He was a collector, especially of photography, both vintage and contemporary, and he was serious about his own photography though he said little about it then. Beri had travelled extensively in Europe and Asia, mainly in recent years to see photographs of high interest and to purchase some of them. He did not mention then that taking photographs of other people was in fact his main motivation to travel. He had once lived in Venice for a year and in Amsterdam and Osaka for several months each and he continued to travel to those three cities in a kind of cycle. His comments on my thesis were not especially helpful though they demonstrated that he was very familiar with some of the galleries I had analyzed and with many of the people involved with them. I found him easy to be with. I was impressed with his knowledge about photography and I soon became intrigued by his obvious interest in me.

During the weeks that followed Beri invited me for dinner twice in favorite restaurants of his in neighborhoods that I was not familiar with. It was nice to be with someone who knew the city so well and had tastes in food and wine that were much more sophisticated than mine. He also had lots of stories about people in the art world in Chicago, including about romantic and sexual relationships among gallery owners, staff, supporters, and even critics. He described how some of these relationships had shifted over the years and had led to the demise of some galleries and the origin of others. My thesis wasn't concerned with such personal factors but they were fascinating nevertheless. Beri also began to share more with me about his tastes in art, photography and film, especially foreign photographers and film makers.

I believe it was at the second of those restaurant dinners that, after we were seated, Beri commented that he was very pleased that I had agreed to join him again, that he had feared that someone as young an as attractive as he found me to be might be reluctant to be seen in public with someone considerably older than myself. He told me then for the first time that he found me beautiful and that when he thought of me, which he did often, the words that came to his mind were captivating and desirable.

I was taken aback by these comments. I did not know how to react, in part because I did not know how I felt. The "beautiful and desirable" seemed too personal too soon. So I just told him that I had no reluctance to be seen anywhere with him, that for such an elderly gentleman he seemed very well preserved and that he must take very good care of himself. He explained in an understated way that he did work hard to keep in shape: vigorous squash early almost every morning at the Athletic Club and, in his apartment, weights and a pad for pushups, sit ups and other floor work, something he had been doing since his graduate school days. But then he added, "And I kept that up for as long as I could." He did not say more and I did not think it was appropriate to ask what he meant. I just told him that I was impressed

After a month or so, Beri told me he would be happy to show me some of his collection of photographs if I was ever interested. Several of the photographers he mentioned were well known to me and others I had not heard of, especially the Japanese photographers. I asked him what kinds of photographs especially interested him and he said his tastes were diverse and that I would need to see some of his collection to understand what really moved him.

I encountered Beri again soon at another Friday evening opening, this one showing new work by several young "emerging" Chicago artists. We talked briefly. Neither of us was very impressed with the promise of the artists whose works were on the walls. As I was leaving I said to him, "Beri, if the offer is still open I would very much like to see your apartment and some of your photographs. Almost any time. It would be a privilege to confirm my respect for your taste."

"That would be my pleasure, Lucy," he said. "How about a week from Sunday, late afternoon, around five. I can offer you a light supper if you have time for that after I show you around my apartment and we can look at some of my pictures." I told him I would.

Not surprisingly, Beri's apartment and its furnishings were striking, a mixture of old world elegance mixed with contemporary design. And there were several very sexy art nouveau sculptural pieces. I did not find this an entirely pleasing combination but he obviously knew what he liked. Photographs were featured on his walls throughout the apartment, a wide range by period and subject, most of them in black and white. Several photographs that he described as favorites were by Italian and Japanese photographers and I was unfamiliar with them. And mixed in here and there were several excellent early twentieth century American paintings and prints.

In a separate room Beri showed me some of his own photographs, especially from his travels. More of these were in color and I found them engaging but not especially imaginative. And then he took me into one small more private room that was filled with his photo portraits of friends and acquaintances, some very formal, some very casual. Most of the people were very attractive and I recognized some faces I had seen at gallery openings or art lectures. A few of his photos were of extremely beautiful women and several more were of very handsome men. A few were of couples, some of older men with younger women. That made me curious though I did not raise any questions then. I was a bit surprised that these seemed to be what he most wanted me to see. I was left with questions I was not prepared to ask.