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.
Knowing that we now had more road behind us than ahead, both of us were committed to wresting as much pleasure from life as possible. When the stars aligned and my body allowed me to move into forgotten positions and when Fredrik could maintain an erection without the chemical intermediary that he has so far shunned for reasons of pride or embarrassment, we got on like the youth we once were. I knew then that the young could teach us nothing, however smug they were with their toned bodies and cloying self-assurance. There was likely not an inch of us that the other hadn’t explored in countless ways many times over — an image, I’m sure, that would send the young screaming into celibacy.
That evening, as he was preparing supper, Fredrik asked, “When do you see the doctor?”
“Not for months. Why? Do you have some ideas?”
It was always safer to ask. I bruised easily even when Fredrik remained on the right side of my limits. Bringing bruises to a doctor was never a good idea, particularly for a woman. You could talk all you wanted about safe, sane, and consensual until you invited someone else to make that determination and they decided that none of those terms could possibly apply to what they were seeing.
“I always have ideas,” he said. Then he asked me to get changed.
I had hoped that he would have asked much later. Later, when the lights were dim and I’d have less time to look ridiculous. Evidently he wanted me dolled up for dinner. As I stood before the mirror, I felt young and stupid in the outfit but knew that Fredrik wouldn’t see me that way. Maybe he had a point. The top did wonders for my cleavage. And the bottom was a screaming, wanton invitation. I paired the ensemble with garters, stockings, and the kind of high heels I only wore when I felt they would spend more time pointing at the ceiling than walking on the ground.
Fredrik looked up as the percussion of heels on hardwood announced my return. His eyebrows shot up and that blessed, familiar look of hunger crossed his face as his gaze raked over me. That he could still lust after me and that I could arouse that feeling gave me a momentary rush. I felt young again.
I settled into my usual spot at the dining room table and he poured us glasses of red wine.
Halfway through the meal, he set his cutlery aside and asked, “What are young Catholic girls allowed to do?”
“Nothing fun unfortunately.”
“What about naughty Catholic girls?”
“You mean like me?”
He nodded hopefully.
“Blowjobs,” I answered. “Anal if they have a misguided notion of virginity. All else if they don’t believe.”
“What do you believe?”
“I believe in pleasure.”
“That’s my girl,” he said. “And what kind of naughtiness have you been up to?”
“Aren’t you more interested in seeing what kind of naughtiness I’m capable of?”
“I am.”
“Good. That list is longer.”
He laughed and my heart warmed. Humor had always factored into our intimate lives, certainly more than the look of earnest constipation that graced the faces of the porn actors we sometimes watched.