My Secret Garden (Women Sexual Fantasies) (20 page)

she said. "I was once raped here, before we were married.

Charles always makes sure I have it when he has to go away."

More recently when I saw Johanna and asked if she would contribute to this book, I got more of the story.

You could say that my inner sexual life still revolves around the rape I told you about. I don’t think a day goes by without my remembering it. I was in this little house, where I was living alone before I met Charles. A man came in. He wasn’t Mexican; I don’t know what he was. He pretended that he was interested in selling me something, but I knew something was wrong. He asked if I was alone, but in such a smooth, easy way that he didn’t frighten me. But maybe something in me was frightened.

Because I almost knew before he did it what he was going to do next. He took a knife out with the same easy manner with which he had asked me if we were alone. He put the knife on the table, near his hand. Then he told me what he was going to do. He told me that he wasn’t a pervert, and that if I did everything he said, he would not harm me. He even told me I would enjoy it. All the time he was talking, I could see the front of his trousers begin to bulge. I couldn’t look him in the eyes. I kept my eyes down. He may have thought I was staring at the ground. I was watching that huge mound in the front of his trousers. I remember thinking what a cruel, powerful bulge it made.

He told me to take off my clothes. I did, with one eye on my buttons, the other on the knife that was so close to his hand.

Then, when I was naked, he told me to unzip his trousers. I did.

"Take it out," he said, "and kiss it." I did.

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I didn’t understand what I was doing. It all seemed so natural, it almost seemed as if I was in a hurry to help him. I did everything he told me. Then he told me to lie down on my back, on my work table, but with my feet on the floor. While I did it, he picked up the knife, and came to stand between my legs. "Spread them wider," he said, and as I did, he stepped between them even closer to me, and suddenly raising the knife above his head, plunged it point first into the table, right beside my hips. Then he knelt down in front of me, his two arms on either side of me, one hand still holding the knife that was stuck into the table, and he went down on me. I tried to think of how terrified I was, how much I hated him. But I felt myself becoming more and more excited. I closed my eyes and tried to turn from side to side, as if trying to get away from his tongue, but it was also to have that tongue touch different sides of me, inside. Once I opened my eyes. All I could see was the dark top of his head, his hair, and the hand holding the knife just beside me. Then I closed my eyes again, and I suddenly couldn’t help it, I pulled his head right into me, pulled his tongue right into me as high as possible, and then I came, over and over again.

The next thing I saw was his face. He was smiling. He was on top of me, still on the table. He was on me. "Put it in," he said, and I was now eager to do anything he said. With one hand I held the lips open, with the other I guided his erection right into me. I remember he wasn’t very big around, but very long and slim. I wanted to feel it all the way inside me. In just a few thrusts I could feel him coming, and I came again, too. I had forgotten to think about how much I hated him. I could only think of his long thing, long and slim, all the way up and lost inside me, and I came and came again. Then the man just went away: Just as he had promised.

I told my husband about what had happened before we were married, but I never told him how it made me feel. The time when this happened, I was going with a Mexican boy, and there 148

was another man before I met Charles. Neither one had ever made me feel so sexually in heat the way that man did when he raped me. Neither has Charles. It’s no good when I’m in bed with Charles, telling myself that I love him, and that I hate that other strange man. It just kills whatever erotic feelings I have.

Other times, Charles can bring me to the point himself, and I don’t have to think about that other man.

But sometimes when I’m not really in the mood, and I know Charles is… or that funny kind of way that a really erotic mood will overtake you and then just drift away for no reason at all…that’s when I deliberately think of that man. I close my eyes and imagine myself back on that table, with my legs hanging down from the knees over the edge, and him in between them. I remember how, much I hated him, and the, I don’t know, the fear, the
frenzy
of the experience, and how I responded to it.

Whenever I imagine that, I still respond the same way. Every time. [Taped interview]

Anna

Anne is a widow and older than most of the other contributors in this book, and therefore her language is more restrained than most. But this does not mean that her life has been in any way less adventurous.

Anne is a long-time friend of my husband’s, who also knew her husband John very well until John’s sudden accidental death.

She works in the fringe land of the films, and is around movie people a great deal. She had been married once before and figured in a Hollywood divorce trial written up by all the newspapers in the early 1950’s. "But once I met John, he was the only man for me, ever," she told me. Romantic talk, if a teen-ager had said it. But from a woman of Anne’s experience and honesty, positively breathtaking. Nevertheless, she is such a vital, warm, attractive woman that I find it hard to understand why she has 149

never remarried. I don’t doubt that she’s been asked, and I don’t understand how such a sexual woman can live alone.

I have always thought of Anne as the most intelligent, good, openminded woman I know…of any generation. She is fun to be with and never lays her problems on you, though she’s got them.

Her vivid stories of her own sexual-social explorations of twenty or thirty years ago stand up to anything I’ve seen in the past world-changing decade. If I ever thought that
I
was alone (i.e., not like the other girls) in my 1960’s explorations, how very

"different" Anne must have felt back there in the thirties.

It’s one thing to be the first girl on the block to smoke pot, take a lover, etc., but for all the zest that being an adventuress can bring, it can also bring, very early on, a seemingly contradictory feeling of the need for self-control. Mountain climbers have to be more careful than earth dwellers. At least, that’s my explanation for my own late arrival to a
full
appreciation of sex. Anne, I am sure, has her own explanation.

Now that I think of it, I find it difficult to describe. I mean what goes on in my mind during sex. I don’t think I can … I am in the dark, but it is not just dark of night; it’s a blackness of infinite space. This is probably scientifically incorrect, because I guess the astronauts, the cosmonauts, whatever they are, find light. My own blackness is a more mythological thing … that

"outer darkness" … but it’s not death. It’s being way, way, far out somewhere in infinite space. I’m somehow in my body, but also outside of it. I’m liable at any second to fall down through infinite, unimaginable darkness, sort of like Lucifer … that’s my second reference to
Paradise Lost;
I
wonder what that means?

Maybe another way to put it is that it’s like falling out of a space rocket, only in absolute darkness. It’s frightening and thrilling. I suppose that’s what I think of men. Unless they’re a little bit frightening … without a touch of the devil, I don’t find them 150

thrilling. There…that explains all the Lucifer associations. He was supposed to be the most beautiful angel of all.

I don’t know why I should have this particular fantasy … I certainly didn’t deliberately
choose
it … because I have that fear of heights, what’s it called? … cannot look out of a plane window or even an office window high up in Rockefeller Center, never can go near the edge of anyone’s penthouse terrace … am terrified because I want to jump. And I never had this until after I started to have really satisfactory sex relations. I suppose I never really understood that terrific loss of control, that falling down into you don’t know what, that letting go of everything that orgasm brings. Before then, as a child and as a girl, I had no fear of heights, no frightening impulse to jump. I think that’s it. The fear so many women have that they’ll leap from the heights is some kind of desire to leap into orgasm. I suppose that’s the connection…do you? [Taped interview]

ROOM NUMBER SEVEN: THE

THRILL OF THE FORBIDDEN, OR,

"NO, YOU MUST NOT! . . . HERE,

LET ME HELP YOU."

At full strength, the sensation of guilt contains an element of discovery, the possibility of being discovered…by someone.

You could say, therefore, that fantasies wherein guilt is the motivating emotion belong in the Audience Room (I even think I have one there), where the desired fuel comes from the presence, or imminent presence, of other people. But guilt is too prevalent and powerful an emotion to be carried as an addendum to another 151

idea. It can bring, all of its own, such vitality to sexual fantasy that I give it a room of its own.

My own fantasies often ride high on the risk of doing the forbidden. I am by nature, like a lot of other women, what could be called "the faithful type," and for this type, men other than our husbands or current lovers are taboo. (This is simplistic language for defining both myself and the idea of fidelity, but I choose to be clear rather than analytically thorough.) For us, fantasies which involve us with this or that sexually attractive man in some compromising situation give us the desired sexual kick without the real guilt; in fact, guilt, the deterrent in reality, has been transformed by harmless fantasy into guilt the exciter. We win both ways.

Some people rob banks for the sheer thrill of getting away with it. Or, to put it another way, for the excitement of maybe being caught. In every suspense-thriller the clock ticks ominously…it is only a matter of time. This idea of time running out on the guilty act heightens everything. It’s especially so when the guilty act is sex. Whether it’s the illicit affair in reality (the only sort some women enjoy) or the forbidden sex in fantasy, with both it’s only a matter of time before that time runs out, before the whistle blows, the footsteps come closer, the bedroom door is opened and the discovery made. In fantasy, time is on guilt’s (sex’s) side, in that it adds to the thrill by threatening to run out. You only have to think of the added charge in a shipboard romance, summer love, sex in another town. To really appreciate the thrill of guilt, add the element of "stolen" love to "September Song."

Emma

I am hiding from the others. We are playing a game of sardines and I have been given a head start to find a hiding place.

At the top of the house I have found an empty room with only a bed in it. Quickly, in the dark, I slide under the bed and wait for 152

the others to find me; their voices are very distant now. They are far away, except for one pair of footsteps, one person, who is getting closer and closer. He comes in such a direct line toward me, it’s as though he knew where I was, as if I had left him a trail, a scent. As if we had planned this hiding place together. I catch my breath, my heart pounding, because I know who it is, the one person in the group I want to have find me, to find me before the others. It has to be him. I will it to be him.

He comes straight to the room, quietly and quickly so the others won’t hear him, and slides under the bed beside me in the darkness. We lie together, hardly breathing, our hands beginning to move over one another. Hands that have never before touched me move all over me. Hands I put a face to in my mind, that face I’ve always found exciting but that was never mine to kiss. I hardly dare breathe as I listen for the others’ voices, moving in and then away as they explore room after distant room. We both move slowly. My skin is alive, the excitement running all through me as my own hands help him to ease up my sweater, direct his mouth to my breast. I help him work the zip on the back of my pants, and then with the most incredible daring I push my buttocks up and his head down. His mouth caresses me all over.

My hands, braver and braver in the dark, move over him, find his erection like a rock, and all the while we seem to move in slow motion on this bare floor, scarcely breathing, our bodies moving against the background noise of the voices on the floor below.

They are calling to one another, "Have you found them?" Then calling my name, "Emma! Where are you, Emma?" With every step they move closer. The louder their approaching voices get, the more urgent our bodies grow. They laugh and call to one another, suggesting places I may have hidden; they are aware now that we are the only two missing. Then their voices fade and I pray, dear God, don’t let them find us yetl Then I hear my boy friend Larry’s voice, and though there is not a note of suspicion in it, the fear and anxiety I feel make me hotter, make me do the 153

most incredible things with this man whom I hardly know. Now there is nothing I wouldn’t let him do to me; even pain, even words in my ear that no man has ever said. "More." My own whisper is in my ear. "More!" I demand of him and I am wet through before he is quite in me. We are like two conspirators in the dark, breathing so hard it seems incredible they can’t hear us.

Now that they know we are together, the search takes on new urgency. "What are you two up to? Where are you?" they call, laughing, teasing now. Their urgency becomes ours, hidden, sopping wet all over now with one another’s sweat, with our clothes half on and half off…how will we explain to the others?

But it’s too late for that now. There are footsteps on the stairs, someone’s found the little door that leads to the attic. It’s just one pair of footsteps coming. We need more time, just seconds. We hear the searcher stumble in the dark, and as the cock inside me thrusts deeper and deeper, my teeth are tearing the skin on my lower lip and our fucking is paced in doubletime to the steps outside in the dark, coming closer and closer, as we get closer and closer to something we can no longer avoid. Now as I know it is beyond my control, I also know that the person coming is Larry. He calls down,to the others below that he thinks he’s found us. As the footsteps and voices move closer and closer, so do we, until I come. [Written down on request]