"CHIMERA" - Chapter 3

[Artie has managed to "date" the fabulous Penny Miller, and actually screwed up enough courage to kiss her - several times - on the lips - on the bench - a "soul kiss" or "French kiss" as we used to call it. This is where I lose Artie, because I knew a girl at our school who could have been the girl he calls "Penny Miller" and there is no way Artie could have gotten within a mile of her, much less touched her knee. Well, he says he had a "date." Yeah, right. So what. Anyway, Artie's "memoir" is about to get raunchy, so beware ... mpb]


We never formally dated again.

That year, we were both active at school in separate crowds. Penny Miller wrote short stories and poems for the school magazine and I was still involved with sports. My group of friends were mostly jocks and the girls who hung around them. Penny played flute in the orchestra. She worked on the staff of the “Sophomore Sing,” an annual musical show put on by the class. She wrote the “book,” a “Twilight Zone” take-off in which Ulysses finds himself transported to our school and runs into clever parodies of teachers and students there. It was a big success, and she won a prize at the year-end assembly.

Penny found the first excuse for us to get together without actually “dating,” at her house after school, supposedly to do homework and watch Dick Clark.

We opened the books, turned on the T.V., danced a little, and at one point, she looked at me with a peculiarly intense gaze, which I sensed to be a silent question — wanting something from me.

I was a novice in the arcane art of interpreting signals from females. That kind of look from a girl was like the mysterious look a cat gives you that may seem to be inviting a tender touch, but could just as easily be prelude to a nasty scratch.

My previous attempts with other girls had usually been faltering and often misfired. But somehow, despite the fact that Penny’s aura should have made her impossible to approach, I acted with almost complete assurance - as on our one and only “date.”

I pecked her on the cheek and she kissed me on the lips so hard our front teeth tapped painfully. I made a teasing joke about it and we kissed again. We continued to kiss and hug until her mother came home.

That day, while we did some homework and flirted out of the hearing of her mother, Penny began to tell me about what she called her “Life Script.”

I’d never thought farther than the next ballgame or summer job and was shocked at how thoroughly she had planned out the rest of her life.

She would go to an Ivy League college and teach English Lit. while she wrote intense poems and satiric short stories and tried to be published in avant garde journals. She wouldn’t get married until she had established herself as a writer, and that only after she had “really experienced life,” which is what “good writing” required. But once she had lived “fully” and written about it, she would have to marry because she knew it would be difficult to support herself and she wanted not just career, but home and family, too.

She expected to marry a wealthy guy from a good family who would support her dream and allow her to write novels in their home. They would live in the country and he would commute to The City and she would raise their children, educating them herself in art, music, and literature. She would write “realistic” novels and achieve a sort of limited fame in literary circles as an eccentric artist with a mysterious, tragic aura.

I didn’t know how to respond to Penny’s elaborate plan, but from the ardent seriousness of her description of it, I decided not to poke holes in the defects, or to criticize it in any way, but rather to support her ideas, which seemed to be very important to her, and which she seemed to want me to understand.

I viewed this development as an important breakthrough, though I didn’t really appreciate the significance of Penny’s sharing these thoughts with me, which in fact elevated us to another level of intimacy in her mind.

After that day, we began to weave a pattern without planning it. It sort of just happened by itself. We kept our separate group of friends and involvements apart from our friendship with each other, but we found time for what Penny called “a rendezvous” two or three afternoons every week. We made concentrated efforts to be alone, either at her house, or outside on park benches. We both felt the drama of what quickly became an addiction to the risk of our secret “affair.”

The next few times we found excuses to get together, our kisses advanced in intensity, grew longer, deeper, our tongues more adventurous, our hands wandering further each time. Later, when the weather warmed up, we rode our bikes to Prospect Park and made out on a blanket on the grass under a huge maple tree.

Once, we took the Coney Island Avenue bus to Brighton Beach, kissed on a bench on the boardwalk, walked on the beach near the shore. I dared her to follow me out onto the breakers, the huge slimy boulders that separated the beaches. We sat under turbulent clouds, with waves crashing, smelling the oily, fishy ocean, kissing and talking about Greek myths.

Over those months, this adventure evolved into an exciting secret life. None of our friends knew about us, and we didn’t talk to one another about what we did with our friends. We eventually stumbled onto a vaguely defined pact. We would each teach the other what we learned from other partners about “sex stuff.”

Because I had few real opportunities for other partners, I used some of the stuff in books my brother kept under his bed, like “A Stone For Danny Fisher,” which had some well worn dog-eared pages that I could use as a manual for borrowed experience.

Later, when I tried something new, Penny laughed, said, “Wait a minute, I read about that - I think it was in 'The Group.'"

I admitted using vicarious literary sources for inspiration and, to my great surprise and relief, Penny thought it was a terrific idea and admitted doing the same.

We then shared our reading material and openly discussed new discoveries. Penny and I would try these things out with each other. Remarkably, whatever I imagined and tried with her seemed completely natural and inevitable, not to say incredibly arousing.

Invariably, when a certain point was reached, we both sensed it had to stop, either because her mother might come home and find us, thereby ending any future for this pleasure, or because I was going to embarrass myself by spouting all over my pants.

At one point, Penny exuberantly referred to us as “Lovers,” no doubt influenced to hyperbole by her reading. I didn’t correct her, or scold for exaggeration or pretense, but the fact is that we were not lovers, in either the romantic or literal sense.

That is, we neither professed nor pretended love for each other; nor did we complete the circle with an act, whether it be defined in romantic terms as lovemaking, or clinically as intercourse. In the words of our parents, we didn’t go all the way. In the competitive terminology of my crowd, I never scored. Penny was not the kind of girl who put out and, horny as I was, I didn’t want to think of her as one.

I never bragged or even mentioned anything that happened between us to anyone, least of all my friends, who were accustomed to pre- and post-mortem descriptions of all sexual encounters, real or imagined. In fact, after our one and only date, we never appeared together in the company of any of our acquaintances.

Our mutually understood joint status was as trusting close friends, intellectual equals, who happened to be privately and innocently experimenting with each other’s bodies as a sort of a science homework assignment.

Truthfully, it didn’t seem like that much of a big deal at the time, at least in the beginning. I mean, it just seemed natural, not dangerous or anything like that.

Because we liked each other, and not more than like, there was nothing at stake, no chance of rejection or the heartache associated with such activities. It seemed that we had solved the adolescent problem of exploring the mysteries of the opposite sex without being burned severely in the process.

I accepted the arrangement willingly and gratefully because I never really expected more than a stolen temporary and superficial relationship with any girl like Penny Miller. From the moment she’d accepted me as an amusing school friend, I’d achieved more than I had a right to expect. When she then evinced interest in me for sexual purposes — even if it was in order to find a safe object for experimentation, which she would later put to use in the far more serious business of finding a boyfriend, lover, husband, or material for “realistic” novels — I was ecstatic.

Because we were not “in love” with each other, there was an informal comfort level to our involvement that made it delicious fun, in an almost childish, playful way. Because our playing was hidden from our friends and parents, it was almost unbearably exciting.

One warm Spring afternoon while we were cuddling on her bed - avoiding some stuffed rabbits and elephants that viewed the event with silent amusement - my hand on Penny’s breast under her blouse and bra while she rubbed my crotch and kissed my cheek, she croaked two magical words: “Let’s undress.”


Copyright © 2006 by Mort Borenstein