If there was a progression for me, an incremental shift toward prurient imagery, I guess it began with my art history course in college. I have always enjoyed looking at nudes—paintings, sculpture, tastefully composed photography—but before that 300-level survey course I had only a superficial appreciation. There was nothing particularly arousing about the collected works of a hundred artists rendering the recumbent nude in a thousand forms. Thanks in part to my professor, however, I learned to look past the “flesh element” and consider the subtext of the painting and the politics behind its composition.

For instance, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe—The Luncheon on the Grass—by Manet is, for me, an intensely provocative, erotic painting. Perhaps you know it. It’s in the permanent collection of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Le dejeuner sur l’herbe depicts a mundane, pastoral luncheon scene on a riverbank. There are four figures in view, three dining together in the foreground and a fourth, a partially dressed woman, bathing in the river in the background. Of the three dining figures, one of them—an alabaster-skinned young woman—is resplendently nude. Her consorts, two bearded and seemingly ambivalent gentlemen, are fully clothed.

The first time I saw Dejeuner, I could not stop looking at it, at the woman’s bemused, perhaps a bit haughty expression, and, of course, her body so matter-of-factly displayed. The popular interpretation of the painting is that it’s a metaphor for sex roles, gender, and power. My interpretation is more literal; I think the woman bared herself on a dare. Her luncheon consorts are not so much ambivalent as intimidated. I like to imagine Le dejeuner sur l’herbe as one frame in a sequence. The next frame would be the men removing their jackets then their shirts. Twenty frames later, they would carry the scenario to its logical conclusion and make passionate and simultaneous love to the bemused young woman—their genteel picnic scattered and crushed under their bodies. Of course, I divulged none of this to my art history professor. Even then, I was fully aware of how distinct my tastes and my perceptions were. It took years, and an unusual confluence of circumstance, to clarify those perceptions and give them a name.

Before October, before our week in the San Juans at Pagoda Pines, I never considered myself a voyeur. However, I have always enjoyed the human form. I like athletes’ bodies, dancers’ bodies, and I admit to sitting in the audience at Royce Hall or the Ahmanson watching the Bolshoi or the ABT and imagining every single person on that stage naked. Bounding, leaping, flexing their firm thighs and their buttock muscles and soaring—unencumbered. When the swan collapses into the hero’s arms, when he caresses her cheek as she dies, I like to imagine him dangling free of his tights, minus his codpiece and with the first stirrings of an erection.

It took awhile for my husband, Dan, to equate the spontaneous passion I expressed—stroking him through his pants as we drove home—after a night at the theater with the bodies we saw onstage. It became a kind of inside joke. When I get to feeling randy, when I seek him out in the shower or begin sucking him as he sleeps on a languid Saturday morning, he will mutter, “Shall we dance?”

So I love looking at dancers and athletes, and I also like looking at us, at my husband and me. I like looking, and I like listening to the audible sounds of lovemaking. Especially ours. So whatever cravings I harbored, whatever prurient interest I cultivated in myself, goes back to art history and, years later, to our adventures with the “marital mirror.”

Actually, it’s more than one mirror, placed in more than one vantage. The first one—our first “look”—was a happy accident in a bed-and-breakfast when we were newlyweds. We were in Washington State, in the Cascade Mountains, staying in a refurbished Victorian. Our cozy room featured a high four-poster bed with a bureau situated at the foot. Atop that bureau was a big vanity-style mirror, the kind you could tilt. It was tipped, perhaps by previous guests, to present a perfect view of the mattress. Our host couple, a pair of German émigrés with a warm and folksy demeanor, did not strike us as sex-crazed or even sex-conscious. But it’s hard to imagine the mirror scheme was a coincidence. For us, it was a revelation. I had just finished sucking Dan—he has a magnificent cock, not too big, not too small, just nicely tapered and deliciously thick at the base—and was straddling him for a cowgirl ride when Dan said, “Paige, take a look.”

I peered over my shoulder at our reflection and caught my very first view of my round ass pressing downward onto my husband’s erection.

“Oh my…” I groaned. Dan’s legs were spread wide, his thighs cradling me, his tan, slender fingers clutching my creamy ass cheeks and pulling them wide. We could see the full length of his cock, the slick portion of his shaft that had penetrated me, his balls jiggling along with our rhythm. We saw that, and we saw my neatly groomed and swollen labia engulfing him, my pelvis tilting ever-so-slightly to milk him at the end of each stroke. So much of sex is instinctive that I did not realize I have a topside technique, a kind of rolling, scooping motion that draws Dan’s pubic bone across my clitoris as I am taking his cock. So there was that, and also Dan’s pelvis jacking upward, his heels digging hard enough on the mattress to pull the bed sheets out at the corners and draw them around us, like a nest.

“We’re beautiful,” Dan observed.

“Yes,” I said. “We are!”

I picked up the tempo, and the faster we fucked the more compelling the image became. From our vantage, we could see the definition of my back muscles, see the candlelight reflecting off the sheen from our exertions. My breasts—like Dan’s cock—not too big, not too small—periodically caught in one of Dan’s hands so he could feast upon a nipple. At the point of our joining, Dan’s cock became a near-blur as he climaxed, coming in spasms that I could both feel and watch, spasms that sent white rivulets draining out of me. I peered backward, savoring the sight of Dan’s leaking cum and the red marks that his fingers left on my rump.

That B&B romp was a watershed moment and inducement to install a tilt mirror at the foot of our own bed, along with a couple of smaller, less conspicuous mirrors to the side. Suffice to say we have enjoyed the views, watching ourselves and our bodies joined in half the positions of the Kama Sutra—some of them impose too much back pain or induce chafing. Our reflections provide such a revelation about the whole mystery of physical response. For instance, it was in the mirrors that I first discovered a particular blush that spreads over my neck and cheeks—a blush that I only seem to achieve when Dan eats my pussy. I do come other ways—for instance, when spooning, with Dan thrusting from behind while I stroke my clit with three fingertips. I also like to come during rear-entry, lying flat with my rump extended to meet Dan’s downward humping as he braces himself over me. Each, in its way, is a delicious experience, but somehow quite different from those tender, foreplay intervals when I have boosted myself with a pillow to afford Dan’s mouth easy access. His tongue works my clitoris in slow, languid circles, his thumbs holding my labia open as he builds to a crescendo. When that crescendo comes—pun intended—I roll my head to the side and see the color wash over me, spreading up from my chest over my jaw and even tinting my ears. Dan takes particular pride in that response. He calls it making me “see red.”

Dan also likes the side mirrors, especially when I am going down on him, because he gets a full view of me—kneeling, bobbing my head over his crotch—but also a partial view of himself. That partial view, he tells me, inspires an “other man” fantasy, the notion that those legs, that stomach and surging pelvis could belong to anyone. With my hair tumbling over his stomach—if I fail to put it up with a hair tie—I could be anyone also: a student, a courtesan, a lovely au pair servicing her cute American boyfriend. Once, when we had returned from a party, I wore nothing but a sequined Mardi Gras mask that covered half of my face. The image in the mirror that night was straight out of Eyes Wide Shut, a mysterious stranger, a supple young woman with milk-white skin who had just…wandered into our room and decided to feast on some mystery man’s hard cock. The scenario was intense enough to make Dan come almost instantly, his seed gushing out of my bright red lips and cascading down my chin.

“Who are you?” he asked as I wiped my face with the back of a hand.

“A present,” I told him, “from the emperor. Yours for the night, to do with me what you will.”

“Just the night?” he asked, playing along.

“You have other intentions, kind sir?”

“I do indeed,” he replied. “I do indeed.”

* * * *

Fast-forward nine years, and we are parents and holistic health professionals—Dan, an acupuncturist specializing in sports injuries and me, a nutritionist. Because we are both self-employed, we work odd hours. And as parents of two young sons, our free time is often comprised of shuttles to soccer practice, to music lessons, and to school. We take turns as room parents, and Dan volunteers as team physician for the high school football team. Our schedules leave us precious little time for romps in the “marital mirror.” The infamous sequined mask was relegated to a hook in my shoe closet, and I became aware, as our tenth anniversary approached, that Dan had not made me “see red” in several weeks.

To be fair, I fell out of rhythm as well. We were certainly affectionate, occasionally even spontaneous, but always after the stories had been read, the teeth brushed, and the boys tucked in for the night. We made gentle love in the shower, and we had some delightful scrub time in the bath. Occasionally lust would overtake us, and Dan would tug down my pajama bottoms, drop to his knees, and start eating me from behind as I stood at the breakfast counter checking my email. That would end with some rollicking lovemaking in the living room, or even, once, on the kitchen floor. And as we cuddled and warmed ourselves in the afterglow, we always felt gratified, loved, and weary. Mostly weary.

There was no deficit of affection, no loss of love in our lives. But we both knew that we desperately needed personal time, time away, time to experiment and to reclaim our sensuous selves. And, lo, our prayers were answered.

It seemed innocuous enough, an invitation for Dan to moderate a panel at a holistic health conference. He gets several speaking invitations a year, but this one came from a non-profit conservation group that specialized in mountaineering. The group, called Rock Stars, had scheduled a conference in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, at a resort called Pagoda Pines. I had never heard of the place, but when I pulled up the e-brochure, it certainly looked enticing. A remote and beguiling compound located in a gorge alongside the Animas River, comprised of individual, pagoda-shaped guest bungalows. There were full spa facilities and a series of heated Japanese-style baths that were aligned in terrace-fashion up the side of a gentle hill. There were hammocks strung amid what looked like fruit trees and some poolside cabanas decorated in an Asian theme. The property had wildflowers, lush stands of bamboo, and bonsai-looking pine trees that must have been imported. It looked enchanting. Dan was promised an “executive” bungalow for four nights. All expenses paid.

“Do you get a plus one?” I asked him.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He chuckled. “You’re coming, Paige, even if I have to smuggle you in a steamer trunk. But you should be aware of the…ambience,” he added.

“What ambience?” I asked.

We were discussing this in bed, Dan with his Eastern medicine journal and me with my computer balanced on my knees. He put the magazine down and gave me a wry smile.

“I absolutely know you’ll love it,” Dan said. “I’ve talked to people who stayed there before. They describe the prevailing culture of the place as…unique.”

“Unique in a good way?” I asked. “Or unique as in Bates Motel?”

“Oh, I should think a good way,” Dan said.

He explained that Pagoda Pines was an adults-only enclave. With the exception of select conferences—like Rock Stars—the resort was also couples-only, and they did not restrict that to hetero couples. The Pagoda welcomed all “permutations,” Dan said. As for that ambience, it ranged from spa-friendly to vaguely decadent. He let the word simmer between us.

“I’m listening.”

“From what I hear, people are relatively modest and relatively conventional in the daytime,” Dan said. Another pause.

“So what about nighttime?” I asked. “Is that like the fall of Rome?”

“No, no not exactly.” Dan sighed. “My buddy says that there’s no policy per se, but…”

“But what?” I had a sense of what was coming, but I kept prodding Dan because he’s cute when he’s tongue-tied.

“People mostly bathe naked after dark,” he replied. “Occasionally they avail themselves…”

“Of what?”

Dan put his magazine aside. “Of each other.”

I put my computer aside and burrowed toward Dan’s side of the bed, saying, “Are you afraid that I’ll be scandalized by all this naked PDA?” My hand gravitated to his thigh. Dan quivered a bit, surprised by the contact.

“It could amount to more than PDA,” he said, taking my hand and placing it on his stomach.

“Mmm,” I said, rubbing the side of his leg with my knee. “So it’s fucking we’re talking about? Newlyweds, gay men, lesbian women…”

“I don’t expect many newlyweds,” he replied, running a hand over my thigh and down to the curve of my hip. There, he found my pajama waistband but continued, undeterred. Soon, Dan was idly stroking my ass with his fingertips. It tickled, but I doth not protest. “The conference clientele is mostly professional climbing guides, therapists, and healers like me. Half of them will be out on the mountain in the daytime and the rest will be in seminars. That should leave you plenty of time to yourself.”

I moved so that my lips were touching Dan’s ear as I dipped my hand downward and pressed against his cock with my palm. He twitched in response, a kind of marital Morse code. “My, my, whatever shall I do with all that free time?” I said.

Dan cleared his throat as his own busy fingers rounded my ass cheek and explored my cleft. “Well, whatever you do, don’t start without me,” he said.

“I’ll text you if I get desperate,” I said, sliding my leg fully over him, not straddling Dan, but enveloping him, like a comforter. We both still had pajamas on, so I restricted myself to a gentle pelvic grind. Dan’s cock was fully engorged now, pointing north toward his navel. I rubbed my pussy over him, taking my weight on the heels of my hands as I whispered in his ear.

“What did your friend think of this spectacle?” I wondered. “Was he shocked, embarrassed, aroused?”

“I could imagine him being…aroused.” Dan grunted. I could tell he wanted me to strip and guide him inside. I wanted this also, but I was enjoying a residual, red wine buzz and saw no need to rush. “I could imagine him surrendering to the moment.”

“And what might that moment entail?” I asked, feeling myself dampening my pajamas. “A mysterious partner, perhaps?”

“Maybe partners, plural,” Dan replied, his hips reflexively dry-humping. “Maybe he did the wobbly H…”

“What, pray tell, is a wobbly—”

In that instant, before Dan could define this exotic terminology, our bedroom door swung wide, and Aidan, age four, came bounding in and jumped on the bed, his face red and blotchy from crying, with brother Harry, six, in close pursuit.

“Mommmmm!” Aidan keened. “Harry won’t let me—”

“I let him!” Harry bellowed. “I let him play with the controller and then he broke it!”

“Liar!”

“Lying liar!”

Eventually Dan and I got the combatants separated, duly pacified and re-installed in their rooms. When I returned from the final tuck-in some half an hour later, Dan was asleep. I would need to wait for another time, a much more private time, to find out just what was involved in executing the “wobbly H.”