Confessions of a Librarian: A Memoir of Loves

By Barbara Foster

In the spirit of such classic female erotic adventurers as Anais Nin, Erica Jong and Toni Bentley, Barbara Foster shares the story of four women who meet to tell the lurid details of their worldly romantic encounters in Confessions of a Librarian: A Memoir of Loves. From Istanbul, Buenos Aries, Israel and back to New York, featuring young women to women of a certain age, with threesomes and everything in between, these inter-connected tales of love and lust are sure to keep you rapidly turning the pages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Riverdale Avenue Books
• Release date: Feb 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781626011502

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Confessions of a Librarian ©2015 Barbara Foster

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Digital ISBN 978-1-62601-150-2

Print ISBN 978-1-62601-151-9

First Edition January 2015

Far away places with strange sounding names

Are calling, calling me

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD by Michael Foster

Part I At Home Abroad

One: Turkish Delight

Two: 9/10/2001, Tribeca, The Confessions Club

Three: 9/11, Greenwich Village

Four: Petrillio, or Love In the Air.

Five: Oh, India Absurd and Marvelous

Six: Open Marriage

Seven: Benares

Part II The Dance

Eight: The Gang’s All Here

Nine: Blame It On the Tango

Ten: July 2004, The Figaro Cafe, Bleecker Street

Eleven: Jerusalem between the Wars--part one

Twelve: Between the Wars--part two:

Part III Give Love a Chance

Thirteen: January 2005, in Marilyn’s Living Room

Fourteen: In Bed with the Mob

Fifteen: 2007, Older Women and Younger Men

Sixteen: Rats in my Belfry

Seventeen: 2010, The Gang’s Not Here

Eighteen: The Starbucks Stalker

AFTERWORD 2014 by the author

FOREWORD: The Object Is Romance

Michael Foster

What is love if it is not a kind of curiosity? wrote Jacques Casanova the world’s greatest lover. It still amazes us how close love brings you to the core of another being. They kid about learning a language in bed, but you can absorb lessons in geography, culture, and temperament. Granted, love must be lived rather than studied, but we read travel guides before embarking on a trip to foreign dangerous lands. So consider Barbara Foster’s Confessions of a Librarian as an intimate guide to the not-so-lonely planet, a worm’s-eye view of Eros ranging from Istanbul to Bombay to Buenos Aires to a sleazy hotel off the Jersey Turnpike, not to mention New York’s Greenwich Village. Love is where you find it.

Barbara is a traveler, an adventurer, but the sort who gets her purse picked. She is a contradiction: a librarian who has difficulty reading flight schedules. To a tout in an Arab bazaar she may look like easy pickings. He would be mistaken. She has spent a professional lifetime in academia, co-authored books on the abstruse subject of Tibetan Buddhism, yet she relates perfectly to the eccentric women in her confessing club. The meetings of the members—a motherly therapist, a stripper, a gold-digger turned Marxist, and more—are no holds barred. Barbara’s real maestro is experience, the school of hard knocks and hot rocks. Men come and go, leaving joyful memories and sometimes regrets. Hers is a life lived, thought over, then chewed on by the sisters. It is relived blow-by-blow in Confessions of a Librarian, which you can read as an armchair traveler who observes amorous feats of daring and an occasional shipwreck.

To cultivate the pleasures of my senses was throughout my life my main preoccupation, Casanova insists. I never had any more important objective. He protests too much. What was he looking for in all those love affairs in all those countries? He was on a quest, like Barbara. He and she are two of those people who are nourished by romance. Casanova shied from the word not the feeling because it was not in vogue in his era. Although the idea of romance remains in our minds and hearts today, few of us find it. In a world of moneymaking, place seeking, and mixed- up characters, romance is a rare flower to be sought for with no assurance of success. Maybe you are one of the lucky ones, and if so, you will enjoy all the more comparing your adventures with Barbara’s. Otherwise, read on and keep hoping. Confessions of a Librarian may help you to dare.

Should you detect a note of nostalgia, it may be because today’s horizons have shrunk. Shortly after Barbara and Michael got married at an absurdly young age, they hitchhiked across Europe from Dublin to Greece. During the Hippy Era, Barbara spent time in the communes of the Southwest while Michael lived in a crash pad in the Haight. Letha met the pair in Paris while escaping from a destructive marriage. That was a time when flying was fun, living easy with a few dollars, and getting in bed with a handsome stranger needn’t cost your health. Safe sex is not exactly thrilling.

Later, we three did the supposedly impossible—at Barbara’s instigation we jointly wrote Three In Love the history of the ménage a trois, and we are jointly living it. This, however, is the story of the most sexually audacious one of us. A woman of distinction requests your attention for a literary joyride.

PART ONE

Proceed from the dream outward. Carl Jung

ONE: TURKISH DELIGHT

Hide your life. Epictetus

ISTANBUL WELCOMES YOU! proclaimed a huge sign in the lobby of the Seven Hills Hotel. What seemed lifetimes after my first foreign adventure, I was returning to a capital supposedly rivaling Prague and Berlin in trendiness. These days in Istanbul overflow crowds of men in designer jeans and women in short, tight skirts wait behind velvet ropes for admittance to nightclubs and rooftop pleasure domes. On this second journey, I am searching for an earlier self. To make sense of who I have become, I want to revisit the site of a tryst long ago that, rather than satisfying my romantic expectations, initiated my erotic education.

I am no longer the same adventurous tourist, needing to escape her day job as Women’s Studies librarian in an urban university, and inspired to explore a country via the beds of its handsome men. I may still be a female Casanova, both bookish and bawdy, but I am more cautious about whose bed I hop into.

On my first trip, a German friend fell victim to an informer who planted a small amount of dope on his person, then tipped the police. He was shut up in prison without trial until the officials were handed a bribe. Violence in Istanbul could erupt with the velocity of a whiplash. One afternoon, walking past the Pudding Shop, a cafe-hangout for international hash-heads, I watched horror-struck as two Turkish men slapped around a young British woman for wearing a miniskirt on the street. As the blood trickled down her face, and she cried for help, the passers-by pretended not to notice.

Foolish or brave, I soldiered on to discover the decayed splendor of Istanbul’s Ottoman heritage: historic neighborhoods with shops selling antiquities for a song and tucked-away belly-dancing clubs. I enjoyed delicious meals at a family-run restaurant for less than one American dollar. The friendly owner insisted that my Istanbul experience would be incomplete unless I sampled the charms of a Hamam (Turkish bath).

The owner’s wife escorted me a couple of blocks to a dilapidated building. Inside the circular, temple-like structure, women were stretched out on marble slabs to relax after their ritual cleansing. As hot vapors permeated my skin, nimble female fingers massaged me. A dome of glass cast an ethereal light on a scene where bathers moved in a slow, dream-like motion. Exhilarated, I found the Hamam’s misty atmosphere an aphrodisiac. Instead of pursuing the reason I was given a research leave—taking notes on Istanbul’s libraries—I lingered in the steamy haze to fantasize about what it would be like to sleep with one of the Turkish men who had glanced at me with dark, hungry eyes.

Next afternoon, as I came outside after admiring the mosaics in the Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia, another dazzling sight met my eyes. He wore a Turkish naval officer’s uniform of snowy white, head to toe. What a military bearing, what hazel eyes! Had this handsome stranger with a gaunt face, small pointed black beard, arched eyebrows, and haunted stare escaped from one of the mosaics in the domed Basilica to flirt with me? All he lacked was a gold aureole.

Good afternoon, miss. Do you need directions to get around Istanbul? inquired Rezi, who spoke English with a trace of a British accent. Declaring himself a native, he assured me he knew every byway of this ancient city. I noticed that he limped slightly. Was he wounded in a war, or a scimitar fight over an affair of the heart? I fantasized he had fought in a naval battle in the Bosporus during the reign of Emperor Suleyman the Magnificent.

New York! The mere mention of the capital I inhabited made Rezi whoop like a little boy. Had I seen the Yankees play, shopped at Macy’s, gone to the top of the Empire State Building? He made me swear that one day I would show him around the Big Apple. Would I trust him with my address, he pleaded. Trust, he insisted, must be the hallmark of our friendship.

During dinner at a restaurant on a terrace overlooking the Bosporus, Rezi spoke at length about Turkish manners and mores. Tangy fish, stuffed vine leaves, kebabs of crunchy lamb on a bed of mashed eggplant seemed to me from a menu worthy of the Arabian Nights. My companion, whose coloring was a honey-beige reminiscent of delectable Turkish desserts that melt in the mouth, plied me with glass after glass of tart wine.

Our encounter assumed a heightened poignancy because I was scheduled to leave for New York at midnight the next evening. Capitulating to his entreaties for one night of passionate love, his promise of more orgasms than there are stars in the sky, we boarded the ferry to Kadikoy, a prosperous residential neighborhood.

Rezi’s apartment belonged to a large, undistinguished complex. Ushered into his sparsely furnished living room, I heard sounds from behind a closed door. Ignore the noise, insisted Rezi. It was his mother watching television in the bedroom next to us, which both comforted and bothered me. Straightaway, Rezi opened a flowered fold-out couch made for pygmies. I barely fit, while Rezi was so tall his shapely feet dangled over the edge. It didn’t matter—we couldn’t rip our clothes off fast enough!

Let the mythological Jason search for the Golden Fleece, I had found a Turk with a golden phallus worthy of worship. I wanted to suck, lick, gobble it whole. Instead, reverentially, to absorb its radiant energy, I gently caressed Rezi’s tawny prick, which stood out like a soldier’s lance.

Nude, Rezi’s long frame was thin, agile, muscular. While his glittering white teeth made the tips of my nipples rise to his mouth, velvet hands as smooth as a camel’s nose twirled my legs over my head. Tantalizingly, he slid in and out of me while kneading the cheeks of my rear end until they felt as sensitive as my clitoris. Inside me, Rezi swiveled with alternate delicacy and strength as though he had been cultivated there like a plant in its ideal habitat.

Inserting silky fingers in my mouth, he wiggled them around while feeding me from a bowl of figs next to the bed. His juicy, sticky fingers made a slow, deliberate odyssey along my skin, penetrating every opening in turn. As our mouths blended into one, my gestures became drugged, dreamlike. In order not to alert his mother, I tried to remain quiet. Nevertheless, as ecstatic pulsations coursed through me, touching every nerve and cell, moans, sighs and sobs escaped my lips. Clutching, we dozed intermittently, not wanting to separate even for a moment.

Early next morning, we headed towards the ferry. Rezi acted much less ardent than the night before. His expression seemed as hard as the rocks we walked over on a street under construction. When I spoke, he grunted. Was this the same man who, the night before, had wept at the cruelty of our separation, pounded his chest bewailing the capricious fates exiling us to different continents?

I was tempted to tousle his glistening dark hair, kiss the beguiling cleft in his chin. Afraid to transgress taboos of his religion regarding public behavior, I restrained myself. Rezi’s strides were so large, I hurried along to keep up. My legs were stiff from our night’s acrobatics, from curling into positions that required the flexibility of a belly dancer.

The lone tourist on board the ferry, sleepy and rumpled, I became an object of mirth to matrons in harem pants carrying chickens in henna-tattooed hands. The men stared at me in a cold, mercenary way. Had they seen Rezi before with other women, or was it my disheveled clothes? What was I doing among these superstitious folk anyway? And what could I expect from this moody, silent Turk sitting beside me ramrod straight?

Perhaps Rezi shared the values subscribed to by conservatives from the old school who kept their women cloistered and mercilessly punished supposedly immoral behavior. Would I get the daylights knocked out of me for going to bed with a stranger? Alarmed, I opened my purse, clutched my passport tight for protection. Could this official talisman keep me safe from goons walking the streets in policemen’s uniforms? Or from Rezi himself?

By the time the ferry docked on the Istanbul side, my erotic escapade tasted as sour as the yoghurt served in local restaurants. As we walked through unfamiliar quarters, the air smelled of garbage rotting in alleys. We ended up at a tea shop filled with gossiping men, smoking water pipes. Their chatter pounded in my ears like dissonant drums. While the crowd greeted Rezi, they treated me as though I was invisible. Were their stony faces a pose they would drop as soon as Rezi gave the signal to swoop down and carry me off? No smile softened his creamy lips, which had probed the contours of my flesh with such tenderness.

Presently, the cafe proprietor brought out a long, serpentine pipe, the hookah. Lighting up, Rezi ordered tea and a roll for me. Was the tea spiced with a mysterious narcotic?

What if I were kidnapped to be sold into white slavery? Although past the first blush of youth, I might be worth a good price. Dismemberment scenarios from tabloids came to mind and I envisioned my body parts floating in the Bosporus. Familiar with Europe, this was my first solo venture to such an exotic spot. My previous love life had not schooled me to cope with a man who suddenly switched from being ardent to a possible assailant.

Abruptly, Rezi paid the bill. Taking direction from him, we walked a short distance to the huge covered market on Divan Yolu Street. We made our way among stalls cluttered with junk and treasures from every period of Turkish history. The businesslike clamor temporarily reassured me, but I felt lost in the unfamiliar crowd.

I hovered behind Rezi, letting him push through the throngs who bargained as though their lives depended on a particular purchase. Stopping at one booth piled with tiles, carpets, and pottery, Rezi threw down a bunch of lira. He picked up something I couldn’t see and put it in his pocket.

Sweaty all over, I could hardly breathe among the teeming throngs. Vendors were yelling, customers talked a mile a minute. In order not to faint, I held onto Rezi. Weak from hunger, I lacked the energy to push people bumping into me out of the way. Noticing my confusion, Rezi guided me to an empty terrace outside of the bazaar. I was relieved to tag along.

Rezi took my trembling arm. As a cold, metal object was fastened around my wrist, I stiffened up. Handcuffed, was I a prisoner, about to become a file in a missing persons drawer? Surprise! Rezi had presented me with an enormous silver bracelet that overwhelmed my slender wrist. It was engraved with the Turkish crescent moon and star, celestial symbols during the Ottoman Empire. It reminded me of a slave bracelet a master might give his harem girl.

Did Rezi regularly buy these trinkets to reward his foreign girlfriends? I cared not, so long as my body parts were intact, my throat safe from a scimitar’s blade. A smirk on his face, Rezi gave me a peck on the cheek and promised to write. I watched him slightly limp further away from me toward a world with customs I could not comprehend.

From a vendor, I bought a bottle of rosewater and dabbed drops behind my ears, on my chest over my heart. Perhaps the floral scented liquid would lift the pall that had settled over me? At another pastry stand I bought a Turkish Delight. Biting into this sugary, sesame paste candy brought back heady moments spent in the arms of a mercurial lover whose puzzling behavior shattered my dream of an ongoing,