Older Women

So: a few years later I was ready. Let me quick sketch the context. In my twenties, I'm a student. In my late twenties, I'm a teacher. In my early thirties, I'm a teacher, writer, reformer, revolutionary. In my later thirties, I'm a businessman. By my forties, I was a businessman who'd just been through a recession and decided, that rather than get over it and recover financially, to instead retire and catch up on some missed youth. When business went south, I stopped drinking in hope that a few recovered wits might make things better. They did. My recovered wits made things altogether better by allowing me to admit that I didn't give a shit about business. It interfered with reading, writing, thinking, everything. I started to play music. I took up golf. I wrote new fiction. I took up chess. Ah, but I still had to eat. So every once in a while I'd try to do some business. Once the rent was paid, I'd go back to the golf course. Take my flute with me.

An old girl friend sends some German artist from South America to me. Oh, hell, OK. I'll promote you. So I take off finally on my forever delayed sales trip to Florida where I guess the South American's blown glass wall hangings might appeal. As usual, I sell a few things along the way. Otherwise I'll never arrive. I have never left for California with any more money than would get me to Philadelphia. If I don't sell something in Philadelphia, I don't go onto Washington let alone to Memphis and LA. Neither do I get back the New York without sales along the way. Make a sale. Go play golf. And on to the next leg of the journey. Well I'm running out of gas by the time I'm in the Carolinas. Gotta make a sale or I'll hitch back to an apartment from which I've been evicted. It had been a few years since I'd put $70,000 in the bank in a day, made $200,000 in six months. But that had been work. I'd read six hours a day, drink another six or eight, but work at least two. Very bad for someone like me.

I stop at Hilton Head Island. Gotta make a sale or abandon the car and put out my thumb. I make a deal with a gal. She gives me a grand. Forget Florida. I gotta go home and pay my rent. But not till tomorrow. Tomorrow I gotta see this gal's bank and cash this check. Otherwise I don't go anywhere. I'm exhausted. I've got to find a place to sleep. I've got this check, but no money. I find a sign for a camp ground and follow the directions. With any luck I can sleep, shower, strike my tent, and duck back out before anyone notices I'm there and thinks about making out I bill I won't be able to pay.

A voice awakens me. "Tents are not allowed on Hilton Head Island by County Ordinance XYZ12blah. Please strike your tent immediately. You are welcome to use the shower before you leave, but please strike your tent immediately."

Jesus. The one thing more important than all else when broke, in a hurry, and camping in a tent, is to get up, pee, and get out before anyone notices you. Too late. Sounds like she's gonna send me off without a bill. That still leaves the problem of peeing. It's broad morning light, for chrisake. I'd deliberately hidden myself and my little alpine tent way in the back of the campground. Campground, hell: I could see by daylight what I'd gotten only a hint of by dark (despite the million lightning-bug-size bulbs that covered the whole place like a net): it was a resort: marina, tennis, quarter million dollar Blue Bird Motor-Homes ... I crawl out. Bladder bursting, I strike the tent. Not put it away, just flatten it on the ground. Now where do I pee? Only one motor-home in the neighborhood. A berm to its rear with a kind of an arroyo on the other side. I slide down among the cactus, screened by not much more than the motor-home itself, hope no one's watching, do what I gotta do. Find the shower and find my new client's bank.

I climb back over the berm to survey the layout and I hear singing. Someone is moving around in the motor-home: the same motor-home I've use to shield my peeing! Jesus, I should have used my car door as a screen. I don't know where the damn bath house is. Maybe this singing lady is singing because she liked what she saw.

"Hello!" She comes out the door in a one piece bathing suit, smiling and waving. "Would you like some coffee? That must have been a rude awakening you just got."

"Ma'am, I would love some coffee. But would you mind if I take one sip and then find the showers before finishing it?"

She directed me to the showers, gave me several cups of coffee, breakfast, and a great deal more. Maybe I'll tell some of those details: some perhaps here as "sex stories." Right now I want to target the theme that induced this story. The woman wore a one piece bathing suit. The woman had a truly attractive body under the beacon of a rarely fine face. But I could see instantly: the woman was old. That is to say, for a fact, I was forty-two; for a similar fact, she was fifty-nine. Almost sixty is very old to a forties newbie. But: I'd been chiding myself about my all but ignoring the old woman who's stuck her tits under my face and talked about them. I didn't plan to be so rude twice.

Jeano was fifty-nine. (Adults get their real names used.) I went to the bank and planned to help her move some pots she was complaining about before heading back north to save my home. She'd complained of a bad back, but when I returned to say Hi and Bye, she'd already moved them herself. I stayed for lunch. We went for a drive in her mint condition 1960s Buick convertible. I learned that Jeano was the oldest still employed model in the United States (that's her in the Doan's Pills back pain commercial). I learned that Jeano's home before her semi-retired widowhood had been on the Connecticut shore of the Sound, that she's moored her thirty-foot sloop at the foot of her yard. I learned that Jeano had been the blond that Perry regularly sang to on his Perry Como Show. I learned that she had dated heroes of mine: Al Capp, for example. When she showed me her portfolio I recognized her as a Miss Rheingold candidate I'd favored on subway rides in my youth. Jeano was fifty-nine, but Jeano was very beautiful. And Jeano was very rich. (Whether the $300,000 credit limit on her Master Card was actually all the money she was allowed in her late husband's Trust or merely the limit on that particular credit card I never did learn.) When Jeano suggested that I spend the night and get a fresh start north the next day, it sounded like a good idea from more than one standpoint. When Jeano that evening stood before me in her one piece bathing suit, I sitting on the edge of her couch, I told her that I was going to put my arms around her. I told her that I was going to kiss her. She stood back to give me room to stand up. "No, No," I said drawing her back toward me as still I sat. I drew her towards me. I put my arms around her waist, around her thighs, around her buttocks. I cupped her buttocks in my hands, oh so gently lifted them, fondled them. The one piece bathing suit was a bit constricting: very well tailored, but still, constricting material or not, it was a very well shaped butt over very well shaped legs. I leaned forward. I brushed my cheek against her mons veneris. I tightened my hold on her bottom. My lips found the crease of the front of her labia. I shook my head like a dog pulling on a sweater. I pressed in and nuzzled her ... She pulled back before the pressure could reach much more of her vulva. I apologized for my presumption. Make a little speech about maturity and opportunity.

Jeano's inscription on her Perkins Agency brochure,

some of the writing visible here on her elbow, wishes me "tis."
The Balinese word I taught her means the perfect peace that follows orgasm.

In bed, I got naked, made sure she saw that she could hang a flag from my rod: do chin ups if she'd a mind. She wore a nightie, assured me that whatever might come between us, it wasn't coming that night. I got a better kiss on her panties-covered vulva, poked her a good poke with my rod, and tried to keep still the rest of the night. Just at dawn, her hand cupping my balls and stroking the penis (that instantly sprang erect) woke me. I got her panties off in a flash and had my tongue far enough inside her to try to kiss her navel from inside her vagina. We fucked a good several times before I got in the car and drove off to save my apartment and my business.

And all else about Jeano will have to wait till another time. It was the first time I'd ever made love with a woman more than a year older than I. My first love (not my first fuck) had been a year or so older. (Come to think of it, my first fuck may have been a bit older too: she was my older sister's college buddy. Thought nothing of puking all over the car, then asking me to straighten her out from inside.) All other liaisons till then had been coeval or had had me the senior.

Details another time, but let me hasten to clarify: I've been intimate in one sense or another with many young girls but never, ever fucked a girl under eighteen until I was thirty-five: and then only one: she pursuing me from the opposite end of a different borough. Rachel was seventeen, a senior in an alternate high school — Coney Island — when she first decided to seek out the founder of FLEX — upper west side, Manhattan — and reward him. Even then, I think she mostly just blew me. She may have been damn close to eighteen before I ever actually put it in her.