The dark-green Jaguar sedan was there across the street this evening. So I've seen its driver. About what I expected, really. Let's say thirty years younger than the driver of the white Jaguar sedan. Let's say forty. And...exactly what you'd imagine. Forty, thinning light-brown hair swept back over a growing calvity. Six foot, probably. An athlete twenty years ago. High school football, of course. And maybe college ball--- a running back, I'd guess, maybe not here, but certainly an SEC school. Starting to show the effect of too many crawfish boils at his weekend camp and too many beers at high-end sports bars after work. MBA, probably. Not a lawyer. Corporate casual uniform--- pressed khakis and polo shirt. Permanent smile. I can hear him at outdoor parties-- "Hell, boy, tradin' bonds is the most fun you can have with your clothes on." He's perfect--- not a sugar daddy, but a client. Or at least what the CraigsList ads call a "generous" date.

I'd seen the blonde girl at Nr. 937 earlier. I was on the upstairs patio with a vodka-lime and a copy of Fernanda Eberstadt's "Low Tide" and the blonde girl came out onto the front steps of the little blue stucco house. She had her mobile with her and a cigarette and a Filofax in the other hand. Not too long out of the shower--- blonde hair still wet. Fuchsia racer-back tank top, black short gym shorts, delightfully barefoot, dark-tanned. I need reading glasses for books, but my eyes are still keen at a distance. So--- yes, bra-less. And, yes--- probably ---a Blackberry Curve. It's a narrow street, and the acoustics favour the upstairs here. I could hear her voice--- clear and bright and with just a tinge of belle. I've heard blonde girls in the Deepest South do that voice all my life--- girls trained to be Charming, girls who can do just enough moonlight-and-magnolias in their speech to catch male attention. Southern girls who go up to Chicago or Boston can dial up the moonlight-and-magnolia effect with icy precision. It's a voice known to reduce boys in the northeast to helpless buyers of drinks and dinner. She sat back on the steps and drew on her cigarette and looked through her Filofax and was...Charming. I could hear parts of it: "Why, baby--- I just got your message. And here I was thinking you'd forgotten all about me..." I liked her phrasing. "Little ole me" would have been de trop. Sugar daddy, boyfriend, keeper, client: she had the Charm down to perfection.

Okay, yes. I'm having visions of a platoon of blonde Tri-Delts jogging along with perfect smiles, chanting out "I don't know, but I've been told / Marry a man who's rich and old..." Charm--- that carefully-mastered belle charm ---is scary. Belle charm is a weapon; it always has been.

The blonde girl is...well: far above me on any Darwinian ladder. She's not someone I could ever talk to, let alone have add me to her Filofax. Still--- I would like to know her Stories. Not an obsession in the amour fou or erotomania way, mind you. But I would love to just sit there at the upstairs table and watch and try to infer everything about her Stories. She's blonde and aerobicised and leggy. But I have to wonder: what are her...specialties? Does she focus on making elderly sugar daddies feel like they can still become hard? Is she skilled at performing--- by herself or with others ---for an audience? She has Charm, and she's able to be a perfect Display Item. That's necessary, but not sufficient. She'd have to have...specialised skills. I do wonder what the skills are...and how she learned them. That's always something I'd ask girls like Stella at stelladellasera or besideserato: stories of how they learned their skills. I'm an historian by training: I need to know backstories.

I've been thinking of Lissy at emigree and her Montauk week. I'll never know her Stories. Details matter, of course--- I'm not likely ever to know them. I'm in a mood where I'm afraid of Lissy's comments and notes at the moment. (I suppose I'm afraid of lost_ligeia's comments as well at the moment, too) I'm always afraid of any comments or notes that might be harsh or dismissive or minatory. I'll never know the interesting (meaning prurient, yes) Details of Lissy's summer. I'll never know how she's had the courage to have a romance where she can go off for a week or sneak a boy into her parents' house--- how she's had the courage to risk parental disapproval and displeasure. Lissy is twenty--- isn't she afraid of parents threatening to cut off support or take away her car keys or tell her to move out? How can she risk those things? How does her family deal with Lissy bringing a boy up from her basement room? Lissy at emigree has a courage I could never have had at twenty if I'd been living at home.

Of course--- this is something that continues to baffle me. There are girls reading this who moved in with boyfriends at university or at law school. There are girls who went off to Europe or the Caribbean with boyfriends while they were undergrads. No girl ever offered to live with me at university--- let's take that as a given. But I could never have moved a girl in, never have found a place together with a girl, never have gone off on a long trip with a girl. I'd have been terrified of having to Explain myself to family. Even if there was no argument about what I was doing, there'd have been a need to Explain--- maybe even to introduce the girl to my family. I don't do that. I still don't do that. I keep lovers separate from friends and family. And I refuse outright ever to meet a girl's friends and family. Why set myself up for derision and mockery? Why be there so that the girl can be told to be ashamed of something like me? At eighteen or twenty, I'd have been far too worried that if I lived with a girl I'd be risking someone in my family saying that since I was living with a girl--- a Grown-Up thing ---that maybe I should be self-supporting financially. I'd never have risked losing air-conditioning and cable and an Educated White Boy life. I have no idea whatsoever how girls chose at university to live with boyfriends, or go off to Europe with boyfriends. Ms. cataplexis took her boyfriend to Spain with her family; the two of them shared a room. How did that happen? How do girls Explain living with a boyfriend to parents? That's something I'll never understand. I have no idea how Lissy at emigree could've gone off to Montauk...or how she might go off to Tokyo at New Year's with a lover. Could ginny_mccoo move in with a lover? What would she tell her family? How would they react? It's all something I'll never grasp--- not least because I'll never have a lover who'd want to live with me...and because I'll never have the income to share expenses on anywhere worth living as a couple.

I do want to talk girls--- Ginny at ginny_mccoo and Ms. steeping and Alessandra at bel_ebat into reading Eberstadt's "Low Tide". It's one of those books--- like Tartt's "Secret History" ---that utterly surprised and intrigued me. I do remember when I first heard about "Low Tide". Fernanda Eberstadt published it when she was in her early twenties. A review in Commentary or National Review gave it high marks and called Ms. Eberstadt a kind of Young Tory pin-up. (Given when the novel first appeared, saying "Young Tory Madonna" would've had a whole other meaning) Ms. Eberstadt had a kind of dark, Pre-Raphaelite beauty in those days--- exactly perfect for Young Fogey boys. She lives in Provence now. Two years ago she did a photojournalism book on Gypsies in the South of France. But--- "Low Tide". It's a brilliant, dreamy, melancholy story. Ms. Chang I know fell in love with it. It's out of print, but it should be easy enough to find via Amazon or at libraries. Ms. Eberstadt was at Magdalen College, Oxford. It's easy enough to imagine her at nineteen walking through an Oxford twilight, a Magdalen scarf trailing behind her. I do want any lovely readers and correspondents who read "Low Tide" to tell me their thoughts...

And it is worth asking Ginny at ginny_mccoo whether she'd like to do the full-on Tokyo debauchery from Hanrahan's "Lost Girls and Love Hotels". I'd love to know whether Ginny is a party girl at grad school...

There is the image of blonde Delta Gammas jogging through campus and chanting, "I don't know, but it's been said / Sign no pre-nup when you wed!" That may derive from a scene in "The Oblongs". But it is a great image. Again--- I am terrified of Charm.

Stella at stelladellasera writes that in the ritual she and her Island designed for Stella's gay younger brother and his boyfriend, there was a passage where the two boys were whipped hard enough to draw blood. That's not something I'd have done. I remember the book "Nine and a Half Weeks"--- a moment where the heroine notes that once you've been whipped hard enough to draw blood, everything changes. I own riding whips and a polo whip, but I wouldn't draw blood. I've only turned girls down flat on two requests. One girl asked me to suck her toes during sex. That got a flat No. And when a girl handed me a straight razor during sex and demanded that I cut her, I left the bed. The first thing was just unappetising. Drawing blood--- I have tactical rather than moral issues. Once you've drawn blood, you run the risk of having to Explain it later. It may be vur' erotic on a Friday midnight, but two days later, when it's just a nagging, throbbing pain--- that's when the girl Changes Her Mind. I don't want to have to do the "Yes, but..." explanation to anyone who asks if I did in fact draw blood. I can design rituals for the riding whip, but they're designed as moments of performance art, moments of...offering up endurance and proving one's stoicism. They don't have anything to do with yielding freedom--- Stella described her rituals of submission as "ripping the freedom out" of a submissive. But then again--- I see s/m as about art, about the abstract, and never about either flesh or surrender. Stella equates surrender with love; she found safety and love in consensual slavery. I don't take physical pleasure in anything. I see both s/m and sex as largely intellectual, as having value that isn't about anything in the flesh.

I hadn't known that Kazuo Ishiguro did the screenplay for "The White Countess". I just re-did "A Pale View of Hills", and now I may have to go back and watch "White Countess" again.

I can look across the street at Nr. 937 and see the blue stucco house and thing that it's not like Gatsby's dock light. It's much more like the office plaza that Arthur Inman saw as his nemesis. Lissy at emigree or Ms. Chang or Ginny at ginny_mccoo can have lovers and romances and Stories. I can only look at that house and think that I'll never have any of those things again. I can't even have those things by voice. I'm not worth Charm--- or the expense of calling plan minutes.