“Listen,” I said to him one day, “why don’t you go and practice what I’ve taught you on my sister, too?”

He must have taken my advice, because a week later a new Mona with slightly dark circles under her eyes called me aside and confided in me.

“Xaviera,” she began awkwardly, “I think Jan has gone crazy or something; all of a sudden he has become sex hungry… And he wants to do it in all different kinds of positions; he even wants me to put my legs over his shoulders. I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

Of course, her husband’s “aberrations” all coincided with the positions I had taught him and, what’s more, she enlisted my aid in figuring out how he had learned them.

“We don’t have any sex books in the house, and he can’t be having an affair, because he never goes out, so I’m all confused.”

“Maybe he’s seen some stag films,” I said, which was a crazy suggestion, because the South African censorship laws are very strict, and so far as I knew, they had no such thing as blue movies. But I thought I had better offer some kind of suggestion.

My guilty conscience began to work by now. I really needed to make love, but just the same, I didn’t want to be calculating with my own sister.

Also I was afraid that if she kept mentioning it to me I somehow might start laughing and say, “Guess who taught him?”

Either way, it would be better for me, after being there for more than a month, to move out, so I announced that this time I really intended to settle down and get an apartment.

I first went into town and found a good job as an executive secretary with a large advertising agency, and then asked Deenie, the girl from the airport, to help me find an apartment.

She took me to several addresses, and the one I liked best was a spacious one-bedroom place in the Hillbrow section of Johannesburg, the young, swinging heart of the city.

Before I moved out of my sister’s house I called Jan aside and gave him a little talk. “Listen,” I said, “all this new stuff I taught you is between Mona, you, and me. So please keep it in the family, and don’t go out practicing it elsewhere.”

The apartment would not be ready until the end of the month, three days away, so Deenie asked me to stay over with her. Her place was smaller than the one I was getting, and it had only one small bed.

The first night I moved in, Deenie surprisingly made no attempt to have an intimacy with me. The second night was curiously the same. By the third night I couldn’t stand the sexual tension any longer. “Listen, Deenie,” I begged, “please let me make love to you.”

That night we had a fantastic time. She was beautiful and exciting and responded to my advances.

For the next two months we had a little affair, but conflict built up again, as in my first lesbian relationship with Liesbeth in Amsterdam. I was more of a butch and liked to please women rather than be pleased. That’s why I often give them satisfaction and don’t get it myself. Mentally yes, but physically no – for that I need a man.

And that was something else that was missing in a lesbian relationship. Something they can have no way – the real thing, cock. Forget about artificial devices and dildos. I happen to like to fuck, and that is one thing women cannot do with each other, at least not all the way. Emotionally, however, a love affair between two women is sometimes the most beautiful thing on earth, because they have more in common than men and women and more understanding of each other’s desires.

It didn’t take long before I was roaming around looking for male action, and I must say Deenie proved to be very tolerant of me when I did. At times she would come with me after work to a British-style pub called Dawson’s where ad men, travel agents, and bankers hung out, and often she picked up a little male something for herself, too. But basically she was a butch lesbian who specialized, as it were, in seducing older women with turbulent marriages – types who usually treated Deenie very generously and gave her many beautiful presents.

Eventually Deenie and I completely severed our sexual relationship, and I launched myself on a one-woman sex spree that at one time or other must have included every one of the habitués of Dawson’s pub.

I attribute my nymphomaniacal behavior at the time to the general South African atmosphere. Like any colonial situation where you belong to an over-indulged white ruling minority, pampered by servants indentured from the indigenous majority, boredom and irresponsibility inevitably set in.

Apart from our high-salaried, low-taxed jobs, all other energies were channeled into pursuit of amusement.

The same boring drunks turned up at the same drunken parties, creating an increasingly incestuous circle, with everyone screwing everybody else’s wife or girl.

As a consequence of this kind of behavior, so-called standards quickly decline, and the mortality rate on marriages – and human life – increases. For instance, South Africa has one of the highest suicide rates per head of white population in the world.

The figure is also swelled by the number of homosexuals driven over the brink by job, housing, and social discrimination. The gay girls and boys are being chased all over Johannesburg. From one bar to the next, each time their new hangout is raided.

The narrow-minded government – the Afrikaans-speaking people, and not the more liberal-minded English – think any form of sex (almost even marital sex) is a sin.

In Jo’burg – or Jewburg, as it is often called because of the overwhelmingly high percentage of Jews who live there – the Afrikaners, old family descendants of the early Dutch colonists, seldom married out of their conservative and cliquey society. Nevertheless, these apparently stuffy men adored the European girls, freewheeling blond German, Dutch, or Nordic types. They preferred their broad-minded sexual approach, their warmth and spontaneity, and, being the most popular, these girls, myself included, screwed their way around town for free.

At the outset the men would take me to a nice dinner or to the theater, but that gradually dwindled to just bringing around a bottle of wine, and finally they would just drop by, get laid, and leave.

In no time I acquired quite a reputation in this ofttimes hypocritical crowd, and at parties they would sneeringly say, “There goes the flying Dutchman – flying from bed to bed.”

It was at this time that I got turned off by the mentality of men. They are basically selfish in their urges, insisting on the right to make love when and how they want it.

Once I tried to extricate myself from the whole rotten web, and they snickered, “What’s the matter, has the little nymphomaniac got a disease?”

I did not especially want to be promiscuous, and would have loved a steady boyfriend to share things with and take care of me, but somehow I never met one, and toward the end of this period I was really fed up and depressed by men in general.

My best friends became the male homosexual crowd, who taught me how to cook and appreciate opera and ballet. The only red-blooded male I could confide in during that glum period was a little Jewish photographer named Aubrey. Ours was a platonic relationship, but at least I could depend on him to take me out in the evenings, knowing there was nothing ulterior about his intentions. And it was a barbecue party Aubrey took me to on a November night in 1966 where I met the man I was to become engaged to.

The occasion far the party was Guy Fawkes Day, when the British observe the anniversary of the day a man by that name attempted to blow up their houses of Parliament. It is traditionally celebrated with fireworks, and that is exactly what exploded when I met our host.

Carl Gordon was a twenty-eight-year-old American economist, recently arrived in Johannesburg on a tour of duty for his New York-based management-consultant firm, and he was every woman’s idea of the perfect catch.