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“The swamis seem to have retired,” I said.

“Ah, too bad. Max, he knew all the swamis. I think that's where he learned
bhoga.”

“Tell me about that.”

“Well, at first, I was sure Max was playing a mean trick on me. Because he always treated me like the big, dumb farmer's daughter. Only the farmer's daughter, she's supposed to get
gestupped,
yes? Just the opposite with Max. He just about don't touch me at all. ‘Your
innocence is too beautiful,' he tells me. So I think, oh-oh, I made a big mistake. Max Castle, maybe he got some problem. In Hollywood, there was lots of men with this problem. Eyes bigger than their tookies, you know. You had to do circus tricks or they couldn't get it up. But no, that wasn't Max's trouble. Max didn't have no trouble. When he said
bhoga,
he meant
bhoga.
Dear Max! For me, that was the beginning of a whole new life. I learned from a master. ‘Olga,' he says the next time we get together, ‘how would you like to live forever—almost? Believe me, no sex is the way.' By then, I'm not so sure he's kidding no more. I don't know about his other girlfriends, what went on with them. But me, I bet I was the best student of
bhoga
he ever had. And look.” She stood up, displaying herself, whipping her hair back with a flick of the head, running her hands from breasts to hips along the contours of her body. “Maybe Max was right. We wait and see, eh? How long the old lady holds up.”

She, along with the heavy cordial, was doing a perfectly charming job of bewildering me. “I may be from California, Olga, but I've never heard of
bhoga,”
I told her, hoping she would provide details. She did better than that. Her face, now somewhat drunkenly blurred in my eyes toward a becomingly soft focus, seemed to melt into an expression that was at once lascivious and maternal.

“Well, time you learned, Jon,” she answered, her voice dropping into a seductive half-whisper. She tugged me up by both hands and led me off up two flights of stairs toward the top of the house. I was going along but with a certain tactful hesitation. “Now, Jon,” she admonished, taking on a schoolmarmish tone, “you want your research on Max to be complete, don't you? So now you're going to find out what kind of crazy lover he was.” That made good scholarly sense to me. So I smiled and went along.

After my years as Clare's utterly cooperative paramour, I would have said I'd exhausted the varieties of bizarre eroticism. I was wrong. The weirdest sexual encounter of my life lay ahead of me at the top of one of the Amsterdam's stateliest mansions.

The room she led me to wasn't a bedroom, but a sort of sanctuary, thickly carpeted and hung with dark, lush drapes that covered the windows. The noise of the streets below didn't penetrate here. What little light there was drifted down through a richly colored skylight, a lazy pink, gold, and purple shaft that fell upon a square upholstered mat at the center of the carpet. Beside the mat was the only piece of furniture I could see—a low wooden table on which there rested
a few implements, one of them an antique-looking incense burner. Olga bent to light this immediately, and it quickly filled the room with a spiced and musky odor, a stronger version of her own perfume.

The room had a shrinelike solemnity to it, but when Olga summoned me to her side on the mat, it was in a bright, playful voice. “Gome on, Jon. Haven't you never been seduced before?” Then, catching me off guard with a movement that was smoothly practiced and which at once dispelled the somber atmosphere, she bowed forward, buried her face in a small cushion and effortlessly straightened herself without a wobble into a solid shoulder stand. I'm not sure she intended a comic effect, but a startled giggle escaped from me at once. Smiling at me with her face turned upside down, she did a little shimmy and the clinging robe she wore slid obediently down her legs and torso, gathering around her shoulders just above the breasts. She held the position for several seconds, allowing me to study her inverted form. She was naked underneath her robe; but, surprisingly, I found that her nude body turned upside down became an object of curiosity more than of sexual attraction. I noted the smooth and milky texture of her skin, flawed only by a few lumpish, purpled veins in the legs. Also, there was a bulge of flesh circling her hips and buttocks that gave some matronly bulk to her figure. She was otherwise straight and strong and remarkably well shaped, still the sturdy dairy maid. Then, as quickly and expertly as she had gone into the shoulder stand, she dropped out of it, her robe smoothly drawn away in a single movement over her head as she settled into an upright, kneeling posture. It was the neatest and most surprising piece of disrobing I ever expected to see. Viewed right side up, her breasts were large and ponderously mushy, betraying more of her age than her face, which was now flushed and glowing.

“Can you go upside down, Jon?” she asked. No, I told her. “Ah, too bad. It clears the brain, you know. Makes you alert. Like I told you, I always like to get undressed first. Now you, eh? Slow, slow. Don't rush. Make a thing of it.”

While I removed my clothes, Olga turned over on her back and proceeded to perform a run of slow, graceful exercises. Her back strongly arched, she raised and lowered and circled her pelvis in a ritualized horizontal bump and grind; then, twisting her legs into odd, impossible angles, she rhythmically spread and closed her thighs. All the while, her hands were gently massaging her body back and forth from throat to knees. There was a yogalike precision to her
movements, something fixed and well rehearsed. But I'd never seen yoga postures like these. They seemed designed to focus my attention on her slowly gyrating vulva as it boldly flowered and folded in upon itself just below my eye level. If that was the purpose, it was working very well indeed and having the desired effect.

When I was undressed, Olga had me kneel in front of her, sitting back on my heels, my hands clasped behind me. She brought herself around into a strange squatting posture, one leg drawn up under her, the other extended with the toe sharply pointed. “Now,” she said, “I teach you just like Max taught me. Only from the woman to the man. It's the same thing, only just the opposite, okay?” I nodded okay, not really knowing what she meant. “Now you breathe very easy, very slowly. And you watch here.” She had taken a small silver chain from a lacquered box on the table and fitted it around her head just above the brows. From it a tiny red jewel depended; it reached to the middle of her eyes, glinting there in the queer, colored light of the room. This was where she wanted me to concentrate my attention.

What didn't happen during the next few hours was more remarkable than what did. At the time, I would have said
nothing
happened—at least not between the two of us. Not a kiss, not an embrace. There was no touching; I mean no
real
touching. Olga moved in close enough for me to feel the warmth of her body, and for a long while that was as much contact as there was. The warmth grew until it was like the sun reflecting off a stone wall. Where was all the heat coming from? The odor that arose with it could no longer be called a fragrance. Olga was taking on a decidedly musky aroma, something I wouldn't have called pleasant. It took several minutes for this physical pungency to tone down and lose its disturbing quality. Oddly enough, I would have described it as too sexy for comfort; I was relieved when I became inured to it.

With eyes closed, Olga placed her fingertips just so, a hairbreadth away from my skin, pointed at this and that carefully selected spot on my anatomy: the forehead, between the eyes, the throat, the left and right shoulders, the left and right nipple, the solar plexus, never touching, but palpably there, tingling like a little point of compacted heat. Meanwhile, as instructed, I kept my gaze fixed on the little twinkling jewel. This, together with the enveloping warmth of Olga's presence and the deep quiet of the room, soon flowed me along into a hypnotic calm. I was becoming so relaxed I concluded that Olga's
methods were obviously self-defeating. This not-quite-touching episode, as it went on and on, began to grow tedious. Charitably, I said to myself—if I could believe her story—perhaps this was the best Max Castle could do, all those years ago. Queer duck, Castle. Apparently an impotent Don Juan with his actress-lovers, covering up with mumbo jumbo. My mind wandered. I imagined Olga as a lovely, eager young thing enduring this baffling treatment from Castle forty years back. Maybe it was a mean trick. By now I knew he wasn't above such pranks. But he had convinced her that great things were happening. Changed her life. Castle, always the illusionist.

Was it all right for my thoughts to ramble like this, I wondered. How could I prevent it, bored as I was? Imagine my amazement, then, when Olga's hovering, searching finger came to rest, now really touching, on the top of my penis right in the crowning cleft. “The top,” I say, because, incredible as it seemed, I was indeed fully, powerfully aroused, a first-class erection. But how had this happened without my knowing? And why? Olga hadn't been stimulating me; just the opposite. I'd nearly dozed off. Now, quite suddenly, as if I'd awakened from a fast sleep, my juices began to surge. Or maybe I was simply becoming aware—upstairs, in my head—of what had been going on in my body all along. I glanced down to see if what I felt was really so. Yes, there I was at full attention, the good soldier ready for action. Just at that moment, Olga began to bring her finger—or rather her fingernail—lightly and slowly down the length of my eagerly upraised shaft. The sensation was so powerful, it brought a rush of blood to my head, with it an intoxicated, deep-tickling swoon that bordered dizzily on the edge of release, but not quite, not quite. Coming, coming, never arriving.

“Careful,” Olga cautioned in a low whisper, “we don't want to lose anything, do we?” She pointed again at the little jewel, fixing my eyes there. Somehow she prolonged this dry near-orgasm for what seemed like minutes. My breath was becoming so shallow, I had to open my mouth to gulp in air. Soon I was panting wildly, greedy to lay hold on the climax that was almost there, but always just out of reach. As tormenting as the experience was, I had to admire the cunning of it. This was prick-teasing raised to a fine art. How long could Olga hold me on the edge? The answer was a sexual condition I didn't know existed: until I became too numb to care. In the moment itself, I couldn't have said if this was a matter of minutes or hours; I'd lost all reliable sense of time.

But after some endless while, I realized that my excitement—so intense, so painfully sharp—had subsided and the warm calm was returning. Dazzled and distracted as I was, I hardly noticed when Olga shifted around so that she was kneeling behind me, cradling my fatigued body, her arms encircling me at the waist. What had happened? I looked down to see my now collapsed organ nestled peacefully in her cupped hand. There was no sign of a climax; I couldn't remember reaching that point. But I distinctly recalled some crowning moment of fulfillment from which I'd now fallen back like a tired runner leaving the race, grateful for the chance to rest. Somewhere deep inside my sexual tubing there was a feeling of uncomfortable congestion; but Olga's other hand, buried in my crotch, was stoking that away.

Afterward, when we'd showered and dressed, Olga let me know she was entirely satisfied with our session, though whether with my performance or hers, I was uncertain. “You are a fast learner, Jon. Sometimes at first it is hard to control, the excitement is too much. But you see, there was no waste.”

Waste.
Such an odd word. How many women thought of it like that? “With brainy boys like you,” she went on, “there can be too much up here.” She tapped her forehead. “You must get the head out of the way, then the body knows what to do. It knows how to enjoy itself.”

I wondered how many brainy boys—for that matter, how many boys brainy or not—Olga was including in her generalization. I later learned it was quite a few. Olga's upstairs room was kept in steady use. This is what Olga did with her life. Instructional sessions like this were something of a mission for her, a lesson she wanted to teach far and wide. She did it out of the goodness of her heart, her gift to the world. Her students included women as well as men, old as well as young. Trouble was: when she set about describing this strange vocation more ambitiously, she sounded disappointingly like a quack doctor promoting a bizarre diet. It was all a matter of health and good physical tone, a sort of erotic vitamin pill. I couldn't associate ideas like these with Castle.

“Did Max tell you all this?” I asked her skeptically.

We were back in her living room, drinking a grassy-flavored tea that supposedly had great restorative power. It would, Olga promised me, help reabsorb my unspent seed throughout my tissues, adding
years to my life. “No, no,” she answered. “I don't learn all this from Max. But I learned the important thing from him.”

“Which was?”

Cutely, she shook a teacherly finger at me. “
No babies.”

“Birth control?” I asked in amazement. “You mean Max had to teach you that?”

She wagged her head, “Not just
how
no babies. Of course, this I knew. But
why
no babies—this is what I learned from Max.”

I didn't follow her. “What do you mean?”

“Remember when it was that Max and me, we got together—1938, 1939, was it? Such a troubled time. Soon there was to be the war. I was here, all through the occupation. I saw what Max told me, that it was true.”

“What was that?”

“The world is hell.” She dropped the remark casually between two sips of tea, never letting the sparkle leave her lively eyes. Hers was not the face which I would have connected with such a pronouncement. “It is so, isn't it? One does not bring children into such a hell. That is why there is shame about sex. It makes babies for Herr Hitler's world. The sex is such a craziness! Like a wild animal inside. It is all right for the body to be an animal. But when it runs away with us, then there is a baby, another baby, another … on and on. Such a miserable business. There is no joy in this. We know we do wrong. Max called it ‘feeding the devil.' You understand? The sex makes babies to feed the devil. But Max, he showed me there is a way to get hold of the animal. You see what good sex you had today? And no waste, no babies. Soon I show you how this can be done in here.” She ran my hand over her belly, placing it between her legs, over her heated organ. “That is
bhoga.
The clean joy.”