A Bestiary of Unnatural Women (32 page)

He tells me what kind of gift he wants from
me. He says that he wants an hour of my time. He says that will be
the best gift that I can give to him: for me to let him do what he
wants for an hour. I know what he means. He means to do whatever
sex stuff he wants to do to me.

When he asks, he looks so sad. Worse than
sad, he looks scared that I’ll say no. He doesn’t leave me with any
choice. I have to say, “Yes. Okay. As long as you don’t hurt me or
anything. I’ll do what you want for an hour. But it can’t be
anything disgusting.”

I don’t think that he’d hurt me. Not
deliberately. He never has before. Not really. He tried to do anal
intercourse on me once, and that hurt so I told him to stop when he
was only half-way in, and he stopped as soon as I told him to, so
that was all right. I’m sure that he doesn’t want to hurt me.
Pretty sure. Besides, he knows that if he does anything violent,
I’ll go to the cops and report him and throw him out of the house.
I’ve made that clear from the day we started dating. I won’t ever
be an abused wife. He knows that.

But I like our marriage. When he looks at me,
kind of sad, I’m afraid that I’ll never get to throw him out
because he might leave me first. He should be happy. Real happy.
But he doesn’t act happy. It’s that damn porn that he was looking
at on the Internet. I hope he doesn’t think that real people act
like that. Those’re just pictures. Staged pictures with models.
They aren’t real women really being tied up.

He says that he wants an hour of my time on
Sunday afternoon and I have to give it to him because I don’t want
to be divorced like my friends. Too many women at work have been
divorced and I hate to hear them talk about dating. It’s hell for
women our age. I see the men that they have to bring to our dinner
parties. Losers, all. If I have to do something experimental for
Bert to keep him happy, I guess I’ll do it. But he better not hurt
me. I won’t put up with that. He better remember that.

He brought home some wood. Long boards or
planks or something – I don’t know much about wood. He told me to
stay out of the basement and he’s been down there all day on
Saturday, sawing and hammering. I don’t know what he’s doing but I
don’t like it. I smell sawdust. He better not get any sawdust in
the furnace. It’s a new furnace and I’m going to go ballistic if he
gets it all gunked up with sawdust and it doesn’t work right any
more.

He thinks he wants a wild woman? Well just
let him wreck our new furnace and he’s going to have a wild woman
on his hands and we’ll just see how much he likes those apples.

I could sneak down on Saturday night or early
Sunday morning to see what he’s been up to, but I don’t. He
wouldn’t have wanted me to. I’ll let him have his surprise.
Besides, it doesn’t make any difference. When he does show me, then
I’ll decide if I’m going to go through with our agreement or not.
If he’s made something awful then he can just forget the whole
thing. Sometimes he doesn’t have much sense.

I make him a nice lunch on Sunday afternoon.
A tuna sandwich with chopped pickles in it. He likes the pickles in
his tuna sandwiches and I always try to make food that he likes. I
don’t think he appreciates how hard I try to do things that he
likes. I make him tacos every couple of weeks because he likes them
and I let him watch those awful police shows after my soaps because
I know he likes them, too.

After lunch, he leads me downstairs to show
me what he’s built. I hope he remembers how much stuff I already do
for him. He whispers to me that I promised him an hour and he hopes
that I can enjoy it a little bit, too. He says that he’s been
really looking forward to this. He says it again: that he hopes
that I can enjoy the hour, too. I don’t like the sound of that,
but, when he says it, I think he’s being sincere, not mean. I think
that he really does hope that I’m going to enjoy whatever he has
planned.

The room is clean. He’s vacuumed up all the
sawdust. I think he even dusted a little. There’s a chair sitting
in the room and a big clock hanging on the wall. The clock wasn’t
there before. It has a white face and big black hands that say that
it’s five minutes before one. I guess his hour starts at one
o’clock.

I guess I’m going to have to do this now.
Whatever he has in mind.

There’s something new in the middle of the
room: the thing that really holds my attention. It’s a frame. A big
wooden frame that goes all the way up to the ceiling and has rings
screwed into the corners. I don’t need a diagram to know what it’s
for. I want to say, Oh, no. I’m not doing that! You’re not going to
put me in that thing! but he’s looking at me like he loves me and I
can’t turn him down. Not after he spent so much time building the
thing. And that wood must have cost something, too.

I told him an hour, so I guess I can put up
with his kinky stuff for an hour. An hour’s not so long, is it? I
mean, it’d be a long time if he was hurting me, but he’s not going
to hurt me, is he? I ask him what he has in mind and he says
exactly what I’m thinking: that he’s not going to hurt me. He just
wants to tie me up a little. Is getting ‘tied up a little’ like
getting pregnant a little? Either I’m tied up or I’m not. If I can
get away then I’m not really tied up, am I?

He’s trying to reassure me. He says that I
won’t be too uncomfortable. He just wants to try something simple
and easy. Just to see how I like it.

Yeah, right. ‘How I like it.’ I can’t believe
that he’s talking about ‘how I like it’ when he knows perfectly
well that I won’t like it one bit. I won’t like anything like this.
I like simple, straightforward sex once every couple of weeks and
that’s it. He knows that. And he knows that I give him sex more
often than that, every week, regular as clockwork, just to make him
happy.

This isn’t about what I like. This is about
what he likes and nothing else.

But he went to all the effort of building
this thing and I said that I’d give him an hour so I guess I have
to give him his hour. If I refused now, he’d be disappointed. What
would he think of me if I said no after he went to all the work of
making this thing? It took him all day and it’s only going to take
me an hour and then he’ll see that it’s not as much fun as he
thought. I don’t look like the young chicks in the pictures on the
Internet, and he’ll get those ideas right out of his system.

He wants me to get undressed. He starts to
unbutton my shirt, but I push his hands out of the way. I tell him
that I’ll do it, myself. I’m not a baby. I can undress myself more
quickly than waiting for him to fumble with my buttons. Even when
we were dating, he never could get my bra unhooked without spending
twenty minutes fussing around with it. He looks a little hurt and I
feel a little bad, even though I know that I shouldn’t. He should
have just asked me to undress and not tried to do it to me. I
already said that I’d do what he wanted.

When I’m nude, I feel chilly. I don’t know
why, it’s summertime and the basement isn’t cold at all. I’m even
sweating a bit so I can’t be cold. I must be a little nervous.
That’s to be expected, isn’t it? Anyone would be a little nervous
when her husband says that he wants to experiment with her and
won’t say what the experiment is all about. Anyone would want to
know what’s going to happen to her. That’s normal.

He leads me to the frame and has me stand in
the center of it. He has a rope; it must have been sitting on the
shelf behind the books where I couldn’t see it from the other end
of the room. He probably did that deliberately so that I wouldn’t
freak out on him. It’s a big, soft, red velvet rope like you’d buy
in a fabric store to tie back curtains if you had no taste at all
and wanted your room to look real gaudy. Or maybe if you were too
far gone into a retro sixties thing.

He asks if I trust him as he ties the rope
around my wrist. I nod but my nod is a lie. How can you trust a man
who’s tying a rope around your wrist? I’ve been married to him for
twenty-one years, but the man that I was married to for all that
time never tied me up. This is a different Bert than my husband. He
might have the same face and the same voice and the same name but
he’s not the man I married.

He wraps the rope around my wrist many times,
maybe a half dozen, before tying it off, so it’s like a big soft
cuff; and he doesn’t pull it very tight, so it doesn’t bite into
me. I have to raise my arm so that he can tie the end to the steel
ring in the upper corner of the frame. As soon as he finishes and
drops his hands from the knot, I relax my arm. It stays pointed
toward the corner of the frame. It’s not comfortable. The rope is
soft and doesn’t hurt; it just feels weird not being able to put my
hand down by my side. It feels not right. And it feels even more
not right when he raises my other arm to the other corner and ties
it up, too, in the same way.

So I’m standing nude with my arms raised
above my head and stretched apart and I look down and see that my
breasts are pulled up by my arms so that they look like they don’t
droop quite as much as they usually do. But they’re still droopy.
They aren’t the breasts that I had when I was a young woman.

Bert kneels at my feet and wraps another
length of rope around my ankle the same as he did with my wrists.
He asks me to spread my leg out so he can tie it to the lower
corner of the frame and I do it without saying anything. It’s too
late to fuss about it now. But I don’t like the feeling of my sex
being exposed. And I know that I’ll be pulled completely open when
he stretches my other leg to the other corner.

It’s easy to balance myself while I’m
spreading my legs because the ropes tied to my outstretched arms
take my weight and keep me upright.

When he stands up to get the last piece of
rope, I can see a big bulge in his pants. He’s turned on by this. I
have no idea what’s going through his mind. No idea at all.

When my last limb is secured to the last ring
by the last length of red velvet rope, Bert walks back to the
chair, his chair, and sits down in it and stares at me. His stare
feels like a punch in the gut. The clock says that it’s five after
one and I can’t move, not even to cover myself with my hands, so I
guess I am going to be stared at for as long as he wants, maybe for
a full hour.

I can see him staring at my breasts and I
want to cover them with something. I pull on the ropes without
thinking, a reflex, but that only pulls the knots a little tighter.
The ropes are deceptively soft and pretty; it is easy to forget
that they are strong and well-secured. I cannot hide any part of my
body. I have no choice but to endure his ogling.

His eyes drop to my crotch and he stares at
my sex. My hair down there is beginning to turn grey. Not very
grey. Not grey like the hair on my head would be if I didn’t dye it
once a month, but a little grey. Not the young grayish brunette
like when we got married, but an old lady grey.

He stares and I look hard into his face,
trying to see the glint of disgust; trying to read the thought that
he wishes that I was younger, prettier, thinner. I see nothing but
a man ogling the flesh of a woman who has no way to hide. He looks
like a man in lust. I don’t understand him at all. I can’t guess
what is going on in his mind.

He looks at my face, long and deep, and
finally speaks. He says that he loves me. He sounds like he means
it. He probably does. He’s stayed married to me for long enough.
Then he says that I am beautiful with equal conviction, but I do
not believe that.

When the hands on the clock reach one fifteen
when he stands up and walks behind me. I do not turn my head to
follow him, but keep facing forward, watching the slow sweep of the
second hand on the big clock face.

My arms feel tired and I try to relax them. I
have been tense, holding my arms up when I didn’t have to. I let
them rest in their bonds, let the rope hold their weight instead of
using my muscles. My legs are a little tired as well, but I cannot
rest them, they have to support me and that takes extra effort when
they are stretched wide apart like this.

I am startled to feel a gentle touch on my
shoulders. It is the first time that Bert has touched me since he
finished tying my last ankle. His touch is light, feathery, and I
wait for more. I am not disappointed. He runs his fingers down my
back over my shoulder blades, down either side of my spine, to the
curve of my buttocks. There, he spreads his fingers and lays his
palms flat on my cheeks. Gently, firmly, he squeezes them for a few
seconds, almost a massage but not quite. I feel my ass being pulled
apart slightly in response to the pressure and wonder if he has
separated them far enough to see my asshole. I hope not. I showered
this morning and should be clean down there, but who knows what he
might find lurking. I tense my buttocks and try to push them
together to close my crack against his inspection. He releases me
and then rubs his hands over the outside of my hips.

I wish I were fully clothed again but this is
his hour and if he wants to feel my body, I will allow it. Allow
it? I can’t stop it. Unless I tell him to stop. I’m sure that if I
told him to stop, he would untie me right away. But I don’t have
any reason to stop him. I mean, I want to. I sure do want to, but I
promised him an hour and I can put up with this for an hour, can’t
I? And if I don’t tell him to stop, he can do a lot more than this
before the minute hand finishes circling the dial. I wonder if he
is going to try to make love to me while I’m tied in his frame and
helpless. We made love the night before last, but I know that he
would like to do it again. It seems so soon to me, but he’s always
made it clear that he’s like to make love more than once a week.
He’s a bit of a beast that way.