I suggested we creep into the cavernlike area under the stairs from the foyer to the second floor of the apartment building, because “this is probably where you and Peter will be when he wants to kiss you.”

I coaxed her gently against the hallway wall, and there, under the heavy oak staircase, started making love to my girl.

Helga was submissive at first, although I believe she expected something a little less realistic than I had in mind.

“Let me hold you the way a man usually holds a girl,” I began, and slipped one arm around her waist and the other around her shoulder. Then I took her chin softly in my hand and planted a light kiss on her lips. She stood there stiffly with her eyes and her mouth closed.

“Open your lips, Helga,” I urged. “Nobody kisses with them closed.” She obediently parted her lovely mouth, and I eased my tongue inside. At first she tightened and drew away. “Relax,” I whispered; “this is what everybody does, and it is the only way you will learn.” My pink serpent of a tongue was exploring her mouth, and I lingered for a passionate eternity until she became restless.

“Now give me yours,” I said, and as her sweet-tasting tongue entered my mouth, I thought I would go insane with excitement. I wished the moment could proceed in slow motion, but if I took too much time, she might become impatient or suspicious and walk away.

“No kiss is complete without some attention to the neck and shoulders,” I said next, and I started kissing her ears and her neck and pulling back her sweater to get to her breast.

Not really knowing what was happening to her pent-up adolescent sexuality, she was getting carried away. She threw her head back to reveal a pale, slender neck, and goosebumps came out on her flesh.

At that moment the front door opened, and a tenant, accompanied by an icy wind, walked past us and vanished along the hall. I pressed Helga to the wall in a protective gesture. She relaxed and responded.

“After kissing, you have to know how to caress and be caressed,” my instruction continued, and I unbuttoned the coat she wore over a sweater and skirt. Then I slid one hand under her sweater, into her bra, and cupped one of her breasts. My other hand went under my own skirt, and I started stroking myself.

I got so frantically excited that I would have loved to have been a man with a big penis and put it inside her. But all I had was a hardened little clitoris.

While she was in her slightly dazed state I moved my mouth down under the sweater and started sucking those glorious breasts with the erect nipples. As I did so, I also took one of her long legs and pulled it up underneath my skirt between my legs; then I rubbed faster and faster till stars exploded in my head and I fell off the earth

I was breathless – and Helga was shocked. She had asked how to respond like a lady to an innocent first kiss and had just been seduced in the hallway by a love-crazed schoolgirl. She mumbled something or other and hastily ran up the stairs.

For the next few weeks I was lovestruck and unhappy and followed her everywhere like an adoring puppy, praying for a chance once more to get my hands on her gorgeous breasts. If she played tennis, I played tennis; if she went horseback riding, so did I; and when she joined the snooty rowing club, I joined the snooty rowing club, even though it was notoriously anti-Semitic.

I would love to watch her sliding back and forth on the bench of the boat in her shorts, and would follow her to the shower afterward and wish I could rub the soap all over her magnificent body as she stood there wearing nothing else but a bathing cap.

As Helga matured a little she started to recognize my absolute infatuation and began teasing me, which would drive me more and more out of my mind, and for two whole years I walked around adoring and desiring her, even after I lost my virginity to a boy at the age of seventeen.

To most girls the actual deflowering is one of the most significant events of their young lives. To me it was just a technicality. I had been dating my steady boyfriend for two years, and we had experimented with sex and explored each other, but had never made love “all the way.” In Holland young people are strictly supervised, and even though we would fool around behind the windmills and beside the dykes, we had never found the right combination of courage and opportunity.

The way it eventually happened in a friend’s borrowed apartment was very ordinary, and nothing like wild rape – there was no bleeding and no pain. There was just the nice, secure feeling of my boyfriend’s penis going all the way inside me, back and forth with more rhythm until he exploded and left me warm and wet.

Far more significantly, I must confess that from the moment I lost my virginity I became absolutely wild about sex, and even threw over my steady boyfriend in pursuit of it. I couldn’t care less who I did it with, even my relatives. In fact. the idea of sampling forbidden fruit made incest all the more exciting. The only taboo against it was don’t make babies, that’s all.

In my early teens when I first heard the facts of life from older friends, I used to wish I had a big brother so I could fuck him. In my late teens I did gratify my taste for forbidden fruit and actually made it with some members of my family. And not by accident.

My first attempt was my mother’s brother, my favorite uncle, who adored me as a child in a paternal way and was an adolescent in what was definitely a more carnal way.

One weekend when my family took me with them to visit his family in Düsseldorf, Germany, we made an assignation to sneak away to a motel room and make love. But the prospect of the clandestine affair apparently so excited him that his wife was able to guess what he was up to. She did not let him out of her sight until my family and I returned to Amsterdam, so the whole endeavor was abortive.

The second family affair was more successful, and it happened a few years later with the twenty-eight-year-old son of another uncle, who had come to stay with our family and see the sights of Holland. He was a big, strapping young German, and certainly no virgin.

It was my job to take him out and show him the town, and I was even allowed to stay out past my midnight curfew because he was a relative. The first night I showed him the regular tourist sights and sent him home early. The second night I showed him the fun spots like the “girls in the windows” in Amsterdam’s legalized red-light district on the canals, then took him back to his hotel and seduced him. He was not bad, nothing special, a typical strong German, but with an unromantic soul.

By this time 1 had graduated from high school with top marks, studied music for a year, and then gone to work for one of Amsterdam’s leading ad agencies as an assistant account executive.

From the moment I began work I approached my job with the large amount of enthusiasm and dedication with which I have done everything else in my life – and still do today. The work was nice, but it didn’t have what you call in America immediate “upward mobility,” so I decided to try for something else. Even in those early days I had the desire and the drive to be Numero Uno. I’d heard that the Manpower Employment Agency was conducting a contest for the best multilingual secretary in Holland, and being competitive and ambitious, I decided to enter it

The contest was to be judged on best typing. shorthand in four languages, translating skills, poise, and personality. There were several exams leading to the final, which required each entrant to write a two-hundred-word poem as a publicity pamphlet for the employment agency. I was the youngest of the sixty contestants – and, as it happened, the most successful. I won the title of “Number One Secretary in Holland.”