For the past five years Kelly, my gorgeous wife, had worked in the city. It was a high-powered job, made even more demanding by the hour-long trip to work and then another hour home again. It wreaked havoc on our private life, and our sex life, but it was brilliantly paid and most of the time she enjoyed it. Her huge salary and perks helped us knock over the mortgage, buy a small holiday place as an investment and really set ourselves up for the future.
With all that achieved Kelly then got a job closer to home, not as well paid, but with weekends and most nights off as well. We were luxuriating in the first few weeks of the job, sitting in front of the fire talking and drinking wine, lots of it, at night. It was nice to have her home more often. My work as a writer allows me to spend most of my time at home anyway.
She always said she envied me my creative life-style, though it always seemed like work to me. One night, while chatting away, she said she would like to use some of her new found time to re-discover her creative side and get back to acting. At University, she had been a member of the dramatic society. It’s how we met. I used to write skits for the annual review. Part of the tradition of the review was gratuitous nudity. I decided to extend it in my year, ensuring the males had to strip as frequently as the females. Kelly starred in a little scene about a hens party where the male stripper gets gang-banged and the women all sat around afterwards saying he deserved it … if you go around looking like that you have to expect to get raped. It was a post-feminist piece that she seemed to find attractive and she made a point of meeting me and we hit it off from there. She was, I discovered, a woman not frightened to push the boundaries of a man’s world.
She finished Uni, we got married and she landed a job with a huge stock-broking firm and her financial career took off while her acting career, such as it was, ceased. But she was a good actor and enjoyed it and I wasn’t surprised she would want to rekindle that part of her life. As it turned out the local professional theatre group was having auditions for what they described as an experimental theatre season. Kelly showed me their ad in the paper and asked me what I thought.
“Go for it,” I said. So on the appointed night, she headed off, full of anticipation.
I was working late when she got home.
“Well,” I said? “I think I’ve got a part,” she said.
“That’s great, what’s it all about?”
She hesitated.
“Well,” I said again.
“Ummm, I think you ought to know it’s a pretty raunchy play by some European playwright with a fair bit of nudity and sex scenes and … “
“And,” I said.
“Well, I think I’ve got the lead role so long as I am happy with it.”
“Why wouldn’t you be,” I said?
“Well, the raunch, I’d be naked on stage and I have to seduce the lead male character with a strip-tease and I, well, I didn’t know what you’d think.”
“Surely you didn’t say to them you’d have to ask your husband first, did you?”
“No, I just said I needed time to think about whether I was ready for something like this first up,” she replied.
“Good I said because I want you to know right now it’s your decision not mine!”
“But the nudity and the sex scenes.”
“It’s only acting isn’t it?” I countered. "It didn't cause any problems in the Uni review, I recall. But hey, if you don’t want to do it, it’s up to you but don’t use me as the excuse.
“Let me sleep on it,” she said.
We made our way to bed and just as I hit the sheets, I felt a hand reach into my groin.
“You really don’t mind,” Kelly whispered, “that I’d be nude on stage with another man, pretending to make love to him?
“I can’t think why,” I replied.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s it, I’m going to do this thing!”
The next thing I know her lips were around the head of my penis. I lay back and thought of many things, though oddly enough, not England, and came inside her mouth.
I stayed well out of the negotiations of the next few days. I heard her on the phone talking to the director, well I presumed it he to whom she was talking. Once I heard her say something like if I’ve got to be naked then he should be too.
A couple of days later in another phone conversation she said to the director she wanted to make the scene as realistic as possible, that she would trust his judgement on that and yes, she was ready to start rehearsals. She was also chuffed to learn she would get $1000 for the season, plus $100 per rehearsal.
Rehearsals started and she would fly home from work, shower, change, rush out again and return around mid-night. I noted she had become extremely vigorous in bed. Often she would come straight through the door and jump into bed and make love to me.
One night she asked me if I was still okay with her doing the play. I said nothing has changed since the first day as far as I was concerned.
She stopped for a minute, then said … “umm, they have a bit as far as I am concerned.”
“How,” I asked?
“Well, it’s sort of like this, after I do my strip-tease, one a bit like that Kim Basinger scene in 9 1/2 Weeks, my boyfriend in the play and I are supposed to jump into bed and have red hot sex.”
“Knew that,” I said.
“Well, the plan was to do it under the sheets and just mess around a bit and make it look like the real thing. Well after a couple of run throughs, the director took us both aside and said quietly that it really didn’t work within the context of the play.
“Without thinking it really through, I said that’s because we’re hiding it from the audience. After a strip-tease like that two people aren’t going to bonk coyly under the sheets.
“I didn’t mean to suggest what I was suggesting. It was an honest answer but I realised it had taken us to what the director was politely alluding. He wanted us to have sex without the sheets and I had already agreed to it without being asked.
“Anyway, that’s how it is, we do just about everything without actually fucking and in full view of the audience. And that’s how it is.”
“So,” I asked, “what is supposed to be my response to this?”
“I don’t know, really I suppose I am just wanting to let you know so that if you don’t want to come you don’t have too, or if you do you will know what you are letting yourself in for.”
“I knew what I was letting myself in for the day I married you,” I said. “You threw yourself into your old job at a million miles an hour and I had no doubt you would have thrown yourself into this at the same speed.
“Look it’s not going to worry me one bit, it’s only acting, surely?”
