Reacquainted Pt. 01

"Sure. I think Theo thinks of it as sort of a continuation of military service; you know protecting citizens at home as well as abroad, that sort of thing. And there are...wow, I know three ex-soldiers on the force, and that's probably not all of them."

Mags: "But then there's a lot of burnout too, right? I mean, here are a bunch of folks who want to do good, who want to take the bad guys off the street, but...well like with your car, maybe they can't find the guy, maybe they know who did something, but can't put enough together for an arrest. Then they bust somebody and the bad guy beats whatever it is in court. That's got to be incredibly frustrating; you're always hearing about cops, particularly on the big-city forces, dropping out, or cutting corners, or sometimes committing suicide. I'm sorry if I'm being reductive, and you'd know much better than I do, but it's a tough life, isn't it? Everybody relies on you, but nobody likes you.

Jen: "Gosh, you make it sound...I don't know. Theo doesn't bring much of that home. I think he's still...I mean, he still believes."

"That's pretty impressive, actually. But now, look at this fantasy world we're talking about. Crime fighters are acknowledged heroes, celebrities even. In fact the biggest personal problem they have is concealing their identities from legions of adoring fans. Even the bad guys are...important, you know? They're plotting to take over the earth or destroy the human race or whatever. Or they're these slinky, sexy ladies like Catwoman or Poison Ivy or that blue chick fromX-Men.And the heroes defeat them, and resist them, and go home to their adoring girlfriends with the big tits and pouty lips, instead of staying late to process some dead-end jackass who tried to take down a parking meter because he needed to feed a crack habit. A guy like your husband—if you're right, and he still believes...maybe there's a psychological tie-in. Guy sometimes feels a little powerless in the face of the system; tough to blame him for fantasizing about being Captain America."

Jen mulled that over in silence for a while. She smiled. "I suppose. Tell you the truth, I've never thought of it like that." Then a new thought struck her: "Um...Mags, no offense, but I'm kind of surprised that you're so pro-cop. I mean don't you operate in a kind of legal gray-area yourself, I mean...look, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're a kind of sex-worker, aren't you?"

Mags took a deep breath. 'God damn it!' she thought, but didn't say aloud. 'I really was starting to like her.' She had less than no patience with the kind of narrow assumptions people made about her profession: dom equals pervert equals sex-adict equals whore equals...the list went on. She lived in a small city in a politically conservative part of the country, and she had gone public with what she did for a living. She hadn't had many friends before the interview, and she had fewer now, and almost none of them were women. And now her old classmate was apparently as close-minded and provincial as those bible-thumping hypocrites who'd tried to close her show.

Or maybe not. For God's sake, the poor woman could barely bring herself to say 'penis.' She probably had almost no idea what a dominatrix actually was. She forced herself to smile, and then heard herself being far harsher than she had intended.

"You are wrong, and I intend to correct you. Yes, I suppose I am a sex worker, under the broadest possible definition of the term, but I am not a prostitute, and what I do is entirely legal; licensed, even, in some states. A dominatrix will, for a negotiated fee, tie you up, spank you, whip you, verbally abuse you, tease you, and/or demand that you perform demeaning or humiliating tasks. Depending upon a client's wishes, and again for a price, she may or may not perform any of the above services—or others—in revealing or sexually provocative attire. However: she, or at least I, will not physically partake in the performance of any sex act, nor will she stimulate a client, manually, orally, vaginally or anally, am I making myself clear?"

Jen was completely taken aback by the force of the rebuke, and now it was her turn to fight to keep her temper. She was getting sick of apologizing to this bizarre and contradictory woman. However...she had apparently made an inaccurate and offensive assumption, and she had spoken out of ignorance. And she had really been enjoying talking to Mags. The woman seemed to have some perspective on her...situation, some insight which Jen suspected might turn out to be valuable. With an effort, she swallowed her pride...once again.

"Magnolia, I'm very sorry. I really know nothing about...what you do or why or how you do it, and if I've said something..."

Mags hadn't been expecting it. She was sure she'd blown it: been too harsh, too prickly, or arrogant or... For just a second, she was so relieved that she could feel the beginnings of tears behind her eyes. "Please, Jen...stop. Oh Lord, now I'm sorry. I can be a real bitch sometimes. It's funny: that's what a dom is, really: a professional bitch. I like to think I can leave my work at the office, if you know what I mean, but sometimes..." She sighed, and sat down on a path-side bench. "Listen. I think I like you. At least I am enjoying your company, and that's more than I can say for most of my acquaintance. Can you forgive me for...well for being a patronizing..."

Jen: "Bitch?

Mags: "Yeah, ok, bitch." Both women laughed. "Are we ok?" Jen nodded. "Then maybe we should get back to the issue at hand: your husband?"

Jen: "And his...fetish for superheroes, or comic books, or spandex, or whatever it is? Yeah, maybe we should." She was silent for a while, then: "Mags, what I think I really wanted to ask you...I mean why I got in touch with you in the first place, and maybe you can't even answer but...ok: is this...something he just thinks about, or does he actually want...does he?...It's a fetish, right? So does that make all this a fantasy or does he actually want to...like, do something with, or about, all this?"

Mags sighed: "Honestly, Jen, there's no way to know without asking him. I will say that in my experience the more elaborate the fetish, the more difficult it is to realize in a way that doesn't disappoint the fetishist. I mean, if your guy was into feet, you could let him play with or kiss your feet, or stimulate him with them, or wear high heels or boots or whatever tickled his fancy. And that might really...enhance your sex life. I mean you and Theo may not have had much in the way of sexual variation, but it sounds like you've had enough sex to know that there are times when you're doing it because it feels nice and you love each other and it's Thursday, and then there other times when it's like you're hungry for it, and you can't keep your hands off each other, and you go off like a fucking rocket ship before he's got half his dick inside you, right?"

Jen sat still for a second, trying to catch her breath. She and Theo had certainly had very intense and pleasurable love-making sessions, butt she had never heard the act described with such...gusto. The thought made her giggle, and she finally managed to say: "Um...right." She looked up and found Mags staring at her. The taller woman's mouth was quirked into an amused half-smile.

"You know you might have yourself a little fetish for dirty talk."

Jen huffed. "Anyway, you were saying? So if a fetish is simple..."

"Right," continued Mags, returning to her point, "but Theo's fetish seems to involve scenarios, maybe even role-playing, and that can be difficult to realize, particularly if you're attitude to sex is..."

"Square?"

"Actually, I was looking for something like reverential, or maybe just...serious. Look, two people who consider sex a beautiful and sacred act which they perform as the physical manifestation of their love might have a long and fulfilling sex life. But they may not necessarily experiment much: no bondage, no toys, no costumes, no porn. But then let's say the guy develops a fetish. Nothing crazy, maybe he get's intrigued by a hooker he sees on his commute home from work. He starts thinking about how exciting and kind of naughty it would be to pay a pro for sex. Now this guy is a loving husband, and he doesn't want to cheat on his wife, so one day he comes home with a little red miniskirt, and a cami-shirt or something, and he says 'Hey, Honey, tonight, would you put this on, and maybe over-do the make-up a little and pretend to be a hooker, and I'll pay you twenty bucks for a blowjob?'

Mags paused. Jen was silent, so her companion continued: "You see the problem, right?

The path now divided in front of them. A right turn would bring them through a small stand of trees and back around to the other edge of the golf course. But an access road led directly ahead into an area of undeveloped county land, which stretched away, wide and flat and empty towards a ribbon of Interstate some eight or ten miles to the west. Jen said: "Oh, sure. I mean, potentially...I see all kinds of problems..."

"Come on," said Mags. "Let's turn around. It's getting late."

7.

Second week on third shift; 10:00 in the morning and Jen was at work. Theo usually made it home between 8:00 and 8:30 depending, kissed his wife, if she hadn't left yet, and fell into bed, but this morning he had been restless. He and Serge had come on at 9:00 last night, and for ten long hours they had responded to one potential Drunk and Disorderly (resolved by the time they got to the bar), and one possible domestic intrusion which turned out to be a impossibly fat and bad-tempered possum trapped in an aluminum trash can. The partners had caught up on paperwork, drank coffee from the Dunkin' on the corner, played far too much Candy Crush on their phones, and spent most of their on-duty hours bored witless. Now Theo was awake and disoriented. He didn't really have the energy to do anything productive, and he knew he should get back to sleep, but...well, heck. There was one thing he could do to relax.

Before becoming a cop, Theo had probably seen less porn than his wife. Of course guys in the army had all kinds of stuff: magazines, DVD's and laptops with...well pretty much anything. But Theo had been "raised right" as his grandmother used to say, which had meant school, sports, Scouting, and Sundays at the First Presbyterian Church of Christ Triumphant. As an adult he found himself at church far less often than his parents, and particularly his grandmother, would have liked, and he was fine with that, but that didn't mean he'd been comfortable sitting with a bunch of sweaty guys around a 12" screen watching some lady get it on with farm animals. After he'd fled that particular gathering, there had been the inevitable heckling, which had gotten out of hand and led to the inevitable fight, which he had won, decisively. Things calmed down in the barracks after that, but nobody invited PFC Sutcliffe to look at any more porn.

Then one day, a little less than two years ago, he'd been part of a squad that executed a warrant on a guy. The mutt in question, a known scumbag, had been running what amounted to a 7-11 of small-time illegal and semi-legal stuff out of a personal storage unit. He'd been busted for something like his 143rd DUI, or driving without a license or whatever, and vice decided to take him off the streets for a while. Somebody got a warrant for the unit, and he, Serge, and another couple of patrol guys—Dave Street and Marty Lefkowicz—had clipped the lock, and rolled open the door.

They'd found a little of everything: some weed, some questionable looking cocaine, a little prescription stuff, some handguns—serial numbers filed, dirty, basically crap street weapons—some hunting knives, 8 or 9 radar detectors, new in the box, and a whole lot of porn: DVD's, magazines, sex toys, bondage gear, some other weird stuff. The four cops called in, got told to wait for some Crime Scene guys, who'd look for some direct link (preferably the mutt's prints) to the drugs.

Lefkowicz got some surgical gloves out of the car, passed them around. The four of them weren't supposed to touch, but Street and Lefty sort of drifted toward the porn. Porn was legal, right? No harm in looking. Theo didn't care one way or another, but he did look up when Street whistled.

"Jesus Christ, will you look at this!"

Street was holding up a DVD in its case:Batman. Batman?The photo on the front made it look like...was that..? It looked liked Adam West from the old TV show. Theo had watched the reruns on Saturday afternoons when he was a kid. He'd had a huge crush on Batgirl, and Catwoman, and...

"Hey, Dave, let me see that."

"You got your gloves on?"

"Yeah, yeah, give it here."

Batmanit was, or at least...had to be, right? The costumes were just too close. There was Batman and Robin and Batgirl on the cover—she was blonde instead of a red-head, but still—and that was the Joker up in the corner. Can't mistake that guy, and on the back...holy sh-...er...wow!

Panels, like a comic book, but with stills from the movie: up in the top left, there was Batgirl, in her cowl and mask, with her lips around the tip of some guy's...and the guy was...he looked huge! Bottom left, there was Catwoman in the black slinky bodysuit with the mask and the ears, and then just across on the right, there she was again, naked except for the mask with one in her mouth and one in her...Theo wanted to look away. He thought he wanted to look away. But if he wanted to look away, why the hell wasn't he looking away? Lefkowicz reached over and took the box out of his hands.

"C'mon, Sutcliffe, close your mouth; you're gonna catch flies."

Marty Lefkowicz was an equal-opportunity pain in the ass. Nobody really resented him because he gave everybody grief. Now Theo said: "Go chase yourself, Lefty."

But Lefty ignored him. After a moment starring at the DVD, he started over toward Street. "Hey, Dave, check and see if there's more like this." Then softer, almost to himself: "Looks legit, but I don't know. Maybe..."

Theo came over. It was like the damn thing was magnetic or something. "Marty, what're you thinking?"

"Hm? Oh, hey. Theo, you don't buy a lot of porn, do you?"

It didn't feel like Lefty was busting his chops, so Theo answered truthfully. "No. Why?"

"Yeah, me neither. Well what I'm wondering is, like...is this legally produced or is our asshole running some kind of studio somewhere? I mean, if the Batman people...the comics people...do they know about this, because..."

Dave Street interrupted: "OK, I got a couple of theBatman, a coupleSuperman...uhSpiderman...there's, um, well it looks like aStar Wars, Avengers, holy shit,Scooby Doo?"

"Scooby Doo! Are you shitting me?"

"Marty, I shit you not, come and look."

Lefkowicz handed theBatmancase back to Theo, and walked over to his partner to browse titles.

The DVDs had been legit, commercially available. The mutt hadn't made them. In fact the cops couldn't prove he hadn't bought them. So the little scumbag had gone down on the drugs and the guns, and the porn went into some evidence locker somewhere. Theo never saw it again. Or, more specifically, he never saw those particular discs again. But a few weeks later, at the end of a Two, he'd driven out to the all-night adult novelty shop off the Interstate and found his own personal copy of thatBatmandisc. Then a few weeks later,Superman, and then he'd found some amateur stuff on-line, and... Now he climbed out of bed, padded over to the guest bedroom in his boxers and a t-shirt, stood on a chair and reached for the ring on the trap door to the attic.

8.

Mags lived downtown, in a 2-bedroom railroad apartment above what had once been a 5-and Dime. Like many downtowns in the south-eastern Untied States, this one had tried and failed to reinvent itself at the turn of the millennium. Condos, boutiques, hip restaurants and clubs; nobody came. The little city just didn't have much appeal for younger people, and most left as soon as they could, scattered as if by a benign cyclone to Indianapolis, Saint Louis, Memphis, Little Rock, or Atlanta. Airmen from the base—which was still operational, by the grace of God and an energetic and hawkish congressman—spent most of their off-duty time and money at a collection of more-or-less salubrious strip malls a mile from the gates. So the sidewalks rolled up around 5:30, as the municipal workers and the merchants and restaurateurs who served them headed out to homes in small suburbs and neighboring towns, and downtown became...what? Quiet, but not empty; dead but not really dangerous: a little sprinkling of the poverty, homelessness, drugs and street crime endemic to most American cities, but not much; not really. A woman could walk the streets alone after dark in most places, most of the time. Mags did, a whistle around her neck, and a can of pepper spray in her purse, but she'd never needed either thing, and when, a week after their "Has Beans" reunion, she invited Jen Sutcliffe to dinner, she mentioned neither whistle nor spray as the two women strolled through the empty streets in the aftermath of a late afternoon thundershower.

A week ago, they had exchanged cell numbers and email addresses, mutually pleased to discover how much they had liked each other. Then, just as she was about to open her car door, Jen had turned and sighed: "And I'm still not sure what to do about Theo's...whatever it is. Did anything...occur to you"

Mags had been surprised, although she didn't know why. They'd spent much of the afternoon talking about and around the topic of Theo, sex, porn, fetishes, etc., but somehow Mags had assumed that the talking had been...what, enough? Talk it through, wrap your mind around it, get past it, right? Jen was not sexually sophisticated, so it had to have come as a shock to her that her husband used porn, but really...many, hell, most men look at porn, and the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west.

"Do you still feel you have to do something about it? I mean, the kind of stuff we're talking about...do you really think it's doing your marriage any serious harm. He'll probably outgrow it soon enough. Might be best if he never found out that you'd..."

But Jen had interrupted. "Sorry, Mags,"—she was smiling slightly—"This might sound kind of funny coming from me. I'm not sure Ihaveto do anything about it, but chatting with you has made me wonder if maybe Iwantto do something about it. Look, would you just give it some thought?" Jen continued. "I mean like: what would you do, if a man you loved was interested in...this kind of thing?"

So Mags had thought about it. And now, the two women were strolling past a park, through the cool, crisp evening air that sometimes comes after a storm. Jen spoke, as if picking up the conversation from a week ago, as if no time had elapsed: "I think you called it 'realizing' a fetish, right?"

"It's not a technical term or anything," said Mags evenly, "realizing a fetish, fulfilling a fantasy..."

"So how would you do it; if you were me, I mean?" Jen paused and smiled at the look on her friend's face. "Come on, Mags, don't look so concerned. I'm supposed to be the prude here, remember?"

Mags smiled, but her voice was grave. "Jen, I just don't know the man. In...transactions (God, what a horrible word) like this: personalities and inclinations? All that stuff matters. For instance, is Theo more dominant sexually? Does he tend to start things off, or do you? Does he like to be seduced, or teased, or is he more of a caveman; you know: 'Woman, on your back, and spread your legs!'—that kind of thing?"

Now Jen laughed out loud. "Probably more of a caveman than the other thing, but I don't really know," and she was suddenly pensive, "I've never really seduced him, I mean...I don't think...shit." She didn't correct the profanity. "Why is all that so important anyway?"