INTRODUCTION
A smoker, my colleague Shelley heads to the back row of the plane where they still allow passengers to puff away once we reach “cruising altitude.” It’s June 1988. I’ll be in an aisle seat closer to the front. Returning home to New York from an all-day business trip visiting a client in Nashville, our day started at 5 am and we’re bushed. Shoving my belongings into an almost full overhead compartment I hear a Southern male voice say, “Ah you always like that?” “That” obviously refers to my decidedly frenetic gestures trying to get my stuff to fit into the bin. Having recently lost 50 pounds, I am svelte and sexy at 41, even if I don’t feel that way. Married with two children - a son almost 10 years old, and a daughter almost 7 - I haven’t had sex in over four years. More on that later.
I turn in the direction of the voice, and my eyes instantly lock with the piercing baby blues of a stupendously attractive, silver-haired man sitting on the other aisle. A young girl sits between us. I start babbling about my day like a flustered teenager. And then, even before the plane takes off, I ask the girl if she’ll change seats with the man.
Thus begins the most momentous journey of my life.
Fourteen years my senior, Edgar is on the way home to New Canaan, one of the waspiest and wealthiest communities in Connecticut, and is accordingly dressed in khakis, white shirt, blue blazer and brown loafers. Downcast about a recent breakup with a woman he loves, he heads the US division of a giant UK-based company. He’s also married with three grown children. Unhappily married. Of course.
By the time the plane lands, less than two hours later, Edgar and I share intense kisses, the likes of which I have never experienced. Intoxicating sensations awake in me that I never knew existed. I can hardly breathe. Edgar doesn’t have to ask my permission. Kissing him seems as natural as breathing.
“God knows what the people in the row behind were thinking,” I muse to myself, not really caring terribly much about what they thought.
Edgar asks if I’d like to stay at a hotel in Manhattan with him. “I can’t. My husband is taking my kids on vacation tomorrow, and I want to say goodbye,” I respond. Publisher for an important trade newspaper in the home furnishings business, I have a lot to do at work and don’t think it wise to take time off. We have to stay close to our desks and employees.
Handing me his business card as we wait in line to exit the plane, Edgar says he’d like to see me again and invites me to call if I’d like. The card seems to indicate he’s legit.
The moment my colleague Shelley meets me in the terminal, I blurt out, “I just met a man whom I’m going to have an affair with.”
That turns out to be the least of it.
I’ll also get back to Edgar later. Now it’s time to give you, my dear reader, a relevant synopsis of my emotionally stunted background and love interests, pre Edgar Earl Sharp.
CHAPTER I
Born in Brooklyn, New York March 8, 1947, and raised in Queens by a dentist father and stay-at-home mother, physical affection wasn’t a big ticket in my Goldberg family. The oldest of three daughters, I only remember my dad kissing me once, when we’re walking to the car following the bar mitzvah luncheon of a distant cousin I hardly know. Daddy is giddily inebriated.
Sam loves me most when I get good grades at school, but he isn’t leaving me to my own resources. Even if I’m bone tired, I wait up for hours until he finishes the last patient in his basement home office so he can teach me geometry formulas and trigonometry equations. We sit at the dining table until I finish every last homework question, daddy screaming and I crying if his lessons aren’t penetrating my thick skull. After working a 14-hour day, the last thing he wants to be doing is tutoring me at 11 pm. But he never gives up. Somehow the concepts sink in.
This tortured father-daughter relationship doesn’t stop with school issues. As a young teenager, I go with him on Saturdays to his Brooklyn dental office in Boro Park, deep in the heart of Brooklyn. I develop X-rays, answer phone calls from patients and scrub the floors. Dr. Goldberg doesn’t have a nurse, receptionist or cleaning woman. And, I want to help him because I see how hard he works. He pays me with pizza lunches, which I relish because I’m spending peaceful time with my father. No crying. No screaming. No toiling. Just enjoying Brooklyn-style pizza. Besides good grades, food means love to me.
I am in constant fear that my father will die in his sleep. I stand outside my parents’ bedroom whenever I pass it on my way to the bathroom and watch to see if his chest is moving up and down. I never check whether my mother is breathing.
I start masturbating in the back room of daddy’s office, which I can close off from the waiting room. I sit on a green leather-covered chair and go at it, anxiously listening for sounds indicating that dad’s approaching and I’ll be caught in the act.
The Sam & Geri Show continues well into my adulthood, even years after I marry. I call him to read chapters of a book I’m writing. To tell him about my raises, my promotions, my problems at work. I even call him after Danny Thomas (yes, that Danny Thomas!) comes to my Chicago hotel room to proposition me when he’s a spokesman for Norelco, where I’m publicity manager.
Do I want my father to be my confidante? God only knows.
I never expect or desire affection from my mother, which is just as well, because she reserves all her physical and emotional capital for my father. Maybe I’m jealous of her because daddy loves her so much. They neck in plain sight on the 1950s plastic-upholstered sofa in the den. They go on dates every Saturday night. She hangs out the front door if he isn’t home from his Brooklyn office at precisely 8:40 pm. Along with my father, she helps turn me into a nervous wreck about the men who will subsequently enter my life.
I have intense crushes in junior high and high school - Neil and Fred chief among them - and lots of boy friends, but not a single “boyfriend.” Mark, Bruce and Peter, the three guys who probably would like to fill that void, don’t tickle my fancy, at least not physically. Besides, they’re more interested in issues that involve using their minds, not their mouths or hands. I don’t suppose any of the boys I know in the early 1960s uses his penis for anything outside of peeing and masturbating. And, my circle of girlfriends isn’t thinking about them anyway.
Penises enter the picture - if not my vagina - the summer of 1965, before I enter New York University as a transfer student from Syracuse. An NYU junior - and five years older - Hal drives me home from a date and we’re talking in the car. “Barbra Streisand was in my class at Erasmus High School,” he makes a point of telling me. I guess he figures I’m suitably impressed, because he takes my hand and places it squarely in his lap, where I feel a distinctly hard mass through the fabric of his summer pants. Horrified, I sprint from the car.
When classes begin, I date curly haired David, who even takes me home to meet his parents. Lovely and solicitous, David resembles a sad puppy when I break up with him in the lobby of NYU’s Loeb Student Center.
My pattern of rejecting nice men is emerging. Instead, I become infatuated with a handsome Columbia University student, Dean, whom I meet through a computer dating service. We roll, making out, on the floor of the den where my parents usually kiss and cuddle. But he doesn’t call me after that, which greatly upsets me. Another of my patterns is emerging: Magnifying every brush-off 100-fold!
I review, over and over, every second of my date, trying to figure out where I went wrong. When a boy I like doesn’t like me back, I assume it’s my fault.
Barry enters my life towards the end of my sophomore year at NYU. About to graduate, he’s the editor of the yearbook. I’m a lowly editorial assistant and Barry is preparing to turn the reins over to a new editor.
Movie-star handsome, Barry is tall and well built, with wispy blond hair that often falls into his blue eyes. About 24, he served two years in the army before returning to college. He lives with Laura, another journalism student at NYU. Laura possesses all the glamour I do not.
One late spring evening in the yearbook office, Barry matter of factly says: “Laura was away last week and you were the one person I wanted to spend a night with.” I am incredulous that such an attractive man finds me attractive? I don’t ever -not ever - think about my sexual appeal, so Barry’s revelation comes as a shock. But, that’s all I need to hear. I float home to Queens.
A few weeks later I calculatingly have the yearbook staff over for a meeting at my house. My parents and youngest sister are away. My middle sister is home, but out of sight. Everyone leaves and Barry stays behind. We wind up in the single bed in my room and I am wild.
“Let’s have sex,” Barry says.
“I can’t. I don’t have protection,” I answer.
“That’s ok. We’ll go to the drugstore. You’ll buy foam and I’ll buy an ice cream cone.” Thinking back, I can’t imagine what drugstore would have been open at that hour in 1966.
“What’s foam?” I ask.
I turn down his invitation and sleep nude next to Barry that night. Well, at least he slept. I don’t know what he told Laura about being out for the night.
I bolt out of bed early in the morning, while Barry is still asleep, and drive to the store to buy bagels for breakfast. Am I pretending to be his new Laura?
When my 15-year-old sister learns Barry is upstairs in my bedroom, she shrieks that she’s telling my grandmother, and runs from the house.
Barry graduates from NYU soon after and becomes a reporter on one of New York’s major newspapers. We speak a few times during the next year but I never see him again, at least in the flesh. He goes on to become a reporter for a local TV station, so I get to see him on the small screen.
I continue to obsess over him and review our night in bed in excruciating detail for a long time.
If only I had lost my virginity to him that night, I might have learned about the appeal of orgasms. And expected more on that front going forward.