When you'd grown up as I had, in a home where spending money was perhaps the greatest of all sins, in adulthood you sometimes found yourself breaking into a cold sweat when you had to buy the simplest of necessities, like tires for the family car or school supplies for the issue of your loins, your most precious children. Some of those juvenile feelings are very hard to shake, as I was about to learn.
It was a sunny Saturday morning about six months prior to my writing this little vignette. I was resting peacefully on my trusty and quite comfortably seasoned Serta mattress, adorned with Martha Stewart's finest God-only-knows-how-many-threaded sheets, dreaming the end of an extraordinarily sensual dream, when my wife rolled over and awakened me by unceremoniously ingesting my engorged manhood into the depths of her throat in a singularly beautiful act of fellatial expertise. I'm sure I moaned with the obvious pressure she applied to my happy friend and also because of the not-so-obvious interruption of my dreamed vision, in which I was about to consummate my nocturnal activities with the beautiful, young, and nubile woman of my reveries.
The fact is: I wasn't fully awake yet so I was pleasantly misled. I instantly thought, as you might have, had you been in that fortuitous position, that I had probably died in the middle of the night and had already advanced through Heaven's Gates without having to pass through any of the purgatorial stages about which I had also learned so much during my youth.
In reality, she simply cheated, as women often do, by pandering to my more basic self, that self the all-inclusive "they of the female persuasion" often describe as being controlled by the "little head".
I think I've told you in another writing or two that my wife, Annie, is the consummate cocksucker and, even better by my standards, enjoys showing me that she loves to swallow my seed with relish, but the details of that aspect of my marriage are probably best left to those stories and somewhat removed from this exercise, at any rate. This is not a sexy story about a steamy morning blowjob, earned or unexpected, at least not yet.
Alas, neither my sleepy fantasy had come true nor was I about to be treated to some wistful, imaginary scenario my bride had hallucinated in her sleep. She simply wanted me to awaken and thought that sucking my evident erection into her throat might do the trick. It did!! And no sooner was I awake than the object of my affection spit out my penis with less ceremony that she had mustered when she originally sucked it in; well didn't actually spit it out, but she certainly wasn't treating it with the same respect with which she had led me to believe it was going to enjoy as she had begun my day, either.
"I want a new mattress," she explained, "one of those memory foam types that conforms to our bodies' shapes and promises to relieve us of all of our aches and pains. I've had a persistent pain in my back and neck for the last week and it has made me stiffer in the morning than you ever can, even when you're feeling your randiest. I've put up with this old mattress long enough, so today is the day, my good husband," she continued, sounding suddenly very nasal and shrew-like to my ears, "for us to buy a new memory foam mattress."
She continued without even taking a breath, "It's a great day for mattress sales and I've found half a dozen stores that are having specials on those very items today."
"Up and at 'em, my lover," she continued, successfully resisting the pressure I was observably applying to the nape of her neck in order to get her to finish the task she had so pleasantly and recently started.
"We need to get to the stores early in order to have the pick of their inventory. They've been heavily advertising and I'm sure there will be volumes of consumer traffic as a result."
"What's the price tag on one of those fancy mattresses, Annie," I asked innocently enough, already knowing the answer in roundish figures. I'd heard other men talk about having to mortgage their houses to buy a new "memory foam" mattress.
It's not that we don't make a good living. I've practiced law for many years now and our income has been steadily growing. But remember that childhood parsimony with which I acquainted you at the outset of this piece? It had me by the throat or lower, depending on your perspective.
The rejoinder was obscene to my ears and I cannot even bring myself to repeat it here. I'm afraid of shocking your conscience, to begin with, or maybe worse, depressing you with the foolishness of my day-to-day existence. She told me and I recoiled.
"No fucking way!" and I really meant it when I said it.
"If I'm going to pay that kind of money for a mattress, I want to be able to live in it." I immediately intoned sounding exactly like my father; bless his deceased soul, and not even surprising myself at the sound of his voice. And even then, I knew I was going to have a new mattress, and soon.
I found myself confronted with a beautiful and sexy wife, my own, whose controlling desire, at that moment, was to sleep the next night on a mattress that would mold to her wonderful shape, a mattress that should have been spun from gilt thread and not made of "memory foam," whatever that is, to justify the price being asked for it.
I relived every second of my miserly childhood in that instant. The sweat was soon upon my brow and I made every argument I could muster to forgo what seemed a totally exorbitant price for a mere mattress, or so I thought. Suffice it to say, I did not win that battle but, looking back on it, the price may have been a bargain.
Instructing me like a mere schoolboy, she said, "We'll need the measurements in order to not have to buy a new head- and foot-board, as well. Go get the tape measure and we'll make short work of the preliminaries. I'm going to grab a quick shower while you measure."
I went for the tape measure, the entire time muttering about going into the mattress business in my next life.
The bed measured seventy-two inches by eighty four inches and we carefully wrote the dimensions on a notepad. Annie, who had quickly showered while I measured, as she said she was going to, stuffed the paper with the bed's proportions into the lacy cup of her bra, where she keeps things no other person would ever think of putting into such an intimate place because one might actually have to retrieve whatever was stuffed in there publicly. We were off to the mattress stores, checkbook and dimensions in hand, well...checkbook in hand, anyway.
We travelled up Ventura Highway for a short distance until Annie directed me into our first store. The salesman sought information about the reason for our early visit and Annie, of course, did all of the talking. I would have beaten about the bush, so to speak, for a moment or two anyway, trying to mislead the salesman into believing that we might want a new mattress or something (although the store didn't seem to sell anything but mattresses) but really hadn't decided on buying one, in order to help with price negotiations. Not Annie.
"We're going to buy a new memory foam mattress this morning," she blurted. "Can you show us what you have in inventory, please?"
