The Panther

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. Both of us were hungry and we tucked into our meal in companionable silence. Then, however, Helen leant back in her chair, hugging her tea-cup in her hands, looked at me and asked: -

"Why you? You know now why it was me that wanted this but .... why you?"

She took it for granted that I understood. I could not be flippant. So, I answered, choosing to tell the unembellished 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. Your directness aroused me. 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 her 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 low, she asked: -

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

I could have responded by playing with the ambivalence in her question and ignore her desire to know more about the man she had, almost blindly chosen as a lover. She had hoped that our relationship would satisfy a long unrecognised, sexual desire. And today she had unreservedly embraced what I could give her. Helen knew, however, that such sex 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. I had to try to tell her, honestly, how I saw myself as a human being, man and lover in our situation.

I started with telling Helen that I had had loving, well-adjusted parents, a not particularly sheltered youth and, thankfully, a normal sexual development. I was interested in sex and became quite early knowledgeable about adult sexual behaviour, liked girls but, despite this, remained a virgin into my early twenties. I was rather shy and too well behaved to persuade inexperienced young girls to have sex with me. In my early twenties, in Australia, I had a succession of sexual relationship. With some exceptions they were with mature women who were as attracted to me as I was drawn to them. This was my luck; I owe them much.

I learned from and through them, I told Helen, to avoid bad sex by never forcing myself uninvited onto a woman, never to fuck in anger, and never allowing myself to be humiliated by a grudgingly consented-to charity-fuck offered by a disinterested partner. Bad sex was not only not worth having; it was an evil that destroys joy, self-worth, and respect for the other.

My partners taught me that for good sex one had to want as strongly as one was wanted. It was as much about the joy and extasy 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 bodies.

This was how these women and I were together; how we made love, explored, adventured, crossed boundaries. We laughed at and ignored the prissy folks that disapproved. There were things that 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, sought to catch Helen's eyes. I wanted to apologise for what I feared sounded like boasting. She 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 found once again another such ideal lover. It was a miracle that we found each other, beyond anything I expected or would have hoped to find again in my life. I told her that to me she was not only stunningly beautiful and sexy. She had, in every minute of our love-making today, been a revelation, sensuous, generous, fun and fun-loving, withholding nothing. I was swept away and along by her brave, shame-free openness to pleasure.

To ease the serious mood without disregarding 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 strongly 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 is possible for us, without hurting others and threatening our other life."

Helen had listened. When I started to stumble in my 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, for telling me, about yourself, 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 how much we want 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, perhaps, have dropped out of your class. But now, you knowing this, almost makes me ashamed."

Helen had gotten up. She stepped behind me and cradled my head against her breast. I heard her heart beat. 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 of his promotion and recall to head-office in Germany in June, but 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 already 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 and 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 the dishes on the sink, lowered her head and said: -

"You see, everything came together for me to have an affair. Andrea in Germany, us leaving for good in December, the poetry, 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, have a sexual romp with a man I fancied, but now ....".

She turned, looked down on 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, in our respective cars for our adult education class. It was, had been for both of us, already a day full of learning.

Next morning, Helen rung me at work. It was, of course, a few years before mobile phones and I had given her my phone-number at college, 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 and whether I had any dreams, she giggled, that would worry Erika. Did I talk in my sleep? She hopes she doesn't!

I would find out that Helen, unlike I, 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. On this morning she just 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 .... she paused, giggled, changed her voice into a sexy timbre: -

"I buried myself under the doona. In five minutes or so I brought my lonely night to a quite satisfying conclusion. In the shower after I missed you again. I have discovered how much I like getting thoroughly washed, but only by you, after you have so thoroughly messed me up!"

Then she complained that she would have another lonely night in 'our' smelly, unmade bed and why I couldn't .....?: -

"If you were a business-man you could quickly find an excuse to give to your wife for being away for a night."

With her voice back to normal she 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 her calling me, I often looked longingly at my phone, hoping it would ring. I shut the doors of my office whenever Helen called. I wanted no interruptions. She 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 day-time-only affair, and then not often enough, in my ear. She always took the initiative to ring. Her calling flattered, of course, my male ego, but it was their sexiness, hearing the playful modulations in Helen's voice that thrilled, excited and aroused me to a level I would not have thought possible. I lost my habitual reserved manners on the, hitherto, disliked phone and I became a more than willing partner in our phone-sex affair.

There is no doubt in my mind that the above contributed greatly on keeping our lust for each other at 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 house. 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 really relished our shag in the bushes, but we enjoyed being together and have 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 her unaffected warmth of feeling and caring.

With Erika that had in the normal stress and conflicts of a marriage seriously gone amiss. Often, I doubted that she still liked me. And I was no longer sure that I was, as her marriage partner, still 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 life-style 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 he still could 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 theirs was not unusual.

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

After her marriage she realised that their feeble first-time fucks at the ski-lodge in Bavaria were indicative of what their sex-live would be 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; always wore expensive driving-gloves in his car. Although he was a successful business-man, he tried to avoid shaking hands. At week-ends, she noticed, he often changed during the day into fresh underwear and he kept a supply of shirts, socks and underwear 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 his phobic cleanliness with his sexual behaviour.

Helen told me then, without any of the salacious bravado 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 on 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 at the beginning we did not make love very often. Then it became weeks, month. Now, when it happens, it's always a surprise; never after a nice dinner, drinks, a night out, flirting, or a sexy foreplay. It's now always in the morning. I wake up, Jurgen is on top of me. I moisten myself. 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 sweet. Now I am just sad, uneasy. For him, fucking me is something dirty; it requires a gift as 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. I was sorry that our so wonderful, sexually so fulfilled and rewarding affair would end. I was relieved that Erika had suspected nothing, and genuinely believed that my affair with Helen had not changed our marital relationship. I had no wish to confess my trespass and inflict hurt. Listening to Helen's description of her marriage, however, made me feel very uneasy about its future.

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 restraint into an active force that enslaves the animal. Despite the remaining grace and strength in its circling behind the bars it is no longer just a dance around a centre, but around a dazed and barely beating heart.

Now I realised, why Helen understood it to be specifically directed at her life. She was in her marriage with Jurgen not just living with his phobia, she was living in it. His phobia 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 in behind the bars of her husband's peculiar obsession.

In our affair, Helen's repressed sexual needs had triggered her temporary escape from the restraints of the cage. However, the restrictions that Jurgen's aversion imposed on their sex-live was only one of many and, 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 together Helen gloried in her nakedness more openly and seductively than even Erika had ever done.

Early in our relationship, when I enthused about her naked beauty and that I could never get enough of her shameless display, she told me that it made her happy. Stripping and showing herself excited her as much as it excited me. "I am really an exhibitionist", she laughed, but then, getting serious, she said that Jurgen always wanted her to be properly dressed. He even supplied her, through his mother in Germany, with special, expensive, full body-length, cotton-weave night-shirts. She grinned: -

"Very dressy, I look like a nun! With Jurgen in his tailored pyjamas and I in my shift, we could go to church instead of going to bed. You know, we never are 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 and me. 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, the Mini's heater was a joke, that she was frozen to the bone and that she needed an immediate hot shower. He made her some tea. Washed and warmed-up, in her nighty, she could join him safely.

As Jurgen avoided kissing and cuddles as much as possible, it had until now gone well. She giggled. Being naughty she had to tell 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 every-day life was unbridgeable. While she had temporarily stepped out of the cage for a sexual adventure, it had remained her home and, she 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 and then, most tellingly, it kept her silent about her life with him until late in our relationship.

I believed that for Helen, as for me, ours was her first extramarital affair. Due to her inexperience she probably believed that a temporary breaking-out from the stifling confines of her married life could be safely kept separate, especially 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. I did not belief that she could stay married to Jurgen. Either she would end it wanting to be free or he would end it finding her untouchably soiled.

These thoughts I kept hidden from Helen. December had come, my Adult Education class had finished in early November. Since then we managed to see each other twice and there were numerous phone-calls. In her last one she told me that they were packing-up, preparing to leave for Germany in ten days. If I wanted to see her as much as she wanted to see me, she could free herself the day after tomorrow. I was still at university, preparing teaching-material for next year. She would meet me there.