Methods of Madness

by Ray Garton

  “That’s what I meant. It’s not what you’re thinking. She’s not for sale. This is a… a personal thing.”

  That threw me a little, but I hardly skipped a beat. “Well, that sounds great. But I’m just not up to it. I’m not up to any of it. I mean… this.” I gestured behind us toward all the women. “It’s just too scary. For the obvious reasons, of course—I’m out of practice—but also because it’s just too dangerous. All the diseases, all the viruses that’re out there now. I’d like some variety, but I’m not willing to die for it.”

  “You’re wrong there, too. She’s not like that.”

  “What do you mean, she’s not like that? It only takes one time to—”

  “This woman has only been with one man in over eleven years.”

  “Oh?” That shut me up for a long moment. “Well… what about this guy? I mean, maybe he’s been—”

  “This guy has only been with one woman in over eleven years.”

  I thought about that a while. I thought hard, looking him over carefully. “But how do you know he hasn’t—”

  “The guy is me. The woman is my wife.”

  Peggy and I hadn’t talked about it in months. Several months. In fact, by the time I met Larry Ruskin, it was pushing a year, because the last time we’d talked, it hadn’t gone well.

  I’d always heard—mostly on those damned talk shows—that it was a bad idea to talk about sexual problems, no matter how small, in bed. So I waited until we were in the car one evening on the way to our favorite restaurant.

  “Not this again,” she’d said. She had a very calm, unangry way of saying things like that. Peggy never got angry.

  “What do you mean? It’s been months since we’ve talked about this.”

  “That’s what I mean. Every once in a while, this comes up. It just gets a little old, that’s all.”

  “Well, why do you think it comes up every once in a while?”

  “Because you just won’t leave it alone.”

  “But why do you think I won’t leave it alone?”

  “I don’t know. I wish you’d tell me.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you! For years!” I was starting to sound angry, and anger just didn’t work with Peggy because, like I said, she didn’t get angry. So I tried to calm down. “I won’t leave it alone because it’s important to me. I think it should be important to… us.” All she did was nod with a tight-lipped expression. The tightness of her lips was the closest Peggy ever came to real anger. Normally, she had a pretty face—beautiful eyes, smooth skin, full lips… the face I’d fallen in love with—but this one look—this one look—made her genuinely ugly.

  “Look, Peggy, you know it’s not that I think you’re a bad lover. You know that. You know that I’m—”

  “No,” she interrupted quietly. “I don’t know that. You keep bringing it up, so what do you expect me to think?” Her voice was flat and ungiving.

  “Sweetheart, we’ve been married for nearly fifteen years, so isn’t it natural that I’d think you’d—”

  “Yes, we’ve been married for fifteen years, so I would think that we’d understand each other by now. I’d think that we would be comfortable with one another’s needs and limitations.”

  I fought the urge to roll my eyes and dig my fingernails into the steering wheel. But I tried to be understanding; I tried to tell myself that perhaps she was fighting the same urge. “Okay. Let’s just not talk about it.”

  “No. No. If it’s bothering you so much, I think we should. You’re not happy with us. Sexually, I mean.”

  “It’s not that simple. I just think it’d be nice if, once in a while, we—”

  “But that’s what you’re saying, right? You don’t like what we do in bed, so maybe we should—”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. It isn’t that I don’t like what we do. I mean… think about it. How would you like it if we ate hamburgers every night for fifteen years? Pretty soon, you’d get—”

  “But we don’t make love every night, it’s not like eating. I don’t see what eating hamburgers every night has to do with—”

  “I don’t expect us to make love every night, Peggy. Really. I mean, what if we—okay, okay, let’s say we only had to eat once a month. Once every two months. Okay? Let’s say our bodies required us to eat only once every two months. And let’s say that when it came time to eat—once every two months, like I said—we ate only hamburgers. Every time. You mean to say you wouldn’t get tired of that? You wouldn’t reach a point where you—”

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at, Arnold, because I am perfectly happy with our love life—our sex life—the way it is. If you just want to get laid, then you can probably go out and get any—”

  “That’s not it! Don’t you understand that I’m no less attracted to you than I’ve ever been? You keep saying you’ve gained weight, that you’ve gotten older, but you still turn me on, Peggy! You! No one else. I want you! I-I… Peggy, I love you, I do, I’m still in love with you. I’m just trying to improve what we already have, you know? Make it more fun. Make it more—”

  “Arnold?” She looked at me with that expressionless mask that always seemed to shut me up. “Don’t you think we’ve talked about this enough?”

  Yes, we had talked about it enough. That was when I decided we had definitely talked about it enough and, if I wanted to get what I was looking for—what I felt I needed— I would have to get it from someone other than Peggy.

  I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “I guess we have.”

  We had a nice dinner that night, and some nice conversation. We even made love when we went to bed a couple hours after getting home. We laid naked in the dark for a few minutes until I could stand it no longer. As they did every couple of months or so, my needs outweighed my fear of being ignored, which was what - usually happened; Peggy never came right out and said she didn’t feel like it—which would have been a lot easier to take, I think—she never even had an excuse… she just ignored me, usually lying there on her side, her back to me, her breathing steady and regular, as if she were asleep, although I knew she wasn’t. But that night, when I touched her, she rolled over—probably because of the talk we’d had earlier—and began, immediately, to finger my nipples and press her knee between my legs. That was the most she ever did; she never touched my genitals with her hands… in fact, her hands never made it below my chest unless I put them there. Shortly before we married, she’d discovered how sensitive my nipples were and, probably because it was the easiest and least messy thing to do, that had been the extent of her sexual aggression ever since: fingering my nipples. Unlike me, she wasn’t fond of foreplay; early on in our relationship, she frequently complained that I paid too much attention to it so, after a while, I gave it up almost completely and sort of fantasized about foreplay as we were making love. She lay beneath me as I moved; as we neared the finish, she raised her legs and bent her knees, as usual, clutching my back and shoulders. Peggy reached orgasm easily—she always had—and she usually had a number of them long before I finished; in fact, she sometimes complained that I went on too long, so I usually didn’t spend much time enjoying it and just tried to finish as soon as I could.

  And that was the last time we’d made love before that night in the bar.

  That’s the way it had been for years. Many years.

  Until I met Larry Ruskin.

  Larry got a cab and we talked on the way to his place.

  “It was her idea,” he said. “My wife’s, I mean. Julie. She was… bored. I guess I’d never thought about it before, but when I did, I realized that, yeah, I was kinda bored, too. Not unhappy, just bored. So we tried a few things. Some we liked, some we didn’t. We got some porn tapes from a friend, watched those. Bought some sex toys and played with them. Read a couple books. We had some fun, y’know? Then, after a while, Julie had an idea. I think she maybe got it from one of those tapes or a magazine, or something. Took her a while to get up the guts to suggest it, a
nd I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you I felt my teeth loosen when she did. She said she wanted to bring another man into our bed. You know, a threesome. Just a onetime thing. Nothing regular. Like I said, I was shocked.”

  “It didn’t bother you?”

  “Well… I wasn’t crazy about it at first. You know what I mean, right Arnold? After eleven years with her, I wasn’t exactly crazy about the idea of watching her roll around in our bed with another guy. It may work in dirty movies and magazines, but in real life, somebody gets hurt. Somebody’s threatened by it. Anyway, it took a while, but… she talked me into it. I mean, she even managed to turn me on with the whole idea. Don’t ask me how. I’m still a little flustered by it… the idea of watching my wife fuck some other guy. She kept telling me not to be threatened by it, not to let it bother me, because it would only be once, right? And she said she’d be thinking of me the whole time. And I’d get to watch her doing to somebody else all the things she usually did to me—y’know, like watching her suck him while I was inside her and vice-versa—and I’d know exactly how it felt.”

  Larry paused and shook his head slowly and I could tell by the look on his face—the slight smile and distant stare in his narrow eyes—that he was actually looking forward to it; however he’d felt about the idea before, it excited him now.

  “Obviously,” he continued, “I went along with it. It sounded pretty good. Still does, in fact. And—” He gave me a broad smile, a secret smile. “—I think it will be. And I promise you, Andy—” He lifted his hands in laughing assurance. “—I won’t touch you.”

  It was probably the drinks, I don’t know, but I started to feel a stir of warmth between my legs.

  The cab stopped in front of his apartment building, Larry paid and we went inside, into the elevator and up to the seventh floor. On the way up, he said, “Look, you don’t have to do anything tonight if you don’t want. Not at all, in fact. I mean, maybe Julie’s not for you. You can just meet her, we’ll talk, have a drink or two, that sort of thing. If you’re not interested, you just tell me later. You know… when the time is right. I’ll understand, and so will Julie.”

  The elevator opened, we went down the hall and Larry took out his keys. As he opened the door, he gestured inside and said, “Welcome.”

  It was dark inside except for a couple lights coming from other rooms. He took my coat and, as he hung it up, called, “Julie?”

  “In here,” a timid voice called from another room.

  He led me across the living room and through a doorway, into the bedroom, where a woman in a long robe lay in bed, her feet covered by a sheet, holding an open book in a pool of lamplight. She looked at me with wide, timid eyes, her mouth partially open, glanced away for a moment, then returned the look slowly, more interested this time—actually interested!—examining me, appraising me, one corner of her mouth quivering into a half smile. No woman had looked at me that way since… well, I couldn’t remember the last time a woman had looked at me that way. In fact, she looked at me in the same way—or so I imagined, and I’m sure now that it was just my imagination—that Peggy looked at her friend in that damned picture she’d showed me.

  As I watched her, I knew in an instant that I would be making love with Julie Ruskin that night…

  We were clumsy at first, understandably, but our nervousness actually made it more fun, more… titillating. I felt like a teenager fooling around with his girlfriend while his parents slept just down the hall.

  A while before, Larry had left us alone in the bedroom with a couple drinks, saying we should talk, get to know one another. We didn’t talk long, which was odd for me; in the past, it’s usually been difficult for me to become sexually involved with a woman I didn’t know, let alone one I hadn’t at least talked with for a while. But this situation was not usual.

  We sat on the bed and talked nervously for a few minutes—just small talk, nothing substantial—then she touched my hand and stood to remove her robe, saying in a breathy voice, “I really don’t, um… you know, I’m not sure what we’re waiting for.”

  I started to say I didn’t know, either, but her robe dropped to the floor and my mouth hung open as I stared at her.

  Julie was in her early thirties, a little over five feet tall and very shapely—not what you’d call thin, but not overweight—with full reddish brown hair that fell past her shoulders and eyes like polished copper; she was olive-skinned and beautiful, but seemed unaware of her beauty. I’d expected her to be naked beneath the robe, but she wore a black teddy of rose patterned lace with black garters and stockings; my eyes froze on a tiny red silk rose sewn to the lace between her breasts.

  “Well?” she said tremulously, taking my hand. I stood and Julie began to undress me slowly, smiling all the while, but with quivering lips. Once I was naked, she eased me onto the bed gently, her hands on my shoulders, and asked, “What do you want? What would you like me to do?”

  Suddenly, after years of entertaining a variety of sexual fantasies, I couldn’t think of a single thing I wanted her to do; I was, instead, entranced by the way she was looking at me. She seemed so involved, so… sincere about wanting to please me.

  I stammered, “Well, I, um, I don’t, uh… I really—”

  “What about this?” she whispered, reaching down and grasping my erection. “What would you like me to do with this?”

  “I-I-I, uuhhh… you can, y’know, you can, uh… “ I felt like a fool, an idiot. I remember thinking, at that moment, that if Jerry Lewis had ever done a love scene in any of those old movies, it would have played just like this.

  She put a finger to her lips—”Sshhh.”—then crawled down my body, holding my cock in her fist, and took it into her mouth, attacking it voraciously, using her mouth and hands, looking up at me the whole time, her eyes smiling as she licked and slurped. Her hand never stopped as she lifted her head a few minutes later and said breathlessly, “Anything you want… I have a vibrator… velvet cords to tie to the bed… you or me, either one… and oils and lotions… anything… anything you want… “ She lowered her head again and continued sucking, running her fingers over my balls as I squirmed on the bed, trying to form some kind of response.

  “I… I thought we… I thought this was going to be thuh-three, um… y’know, the three of us, um… “

  “He’ll be here,” she slurred. “He’s probably outside the door listening. He… he wants… to make sure we’re comfortable, thuh-that’s all. But he’ll buh-be here. This is what… what he’s wuh-wanted for a long tuh-time.”

  That made me flinch. It sounded as if the whole thing had been Larry’s idea, although he’d told me it had been Julie’s. But, as much as I wanted to speak up, to protest, to ask her questions, I couldn’t; it felt too good. Instead, I laid back and began thinking about all the things she would do, if only I’d ask…

  Larry joined us later, after Julie had taken me to heights of pleasure that, until that night, I had not known existed. She’d tied me to the bed, licked nearly every inch of my body—laughing girlishly half the time, mind you, which just drove me crazier, because she seemed to be having so much fun—brought me to the edge of orgasm with her mouth then finished me off by mounting me. After she’d untied me, when my erection didn’t go away, she’d grinned and said, “Good, good,” and that was when Larry joined us. He had come into the room once before, wearing a robe, and gotten something—I wasn’t sure what at the time—but the second time he returned, he was naked and smiling as he crawled between the sheets with us.

  It was like watching—no, no, living—a porn film; it was something I’d never expected to happen to me in my entire life, and yet I was experiencing it. I fucked her as she sucked Larry and fondled his balls and, later, we changed places and she sucked me and fondled my balls and scraped her nails over my nipples—

  —How did she know? I thought—

  —while Larry fucked her. We changed again and again, experimenting with various geometric possibilities, until neither
Larry nor I could take it any longer. He came inside her, clawing the sheets and crying out breathlessly; I came in her mouth with one hand buried in her hair, the other doubled into a fist behind my back.

  We were quiet for a long while; none of us spoke or looked at each other. Then, somehow—I’m not sure who started it—we began to do it all over again…

  On the way home, fresh from a quick shower at the Ruskins’, my hands trembling, I wondered how he could stand it. I knew I could never sit by and watch someone else have sex with Peggy, even if I was involved. It would have hurt too much… in fact, it would have torn my guts out.

  That made me think of Peggy. I was going home to her. I looked at my watch; it was after two in the morning. What would I tell her? I’d been coming home late every night for weeks, but never this late. Actually, I hadn’t been working late any of those nights, I’d been doing exactly what I’d done that evening: wandering around the city restlessly, going to bars, restaurants and nightclubs, searching for a woman who’d be willing to satisfy my dirty little adolescent cravings. There’d never been any danger of Peggy finding out; no one ever answered the phone at the office after hours and she never called if she knew I was going to be late. But tonight I would need some kind of explanation.

  It wasn’t until the cab stopped outside my apartment building that I realized something was wrong, something was missing. I’d rushed to leave Larry and Julie, hoping to get home no later than necessary, and I’d left behind… what, my wallet? My… my necktie.

  Shit, I thought, something else to explain. By the time I got home, more than my hands were trembling and my gut was a mess…

  I knew something was wrong when I found Peggy on the sofa in the dark living room, smoking as she watched CNN; she’d stopped smoking over two years ago and despised the news. She wore her bathrobe and slippers and—odd for such a late hour—she smelled of perfume. She looked at me over her shoulder and gave a brief, weak smile.