No more stories about women who have themselves tied spread-eagled, stark-naked under the Christmas tree as a surprise for hubby. No even with the help of nurses.
I think the fad began with the movie of "Sex in the City," when the big blonde has her naked body covered with sushi and sashimi and lies on the table waiting for her boyfriend. Except, he has to work late. After three hours, she sits crying and eating the sushi, peeling ginger slabs off her knees.
I had invited over a woman I knew at college. Just for drinks during that slow week between Christmas and New Year's eve. I hadn't seen her for a couple years, since graduation; but the class notes in the "Alumni Monthly" said she had moved to NYC with her husband. I thought I would network. Besides, she fascinated me.
"What kind of Christmas did I have?" Kiraz began, responding to my question. "Well..."
Kiraz is Turkish. "Of course, I don't celebrate Christmas myself," she had said. "But we [Moslems] honor the great prophets Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad." For a moment, she gazed down at the small table between us, picked up her wine glass. Drinking alcohol? What else had Kiraz been learning?
Kiraz means "cherry." She is not a small, bright-red cherry, though, a little tart on a skinny stem. Kiraz is a big black cherry, succulent. I used to see her in the dorm showers. She's big, but not "plump," with ripe-melon boobs that levitate way out there but barely jiggle, nipples darker red than I've ever seen. Same with her hips and her belly. Fleshy but not fat. Never shaved her pooch, back then. Jet-black hair rushing up from between her legs and racing up her belly almost to her navel. The shimmering black hair on her head fell almost far enough to meet it. If she's an "average," then I'm anorexic. We were not great buddies. Got to be masochistic to walk around inviting comparison between my Mediterranean-diet body type and her sultan's banquet.
Kiraz is hesitating, her glass raised. I will forgive her for being Aphrodisias, Artemis, and Aphrodite. For being the wet dream of the everlasting harem, the houri waiting for you in heaven if you die for Allah. With eyes and a smile that boil in your belly-even mine, a little. Is she still thinking about her Christmas?
I encourage her. "Your husband isn't Turkish, right?"
"Oh, no. And I didn't meet him at college even though he was in our class. Right after! Totally American!"
Whatever that is. "A little too late for combining commencement and the wedding!"
"I loved the college so much! I wanted a man..."
I'm quite sure no man got a piece of her in college. It took four years of expensive education in nihilism, secular leftism, systematic philosophical scepticism, and adolescent identity politics to root out any concept of morality she acquired growing up.
I know. Cut to the chase, Ellen. I repeated, "So how was Christmas?"
"Well... " said Kiraz. The depthless brown eyes-huge, excited-and those cherry red lips so full she might have been having an allergic reaction.
I made a quick calculation. "Your first Christmas with your husband..."
"Yes, first married." The swirling, shining ebony curtains of hair swaying as she vigorously nodded her head. "And Ellen, I wanted to give myself totally, surrender myself—everything—to my husband, Johnny, on this first holy day of his in our marriage."
If I may interject a sectarian comment: Oh, Christ, this looks bad. Remember when they would call a wife who exhuasted herself in the kitchen, cooking for her man, "a burnt offering"? Well, I do. It's different, today. You order a Domino's pizza and then make your offering on a rack that stretches the pink of your pussy. Kiraz is leaning slightly forward, taking another sip. Her eyes are pools of desire and pain. She is fucking dying to tell me. What does she think I possibly can do for her?
"What did you do?"
"A woman I know through my husband..." She blushed, her brown skin infused with red and smooth as cream.
"She helped with the gift of yourself?"
"I had no one else to ask, Ellen. This woman is a nurse, the wife of my husband's best friend. I always thought she was angry at me for something. But she is sassy, unconventional. You remember how we used to say-a CT?"
No, I didn't remember Kiraz ever saying CT. Or "pussy" or "dick." Must have learned new words. Along with starting to drink alcohol and marrying an infidel-maybe not in that order. More than once, however, I did definitely hear someone call Kiraz a "CT"-and other things.
"So you knew she would help?"
"Ellen, I should not have trusted her! I could not have imagined. How would I ever know that she is not normal! I did not know how she had been looking at me!"
Lucky I have wine. Better get the cheese and crackers. This could be long.
"On the afternoon before the eve of Christmas, she came to our apartment, as planned. I loved her, then. I lost all sense of embarassment or guilt, Ellen! She stripped me. Insisted. She complimented me, she laughed. It seemed such fun. And she said that my Johnny would be honored! That no Western man knows this gift of woman. Its nobility..."
Wait, where is that airline emergency bag? So, let me summarize, okay? Her friend, Nurse Donna, is super-efficient. How to spread-eagle Kiraz under the Christmas tree? Nail some spikes into the floor? Nope, thinks of everything. Two sets of dumbells, eighty-pounders. (Another compliment to Johnny, except he is going to need a handtruck to move these out of the livingroom.)
So, slim wrists fastened to one set of dumbells, pretty ankles to the other, Kiraz is spread sadisticaly wide. "I cried out to her, Ellen! To my friend. Already inside my thighs the tendons were aching. And my lips, down there, they stung with being stretched and I felt cold air on my vagina. Donna got down on her knees and examined me. Her fingers pushed aside my hair; I felt her tug aside my labia. She said this was how women show their men they were open to them...
"Donna whispered to me about her husband, Charlie. What he wanted. For her to withold nothing and hide nothing. No woman's reserve. Ellen, she touched me for so long!
"Finally, she said: 'You are the gift. Your whole body, nothing is private.' And she was tickling me, moving her finger around my... you know, my..."
"Your asshole," I said, nodding very gravely. "I wonder why."
"And I couldnt stand it."
"So exciting! Please, share with me!" (Yeah, well what would you say?)
"When I was naked, Donna shoved a pillow under my butt to push up my mons. It felt obscene to display myself like that, to thrust myself...!"
I could picture all that riot of curly, black shining hair atop the perfect contours of dunes and valleys, smoother than powdered brown sand. I said: "You must have been gorgeous! You have such breasts, too!"
"I was sticking up! My nipples because I was aroused, now.
You can't imagine how dark red an already deep-brown face becomes when it blushes. Her beautiful eyes were swimming with tears... "I wanted to be nothing and my husband everything!"
"Could you share something with me, Kiraz?"
"Yes, Ellen. Yes, anything."
I walked around the table behind her, filled her glass. I took her long hair, running the strands through my fingers. I stroked her hot cheeks. I pressed my lips to her the nape of her neck. Who said, "Never given a sucker an even break?"
Kiraz startled as I reached down, took the bottom of her sweater (black, of course), and began raising it. Her face whirled around to me, the beautiful dark straight eyebrows frowning. I said, "I must see to understand" and whipped off her sweater, tossed it over a chair.
Her head fell forward. She murmured, "I understand, I think." Her beautiful hand with the long fingers and the red nails groped for the wine glass. I unsnapped her in back like the expert every woman is and flicked aside her jumbo, heavy duty bra. She did not stir when the melons fell out. What the Christ was she thinking?
My hands slid down her body slowly. I took them. As I had been dying to do. I felt their heavenly heft. Then, with my fingers straight out and spread wide, I began to strum her titties, back and forth, like harp strings. I could have come, I swear. kiraz began to moan, rolling her head. When her titties were as stiff as red erasers, I stopped.
"Okay, I see, now," I said.
"Oh!"
"Tied spread-eagled under the Christmas tree with the lights red, green, blue, yellow playing over your naked body? And waiting for your husband?"
Yes!"
"Donna had left. And you were wetting yourself down there?"
"Oh, how could you know!"
"I know about wetting and so do you." I was back in my seat. I winked. This was a very agreeable young woman. So, just for the hell of it, I had left her half naked. The big boobs rested on the table in front of her. I was looking right at the blunt ends of two almost maroon nipples.
"But Ellen..."
"It's okay, Kiraz. We're women. Stay like that," I ordered.
"But you are a woman, too!"
What did I care? I flipped off my dark brown sweater. I rarely wear a bra. To hold up what?"
A gasp. "Oh, Ellen! So beautiful! So small and perfect on your pale chest, so high! Such sweet brown tips..."
Toasts all around. I could get used to this babe. "What did you think about as you waited, there?"
"Oh..." A blush. "About being younger. In my village in Turkey. Men can't do anything to a girl who is not in their family. The men in the girl's family would attack them, even kill them. But my brothers..."
"You were younger?"
"Yes, they were 'twenties. I was a few years younger. Oh, Ellen still virginal! But so developed..."
I nodded. She said, "They burst in on me, when I was showering. On the idiot girl. I did not know how to wash! And then their hands on my breasts, and down between, with soap. Young girls idolize their big brothers. I would say, 'No!' but I was squirming, my hips never still, my breasts heaving...