One day in spring, accompanied by a 50-something-year-old inorgasmic couples counselor* snapping photos for her out-of-state-lover on her cell phone, I went to a sex store that I always call Great Sexpectations, though it is actually called something else.

My friend was visiting from out of state.  I used to be a therapist, and once upon a time she was one of my supervisors.  She has quite a reputation as a hard-ass, take-no-prisoners therapist, and is in such demand she has to turn desperate couples away.  We don’t know many people in common anymore, but those we do have always looked up to her for her practical knowledge of how to make a relationship work, including in the bedroom.  For these reasons–her reputation, her position as my elder and a former mentor, and also, incidentally, for the fact that she has been married twice–you can imagine my surprise when she told me tearfully over dinner the first night of her visit that she has never had an orgasm in her entire life.

No: I don’t mean “with a partner.”  I mean Ever.

“What about masturbation?” I asked.

“I don’t do that,” she said.  ”It doesn’t work.”

“Not even with a vibrator?” I asked incredulously.  I had not . . . um . . . realized that was possible.

“I don’t have a vibrator,” she said.  ”I’m too embarrassed to buy one.”

“But what about the internet?!”

“No way!” she gasped.  ”Then they’d know where I live.”

You might say it was then that I realized we were in trouble.

Flash forward a few days, and the two of us were having lunch in my neighborhood–or I should say we were imbibing enough wine that I could get her to enter a sex shop.  During lunch, she kept getting calls on her cell from her lover.  He lives on the west coast, whereas she lives in the east, with her husband.  The lover is married too.  As she spoke about him, she began to cry.

This is the story of their love, more or less:

They met in their teens.  They dated, but the lover kept pressing my friend, whom I’ll call L, to have sex, as teenage boys are wont to do.  L, however, burst into tears of panic whenever he made these advances, and because he genuinely cared for her, the (would be) lover decided they should just be friends, because he felt like a Scummy Rapist.  However, even after L began dating other people–and married her first husband–he remained her faithful sidekick, once even moving to another city in order to be closer to L.  At that time, L felt for him only as a friend.  They went on in this fashion for some time, until one day L fell into an extramarital affair with an older man.

Some women have such bad sexual luck it kind of defies the imagination.  Were I writing about a young woman whose fears of sex were so profound that she could not come even by her own hand, even I would not think to give her a married lover who suggested penetrating her with a wine bottle for kicks.  Yet of course, truth being stranger than fiction, that is the kind of married lover she ended up with.

Add to this: her husband found out about the affair.  And threw her out of the house.  Her lover then left her too for another woman.

The young man who had loved L unrequitedly for years became her only lifeline.  One night, she told him that she needed to get over her sexual fears by going to a bar and picking someone up.  As a single man, she asked him to take her to some such place.  Of course, once they were there they ended up picking each other up instead, and at long last ended up in bed.

The next day, the lover believed they were now a Couple.  But L was shell-shocked from her wine-bottle affair and her divorce, and didn’t feel ready.  At long last, the lover had had enough and went off on his own.  Within months he was married, and that was the last she heard of him.

L remarried too.  She remained inorgasmic, but stopped worrying about it.  She made her peace with it, went to graduate school, became a couples therapist, and the rest was history.  She believed she was “content.”

Flash forward some twenty years.  The lover remained married all that time.  But he had never gotten over L.  Sometimes he drove past her old apartment and sat outside in his car playing music (he is a musician) and thinking of her and crying.  Yes, crying.  If we are to believe him, he thought of L constantly for years . . . the woman of his dreams, the only one he had ever loved.

One day last year, L was visiting her parents in her home state and decided on the spur of the moment to give him a call.  Thrilled, he suggested they go out to brunch: him, his wife, and L.

After the brunch, the wife said to L’s lover: I can see that you have always loved that woman.  I want you to either call her right now and offer to run away with her, or never, ever speak to her again.

The lover said something like, “Stop being histrionic.  She’s married.  She never wanted me.  Don’t worry, I’ll never hear from her again.”

Except, life being stranger than fiction, a funny thing happened at that brunch.

L realized that this man was the only man she had ever felt truly close to and comfortable with in her entire life.  She had realized he was the one for her–the one she should have been with all these years.  And so, once she returned home, she called him and before you know it they were both confessing their feelings.  After 30 years, the floodgates had opened.  Tears were shed.  Phone sex was had (though L, of course, did not come during these encounters.)  Phrases were used: Soul Mate; True Love.  And, of course, the usual plans: somehow they would run off into the sunset.

And then.  The lover’s wife, who is a bit older than he, had a stroke.

And then she had another.

The lover called L weeping.  He could not leave his sick wife, he told her.  A long distance affair was all they could ever hope for.

During our lunch, while L wept, saying she fears she has lost her one chance of real intimacy and happiness and sexual fulfillment, her lover kept phoning to find out if we were at the sex shop yet.  L had told him what we were up to, since he wanted her to be able to get off during their phone sex encounters too, and he was titillated.  At once point he wanted to talk to me.  At one point, L told me she had sent him my photo.  At one point, he asked if I would be giving L a tutorial.

My understanding is that he spends much of his time distraught and weepy just like L.  But the day that she was vibrator shopping was, um, not one of those days.

L had promised to take photos for him of our excursion.  She snapped some in the parking lot, but once we got inside the shop guy told her it wasn’t permitted in the store.  L was so crestfallen that I immediately pretended to be fascinated by an electric blue vibrator and engaged the shop guy in talking about it so that she could covertly snap more pics.  Then, feeling guilty, I had to buy the blue vibrator, which cost 30 bucks.

There must have been 300 types of vibrators in that store.  L and I were overwhelmed.  I have only ever had one vibrator in my life.  I’ve had it since college.  Back then, it was called something like a Lady Finger.  Now, when I found the same vibrator in the store, I found it had been relabeled “The Classic.”  The moral of that story is that I am old.

I told L to buy it.  I could not vouch for the others, but that one I knew worked like a charm.

She didn’t listen to me and bought some other newfangled thing that looked like it might explode if you pressed the wrong button.

We parted ways outside the store and she went off to O’Hare to catch her plane.

That was about four or five months ago now.  L used the vibrator 2 or 3 times, without success.  She found it too loud (her husband might hear), and too depressing.  She wanted her lover–who of course is not really her lover quite, but a man who lives in another state and will not leave his wife and who jacks himself off while talking to her on the phone–not a battery-operated toy.  She is supposed to see her beloved this fall, and maybe at that point she will get an orgasm out of it, but given how often she cries these days, I kind of doubt it.

There is such a thing as paralysis under pressure, too.

All in all, I find this whole business one of the saddest personal relationship stories a friend has ever shared with me.  Precisely why, I can’t even quite say.  Parts of it are, if not “funny,” certainly ironic.  Maybe it’s that I don’t really trust L’s lover, though in fairness it seems clear that earlier in life he truly was devoted to her, so I don’t really question that he has always loved her.  I question his “character” at times.  Yet in fairness, I cannot exactly say a man is an asshole for not leaving his wife who has had 2 strokes.  I don’t know what I “want” from L’s lover; I just know that what he is giving isn’t doing the trick, and that she is very, very sad, and not much closer to being sexually fulfilled than before.  I know that the clock is ticking, and both of these people have made some profound errors in judgment for which they may be paying for the rest of their lives, and that like some nun and priest, they cannot “have” the one thing that might make them happy without crossing a line of immorality to get it.

Would it really make them happy if they got it?  Well, of course that much is anyone’s best guess.  I only know it will make L forever unhappy not to be able to try.

Meanwhile, that blue vibrator was a fat waste of money.  When my husband saw it, he got as excited as L’s lover was on the phone the day of our excursion, so we tried it out.  But it’s short and squat, more like a plug, and vibrates so fast it could burn your clit off and bore a hole into your skin.  David suggested it was for “insertion,” but when we tried that it vibrated so fast that it would pop itself right out of me like a banana in a Dutch sex show and hit David right between the eyes.  We declared it a safety hazard.  I suggested sending it to L in the mail to see if she could make anything of it, but David said that was gross.  I clarified that I was going to cleanse it first, but he just shook his head in disgust.

This is twice the 1,000 word limit.  Sue me.  Sorry, Brad, I really do want to be in the book, but I’m wordy.

So, next time you’re counting your blessings that you’re not a victim of genocide in Darfur or a detained journalist in North Korea, add to these blessings your ability to come.  And if you have any fool-proof sex toys, send them to me and I’ll pass ‘em L’s way (just don’t tell David.)

*Note: If you are one of the few people who might be able to guess L’s real identity from this account, please do not divulge it here.  I’m writing this with her generous permission, but with the understanding that I will disguise her, so keep any theories about who she might be to yourself!