Women in Underwear

in Playboy*

Karen sits on a sofa in her boyfriend’s underwear reading poetry. The underwear, resembling an Olympic diver’s swimsuit, fits her curiously: too tight across her bottom, too large in front where his penis was bound, the fabric forming the shape of him there even though empty now. She wears his underwear for the same reasons she reads poetry, to feel closer to him. She wanted him to wear her underwear too but he refused. He could not explain why it was all right for a woman to wear a man’s underwear but not conversely, and although she accused him of having double standards he said no argument would get him into wearing women’s underwear.
“But they’re not any woman’s,” she said distressed. “They’re mine.”
“I’ll carry them in my pocket,” he offered. “Isn’t that close enough?”
She was disappointed, even mildly hurt.
“Don’t you want me wearing your underwear?” she asked.
He did not know how to reply, for the question was unlike any ever asked of him before.
“It’s not that I want you to,” he finally said. “It’s nice that you do. It’s cute. But it’s not that I want you to.”
Her face twisted with annoyance.
“Wearing your underwear is cute?”
He smiled, then nodded faintly.
“Is that the word you mean?” she persisted.
“Karen, what do you want me to say? In your underwear you’re sexy. In mine, you’re cute. Sexy but cute.”
She sulked for a while. She had hoped he would think that wearing each other’s underwear was romantic, like exchanging rings only more intimate. She took his refusal as an indication that they were drifting apart, that he was losing interest in her, that there might be another woman, one better read than she was. Hurt and haughty, Karen now sits on the sofa reading, but his underwear has worked its way uncomfortably into the furrow of her bottom and she has trouble concentrating on the poems.

Early Saturday night, Laura left her apartment to meet her lover wearing the satin floral-print bra-and-panty set he had given her for Christmas. She had received a set in black silk for her birthday, a red camisole for Valentine’s Day, and numerous pairs of panties in cotton, satin, and silk for no special reason, simply for his own delight in giving her lingerie. That her husband, too, would take pleasure from these gifts troubled her lover less than the possibility that other lingerie she wore might be gifts from another lover.
“And who gave you these little nothings?” he once had asked, his suspicion over her white-lace bra and panties momentarily greater than his arousal.
“I buy my own lingerie,” she had replied, and he wondered if her husband had ever received the same answer to a similar question.

Originally from the island of Melos but residing now in Paris, Venus wears, tied low on her hips, a chiton exactly the color of her white flesh. Sculpted and sexy, she has rather small, shapely breasts, no arms, and a lovely navel.

For twenty-five years Eva had thought her breasts were too small. The fact that most women her age had breasts already sagging gave her no comfort. She wouldn’t mind a little sag, but her breasts remained as perky and small as an adolescent’s. She had blamed her mother for this misfortune and had spent her girlhood terribly self-conscious about what she considered a deformity, developing a mild case of round-shoulderedness in an attempt to hide what she did not have. Believing that boys desired only girls with large breasts, Eva was certain boys wanted nothing from her.
Eventually she met and fell in love with a man who thought himself too short. She would tell him that she liked being the same height as her lover (though actually she was slightly taller) because she felt equal, and he, in turn, gave elaborate, extensive attention to her breasts, which were very responsive. Although Eva and he knew each other’s weakness, they never used this knowledge against each other even in their worst arguments. He eventually left her for a shorter woman with, to Eva’s relief, unremarkable breasts, and Eva regretted losing him as much from love as from fear at reentering the competitive world of well-endowed women.
And so for her fortieth birthday, in an effort to gain confidence and attract more attention, Eva purchased a bra with underwire cups lightly padded for a more noticeable décolletage. In it she felt renewed and unintimidated. When she held her shoulders back, her blouse reveled an alluring cleavage that fascinated her even more than it did the men who glanced at her. For the first time in her life she knew how it must feel to be a complete woman.

Although tall and lean, Anne acquire a soft belly after childbirth that no amount of dieting or sit-ups could alter. To conceal what she believed her only physical flaw, she wears hipsters, panties cut high on the leg with lace trim reaching to her navel. She has a drawer full in solid pastels and floral prints, stripes and polka dots, and even a pair in a leopard-skin pattern, all with the same cut. Yet no matter how elegant she looks in them or how they make her long, shapely legs appear even longer, her desperation over her waning beauty is only partly soothed by the pleasures of motherhood.

In her office mail, Jacki received a manila envelope with cotton bikini panties inside. A type letter, unsigned, requested that she wear the panties before returning them in the envelope provided, postage paid and addressed only to a local post office box. Accompanying the panties was enough money for a fine dinner. The offer seemed to her a perverse joke and she immediately discarded everything but the cash.
A month later, another manila envelope arrived with another pair of panties, also cotton bikinis but in a different color. She became mildly intrigued and wondered who this secret, if strange, admirer could be. Someone at the office? An old, extinguished flame? Perhaps even her husband. This time she did not discard the panties for it seemed silly to throw out such a delicate, pretty thing, and the naughty sensation she experienced while wearing them increased thrillingly as she slipped the faintly soiled panties into the return envelope which she dropped discreetly into a mailbox.
The next month, another pair, and another the month after that. Cotton bikinis in various pastels, stretch-lace hipsters, satin prints, even red silk during the Christmas season. With each new pair Jacki felt her involvement deepening with someone whose identity remained unknown, and she cherished the attention that kept her from leading a normal life. She thought of him often, particularly when wearing the gift panties, and to alleviate guilt from her unfaithfulness she used the enclosed money to buy small gifts for her husband. The pattern continued for twenty-four months, then the manila envelopes ceased arriving. Jacki worried that he might lie injured somewhere, that he might have moved to another town. Worst of all, that he had fallen in love with someone else. After the second month and still nothing, she knew it was over between them with no explanation or farewell, and she endured her loss with all the heartache of a lover abandoned.

Bev had not made love for over a year, ever since the man for whom she left her husband left her. This rejection cooled her completely toward men until she met Brian, and it seemed likely they would make love. After showering, after shaving her legs and underarms, after rubbing her body with lotion and dabbing fingertips of perfume onto her throat, behind her ears and between her breasts, she poked through her underwear drawer indecisively. White may be too innocent—she was, after all, the mother of two—black overly seductive, and red made her look cheap. She had a blue-lace bra-and-panty set, but it had been a gift from the man who had used and deceived her and left her life in shambles, and she wanted no recollections of him that night, nothing that could distract or deject her.
She chose a bra and panty set the color of violets because they reminded her of spring, of new life and new beginnings. After stepping into the panties and fastening the lace bra, she looked into a full-length mirror, and her heart ached at the sight of herself. All vitality in her body had disappeared, as if her self-imposed celibacy had drained the life out of her. She hated the man who had betrayed her, hated men who take what they want and leave nothing. She sat on the edge of her as unrestrained tears seeped from her eyes before falling upon her bare thighs.

Late Saturday night, Laura left her lover’s apartment in mismatched bra and panties. The deep blue lace bra was the same one in which she had arrived several hours earlier, but the panties were pink. In his impatience and desire, her lover had not removed the deep blue lace panties while making love to her, and so that she might have a more comfortable taxi ride home he presented her with a fresh pair. He kept the blue lace panties in a drawer among his handkerchiefs, and the feel and scent of them brought to his mind delightful memories.

Just before bed, Danielle lowers the window shade in her darkened room as the street lamp dimly illuminates her body. Often a young man, reading in a hammock strung on the fire escape, glances at her, and when his glance coincides with her lowering the shade, a quiet thrill spreads from their hearts. She has appeared at the window in a T-shirt and panties, sometimes in a satin teddy that shimmers from the streetlamp like moonlit water, and, on randy nights, in panties only. Danielle and the young man feel an affection for each other because of these intimate moments shared only just before bed.

While sitting for hours night after night sipping cognac, Henri sketches La Goulue doing the can-can. He has decided to make La Goulue’s swirling skirt and not the singing of Jane Avril as the central focus of the poster requested by Monsieur Zidler, the nightclub’s owner (who will pay him with free drinks for a month, the best deal Henri has had on his work in months). In the foreground, a profiled silhouette of La Goulue’s dancing partner, Valentin. Soon the poster appears all over Paris, La Goulue’s kicking heels and vast display of pantaloons creating a sensation. Henri’s father, the Count de Toulouse, is infuriated that the family’s noble name is linked with such pornography. Jane Avril refuses to speak with Henri. Valentin vehemently denies that his nose is so large and his chin so pointed. Even Monsieur Zidler complains that Henri should have drawn more people in the background. Still, many new customers come to the Moulin Rouge just as Henri had hoped, but its previous raw atmosphere is permanently spoiled for him by the popularity generated from his poster.

Marge wears crotch-less panties when making love with her husband. Aside from the garment’s erotic potential it allows her to have intercourse while hiding the scar from a Caesarian section. At first she is relieved that her husband finds the panties arousing though odd, but when he eventually wants her naked Marge turns self-conscious and resists. Peeling the panties down her hips with tender insistence, he gently kisses the thin, hard scar shaped like a smile.

At a shopping mall, Billy is caught stealing a pair of women’s panties. Store policy requires notification of the police, but, as Billy is a minor, he is released into the custody of his parents. His mother is shocked and embarrassed by the drawer-full of stolen underwear discovered in his bedroom, and the obligatory lecture given him by his father deteriorates into curiosity about his son’s sexual experiences with teenage girls.

Needing an image for her painting of a woman in a garter belt and stockings, Diane perused several men’s magazines but could not find what she wanted. Rather than ask a woman friend to pose for her, she decided to be her own model. She bought a black garter belt and black stockings at a local lingerie shop, then returned to her studio.
She arranged her easel across from a full-length mirror, then stripped to her bra and panties. After placing the garter belt around her waist, she rolled the edges of a stocking until it resembled a donut, stuck her toe in the middle and unrolled the stocking up her leg, high on her thigh. She fastened the stocking to the garter belt’s little clasps, one in front and one in back, then rolled the other stocking up her other leg and fastened it as well. Seeing herself in the mirror and certain that only a man could conceive of a garter belt, she picked up a pencil and began working.
Unsure of the exact image she wanted, Diane first sketched herself simply facing the mirror, turning her head repeatedly from her reflection to her easel and back again. Initially, she had the cool eye of an observer, but the image in the mirror soon aroused her. She was surprised: not that a woman could arouse her but that the woman was herself. This did not distract her from working. If anything, she sketched more intensely, with heightened and unwavering concentration, the observer’s cool eye transformed to one of increased involvement.

Rachel poses in lingerie ads for the most fashionable catalogs. Other models consider such work the lowest in the business, but the pay is excellent and she keeps her unclothed body in superb shape. To add style to her poses, to appear as something other than cheesecake, she insists on arranging flowers while wearing a cotton camisole and a thong bikini, lounges upon a fluffy bedspread in a point d’esprit stretch-lace bra and panties, reading. Not a favorite with photographers and art directors, Rachel wants to wear eyeglasses as well. Women in eyeglasses also wear lingerie, she insists. After a fifteen-minute argument, the glasses are compromisingly placed upon the open book.

In her hometown in Colorado, Cheryl enjoyed the attention of the local boys in part because of her large breasts. Had she not also been a pretty, blue-eyed blonde, the attention, she knew, would not have been so lavish. Although most other girls in town were jealous of her pink and pendulous treasures, Cheryl considered herself blessed until moving to New York where she studied acting. After numerous wolf whistles from construction workers, lewd comments from teenage boys and countless fondling by men in crowded subway cars, she knew she must dress down in order to diminish what had previously been a proud asset. She purchased a Minimizer bra by Lilyette, guaranteed to take an inch and a half off her bust line, but even this did not deter one middle-aged businessman from reaching out while passing her in the opposite direction at an intersection and grabbing what he wanted.

Tired of waiting, Terri has decided to end her affair with Michael. She has waited for his phone calls, his spontaneous and infrequent visits, his impending separation from his wife, and she refuses to wait any longer. She wants something more from a relationship and has known for a while now that she will not get it from him. Her decision has not been easy, for she loves him and discovered with him those places no man had ever touched quite right, believing until then that no man ever would. But her persisting loneliness and need have become too great an emotional payment no matter what pleasure she found in his embrace. Although she bears some resentment, some anger, she wants one last delicious night with him. To increase his subsequent feeling of loss, she wears his favorite lingerie, hoping that his recollection of her form moving gracefully through her room or stretched beneath him in a black-silk bra and matching panties will haunt and arouse him long after she has sent him away forever.

For the past two weeks John has been employed as a security guard at a lingerie shop. He is there not so much to prevent shoplifting as to insure that undesirable characters do not enter and create a disturbance. The salary is not good and he is on his feet most of the day, but when a pretty brunette holds a merry widow up to her body and gazes at herself in the mirror, John slowly shakes his head, smiles faintly, and says to himself, ‘You got to love this job.’

Kim has a small bottom, not unusual for an Asian. Although she cannot easily correct this inheritance as she could if it were her nose or her breasts, she orders a pair of panties with a padded seat from a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog. The garment, when it arrives, is the most ridiculous item she has ever seen, but when she wears it under slacks or a dress her bottom rounds out like that of a pony. What troubles her now is that when she takes a lover, the illusion will disappear along with the padded panties.

After completing the first sketch, Diane faced the easel so that the image in the mirror was of herself from the side. She shifted her weight so that her hip would round more fully, and for a moment she admired her own beauty. When she placed her free hand on the curve of her bottom, the image looked a little vampy but accentuated her breasts. While sketching, she felt a mild tingling in her breasts, almost like an enjoyable itch. With pencil still in hand she rubbed her thumb several times along her nipple. This both eased and intensified the tingling.
With the completion of the next drawing, she rearranged her pose slightly, the hand previously on her hip now on the front of her thigh. The lightest pressure of her thumb lay along the edge of her panties, and while sketching she pressed her thumb gently and rhythmically, pulse-like, until the tingling in her breast appeared between her legs. The tingling and the silky feel of the nylon stocking were so pleasurable that her thumb slipped beneath the elastic of her panties and scratched lightly in her pubic hair. Never did she stop sketching: the hand with the pencil maintained its pace while the thumb in her panties moved to a different, more rapid rhythm. She sketched and scratched, her thumb now wet with her own excitement, and at the drawing’s completion she dipped her index finger into herself, then gazed with thrilled fascination at her image in the mirror. She resumed sketching as her other hand nestled deep in the front of her panties, her fingers steadily stroking her surfaces and depths. The pencil moved more slowly across the paper as her caresses quickened, bringing her closer to the release that she observed in the mirror. She ceased her work entirely when floods of sensation spread through her body and she came in trembling, leg-weakening waves.
Later, satisfied, evaluating the sketches while smoking a cigarette, Diane knew that she had captured that special love between artist and subject.

Knowing she would miss him like crazy, Cindy worried that he might not miss her at all. They had been lovers only a short time and now he was leaving for several weeks. After their last night together, she rode with him in a taxi to the airport, and as he stood on the curb after kissing her good-bye through the open window, she reached under her skirt and slipped off her panties which she pressed into his hand an instant before the taxi pulled away.
For the entire flight, black silk rolled like syrup through his fingers.

Barbara and Jane are best friends who share a similar though opposite problem. Jane has small breasts, while Barbara’s are rather large, and Jane’s behind is substantial, though Barbara has almost none. Each woman can purchase a bra in one size, panties in another. They problem arises when they want a matching set. Because the best shops are politely reluctant to split sets, the two friends have decided to shop together for sets they both like. Visiting several shops, their gaiety increasing at each, they buy cotton intimates in white with ruffled edges, sheer black floral chiffon of imported silk, satin string Charmeuse bra-and-panty sets in blue, in pink, in emerald.
“Let’s get these,” Barbara says, or Jane is sure, “This color would be smashing for you,” or they both knew “This is absolutely us.” They arrive laden with packages at Jane’s apartment where they open a bottle of rosé and sip as they sit on the floor laughing at what the sale women must have thought of them.
“That we’re lovers,” Jane says tenderly to her friend lying on the rug, her full breasts cupped in white lace scalloped lace, nipples showing through the pattern like pink flowers which, with the tip of her finger, Jane lightly touches.

Thirty-five years after she climbed higher than he did on the monkey bars, years after adolescence and high school, marriages, children, divorces, Susie and Arnie are lovers at last. The fact amazes and delights them both, the strange road that brought them back together again only proving that, just as both of their mothers had said, they were meant for each other. Happily complying with Arnie’s request, Susie wears baby-blue cotton panties beneath her skirt. As he reaches for her, Arnie feels once more, with a kind of wonderment, a kind of awe, the vision he had cherished ever since that distant afternoon on the playground where he could see all the way to London, all the way to France.

Carol and Roger are in trouble. From her point of view it seems a minor problem. Surely nothing that should end their relationship, their engagement, their plans for the future. Roger sees it differently. How his woman looks in underwear means a great deal to him, but how Carol looks in underwear leaves something to be desired.
It’s not that he wants her wearing anything lewd or vulgar or anything that glows in the dark or is edible. Just something other than waist-high white cotton panties with a white, practical bra. Something more feminine. Something, admittedly, sexier. He loves her body, her blue eyes, what she bakes and how she imitates Piaf. He wants to change nothing about her. Only her underwear. For unless that visual delight of a woman in lingerie is satisfied by Carol, he knows he’ll seek it elsewhere, that quite possibly his faithfulness can be insured by nothing more than a lace bra and a string bikini in satin or silk, even in white.

Sharon has a large pubic patch, all the more apparent because she’s brunette. She waxed last summer, but the process left an angry rash high on her thighs and, by autumn, the soft, dark hair had grown in thicker than before. Resigned to letting nature take its course, Sharon wears panties edged with embroidery, silk boxers in pastels, or satin tap pants and camisoles, and she is comforted by thinking that birds do not nest in bare trees.

While everyone else ran down the street to see over the houses and the church, Gerty remained seated on the rock.
“It’s fireworks,” Cissy Caffrey said, but Gerty was far more intrigued with the man in the dark clothes watching her.
Feeling his eyes on her sent her pulse tingling. When she looked at him for a moment, their glances met and she knew she was his by the white-hot passion in that glance. Catching her knee in her hands so as not to fall, she leaned back to look up at the fireworks and revealed to him her beautifully shaped legs. After another flash in the sky she leaned back further. Her garters were blue.
“Look,” they shouted, “look, there it is.”
She seemed to hear the panting of his heart and she leaned back more and more, trembling in every limb from being so far back but willing to do anything that he might have a full view high up above the knee.

Overcoming some mild embarrassment, Tom purchases a lingerie video.
“Gift for a bachelor party,” he assures the clerk who raises a skeptical eyebrow.
Although Tom has seen hard-core videos, he found them tasteless and unfeminine, the women rarely beautiful. That night, he feeds the tape produced by Playboy into the machine, turns out the lights, and lies on his bed. Two women in the desert, a lean blonde and a curvaceous brunette, walk toward the camera wearing bra-and-panty sets, then only panties; then they are walking away from the camera, turning back. A woman in bed, wearing black lingerie, caresses herself, then undresses completely before a whirling electric fan. Male hands remove a stocking from a woman’s leg. All the women are stunning, and the camera moves closely and slowly along their bodies while soft jazz plays in the background. Tom’s heartbeat quickens and his breath labors as three lovely women in camisoles and panties have a slow-motion pillow fight, feathers floating. Each visual is teasingly, agonizingly brief. His blood surges as a stunning creature in a sheer pink, wet T-shirt and nothing else rolls on her side in three inches of water, but it’s of Laura that he’s dreaming.

On a steamy night in July, Julia followed Jack up the stairs of his apartment building, the over-lit stairwell turning hotter with each flight. When they reached the top of the staircase Jack unbolted a door to a rectangle of black sky. A cool gust of air passed over Julia’s face. She hesitated, uncertain where the dark rooftop ended and a drop of five stories began. Jack beckoned, his hand outstretched to her. She could see the glittering shafts of the World Trade Center and, to the left, cables of a bridge strung like a carnival ride. Above them, the summer night and the smudged, bright risk of the full moon.
“No one’s ever up here?” she whispered excitedly.
A half dozen adjacent tenements connected without a gap. Clasping Julia’s hand, Jack led her from one rooftop to the next, carefully guiding the way over phone cables and random bricks and tar buckets she could barely see but that Jack seemed familiar with in the darkness. When they came to the last rooftop where the row of buildings ended, he turned her so she faces uptown, the Empire State Building rising white and castle-like in the center. She placed herself in his arms and rested there a while until he kissed her. He kissed her many times, each kiss more fiery than the next, his body warm and alive against her. She felt herself turning, then he was behind her. She held the parapet for support as he deftly lifted her skirt to white satin panties and her bottom full and round as the moon.

He had spent another embarrassing night with Clio and her graduate school friends whose spirits, like their faces, were without a wrinkle. They attended a rock concert in the park that summer night, then he and Clio returned to her book-filled, candle-lit apartment off campus. After kicking herself free of her jeans, she cuddled beside him on the sofa wearing a Springsteen T-shirt and blue cotton panties with little flowers on them. He felt her gaze, knew she felt his distance, then turned to her eyes which were dark and large, the whites luminous in the dim light.
“You look nine years old,” he said miserably.
Clio shook her head for dark strands of hair to drape over one eye. Her chin extended and she smoked an imaginary cigarette.
“Well Dah-ling,” she said with exaggerated affectation, “the party at Gatsby’s was mah-velous,” then she exhaled imaginary smoke, her face set with distinction, a pimple apparent beneath her ear.
“Now you look eleven,” he told her.
Her façade instantly vanished, she frowned a moment, rose to her hands and knees, and crawled toward the end of the sofa. She stopped, reached with one hand behind her, tugged her panties tight and looked at him. The panties snugly formed the perfect shape between her legs as the material disappeared in the separation of the round, ripe halves of her flawless, hovering, youthful bottom. He was dazzled, immobile as a deer frozen in headlights.
“How old do I look now?” she asked.

When Miss Bowman sees her professor scanning art books in the reference section, she wants to say hello, have coffee with him, and even more for him to make love to her regardless of his standards, his age, his wife. He kneels for something on the bottom shelf, and as she passes very close to him in the aisle she utters a breathless, “Excuse me” while swirling her skirt over his head before hurrying on.

One morning Fran knew she was pregnant though her husband said, “You’re crazy.” When her period was late he attributed it to the power of her will. Only a home pregnancy kit convinced him and he reacted with amazement and an erection.
Much of her lingerie would soon be useless. Bras too tight, merry windows too confining, and besides, she was already rarely feeling sexy or attractive. She felt best wearing nothing but a robe. Floor length, mid-length, short ones on hot days, in cotton or flannel, sometimes black satin on those nights she wasn’t nauseous and he made love to her with particular tenderness.
She wore robes when she got home from work, robes on days in bed reading books on babies and watching talk shows; she’d wear one to the market if she could and did to bed on cooler nights. New robes appeared. Two for her birthday, plaid robes, pink robes, and one her father had purchased from a famous hotel. Her favorite was a Japanese-style robe with gold embroidery, and her husband thought she looked beautiful in it even with her head in the loo.

On Manhattan’s hottest days, with hazy sunlight baking the tenement and humidity so high the pipes in the water closet drip, Mrs. Parisi sits at her window in a cotton chemise. The straps are thin as spaghetti, there is lace where breasts should be though her breasts descended years ago. The bodice generously surrounds her, while the skirt-like section hangs nearly to her knees. She sits quietly at the window most days for many hours when she feels well enough to sit up at all. Her daughter on Staten Island phones daily. A neighbor will check to see if she needs anything from the market. Except for these brief and welcome interruptions she remains at the window waiting for a rare, faint breeze that will stir loose strands of her white hair, brittle and thin as dry thread.

To him she was the beautiful one, his heart’s darling, and he wrote a book using the tools which he thought proper to tell her story. There were four children, three were brothers, but only their sister was brave enough to climb that tree to look in the forbidden window to see what was going on. The little girl had muddied her drawers, and the muddy drawers meant something else to each of her three brothers looking up the apple tree that she had climbed. He wrote the story once, told in the mind of the brother who believed she was lost to him forever. He wrote the story again, this time with the desire and shame of the brother aroused by the muddy drawers, then he told the story once more, through the third brother filled with venom because his sister was promiscuous. None of the three stories was right, so he tried to do it himself, to let Faulkner tell the story, but he believed he still had not drawn the complete picture of the little girl with the muddy drawers who had climbed the tree and looked in the window where her grandmother lay dead.

Except for her doctor, Ruth has not undressed before a man since her husband died twelve years ago. When she met Abe at her grandson’s wedding, he told her during their first dance together that he was going to marry her.
“You’re talking through your hat,” she laughed, then looked away, but six months later the families met again for another joyous celebration.
On their wedding night, Ruth wore a cream satin nightgown, a gift from her eldest daughter. She did not worry how Abe might react to her wrinkled neck and shoulders, her thighs sagging and veined, nor the pale, loose skin on her belly. What distressed her was him finally seeing the effects of her mastectomy.
“Please turn off the light,” she muttered before undressing. “I don’t look so pretty.”
“Never mind about that,” Abe told her while reaching for her hand. “I’ve known since out first dance.

“I don’t want to wake you,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You say that now, but when someone’s nuzzling your neck at three in the morning you might feel differently.”
“Not if it’s you.”
“Even at three in the morning?’
“Try me.”
“And if you don’t want to, I’ll feel rejected and have woken you for nothing.”
Pause.
“I know,” she said. “I’ll leave a signal.”
“Where?”
“Inside the door,” and she paused again before her voice dropped enticingly. “Wake me if my panties hang from the knob.”

On her way home from the office, Melissa stopped at a lingerie boutique to exchange the bra that matched the panties Neil had given her the night before. The bra and panty set was in a floral design on a black satin background, and though the panties fit perfectly the bra was one size too large. A sales woman assured her there was no trouble exchanging the bra for another, then directed Melissa to a particular rack along the wall.
The lingerie was displayed on little plastic hangers, bras on top, panties beneath. The floral design Neil had chosen was repeated on a peach background, and there were solids in the same style in pink, in white, in pale blue. Melissa noticed a sign indicating the rack was a two-for-one sale, buy one bra and panty set at the regular price and get the second set free. Suddenly her heart surged. She knew he would never pass up a bargain, and the second set had not been given to her. Suspicion, reawakened and reaffirmed, fired her Latin blood, and she wanted to scratch at his face, his eyes. Mostly, she wanted to get her hands on this other woman.
Surely Neil’s gift was no thoughtful lover’s gesture at all but a weak attempt to ease his own guilt. Had he bought the same pair for her? Had he mistakenly given to one woman what belonged to another? Was the other woman in the boutique at the same moment, for the same reason, exchanging the bra for a different one, for the one Melissa was exchanging? Her dark eyes widely scanned the shop for the woman with larger breasts who was the real cause of his alleged late nights at the office. Problems at the warehouse, trucks breaking down, all were lies. Had she known for certain that his mistress would appear in the boutique, Melissa would have stayed until closing if necessary to confront her. Instead, she hurried home without exchanging the bra which she now hated and would die before ever wearing. She had a quick rum, then another, and waited for Neil.

Since entering the world of international finance, Casey (though Kathryn at the office), wears the finest undergarments money can buy. Her salary is dazzling, and there’s profit sharing, expense accounts, trips to foreign capitals. The hours are long and the work often tedious, but what she likes least is the expected, unspoken dress code. Slacks are frowned upon, while skirts and dresses are never above the knee and always in subdued colors, with nothing to highlight her womanhood, her attractiveness.
And so to prevent the outer woman from becoming the inner one, to nourish her sensuality at any cost—the heights of indulgence equaled only by the price of the item—Tammy wears a plissé satin slip or a pure silk charmeuse bra and panty set, luxury unsurpassed. On the way to the conference room, she walks with private pleasure in nylons ordered from Italy by the world’s most discerning women.

Mac drove until the tank was empty, then left the midnight turnpike for the truck stop, Union 76 rising bright above the pavement. His partner woke from dozing when the truck downshifted on the exit ramp, headlights passing like a ghostly arm above the dark landscape. There was a thin covering of snow, only the evergreens alive. He filled the tank with diesel while stretching his legs, his back, sensation at last returning to his ass which seemed considerably flattened from eight hours behind the big wheel. His partner revived, blinking beneath the harsh light of the station. Mac paid with the company’s credit card, then parked near other trucks, all of them idling so the diesel doesn’t freeze, so the air pressure doesn’t drop, so the cabs keep warm before they head for the road and a delivery, a pick-up, or, hopefully, home.
The truck stop was an oasis, bright and busy along the dark highway. At the restaurant Mac had fresh apple pie and coffee while his partner had pie and coffee and coffee to go since he would be taking over. They paid, kept receipts, then browsed the gift shop so as to delay the long drive ahead. Among the spark plugs and flashlights, buckles and belts, knives and work gloves, sometimes there were gifts for the women waiting back home.
Sally hated when Mac did the long hauls, the all-night runs when one mistake and something terrible could happen. On the news she watched weather reports, her fingertip daily trailing on a road map the routes he drove. Always she slept badly until he returned and always with a present for her.
He brought ear rings of pale blue sea shells from the Gulf Coast, a milk pitcher shaped like a cow from Wisconsin, and though she lost the anklet from Virginia because the clasp was cheap, she wore the black T-shirt of a truck highballing down a mountainside when she danced for him. Part ballet, part strip tease, her dances were either slow and arousing or wild as disco, the music selected as thoughtfully as her little outfits. A garter beneath a sheer short skirt, white-fringed gloves that reached her elbows: once, her finest dress, its gold threads flickering in the candlelight. Sometimes she danced for him before they made love as he squirmed on the bed and reached for her floating from his grasp. Other times she danced after love, before he took her furiously again, his appetites especially large after long days and nights on the road.

On a deliciously mild summer night in Manhattan in 1954, a man deep in thought crosses 49th Street at Broadway heading for a meeting with his producer. The film they are working on goes well though there is some concern if the stars are that bankable. He watches the pavement as he walks because passing pavement is more conducive to thought, but for a moment he looks up and ahead. Perhaps a noise distracts him or he seeks the traffic light or else he simply looks up as if taking a mental break. At that instant a young woman approaching in a light summer dress steps over the grate of the subway beneath, and the air pushed by an incoming train billows upward through the grate and sends her dress swirling above her waist. Her beautiful legs are as white as her panties. She quickly pushes her dress in place and hurries on, amused and embarrassed, but the man has been struck by a vision which, later that night, he writes into his film.

“There is a difference,” he proclaimed inflexibly.
“What is it?” she asked again.
“One’s a swim suit, one’s a bra.”
“But they fit exactly the same.”
“That doesn’t matter,” he declared, discounting her explanation with a sweeping, single gesture of his hand. “You don’t wear a bra to the table with other men around.”
His criticism embarrassed her.
“My swim suit was wet after swimming,” she protested in weak, effortful defense.
“Then wear a T-shirt,” he snapped immediately.
She lowered her eyes and looked forlorn, softening his anger.
“Would you wear panties to the table,” he asked with gentle challenge, “even though they fit exactly the same as the bottoms of your swim suit?”
She thought a moment, a fine crease of concern between her eyebrows.
“Of course not,” he answered for her, “because there is a difference,” then he tapped his forehead with a fingertip. “Here.”

Ever since holding her infant grandson above her head an instant before her bladder leaked a few drops, Miriam has worn a protective undergarment as underwear. The accident was not the first though thankfully both had occurred when she was home. She had resisted protective undergarments more stubbornly than she had resisted eyeglasses. What depressed her most was that the protective undergarment resembled her grandson’s diaper, and this indicated to her a cycle nearly complete, that the Angel of Death’s cold hand draw ever nearer her shoulder.

For the next hour, Melissa replayed every one of his recent odd or unexplainable action: his preposterous long hours, his modesty one night while undressing, a recent interest in eating better all swept into the whirlwind of her jealousy. She remembers an instant before her blood surges that weeks ago someone hung up when she answered the phone. She was scrupulously inspecting his soiled shirts and handkerchiefs when the front door opened and the remaining contents of the laundry hamper were sent hurling at his head. She accused him of infidelity, shouted her reasons, her evidence, the pain she felt at his betrayal. With deep affection and sorrow for her self-imposed misery, Neil removed from his dresser drawer a thin box with the second bra and panty set inside.
But even this did not soothe Melissa, her passion having gathered too much force to stop so abruptly. The second set still could be for another, and why is he cutting back on cheese and at work so late and what about that mysterious phone call weeks before? Melissa slapped the lingerie from his hand to the floor, but amid her tears and Spanish profanities Neil smiled inwardly, for he could tell she was still very much in love with him.

From a vase on the counter displayed among the glass cases of turquoise rings and Zippo lighters, Mac pulled a long-stemmed rose. The stem was a wire wrapped tightly with green cloth. The leaves too were cloth, but the rose was red lace and, Mac knew, when plucked became panties.
“Well that’s a nice choice,” said the woman behind the counter. “Actually,” she added in a whisper, “my husband just gave me one like it.”
No longer young, wearing make-up to excess, hair puffed and sprayed like a Country singer, she was alluring, feminine, and had kept her figure, a white blouse tucked into her tight jeans.
“How are they cut?” Mac wondered.
Her penciled eyebrow lifted: “Skimpy.”
After taking his money, then giving change, the woman smiled provocatively and said, “Enjoy.”
With his partner driving, Mac pulled his jacket around and curled uncomfortably in the cab. He heard the incessant rumbling of the truck, and even when closing his eyes he could still see the road passing under him. Often when he dozed, with his partner driving, Mac had a recurring dream in that hazy place that was neither sleep nor waking, where from exhaustion he drifted off but never deeply and he thought he was falling asleep behind the wheel. Even in the dream he knew he mustn’t sleep while driving but it was impossible to keep his eyes open.
Yet that night he bundled himself tighter in his raised collar, lowered his head, and imagined Sally freeing the red lace rose bud panties from the stem as if delicately picking a thread off his collar, and he was happy the truck was empty and moving faster, that his partner, with his pedal to the ragged floorboards, hurried him home where his private dancer will wear the red lace panties and dance for him again.

On the dark breaker wall on the Manhattan side of the East River, Josephine called Jo casts her line as if trying to snag Brooklyn. The bobber, weights, and worm sail through the summer night and plunk ten yards out before sinking into the swift, murky, brackish water. After one ‘Hail Mary’ for luck and a long, lazy gaze at the river, Jo looks downriver and upwards to the Williamsburg Bridge where a subway train crosses, lights from its windows interrupted by the steel supporting beams of the bridge. Before too long, before losing hope that she might not pass another hungry night, Jo cries a grateful “Yes!” at the strike on her line. She reels in as other fishermen gather, one carrying a Coleman lantern.
“Too small,” she says, diminishing her own success, but the fishermen glance at the landed bass in the plastic bucket, turn to each other and declare, “It’s a meal!”
Back in her room off Delancey on Pitt Street, after her bath in the tub in the kitchen, she finds a smokeable butt in the makeshift ashtray, once a tin of Pfluger’s Hande Pak Fishhooks, and prepares supper. She opens the apartment door, still chained, a crack to let out smoke from the boiling potato and frying fish. She wears an over-sized, thin, decade-old “Someone in New York Loves Me” T-shirt and her only other pair of underwear. Too small, the red cotton washed so many times they’re pink, fabric unraveling at two places along the waistband, it was a gift from Harry, her Harry, lost forever in cheap wine, his wandering heart, and her dreams.

Sean lounges in a hammock strung on his fire escape as a clear summer dusk descends on the city. In his hand, a lingerie catalog that arrived in the morning mail and from which he’ll select something for Ariel. Though he has ordered from past issues of the catalog, he had never ordered something for her. He will chose nothing he’s given other women; giving her items similar to what others have received seems dishonorable both to his former lovers and to Ariel. It would imply that women are indistinct, interchangeable, when each is truly marvelous and rare. By choosing something new, he would preserve the sanctity of former loves and demonstrate to himself Ariel’s special place in his heart. Besides, the variety of the catalog’s alluring lingerie is large, new items added monthly. As the sky turns deeper blue and the street-lamps brighten, Sean opens the catalog that is filled with memories and lingerie.
The catalog is tasteful, refined, the models lady-like and discreet even in underwear. Perfume is advertised, and lotions, and porcelain bowls of pastel-colored soap bars. In a lush room amid a dusk as splendid as the one which surrounds Sean in the hammock, the catalog’s most photographed model, poised on a fine, upholstered chair as if in a palace or hotel lobby, wears a purple, strapless merry widow with matching panties like the one he had once given Nina. He turns the page, his eyes moving in a slow dance over the women in hosiery. Lace-trimmed thigh-highs, control-top panty hose, nylons that Tiffany wore which made a soft whish, whish with each of her steps. On the next page, the brunette he always liked wears the subtle smile as if she knows his secret and the cream colored tulip cup bra and panty set he had delivered to Danielle across the street though in the gift she never appeared at her window; one rainy morning she loaded a car with two suitcases, a guitar case and a cat, glanced up at his window, smiled faintly and waved her fingers as if scratching, then disappeared in traffic.
In this issue of the catalog is a new model, slender, with long black hair and very white skin. She wears a lace bodysuit as black as her hair. Like he’s done before, Sean imagines the woman in his life wearing the article worn by the woman in the catalog who most arouses him: this time, the new model in the bodysuit. He lingers on the photograph until it vaguely comes alive in his imagination. He considers ordering the bodysuit for Ariel. He lifts his eyes to the night, for it is night now, the sky black and starless, and says her name aloud. Like a delicate bird or the title of a song. He closes the catalog and it slips from his hand, off the hammock to the iron grating of the fire escape where it remains, for he has decided to select nothing after all, particularly the bodysuit. Though he wants to give Ariel lovely lingerie as much for his own pleasure as for hers, he wants even more to break a pattern, to make a new start, to savor what he slips from her body simply because it’s her. Having fallen in love again, Sean wonders hopefully if it’s for the last time.

*illustrations by Larry Rivers