Lovers. Husbands. Strangers.: A Baby Boomer’S Chronicle of Lust, Love and One-Night Stands

By L. L. Ferris

Lovers. Husbands. Strangers. is a single-person anthology, chronicling the sexual and emotional adventures and misadventures of a baby boomer. Luna Luce, now in her sixties, recollects the affairs of her youth to her middle-age years. Each tale, though singular, reflects shadows of other lovers overlapping, intertwining, and tangled. The lovers have no names but are referred to by Lunas vision of what they have represented in her life. Luna comes full circle, from the loss of her virginity with setting the standard, to the last stop of her middle age, ending with the LAST RIDE? The tales are told with passion, pathos, emotion, a dash of dark humor, and contain adult language and strong sexual content.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524699253

L. L. Ferris

L. L. Ferris is a creative consultant and ghost writer for fellow authors, as well as script editor for independent film and theater companies. Ferris lives in New York City with her two dogs, Woodrow and Augustus.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

My name is Luna Luce. For persons interested in the planets, luna means ‘moon.’ It’s the lifeless sphere in the heavens that requires light from the sun in order to glow, so that all the composers have something gooey to write about — and ‘moon’ rhymes with so many romantic words like June and spoon and tune. Now, my middle name, Luce, is light. If one were to put them together in a positive way, my name would be Moonlight.

I have always thought that my names ‘fight’ each other, like two sisters, one pretty, the other, ugly. The ugly one hopes that by standing close to, or being in the shadow of the pretty one, she might look better.

People just call me Luna and don’t know or care about my middle name. I don’t use it, and maybe that accounts for a life of scrambling in the dark, yearning for light. Perhaps the Light or Luce was right there, within myself, and I didn’t need to look for it in a man’s eyes. Men’s eyes, I should say. Too many men. And, a ‘try-curious’ female encounter thrown in which doesn’t count.

There were lovers, and there were husbands, and there were one-night stands— all singular experiences, unrelated to each other with very little segue. Separate scrapbooks.

* * * * *

It is interesting to note — to calculate — that at the age of sixty-four, I recall that during my life, I have encountered, in one way or another, many, many penises, but only thirty-one (more or less) were actually inside my vagina. Not bad, really. Can’t call it out and out promiscuity. Can’t call it prudishness. When stretched out over, or divided into, the number of years I’ve been around, each encounter can be looked upon as a bi-annual event.

I am not including the time I sat across from a man who gratified himself behind the Wall Street Journal on NYC’s Number 6 train, all the way from Lexington Avenue to Pelham Bay in the Bronx. I kept my head down, read my book, and every now and then, crossed and uncrossed my mini-skirted, stockinged and garter-belted legs just to give him a little incentive. I guess I was no Sharon Stone because when the train reached the end of the line, his eyes were closed and his dick was still in his hand.

Nor will I write about the neighborhood shoe-shine boy who exposed his pink little prick to me when I was eight. I thought it was a piece of Bazooka bubble gum that got caught in his zipper. I told my mother on him, and after that he was shining shoes with his elbows.

You will not read about the time my friend Reah and I were asked by a mutual guy-friend to pay a visit to his friend, who happened to be an exceptional backgammon player, but had no one to play with. Reah and I were both novices at the game, but we had a hunch that the real game had nothing to do with moving plastic pieces around a board. No one was more surprised than Mr. Backgammon to see two twenty-something titillating young women when he answered the bell and opened the door to his apartment. He probably thought we working for the singing telegram people, and not a couple of bored and cheating wives. He reluctantly let us in and hobbled to a chair in front of which, a backgammon board, was set up on a table. He was very shy, and asked if we wanted to play, but before we could answer, he cringed in pain and grabbed one of his feet, which, thank God, were socked. What’s wrong, we wanted to know. Oh, he explained, he’d just returned from the hospital. His feet were crawling with gangrene. What a shame, we said, and headed for the door. Poor guy, he never even got a chance to roll his dice.

Thirty-something is a good, respectable number for a girl raised by a mother who had one Lover, one Husband, both the same man. Although, to me, she always seemed like the Stranger.

There is a small possibility, since people are living longer, that there might be a thirty-more, but the odds are against it. I am no longer pretty. If my body had any kind of desirable shape, it is gone. It’s become post-menopausal round. Round shoulders, round knees, round ankles. A thickness that begins when the periods thin out. Thin is now a word only associated with hair including drapes and carpet, except when referring to the testosterone-charged mustache that needs constant attention — not to mention that one persistent hair that keeps popping up on my chin. The tits and ass have sagged; the face, cheekbones and jaw line have been obscured by a layer or two of jowl fat. There is a definite lack of definition to my features now, which can only be defined as Age. My eyes, the one single attribute that has sustained me, are still blue, still big, and have retained a bit of the ‘bedroom’ look — only it’s the guest bedroom now. The waistline? Forget it. I’m an apple - not a Delicious, but a Granny. I envy the pear-shaped woman. At least she has a shot at meeting someone while sitting down behind a table.

Of course, there are times I go without a shower for a couple of days. This nasty habit is due to the fact that men have stopped looking at me…or smelling me. I do what is called the whore’s bath — pits, tits, pussy and ass, followed by a generous dousing of Chanel No. 5. I’ve come to know why all the old ladies I knew growing up smelled like that. It was the powerful pungency of too much perfume where the delicate aroma of soap should have been. Only back then the perfume was My Sin or Evening in Paris. At this point in my life, I wouldn’t mind a little sin, or an evening in Paris — in Peekskill — in Pelham! The men are simply not interested. I’m not exactly a ‘guy magnet’ — not even for a limp-dicked, Depends donning geezer in a Medicare provided scooter with one wheel in the grave.

Even if I got lucky, and met a lonely widower in the The Best Way to Puree aisle of the supermarket, sex could never be the same. It was, in more energetic times, a cornucopia of conjugal delights: clothes thrown everywhere, or just up around my neck, hair (lots of it from both parties) sexily messy, mingling scents from younger, finer flesh, mascara running brought on by tears of explosive orgasms (real or faked), screams and moans (real or faked) and in the end, I, looking like a freshly fucked, but still fresh looking, baby doll.

I don’t think of sex anymore as exciting or thrilling or adventurous. Somehow it has lost its luster — like me. And, I’m nobody’s baby! Certainly, having sex won’t be (can’t be, really) spontaneous. Surely there would be some thoughts circling my mind while waiting for him to emerge from the bathroom at his paid-up condo in Canarsie. I can imagine myself (in a pitch black room, of course) carefully removing and folding my clothes, arranging them neatly on a chair, rushing under the covers, testing the smell from down under with a quick finger over the old labia, practicing the on-my-back, arms-over-head, languid pose, while trying to assuage my Vertigo, and at the same time, hoping that my over-the-hill looks do not offend his one good eye. So, how will he return from the bathroom? Teeth in or out? Testicles two ping-pong balls swaying in knee-high socks? Pecks pendulous? Derriere deflated? And, that’s just the preview.

The better-times main event : Oh, yeah, right there…ooh, yes, yes! Flip over! Put your feet on the ceiling! Get on the chair! No, backwards! Yes, ooh, yes, ooh, baby! And now: No, wait, I can’t turn like that. I had my hip replaced last year. Ooh, ooh, oh, wait, not on my knees, please! They’ve been killing me since I took that wine tour in Napa. Oh, ouch! Just a minute, let me move my hair (what’s left of it) out from under your elbow. No, it’s just that if I lie like that, my acid reflux goes crazy. Is that okay, now? And, in the end: Can you just rub it a little — that’ll do the trick. Doesn’t matter whose line it is.

The question is: Is it worth it? I mean, the extra bathing (all that soap and water), the phone calls (neither of us know how to text), the drive (at 18 miles an hour) to the obligatory dinner (at five p.m), the small talk, the little dick (probably), the undressing in a strange bedroom, the nuisance of putting the bra and panty hose back on, the shy smiles, almost apologizing for the natural course of aging. The perfunctory ‘that was nice.’ Both of us painfully aware that the glory days are over. He probably shattered his record of seventeen (plus or minus) sexual encounters with these fumbling festivities, and wonders if he could get a refund on that thirty-day supply of Viagra. I’m wondering if he deserves a place in my chronology.

* * * * *

I remember all these men — all of them. The woman (women?) was totally anonymous. I remember the men’s names, their birthdays, and even a couple of Social Security numbers. Whatever havoc is being wreaked on my body, my mind is holding up. Sometimes I wish it didn’t. But I do think of them, and before my brain goes the way of all flesh, I find myself compelled to chronicle the good, the bad, the bold and the bald. Better to have had them, to remember, to write about them. A sexual adventure is like having a place in the sun — fleeting though it is. The sun is setting, and the shadow of passion is casting a