I've discovered that there are other husbands who feel about their wives much as I did about mine. Like me, they are proud when other men look at them, eventually seeking, even creating situations to expose them to the eyes and hands of admirers.
Norma was born in Córdoba, Argentina, and raised in Montreal, Canadá, where she spoke only French and Spanish. She was twenty-three when I came to know her as one of my students at a university there. Four months after we moved to her native Argentina she gave birth to our daughter, Fatima. And five months later, when Norma was just twenty-seven years old, they were both killed in a traffic accident. Eventually, erotic accounts on the internet, coupled with memories, became a comfort for me.
Socially, my wife avoided alcohol, except in the presence of girlfriends who would protect her, or with me. She was one of those women who, upon taking even a small sip of an alcoholic drink, not only shed her formality, but became fair game for any interested male. Lit by a mere glance or touch, she was dry tinder in a forest of sexual appetite.
And, she was a blusher. If merely from pleasure at a compliment, or when unselfconsciously delighted at some personal achievement, her cheeks glowed. When genuinely embarrassed or highly aroused, the rose on her cheeks spread to suffuse her neck, arms and shoulders. Like a fever, it made her breasts swell, and firmer in the hand. Her ear lobes and nipples turned dark.
I was already sixty years old when I met her. As our relationship deepened, I felt increasingly guilty that I couldn't maintain an erection. Although Norma soothed me with little reassurances, saying "No tiene importancia"—it's not important—I saw that my wife had all the normal needs of a young woman. As for affection and trust, ours grew. In bed I employed every skill and experience of a long life. But in the frequent moments that our love spilled into passion, I was overcome by humiliation when I was not able to mount her as she deserved, even with chemical aid. Increasingly, my inadequacy gnawed at me. I wanted her to miss nothing. Then, life itself presented an alternative.
We began with unexpected adventures—a painter seeing up Norma's dress for a moment, a friend at breakfast in our home bug-eyed and short of breath as my wife nursed our baby, our young gardener watching through the bedroom window as she ironed a blouse, dressed only in panties. She eventually noticed him through his reflection in her vanity-table mirror.
The first time she related a little adventure to me, it was only to voice concern. We had just gotten into bed. Curled beneath my arm, she told me that she didn't feel comfortable being alone in the house with the painters. I thought the worst and sat up, anxious. She squeezed my hand, laughed, and said that nothing had happened really, just that when I had gone to work early that morning, and she had thought she was alone, she had caught the younger of the two painters looking up her dress. "How?" I asked.
She had been hanging clothes on the porch landing at first light, taking advantage of the warm spring air. He had apparently come silently through the tall yard grass much earlier than before and had stopped, intending to duck under the overhand of the veranda, where he had left tarps, brushes and cans. He was looking up at her when she had become aware of him. "I don't know how long" she said. "I felt like he was spying on me a couple of times during the day." I asked what he had seen. Reluctantly, she said "You know, I was wearing my housedress, the old one you like. It's yellow and buttons up the front. I had that on."
Her reserve in revealing what had happened whetted my curiosity. "Is that all, just your legs?" I asked. "He was below me," she said, impatient that she had to explain. He could see up between my legs," she said, defiantly. Goaded, increasingly curious, I asked what panties she had been wearing. "You know, the ones you bought for me on Florida Street."
On one of our walks she had worn a pale-yellow silk dress she had bought herself the day before as a present to celebrate spring. But in the strong sunlight her white panties become visible, and I soon found myself seated on a low stool in a lingerie shop cubicle, surrounded by mirrors and looking up at Norma as she tried on panties. Together we settled on one that was light and nearly the same yellow as her dress. Close-fitting, they stretched semi-transparent across the divide of her bottom. At home, I'd asked her to stand over me so I could look up inside her dress. In the early morning light they must have been a memorable sight for the painter. The voyeur in me rising, I asked, "How close was he?" Clearly self-conscious, she yielded each detail grudgingly.
She had been standing with her back to him, her legs apart. She remembered that as she had stretched to fix a clothespin on the line high over her head, a dawn gust of wind had filled her dress like the spinnaker of a sailboat, carrying it aloft, brushing her arms and covering her face. For a second she couldn't see her hands to place the clothespin. She stopped moving to enjoy the caress of warm air everywhere on her body. She told me it felt like when she was a little girl off by herself in a clearing in a forest near Montreal, and had taken off her dress to run through the tall grass and flowers.
When she pushed the billowing skirt down to get another clothespin from the bag at her waist, she saw over her hip the rapt, startled eyes of the young painter. She said that he'd had that caught-with-his-hand-in-the-cookie-jar look. In the moment before he said "Buenos DÃas" and ducked out of sight, she remembered seeing through the lattice of the railing only his round eyes and mouth ajar. Although she'd avoided him all day, he'd found a couple of, to her, obviously unnecessary excuses to approach her.
After we made love, she asked if the painter having watched her had had something to do with my unusual passion. I kissed her, and said "Maybe." On following nights I asked Norma if anything else had happened, if she'd noticed any difference in how the men looked at her during the day (I was sure that the young painter had boasted to the older one about what he'd seen). At first she greeted my curiosity about her "little adventure" with mild amusement, then annoyance. On subsequent occasions, when I pushed for titillating details after she mentioned the visit of a delivery man, or how crowded the subway was, she was irritable, offended, saying that by "little adventure," I meant I didn't trust her. One evening, after she mentioned that a friend, who I knew had an enduring crush on her, had visited while I was away, I pushed her for details—about how she had dressed, if he'd remarked on how she looked, and even teased her about his long-term infatuation, saying that I'd seen him practically panting in her presence. She cried and told me she didn't understand how other men wanting her excited me. She said that she doubted my love for her. My wife was silent as I tried to reassure her.
And then one night, as unpredictable as all women, she came to bed with an impish light in her eyes. When I asked, she proudly said she'd had a "little adventure" that day.
She related how an attractive business executive in the crowded subway at evening rush hour that day had remained many stops with his hard-on firmly pressed between the cheeks of her bottom, his breath in her hair. For the first time my Norma's eyes crinkled with amusement and her face glowed with uncertain pride as she warmed to my eager questions. Her nipples rose hard against my fingers as she spoke and her legs opened as I pressed to get closer to her. When I asked, she admitted that she'd pushed back against him. The sporadic swaying of the train and occasional jostling of neighbors around them finally guided his cock to lie up the length of the cleft formed by the cheeks of her bottom. She remembered how hard it was against her tailbone. The movement of the train, the anonymity in the pressing crowd and their willing union in the overpowering heat of the airless subway allowed him unrestrained access. The soft material of her dress molded almost unfelt between them. In moments it had become almost unbearably hot where they joined. She had pushed back, like when she is trying to pee, opening for him. In her words, she was "kissing his friendly hardness." Our love-making that night was like our first time, in the back seat of my car, when we'd had nowhere else to go, parked by other cars rhythmically squeaking in the night..