Napoleon mon amour
Part II: I am old enough to know that a little of something that gives you so much joy is better than none at all

November 16, 2005
iranian.com

I have decided to write a chronicle of this affair that I am having.  The one I wrote about last week with the guy we called Napoleon.   This way I may be better able to exercise some control over an otherwise rather dangerous and out-of-my-hands affair.  I may be able to sort out my feelings and separate the erotic from the romantic and keep the thing at a proper distance.  Also if I treat the affair as material for my writing , I won’t feel used or victimized like I usually do when I fall in love and the other doesn’t.  This will intellectualize the damn thing a bit and make me, a forty-five-year old single mom with a bit of an education and enormous amount of experience, feel less like a bimbo. 

Right now for example I am waiting for his call.  Waiting for the telephone calls, from as long as I remember, is the one thing I hate the most about being a woman.  I know, I know, now-a-days a woman can pick up the phone and call her lover.  But my situation is different.  As I recounted for you before, in my previous essay, this is a purely sexual affair where the guy has a serious girlfriend of three years.  We are also friends but our affair rests entirely on our ability to have great sex together.  If I show my eagerness and availability, any more than I already have, I am afraid that he will, khodaye nakardeh, zaboonam laaal, lose his erection for me.

So you, dear reader, have to bear with me and help me use you as a speed bump on this road that I am taking. Hopefully I can, in return, entertain you with my story. As to how it will end you and I are equally ignorant. 

Last night I saw Napoleon.  His girlfriend has a son and is a single mom like me.  The weeks that her son stays with her, my lover gets to go home at night.  He lives with his parents in the same residence as mine.  His parents were my parent’s friends for more than twenty-five years.  Anyway, we usually met at the aptartment that belongs to his friend who rarely comes here and whose keys he has.  But last night, his parents not being here, I went to his house. 

Tuesday night I had been there to dine with him and his girlfriend.  I had a couple of scotches before I left and ended up making them laugh all night.  I am a conversationalist and even though I had to speak mostly in French, I managed.  The girlfriend and I have a lot in common: we are both of us in our forties, single mothers.  We talked about the children and how they are taking our respective divorces.  Things went so well that by the end of the night I was spoon feeding profiteroles to her. 

Napoleon was great too.  He placed us on the couch facing him, on his chair, so that he was strategically equidistant from both of us. He was attentive to both, lighting our cigarettes, getting us drinks, being a most ‘serviable’, as the French say, host. We had a great night the three of us.  It was easy for me because somehow the girlfriend does not make me feel jealous.  Maybe the fact that I am a bisexual helps.  In fact if she was not so straight this could be a great threesome.  But, alas, even the French are less French than I am!

That night, again, I showed myself how thoroughly capable of deception I am. I was so incredibly good at acting the “friend”-- shame on me.  I think all Iranian women have a genetically programmed ability to lie.  We, for so long oppressed, have learned to lie our way around the bullying laws and ways of men.

Last night when I went to see him I wore my black low cut tee-shirt and tightest bra.  He greeted me at the door and we kissed.  We sat down on the couch he gave me my drink and I started recounting the story of my trip to Italy.  I had gone to see a boyfriend whom I met in Iran, who is twenty-five, and is studying in Florence.  I try to see others just to keep Napoleon off my mind.  Also, it turns him on every time I sleep with someone else.  I have found that imagining or watching their woman get fucked by another man is many men’s greatest fantasy! Anyway Italy was a disaster because the boy got caught shop lifting which made me feel like an old lady with a gigolo.

The boy, Mehdi, was good looking with a huge and thick penis he did not quite know what to do with.  Initially I liked his doe-eyed innocence and his eagerness but soon I learned that it was faked.  That he too, like many young Iranians growing up after the revolution, is in love with material possessions: Gucci shoes, Replay jeans, this is what they live for.  Neither culture, nor education, nor ideals, not even dreams.  Just a great yearning to own things and look good. It is hard to love someone who only loves things.  This boy spent most of the time looking into mirrors.  I told him it was hard to compete with his own image. Anyway, I did not even like him really.  I only saw him for Napoleon’s pleasure.  Well sort of. I also had some fun with him. 

I arrived in Florence tired from the six-hour drive.  I checked into  Hotel Ortho de Medici, on the narrow stoned paved, via SanGallo, near Piazza San Marco.  It was a beautiful 18th century building with high ceilinged rooms and marble baths.  He met me as I was checking in.  He was wearing a purple sweater and shawl and jeans.  I loved his eyes: huge and watery, protected by a set of upturned lashes so thick it looked like he was wearing mascara.  We kissed and I wondered what the prim and proper, button-down-sweater- wearing, receptionist was thinking of our age difference.  In Italy they are used to this kind of thing: a lady with a gigolo. Nothing is worse, than feeling so old that you have to pay for sex, for a woman’s sense of self!  But this boy seemed to come from a well-to-do background and I trusted that he, at least, liked me and loved having sex with me. 

Upstairs in our room he grabbed me and kissed me with an eagerness and erection that only a twenty something could possess.  I pulled him off and begged him to wait till I had a couple of drinks.  We went to the bar next door and got drinks.  After drinking a few we went back to the room and fell to the bed.  He undressed me impatiently, clumsily.  Then he climbed on top of me and kissed me pressing his erection on my kos.  It felt good.  He was so big that every time before he entered me I held my breath. But he always hesitated, dangling before my vagina as if not sure what to do, until I encouraged and led him.  His penis went in a little at a time-taking with it a little more of a gasp with each push. 

Often I wanted him to just penetrate me the way Napoleon does, with a confidence and a certainty that only those truly loved or truly experienced possess.  Once he penetrated me his movements seemed mechanical, up, down, up down -- boring. It was this kind of love making with college boys that made me turn to women many moons ago.  I tried to teach him -- but the truth is that he was not into it. There are some men who love women and some who just really don’t seem to.  Anyway now that I saw the little thief in him it seems to all make sense.  You cannot fake these things. I should have known better. What was he doing with someone his mother’s age anyway?  I was so sure of myself that the answer to that question seemed simple. Now it does not.

After love making we got dressed and went strolling on the streets of Florence.  In one shop I bought a beautiful black winter coat.  He was great to go shopping with, like a girlfriend. He had good taste and knew about the latest trends.  But as we were leaving the beautiful little department store the beepers went off.  He took out a little paper bag he had thrown in my bigger shopping bag and started running towards a cashier.  The security guard stopped him.  His face went so pale I thought he would faint.  He mumbled in his horribly insufficient Italian. 

I had to beg the store manager for an hour before she let him go.  If it weren’t for my having bought something, ten times the value of the broach he stole, they would have turned him into the police.  I was kind to him afterwards.  Telling him that though it was a stupid thing to do it was not the end of the world. But I also told him that I could not take him to my friend’s house in Rome like we had been planning.  I broke up with him gently.  We went to have dinner with his friends. I told him that I would stay one night and leave the next day for Rome.    

What little trust I had for him was gone and so there was no use in staying together. The absurdity of the situation hit me and I felt old and tired.  I needed to be around people that were more like me in age and background.  It ended badly, with him accusing me later that night of flirting with his friend. Iranians have an uncanny way of turning situations around so that they have the upper hand.  Here was this boy whom I had just saved from getting arrested acting all macho and jealous because I flirted with his friend! Give me a break!

We fought. He called me horrible things and left.  Napoleon called me twenty minutes after the boy had left. He was just checking to see if I was having fun! So I told him what had happened and he was kind and gentle and supportive. He tried to make me laugh.  He did not offer to come and save me from having a bad trip. But he was kind just short of commitment as usual. 

I got into my car on a rainy morning in Florence wanting nothing more than to drive back into the arms of my Napoleon and have him make me feel whole again.  But alas, I could not.  Napoleon is not mine.  I only get to see him when she is not there.  Not when I need it but when it is convenient for him.  In order for this affair to last I have to be ‘convenient’ otherwise he will tire of the pressure. If a mistress starts pressuring her lover then she becomes like the wife thus killing her very raison d’etre.   I know, Dr. Phil, or any shrink for that matter, would be dead against it. I am supposed to be ‘the manager of my own life.’

But I am old enough to know that a little of something that gives you so much joy is better than none at all.  I want this affair to last because it gives me an enormous amount of pleasure.  All these psychologists and life-style gurus leave no room for the erotic.  For the fact that to be at someone’s beck and call is enormously, erotically, pleasing for a woman.  It may not pan out with my feminism but who cares.  It feels good.  At least up to now the pleasure has outweighed the pain.  When it stops being that then I will probably make it end. This usually means that I become so unbearably insecure and needy that the other person splits. Ends it.    

That night was the first night I saw him alone since Italy.  I went to his house and was so happy to see him alone that he would have been a piece of wood if he did not feel it.  I told him that I have decided not to sleep with other men unless he is there with me.  He smiled and kissed me hard.  I returned his kiss with many small ones around his neck and ears. He put his head into my breast and started kissing and then sucking them. One by one he took them out of their cups, with care, and gave them pleasure making sure that he was equitable in their treatment.  I let out an “ah” and fell back on the couch.  He pulled himself on me and I could feel his erection under his pants.  He continued sucking my boobs while moving one desperately searching hand into my pants.  Then as if he could not bear the foreplay anymore he got up and took my hand, “beeyaa bereem oon otaagh meekham bokonamet azizam.”

I opened his jean buttons and pulled out his penis ignoring his comment.  I put it in my mouth with desperate impatience and blatant hunger.  I sucked him for a while until he pulled me up from the couch and took me in his room.  We took off our clothes and he laid me down on the bed and kissed me. He penetrated me with one push making me let out a loud cry he looked me in the eye and started moving inside me, “injoori kardet Mehdi?”

I nodded a no and said, “Heechkee mesleh to nemeekoneh mano.” I felt him get harder.