Ela's Performance: A Romantic Wife-Watching Novel

by Arnica Butler

  I was grateful the door locked behind me, and the halls were empty and dark. I left through a back door, and crossed a large, browning field. I caught a cab, returned to the airport where I collected the luggage I had planted there. I stayed in the airport hotel.

  The next morning, I went to her apartment and pretended to have just arrived. She threw her arms around me and kissed me passionately.

  “Why?” she said, her cheeks pink with excitement and the chilled air. “Oh my gosh, I'm so excited! But why didn't you tell me you were coming?”

  Another hug.

  I told her I had been thinking about it, and I wanted to end our open relationship agreement.

  She backed away from me, looked me in the eye, her own eyes moving back and forth, like she was reading something.

  “Okay,” she said. Casually, like it was nothing.

  Then:

  “What do you want to eat?”

  There was one more thing she said, as she was walking back toward the apartment, dragging my wheely-suitcase behind her. She waved a mittened hand in the air, and I was reeling from everything that had just happened, so I didn't catch it until later. Much later.

  “Did you try one of those Danish hot dog thingies, yet? From the little hahvnegrillen or whatever it is?” Despite being a musician, Ela had a terrible ear for accents and her attempt at sounding Danish came out, like all of her accents, sounding cartoonishly Indian.

  Ela's brown hair was silky, her slender hands waving around in mittens and her pink cheeks and smile had pulled me in again to hopeless adoration.

  So it was a long time later before I wondered about it:

  Why had she asked me if I had tried a hot dog yet? I had told her I arrived that morning and come straight there.

  Like so many things, I shoved it into a junk drawer in my mind somewhere, a place for unexplained coincidences I didn't want to deal with or could not explain, incriminating evidence against people I liked, and anything that bordered on too weird to be known about.

  And that was that.

  When I found her shaved pussy, maybe half an hour later, it was silky and smooth in my hand and it drove me wild to feel it on my palm, the wet slit in its center gushing its hot juices onto my hand.

  “Did you do that for Christian?” I asked her, and she had shrugged in a noncommittal way, smiling. Leaving the question unanswered as I pushed my nearly-bursting cock into her. As I fucked her, her juices slid like a river down to my balls.

  Or perhaps her ass was full of cum, for who knew what else she had gotten up to that night? And it was all gushing from inside of her, and coating my balls as they slammed against her perfectly smooth taint and asshole.

  The thought of which sent me over the edge, immediately.

  T HE ENSEMBLE

  These were a few of the thing that were, I suppose you could say, in the mix, as I thought about my wife and her return to school. All of it: Christian, odd remarks, the possible history of her “other TA,” her strange blowjob for imaginary grades, her short skirts and her Lolita-ish skip to the bus...all of it was combining in very bad and very delicious ways inside of me. Driving me insane. Taking up huge amounts of my time, dedicated to daydreaming filthy scenario after filthy scenario.

  Ela, after all, could be a very naughty girl. She was not afraid to cross certain lines. She was not afraid to be filthy.

  A month went by, and Ela came and went from home to school. She practiced. She ate a lot of Thai noodles when I came home and then returned to practice.

  My obsession began to dull, just a little.

  Then she joined an ensemble.

  “An ensemble, huh?” I responded. “Do you think that might be a little much?” I was barely hiding my jealousy. There was the fact that a new group would mean additional practice, and less time, therefore with me. And additional people she would be spending time with. Additional excuses for staying away late at night. I felt the potency of my obsessive thoughts returning to life.

  Ela slurped up her Thai noodles, which were, at this point, the only thing I think she ate all day. She seemed thinner. She waved her chopsticks at me. “You promised,” she warned.

  I had. I had promised I was not going to make comments like this.

  “I have to do it. It's just...something you have to do.”

  “Why?”

  “Win contests, look famous, take photos, announce stuff on Facebook.”

  I nodded, as if I really understood. Most of what went on in the classical music business was disappointingly similar, at the end of the day, to what went on in any other business. Schmoozing, bombast, marketing, and a lot of people with mediocre abilities pretending to be really hot shit.

  And then a lot of talented people not making it anywhere because they hated all that crap.

  “I have to do it,” she said dryly.

  I tried not to be annoying. “Who's in your group?” I asked cheerfully.

  Ela started her sentence halfway through mine. “Did you get the insurance guy's message, by the way?” She slurped up a noodle at it whacked her on the face, which made her laugh.

  And in this way, she continued to avoid the question, until it was no longer a good time to ask it.

  “Who's in your group?” I ventured again, and she rolled her eyes.

  “Big, hot, sexy construction men.”

  “Seriously,” I said.

  She tossed her hair.

  “Just a bunch of music people. Do you really know who they are? John O'Connor, a Korean girl, a hairy hipster, a weird cellist, some foreign guy....you know. The usual cast.”

  I thought I saw a tiny shadow of deception darken her face.

  “Oh!” she yelled, before I could say anything else. “This is the best part. We'll be going to London if everything works out! You should come with us. We can see your folks.”

  I suddenly felt foolish, and I wasn't even sure what train of thought I had been riding before she announced the trip. A dark one, one in which she was deceiving me and unwilling to tell me who was in her ensemble because she liked one of them...but no. Her cheery invite cast a sudden, glaring light on everything.

  God Peter. Get a hold on yourself.

  Ela was blinking at me. “Brilliant,” I said, treating her to my long-dissolved accent.

  I was just a man, with a nice wife, who was acting like a crazy paranoid person for no good reason.

  Brilliant.

  O DD THINGS

  But the ensemble began to eat away at our time together, as I had predicted.

  This did nothing for the strange cloud of paranoia that was brewing inside of me.

  There was this: Ela seemed distant when she was with me, and was always tired.

  There was also: We started having sex only once a week or so. Ela would stay at school until the afternoon, and then come home and lock herself in her practice room for hours of practice. I couldn't wait her out. I fell asleep, over and over again, to the sounds of her repeated phrases, her whispered dammits, whole concertos.

  Then she began to come home late.

  She called me the first night, when I arrived home to a dark house even though it was eight o'clock. There was no sign that Ela had been home all day.

  Something turned in my stomach.

  As if on cue, my phone buzzed in my pocket.

  “Hi, sweetie.” I said.

  “Hey.”

  An unusual choice for Ela. Or was it? Why not, hey sweetie? Or honey?

  My skin prickled with an animal-like alertness. I listened to the air behind her voice, for the sounds of where she was, what was happening around her. Another man's voice.

  Nothing.

  “Listen,” she began, and I already knew what was coming. “I have to stay here late with the group. Things are...” her voice drifted off, and then she laughed. It took me a second to realize she wasn't paying attention anymore to what she was saying to me.

  What was she laughing at?

  Was her lover, the one that was a
sking her to lie for him, doing impressions of me? Making faces of cluelessness to mock me?

  “Sorry,” she hissed. “I...sorry.” Another laugh. “Ian's just standing on...” Another laugh. “Anyway. I have to stay late, things are a mess.”

  She sounded suddenly impatient.

  “Any idea what time you'll be home?”

  “Oh god,” she said, and her voice was dripping with annoyance. Though who it was directed at was unclear. “No...no, like I said really a mess. Listen everyone's leaving for dinner now so I have to go. See you soon.”

  She kissed the phone.

  Was that really what she was looking at? Ian (who the hell was this Ian?), standing on something funnily, beckoning her to an opened door so they could go get something to eat? And if so, wasn't she on a bloody mobile phone? Couldn't she just go, without having to hang up? Like everyone else on earth?

  Or had she been looking at something else? Had she been sitting on a desk, her fingers sliding along the hem of her skirt....the line of her panties....up and down, while her lover, whoever he was, watched? Listening to her lie to her husband. Had he reached up and stroked her clit through the fabric of her panties? Was that why she had laughed?

  I stared at the phone.

  It was her cell number.

  In my mind, the lover slid his fingers up to the hem of her panties, right beneath her navel, and ripped them down. At times in my fantasies this was a member of her ensemble, young and muscular, strangely athletic; other times, some other, older man, a prof.

  Maybe she didn't even have an ensemble, maybe this was all just an elaborate lie.

  I continued the fantasy. The panties tore, and he pulled her with a jerk toward him. My wife's sweet, tangy scent flooded his nostrils with the puff of air that came with his tug, and then he hooked his arms beneath her legs. Immobilizing her, while she held the phone limply in one hand, not caring if it was really off or not, and his thumbs pried apart the lips of her cunt. So that his mouth, moving ever closer, could have easy access to all of her pink flesh, the hard, pulsing knob in the center of her.

  I closed my eyes.

  I was coming apart like a five-dollar watch.

  I waited for Ela to come home, and I was sitting in the kitchen a little bit like a madman, or a father waiting for a teenage daughter. I had a whiskey in my hand and I clanked the ice and made her jump.

  She held her hand to her heart. “Jesus!” she spat. Then she ran her eyes over the scene, calmer now that she recognized me. “Well, look who's Mr. Spooky today.”

  I didn't say anything, in part to make her frustrated. To make her ask me what I was doing, even though I had no answer myself.

  She sighed. Crossed the room and opened the fridge. “So? What are you doing, being spooky down here?” She surveyed the contents of the refrigerator and sighed at her choice: a tuna salad. “Aren't you usually in bed by now?”

  She didn't even look at me.

  “I thought you ate,” I said.

  Ela shrugged. “I practiced some more and now I'm hungry.” Her eyes lifted to look at me. “What is your deal?”

  My deal. My mind was wandering, in part, to a fantasy in which I yanked her by the knee close to me, and she straddled me reluctantly as I pushed her shoulder down, and then I felt the warm, wet stain of her cum-filled pussy leaking on my thigh.

  “Who else stayed with you?”

  She tipped her head and a faint smile quivered on her lips. She dug into her salad and held up a piece of tuna for inspection. She squinted at it. Now she was feigning disinterest, I could see that.

  “Oh...you know.....maestro....David....a coupla guys from the varsity rugby team...”

  She couldn't even keep it together and laughed a little at the end of her sentence.

  “We just had a big...” she was cracking up, “gangbang. With violins.”

  She was still holding her tuna up, but she was looking past it at me. Her eyes were smiling.

  I was being a dumbass dick, she was saying, in her most polite way.

  She popped the tuna into her mouth.

  “No one,” she said, after chewing a bit. “Just me, in the end. Those guys are super flaky. They ate a burrito and they were outta there.”

  Disappointment clanged around in my chest. I was as annoyed that she had stayed alone as I was that she had stayed at all, with potential lovers.

  “Is that a good idea? Staying by yourself?”

  In my mind, of course, I imagined that she had not done that at all. That she had gone home with Ian, the funny-man standing on whatever-it-was.

  Or maybe she had never been there at all, at the conservatory. Maybe she had just pretended to be there, while she was in fact lounging on the filthy couch of some hipster boyfriend, who had been sliding his hands up and down the column of her thigh the whole time she spoke to me on the phone.

  In my mind I went briefly to a fantasy where I would go down to the conservatory myself, the next time she claimed to be staying late, and -

  And what, Peter?

  She was leaning across the counter. She blinked at me.

  “I mean, the janitor had his way with me,” she said, and I had to do a lot of backpedaling to remember what she was even talking about.

  She snorted again.

  I was mostly on my way to thinking I was being a stupid and complete idiot, when she jerked her head in the direction of the stairs. “Come on, cowboy,” she said.

  It had been a long time since Ela had just invited me to sex – the only thing she ever called me “cowboy” for.

  She turned to face me and pressed her small body up against mine at the top of the stairs. I felt her mouth smiling under my lips as she felt my already-hard cock against her.

  I started in immediately on her jeans, popping the button and getting my hand quickly into her pants. An unusually bold move for me, but there was something driving it, and Ela didn't seem to mind or even notice.

  I slid my fingers into her panties, and when I touched her bush I almost recoiled.

  “What's this?” I said, standing back from her.

  She had shaved.

  Almost, though not entirely. A small, feathery landing strip was all that I encountered, and then my fingers had brushed against all of the ultra-smooth skin surrounding her gash. My fingertips, too, were wet with her excitement.

  Like a giant wave, all of my suspicions towered over me again.

  And tantalized me with their possibilities.

  Not to mention, the smooth silk of her pussy sent me over the edge with desire. My hand almost pulsed from the feel of it.

  My heart was racing.

  “You like it?” Ela said, and her reaction was one of coy flirting, nothing more. I searched her face for a glimmer of guilt, of having been found out or caught. But there was nothing. Nothing on Ela's face to indicate that she was worried at all about how I would take her new shave-job.

  “I did it on lunch break like a day ago. Kim Lee had a coupon.”

  I scrutinized her face.

  Was she offering too much information? Would she have told me all of this if her trim was just, in fact, a trim she had gotten with Kim Lee, the token Korean violinist from every ensemble?

  “Kim Lee gets waxed?” I said, my mouth way ahead of my mind.

  Ela smiled. She put her hand up as though shielding her secret from an audience. “She's a really dirty little slut,” she whispered. “I know,” she said, putting her arms over my shoulders. “It's shocking. I always though Kim Lee was such a nice girl...the real question,” she said, changing her voice to sultry and with it the subject, “is: do-you-like-it?”

  The feel of her soft skin was still radiating on my fingers like erotic stardust. Yes, yes I fucking liked it.

  But I almost liked it better thinking it had not been with Kim Lee at all. I liked the idea of it being for someone else.

  I slid her jeans from her small frame and pushed her panties down to her knees. I rubbed my fingers over her mound and sav
ored the softness I encountered. Her hair was soft, but now there was only skin, Skin and the soaked gash between her folds.

  I slid a finger into the hot flesh between her lips, and encountered a flood of hot juices.

  I opened my mouth, maybe to say something, maybe not. Ela found my lips with her tongue and traced her red, wet, candy-tasting tongue over them. It was not something she had ever done before, and it was exhilarating. I made a move for her mouth, but she pulled away, smiling. Teasing. She bit at my lip, snapping at it a little, and then pulling her hot little mouth away before I could have her.

  Ela's panties and jeans were still around her knees, and we were precariously close to the top of the stairs. I tried to maneuver her into a room, but she turned herself and hung her body over the banisters, nearly folding in half. Her ass was turned upward and spread open slightly by this action, and then I watched, my cock pulsing with excitement but my body paralyzed by Ela's movements, as she wound her hands through the rails and ran her fingers along the inside of her thigh – up, up, to her spread gash. She slid her forefinger along the engorged flesh, and then began to stroke her clit.

  It was all a display for me, and I watched it, mesmerized. Her fingers went up, and she trailed her juices over her taint and up more, to where she made a small little circle around her asshole.

  The scene was lewd as hell, and I would call it to mind over and over again nearly every five minutes for weeks to come. She was so bent over, and her fingers were doing such naughty things. She made several slow, lazy circles around her ass, and then I watched like a zombie as her finger slid inside of her own asshole.

  I moved toward her, and she removed her finger. It slid from her easily, and with her slippery fingers she guided my hand to her asshole. The message was clear – I began to rub her small eyelet with my thumb. I was rewarded with a gasp. I pressed inward, and her tight flesh pulsed around me, but my thumb slid in easily. I went until I was buried up the knuckle, and I felt Ela squeeze around me in slight pain.

  “Now fuck me,” she breathed, and she lifted herself up with the strength of her abs to say this.