Nadine the Travel Agent

A reasonably true tale of sex and astral travel

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At Sundman figures it out! we aspire to the intricate art of consecution, on the model of the ancient art of weaving made manifest in songs the the Rolling Stones.

Themes emerge, interleave, dance around and interweave like maypole maidens; they fade away and sometimes reappear. Incidents ramify, and their import changes upon being revisited. So reading earlier posts enhances your experience of those that come later, know what I mean, nudge nudge? He said knowingly.

But if this is your first time with us, then, as William Shatner monotonically intoned in his brilliant cover of Common People (performed with the help of Joe Jackson and his band), you have to start somewhere, so you might as well start here.

One has to wonder: are those planes, cruise ships, trains and so forth from the same spacetime dimension in which we now reside, or from somewhere else?

Background and précis

After I got knifed in Dorchester in the autumn of 2000 I decided to look for someplace else to stay. I found a room in a house on School Street with a view of the parking lot at Somerville (MA) High. My housemates were grad students at MIT and Harvard.

On weekdays over the next four years I commuted by bicycle to various jobs — to Curl, a fucked company headquartered in Kendall Square, to gigs in Boston’s South End, and to various campuses of Tuft University when I was employed as a writer of grant proposals — and, on weekends, I commuted by car and ferry home to my wife & family on Martha’s Vineyard.

During that lonely time I found an online home at the public diary site Kuro5hin (“K5”), and, after trolls wrecked that site, at the wonderful refuge called Hulver’s Site, or HuSi.

Every evening, after making my one-pot meal of macaroni, cheese and vegetables, I retreated with my one-bowl dinner to my lonely, sparsely-furnished Somerville rooming-house room, opened a growler of porter, put on my headphones and pressed the ‘start’ button on the CD player pre-loaded with Philip Glass’s opera Akhnaten. Then I turned on my computer and signed on to HuSi.

One of our HuSi traditions was a rolling storytelling contest, with the winner of each episode deciding the topic of the next one. So it was that the enigmatic HuSian (and marvelous writer) known as Kellnerin (German for ‘waitress’) having (again) won the current Writing Fun Challenge, decreed that ‘Sex’ would be the topic for our next WFC.

For my entry I wrote about an experience I had in 1978 when I was a graduate student in agricultural economics at Purdue University, in Indiana. My ‘Sex’ story ended up being too long for the HuSi WFC, so I just posted it as a regular diary. Today I repost it for you, below.

My tale of astral sex with Nadine the Travel Agent is now more than twenty years old but I think it holds up well. It’s about sex, of course, but it’s also about how the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are actually determine who we can become, about wondrous coincidences and theories of mystical New Age woo-woo that we turn to to explain them — themes by now familiar to regular readers of Sundman figures it out! I hope you enjoy it.

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CONTENT WARNING: EXPLICIT SEX

If you do not wish to read explicitly sexual material, please skip this essay (below).

I have made some minor edits, but the story that follows is pretty much exactly how I published it ~2002 or ‘03 on HuSi. So here goes.

A Shower Fuck in the Realm of the Hidden Imam

My sexual relationship with Nadine the Travel Agent ended about six o'clock on a fine early December morning in 1978.

I had been asleep for about an hour and a half, having spent the prior four or five hours having sex with her, talking with her, and listening to her play the piano — a little spinet at the foot of the bed in her small house in a nondescript neighborhood in Lafayette, Indiana.

"Oh my God wake up!," she said, shaking me. "My boyfriend just pulled into the driveway. He's supposed to be in Indianapolis! No, don't get dressed here. Take your shoes. Get dressed outside. BACK DOOR! Hurry. Wait. Kiss me. Hurry."

Although I had known Nadine for about a year, that was her first mention of a boyfriend. She turned on a light, got up and threw on a robe.

I did as she said. After hearing the front door close, I waited outside by the back kitchen door an amount of time that I deemed sufficient for the boyfriend to be welcomed to her house, to her bed, and then I quietly walked to the street, and thence three miles home. The sun had not yet come up.

My personal relationship with Nadine ended a few weeks later, after a Christmas-themed holiday tea party at her house hosted by Nadine and this same boyfriend, who may have been introduced to me as her fiancé.

Nadine was wearing a floor-length red and white skirt and a white blouse. She had on makeup and perfume. Her boyfriend was wearing a white shirt and a red tie. I only chatted with him briefly, but I got the impression that he was clean-cut and boring; an insurance salesman. There was a Christmas tree and lots of decoration throughout the house, most of it not to my taste. I don't recall specific artifacts, just a kitschy, saccharine feel.

There were people of all ages there, and I think some of them may have been introduced to me as having been from her church. I don't recall what I was wearing, but I was a graduate student at the time and I didn't own any fancy clothes. Certainly I would not have been wearing a tie. At one point during the party Nadine winked at me, and later, when she and I happened to be alone in her kitchen, she briefly copped a feel of my ass. "This is bullshit," I thought, and left, by that same back door. I never saw her again.

My sexual relationship with Nadine had started the prior November. Over the six-week period from our first kiss to last separation we spent a total of two nights together, during which we fucked ten times, where "fuck" is defined as activity ending with me ejaculating into her vagina. During this interval Nadine and I did other things together that did not involve sex. The Universe was in flux then and many magical things happened, including magical things thad did not involve sex, but including also, notably, Nadine's and my sixth fuck, which happened in another space-time dimension.

Although I don't remember my first encounter with Nadine, I'm pretty sure that I met her in Autumn, 1977, in the course of arranging my travel from Purdue University, in West Lafayette, where I was a graduate student in Agricultural Economics, to Senegal¹, West Africa, where I was to conduct some field research. I was twenty-five years old and she was about twenty-eight. She was blond and kind of pretty and not very tall. She had four earrings in each ear. Her travel-agency office was cramped and busy, and there were of course posters on the wall of exotic destinations. Another pretty woman of about the same age worked at the travel agency. I don't recall this other woman's name, so let's say it was Suzy.

After I got back from my eight months of research among the peasant farmer cooperatives at the Nianga experiment station, I guess Nadine and I must have met up again somehow. Probably we went out for a few beers at The Stabilizer, a grad student hangout, because that's where everybody went.

Nadine owned her own home — a small place in Lafayette, across the river from West Lafayette — about three miles from the campus. Her home-ownership marked her as a real grownup. Unlike Nadine, all of my other friends were grad students who roomed together in cramped quarters. I myself had a room in a house that I shared with Ed and Chris and MaryBeth and Murray. My grad student friends and I studied hard. Earnestly we discussed economic theory and agricultural development in poor countries. Earnestly also we discussed everything under the sun. We went to the Stabilizer and drank a lot of beer and then went home smoked pot, discussing farm export subsidies and crop rotations and genetically modified plants the design of disc harrows.

Nadine was not of the grad student mindset. Experience, not ideas, were her thing. She travelled a lot, and had just come back from her third trip to Russia. Traveling to Russia in 1978, long before the Berlin Wall came down, was a pretty exotic thing to do, especially for a young woman from small-town Indiana.

Eventually, about a month after returning to Purdue from eight months in northern Senegal on an irrigated farm virtually in the Sahara — the far side of the moon it might just as well have been — I ended up one night at Nadine's house, to which we had ridden in her car. We talked until two in the morning or so, and then I walked home. And then a few days later, presumably after going out for drinks, we ended up at her house again, and again we talked until late, and then again I walked home.

Now, I did more or less have a girlfriend at the time. Her name was Eleanora, and she was in Brooklyn. While I was in Africa, Eleanora was in Brooklyn. While I was in Indiana, she was in Brooklyn. And so on. So we were not physically connected very often, but still she was my main girlfriend, and we saw each other whenever we could. When I spoke to her on the phone and told her how much I missed her, she would say things like, "Well, are you getting laid, at least?" And I would say, "Well, sometimes, you know. Not so much," or whatever, and Eleanora would say, "Well go get laid for Christ's sake, you're making yourself crazy."

On the third night that I ended up at Nadine's house, we were talking about music. She was telling me about Martin Mull, whom I did not know, and I was telling her about Tom Waits, whom she had never heard of. So I kind of sang/recited a Tom Waits piece, maybe the one about "The Piano has been Drinking" or similar. Martin Mull is kind of a novelty/comedian style songwriter. So, Nadine put on one of his albums, and as we were listening to it, she kind of dozed off.

Then Mull sang a song about reincarnation called "We made love in a former life, why can't we make love now?" As I was looking at her, asleep in a reclining chair, like a Lazy Boy or something, her eyes opened. I said to her, "We made love in a former life. Shall we make love now?" She literally shook her head, as if she couldn't trust her ears. "What?" She said. I said, "Shall we make love?" and she said, "Why yes, of course." You see, I think she had come to the conclusion that I was gay.

I went over and lifted her out of her chair and carried her into her bedroom. The heat was on, and her room was toasty warm. I remember being awestruck when she removed her clothes, and being amazed at Nadine's nonchalance in the presence of her perfect breasts. I was literally surprised that she was not surprised at how perfectly shaped she was. At this point in my life I was not especially experienced with women, but neither was I inexperienced with women. Nadine was probably about the tenth woman I had been with.

So anyway we fucked, and that was great fun, in the warm room, almost too warm, like a womb or something. And then the most extraordinary thing happened. Nadine got up and walked over to the little spinet piano at the wall at the foot of her bed, and still naked as naked can be, she sat on her bench and played for me a Chopin polonaise. It was a divine moment. After which we made love, blessedly (with musical intermissions), until the sun came up. And then she made a pot of coffee, and I drank a few cups and walked home.

And then I went to my classes. And after my classes I went over to the Memorial Union to get another cup of coffee, for I was pretty groggy. And as I was getting my coffee, there was a kid there filling one of those racks where they put out free newspapers, those nationally syndicated rags that they clutter up campuses with. And so I picked up one of these free papers. And who was on the cover?

Tom Waits and Martin Mull, with their arms around each others' shoulders, that's who: smiling at the camera, smiling at me. And it was immediately clear that the universe was signaling its approval of that night of exquisite fucking.

(Sometime in the next few weeks I drove from West Lafayette Indiana down to Bloomington to see a concert by Little Feat at Indiana University. Nadine was with me. We stopped at the corn and soybean farm owned by her sister and brother in law, conservative Christians who were not at home at the time. My friend Len was going to meet us at one of the field house gates to give us our tickets. Alas, signals got crossed, cell phones had not been invented yet, and Len and I did not find each other until after the show — which he saw, and which Nadine and I did not. Not long after that, Lowell George — the founder, heart and soul of Little Feat — died. "Waiting for Columbus," Little Feat's concert album, was then, and remains now, my favorite album of all time. I would have given anything to see that band perform. For years —decades — I lamented that screwup with the tickets, and "the missed Little Feat concert" became part of my personal internal mythology.

Recently I read my diary from 1978. Guess what? That concert in Bloomington? It was Frank Zappa, not Little Feat. I'm a big Zappa fan too, but by 1978 I had already seen Zappa play four times, with different bands, in different venues. Missing him would have been a disappointment, but not a life-altering disappointment like missing Little Feat. How odd that my memory had done that switch and amplified the negative emotion! And now how can anybody trust the memories of a man like me, memories of astral sex with a woman like Nadine?)

On the 18th of that November, the night after my 26th birthday, I met Betty, the woman who was to become the love of my life. And sometime around then Ed and MaryBeth and Murray and Chris and I threw a party, a kegger, and Nadine came along with Suzy from her office, who was dressed in skin-tight clothes. (Perhaps that yet-to-be love interest Betty was there too? I don't remember.)

All that night Suzy kept coming on to me, dancing provocatively, touching me as if we were intimates, even though I hardly knew her. I wondered what information Nadine might have shared with her. It was almost as if I were being pimped. And I felt very sad for Suzy, for she was a single mother with a five year old son, and she was desperately seeking a father for him. I felt almost cruel for not having sex with her. But her son, that innocent, was to me as kryptonite to Superman. Or not the child himself, but the fact of his existence that so pervaded his mother.

Now let's go back to that first night I slept with Nadine. In our inaugural sexual act, I licked her pussy until she orgasmed, locking her feet behind my back and pinching her own nipples. She then fellated me for a little bit until I said, "now I must fuck you!" and did, positioning myself on top of her, and she fucked me back, and when I came it was monumental, and she shuddered, and I said, "did you come?" and she said, "couldn't you tell?" And then she got up and played that Chopin polonaise.

The second time we fucked she was sitting on my lap, her breasts pressed against my chest until suddenly she leaned back resting on her hands, and I leaned back resting on my hands and although our legs were still touching it was as if our sole connection was cock to cunt, as when members of the company of an opera move to the sides of the stage so the leading man and leading lady can sing their duet, and again we both came at the same time, and I could feel a kind of weird magic in the room when we separated, and then she played something else on the piano, I don't know what. Maybe a Scott Joplin ragtime tune. And so on, two more times until we finally fell asleep, with her facing away from me, my arms around her, and my penis softening inside her vagina.

The seventh time we fucked, which was the first fuck of our second and final night together, also began with cunnilingus, with me on my back, my head on her pillow, looking up at the undersides of those aforementioned breasts; looking at her chin and neck as she tilted her head back. And then she sat on my lap and said, "Don't move. I have a surprise for you." I tried to lie perfectly still, despite an overwhelming desire to push up into her with all my might. She said, "I want to see if I can jerk you off without using my hands." And then she massaged me, using only her internal muscles. This was a first for me, and I was indeed surprised at the result. And thus began another evening, as intense as the first, that ended with the boyfriend's car pulling into the driveway, its headlights waking my lover, thank God.

So there I have told you the chronology and context of my short-lived affair with a pretty woman with whom I had no especial connection aside from sex. I have told of one magical thing that happened outside of her bedroom and asserted that there were others, which there were: great cosmic coincidences and secret harmonies, which I heard, and even in one instance played on my guitar, just like Pete (q.v). Other things were beginning to go on in my private and sex life, varied, exhilarating things; late 1978 being but a prelude to early 1979. Unknowingly, I was hurtling towards marriage with a beautiful woman with whom I have now been in a monogamous union (with one asterisk), for twenty-six years². So this Nadine affair was a harbinger. But believe me, it was more than that.

Now, the fifth time that Nadine and I fucked was on this wise: I awoke with my arms still wrapped around her. She was asleep, breathing deeply. My dick grew hard between her legs. I couldn't help myself. I began to push my hips slowly back and forth, slowly, slowly, not wanting to wake her, not really thinking of entering her, but just loving that sensation, when she surprised me, surprising me for about the hundredth time that night. She reached down with one swift motion and steered the head of my cock into her and, just like that, we were fucking again, whereas I had been completely convinced, seconds before, that she was fast asleep.

In that kind of situation, you know, a woman might reasonably get annoyed, even angry. But Nadine wasn't angry; she kept her right hand below as a kind of a guide while half-turning her torso, wrapping her left arm around my neck, and began to reciprocate in earnest, moving her ass. She turned for a kiss, and her tongue went deep into my mouth. I wish there were a way of writing about this kind of thing that wasn't so trite and hackneyed! There is no way to say how good this felt! Then after just a few minutes, what was for us a very short time, she moved her hands a little lower, onto my balls, and said, "come now." To which command my cock came, my balls came, my scalp and skin came, my kidneys and liver came, my eyes and eardrums came, my brain went insane with coming, my spine came, my fingernails came, the fillings in my teeth were shaken in orgasm. Nadine came too.

Just a short while later, after she had made for us a pot of coffee, we were in the shower, bathing each other, and I got another erection. I'm much taller than she is. I pressed against her, my erection in the middle of her tummy. "Oh you!" she swatted at it, laughing, as if it were a puppy. "Go away!" Quickly she opened the shower door, stepped out, dried herself, got dressed, blow-dried her hair. Soon I was on my way back to my own place.

Now I hope it is clear why I felt that with that last encounter in her kitchen my thing with Nadine had turned to bullshit. For either she was not being straight with me, or (and I think more likely), she was not being straight with her fiancé. Something was phony; that whole red-and-white themed Christmas party reeked of phoniness. Yet our sex had been among the most earnest, un-phony experiences of my life. And so it remains. I am grateful to whatever cosmic whatever gave me to see that the Nadine-and-Johnny deal was over. Thank you, Whoever You Are.

On the television show "The Adventures of Pete and Pete," about which Wikipedia has an excellent entry, there is an episode ("A Hard Day's Pete"), in which thirteen-year-old Pete looses his song. It is a song that he has been carrying around in his head all day after serendipitously hearing it performed by a mystery band in a garage on his way to school.

And then suddenly his song is gone. He can no longer hear it. It drives him nuts, trying to find that lost melody, that lost harmony, that song that entirely embodies, in some astral eigenvalue, everything that he, Pete, is.

Similarly, according to my shallow understanding of deep things, Jews await the return of the prophet Elijah, (not to mention the Messiah), and Shia Muslims await the return of the Hidden Imam, who went missing some long whiles ago. Now that you mention it, some Christians similarly await the return of Jesus to make complete their Story. Every story demands completion³, just as every lost song demands to be found, although in most cases these demands go unmet by a universe that is not always kind, or even attentive.

I have a hunch that there is an astral plane where Pete's song was hanging out. That's where Martin Mull's and Tom Waits' cosmic eigenselves were voyeuristically digging on me and Nadine, deciding to send us that newspaper as a sort of magpie compensation. Perhaps the hidden Imam is there too, playing cribbage with Jesus and Elijah.

And in that astral place, Nadine and I have our sixth fuck. We had it in a former life, will have it in the future, are having it now, this timeless, eternal encounter. I press against her, my erection rubbing her belly. Playfully she swats at my so-called manhood, "Oh, you! Come here," she says. "But this is the last time, I mean it!" And then, with the water streaming over us, we make love standing up against the shower wall. And when we come, together, to borrow a wonderful phrase from the opera that streams through my headphones as I write these words, "the constellations stagger".

At the end of that "Pete and Pete" episode, the producers eschewed the obvious plot, which would have been to let Pete thirteen year old Pete learn the hard lesson of adolescence that some things are evanescent: once lost they can never be retrieved; that Pete’s song is gone for good.

Instead they let Pete find his song, and when he finds it, it’s every bit as joyous as if he had found a lost puppy.

To celebrate, Pete forms a band and he plays "his" song, accompanied by his garage band, with the kind of joy that is virtually never seen in TV shows — nor hardly outside of TV, in real life, for that matter. And with a little sleuthing, you too can find on the internets that joyful lost-now-found song and have a listen. It's a joyous song that joyously speaks, obliquely, about me and Nadine.

[Note: At this point my HuSi version of this story contained links to the band Polaris’ Myspace page, which now defunct. I’ve updated it to the Wikipedia page, which didn’t exist at the time I wrote this story. Similarly I’ve changed a link to the song ‘Summerbaby’ from Myspace to Youtube.]

Oh heck, I'll spare you some trouble. Here is the link to the page of the actual mystery garage band Polaris that Pete hears on his way to school. And here are the lyrics to ‘Pete’s song’ Summerbaby, and let them stand as the epitaph for this N the TA story:

Summerbaby, by Polaris

Summerbaby, come on baby, show me the town
I didn't know that you'd be such a short visit
Once a year I notice that you're not around
Mama says you went when you were exquisite

If you seen all I done
When I'm alone I do things nobody knows

We were all wondering where you came from
Last night we were hypothesizing that you were an angel
Sometimes it feels like you're looking down
From a place up where angels are found

If you seen all I done
When I'm alone I do things that nobody knows
Every drop of sex, every little mess I've made

I was around, I was around

I was around
(nobody knows, nobody knows)
I was around
(nobody knows, nobody knows)
I was around
(nobody knows, nobody knows)
I was around
(nobody knows, nobody — )

Do you see a lot of angels up there like you?
Wolfgang and Vincent van Gogh
Have you seen Josephine?
Someone from town like Marshall Brown?
Or someone you know?

If you seen all I done
When I'm alone I do things nobody knows
Every drop of sex and every little mess I've made
I was around, I was around, I was around

I was around
(nobody knows, nobody knows)
I was around
(nobody knows, nobody knows, nobody knows)

1. I was returning to Senegal a year an a half after completing my life-altering two year turn there as a Peace Corps Volunteer, which I have written about a few times on Sundman figures it out!, most deeply in The Dark Side of the Hut, Fifty Years Later.

2. 43 years in 2023.

3. The idea that every story demands completion is an ever-present hobby-horse here in Sundman figures it out! The insistence of each story for its own conclusion is the main concern of Frank Kermode’s book The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, which has been mentioned in several of these essays, starting here. And we ain’t nearly done with it yet.