Talking About Sex in Hudson

Drove up to Hudson where I rendezvoused with ____. We spent a few companionable hours wandering in and out of antique stores and talking about his sex life.

Overcast skies. So humid, the air had the quality of a piece of old milky glass.

The New York Times Travel section and various leisure arts magazine began touting Hudson as THE unknown gem in the Hudson Valley diadem maybe 15 years ago. Hudson certainly has an interesting past. It was one of Dutch Schultz’s hangouts in the 1920s, and straight up through the 1940s was Vice Central for upstate New York with 15 brothels, a Nathan Detroit-style big-stakes floating crap game, numerous other illegal betting parlors, and close proximity to the State Capital.

In 1950, New York’s governor, Thomas Dewey, ordered state troopers to raid Hudson’s red light district. (One imagines he was still smarting over his defeat to Truman in the 1948 Presidential election.) Everything was shut down. The buildings that housed the old brothels still stand on Columbia Street – they are surprisingly unremarkable-looking.

IBM never colonized this far north, so Hudson was spared the hideous urban renewal movements that decimated cities like Poughkeepsie, Newburgh, Beacon, and Kingston to the south. Warren Street, the main drag, sports a truly amazing range of Colonial and Victorian architecture, more-or-less intact. Like this building, which gives me the opportunity to show off one of my favorite vocabulary words: Nice fenestration, no?



There are scads of antique stores lining Warren Street, high-end antique stores where you could easily drop a grand for a vase and five grand on a 1950s-style coffee table.

____ is the perfect person to explore these kinds of places because he knows quite a lot about high-end antique furniture and other collectibles since he is quite house-proud (understandably since he has an extremely beautiful house.)

He’s taken up swinging as a new hobby. (No, not the kind you do in the playground.) We talked a bit about that.

“What’s the attraction?” I asked.

He snorted. “Are you seriously asking me that?”

“Yeah. I am. I mean, sure – sex is fun. And I guess there’s a pay-off in terms of the physical sensation of orgasm, which we’re all biologically hardwired to think is the most enjoyable sensation in the universe. But scratch that surface there for a second, and think about it.”

“I guess it has to do with mortality,” he said.

“Mortality?”

“Yeah. Like I’m thumbing my nose at Death.”

“And yet the French call orgasm la petite morte, don’t they?”

“Yeah, but they’re French. And anyway, you did quite a bit of swinging, didn’t you?”

“Well, not exactly,” I said. “I went to orgies. Throughout my mid-20s.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Hmmmm. Good question! Has to do with the actual event planning, I suppose.”

“So what did you think?”

I shrugged. “I really can’t remember. I guess I must have enjoyed them since I went to quite a few of them. They were rather grimly heterosexual – that part I do remember.”

I told him a few stories that made him laugh.

And then we started talking about love.

“Well, that’s why you and I broke up,” he said. “Because I wasn’t about to fall in love with you.”

This took me aback.

Because, first of all, I wasn’t aware that we had “broken up.” Since by no definition of the term could we ever have been said to have been “going together.”

I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore. We stopped communicating. Then, maybe eight months later, we resumed a friendship.

Second, though, because I don’t think I had the slightest interest in having ____ fall in love with me since I wasn’t going to fall in love with him.

All during the time I was seeing ____, I was also seeing J____, and I told J____ I didn’t want to see him anymore around the same time I told ____.

I got along better with ____; we shared some interests, and there were enough moments when he would say things I’d been thinking that I suspected we might share a common psychic bandwidth. But the sex was much, much better with J____.

Now, the mental telepathy fantasy is a big deal for me in intimacy. I know you can’t really expect your sex partner, or even that person in the bathroom who’s futzing around the kitchen making you coffee, to read your mind, but this is what I continue to want, nonetheless.

So the people who can formulate the actions and words hiding in my various unspoken thought balloons are the people I crush on.

Though J____ could not discuss antiques or great literature with me, he had a really, really good idea of what I wanted, what I needed, in the sack in order to get off. I suspect this might have been mutual. As a life long runner, he was also in terrific physical shape for a guy in his 60s and never needed Viagra, Cialis or one of those other pills that if you pop it and still have a boner four hours later, you need to hurry up and go to the Emergency Room.

Sex with ____ was never good. A great deal of that was due to the fact that he doesn’t take care of his body – sex is clearly the only physical exercise he does. Given his queasiness on the general subject of Mortality, one might think he’d exercise more.

Anyway, it was totally impossible for me to be as – Well. This is an unexpected word, maybe, but for me it applies – reverential toward his body as I need to be to be at all interested in pleasuring it.

Our conversation left me feeling vexed.

I was in a bad mood all yesterday evening, and woke up in the middle of the night.

Fine today, though.

I’m superficial, I guess. Every morning wipes the slate clean. It’s like that scene in Tom’s Midnight Garden – one day Tom watches the beautiful yew tree topple when it’s hit by lightening, but the next time he visits the garden, the yew is standing as tall as it ever was. That’s because he’s viewing events out of their chronological order. Conversations, events, are not sequential for me. They’re strung on a string that isn’t temporal.