Sounds like a movie sequel, doesn’t it? I doubt it’ll be a dramatic but I’ll settle for entertaining. For a certain someone, however, the memory of this incident might well still conjure up every parent’s 1970s nightmare. And it occurred during my college years.
I had fallen in love with the man who will be forever known as “my college boyfriend.” He was the first person I shared a significantly long-lasting relationship, one that included rose and fell on the vagaries of young adulthood, but included really, really fine sex throughout its duration.
If the college years represent the dawn of adult discovery, then mine were as much sexual as academic, and two erotically prosaic things I learned were the pleasures of occasional skinny dipping (co-ed and same-sex opportunities) and the thrill of the instant camera for naked pictures.
My boyfriend only pointed the camera at me once, early in our relationship when he still lived at home. The resulting photo was tepid by today’s standards: just me sitting on his bed, cross-legged and naked with enough of a beaver shot to be explicit. (Remember, this was the ‘70s. The wide open beaver had only just come off the endangered sexual species list and men could be easily satisfied by its mere pictorial portrayal.)
The photo was, of course, given the spirit of caring lust. I knew full well it was meant to serve him well in solitary times. Had I been a smarter girl, I would’ve asked for a full woody photo of my own, but live and learn. As it was, my boyfriend hid the photo in a book in the headboard bookcase of his bed.
I wish I could remember what novel he hid it in, having filched and read a number of them back then. Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, any one of them had some connection to our discussions of sex and literature. All looked down on us as we rolled around in horny fervor in those early days of our relationship.
I don’t remember how long he had the photo, but I remember the day I noticed it was nowhere to be found. It has disappeared, completely. I asked my boyfriend what had happened to it. Had he moved it? To my utter horror, he hadn’t noticed its absence. So where did it go? Then horror became panic when I realized one way it might have disappeared.
His mother. She still dusted his room.
The thought of her seeing me naked – and knowing that her son wanted to a token of my nakedness – stunned me. Whatever look-the-other-way acknowledgment we had earned from his parents had, in my eyes, likely been blown to smithereens. Speculating on the possible fallout had me panicked.
To which my boyfriend said, “Don’t worry about it.”
I’ve since learned that sons have a way of sloughing off their mothers. Somehow, they develop an imperviousness that daughters don’t – disengaging where daughters engage. (Which goes double for in-law situations.) I can’t say I entirely understand it but, having watched this phenomenon for decades, I’ve come to accept it.
Some months later, an eye-popping coincidence hit me square in the face. Perusing the advice column of my newspaper, I found one of the Landers sisters – I can’t remember whether it was Ann or Abby – answering the letter of a panicked mother.
Who had found a picture of her son’s naked girlfriend in his bedroom while dusting.
That punch just about made me fall out of my chair. I couldn’t believe it. I sat there, stunned, staring at the cold, hard type before me.
To my surprise, AnnOrAbby read the riot act to the mother, essentially telling the mother to stay the hell out of her son’s bedroom! Her son as a grown man who could dust his own room and was entitled to his privacy and possessions. You don’t want to know what your son’s up to? Then don’t tread on him!
Holy crap.
I doubt the words I used to express my surprise back then were that low-key, and they were probably even more tasteless. But I was stunned to find AnnOrAbby taking such a progressive stance on what was essentially unmarried sex under a parent’s roof.
For a long time, I wondered if my mother’s boyfriend was the letter writer in question. But proof was never in the coming and, today, it hardly matters. What it showed me – and, presumably, the mother-in-law-who-wasn’t – that I wasn’t the only girlfriend posing for her boyfriend, he wasn’t the only boyfriend asking, and she wasn’t the only mother snooping. And it confirmed that we were entitled to our sexual privacy, regardless of whose roof we were canoodling under.
Either way, one person’s dirty found was a lesson for us all.
