Orgasmatron

I heard the first whispers about it in early February. A researcher in biosciences was said to be working on some sort of sexual response research that was attracting lots and lots of corporate money. The rumors ranged from the development of the ultimate aphrodisiac to hints that this person had figured out what part of the brain made a person gay and could switch it on or off by modifying a gene. As titillating as the rumors were, I dismissed them as the idle gossip of bored and sex-starved professors.

Me dismissing them didn't make them go away though. Throughout the spring semester I kept hearing bits and pieces from colleagues, usually with a nudge or a wink or the rolling of eyes. The only evidence I could see that something big was happening was in the Provost's annual report, which included a line on some very large corporate donations to the biosciences program for "path breaking research."

It was at an end-of-year cocktail party at a neighbor's house that I found out who the mystery researcher was, although it took me longer to find out what was actually going on. This particular party was an annual ritual that my friends and neighbors Bob and Mary Alice staged the day after graduation. Everyone's grades had been turned in for several days, the students were all dispersed to the winds, and the campus was emptying out fast.

Bob and Mary Alice live three doors down the street from me in what we like to call the "faculty ghetto," a neighborhood of older Victorian houses, none of which are rented to hordes of students. They've got a big back yard and set up half a dozen grills and a full bar and invite every faculty member they know to come and unwind. Even people they don't know show up, which is just fine with the hosts. The point is to have fun and forget that classes start again in 12 weeks.

I'd arrived early in the day to help with the grilling—I'm the master of the bar-b-que ribs and supervise four large smoker grills. This, of course, requires the supervision of a cooler of beer strategically placed under a shade tree nearby. By the time the guests arrived six hours later, the ribs were done and I was sobering up a bit, having supervised the cooler a bit too strenuously at the start of my cooking.

Over the next several hours I took dripping slabs of ribs to the chopping block just behind the smokers, whacked them into individual servings with a large cleaver I bought for just such a need, and then set them on the main serving table for people to ooh and ahh over. The key is to stagger the batches over a couple of hours so that the ribs keep coming throughout the high point of the party. It's a dirty, smoky and hot job, but hey, somebody's got to do it.

Around 4:30, the last of the ribs were on the table, minus a half dozen I'd reserved for myself, and I was safely ensconced in my lawn chair next to my cooler, digging in to the bounty of my labors. As I watched about 100 or so of my colleagues mix and mingle (a couple of them were already staggering just a bit), I noticed an attractive woman around my age (I'm 46) messing with my smokers. She was opening each lid in turn and looking inside with a slightly sad expression on her otherwise attractive face.

"Looking for something?" I called out to her from the shade.

"Ribs," she said, turning to face me. She was a tall woman, maybe 5'10" and athletic looking in her shorts and t-shirt. "I missed the ribs and I was wondering if there were any left."

Ruefully, I looked down at the five I had left on my plate, then did the gallant thing, "If there aren't any more on the table, pull up a chair and I'll share mine."

"Oh no," she said, shaking her head sadly. "I couldn't do that. I saw how hard you were working over here earlier. Go ahead. Eat your ribs."

"Absolutely not," I replied. "The grill master must share his wealth. Seriously, pull up a chair."

"Well, okay," she said. "Let me go get some sides."

As she walked away from me to the main table, I couldn't help noticing that she was as attractive from behind as she was from the front. Not a stunner, but certainly attractive. She had shoulder length light brown hair, broad shoulders and legs that went on and on.

A couple of minutes later she returned carrying a plate piled high with sides—clearly she was hungry—and was dragging a lawn chair behind her. I would have stood to help her, but she seemed to have the situation under control.

"I'm Tom," I said. "Master of the smoked meats."

"I'm Christina," she said. "Acolyte of the smoked meats." Then she laughed. It was a hearty laugh that made her breasts jiggle in an alluring way. "Let me go get a beer and I'll be all set."

"You are all set already," I said, patting my cooler. "I'm well stocked."

"You've done this before, haven't you?" she asked.

"My thirteenth year," I replied, a note of pride in my voice. I reached into the cooler, pulled out an icy Heineken, popped the top and handed it to her once she'd gotten comfortable in her chair. Like me, she'd chosen one of those fold out chairs that can lie all the way back. Then I handed her three of my remaining five ribs.

"Thanks," she said again. "You're very nice to share."

"Like I said, ma'am, it's my duty."

"Well, lucky me then to have come along before you had eaten all yours." She smiled at me again. It was a nice smile. "What department are you in?"

"History," I said after I'd finished chewing a large piece of meat I'd just torn from the bone. "You?"

"Biosciences," she said, doing like me and tearing into the meat with her teeth.

"Ah..." I said.

"Ah?" she asked after she'd chewed and swallowed. "What's that mean, 'Ah'?"

"Well," I began between bites. "I've been hearing rumors all semester long about some tawdry sex thing going on in your laboratories over there."

She took a long pull on her beer before answering and then said, "Ah indeed. Yes, it's all very tawdry actually."

"So you admit it then?" I asked, getting into the game. "Naked students running around the lab and all that?"

"I wish," she said. "No, nothing quite that tawdry."

"Do you mind if I ask for specifics," I prodded. "I can keep a secret."

She looked at me closely for a second or two, took another pull on her beer, then said, "Sure, you can ask, but I won't tell." Then she laughed. Boy did her breasts jiggle when she laughed!

"No, seriously," she said after she'd finished off her first rib. "It's me who's doing the research and, well, given the rumors that are flying around campus, I'd rather not say what I'm doing. You can understand that, can't you?"

"I'm deeply offended and disappointed," I said with mock Indignation. "I share the last of the ribs with you and now you clam up on me at the moment of truth!"

"You did say it was your duty," she chided me.

"Got me there," I said. To mask my disappointment, I cracked us each another beer, which she gladly accepted. "Tell me about something else then to assuage my hurt feelings."

"Fair enough," she said. "I'll tell you how I got into this line of work in the first place. It's a story that will just make you want to know more. When I was an undergrad I wrote my senior thesis on the social construction of frigidity. I had heard the term used a number of times to describe girls I knew who didn't want to have sex with men, or with specific men any way, and it really pissed me off, so I decided to learn how our society came to describe some women as frigid. I learned a lot, but one thing that I hadn't expected, was that there really were women who experienced no pleasure from sex. Given my own experiences, I couldn't imagine what that must have been like and it saddened me. They were missing out on so much. So, when I went to graduate school, I ended up studying the science of human sexual response. And, by the way, I also found out that there were men who also had never experienced an orgasm."

This last bit was news to me. "No shit," I said. "Now that is sad."

"Yeah, most men say that when I tell them," she said. "You aren't one of those men, then?"

"Moi?" I said, hand on chest in mock alarm. "I should say not."

"Well, that's a good thing then," she said. Before I could follow up on what seemed like a possible proposition, she asked me about my own work and the moment passed. The two of us sat happily under our tree, swilling beer, gossiping about the colleagues we could see in the milling crowd, and getting progressively smashed. As the evening stretched toward night, Bob turned on the strings of tacky little paper lanterns he'd hung from trees all over the yard.

The crowd was waning and so, alas, was my supply of beer. That was probably a good thing, because I was definitely drunk and if I had been sober, I could have judged whether Christina was too. She sure seemed drunk.

At last, she put down her final beer and said, "I better get out of here. No way I'm going to drive home in this condition, and it's a good half a mile to my house. If I'm lucky, I won't get lost on the way."

Ever the gallant host, I said, "I insist on walking you home. Between the two of us, we ought to be just sober enough to find your house."

She batted her eyes at me and said, "Offer accepted."

We spent a minute cleaning up our mess, mostly by dumping it all in my cooler which I told her I'd planned to pick up the next day in any case, and then we wove our way through the last of the revelers and out onto the sidewalk. Christina paused for a moment considering, then turned and headed off to the right with just a wee bit of a weave. Yep, she was drunk alright. Takes one to know one.

On the way to her house, which I'm proud to say we managed to get to without one detour, we continued our idle banter about colleagues, the university, and other topics of no meaning—both of us clearly trying to avoid talking about anything important.

When we reached her front walk, she took my hand in hers, gave it a squeeze and, with a slight slurring of her words, said, "Tom, I'm too drunk to fuck, otherwise I'd invite you in."

"Baloney," I said. "If you could walk this far unaided, you can fuck. No doubt about it."

"No," she said a bit more firmly. "I hate to fuck when I'm this drunk. But I do want to fuck you, so maybe we could have dinner tomorrow?"

I gave her hand a squeeze back and said, "I'd love that. Your place or mine?"

"Come over here," she said. Then, giggling, "That is, if you can remember how to get here when you wake up tomorrow."

"Don't you worry about that, my dear," I replied. "I've never yet missed an offer of a free dinner from a beautiful woman."

"'kay," she said. "Get out of here then. And don't kiss me! I've got a nosy old bat of a neighbor and I don't want to give her the satisfaction."

"I'll have to wait until tomorrow, then," I said. I gave her hand one last squeeze, turned and weaved my way back toward my own house, my thoughts already turning to large doses of aspirin washed down with quarts of water to stave off the hangover that was sure to greet me tomorrow morning.

***

I was indeed hung over the next morning, but not nearly as badly as I had expected...and certainly not so hung over that I might forget to call Christina. Given the pounding in my own head, I waited until noon before calling and, given the croakiness of her voice when she answered, it was a good thing I hadn't called sooner.

"Oh, I haven't forgotten that I invited you," she said in response to my query. "Be here at 7:30 and bring some white wine. We're having seafood."

I puttered around the house for a couple of hours waiting for the worst of my hangover to subside, then went to the gym and swam 3,000 yards to clear out any of the last vestiges of the day before from my system. By the time I got home, I was refreshed and ready for what promised to be a very enjoyable evening.

Armed with two fairly expensive bottles of white and dressed in one of my best Polynesian shirts—it was the first day full day of summer vacation after all—I arrived at Christina's front door at exactly 7:35...on time, but a tactful few minutes late. She greeted me with a smile, took the wine and ushered me in. Because I'd come in very casual attire, I was glad to see that she was also dressed to relax—another pair of nicely fitting shorts and a pale green polo shirt that clung to her very nicely. I noticed that her breasts seemed a bit larger than I had remembered them. Yum.

"I was planning to grill some shrimp but then I remembered that you are the self-proclaimed 'Master' of the grill, so I didn't want to do anything that might harm your self-image," she said playfully as she poured us each a healthy glass of wine.

"Madam," I said. "I am very secure in my manhood and my status as the 'Master', so in future, please do not refrain from cooking any which way you want."

"Okay 'Master' Tom," she replied. "For tonight, though, it's scampi on the stove."

"Works for me," I said, following her as she led the way to her back screen porch. We sat for a moment enjoying the evening air and the wine, and then she said, "Thanks for not pressing me about my research yesterday. Everyone here is so damned nosy about it."

"Hey," I said. "Don't worry about it. I figure it's your business and you'll tell me about it if and when you want to."

"Actually," she replied, "I'd like to tell you about it now. I'd rather it didn't sit there in the corner of the room staring at us, making us both uncomfortable."

"Okay," I said. "I'm all ears and, as I said yesterday, I can keep a secret."

"Thanks," she said. Then, clearly screwing herself up a bit, she took a gulp from her glass, set it down and began.

"Like I told you yesterday, this all started when I wrote an undergraduate thesis on frigidity. In my MA program I learned that while we know a lot about how the human body responds to sexual stimulation, what we know less about is why it doesn't. That is, why some minority of people seem unable to achieve orgasm, regardless of the stimuli. For some people diagnosed as dysfunctional, the problem is largely psychological, but for a very small minority, their bodies simply won't orgasm. As it turns out, the numbers of men and women in this small group are about the same, as near as we can tell."

"For the past decade I've been working on this problem. Most of my colleagues have tended to see it as a combination of psychological and physiological factors, but my research has led me to conclude that for those who truly cannot achieve orgasm, the real problem is entirely physiological."

"Sort of like how some people simply cannot read, no matter what learning strategies we use with them?" I interjected.

"Sort of like that," she said. "The brain is a hugely and wonderfully complex organ and at the moment we understand about ten percent of its functioning pretty well. The rest of it remains largely a mystery to us. However, when it comes to orgasm, we've been able to identify that region of the brain that triggers the final response—the part that pushes us over the edge from almost cumming to the actual explosion. For the past six years I've focused entirely on that region of the brain and have learned a lot about what goes on when orgasm occurs or doesn't."

"At the moment of truth, you might call it, the cells there release a particular protein that stimulates a cluster of nerves in just the right ways. Those nerves then send a pulse to the subject's genitalia and the orgasm begins. Some people's brains just don't release that protein, no matter what's happening in their crotches, and so they never reach orgasm."

"That would be terrible," I said. "To be able to get close but never get there."

"Yes," she said. "Most people in this category lead very unhappy lives. A few manage to convince themselves that intimacy doesn't require orgasm and others find peace in celibacy. But most are just sad, frustrated and sometimes even suicidal."

"I can imagine," I said.

"No," she corrected me. "You probably can't. If you're like most people, you've been having orgasms since you were a teenager and so you just can't really know how difficult it is for these folks."

"Sorry," I said. "I meant I can imagine that it is terrible, not what exactly it feels like."

"Or doesn't," she added. "Let's go eat and I'll finish the story in the dining room."

So I followed her into the kitchen where she cooked the scampi, set out our plates and handed me one. At the table, we both munched contentedly for a moment—she was as good a cook as I, maybe better—and then she continued her story.

"I published a number of papers on my first findings and lots of my colleagues were interested. I even sold a couple of patents to one of the big pharmaceutical companies and they've been trying to develop a drug that will allow the brain to release those blocked proteins. My own work has continued on a slightly different track."

"I wanted to know if it would be possible to force the brain to release the missing protein through direct stimulation. If so, then the development of such drugs would be easier and faster because we'd be able to see what caused the brain to do its thing at the crucial moment. That is, we could observe the physiological changes that occur and then could develop a drug to cause those to happen."

I poured us a third glass of wine and then asked, "How would you do that?"

She smiled. "That's the secret," she said. "That's the part I've been working on for the past two years and the part that's gotten my corporate partners all in a lather. You see, I've had very good results in monkeys for the past year and the FDA has now given me the go ahead to begin human trials on my procedure."

"What do you do, put them in an Orgasmatron like the one in that old Woody Allen movie?"

She laughed at that, making those breasts of hers jiggle again for me. "You'd laugh to see that one of my doctoral students actually stuck a picture of Woody Allen in that robot get up on the equipment we use. So yes, we call it the Orgasmatron. But no, it's not a booth like that. Instead, it's a variety of interventions, with the most important being electromagnetic stimulation of carefully targeted regions of the brain. There is also very mild stimulation of the genitalia, but it's what we do with the brain that makes the real difference. If you like, I'll show it to you one of these days."

"I would be very interested to see it," I said, pushing my plate away. I'd had the chance to eat while I listened, but she was behind. "You go ahead and eat now and I'll regale you with tales of my huge government grants for the study of history."

We both laughed at that. Nobody gives historians huge grants for anything.

For dessert we had fruit tart and espresso back out on the porch. The fireflies were out in force and a pleasant breeze was blowing. Altogether, it was a wonderful evening to sit and chat amiably with a new friend who, I hoped, would be a new lover shortly.

When Christina finally put down her cup, I took the bull by the horns and said, "Christina, last night you said you were too drunk to fuck. And tonight I notice that we've both been very restrained in our consumption of alcohol. I hope that means you and I will be able to see if we're mutually orgasmic."

"I thought you'd never ask," she replied. "Follow me."

Like a puppy on its way to dinner, I followed her through the dining room and up the stairs. Watching her ass float before me as I mounted those stairs had a positive effect on my cock, which was now at way more than half-mast. At the top of the stairs we turned right into a large master bedroom with a four-poster bed and lots of pillows. Before she could take another step, I took hold of her arm and spun her around. Her face came up to mine and our lips collided, tongues lashing outward to dance back and forth against one another.