We exchanged greetings. She asked, “Is Fredrik around?”
Fredrik had overheard the conversation and approached. The girl gave him a beseeching look. “Would you mind if I asked you for a favor?”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“I have a leaky faucet in the bathroom and I don’t really trust building maintenance. Can you help? I have the cartridge and everything. I’m just not confident about installing it, even with YouTube.”
The girl was right about building maintenance. Shoddy workmanship met general creepiness in the form of the building’s handyman, nicknamed the hedgehog because of his resemblance to Ron Jeremy. His real name was Don. His real name and the jeans that he wore slung low, especially when working beneath sinks, inspired more than one tenant to quip about the “crack of Don”.
“I can walk you through it. Best way to learn.”
The girl smiled. “That would be fine.”
On his return, he told me a little about the girl’s apartment. He wasn’t a gossip, but a large photograph seemed to have captured his attention. It hung just above the headboard of the girl’s bed, he said. The door was open, he insisted, before I could tease him about looking for leaky faucets in all the wrong places. He said it was a black and white photograph of an arm and the side of a breast cast in heavy shadow. The arm carried the impression of ropes embossed on the skin. He suspected that the photo was of the girl in 3D, but there was no way of knowing for sure.
“It was a very striking photograph,” said Fredrik. “Evocative. I can’t help feeling that I’ve seen it before.”
I shrugged.
“I think she might be a kinky one,” he said in an exaggerated stage whisper, eyes wide. Fingers doing some kind of weird dance.
I didn’t respond, not wanting to encourage him, but thought: Good for her.
“Kinky,” he said again before stowing his tools in the closet. “Into shibari, probably.”
So, to Fredrik. Henry was the name that was on all of his IDs and official documentation. In real life, Henry went by his middle name, which was Fredrik. He’d been going by Fredrik for decades, ever since he and I started going steady (as was the terminology back then) and later married. My name is Henrietta but I went by Henny. After several months of Henry/Henny jokes and general confusion, Henry volunteered to go by his middle name. The fact that my middle name was Gundula prevented me from being so selfless. Fredrik wasn’t so accommodating and flexible that he wasn’t secretly pleased when I took his surname when we married. We were of a generation where such things were never questioned. Besides, he sacrificed his first name for me. It was only fair that I would give up my maiden name.
As mentioned, Fredrik and I had been together for a long time. Long enough that it felt like our marriage could qualify as an exhibit in a small community museum as a artifact of a bygone age. People sometimes asked me the secret to a happy marriage, as though being four-decades-married made me some kind of oracle. Depending on who was doing the asking, I would answer with “communication” or “common goals” or “ennui”. To my closest friends, who never would have asked anyway — because TMI, as the kids say — I would have answered: “Be the canvas upon which your partner paints his fantasies”.
At any rate, no one wanted to think of two old farts painting fantasies on anything, let alone the other’s body.
He caught me as he was leaving the bathroom. “Ah! I left you something.”
I sniffed to make sure that he hadn’t left me a bomb. It wouldn’t have been the first time.
“It’s on the counter.”
No bomb then. He grinned. Then I made the connection. It was play day.
“It’s play day,” he said unnecessarily.
On play day, the shot-caller or Dom-du-jour usually left some thematic hint for the other somewhere in the apartment. A teaser. I peeked into the room, curious to see what my dear Fredrik had come up with.
Sometimes, he would leave a collar for me. Maybe cuffs. Maybe a crop or flogger or a butt plug, just to give an idea of what was planned. I often chose some of those same things, being all about equality, but sometimes opted for massage oil if I was feeling selfish and worn out.
Other times, he would leave me lingerie.
Occasionally nothing, if the Dom simply didn’t want to play, wanted vanilla, or forgot.
We alternated. At the beginning of the month, he got to choose. At the middle of the month, I did. Either way, we tried for two play days a month, when one of us would act out with the other whatever was on our minds. We’d done this for several decades. Painting fantasies.
It worked. It kept things interesting. Encouraged imagination. Kept atrophy at bay. I didn’t always like what he came up with, but I always pretended to. Nothing killed creativity like indifference. Nothing killed one’s love life more than a lack of creativity.
Sometimes he left me a collar and cuffs, sometimes lingerie. And sometimes, costumes.
Today was the latter.
I stepped into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. I didn’t want to ruin his fantasy by making a face or groaning. The package had a photo and I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. At least Fredrik had selected a plus size. Too often, he would get all distracted by the models online and forget that I wasn’t the twenty-year-old waif with an actual waist that I used to be.
Out of the plastic sleeve slipped a few scraps of vanishingly sparse fabric. Somewhere, I thought, an imprisoned Uyghur seamstress would cringe at the prospect of me wearing her handiwork and wonder about the general depravity of the West if only she knew. Then again, maybe she stole from the factory so that she could paint fantasies with her lover as well. You never knew about people.
So there I stood in the bathroom, a sixty-something year old woman, gawping at a Catholic schoolgirl’s outfit — or at least a man’s perverted version of one. Made in China, the label read, as it did for just about everything these days.
The outfit consisted of an impossibly thin tartan band aid of a skirt and a top that consisted of matching tartan lapels and see-through fabric everywhere else.
The top of my face featured rolling eyes. The bottom, a faint smile.
“I see you’ve found the outfit,” he said when I emerged.
I nodded.
“Good,” he said. He rubbed his hands together and actually giggled.
God bless him.
The beauty and the sorrow of having grown old is the memory of our younger selves, the things we allowed ourselves and the things we denied. With age we denied ourselves less, but of course we were capable of less too. Parts of me had surrendered to gravity. Parts of me testified to overindulgence and under-utilization. Same with Fredrik. Without the benefit of having known each other in our respective primes, I doubted that either of us would have looked at the other now with much of a lustful gaze.
Back in the day, I was firm and proud breasted. Flexible. Fredrik said that my personality had pull, like a planet. I’d never been compared to a planet and wasn’t sure what to do with that bit of information, but I was sure the sentiment came from a good place.