All a Loan

My patients on Friday came in with their usual complaints, but eagerly anticipating tonight's events, I found it easy to empathetically embrace each woman's concern: screening for infections in a sex worker, sharing the joy with a first-time mother in hearing her baby's heartbeat, providing birth control pills and comfort to a teenager in her grief over an unfaithful boyfriend.

At 6 PM, after my last patient had departed, and with my chart work completed, I returned home. I got the house ready, showered and dressed, took one last look around, then departed for the club and what was going to be the most unusual milonga evening of my life.

As was etiquette for an Argentine Tango milonga, I danced three dances with each tanguero, then, during the brief break before the next three-song set, marked by a short piece of music called a cortina, I cast my gaze about, locked eyes with another dancer, nodded, and waited his approach.

Seamus was one of my favored partners, but unlike previous nights where our movements matched perfectly, tonight's first of three dances betrayed our nervousness. By the third song, though, we were on track, portending good things for our evening to come.

The milonga went on, but I had danced enough. I left first. Seamus had one more tanguera he wanted to dance with. He promised to follow shortly.

I drove home, still not believing my good fortune, wondering how and why the Universe had been so good again to Autumn Reynes, a recently single, almost fifty-year old woman.

Actually, I'm forty-nine, but that's only my chronological age. Emotionally, I am somewhere in my late teens or early twenties, meaning that my moods are mostly controlled with an on/off switch, but I am forever intending to put in a rheostat.

Physically, I'm in my mid thirties. That's because I've done all the right things for myself: I eat really well; work at a job that I generally love and don't feel stressed by; regularly practice secular Buddhism; and--my true secret to youthfulness--I dance with abandon.

Which brings me to one of the great ironies in life. I'm spirited and attractive, I've been a good mother to our two children and a devoted wife to my husband, Finn, for twenty-nine years, and yet, three years ago, he walked out on me to be with another married woman who in turn walked out on her husband to be with him.

If you talk with Finn and get his version of our marriage, like a good journalist might do, you will find, like with all human relationships, there are complexities. Perhaps you might well appreciate his point of view. Maybe even like it better than mine. But no matter what you conclude, I still feel there was something very wrong in how this young-minded middle-aged woman was treated.

I did date someone a year after Finn left me, and while Liam could dance, he couldn't cook, clean, or, worst of all, carry on an intimate conversation. After almost a year together, we broke up. Which made me think, what do I really want, anyway? With my kids grown and gone, and being completely on my own, with no one to answer to but myself, I am in a really enviable state. With one exception: I miss a sexual connection with a man.

Which in turn brings me to Seamus, another of those Irishmen I seemed destined to fall for. I met Seamus dancing. He was the perfect leader for me: tall, thin, relatively good looking, with a little gray in his beard and a trifle thinning in his scalp. But best of all (there's a worst of all, too, unfortunately), he has this uncommon quality in a man of being able to converse sensitively with me about any subject. This I know because we had the opportunity to spend an afternoon together in my kitchen last fall making jalapeno jam, which we call "JJ."

That's the other thing I do well--garden and can. Without going into detail like most gardening fanatics do, I will spare you the litany of vegetables and fruits that I grow, and the bragging of how I either eat them fresh out of the ground and off the vine, bush, or tree or preserve everything for use throughout the winter like a Barbara Kingsolver locavore.

I will tell you, instead, that I gave a little jar of last year's JJ to Seamus one summer's night while we were dancing Salsa. Being the curious sort, he inquired as to how to make it, and I invited him over so that he could find out. (Or perhaps it was the other story I told him that piqued his interest more --of how Finn and I made JJ one year. I wore gloves to cut the jalapenos, but Finn did not, and later that afternoon, when we made love, I was hotter down there than I had ever been, and realized it was from Finn's peppered touch. Not even his cream could soothe the burning, though! Maybe I should have taken that as a sign that he wasn't able to care for me as I really needed him to.)

So, this past autumn, Seamus and I were standing side by side at the kitchen counter, the sun pouring in, how did Joni Mitchell say it, "like butterscotch," slicing open the shiny green peppers, extracting the seeds, and dicing them into little picante moieties for boiling in a broth of sugar and vinegar. As we worked, we talked. That's when I found out the worst thing--he was married.

At dances, where we usually saw each other, we didn't talk. We just danced and went home. But here in my kitchen, we did.

And in our conversation, he was completely frank about some of the conflicts he and his wife had had, which made it only natural for me to tell him about my marital saga.

With the heat of the stove and the fumes from the cooking peppers, it was logical for me to feel a little perspiration along my upper lip and forehead, maybe even in my axilla, but why, I wondered, were dew droplets also appearing in my nether regions.

And that's when it occurred to me. Building relationships, new ones especially, are a lot like making JJ. You think you know what you're doing. You have a recipe or a method that has brought you some measure of success in the past, and you follow it. But jalapenos are not always the same in size, color, or flavor. Same with the sweet bell peppers you cook with them. So you need to sample the pot while you're boiling, for hotness, sweetness, and body, to decide if there's a need to add more sugar or vinegar or peppers.

Similarly with men--and Seamus specifically. I had a fanciful notion come to me while making JJ. I was feeling an attraction for him. Maybe it was only an unconscious tugging back then. Perhaps it wasn't a conscious desire until a week or so later, when, upon returning from work one evening, I found Seamus' gift hanging in one of those plastic grocery bags by its handles on my back door.

I had mentioned to him on that JJ day that I had begun reading erotica (Why had I said that, to a relative stranger, I wondered afterward. How well was I sampling what was boiling in the pot?) I told him I wanted some well-written material, but there were obstacles. Because I lived in a small town, going to the local bookstore and buying erotica just wasn't going to happen. Plus, I like to hold the book that I'm reading, not use an e-reader. And I wanted to support my local mom and pop store rather than ordering online.

To my shock and delight (maybe I was tasting my brew pretty well after all!), he had related his love of erotica, too, and offered to loan me some of his editions of Best Women's Erotica, which he had been collecting since 2000, when it was first published. "This could be the start of a beautiful relationship," I cheered as I opened the bag to count four BWE anthologies. And my fantasies about Seamus went wild.

In fairness, I have to add that in addition to being an impediment to some things, small towns can also be a single woman's best friend. Certainly it was to this single woman--conniving a fling, which like most affairs, would likely go awry and potentially cause a lot of hurt feelings.

It turned out, a week after my present's arrival, that my neighbors up the road, Dawn and Dan, who knew Seamus and his wife, Lillie, invited me to a party. So, I got to meet Lillie, too.

To my surprise, she was actually quite nice, easy to converse with, and not at all reluctant to voice an opinion on any subject. As we both worked in the healthcare field, in women's health as a matter of fact, we had innumerable stories to share about women and birth control, women with weight out-of-control, shaving folliculitis, piercing problems, and eventually about sex--with men, because we were both happy being straight--and of course marriage, marital discord, devotion, dalliance, and divorce. She soon learned the details of my marriage and its dissolution, and I learned all about hers and Seamus' and their past struggles with the three Cs: connection, communication, and commitment.

With that conversation, it became clear to me how heartless my initial impulse had been, while slicing and dicing jalapenos, to try to prove how unworthy a person Lillie was and how Seamus was much more suited to being in a relationship with me.

After meeting Lillie and finding a sisterhood between us, I had needed to revise my thinking quite a bit, and, rather than act in a bitter, vengeful way, doing to her what another woman had done to me, it was time to add some sugar to the pot.

Lillie and I seemed to have found out in a short time, how simpatico we might be. Just how so was something I wanted to more fully discover. And how my friendship would evolve with Seamus was completely uncertain as well. Building both relationships would take time, I knew, as I left the party that afternoon.

Getting to know Lillie better didn't happen over a couple of chats. Like friendships that are solid, they grow slowly with dedicated time spent together, over months, sometimes even years. The party at Dan and Dawn's had first introduced us to each other, but over the succeeding months, Lillie and I developed an intimacy and honesty that I had only rarely felt in the half-dozen or so women friends I had made over my lifetime.

Which meant I had two things to look forward to during each and every week: dancing with Seamus every Tuesday night, and dining with Lillie every Thursday, as Seamus worked those evenings and Lillie was therefore alone.

Ahh, dancing with Seamus. Being rather tall myself, and willowy, our bodies fit well into each other's with the close embrace of the Tango. In fact, because Seamus kept his axis so perfectly weighted and his frame so solid, it was quite easy for me to maintain the connection, my chest against his, my breasts flattening against the ridge of what I could only imagine were the well-developed pectorals of a man working out.

It's difficult to describe the sensation to someone who has never danced the Tango. Like all partner dances, your combined goal is to move as one. However, rather than executing patterned steps, one right after another, the leader leading and the follower following, in the Tango there is lead and follow for sure, but each movement is improvised based on one's posture, one's partner, the music, and the surrounding dancers. The leader invites the follower in a direction, places their weight on left or right foot, but allows them to take some liberties in exactly how they get to where the leader is directing them to go. In many ways, it is a perfect yin-yang form of dance, with a duality and a delicious freedom in the give and take.

Feeling Seamus' right arm around my back and his chest's warmth radiating through my front as we do back ochos, cicadas, volcadas, and crosses to wonderful traditional or contemporary music, is the most divine experience I can imagine. (Well, there might be something else just as divine, but I wasn't currently experiencing it!)

So...full of affection for Seamus from the previous Tuesday, come Thursday, I either entertained Lillie at my house or we got together at hers. Over a meal we would talk lightly about our work-days, but eventually delve into the more personal and interesting, especially when the topic of Seamus was raised.

I clearly had an obsession with him, and whether Lillie sensed it or not, there were things about him I just had to find out. Or at least one thing specifically: I wanted to know what sex with Seamus was like--for him and Lillie, that is. After the party, I vowed I was not going to do something that might break up a marriage. But fantasies do no harm, after all. And learning about their physical intimacy was going to make it more fun for me to go to bed at night.

All right. Let the pepper brew simmer, I'd find myself saying. Turn the burner down. Despite my need, this was going to have to happen at Lillie's pace, and so I had to temper my queries.

Which I had done. Although I have to confess that the Sancerre which I brought over to her house just last night might have improved the yield.

She was in a particularly jovial mood, things having gone well at work all week; she was off the next day, and had little reason to limit her intake of what turned out to be her favorite wine. After some light-hearted banter, I broached the subject of a personal concern, about a time when Finn had suggested a threesome with me and a woman friend of his. I had rejected Finn's offer, and wondered if that was part of the reason that he grew disinterested in me and eventually left.

Although Lillie was quick to defend my decision, she admitted with a little flush of embarrassment, (or was it from her third glass of wine?) that Seamus had made a similar request a dozen years or so ago, and she had reluctantly agreed to trying it. With a simultaneous dread in my gut and quickening of my pulse, I asked Lillie to tell me more, and Lillie, relieved to be given the chance to at long last tell someone about it, spared me no detail.

"Her name was Jean," she began, "a friend of Seamus' from art school. A redhead--maybe a brunette who colored her hair, because her pubic hair--that which there was--was definitely brown. She was cute, but a little worn looking, wearing makeup to cover up the effects of too many years in the sun.

"She was a petite," Lillie continued, "a couple of sizes smaller than I, but her breasts were larger. Her legs were shaved, her crotch, too, except for a little tuft on top. I was the opposite: no makeup, large eyebrows nearly meeting in the middle, full crop of axillary hair, and long, unruly pubes. Seamus says he likes the androgynous features about me."

I couldn't help but love Lillie, feeling comfortable enough to reveal to me these things about herself. Could I do the same? What would she think of me, shaving my armpits, waxing my eyebrows and legs, and still trimming my pubic hair, even though I had no man to titillate. Alas, I sighed. Maybe Lillie and I were more different than I had originally suspected.

"I told Seamus that I had agreed to this threesome once and only once," Lillie forged ahead. "I felt the need to draw a line, else who knows how Seamus or Jean might interpret our menage for any future reunions.

"I knew I was going to have trouble relaxing that night, so I needed to smoke. Seamus had to acquire a little stash, which he had done, and the three of us got stoned after supper and just let things happen."

I couldn't believe how wet I was becoming. I had flatly turned down Finn's request for a trio, yet I was hanging on every word of Lillie's, sitting forward on my couch cushion, and finding this as real as Lillie had: two pairs of hands initially rubbing all over her, then one pair brushing her scalp hair, the other attempting to straighten her unruly pubes using, as styling gel, the wetness seeping from between her vulvar folds. Finding her clitoris in the process, Jean had teased it, then tickled it, bringing her to the brink, before gently backing off.

The three traded places, with new sets of hands or mouths finding the pleasures in the tautness of a nipple or the tumescence of a penis. Seamus sounded massive, the way the two women apparently leap-frogged with their mouths up and down his shaft, taking turns bringing him, too, to that precarious edge.

Finally, with Jean rolling Lillie's nipples between her fingers and tonguing her mouth as deeply as Seamus was plunging into her vagina from behind, Lillie gasped in release as Seamus unloaded his milky treasure into her vault.

Still full of eros, Seamus turned his attention to Jean, took her womanhood into his mouth, brought her to pleasurable screams and shouts, then a prolonged period of heavy gasps and sighs.

Jean reciprocated by making sure that there was no drop of semen left unspoken for, licking it off Seamus limpness and then out of Lillie, which, combined with Seamus' earlier priming penetration, brought Lillie to another really lively orgasm.

I was dizzy. My breaths were coming a little too quickly for me to hide my arousal. Nonverbally, I was telling Lillie too much. She took my hand, looked deeply into my eyes, and apologized for revealing all too many details.

Not able to contain myself, I blurted out, "I have never done anything even remotely close to that," then sighed, "and I guess I never will."

I let my eyes fall toward the floor, embarrassed to meet Lillie's, after having confessed that my sexual life with Finn had been tame and tepid, by comparison--and implying, once again, that our divorce was on account of me lacking a sense of adventure.

Lillie read my mind. "Yeah, it may have been good that one little sliver of time. But the aftershocks, the problems for Seamus and I that followed. Initially, it wasn't worth it. Our relationship suffered for many years. We can joke about it now, but we couldn't back then.

"Whenever Seamus felt art sales weren't going well, or his creativity was faltering, he would make the case for revving up his sexual energy, from where he felt his creativity flowed. He would get these outlandish ideas for new sexual escapades, which I would refuse to embrace, making him feel rejected and leaving me feeling unwilling, undaring, and sexually conservative.

"We've come a long way in our understanding of each other, in stretching toward each other, in going part way--and that has let us try some new things, without putting us on the precipice."

"Did you ever have an experience like that again?" I asked in a faltering voice.

"No, not exactly," she began, and in the next half hour she related more about their journey. Initially it was only Seamus', but she later joined him, to explore the ancient eastern tradition of Tantra. Through the practice of High Sex, as Margot Anand referred to it, she and Seamus had gotten a lot closer, had become more intimate, and more willing to play with other ideas and notions.

"Neither of us are into having secretive affairs or in swinging," Lillie continued, "but we were talking the other night..."

And what she then said completely blind-sided me. That's not strong enough language. And it's the wrong metaphor too. What Lillie offered to me was like not having to die to go to heaven. It was like the last scene in The Big Chill, where Sarah lets her best friend, Meg, who's single, getting older, and trying to conceive, have her husband, Harold, for the night.

I couldn't stop crying. I couldn't stop hugging Lillie either. Sobbing, the grief of being left by my husband, which I hadn't ever fully relinquished, poured out of me, into the lap of this woman who had made a most generous gift of kindness, who had risked her marriage in a threesome over a decade ago, and was now offering something that in my mind could be as risky, yet doing it for a love that I had never felt from another woman.

"I can't accept," I managed to say, after dozens of tissues were soaked through and Lillie's poor shoulder wore the stain of my tears.

"We both want this, " Lillie simply stated. "I do, and I know you do, too."

She was pure goodness. I wanted to be like her. Secure. Confident. Generous. So full of love. And I will be, some day, I promised myself.