Secret of the Universe

Originally Posted Saturday, August 3, 2013

I was at dinner last night with two twenty-two year old women.  I could just end the post there and leave well enough alone as my mother used to say.  I am tempted to launch into fiction, to tell you they were twins and that they performed unnatural acts, but the truth will suffice.  One wore pantyhose over underwear that she had to sweat up to sell on the internet.  No, I'm not making that up.  There is a market for everything, I am learning.  Some want the panties, some want the pantyhose (they have the additional pleasure of having smelly feet).  The other girl rode a motorcycle, and it gave me an idea for making my own website called "Crotch Rocket Undies" for guys who might be into that particular "thing."  Whatever.  I've heard much weirder stories than this, but by now not much surprises me.  Durkheim wins.  Anomie reigns. 

So now that I've killed the sweetness that the post's first line might have had you imagining. . . . Trust me, though, they are nice girls and I adore both (or each) of them.  But when I told the one that I was now curious to smell her underwear, she waived me off with a disdainful look. 

"I'm just saying," I said, perplexed.  WTF? 

Anyway, I was surprised when the conversation took a turn to sex.  O.K.  No I wasn't.  They talked about boyfriends and ex-boyfriends and how they performed in bed.  Well, not bed literally.  And one of them said that so and so was good at that.  So I asked (as I always do) what that meant.  What does it mean that he was a "good lover"?  One of them said that the size of a penis matters.  O.K., I said, so the guy with the biggest penis wins?  One could scour the prisons of the world to find the best lovers?  I then wondered disingenuously if there was some technique that won the day, perhaps some little counterclockwise corkscrew twirl that happens at just the right moment that sent women over the edge (I think I got that from an old "Seinfeld" episode).  If that were the case, that would be the most known secret in the world because every woman would have that published as widely as possible.  Or would they, I asked?  Are women competitive about their orgasms?  Would they prefer to be the only ones having them or do they want theirs to be much better than those of their friends?  I just can't imagine women going all NSA about a thing like that.  So having disabused the conversation of a few obvious fallacies, I asked again what it meant when a woman said a guy was a good lover?  Would that guy be a good lover for every woman?  Etc.  I waited to hear the big secret of the universe, but it wasn't forthcoming, and so I plopped out my profound idea (withheld until I had prepared the audience who now was longing for some denouement to the conversation).

"Isn't it just a matter of how much you like someone?" I offered.  "Isn't it really just that?" 

I sat back and took a triumphant pull on my beer (we were eating on a veranda on a warm evening). 

Derisive laughter was my medal, my prize.  They really guffawed at that one. 

"Nooooo. . . haw-haw-haw. . . . " 

Patrons at the other tables looked over and smiled to know we were having such a wonderful time.  I smiled and nodded back pretty sure they thought it was cute that the girls were having such a good time with their father.  Sweet. 

I thought back to a day when the world didn't have an internet. 

Later that night alone at home, I wondered about it all, not in any orderly, rational way, but just wondering in random thoughts and images. I am a fossil, I know.  I still think that relationships are rooted in deep emotions.  I think that is the most important thing.  I dated a girl for a while, about six months, with whom I was not in love, but the fact that she was decades my junior and was beautiful and would not leave me alone was quite persuasive.  One night, she told me her friends were all asking her what it was like to make love to an older man.  I can't give you the answer here, but she was saying that I was a good lover.  In the end, however, her ex-boyfriend got a job writing for a major magazine in NYC and wanted her to come along. 

"Maybe I'm a whore," she said, "but I'm going.  I want to live in New York." 

I don't think our relationship was based in the sort of deep emotions I prize.  Maybe.  I don't know.  She wrote me often when she moved to New York, wrote me when everything was going well, when they bought their first apartment, when they got married, when they had their first baby, then the second, when she saw an old girlfriend who was now a major fashion model and fell in love again and left her husband and babies, and six months later when she and her girlfriend broke up.  Throughout it all, she always kept in touch.  Deep emotions?  I don't know, maybe, what that means any longer.  It is a weird and topsy-turvy world. 

If any of you have the answer, let me know.  Existence seems more random to me all the time.  I'm pretty sure you can't solve that problem for me, but maybe you have some insight into the other thing.  I enjoy my occasional forays into the world now, but most of the time I'd rather be alone.  I don't really seem to understand anything any more.