Part One: My Wife's Out There Sucking Cock, So Why Shouldn't I?
I'm going to stop sucking stranger's cocks. Next week. Or probably the week after. Maybe. I'd rather not talk of these things. But there's a need to confess, to seek absolution for my sins. Look at me. What do you see? Go on, admit it, to most people, I'm a respectable married man with a well-paid and highly responsible financial position in the city. But I also have a dark secret, a covert life of shame and humiliation to which I'm uncontrollably addicted.
"Perverse and foolish, oft I've strayed..." Once a month, sometimes more frequently if my work has been particularly stressful or my home-life especially claustrophobic, the images start seeping into my mind. Bringing an almost unbearable hunger to my throat. As though every cell in my body is screaming, like a drug-addict in withdrawal, for the next fix. I'll fight the impulse, fight the relentless surging tides of darkness devouring me, stifling the faint murmurings of conscience, I fight so hard it physically hurts.
No! No! No! No! I said I'd never do this again. It's wrong and vile. I promised myself I'd never do it again. Never. But god knows it's difficult. I'll weaken, I know I'll weaken, it's only a matter of time, I'm not strong enough to fight it, I'm too weak. It never goes away.
And eventually there'll come that moment when I pick up my mobile with trembling fingers, to call that special number in Lambert Grove. Frey is my contact. It's probably not his real name, but he's been 'helping' me for a number of months now. At a prearranged time, as we have negotiated, I will drive to his apartment in a fug of nervous anticipation. I am forty-five. He's probably in his mid-thirties. He invites me in and we small-talk for a while. We drink, martinis probably. All the while, I'm aware of the red door leading off his apartment. For me, that door -- insignificant in every other sense, holds the same promise as Room 101 does for poor Winston Smith in Orwell's '1984'. A reluctance and a crawling fear of the moment I must pass through. Yet a dread offset by an equally burning desire.
I pay him. "Do you have something for me?" I ask.
He nods. "Something special. So if you're uncomfortable with any aspect of this, now's your last chance to say so, and back out. You only have to say no."
Instead, I say "How do you want me?"
And he explains. Sometimes I'm just naked, so hurriedly I undress -- usually erect already, in fact chances are I've been hard ever since the phone call, and usually even before, at just the thought of what I'm preparing to do. At times I'll be blindfold or handcuffed, or in a latex pouch. Or he'll attach a tether to my penis and scrotum and lead me by it into the adjoining room where a stranger awaits. Always different. And I do what I must do...
This is how it began. I don't usually read the broadsheets far beyond the financial pages, and the local tabloid even less, but on this occasion a short piece snares my attention, concerning resident complaints about a public toilets on the outer perimeter of the city park frequented by Gays for 'cottaging'. The story sets off imaginings in strange ways I couldn't quite understand. It occurred to me that on the occasions I've taken my lunch-break away from the office, I'd find myself sitting in that very park, or when I take a brisk short-cut across the park, I must have passed that spot a number of times without once glancing in its direction.
In that clean fresh air, with the business hub of the nation thrumming all around me, I'm so close to the heart of darkness, a subworld most people never even suspect exists.
What would happen if I were to find myself there? Would I be set upon by ruffians who'd force me to endure humiliating deviant acts? And why do such vile images leave me breathless with nervous excitement? Sometimes the greatest mysteries are not space-time and destiny, but the unknown darkness that lies within your own deepest soul.
It was a confusing time for me. My wife had just confessed -- well, more boasted to me about having a virile and demanding lover. Deal with it, she's been involved with a colleague for some time. It's only right I should know. They meet in hotel rooms, or sometimes they have torrid sex in his car during lunch. As far as she's concerned the comfortable social and financial stability of our domestic arrangement will continue, as will her affair. She's not prepared to lose the benefits of either.
What was I to do? How was I supposed to react? I know all the Soap Opera responses, rage, anger, jealousy, anaesthetising the pain with alcohol. Yet oddly, my reaction is less of shock or upset, as it is of a curious sense of relief. A responsibility of pretence has been removed. In a strange dislocated sense of timelessness, I feel liberated, as if some kind of repressive clamps on my emotions have eased, and then dissolved away. It's time to let it go, let it all fall away. The parameters of my life have been altered. She'd made the choice. A choice that also releases me.
So am I mourning my cuckolded marriage? No, not quite. The pretence of marriage has provided a structure that's regulated my life for those decades. Now that structure is no longer there. My life is adrift, it's become empty and pointless. She was indulging her carnal needs, now I feel justified in pursuing previously suppressed elements of my own personality. If it's a point of view forced on me by strange circumstances, that doesn't make it any the less true. If you feel yourself floating, dissociated, that's just exactly what you are. So take yourself off. Let the tide surge around you a little.