It was Janet's idea.
"What harm can it do to look around?" she said.
Ha!
Janet was an inveterate surfer. And you did not have to surf very much to find all kinds of things out there that would have horrified Janet's mother, for one.
We had both been brought up in the sheltered cocoon of the 'typical American family', Yes, including church on Sunday. We were not into drugs, booze, high-jinks of any sort, hell, we did not even screw until we'd been going out for three years, and even then we used a condom. Model students, we graduated from High School, then from College, and we both held down uninspiring, but solid jobs. Janet was a librarian. She had always loved books. I am an accountant. With prospects, I was given to understand. Hang around and you'll one day be a partner. That kind of thing.
We married young, and we were happy. Well, sort of happy. I guess we both felt we were missing out on something, or had missed out on something. Perhaps this is true of all couples who were High-School sweethearts, who had never strayed from the straight and narrow, never played the field, never experienced the highs and lows of the 'singles game'. What you have, you do not value. What you have not, this you come to yearn for.
It began quite innocuously. Well, relatively innocuously. I arrived home one evening in a foul mood. My boss had 'ripped me a new one' and it was not my fault. It was his mistake, not mine, and he did not have the balls to come clean. So, you will understand, when I put my key in the latch and entered home and hearth, I was looking for a scotch and water, or two, some TLC, and a ball-game to occupy my mind. I was not looking for what I received.
"Look at me," Janet had said, in a playful tone. "D'you see something different?"
In the process of pouring my own scotch and water, I glanced across.
"Different? What do you mean?"
"Well, just different."
I looked then, and I did not see anything different. She stood in the center of our living room dressed in blouse and skirt and, true, her feet were bare, but this was not different. She often walked around bare-footed. I'd warned her about it. You never knew. But she did it anyway. Liked the feel of the pile, she said. Cosy, intimate. I turned back to the cabinet to finish preparing my drink.
"Look now," she said.
Wearily, I turned my head. And, Yes! That was different.
She had raised her skirt above her waist. Beneath she wore nothing. No panties. Janet had been blessed with long legs and a firm torso. The good Lord had also granted her her fair share of pubic hair. Which was now absent. Her pubis was as naked as on the day she was born.
"Notice now?" she said, coquettishly.
"Hell, Janet!" was the best I could manage. What was I supposed to do? Fall on her and fuck her on the spot?
Apparently, Yes!
"God! You're impossible."
She ran upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom.
Later, much later, I wormed it out of her. She had read it on a website. '36 things you can do to please your husband.' Number 5: 'Shave your pubes.' Number 7: 'Try a day without panties.'
She was as horny as a rampant rabbit, and though we did eventually make love, it obviously was not the way she had envisioned it. As usual, I came too soon, and she was too inhibited to allow me to get her off, even if I had known how. Maybe she got herself off, in the bathroom, behind a locked door.
"Let's face it, Ron," she said next day, "Our sex life sucks."
Usually I looked around the paper when Janet spoke to me at the breakfast table, but this time I put it down. I stared. This was not language Janet used. 'Sex life sucks?' Where the hell? Of course, I knew. The web. Where else? 'What to do if your sex life sucks' was probably one of the top entries Google generated if you typed in 'sex+life+improve' and let it loose.
"What do you mean, our sex-life sucks," I said indignantly. "We have a perfectly normal, healthy sex life."
Whereas the 'normal' bit may well have been true, the 'healthy' was a bit of a stretch. In fact, if the truth be told, we did not have much of a sex life at all. Mind you, I say in self defense, not having sex that often is not necessarily unhealthy.
"Well, whether you're right or wrong, Ron," she replied, "it still sucks. There must be more than this."
"Look, Janet," I said, adopting the condescending tone that she detested, that I knew she detested, but that I could not prevent myself from adopting, "if you are mad at me about last night, I understand. I'm sorry at my lack of response. I was in the wrong frame of mind. You just picked a very bad night. I explained that to you."
"All right. I accept that my timing was off. How was I to know? You come home in this mood, you come home in that mood. What is it that I can do that turns you on? Hell, for that matter, what turns you on, period!"
Which left me somewhat at a loss for words. In fact, what Janet had done the previous evening would normally turn me on. Like hell. Well, it would have turned me on if a woman had done it who was not my wife. Somehow, the act had clashed with the image I had of my wife, that had grown over the years, and was not compatible with a raised skirt, no panties and a shaven pubis.
"God, you're so inhibited, it's pathetic," she said, when I did not answer.
"And you?"
"At least I tried. I spent the whole day in that library smoothing down my skirt, terrified that someone would ask for a book on the upper shelves and I would have to go fetch the ladder."
"Let's face it, Ron," she said, over my silence. "We need therapy."
"Therapy!?"
"Yes, that's what I said. Therapy. We need to improve our sex life. There has to be more than this."
