A middle-aged couple's fantastic journey from a married middle-class existence to the liberation of sexual serfdom.
Part 1 – CHANGES
I.
Passion is an intensity of emotion that lets you know you're really alive – not just on auto-pilot.
My life is satisfactory. I am generally happy; I love my wife; our standard of living is more than adequate. I am, more or less, content.
Yet, I have very little passion – real passion – in my life. Certainly, there are moments, as in conjugal sex; but they are just that – just moments, fleetingly brief. There may even be moments of real passion experienced during avocations – lean morsels tasted during a particularly spectacular ski run; moments during an exquisite meal. Nevertheless, most of the passion I feel in my everyday existence is, unfortunately, anger, frustration, or disappointment.
I long for some real passion, like that which one can glimpse in story and song. The passion of young love, blind love, love against all odds, illicit love, love gained, love lost. The vicarious experience that comes from a good tale or a really sad tune just hints of the powerful passion within. But it is still only vicarious – ethereal, unreal.
To find oneself so totally infatuated that nothing else matters; to get oneself into love so deep that when it ends you asphyxiate on the emptiness; to revel in a love so new that the sex explodes between you.
Or even, if not actually love, then sex – pure honest animal sex; novel and exciting sex; fresh and invigorating sex; sex so satisfying as to sate all desire – to sate desires one didn't know existed; an enveloping all-encompassing sex; sex so intense that it's frightening, so concentrated that it warps space-time, so dense that it obscures everything else, so massive that it absorbs reality. That is the passion I would like to feel – to live, even if only for a moment – long enough for the memories to gel in my mind. Memories of my own passion instead of glimpses of someone else's – real or imagined.
Matthew Anderson
March 23, 2004
Matt stared at the screen as if awakening from an unsettling dream. He had been sitting at his computer, surfing aimlessly through miscellaneous files. Some days it all seemed so meaningless – pointless. He came into work, now, so irregularly – occasionally every day of a given week; some weeks not at all; usually, and with increasing frequency, just one or two days in seven. And much too often he would find himself doing just exactly what he had found himself doing this time – surfing aimlessly through the hard-drive – staring at his monitor with no focus, no comprehension. He had just gone away; escaped into a nether world.
Yet, while he was gone, all thoughts elsewhere if anywhere, some part of him had cleared the desktop, called up Word and begun typing. It had come, unbidden, from deep inside – from his heart, or his core, or his soul. And it had come with a vengeance. Fingers rattling across the keyboard, his eyes had remained glazedly fixed on the monitor. He had, he realized, typed and deleted, reworded, rephrased, revised the short piece umpteen times. He had been well through the first rewrite before he had even become aware he was writing. Even then, it was some other part of his mind – some unfamiliar part of him – that had begun to read the words that burst onto the screen only to scroll up and out of sight like the eyes of a swooning face. He'd let his fingers carry on, unconsciously manipulating the contents of the electronic memory; capable himself of nothing except watching it dance about the pale window of the screen. It had been, then, unintelligible – gibberish.
Now, abruptly finished, Matt sat back, exhausted by the sudden release of emotional energy. There wasn't much to show for all of that. Still, using the mouse he scrolled slowly through the text, reading it as if for the first time, as if it had been written by someone else – some other creature. It was somehow disquieting, and that in itself puzzled him. He looked suspiciously about.
His office was small and bright, its large window looking down the hill, over the Westminster Quay at the industrial docks of North Delta. Decorated with a subtle mixture of white and pine Scandinavian furniture it had a rather pure feel to it. With only a filing cabinet, bookshelf, a couple visitors’ seats, and an expansive desk with swivel chair, its Spartan sterility spoke only of business; no fun and games here; no daydreaming allowed. Still, for Matt, it was like an old pair of sneakers – comfortable, familiar, its faults easily overlooked. His familiarity had, in fact, corrupted the no-nonsense tone of the place, and allowed such aberrations.
He saved the strange file onto a floppy and pocketed it, printed the brief treatise, then deleted it from the hard-drive. He glanced furtively around, then took the sheet as it emerged from the printer, scanning it quickly before folding it and placing it in his inside pocket. He caught himself, once again, looking around to see if anyone was watching. He didn't know why; no one was around anyway, yet he felt very guilty for some reason; about exactly what he couldn't say, but he felt guilty, nonetheless.
Matthew – Matt – was the past CEO of Anderson Custom Industrial Printing & Design. He had brought the company all the way from a three-employee shop to what it was now – a slick, serious operation with over fifty employees. That was, of course, ancient history. Now just one of several major shareholders – just one more member of the board – he still sometimes thought of it as his company – his baby. That notwithstanding, two years ago he had basically dropped right out.
