I never found any Polaroids of a stripper in bondage poses. I never found a leather cuff or padlock. I never found a vibrator among my mother's possessions. There was no enema bag and nozzle. Nor did I find any copy of “The Story of O” in my father's workshop or anywhere else in their house.
For all I know, the letter and entire week of diary entries might have been nothing but fantasies that they wrote to amuse each other and never acted out in real life.
But they must have amused each other some way because they stayed married for the rest of their lives; and I've never met any couple who seemed happier with each other.
Her diary contains one other bit of information. Every twenty-eight days, more or less, she ends her diary entry with an “M” printed in red. I was born on the 28th of October in 1973. The last “M” before she became pregnant with me appears on 22 January 1973. My mother would have been at the peak of her fertility during her week of sexual submission to my father. She was sent to buy condoms but she never wrote that they used any of them during that week. And I was born about nine months later.
Maybe I inherited a meme that was implanted during that week. Maybe that's why I've enjoyed fantasizing about bondage since I was a child.
Now, I've decided that it's time to find out if I can translate those fantasies into reality. Yesterday, I asked my husband if he’d ever read “The Story of O”. He said that he did and that he liked it.
Christmas is coming. I have a letter to write.
If my mother could do it for her husband, then I sure as hell can do it for mine, too.
Topper
“Ya gotta love a good woman,” Clement (“never call me 'Clem'”) said, giving his wife, Julia, a little pat on the tush as she walked by.
Julia smiled indulgently as she carried the over-done roast to the table.
“I know what you mean,” Josh nodded. “Kelly gives me exactly what I need.”
“Not like Julia, I bet.” Clement leaned forward and whispered theatrically, “When we're in the sack, she's got some mouth on her, if you know what I mean.”
Julia had the grace to blush as she took her seat.
Josh frowned.
Clement drained his third double scotch of the evening, leaned back, and laughed uproariously. “Didn't mean to shock ya, Josh,” he roared. “I should'a pegged ya for sittin' on the prudish side of the fence, eh? I mean, you always act so quiet an' cool but I know yer just uptight. But Julia and me, we like to have our fun. Three, four times a week, even. Ya know? We don't believe in hiding our exuberance. Good word, huh? Exuberance.” He leaned toward Josh again. “But I understand that not every woman puts out for her man like ol' Julia, here. Fer shur, it's natural you'd envy me for havin' a woman who's so happy to accommodate me. I tell ya, yer Kelly should spend a little girl time with Julia, here, and she'd learn a thing or two about bein' a good, proper woman.”
Impugning his wife crossed a line. Josh stood abruptly, scraping his chair back from the table and snapped his fingers, pointing at the floor. “Slave, kneel!”
Kelly immediately sprang from her seat and knelt at his feet, her head bowed and her eyes downcast.
“Give me my belt.”
Keeping her eyes downcast, she unbuckled Josh's belt with shaking fingers, pulled it from his pant loops, and presented it to him, draped over her upraised hands.
“Present yourself over the chair.”
She rose gracefully to her feet, then draped herself over the back of Josh's dining room chair. She lowered her pantyhose and panties to her knees, then raised her skirt to her waist, baring her backside.
Josh delivered a dozen swift blows to her ass, using his full strength. Clement and Julia's jaws dropped open as they watched her face crumple in pain. Despite her welling eyes and involuntary jerks, Kelly snapped a smart, “thank-you, sir,” between her whimpers after every brutal stroke. They could not see her bare buttocks but knew that they had to be striped with angry welts.
When Josh lowered his belt, he asked, “What else will you do for me?”
“I will do anything you wish, sir,” she replied through her tears, “I will accommodate you any way that you want.”
Josh looked at Clement and smiled slightly. “That, Clem, is a woman who knows how to accommodate her man.” He turned his gaze to Julia. “Thank you for cooking this lovely meal for us, but I'm afraid that we're going to have to excuse ourselves. We have some urgent business to take care of at home.”
Julia nodded, her eyes still wide with shock. “It's all right. I understand.”
“Heel,” he said to Kelly in a low, hard voice.
She meekly followed him out of the house. Her skirt fell back to cover her burning ass but she had to take short steps because her underwear still hobbled her knees. He had not instructed her to pull them up.
After driving down the street a short distance in silence, Josh glanced over at his wife and smiled tentatively. “I'm sorry, mistress. I know that I deserve punishment for my behavior.”
Kelly nodded solemnly. “You were right to show that jackass what an obedient woman looks like and I was happy to play the role for you. But you know that I'll have to punish you for your insubordination. You can look forward to a severe caning when we get home. Severe. And you'll have to endure considerably more punishment as well. You will suffer the agonies of hell tonight.”
His grin disappeared and he nodded with a shudder of fear. His mistress always gave him exactly what he needed, especially when he needed a long night of painful and humiliating punishment. He gave her reason often enough, but he had to admit that, tonight, he had topped himself.
A Wife of No Small Promise
Hillary edited and re-edited the email; then deleted it, re-wrote it from scratch and edited it some more. But this second draft was getting too long, too wordy, so she deleted that one, too, and rewrote it in a completely different way. When she was finished, she was still unhappy. Her intent was simple, the gist of the message straightforward, but she had to get the right nuances or her night would end in a disaster. A wrong outcome might even ruin her life.
It was worth spending time to get it exactly right.
After sweating over the keyboard for more than two hours, she admitted to herself that was good enough, that it had been good enough all along; that her fears – entirely valid fears – had driven her to look for any excuse to avoid sending it. But, right or wrong, it was time to commit herself. With her hand trembling on the mouse, she clicked the “send” button and let her promise fly through the Internet to Walt’s office computer, warts and all.
As soon as she sent it, she began to regret her stupidity with all her heart. Now she was committed. Absolutely committed. She asked herself what she had done. She cursed herself out loud because she had to follow through no matter what second thoughts she had. The email was a promise and she always kept her promises. If she reneged now, how could she expect Walt to trust her ever again?
She opened the copy of the email in her “sent” folder and stared at it for a half hour, reading and re-reading it. And, with every reading, she imagined a different way that her evening could unfold. The best she could hope for was utter degradation. Every other outcome that she could imagine was worse.
Dear Walt:
Last week, you told me that you were unhappy in our marriage. I was surprised because I thought it was going pretty well. Since then, I have been thinking about what I might do to make you happier. You told me on a number of occasions that you think that our sex life has become mundane. That I am haven’t been as adventurous as your wife as I was when we were dating.
I am going to change that tonight.
I am not coming home after work. Instead, at exactly 9:00 PM, I will go into the bar at 1529 Broadway called O’Reilly’s Pump, sit down, and begin entertaining sexual propositions from men. I do not expect that to take long because I will dress in a way that makes my intention obvious. My intention is this: I will get on my knees in the Men’s wash
room and give a big, sloppy blowjob to the first man who is willing to pay me twenty dollars.
If I cannot find any one who is willing to pay me even that paltry sum by 10:00, then I will start approaching men and offering to service them for free. One way or another, I will not leave the bar until I have swallowed some man’s cum. This is the promise that I make to you and to myself.
I hope with all my heart that you will be the man to buy my service, but if you chose to let someone else to make an offer first, I will not hesitate to give him a blowjob instead.
My fate is in your hands.
I hope that this is the kind of sexual adventure that will make you happy.
Love,
Hillary
Walt read the email a second time. What the hell was this all about? He never told Hillary that he wanted to get a blowjob in a Men’s room in some seedy bar. And he sure as hell never told her that he wanted her to cheat on him with some stranger. What the hell was she thinking?
He raged because, after twenty years of marriage, he knew exactly what she was thinking. This was just another way for her to jerk him around. It seemed like she spent every minute of every day searching for some way to impose her will on him, complaining that he never helped out around the house, and when he did, complaining that he did everything wrong – demanding that he fold towels the same way that she folded them and demanding that he take out the garbage precisely when she wanted it taken out.
And, of course, the ultimate battleground for their two-decade-long power struggle was the bedroom. When he wanted sex, she got more power by denying him than by allowing herself to be seduced. So they made love on her schedule – two or three times a month – rather than according to his needs; needs which became more urgent every time she looked at him with a twinkle in her eye, let him beg for a while, then decided that she wasn’t in the mood after all. And when she did let him make love to her, the rules were hers – in the bedroom, lights off, missionary position, and he better come quick or she’d find it too painful to let him continue to the end.
And now she was commanding him to show up at some bar at exactly 9:00 or she was going to give some stranger a blowjob – a sexual act that she had always said was “too disgusting” to perform on him even as she told him with her next breath that she loved with all her heart.
He was so frustrated that he wanted to scream.
Instead, he moved on to his next email.
Shopping took longer than Hillary expected – most of the afternoon. Who would have thought that it would take so long to find clothes that would make her look like a two-bit whore? It was true that she was a little old for the game – already over forty – but that shouldn’t have been a problem. Dressing two decades too young for her age would give her the exact look that she wanted: desperate and willing to do whatever she had to do to earn twenty bucks. The problem was that she was fifteen pounds overweight and those few extra pounds on her forty-year old body made her about six sizes too large to fit into the clothes that designed to make a twenty-year-old look like a slut.
But she was a trooper and was willing to squeeze into clothes that were a couple of sizes too small if that was required. Comfort was not her goal. Her only practical concern was that she had to be able to sink to her knees without splitting her skirt in half.
If her personal humiliation would make her husband happy, that was a price that she was willing to pay. Not a price that she wanted to pay; not a price that she was eager to pay; but one that she would pay for his sake.
But she never expected that she would have to start paying so soon in such large denominations to so many condescending, skinnier-than-thou, minimum-wage teenage clerks in trendy clothing stores. The frank sneers and giggling whispers behind her back made her blush as she sorted through the racks of plus sized teen apparel. How did these clerks know that she was shopping for herself and not for a daughter? Maybe their first clue was that she was shopping alone and their second clue that she kept taking the clothes into the change room to try them on.
In Rue Chic, she managed to squeeze into a hot pink tube top in the dressing room. As she looked at herself in the full-length mirror, she hated the way her waist bulged and strained the double-stretch almost as much as she hated the way her nipples made such prominent bumps in the thin material.
It was perfect.
She wasn’t looking for clothes that she liked; or even clothes that flattered her; she was looking for clothes that made her look like she was available to anyone who cared to ask. And the way the skimpy top displayed cleavage all the way down to her nipples screamed that her boobs were available to one and all. She imagined that Walter – she had convinced herself that the man who would buy her services tonight would certainly be Walter; that was the only way she could force herself to do this – would want her to pull the top down to her waist while she was blowing him so that he could watch her naked tits bounce as her head bobbed back and forth in a frenzy of licking and slobbering. This hateful scrap of clothing was the prefect top in every way.
The teenaged clerk gave her a smarmy grin as she passed her the bag and said, “Have a nice day, ma’am,” investing the final word with as much venom as possible.
Hillary felt a fresh blush of shame and wanted to slap the little bitch. She refrained only because she would not give the little tart the satisfaction.
The scene was repeated at Lilly’s Boutique where she found a little black miniskirt that was short – the hem rode more than two inches above her knee – and uncomfortably tight. Before she left the change room, she looked in the mirror closely, then took a blue pen from her purse and marked a small line slightly less than halfway between the hem and her crotch. The line was hard to see on the black material, but she knew that she would be able to find it when she looked for it later. The skirt was already short, but it would be a lot shorter before she wore it out tonight.
The slender, blonde, teenaged clerk called her, “dear,” a term usually used to condescend to senior citizens, in a tone of precisely calculated disdain. She ignored the clerk and worried about the skirt. She was going to have to hike it up to her crotch before kneeling down, otherwise it would split the seam for certain. She could look forward to one more little inescapable humiliation in the Men’s room at O’Reilly’s. When she thought about hiking the skirt up, she realized that her choice of panty style and color was going to matter.
She would have preferred going out bare-legged, but the skirt would be short enough to reveal a little spiderweb of varicose veins halfway up her right thigh, even when she was standing up, and she worried that that would reduce her desirability – or, she should say, salability – when she put her body on the open market tonight.
She could not wear a bra with the top, even if she wanted to. Finding black stockings, garter belt, and a scarlet thong in her size was easy. She could have chosen a black thong to match the miniskirt or a pink one to match the top, but it was important that the thong contrast with the skirt and stockings as much as possible; she wanted men to have no doubt about what they were seeing when she had to part her legs or when her skirt hiked up accidentally. She was not a natural exhibitionist and hated the thought that anyone would see more than was modest and proper – she would do her best to minimize the frequency and severity of her indiscretions – but realistically, indiscretions would happen no matter how alert she was and how careful she moved. By the time she got to the Men’s room, she would have no shred of self-respect left. But she would instinctively fight to keep as much dignity as possible before that final, inevitable degradation. That would make her feel every little humiliation along the way all the more keenly.
As she bought the garter belt, she fretted about the miniskirt that was in the trunk of her car. It was going to be very short by the time she was ready to wear it and the garter belt straps were only adjustable to a limited degree. Even with the stockings pulled as high as possible, she wondered how much of the rigging would be visible below the
hem. She was sick with fear that the hem of the skirt would be too high and the stockings too low, showing more than she wanted. But she was already committed to wearing the entire ensemble, no matter how it looked when she finally saw it all together.
Pink, strappy, open-toed shoes with three-inch stilettos completed her hooker outfit. If those shoes didn’t shout, “fuck me!” to the entire world then nothing would.
She could not return home and risk running into Walt prematurely, so she checked into a cheap motel and spent the next hour sitting in the crumby room, working on the miniskirt. She had brought a pair of tailor scissors with her and immediately began cutting at the pen mark that she had made in the change room in the store. After chopping a good three inches of material from the bottom, she used a black thread and a needle to re-hem it by hand.
After her alteration, she looked at the skirt in her hands and wondered if she had cut off too much. Would this scrap of material even cover her crotch? She hoped to hell that she had marked the skirt properly in the store because she was going to wear it in public this evening, no matter what kind of tailoring mistakes she might have made.
She would not get dressed until the last minute for fear that, if she had time to think about what she looked like after seeing herself, she would lose her nerve and flee home in shame. Failing to keep her promise would be the worst humiliation possible. So unthinkable, that she simply refused to think about it.
Her stomach was already twisted into knots too tight to eat and her mind was too distressed to follow even a simple television program. She did nothing but sit quietly as the sun sank lower in the sky and let her multitude of fears torture her while the minutes ticked away.
She hoped that Walt understood and appreciated the hell that she was putting herself through just to give him a bit of excitement.
A Bestiary of Unnatural Women Page 15