Adult Education Beware! A Novella

Helen, however, managed to banish any after-the-fall feeling. Every one of her moves and gestures helped maintain a warm afterglow of intimacy between us. As she put on her bra and slipped into her panties, jeans and tops, she, at times, glimpsed and smiled at me. I was getting dressed too. She finished first.

Assuming the mannequin posture from her earlier, tantalising striptease, she declared:

"Well, what do you say? Transformation completed. Do I look like your innocent student again, Herr Professor? Should we get something to eat before we go to class?"

Not waiting for an answer, she grinned down at me sitting on the seriously messed-up bed, turned and went to the kitchen.

When I followed and took my seat at the table, Helen had bacon, eggs, toast and a pot of tea on the go. It demonstrated that she was still an English girl at heart, that we were familiars, and that there was no need to ask or explain. Both of us were hungry, and we tucked into our meal in companionable silence.

Then, however, Helen leant back in her chair. Hugging her teacup, she looked at me and asked:

"Why you? You know now about my frustrations and why I wanted this. But why you, Ben?"

Helen took it for granted that I understood. I could not be flippant. So, I answered, choosing to tell the truth:

"I was willing, no, eager to follow because you, Helen, are a beautiful, intelligent, desirable and sexually tempting woman. You showed that you wanted me. It was a gift I could not refuse. In your honesty and directness, you were irresistible. I wanted you immediately, there and then in the car. I wanted you as much as I've ever wanted a woman. And I still do."

Looking at Helen, I sensed that my answer pleased her. There was the beginning of a smile, but it vanished as she mulled over what she should ask next. I thought she blushed when her voice was low, she asked:

"Have you known other women like me? I mean, as lovers?"

I could have responded by playing with the ambivalence in Helen's question and ignored her wish to know more about the man she had almost blindly given herself to, hoping that he would satisfy a repressed sexual longing.

And she had unreservedly embraced what we could be for each other: partners in sin. Helen knew that it had to be kept separate from her orderly, married life which she did not want to endanger. I needed, therefore, to put her mind at ease. Honestly, I had to tell her how I saw myself as a human being, a married man, and her illicit lover.

I started by confessing that I was not an Alpha male. I remained a virgin until the end of my teens. I was too shy and well-behaved to pressure girls, as inexperienced as me, into sex. After migrating to Australia when I was twenty, I had a succession of sexual relationships. They were all with exceptional women who were as attracted to me as I was drawn to them. I owe them much.

With them, I learned to avoid nasty, ungratifying sex by never forcing myself uninvited onto a woman, never to fuck in anger, and never allowing myself to be humiliated by a grudgingly given charity-fuck with a disinterested partner. Such sex was not only not worth having; it was an evil that destroys joy, together with one's self-worth and all loving respect and lasting desire for such a partner.

The women I met taught me that for good sex, the desire had to be mutual and strong. It was as much about the joy and ecstasy of giving pleasure as it was about being pleasured. Good sex was a dance beyond what a dance could be. It was the ultimate, shared, life-affirming celebration of ourselves through our now desired and desirable bodies.

These women and I made love, explored, adventured, and crossed boundaries. We laughed at and ignored the prissy folks that disapproved. Some things stopped us from considering a permanent relationship. As far as our sexual one was concerned, our difference in age and material considerations seemed not to matter.

I stopped and sought to catch Helen's eyes. I wanted to apologise for what I feared sounded like boasting. Helen was deep in thought. So, I told her that although each one of these wonderful women was different, all of them were like her in being so fully, sexually alive. With her, totally by chance, I had found once again another ideal lover. It was a miracle that we found each other, beyond anything I expected or would have hoped to have again in my life.

I concluded by telling Helen that for me, she was not only stunningly beautiful and sexy. In every minute of our love-making today, she had been a sensual, generous, withholding nothing revelation. I was swept away and along by her brave, shame-free openness to sexual pleasure.

To ease the too-severe mood without disregarding the truth, I concluded:

"If I have managed to half-satisfy you today as a lover, it is not because I am a sophisticated philanderer. I have not slept with another woman than my wife for close to eleven years. In our marriage, good and frequent sex still binds us together.

What you and I have found and do will not change that. I want you as you want me. I believe we can have beautiful sex with each other as often as possible without hurting others. We both know we must not threaten our other life."

Helen had listened. When I started to stumble in my nerdy, school-masterly search for the right words, she stretched her arms across the table, offering her hands. I took them. We were linked and our hands playing into each other helped to ease the awkwardness of her need to know and my wish to explain. She looked up at me now and softly said: -

"Thank you, Ben, for telling me about yourself. And especially for being so open about what I am to you and what you want us to have. I wanted you, propositioned you. I was both shameless and frightened, and now I am just so glad I did because I know that we are good for each other.

But there is something I need to confess. What made it easier for me to throw myself at you like a streetwalker was that I knew I was leaving Melbourne in a few months. If you had decided to reject me, I was not going to be around to be ashamed. I would have dropped out of your class. But now, you knowing this almost makes me ashamed about my cunning."

Helen had stepped behind me to cradle my head against her breast. I heard her heartbeat. Then she started to clear the table. With her back turned, standing over the sink, she began to tell me what the future held for her and, thereby, us.

Jurgen had been informed three weeks ago of his promotion and recall to head office in Germany. He was to continue in his job in Melbourne until the end of the year.

Knowing that he had successfully concluded his rounds of overseas postings, they had immediately sent their daughter back to Germany to Jurgen's parents. Andrea was ten and could begin her secondary education in Germany in September. She would, therefore, not lose a year in her schooling.

Helen paused. Then she said, "I only hope Jurgen's mother won't do to Andrea what she did to Jurgen."

I did not ask what she meant by this cryptic remark. Helen shrugged her shoulder, stopped worrying about the dishes on the sink, lowered her head and said:

"You see, Ben, everything came together for me to have an affair. Andrea in Germany, us leaving for good in December, Rilke's poem, you! I was a scheming bitch. I thought four months be ideal, safe, time enough for me to let for once my hair down, leave the cage, and have a sexual romp with a man I fancied. But now?"

She turned and looked down at me while she dried her hand on a towel. Suddenly she grinned:

"Oh shit! We'll just have to make the most of what we can have. I hope you agree."

We packed up. It was already dark outside, and time for us to leave for our adult education class in our respective cars. It was, had been for both of us, already a day full of learning.

Chapter 6

The following day, Helen rang me at work. It was, of course, a few years before mobile phones and I had given her my phone number at University so that we could keep undiscovered in touch. She was in high spirits, her voice chirpy as she asked me how well I had slept. She giggled:

"Did you have any dreams that would worry Erika? As for me, I just hope I won't moan and gasp in my sleep!"

I would find out that Helen, unlike me, loved the phone. While phones inhibited me, she was as liberated on the phone as she was in bed. I loved her sexy phone talk, and it became right from the beginning a titillating part of our affair.

This morning, she had to tell me that last night she crawled back into 'our' messed-up, lovely-smelling bed and how well she slept. Waking up, she missed me badly, but then, Helen changed her voice into a sexy timbre:

"I buried myself under the doona, and my fingers brought my lonely night to a quite satisfying conclusion. After, under the shower, I missed you again. I remembered how lovingly you washed me after so thoroughly messing me up!"

Then she complained that she would have another lonely night in 'our' smelly, unmade bed and why I couldn't -? She stopped. "If you were a businessman, you could quickly find an excuse to give to your wife for being away for a night."

With her voice back to normal, Helen added, "Not that Jurgen ever has or would." With this hint, an explanation left for the future, and a cheery -- "Well, then. See you Thursday." she hung up.

Over the following months of our relationship, there were numerous such calls. As it had to be always Helen calling me, I often looked longingly at my phone. I shut the doors of my office whenever Helen called, wanting no interruptions.

Helen loved to reminisce in raunchy, explicit detail about our love-making the last time we met, as well as to suggestively speculate how we would drive each other crazy next time. Jokingly, yet more than half-serious, she moaned her lust-filled frustration about our daytime-only affair - and then not often enough - in my ear.

She rang often. Her calls flattered my male ego. But it was their sexiness, hearing the playful modulations in Helen's voice that always thrilled, excited and aroused me. I lost my habitual reserved manners on the hitherto disliked phone and became a more than willing partner in our phone-sex affair.

There is no doubt in my mind that the above kept our lust for each other at a fever pitch, from beginning to end. Between August and late December, it was only seven times that we could spend significant time together. Twice more, with Jurgen interstate, we spent a Thursday morning till night in Helen's marital bed! Three times, ten till four, we were in a motel, and twice we drove for the day into the country.

Regarding the latter, neither she nor I relished our furtive shags in the bushes. However, we enjoyed being together and having a day filled with sun, laughter and affectionate exchanges.

It was paradoxical, yet not surprising, that I felt guiltier about the warmth of affection for Helen that was more and more often welling up than about the illicitness of our affair and the heat of our sexual passion. The challenge facing me was twofold. I had begun to care about Helen, not just as a sexual partner.

Critical was that Helen too offered me more and more of her natural warmth of feeling and caring.

Such warmth between Erika and me had in our marriage's everyday stresses and minor but persisting conflicts gone amiss. Often, I doubted whether we still liked each other and were, as marriage partners, likeable.

I could not then and cannot now make up my mind about how Helen felt and what unforeseen challenges arose for her out of our brief affair. She steadfastly maintained throughout our relationship that she loved Jurgen, that he was a good man and father, and that she would never hurt or leave him.

Jurgen was undeniably, on many levels, a desirable marriage partner that provided Helen with an affluent lifestyle and a secure future. I did not know him, and Helen never talked at length about their life together. I don't think they shared many interests, but Jurgen could still have been a pleasant, companionable partner. With these factors added up, their marriage was, perhaps, a successful one, even if the sexual spark was missing. In this respect, their marriage was far from unusual.

While Helen hinted from the beginning about a sexual problem in her marriage, it took her a long time to talk about the details.

After her marriage, she realised that their feeble first-time fucks at the ski lodge in Bavaria indicated what their sex life would be like in marriage. At first, she thought that Jurgen's sex drive was simply low. Her sexual experience with previous partners had not saddled her with great expectation, and as he was kind and generous, she was sure he loved her.

She could not fail to notice, however, a variety of behaviours that eventually revealed a pattern. Some of them she thought funny, others strange.

Jurgen was compulsively clean. He constantly washed his hands, never touched a bannister, and always wore expensive driving gloves in his car. Although he was a successful businessman and regularly interacted with others, he tried to avoid shaking hands. At weekends, she noticed that he often changed into fresh underwear during the day. He also kept a supply of shirts, socks, and underclothing in his office at work. Even for short business trips, he packed more in smalls and toiletries than she ever would.

When it struck her that blindfolded, she would only recognise her husband because he smelled of nothing but soap, Helen began to connect Jurgen's phobic cleanliness with his sexual behaviour.

Helen told me then, without any of the salacious bravadoes she enjoyed in our sex talks, that she believed that Jurgen had always sexually desired her and that he still did. When it came to making love to her, however, his phobia of cleanliness and skin contact created for him a, probably, unresolvable conflict between desire and aversion. It was the only time, I thought, there was a touch of bitterness in Helen's voice:

"Even in the beginning, we did not make love very often. Then it became weeks, months. Now, when it happens, it's always a surprise, never after a nice dinner, drinks, a night out, flirting, or sexy foreplay. It's now always in the morning. I wake up; Jurgen is on top of me. I moisten my bone-dry pussy with spit. He fucks me quickly, rushes under the shower, then hurries off to work."

Helen laughed, somewhat bitterly:

"I started to think of our sex as Jurgen's hands-off, little morning fuck.

Usually, when he commits this sin, he returns at night with flowers or little, expensive gifts. At first, I thought it was sweet. Now I am just sad, and uneasy.

For Jurgen, fucking me is something dirty; it requires a gift as an apology. It's not his fault. But I feel now defiled; not by his stealthy little fuck in the morning but by his feeling guilty, by his conviction that sex is dirty and that I am unclean, soiled by sex and soiling him."

Helen told me the above only late in the year, with our parting drawing day by day closer. It became clear to me, why our uninhibited 'dirty' sex held such attraction for Helen.

I was sorry that our so wonderful, sexually so fulfilled and rewarding affair would end. I was relieved that Erika had suspected nothing. I also believed that my affair with Helen had not changed our marital relationship for the worse. I had no wish to confess my trespass and inflict hurt.

However, listening to Helen's description of her marriage made me feel very uneasy about its future.

At first, I had not taken Helen's claim that Rilke's Der Panther and my reading and suggestive interpretation had led her into our affair as fully serious. I had tried to explain in class, in general terms, how Rilke's poetry transforms the cage from a passive means of housing the animal into an active force that enslaves it. Despite the remaining grace and strength in the panther's circling behind bars, it is no longer a dance around a vital centre but around a dazed and barely beating heart!

Now I realised why Helen understood it to be specifically directed at her life. In her marriage with Jurgen, she was not just living with his phobia. She was locked up in it like a cage. His aversions formed the soul-destroying bars behind which her life circled. They affected and constrained practically everything in their shared, everyday life. If her marriage was to survive, she had to remain locked behind the bars of her husband's peculiar obsessions.

Helen's repressed sexual needs triggered her temporary escape from the restraints of the cage. However, the restrictions that Jurgen's aversion imposed on their sex life were only one of many. It was, possibly, not the most critical restriction forced on her. About these, I learned only in snippets, and I was not curious enough to follow up.

In our love sessions, Helen gloried in her nakedness more openly and seductively than even Erika had ever done. Early in our relationship, when I raved about her naked beauty and that I could never get enough of her shame-free display, she told me that it made her happy. Stripping and showing herself excited her as much as it excited me.

"I am probably an exhibitionist", Helen laughed. Then, getting serious, she said that Jurgen always wanted her to be "properly" dressed.

Through his mother in Germany, Jurgen supplied her with expensive, full-body-length, cotton-weave nightshirts. She grinned:

"Very dressy! I look like a nun! With Jurgen in his tailored pyjamas and me in my shift, we could go to church instead of going to bed. You know, we are never naked together."

Another hint of her home life I picked up in mid-September. We had been lovers for about six weeks. Besides having met twice for a day-long abandonment plus numerous raunchy phone sessions, Helen acquired the habit to park on Thursday nights near my car in her Mini to wait for my delayed departure after class. By then, we hoped, the other students had safely left.

What followed was half an hour or so of hurried, intense and voracious love-making in my car. Helen began to come to class no longer in jeans but in skirts. On our second night, my hand discovered that she no longer wore panties!

In mid-September, in one of her phone calls, she told me that we had to stop our Thursday diversions. The problem was that it left her smelling of sex. She loved it, but she could not come within metres of Jurgen.

Until now, on arriving home, she had plausible excuses. She told Jurgen that the Language Laboratory was unheated, Mini's heater was a joke, that she was frozen to the bone, and that she needed a quick, hot shower.

Jurgen, always considerate, made tea. Washed and warmed-up, in her dressy German nighty, she could join him safely.

As Jurgen avoided kissing and cuddling as much as possible, it had until now gone well. Giggling and being naughty, Helen told me that she didn't need to brush her teeth! But now, it was getting warm. She had run out of plausible excuses.

Our brief affair was, therefore, for Helen much more problematic than for me. The chasm between the experiential freedom as a sexual being that she had wanted and found in our love affair and the enslaving constraints that Jurgen's phobia imposed on her everyday life was unbridgeable.

While she had temporarily stepped out for a sexual adventure, the cage had remained her home. And Helen believed, at this stage, that it would remain so. It made her avow from the beginning that she loved Jurgen and that he was a good man. Most tellingly, it kept her silent about her life with him until late in our relationship.

For Helen, as for me, ours was her first extramarital affair. Due to her inexperience, she believed that a temporary breaking out from the stifling confines of her married life could be safely kept separate if it was restricted to the purely physical. But the freedom she discovered and so enthusiastically embraced inevitably set her other confinement in sharp relief.