Kate, looks back on some of her more memorable sexual adventures as she tries to decide whether she is a slut.
*****
It had been a long day of meetings in Chicago followed by a four hour flight back to San Francisco, so it was late, perhaps 11:00 p.m., when I walked in the door of my home in San Francisco. I had refrained from drinking on the return flight, as I was reading a new piece of fiction that one of the agents I dealt with regularly wanted me to publish. My publishing house was still small enough so that I could read everything we decided to publish. Control of that final decision to accept a property for publication was a prerogative I jealously guarded. I delegated most of the editing these days, but it was my house, and I wanted the final say about what we put our name on.
I set my bag and briefcase down in the kitchen, and I had just barely removed the cork from a nice little bottle of Sonoma Zinfandel when my cell phone rang.
"Hello?"
"Hi lover." It was Henry.
"Oh hi. Didn't expect to hear from you tonight."
"Well, a crisis came up in Palm Beach, and nothing would satisfy the nabobs except for me to get on a plane and go over there to deal with it personally. Honestly, sometimes I think they don't know what telephones are for."
"So you're in Palm Beach tonight?"
"Right-o, and thrilled to be here. Where are you by the way? Cell phones are marvelous toys, but they don't tell you where someone you're talking to is."
"I'm at home. Just got in from Chicago. I was just opening a nice little bottle of Sonoma Zin. I worked on the plane, so I thought I'd earned a drink."
"Exactly," he said. "I worked also, so I'm enjoying one of those tasty little rum concoctions they like to serve up here in Florida. They're one of the few things I like about the place."
"Yes, that and the scantily clad women and the generally raunchy atmosphere of that West Palm Beach neighborhood you like to stay in," I said sarcastically. "I'm surprised you could find time to call."
"Kate, Kate, Kate. You have so little faith in me. I admit there are some distractions here, but I was really hoping to hear another installment of your tales of your former lovers, like the one about the Pool Boy you told me last week."
I ignored his comments about my lack of faith. What I really had faith in was his willingness to fuck anything he came across that he found attractive. However, I was no better, and he knew it. That was a part of our marriage accepted—in fact endorsed—by each of us from the beginning.
"Oh, you liked that story, did you?" I responded.
"Mmm. Very much. You really were being a nasty little slut with him."
"What! He was the grown man who was screwing an 18-year-old girl every week for most of the summer."
"Oh, bullshit, my dear. You seduced him, and you were proud of it."
I laughed in response. "Okay. You're right about that. I seduced him. He really was a remarkably good lover, although I was getting a little tired of the school girl costume by the end of the summer."
"So pour yourself a glass of that Zinfandel and tell me about another of your lovers. Who was next after the Pool Boy?"
I poured a generous glass of wine as I thought about the question. "Next, after the Pool Boy probably wouldn't be that interesting. There were a number of guys my own age who I slept with during my first couple of years of college, but they were far from memorable—better than doing without, mind you, but there was nothing with any of them that you would find particularly arousing or entertaining. In fact, while I remember them as a group, I really can't remember which one was "next' after the Pool Boy. Now that I think about it, "next," might have been two or three of them at once. I did some of that when I was younger."
