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followed wasn’t my first sexual adventure, but it might as well have been. The quantity, intensity, above all the stunning variety of Clare’s lovemaking reduced me to virginal status. I was blithely swept along in the torrent, accepting all that was thrust upon me, yielding all that was demanded. It was a night I never expected to be repeated.
    Toward morning, in a condition torn between physical exhaustion and undiminished emotional frenzy, I found myself oddly positioned across Clare’s bed, my face sunk between her corpulent thighs, performing as required, when I felt a tug at my hair. Lifting me from my diligent efforts, Clare looked at me quizzically down the length of her naked torso.
“Mother?
Is that what you’re thinking of?”
    Her juices still warm upon my cheeks, the look I returned was surely more quizzical than her own. For mother was—I hope—the farthest thought from my mind at that moment.
    â€œI mean,” Clare explained, “are you sure you’ve ever seen a Pudovkin?”
    Even this didn’t help. Was “pudovkin” perhaps a sexual code word? I was about to answer, yes, I’d seen a pudovkin before, when I realized she was resuming a line of conversation that had broken off some time before. In one of our brief respites, I’d apologetically mentioned my dislike for silent films—for, of course, between bouts of love-making, we talked film. Or rather, Clare talked, I listened. “Surely, that doesn’t include the Russians,” she had protested. “Dovzhenko, Eisenstein, Pudovkin … ”
    â€œPudovkin?” Distractedly, I simply picked up on the last name in the series. “Well, yes, he’s all right, I guess. But his movies are soslow, so heavy… .” Which was what I said about all silent movies that weren’t comedies.
    Now, some two hours later, Clare was returning to the subject, holding my head unsteadily balanced on her pubic bone.
“Mother,”
she informed me, “is the only Pudovkin you can still rent in this country. And we haven’t shown that at The Classic in over four years. The Museum of Modern Art used to have a bad print of
Storm over Asia,
but, God, that hasn’t been available since 1948. So where have you seen any Pudovkins?”
    â€œWell,” I said, struggling to dredge up any Russian movies I could remember, “there was that picture about the czar last month—
Ivan the Terrible.”
    Her belly shook with laughter beneath my chin. “Silly! That was
Eisenstein!”
And she abruptly returned my head to its salacious assignment. “Lover, you’ve got lots to learn.”
    One week later, I vacated Geoff and Irene’s apartment and moved in with Clare. My education had begun.
    There are moments when a door opens in the mind’s eye, and through it we see the path that lies before us in life. Our talent, our calling. Years later that first experience of vocation may still glow as vividly as the recollection of our sexual awakening. In my case, the two moments are intertwined, and at the center of both there is the memory of Clare, lover and teacher. We both knew our relationship was bound to be perishable. The years we spent together were an erotic holiday. Clare never made a secret of the fact that she was grooming me to satisfy her ego; she never asked me to pretend she was more to me than a young man’s sexual fantasy come to life. Of course, she
was
more than that. But whatever more she may have been, I understood I mustn’t speak of it as “love”—a word she had banished from her autobiographical vocabulary. There was a defensive cynicism about Clare that led her to prefer a tougher style—an emotional abrasiveness, an unsparing contention of minds. For her, honesty between a man and a woman was a sort of martial art, a dry-eyed giving and taking of wounds. I dutifully absorbed many such wounds—hard