Katherine's Earthly Delights

She suddenly felt a pang while looking at the photo of her friend and lover. Oh, my dear Renée, I think you are always so kind and sweet and smart and funny. She smiled to herself. Wow, I'm really piling on the superlatives!

Some of the fantasy dialogue about Bosch and Blake had come from actual discussions the two women had done while examining some art books that Renée owned. Katherine had borrowed one of them, and she got up to get it from her bookcase.

That volume had a reproduction of Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights," and Katherine sat in her bed looking at it. This is an amazing work, and it goes back to what, 1500? Much of it looked more modern than that. He was far ahead of his time, much like William Blake had been in his, she thought.

The large central panel showed a huge outdoor, daytime orgy with naked people cavorting everywhere. On the left was the Garden of Eden with Jesus talking to a bare-assed Adam and Eve. There was full frontal-nudity for those two, although as Renée had noted, pubic hair was generally missing from Bosch's paintings.

On the right was a surrealistic depiction of Hell, and an excuse to have even more nudity. Katherine flipped the pages to some portraits of Bosch, including one he had drawn of himself when he was close to sixty. He was smirking, perhaps. He looks like the proverbial dirty old man.

She knew that the painting had been in the Prado Museum in Madrid since 1939. That was right after Franco took power, and he must have been aware of the painting's existence. Yet apparently he had no objections to it being displayed in his country.

Bosch and Blake called themselves Christians, but they were unlike any Christians Katherine had known or heard about during her time in local Catholic schools before she got to Queens College in 1978. I probably couldn't have handled any of this back then.

It wasn't until recently, at the age of thirty-five, that she had broken away from her religious training and felt free to openly explore her sexuality.

Of course, I had always explored it privately, mostly in my bed at night, but now I'm doing it with real people. She had had only experimented once before with a guy from her neighborhood named Jake. She was eighteen at that time, and it had only gone on for a couple of weeks before her family found out about it and forbade her from seeing him again.

He hadn't even penetrated me yet; why did I listen to them? Now, quite recently, she had finally lost her virginity -- first to Renée, and then to a man who had just become Renée's lover. All three knew each other and knew what the others were doing. As Renée had put it, "We're having a threesome of sorts, although we are not together at the same time. Do you get what I mean?"

Katherine did get it, and she sometimes wondered if they would all wind up in the same bed eventually. For the moment, she thought that there was no point in rushing it.

She felt her body under her nightgown. Her parents had taught her to wear panties and even a bra under her gown at night, but she had given that up when she moved to her own apartment. Now she was pleasantly nude until her garment as she slept at night.

Well, I've certainly changed a lot recently. I said I was going to get my share of loving someday and now I'm doing just that.

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