An Intimate Life (31 page)

I lowered the volume on the TV and sat next to my mother on the couch that was covered in brown upholstery.

“Mom, I know you saw the show and you’re angry,” I said.

She glared at me.

“I did it because I want people to stop being ashamed of things they shouldn’t be ashamed of.”

My mother flushed.

“It is shameful. It’s sickening how you behave!” she screamed.

Now I was irate, not just at her but at myself. My mother had once again managed to infuriate me and I was frustrated with myself for allowing her to get me angry.

“No, Mom, it’s not. I haven’t done anything wrong and you need to understand that. What’s sick is pretending that there’s something wrong with sex.”

I stood up and started pacing across a rug that lay on the floor in front of the couch.

“This is his fault. I don’t know why you let Michael control you like this.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know you only did that because he wanted you to.”

Now not only was I furious, but insulted and hurt. Did she think I was just Michael’s pawn? Was I just a fool who couldn’t think for myself?

“You’re wrong. If you knew me at all you’d know that!”

I stomped out of the living room.

“Let’s get out of here!” I shouted to Michael.

We threw our clothes into a suitcase, slammed it shut, and left for the nearest motel.

The only thing that stopped Michael and me from getting on the next plane to California was that I planned to see Nanna Fournier the next day. She was now eighty-seven years old. Her hair was peppered with grey and she walked with a limp from the arthritis that had overrun her body, but she was still as sharp-witted as ever. Her joie de vivre had carried her intact through a life with its share of hardships.

“Is that you?” Nanna called when I knocked on the door of her apartment in Salem. “It’s me,” I answered. She opened the door and flung her arms open wide. “Cheryl!” she cried. “Nanna!” I yelled back, and planted a big kiss on her lovely face. We hugged each other and then Nanna leaned on me for support as we walked to the kitchen. She took a pound cake out of the refrigerator and put the kettle on for tea.

We gossiped about family members and joked about her losing the figure that she used to love to dress up in the latest fashions. Even still, she looked more stylish than most women her age. She continued to wear lipstick and had taken to wearing a wig. It was as if I had never left. She told me, once again, the story about my sweet but somewhat dopey uncle whom she watched one summer afternoon as he sat in an maple tree sawing away on an overgrown limb. He forgot that he sat on the very arm he was cutting off until he crashed to the ground with it. It never got old, especially the way Nanna Fournier told it.

If I had never mentioned the
Geraldo
appearance, I know Nanna wouldn’t have broached it. I wanted to talk about it, though, because I wanted her to know that I cared about her opinion and I wanted a chance to explain myself to her.

I carved a second slice of cake and looked at my grandmother squarely.

“Nanna, I know you saw the TV show I was on.”

“Cheryl, I couldn’t believe it,” she said.

“Why?”

“Why? Because of what you talked about. That’s personal. You don’t talk about those things in public.”

“No, Nanna. We need to talk about it. We have to stop being ashamed of sexuality and we have to stop keeping it a secret.”

Nanna took a bite of her cake and looked at me with a little smile.

“You’re not mad, are you?” I asked.

“At you? I can’t be. Nothing you do could make me angry. If you were lying in a gutter I’d get in there and lie beside you,” she said.

My heart felt like it was going to burst. When I was a kid I thought that if my grandmother knew how I sinned she would turn against me. I had no idea, when I was a secret masturbator, that her love was this unconditional.

17.

the fantasy: derek

“H
e’s different than other clients I’ve referred to you,” Samantha said. We were in her office on a late afternoon in the winter of 1990. Samantha and I had worked together several times over the past few years, and as I sat across from her I wondered what could be so unusual about this potential client.

“How so?”

“He’s struggling with an obsessive fantasy that’s causing real problems in his marriage and his life.”

“What kind of fantasy?”

“It stems from an experience he had as a kid. When he was around eight, his babysitter was a neighborhood girl of around twelve or thirteen. She used to tie him to a tree in the backyard and then slap him or dance around taunting him.”

“I think I know where this is going,” I said.

Samantha smiled.

It’s not unusual for erotic preferences to be shaped by childhood experiences, and I had a feeling that this was the case with Derek, the client Samantha was describing.

“He gets turned on by the thought of being restrained. He’s told his wife about it and she’s called him ‘sick.’ She won’t consider acting it out with him, and right now it’s what excites him the most.”

“Is he able to have sex with his wife at all?”

“Yes, but he feels like he’s mostly doing it to pleasure her. The whole time he fantasizes about being tied up and then he feels guilty. I think if he could act out his fantasy it might help him break the obsession with it.”

This wasn’t what I normally did as a surrogate, and it would mean deviating from protocol. I wasn’t completely comfortable with this, but I also trusted Samantha’s instincts and I knew I would be safe with Derek.

Samantha and I talked more about what my work with him would entail. I could go through the regular exercises, but our primary focus would be on acting out the fantasy in the hopes that it would loosen his obsession with it. I was unsure, not only because it was so outside the bounds of what I typically do, but also because my tastes are pretty “vanilla” when it comes to sex, and I didn’t relish the idea of getting someone off by taunting him.

When I left Samantha’s office that day, she told me she would pass on my contact information to him. The next day he called to make an appointment.

Derek was in his mid-forties. He was tall, with a strong build and brown hair. That he desperately wanted to stay with his wife, with whom he had three children, came through almost immediately in our first conversation.

“I don’t want to lose my wife, especially not over this,” he said.

I asked Derek to talk a little about the discussion he had had with his wife, Melanie, about his fantasy.

“She likes sex and she initiates it a lot, but the idea of, well, what I’m into—it really turns her off. She says she can’t humiliate someone she loves. Before I started seeing Samantha we got into a big fight about it.”

“Is that why you went to therapy in the first place?”

“Yeah, it was what she said about my fantasies that made me go.”

I asked Derek to describe their fight.

“She wanted to have sex and I wasn’t really interested. I mean, I can’t get turned on unless I fantasize about being tied up, and I was trying not to do that. I was trying to force the fantasy out of my mind and to get turned on by her kissing me, but she could tell that I wasn’t into it.”

Derek paused and looked off to the side.

“She got really mad, and she said I should just go get a mistress who would tie me up or find someone who I could pay for it. I told her I didn’t want that and that I loved her. She started yelling at me and said I was sick. After she calmed down she apologized and said she didn’t mean it, but I guess I wonder if she’s right.”

Derek stared at me with a look that expressed something between expectation and desperation. He wanted to hear that he wasn’t “sick.”

“Sexuality is very complex and sometimes childhood experiences can determine what we desire in later life,” I said.

Since Derek wasn’t feeling satisfied with his wife, I wondered if he was engaging in other activities. When I asked him about this, he squeezed his hands on the armrests of the chair and nodded.

“What kinds of things do you do?”

Derek closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

Then he told me that when his wife and children were gone he broke out a box that he had hidden in the attic. It held a corset and a pair of support hose that were the smallest size he could fit in to. Dressing up in these items simulated the feeling he’d had as a child when his babysitter tied him up. He could feel his penis growing against the pressure of the constricting hose, and just before he felt he was going to ejaculate, he would rip them off. Sometimes he masturbated himself, but other times he came without any direct stimulation.

“I feel like I’ve built up this parallel life around my fantasy, and I have so many secrets because of it. Once when my wife and kids went away to her parents’ house for the weekend, I spent the whole time in the garage working on a . . . a . . . device.”

“A device?” I asked.

“Yeah, I built it a while ago. It’s been hidden in my garage for a long time.”

“What does it do?”

“It’s something I could be tied to. I also have rope.”

“Have you used it before?”

“No, but . . . I’m hoping we can use it together.”

Derek asked if he could bring it to our next session. I was a little apprehensive, but I agreed to take a look at it.

Derek and I talked for a little while longer. He described his fantasy in great detail. He even had a script he had written that spelled out what each player would say and do, and he asked if he could show it to me.

He wanted me to dance around him after I tied him up and then gently touch his penis, but not jerk him off or bring him to orgasm. He also said he wanted to have intercourse afterward. By the time he was done, I had a vivid picture of what he was hoping to experience. He left the script with me so I could review it before our next meeting. We decided we would see each other once a month for the next five months.

When I opened the door to let Derek in for our second session, I was greeted by a contraption that was about six-foot tall and hidden beneath a black tarp. I could see two points sticking up about three feet apart from each other. He lifted it with both hands and carried it into my office.

“I brought it,” he said.

“I see.”

We talked for a little while. In the last month, Derek’s fantasy had continued to intrude into his life. He found himself wondering if attractive women he passed on the street would be willing to tie him up. Melanie was getting frustrated with his lack of progress. He did his best to feign interest in sex with her, but he couldn’t ejaculate unless he thought of himself being restrained. He didn’t tell her, but he had been looking forward to today’s session ever since he’d left our first one.

“Are you ready to head to the bedroom?” I asked Derek.

He lifted up the mysterious device with both hands and followed me down the hall to the bedroom. He had to turn sideways to comfortably fit it through the door.

Before I asked Derek to disrobe, I asked him to remove the tarp that covered his invention. He pulled it off, and there it was. It was beautifully constructed out of what looked like cedar. It had two tall posts that were held together by a latticework. The bottom of the posts flared out and had rubber tips fitted to them to ensure that they wouldn’t slip. Along the two legs were large metal loops, like those that would go with a hook-and-eye closure. Derek unzipped the gym bag he had brought with him and lifted out a coil of white rope. He showed me how the rope would weave through the metal loops.

“You’ve obviously put a lot of thought and hard work into this,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s something I’ve thought about for years.”

We both undressed and went through a round of Spoon Breathing. I taught him a few relaxation techniques. Then, when I normally would have asked if he was ready to begin Sensual Touch, I asked if Derek was ready to act out the fantasy he had dreamed of for decades.

He stood up and shook out his arms.

“I can hardly believe this is happening,” he said.

It’s new for me too, I thought.

My apprehension was starting to slip away a little. I had reread the script that morning and I was relieved that I could take my lead from it. Taunting someone wasn’t part of my professional or personal repertoire. I had friends who liked this kind of play, but it just wasn’t for me. I thought back to the script and silently thanked Derek for being so well prepared.

Derek walked over to the device, pressed his back up against the latticework, which I could now see extended from the backs of his calves to just above his shoulder blades. I picked up the rope and threaded it through the bottom left loop. Derek guided me through making a square knot to ensure that it would be firmly anchored to the frame. I walked to the right and threaded it through the corresponding loop, then I went up through the second set of loops, and the third, and the fourth, until the rope made a zigzag pattern all along the front of Derek’s body. “Tighter,” Derek said when I pulled the rope through the last loop and crossed it over to make a knot. I tugged a little harder and he smiled. “That’s it,” he said.