In Chapter one our heroine, Kate, a successful businesswoman turning 60, has asked herself a troubling question. Is she a slut? Thus began a series of chapters in which she describes to her husband Henry (her fourth husband) her life beginning with her late teen years and her sexual activities at each stage. The portion in italics in each story is her recollection of some memorable sexual experience from her past. In this chapter Kate, now employed in an entry-level position with a major publisher, takes an author to a book signing and they squeeze in a nooner before the signing.
"So what did the Professor and Halili think of your new love? Or was it a one time thing?" asked Henry.
I stood and walked naked over to the counter in our loft to refill our coffee cups. "Oh, I never told them about Howard, and I never told Howard about them."
I laughed as I walked back. "I just fucked all three of them for the whole school year. I was a very busy girl. It was a miracle I graduated."
"Now, correct me if I'm wrong," Henry asked, but didn't this Howard fellow become your first husband? How did that work out with the Professor and Halilli?"
"Oh, they left for Harvard about the time I got married, so they never knew. The Professor was a really big deal in English literary circles, and lots of universities were willing to bid for him. "Besides," I laughed, "I have to admit, getting married was a bit of an accident. It certainly wasn't the great white wedding. I don't think my mother ever forgave me for the way I got married the first time."
"What? Were you pregnant? I thought you told me you couldn't get pregnant?" There was a tone of panic in his voice.
"Relax Henry. There is zero chance that I was pregnant then and less than zero chance that I am going to get pregnant now. For God's sake, I'm sixty-two years old. It was the marriage that was an accident."
"So how did that work?"
"Well, Howard liked to gamble, and he fancied himself a card counter. One day about six months into our relationship, he announced that he and some friends were going to Las Vegas for a long weekend and that they were going to make a fortune playing blackjack by counting the cards. One of his buddies had a big Cadillac convertible—you know the ones with tail fins that had as much metal in them as a Mini-Cooper has in the whole body today. I had never been to Las Vegas, so I thought, what the hell and agreed to go.
As it turned out, they wanted me along as the designated driver. The guy who owned the Caddie had a baggie of drugs that would have made a pharmaceuticals salesman feel inadequate. So I found myself behind the wheel of a '68 Caddie convertible tearing across the Nevada desert at something slightly in excess of 100 mph, with three guys in the back seat who were hallucinating.
Sounds like "
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
," said Henry, referring to Hunter Thompson's best-selling book about a drug-addled trip to Vegas.
"Exactly," I said. "The first time I read that book, I wondered if Hunter Thompson had been one of the three amigos with me in the Cadillac. I never could remember who the other two were besides Howard."
"So you were partaking from the magic drug baggie, too?"
"No, no. But I drank a shit load of beer as we rolled across the desert, and once we got to Vegas I pretty much killed a fifth of good Scotch. No drugs, but enough booze to make my memory at best highly unreliable and, for some parts of the trip, non-existent."
"So okay, you went to Las Vegas and tied one on. Hardly an original strategy. But how did the marriage thing work?"
"Well, the guys were so fucked up that they could hardly play blackjack, much less count cards effectively, so they didn't take long to run out of money. But somehow, on what should have been his last few hands, Howard scored big. He raked the chips off the table and announced to the world that he was going to marry me."
"The rest of what happened is a bit of blur, but when I woke up late the next afternoon, I had a gigantic fake diamond on the third finger of my left hand and a fully signed and apparently valid and enforceable wedding license and certificate of marriage in my purse. The honeymoon consisted of a painfully hung over drive back to Berkeley with three guys in the back seat who were slowly reconnecting with reality. Howard didn't figure out he was married until we got back to Berkeley."
"I don't think Howard was quite ready for marriage. He just got heavier into drugs, and about six months after the Las Vegas trip he announced he was quitting law school and going to India to join an Ashram. I never heard from him again, so after a couple of years of waiting, I divorced him. Even in those days California had lovely no-fault divorce laws. There weren't any assets to divide, and asking for alimony would have been silly, so it was a pretty simple procedure. One of Howard's law school buddies handled the whole thing for me."
"Wow," Henry said. "Everyone says you should have an interesting story about your wedding, but that one tops any that I have heard. So what did you do for sex after Howard bugged out to the Ashram?"
I looked at him over the top of my coffee cup with a smirk and said, "Oh, I learned to do without."
Henry laughed and said, "Oh bullshit. I can't imagine you going a week without having sex with someone."
I smiled and said, "You know me too well, lover. Let's just say that I returned to my pre-Howard habits. After all, it was Berkeley before the AIDS scare. If you couldn't get laid, you just weren't trying."
"So have you got any good stories you want to tell me about your sex life after Howard left?"
