The Art of It

"Hello, you must be Shayne. I'm Mr. Caldwell's boy, Jerome. Come on in. I'll take your bag to your room. He's out beyond the great room, in the pool. Go on back."

With that welcome, I entered the world of Ted Caldwell, retired supposed master spy, the man I'd been sent to the New Jersey shore to interview over the weekend for Spy magazine. I hadn't been looking forward to this assignment. I didn't half believe in what Caldwell said he was and what he'd said he'd done. His book had sold well, but I put that to the sensationalism in it. But Alex Jameson, the magazine's publisher, had been all keen on an interview—anything on Caldwell at this point in his book sales would help the magazine's bottom line, I could see, so I couldn't argue with that. And I was engaged to Jameson's granddaughter, Denise, so I couldn't very well wiggle out of the interview.

Ted Caldwell's "boy," whatever that meant—was a surprise. He certainly didn't look the least bit boyish, although he looked maybe four or five years younger than me—barely twenty. He was a chocolate brown and obviously worked out a lot. He'd answered the door in just wide-legged white muslin pants that rode low on his hips, and he was barefoot. There was a gold medallion on a string around his neck. Other than that, he was all muscle and male model looks. I could see that the New Jersey shore was a whole lot more laid back in midsummer than Manhattan was. I wasn't complaining, though. I was happy to be off the steaming asphalt of the streets of New York.

The wall toward the ocean in the great room was one whole expanse of window, and I could see the gray head of a man swimming laps in the terrace pool beyond, breaking water at a good, fast pace as I walked through the room toward the sliding glass doors to the pool area. He apparently saw me coming and was rising out of the pool as I came through the door.

Yes, indeed, the Jersey shore is far more laid back than the city, I thought, as I watched him emerge from the water. He was nude. This, I assumed was Ted Caldwell, author of the best-selling novel, The Candy Store, which supposedly was only a fictionalized—and toned down—memoir of his years trading gay male sex for secrets in service to his country's intelligence interests.

I recognized his face from the cover of his book and had one of my doubts blown away. The cover photo hadn't been doctored. He looked as good in the flesh in his mid fifties as he did on the cover of the book—no helpful airbrushing or lighting distracting from flaws. He was tall and trim and somehow had maintained the muscle tone of a man at least twenty years younger. His silver-gray head hair was stylishly cut to a short style and required no combing over. His chest hair, which extended down his belly and into his bush in a light matting that showed off his musculature to good effect, had speckles of reddish auburn in it, the whole downward trip ending with rather more dominance of the auburn in the bush. His leg muscles were firm, his butt well rounded, and his balls hung low. The cock was probably much longer and thicker than the norm, although who was I to judge a norm? I just knew what I saw at the Athletic Club and in the mirror.

I wouldn't normally scrutinize a man like this, but, like I noted, he unexpectedly rose out of the pool in the nude and my whole interview revolved around what I assumed would be a mild debunking of his sensationalist claims in his book. I must say, at first—quite full—view, I couldn't say he didn't fit the part of male stud—even in retirement.

I stood there, in the doorway, as he padded over to a chaise lounge, one of a pair, dripping on the hot patio stones the whole way, retrieved a pair of white, button-fly short shorts, and pulled them over his hips. They immediately turned damp and plastered themselves to his body, doing no good at all in making that cock disappear. I found my attention riveted to his midsection. I couldn't think of any other man I'd seen that fully equipped.

"Is that you, Mr. Tanner from Spy magazine, come to suck this old man dry?" He called out to me. "Come. Come out to my playground." He smiled, a very nice, disabling smile as I gulped through his colorful double entendre reference without being able to discern that it wasn't a well-turned and apt phrase. I had enjoyed his book—at least the writing style—and I felt yet another of my spiteful pre-notions dropping and shattering on the patio tiles. It was quite possible that he was facile enough with the language to have actually written his book himself. The critical undercurrent of the structure I'd already preprogrammed for this magazine interview was quickly being shredded into tatters. I was left with trying to tie him up in lies and contradictions.

"Umm, sorry for surprising you this way, Mr. Caldwell. And please call me Shayne. And as for coming out into the hot sun . . ." I spread my arms, bringing attention to the three-piece suit I was wearing. I had driven straight from the Manhattan office building our magazine hid in. And I had learned that, with interviews, it was better to arrive overdressed than under. The latter often was seen as disrespectful and the interview was a disaster from the get go.

"Surprising me? Oh, no, dear boy, you arrived within a couple of minutes of when I expected you. So, you seem to be the obsessively punctual type. We'll have to see what we can do about . . . how we can help you prolong your pleasures. Do call me Ted—or daddy, considering the differences in our ages. Oh, no, that wouldn't do. Jerome calls me daddy, and it would be so confusing when the three of us were together. Oh, sorry, I'm prattling again, and you've dropped your jaw."

I indeed had dropped my jaw. The innuendo he was throwing in there, the breezy "but of course we all are on one page with this" talk. It was straight out of his book. It should have put me off in reading the book, but, strangely enough, it hadn't. It had made me feel warm and wanting to think of the possibility of being in his world, which seemed so open and easy. It was like chocolate; I had felt evil in indulging in the book, but I read it to its completion and wondered what deeper level he could talk to that he hadn't put in his book.

This feeling that I only now was intellectualizing, coupled with the man just standing there toweling off his head and chest, with the water dripping down the white, now nearly transparent front panel of his shorts, was making me feel a little woozy and dangerously aroused. But Caldwell had prattled on while I was spaced out.

"No suits allowed on the Jersey shore in the summer, my boy. What you are wearing will not do for another second. Take that off on the spot. Here, here is a swim suit. Put this on right this instant. Here. Then you can take a cooling swim, and Jerome will bring us some drinks. I have a special cocktail for you to try. It's got passion fruit juice in it."

He was moving toward me, holding out a skimpy Speedo and capturing me with laughing eyes that were a pale blue.

"Uh, OK. I'll just take this and find where your Jerome has put my bag and be back out in a moment."

"No, no, I said instantly. You can strip all of that hot stuff off—and I'll admit that you do look very hot in it—right here, and Jerome will pick it up and take it to your room. Chop, chop. Or should I undress you myself?"

What was I to do? I slowly stripped down on the spot, with Caldwell standing there and smiling at me, taking in an eyeful. I did turn from him when I exchanged my briefs for the Speedo, and Caldwell just laughed.

"Now, into the pool. Then we'll lay and laze and bake and you can start your interview."

Caldwell stripped off his shorts again, walked over to the side of the pool, and neatly dove in. I followed him at a slower pace. We swam laps for a while and then we moved to the shallow end and hunched down and lay against the side of the pool, next to each other.

"You look like you work out, but that you could be getting a little bit better definition in the torso," he said while we were talking about gym work and what we did.

"Uh, well, I can't shake loose a lot of gym time in Manhattan. Work, you know."

"Yes, no doubt," he smiled, "And all of that extra exercise time with Denise Jameson, right?—I did hear right, didn't I, that you were shacking up with the publisher's daughter?"

"Well, um?"

"Big breasts, doesn't she. And those hips. Do you well in bed, does—?"

"Uh, well, everything good there. I do have to get material for an interview. Maybe we should be—"

"How'd you like the torso of that Jerome?" Ted asked, switching gear. "Your chest and six pack aren't bad, but how'd you like to be cut like Jerome is?"

"Well, um."

"You know, he looked no better than you did when he came to me, and now look at him. Here, move around and stand out and let me take a look at you. Yeah, hmm. Raise your arms."

I stood, feeling embarrassed and then feeling tingly and knowing I was trembling as we both stood up in the shallow water, up to our knees, and Caldwell ran his hand over my biceps and shoulders and chest muscles and then let the hand glide down to my lower belly and just rest there as he prattled on about exercises and equipment that would tighten me right out and bring out the definition.

I looked down and saw that he was half hard. And I'm ashamed to admit that I was too. I didn't look down, but I knew it from the sensations I felt.

I fell back into the water with a splash and sat on the floor of the pool, with water up to my neck and my eyes on his half-hard cock.

"The interview. I think we'd better get on with the interview," I croaked. "I've got a lot of questions, and it's just tonight that I plan on staying."

"Yes, that would be splendid," Caldwell chirped happily. And he gave me a happy smile—I'd like to say a pleased, satisfied smile, as that seemed more fitting—and turned and streamed off in a perfect breaststroke toward the pool steps.

The next two hours were quite productive for me, although I was being warmed by more than the cancerous rays of the sun. Caldwell stretched out on his back on one chaise, fully reclined and fully nude, and responded to all my questions in a witty, slightly risqué stream of fully coherent, well-organized, rich baritone expostulation. He was filling in background on things he had only hinted at in his book, and I wasn't able to catch him in a single inconsistency. My preconceived line of attack that I had wanted to use as a tongue-in-cheek approach to covering his whole life with a question mark and a whisper of scam in my Spy article was sliding off in little chunks and smashing to the ground. I found myself searching for a whole new line of foundation for the article, and the clearest concept I was being able to come up with was something ricocheting back and forth between "Wow" and "Hot."

The heat was getting to me. The heat of the sun beating down on our bodies, the heat of the stories behind the stories in his book, the warmth and relaxation and tingly feeling coming from those cocktails Jerome kept bringing out to us, the increasing warmth of the reactions of my body while watching Jerome deliver the cocktails in his billowy muslin pants and seeing his long feet and plump toes, the heated looks Caldwell was casting my way as I lay on the chaise lounge with the laptop propped on a basket that betrayed that I was having very disturbing feelings and reactions, and, above all else, Caldwell lying there, lazily running his nails along his slim, well-muscled torso and then down to fondle his half-hard cock.

I felt myself breathing heavily and my voice becoming thick as I asked the questions and then tried, with not the greatest success, to enter the gist of his fascinating, but definitely not family-rated stories into my files—when he suddenly hopped up off the chaise lounge, reached for his now-dry shorts, stepped into them, and announced, "Nap time. I can tell you are getting drowsy, and it's time to take a nap. Shower and rest in your room, and the house will go completely quiet as I do the same. Dinner is at 7:00. Jerome grills a mean steak, and we have some lovely wine—unless, of course, you would like to continue with these cocktails. Like them, do you? Give your cock a little twinge do they?"

There was little I could say in response to the torrent I was growing accustomed to from Caldwell. And he left me speechless with that last comment, because, now that I thought about it, that's exactly what the cocktails did for me—they gave my cock a twinge. And it was far from an unpleasant experience, although it was with great embarrassment that I now thought about it.

I showered and pulled clean boxer shorts out of my bag and stretched out on my bed, drowsy, and my eyes watching the slow-moving paddles of a ceiling fan above the bed. The room was in shadows when I awoke. I don't know what woke me, but it seemed to be a bell somewhere. When reflecting on it later, I quite suspected that I had been awakened on purpose.

I lay there, trying to decide whether to get up and review my notes or drift off to blissful sleep again. I was leaning toward the latter, because I woke in a mellow mood and my cock was hard. I must have been having a pleasant wet dream, but, as with most dreams, I couldn't remember a bit of what that was except for waking with a pleasant feeling and slightly panting. In my world that reflected a sex dream.

It took a while laying there before I heard the sounds, and it must have been the residual randiness that pulled me out of my bed to investigate what were pretty clearly identifiable sounds. I padded down the hall.

They had left the door open to the master bedroom and they were both on the bed, naked. Jerome was on all fours and Ted was hunched over his hips, fucking him in long strokes. I watched Ted's cock pull all of the way out, which was a long journey, and then slowly, inch by inch, work its way in to the root, followed by three quicker strokes and then the long one. Ted's hands were wrapped around to Jerome's chest and were latched on to the chocolate god's nipples. By the expressions in their faces and the moans being emitted by both, I knew they were at the height of passion.

I turned and fled back to my room—and laid on my back and masturbated, trying, without success to replicate the moanings I was hearing from down the hall. I was in a whole new world here. I'd never reacted this way to men before in my life. And I'd certainly never caught the reality show version of men having sex with each other.

I was scared. And what scared me the most is that I didn't get up and put on my three-pieced suit and just walk out of there.

Dinner was delicious, taken at a long table in the dining room, overlooking the shimmering lights in the pool and the relentlessly pounding surf of the ocean beyond. It also was an eerily quiet dinner; not a word was spoken on anything that had happened earlier in the day. Ted sat at one end of the table, still only in his shorts, and Jerome, still only in the muslin pants, pattered about delivering food and pouring wine. There was soft pseudo-Brazilian samba music in the background, Brazil 66, if I wasn't mistaken—or something similar, at least. I sat at the other end of the table, with the laptop open and humming on a chair beside me, trying to pick up on and file away the nuggets of gold being rattattattated at me from Ted's end of the table in a rich, rambling unloading of his spying exploits—most of which left me gagging on my food and blushing.

Afterward, we adjourned to the adjacent living area and sat at opposite ends of a huge, curled sectional sofa facing the ocean while Jerome padded about in the kitchen area, cleaning up the dishes.

Ted had told me that I could have this time to backtrack and ask questions about what he had already told me in his long, fascinating, extremely hard-to-believe save for the believable detail monologue. And while we talked, and Ted continued to weave a web of contentment and slight sexual stimulation around me, Jerome appeared with another of the cocktails we'd had earlier in the afternoon. I didn't intend to drink the one he set in front of me, but as Ted and I talked and I became engrossed in our discussions, I noticed Jerome taking away an empty glass and putting down another full one, and then another one after that.

I was feeling woozy and fully contented and more than just a little tingly when Ted suggested we needed to take an evening swim, with the pool just lit by the under-the-subsurface lights.

I don't remember at all being convinced I didn't need a swimsuit for that swim. I do remember being embraced and kissed by Ted in the middle of the pool. I vaguely remember being asked if I'd ever had a blow job as I lay on my back on the deck at the shallow end of the pool, my butt on the rim and Ted standing between my spread legs. I remember that, because I said no, but I lied—just barely, though. I'd let a guy do it at my prep school for college in the bathroom of our dorm, because in that year I was trying anything new and forbidden. But I didn't feel all that guilty about saying no, because that prep school blow job wasn't anything at all like Ted's sucking—or his bringing me to the brink and laughing and holding me still until the moment passed and then starting to suck my bulb and flick my piss slit with the tip of his tongue again and deep throating me until at last he let me come—and swallowed it. And then came over me and laid his chest on mine and kissed me.

I was with it enough to moan and object when he asked me if I'd ever been fucked. And, ashamedly, I was also lucid enough when, after moving his head down and tonguing my hole and working my cock again with his hand, his face loomed above mine again as well as his hand with the disk of a condom between two fingers, and he asked me if he could, and I moaned not just my acceptance but also my need.

He was gentle and took it slow and praised me when I took it all and stopped long enough after I cried out at the beginning of the stroking that he was too big for me for my walls to stretch to accommodate him. And I remember rising to new, never-before-experienced heights of pleasure as he fucked me for what seemed like forever.

And I was mostly "with it" when I let Jerome kiss me while he was toweling me dry, and I must have had at least some of my faculties when, after he had led me to my bed, and stretched out beside me, I begged for Jerome to fuck me on all fours, like a dog—just like I'd seen Ted fuck him. And he did.

I woke in the middle of the night, sandwiched between Ted and Jerome, and I remember murmuring my pleasure when Ted moved my body to where I was stretched out on his body, my back on his chest, and his arms wrapped around my torso, and he raised his knees between my legs and spread my thighs with them and slowly entered my channel and rose deeper and deeper inside me and worked my nipples with his fingers, as I moaned and moved my hips, fucking myself, and beginning to drift off again as Jerome took my lips in his and encased my cock in his hand and started to stroke me. If this all sounds confusing and disjointed—and overwhelming—that's pretty accurately how I experienced it at the time.

I was alone when I woke. My muscles felt tired, my channel was sore, and I was remembering only bits and pieces of what had happened. But I remembered enough to know that it had happened—and that I hadn't walked out the previous afternoon before it did happen.

Ted was at the table for breakfast, with the same cheeriness of the night before, not indicating that anything momentous had happened—and it struck me that, for him, it undoubtedly hadn't been anything new or special. What he had done—what he and Jerome had done—fit in perfectly with their world—the world Ted wrote about in his book and described to me in the interview. This was my own disconnect with reality. I was the one out of touch with the world—at least of the world I had intruded into for this interview.