had never understood the purely internal process of a woman's pleasure. I was from the Hugh Hefner school of ideation, and needed to ogle my woman as if she were a pin-up held in front of me. My girlfriend took normal female fantasizing -- getting off on an idealized reality -- to a fantastic level of abstraction. After sex, she often told me about tripping off on the temperature of my earlobes or my thighs, dreaming of flowers that bloomed to fill the sky. Last Tuesday, everything was magenta and pink, if I remember correctly. Other times, she spoke of skies filled with velvety petals of indigo blue and black. One time she imagined she was an old woman waiting for a train in Speonk, L.I.! The train, she explained, was her slowly oncoming orgasm. It wasn't easy, but learning to shut my eyes and enter this internal world had the effect of bouncing sex from one dimension up to three. The more you know about the places your lover goes to, the closer you can be to her, and to her peak events. Which is the big turn-on now. My neighbor Barry says, "I get just as much pleasure when she comes as when I do."

The moment I really wasn't ready for was when the tears came. Guys have never understood how the most pleasurable experience -- what John Updike calls "the most exalted moment of our physical lives," could make a woman cry. One afternoon, at the end of a particularly sweet and tender love session, I found myself having an emotional upheaval along with my physical one. Allowing myself the internal experience of my lover, I was using my feeling as well as my body in my lovemaking.