From the time she was aware of sex in her imagination, each act in her fantasy was perfect, the best sex she ever had, the next time always more incredibly delicious than the time before. All the dashing men who were friends of her father’s, husbands and lovers of the women who were close to her mother, taught her about seduction. The moguls, actors, writers, doctors, lawyers, painters, diplomats, the men who came to swim and play tennis in the country or who sipped cocktails at parties in the city, made her aware of the “it” her friends giggled and whispered about. “Did she do it?” “I heard she did it.” “Did he try to do it?”
By the time her teenage years were winding down, she was way beyond the “it.” She understood the subtle glances of the sophisticated and suave older men, the light touch on her arm to help her on with a coat, the words that held double meanings to camouflage the message, the embarrassed glances when she dared to look them in the eye, the flicker of hope when she hugged them too close. Because she understood their silent language, she knew why Eddie left Debbie for Liz and Frank left Nancy for Ava, and Archie secretly preferred Veronica though he always stayed safely with Betty. At sixteen and seventeen, she even understood what Hammett saw in Hellman, how Monroe desired Miller, and Bogart and Bacall exploded on the screen.
The “it” had no form or memory, no aftermath of regret or embarrassment, as it remained elusive and intangible, created and orchestrated by her alone—masturbation with a willing partner who was under her control and direction. Miss Honeypot was the Alexander Haig of sexual fantasy. “I am in charge here” was her mantra. Those older men were all Cary Grant, obliged to recite words written for them by her, succumb when the script called for surrender, retreat when the director, her again, needed sexual tension.
She had sex before she had sex. She had great sex before she ever had bad sex.
Miss Honeypot’s abstinence was never based on lack of daring or fear of reprisal but rather on a dread of disappointment that would contradict the perfection of making love that went beyond her brain. There were good girls and bad girls and somewhere in her mind, until she could come out and be both, the bad girl hidden within the good girl, until she could find someone who would understand that fantasy was her game, she was out of the running. Her desire was the chase that ended in half-finished acts which always promised more and better and best. Hunting for the drama that would turn into ecstasy impelled her to seek out the perfect candidates to share an actual foray into bed. The “it” became the “what if” when the first kiss at sixteen with a brooding, tragic boy who died two years later by his own hand, kept her going for another two years until at eighteen, the “what if” became a “so what” when the son of a literary giant tricked her into believing that knowing the steps of the dance standing up had bearing on the moves lying down. A black lace party dress ripped down the back was a remnant of his misplaced enthusiasm, lipstick askew covering a bruised lip happened more out of anger than ardor, which made the whole encounter off the charts and impossible to rank. She was his Lolita in the flesh. Coupling with him was a trip to a zoo where wild animals roamed free and which had her scurrying back to the safety of untried yet fulfilling fantasies. After doing “it” for years with happy endings, she made the mistake of doing “it” for real. The scale from worst to best had taken form.
In her twenties, Tuscany melted her heart and an Italian opera singer melted her icy veneer. Miss Honeypot heard him sing before the world sang his praises. He was the perfect panacea for her second encounter of the intimate kind and the appropriate send-off before heading down a Swiss slope into the arms of a married mogul who gave her a ride on his private plane. From there to Belgrade and the impoverished Yugoslav student who had no bathroom or shower in his room in the shabby pension, but who offered lilac soap to bathe in his sink. The affair was sweet and tender but geographically impossible, which was why it seemed great for the seventeen hours that they tangled. By then, the impossible, improbable, and highly unlikely freed her to hit and run.
On a train headed for Paris, she considered her position on the scale from worst to best. For a brief instant she had great though in reality, she was still firmly on worst, hoping to inch her way up to passable.
Driving along the quai in Paris at dusk where rooftops cut magical designs in the sky, she heard the question for the first time. “Am I the best you ever had?” Best? With the exception of seventeen hours of silent sex with an impoverished Yugoslav, she had just gotten over worst, passable was barely possible and adequate was a distant dream. The man asking the question was French and adept at food and wine, which, in her state of confusion, had her comparing him to the rich risotto she had devoured in Tuscany with the thin Nouveau Beaujolais that she had just tasted and despised. Too young to be so embittered, Miss Honeypot headed home to America with the intention of burying herself in work. While buried, she married a grim but brilliant economist who baffled her with his choice of monetary policy and his penchant for serial infidelity with obese women who lived in trailers. If fantasy was still her mantra, gratitude was obviously his. Sex with him was neither bad nor good, neither best nor worst. It was married missionary mundane and monotonous. While she wrote copy in her head for the news broadcast the following evening, he toiled away at intercourse. He was Portnoy. She was liver. Once in Berlin with him, she wrote a postcard to her mother. “Who is this man who calls himself my husband, and what is his name doing on my passport?”
Back in New York, divorced and working in television, Miss Honeypot met them all. There were the men who flattered, chased, pursued, begged, threatened, abused, drank, drugged, and sometimes even made it past passable. There was the anchor who used toys, the Greek who used drugs, and the producer who used the 8h13 back to Scarsdale to excuse his premature ejaculation. Another husband followed, a man whose face she couldn’t quite place years after the divorce when they crossed paths at an airport.
Something clicked in her brain. Bad sex was easy to recognize. Good sex, though elusive, was tough. It had little to do with technique, size, durability, or improbability. It had only to do with finding a man who had her number.
Settled in New York, and working in television, the dashing older men who were still her father’s friends were a decade more cynical, less confident and suddenly willing to risk it. It was a match made in Greek mythological heaven. They needed to assure their own immortality. She was Electra let loose in a geriatric ward. Her thirties were a blur of whirlwind encounters with men whose desire for her took precedent over her own sexual pleasure, when her body was taut and her power at its apex, when her ability to seduce gave her the right to go careening in the wrong direction down a one-way street. The scale from worst to best was all about conquest and some bizarre need to rebel against her roots. Had she been Catholic, her target would have been a priest. Had she been daring, it would have been a woman. Had she been in Auschwitz, it would have been a Nazi. Her story was banal. It was fear that propelled her to choose the worst and convince herself that she had found the best.
Fantasy is delicious. Reality is rarely better. Then it happened. For the first time, reality was the fantasy Miss Honeypot had never had.
Somewhere in her midthirties, she found herself floundering professionally and personally, convinced that she had hit the bottom, certain that the best was behind her and the future was bleak. Halfway down that one-way street, Miss Honeypot collided with a man. He was handsome, adorable, funny, guilt ridden, grief stricken, frightened, professionally in limbo, exiting a marriage, and the new father of an infant. At first glance, he was everything she wanted and everything she feared. Had he asked what her astrological “sign” was, she would have said “available,” but he only asked her name, where she lived, and what she did. The first two questions were easy to answer. The third was like an arrow piercing her heart. No longer able to hide behind a glamorous job, bored by men who had never penetrated her soul, desperate to regain some semblance of sanity and order in her life, Miss Honeypot fell madly in love, albeit with the unspoken but conditional proviso, “enter at your own risk.” He did. She did. Within twenty minutes or so, they were living together. It was the best sex she ever had. It was the best love she ever had. It was the funniest, most intellectually challenging time she ever had. It was the most tender and exciting moment in her life. And she and he did everything in their power to turn heaven into hell.
Their fights were an exercise in linguistics and psychoanalysis. His command of the language equaled or even surpassed hers. His ability to dissect her motives and machinations destroyed the little power she had left. He had her number to the point where he knew her body, defenses, and games, and could even dismantle her armor with nothing more lethal than his tongue. Their routine was predictable. They made love all night. Who knew what Miss Honeypot was capable of doing with a man who knew what he was doing? Starved at dawn, they stumbled to a neighborhood diner for food, came home and made themselves presentable to show up either to work or to interview for work. In the evening, he came home, carrying a shoulder bag on one arm and his infant in the other. His dog was a big part of their life until they parted and the dog jumped out a window. They would never know if it was suicide or dementia or perhaps sadness that the perfect couple had simply given up. When they parted officially and her closets were emptied of his clothes, her shelves bare of his books, her bathroom devoid of his toiletries, he took up residence in a building next door. He could see her come and go though never for a moment did she ever imagine he cared enough to suffer. She watched him come and go, steeling herself against the pain of missing him by taking to her bed or diligently plotting her next professional move. Six months went by and he saw other women, many women, not particularly plausible women, while she dated the occasional man. They had their moments. He would call. Miss Honeypot would answer. They would make mad passionate love and know that the bond wasn’t broken but the fear was too overwhelming to give it another try. He would tell her that all she had to do was ask. She would respond that if only he would say what he wanted. And it went on like that for several years—until she got a job and moved to Paris, and he found a woman and made a new life.
Based in Paris and working for a major news magazine, her job took her to the Middle East where the reality of love was quick and impersonal, death lurking at every bedpost, bombs flashing in the distance through shattered windows. It was essential to be dressed at all times as militias attacked the hotel in Beirut where the foreign press stayed. Evacuation could be imminent. The guys who covered the wars were expert at in-and-out. She was expert at running for the story. She had no time or desire for furtive moments. She lived with her boots on, her notepad and pen handy (no outlets on the battlefield), ready to rock and roll to a safe place behind the Green Line, after the usual television questions about how it feels to be the sole survivor of a massacre. In Beirut, where war raged and the bouquet of terror armies was as varied as petals thrown on a funeral pyre at a Hindu cremation, Miss Honeypot lost her sense of fantasy. Those same male colleagues, who wore trench coats and safari jackets, smoked unfiltered cigarettes, and expertly handled a Swiss Army knife, were considered the real thing. They were the war correspondents, the swaggering macho men who, backdropped by the ravaged scenery of devastation and destruction, did their five-minute stand-ups in all the horrific corners of the Middle East. She was the only woman. Sex under fire was an unimaginable fantasy. Bombs crashing, grenades exploding, sporadic gunfire surrounding tangled bodies in fields where land mines were suspected, pushed the mercury up on the thermometer from passable to good to great to nothing after the moment ended.
What did she know that they had not yet learned? What had she forgotten that they would never know?
One thing Miss Honeypot knew for certain about her male colleagues was that beneath the belted trench coats, waiting for Moses to hand them the Ten Commandments at the foot of Mount Sinai, the smaller the penis, the more they bragged and boasted and described in detail what they had done in the mine fields.
One thing she learned was that men like that didn’t have scales from worst to best. It was sex—yes or no—and they moved in like a one-man army, exterminating villages before careening onto the next helpless civilian enclave, a notch in their belts or on the butts of their Uzis that counted the number of bodies—dead or alive.
For the first ten years while Miss Honeypot lived and worked in Paris, she embraced celibacy with a vow as fierce as a nun’s. In her forties, time had been kind enough to make her vocal position on abstinence a challenge to the new crop of macho journalists, insipid French intellectuals, the up-and-coming new generation of moguls, and those same impoverished students who had since become destitute artists and writers. Days after her fiftieth birthday, she met the perfect man—an impotent and powerful French politician who offered a respectable base as she traveled around Europe and the Middle East covering the same old internecine struggles and terror attacks.
Ten years into their relationship and beginning her second decade in Paris, Miss Honeypot happened to be in New York, finishing a book and refurbishing her parents’ apartment while they were in Palm Beach. Life had changed. They were old. Her mother was ill. Her father was desperate to make her well. An e-mail arrived from her agent. He had forwarded a message from the only man in her life that she had loved, along with a cynical remark at the end that read, “Another one has come out of the woodwork.”
The man had not exactly “come out of the woodwork.” They had been in touch on and off throughout the years, though she hadn’t talked to him for a while. On that occasion, she replied immediately. He called. She answered. He told her he had a dream on the eve of his sixty-fifth birthday. He had to find her. He invited her for lunch. Miss Honeypot said she didn’t eat lunch. What about dinner? He said it was difficult, as he had recently married. Why call? Why now? Why me? He was the age his father was when he died. He wanted a real life with the love of his life.
They met for dinner and the years disappeared. She knew then what she had never known or never dared to believe. Somehow she had entered his psyche and owned his soul, and for twenty-something years he had harbored a hope that would not go away. When he kissed her on the street after dinner, she was surprised by her words. “You awakened me.” They saw each other every day while she was in New York. Approaching sixty, it was unthinkable to take off her clothes and make love with a stranger. But he was no stranger. She knew his body as well as her own. To him, her body hadn’t changed since they had first met when she was somewhere in her midthirties. He still had her number but, by then, she had her number too, as well as his. They went slowly, considering the passion and intensity of their feelings, aware that there was no room to turn heaven into hell this time around.
When she returned to Paris, they spoke four or five times a day, e-mailed constantly and made plans to do what had to be done to pick up where they had left off. Four months later, she was living with him in New York. He was in the throes of divorce and she had packed up her life in Paris.
In the beginning, back then, they made love constantly to calm the anxiety and guilt and pain of what they knew was a trail of bruised and battered bodies they had left behind. They struggled to find their place with each other. They laughed at their sheer insanity to think they could pull this off after middle age. They sparred. They fought. They laughed. They cried. Sex wasn’t even an issue. It was the least of their struggles. It was amazing, surprising, unpredictable, never the same, always new, and doing things that they never dared to do with anyone before. Sex was suddenly more than doing “it.” It was trust. It was nurturing and caring love. It was the fact that a woman of sixty had a man who still saw her as she was when she was young. It was the fact that a man in his mid-sixties had a woman who saw the only man she had ever loved evolve into a grown-up who had conquered the demons that had haunted him the last time around.
They got married. Miss Honeypot married Mr. Intensity. Miss Celibate married Mr. Promiscuous.