Single-Minded Sex Circa 1975

Mr. Selfish Gets A Handjob

"Do you mind?" Tanner asked.

"No, I don't mind," she told him.

Sarah was married. Not to him, of course. Now she thought she was pregnant again. She'd see her doctor soon. Her nerves were bad and she didn't want to have sex right now, but she had offered to help him have it.

"Who knows," she'd said at first, "I'm so fertile, just thinking I'm pregnant and having sex—well, that might make me pregnant even if I'm not yet!"

"Stranger things have happened, I suppose," he sighed, not meaning it. "Perhaps..."

He shut up because Sarah began to congenially remove his clothing and it was quite arousing. She kept hers on. She attempted several ways to masturbate him, but nothing much happened. She didn't seem to know what she was doing. She had good imagination, but not much practice. He didn't tell her to stop; either he wasn't able or wasn't willing to just forget about it. Sometimes horny men need the proof that they can ejaculate more than they need to ejaculate.

"Good god," he wondered, "is that what being married early in life means? That you never learn how to jerk anybody off?" It was such a prominent part of his life, even among his girlfriends who also fucked him, that he couldn't imagine such a state of unknowing.

He didn't ask her, though. He'd always been comfortable with her about everything—she was older, she was smart, she knew most things worth knowing—but this began to embarrass him. He looked downcast and begged her to remove her blouse.

"I'll do the dirty deed myself," Tanner said. "And—please—don't watch!"

"The dirty deed! Indeed!" Sarah giggled as she took off her blouse. She held his head against her naked breast, and looked the other way. He felt pretty certain that she wanted to watch, though. She patted the back of his head affectionately as he took her nipple in his mouth. In the end he didn't know if she watched or not because he wasn't really able to watch her. He couldn't believe what a good sport she was; at the same time he felt utterly ignoble, disgraceful, wondering if he shouldn't just forget the whole thing. That's not what he did; instead, he gently sucked while brutally jerking himself off, getting more and more in a hurry to finish. When he'd finished, he was relieved but felt like a fool. He wondered what she thought of him, and was afraid to know the answer. He figured he knew the answer. He pulled the covers over himself and lit a cigarette and tried to talk of other things.

"I feel like a fool," he said a couple of minutes later when he was getting dressed. "A pervert."

"But why?" she asked.

"Oh, you know why," he said, his face turning red. "No matter how liberal we are or how liberal our attitude toward others, a man still think that it's perverted if he himself has to jerk off. And especially this. Jerking off by yourself is because you are by yourself but doing it with someone present—ah! Well, that really does feel perverted, I just found out."

"You're not saying that all I did was help you to feel like a pervert, are you?" she asked.

"No, not really," he laughed nervously. "I'm sorry it sounds like that."

"Yeah, it's okay, I understand," she said with a sigh.

"Mmm," he sighed, still looking chagrinned.

"You know, it's really only perverted if you think it is," she said with a tired smile. "But, really, dear, I didn't mind it, if that's what's bothering you. You're allowed to be human. I sympathize with your sex drive, whether I happen to be feeling the same thing myself or not. I've been driven by Desire a few times myself, you know."

He looked at her silently, feeling as grateful for her words now as for any of her actions earlier.

"Well, all I can think is that you must really love me, to—"

"Oh, of course I love you, dear!" she said, shaking her head at him.

"And, who knows," she added with a bright good-humored smile, nudging him, "maybe some day you'll have to help me masturbate."

He smiled and laughed lightly, nodding his head as if agreeing with her strange suggestion.

"Well, that would be fun! But, Jesus, I can hardly imagine that!" he laughed.

He had to admit, he completely and utterly doubted it! She was far too noble, too practical, too dignified and too private to ever get caught up in any such ridiculous procedure as she'd just gone through for him. And, beyond that, Sarah was a woman, after all; she not only had a husband to bed her, but she could probably always get laid by somebody. By his lights, she was so very attractive that… Well, if women were like men, you could say they had it made, he felt. Of course, women weren't like men… No, of course not.

Making the unlikely presumption that Tanner made, are we to conclude then that she really didn't know how to make love to herself? Or was it just, as is more likely, that Tanner couldn't picture it? You never can tell with an old-fashioned boy having an affair with a liberated older woman for the first time. He was 26 and she was only eight or nine years older, but she did seem of another generation to him. He wanted to believe her about everything; he wanted every intimacy with her, he wanted, not just to know, but to think all her thoughts. But would the affair even last that long, he wondered. He kissed her lips softly, briefly, as they parted at the threshold of his front door and she strode away confidently in the dark toward her car.

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"Rogues are preferable to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest." Alexandre Dumas

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