By June of 1987, I was thirty-two years old and my life was in the doldrums. I had been married for a few years, without children, and I had been divorced for two. My job was mediocre, a task in a Wall Street brokerage firm that would be incomprehensible to anyone not actually doing it. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the Windsor Gardens section of Brooklyn, and I did have a car, a 1984 Plymouth Caravelle.

It was the tenth anniversary of my graduation from City College with a virtually useless B.A. in history. I had some plans for graduate school but I hadn’t acted on them yet.

I sometimes thought of Arthur Schopenhauer, the pessimistic German philosopher, and how that sour old Kraut has been mostly correct.

“In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.”

I had just gotten out of work when I was wandering along Trinity Place. There was no particular thing for me to do on this Friday afternoon, so I was in no hurry to get home. Then I heard a women’s voice behind me saying, “Paul, hey Paul.”

For a second I couldn’t believe that this had anything to do with me. Then I heard, “Paul D’Amato, I remember you.” I turned and I instantly recognized my first ever girlfriend, Nora Meara. “You remember me, don’t you?”

“Of course Nora, I remember you.” Before I could get my bearings, she had thrown her arms around me and she was kissing me warmly. Then she said, “It’s been so long, but you look pretty much the same.”

“Actually, it’s been almost exactly ten years, but you look about the same too.” Then she was hugging and kissing me again.

“Come on,” she said, “Let’s get dinner and something to drink. There’s a little place down the street that I like.”

As she walked next to me, I assessed who I had here. She was about five-seven, fairly slender although I could detect a bit of widening in her hips. Her dark blonde hair was cut in the same bob cut she had first tried out in the fall of 1974. On this day, she was wearing a blue blazer, a tight gray skirt, nylon stockings, and dark medium-heeled shoes. Her steel-rimmed glasses were exactly as I had remembered them.

I remembered some notable facts about our relationship. We had both been nineteen-year-old freshmen when we had met in a modern European history class in the February of 1974. I didn’t know anything about her for the first few months, because she had almost never spoken to me during that time.

But the truth was that she made ends meet by working as a part-time hooker on campus. She had stumbled into it almost by accident, then she decided she liked the money. Near the end of that semester, she decided she needed to get her grade up, and she asked me to write the end-of-term paper for her. In return, she would provide me with a blowjob.

I was still a virgin, and her proposal both excited and appalled me. I’m not sure why, but I agreed to her terms. Maybe I figured a single bout of oral sex was a least a start in getting my sex life going.

One night we met in the office of my student newspaper to make the exchange. It went wrong when I accidentally fired my splooge into her hair instead of into the air. She had made it very clear that she wasn’t going to swallow, but in my pleasure, I forgot and she had pulled my cock out at the last second.

That mishap led to a fight in which we hurled insults at each other and then we slapped each other’s faces. I was so triggered that I pulled her over my lap and gave her a good hard spanking on her bare backside. She had liked it more than either of us had expected, and she had offered her well-lubricated pussy to me for rear-entry sex. Thus I lost my cherry right there on the ratty old office couch by the windows.

Then I had the inspiration to invite her for dinner and drinks downtown, and she had accepted. Once there, she had told me all about her hooking activities, but it didn’t bother me. Quite suddenly I had landed my first girlfriend. A very unconventional girlfriend indeed, but she was mine.

By the fall, she had given up her “profession” for regular jobs, and I invited her to join the staff of a student newspaper with me. It all seemed idyllic, but then in October, it abruptly ended.

She was looking for a bigger, better deal for herself and she began dating an older guy with a good job and a nice Triumph convertible. My time as her lover had lasted a little over four months.

Yet I survived the initial surprise, and I soon had other girlfriends lined up. Nora stayed on the paper for the next three years, and thus she remained a kind of friend/acquaintance/ex for me. In her senior year, she lined up part-time work as a dominatrix for some kind of professional outfit. I figured it was her business, and I didn’t talk to her about it much.

In June 1977 we both graduated and, lacking any reason to stay in contact, we went our separate ways. Then almost exactly ten years later, we had that random meeting on Trinity Place.

Nora talked quite readily about herself during our meal. She too had been married for a while and then divorced.

I asked her, “It wasn’t that guy with the Triumph convertible, was it?”

“No, it was somebody after him.”

Nowadays, she had her own incomprehensible job at a brokerage firm, plus an apartment in Chelsea. During our drinks, she started to talk more directly about herself.

“I still look pretty sexy, don’t I?” She patted one of her hips, “At thirty-two, I still have a very good shape, I think. Just a little broadening in the beam.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. It wasn’t like I was trying to land her now, so I gave a neutral response. “Yeah, as I said, you’re pretty much the same.”

She leaned forward and quietly said, “But I’m not wearing garters and straps today.” She had often done that during the time I had known her. Sometimes she did it without panties on. “It’s just conventional panty-hose, but I have the cutest little pair of pink panties underneath. They do show through quite nicely. When I get a chance, I’ll give you a flash and you’ll see.”

That seemed to be going beyond flirtation into making a pass territory, and I wasn’t too comfortable with it. I tried to change the subject, “They tore down Finley a couple of years ago.” That was the old building that had been our first trysting place. “The North Academic Center is finally finished.” The city’s fiscal crisis had delayed it for a long time.

“Wow, really? Finley was like a second home to me.”

“Wagner is next, it’s already abandoned.” That had been the site of our first meeting in the history class. “Eisner is going after that.”

“The Salient is gone too, I heard.”

That was the student newspaper I had been on for four years. I described the convoluted but interesting story of its demise in 1979.

Nora said, “That was a wild publication. I still can’t believe the stuff they got away with. That couch we used to use – like for our first time in fact – I know that was the scene for the Fuck Cover.”

The Fuck Cover was exactly as it sounds; a full-page photograph of two people fucking on The Salient office couch. The story was that two men and one woman were in the office one night when one of the guys and the girl decided to get it on. The third guy assumed he had the right to snap a few photos and then he left. I suspect that drugs were involved somehow but I never could confirm that.

Somebody on the staff decided that one of the pictures should be published in the next issue. I never heard if permission was obtained from the two subjects. It’s true that their faces weren’t visible, only the guy’s bare ass and the bare legs of the girl stretched up and out.

Nora had seen the issue once since it was in our back issues files in a cabinet. Even wild-girl Nora was shocked. She had said back then, “I can’t believe they let you publish this. And if I was that girl, and I didn’t give permission, I would have sued your asses off.”

“If that had happened, I never heard about it. Maybe everybody was stoned or wasted.”

Back then she had said, “There were actually three assholes involved with this project. The first was the guy in the picture. I would never give someone the okay to bang me with a witness on hand. Even as a hooker I never did that. The second was the guy with the camera, he was pretty arrogant in fact. The last was the editor who decided to publish it.”

Now, in the restaurant, I said, “You know, I don’t have a copy of that issue myself right now.”

She said, “You must have been a virgin when you first saw that. Did you want to be that guy?”

“Yeah, of course I did.”

“But then, I came along, and you were that guy and I was the girl.”

Nora was getting back to some explicit comments about herself, and again I wasn’t sure how to react. Our time in the restaurant was coming near the end, and I wondered how our parting would go.

She asked me, “Are you seeing anybody now?” I had always noted the euphemistic sound of that expression. It really meant, are you fucking anybody right now?

“No, I’m not. How about you?”

“No, not for a while now.” Then she revealed her intentions. “Paul, I know it’s been an accidental meeting today, but I’d still like to, you know, keep seeing you. We could hang out together, talk to each other, and so forth.”

“That sounds like we’d be dating, actually.”

“If you want to put it that way, all right, yes.”

I felt I had to make it clear, “Nora, do you want to bang me?”

She wasn’t as surprised as I might have expected. “Well, what do you want?”

“I wasn’t talking about what I want; I asked you what you want.”

She hesitated, then she quietly said, “Yes, I suppose so.”

I let her statement hang there, and she soon launched another explanation. “I know it was a long time ago, and I left you rather suddenly.”

“It was a long time ago, but I don’t hold any grudges. I moved on like you told me to do. I had some new girls lined up in a few weeks.”

“I know, I met some of them. Like Michelle and Andrea, and that plump little chick, Judy.” She giggled, “That was cool, three-somes with Michelle and Judy. I was impressed by that.”

“There were others after that. Now you, so you’re thirty-two and lonely I suppose.” I wanted to put her on the defensive.

“Aren’t you lonely too?”

I didn’t answer her directly. “You expect us to just start up where we left off in ‘74?”

“No that’s not it.”

“Then what is it then?”

She seemed uncomfortable, and she answered indirectly. “I’d like you to come home with me, tonight. Come back with me to Chelsea.”

I thought, this chick always had nerve. In fact, if a lady could have balls, then Nora would be one of them. She actually said, “You’re not going to pump and dump me, are you?”

That was a good tactic, assume the sale. She had been pretty canny during her hooking days, I knew that. “Nora, that’s not the way I operate, and you know it.”

“Right, you’re just the opposite. You fall in love with every girl you have sex with.”

“For some reason, they keep leaving me. Well, there was one time when it was justified.”

“Which one was that?”

“I’m not going to talk about it now.”

Then, like the good salesperson she was, she kept quiet. Having made her pitch, she was going to wait and see if the customer was going to buy the product.

I looked her up and down, and she stared back at me. Man, she was always so pretty. I had noticed her from the first day I had entered that classroom in February 1974.

I said, “You ignored me for months until George Orwell came along.” He was the subject of the term paper I had written for her.

“Oh right, I still have that thing.”

“Yes, suddenly I became a person of interest at that point.”

She said, “I’m sorry, I was just doing what I had to do. It all worked out in the end.”

“Yes, the end came around that October, as I remember.”

I could see that was a sore point with her. Some of her old snippiness came back. “Well, think about it for a while if you have to.”

“What I think is that I should give you a good spanking. First on the seat of your nice business-lady skirt, and then I’ll work my down through the layers.” I surprised myself with the bluntness of that statement and I worried about being rude. Nora had been very kinky when I knew her, but I had no idea what her attitudes were like now

She replied, “That sounds absolutely delightful.” So she didn’t slap my face and storm out of the place. Perhaps she was the same old Nora.

I changed the subject, “I do have a car now, you know, a Plymouth Caravelle. Really exciting.”

“We can go on trips with it.”

Yeah, she’s really taking it for granted now. “Of course. I’ll even let you drive it at times.”

“Oh, I know I never let you drive my cars.”

That had been a minor sore point with me, that she didn’t trust my driving skills. I shrugged, “As I said, that was a long time ago.”

So, am I going home with her or not? I had learned a long time ago to be decisive with women.

“Okay, Nora, if you’re ready to go, then so am I. Let’s splurge and take a taxi.” Something about this reminded me of our first date that night right after the first spanking and then the first fucking. I guess that whole date sort of ran backwards, because I hadn’t even kissed her at that point.

Just like that first night with her, she didn’t hesitate. In fact, she had imitated the continuation of this new date. She grinned at me and said, “I’m ready right now,” and then she leaned forward to kiss me.

Yeah, honey, you’re getting the ice cream cake today after all.

Nora’s apartment was on the third floor of a walk-up building. In New York real estate parlance, it was “pre-war,” pre-World War I in fact. But it had gone up after the Spanish-American War, I was sure of that. It was, in another New York term, a “new-law tenement.” That law went into effect in 1901, and required buildings to have side courtyards, not the mere air-shafts of the previous generation.

It was very nicely maintained, however. Nora’s place was in the back. There were windows in her bedroom that faced the rear alley, and side windows in the living room that faced the side courtyard. Other buildings were blocking the view in both directions.

Somehow I got a feeling of urban loneliness from the place that was beyond what I felt in my own place in Brooklyn. At least out there I had a view of something. As soon as we walked in Nora said, “Well, make yourself at home. Would you like a drink or something?”

“Just a glass of wine would be fine, whatever you got.”

When she came back and sat down with me, I felt a sense of awkwardness that was different from the restaurant. I realized that I had never been in any of her homes before except for her uncle’s house in Maspeth, and of course I couldn’t stay there overnight. When she had been a senior, she had rented her own place with her dominatrix earnings, but I had never been in it.

I said, “How about we listen to some music? You’ve got an album you’d like to play?” I noticed that I was making these into questions, not being decisive as I had once been around her.