Chapter 12
Shame Is Sickness
It was near noon the next day that a singularly strange thing happened. I had just finished showering and was in the act of drying myself when I thought I heard Rebecca's voice. Low, coarse, she sounded as if she were somewhere in the house calling me. "Doris. Doris," I distinctly heard her repeat my name. Twice.
I opened the bathroom door and called out, "I'm in here, Rebecca. The bathroom. I'll be right out."
And then, very low, but quite clearly, I heard her chuckle: that rippling ironic chuckle that you could never really fathom. (Was she laughing at you or with you?)
I dried quickly, slipped into a robe, went out to the front room. But no Rebecca. It seemed, though, that she'd been there and left, for I thought I still detected the faint aura of her fragrance. "Rebecca!" I called out. No answer. Goose-flesh chilled over me. (Why I don't know.)
I looked out a side window. Janet's car wasn't in the driveway. "They must be out shopping," I said aloud. But no sooner had I said it than, once again, faintly but clearly, I heard her call out to me. "Doris. Doris."
"What is it, Rebecca; Where are you;" I answered, and my voice broke with a sob of downright terror and my whole body suddenly went as limp and weak as if I'd been drained of blood.
No answer. A near silence prevailed. I could hear the ticking of our front-room clock, and from somewhere outside the distant peep, peep of a car horn. I went to the phone and dialed Janet's number, and I heard a sigh of relief when someone picked up the receiver.
"Hell," I said. "Is that you, Rebecca?"
No answer. But I heard breathing and I was sure by the rather husky tone of it that it was Rebecca.
"Dammit, Rebecca! Quit playing games with me! You've scared me half to death. I'll be right over. Is Janet there with you?"
No answer. I began to hang up, but just before the receiver closed the circuit I heard that low ironic chuckle. "Damn her!" I said, feeling a hot flush of blood rise to my face and neck.
Not even bothering to put on slippers, I barged out of the house and headed next door. I was mad. I've always hated being deliberately frightened; I've never been able to consider it the least bit funny. But just as I reached with a trembling forefinger to push their front door bell, I heard the sound of a revved-up motor behind me and I turned just in time to see Janet pulling in the driveway. And ... Rebecca was with her.
They both greeted me warmly as they got out of the car. And I, my knees shaking, tried valiantly to return their greeting with at least a measure of composure and friendliness.
"We've been grocery shopping," Janet said as they approached me. "Why don't you be a jewel and get that other bag, Doris," she gestured back at the car.
I got it, glad to be able to do something that would at least temporarily hide my nearly terror-stricken state. Following them in, setting the bag of groceries on the kitchen table, Rebecca turned to me and said, "Whatever's wrong, Doris? You look as if you'd just seen a ghost or something."
"It's nothing," I said, trying to smile but not quite making it. "Just a ... a mistake. I thought I heard you ... well ... calling me. My imagination must be working overtime."
Janet laughed. "As a matter-of-fact, Doris, we were talking about you just now. Rebecca was saying all sorts of nice things about you. And she said something about calling you to come over for coffee with us. We us ... wanted to discuss having that little party with Charles and John. How about Saturday night?"
I nodded and then dropped weakly into a chair. Looking up at Rebecca I was further confused and intimidated to see that she was smiling at me like the cat who has just swallowed the canary. Her eyes were half closed, and the levity in her gaze was as devoid of real humor as the meaning behind a sick joke. I looked away quickly-but I felt my cheeks and ears grow hot with shame that was an inexplicable as the voice I had heard calling me a scant five minutes before.
"Why, you're blushing, Doris! How charming! But whatever for?" Janet's outburst only served to deepen my blush (and my inexplicable feeling of shame).
"I ... I don't know," I stammered, half truthfully. Rebecca's response to that was immediate: an ironic chuckle; the selfsame ironic chuckle I'd heard when hanging up my phone.
I realize fully that imagination can play strange tricks on us; we often think we hear or see something that just isn't there. But I had heard Rebecca call out to me twice, and that heavy breathing on the phone followed by that low laugh was really a lot to accept as imagination or mere coincidence. There simply had to be an answer. Perhaps Rebecca had called me from some phone booth while she and Janet were shopping. But if that was the answer ... how had I heard her voice, once from the bathroom, and then again in my own front room?
As we sat drinking coffee I tried to avoid looking at Rebecca. I was afraid that if I did she'd chuckle again, and that, right then, might've sent me into a nervous tantrum. (As it was I could barely hold my coffee cup, my hands were shaking so badly.)
"So you thought you heard Rebecca calling you, eh, Doris?" Janet peered at me and grinned.
"Yes," I said, "and quite distinctly, too. 'Doris, Doris', she seemed to be saying. Right now I'm still scared half out of my wits. I was so certain I heard her."
I took a chance then and glanced at Rebecca. She didn't chuckle. She looked very solemn and serious as she murmured:
"He who knows the masculine and yet keeps to the feminine will become a channel drawing all the world towards it; being a channel of the world, he will not be severed from the eternal virtue, and then he can return again to the state of inimagine."
"What? What was that again, Rebecca?" Janet gave her an astonished look.
"Never mind, Janet!" I snapped. "Rebecca wasn't talking to you! She was talking to me!"
"Oh. I see, "Janet sort of flinched; then she reddened and took a hurried gulp of her coffee.
"I'm sorry, Janet. I don't know why I said that. I guess I'm still nervous from that ... that mistake," I shrugged and gave her a contrite smile.
But truth to tell, those rude words had sort of spilled out of their own volition. I didn't know what Rebecca had meant either, so I certainly don't know why I could've even imagined she was talking to me.
"I wasn't talking to either of you," Rebecca said quietly. "That was something I learned as a child from a little book called the Tao Te Ching. The Tao Te Ching is my Bible. I'm a Taoist."
"Oh," Janet nodded, flashing me a bewildered look.
"That's Chinese, isn't it?" I asked Rebecca.
"Yes," she answered laconically.
Then, to my immense surprise, I felt her foot rub against my leg in a slow caressing fashion. She'd kicked off her shoe. She was sitting across from me. The kitchen table was a tiny one and with her knees crossed as they were her stockinged foot reached well up beneath my robe. It tickled delightfully; I managed to open my robe so that I could part my thighs wider and thereby give her a higher vantage-point to reach and caress. Glancing nonchalantly at Janet I could see she was unaware of what was happening.
"It's curious, isn't it, that Rebecca was talking about you at the same time you claim to've heard her calling you, Doris," Janet ventured.
"Yes, I suppose it is," I replied.
"I can see why it would make you feel ... well ... a little insecure," Janet added.
"Security!" Rebecca's outcry really made me jump. "There's no such thing! The person who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble. Security's a form of death. The person who takes risks lives more in a week than a frugal careful person lives in a year!"
Her foot, while she'd been delivering this brief but vehement indictment against security, had moved far up between my thighs, and she'd sort of fluttered it around there, as if to accentuate her words by the action. It was terribly titillating! I evoked an image of that lovely-arched foot, and I tried hard to keep my eyelids from drooping and my mouth from twitching. Janet, though (I was relieved to see), appeared to be very much interested in what Rebecca had said; she was looking at the voluptuous little temptress and nodding slowly.
"I agree with you, Rebecca. People who take chances do have all the fun," Janet said.
"And there's so much to do!" Rebecca's eyes were wide open as she began again with fervor. "There's so much to see ... to feel ... to experience! Why, in the world of sex alone there are so many fine, beautiful positions and tangents and perversions that it would take the average person a lifetime to try them all! Take fetishes, for instance. Do you have any idea how many there are; No; Well there are thousands! Take your fairly common foot-fetish. D'you resize that there are untold millions of us who can reach complete sexual satisfaction merely through some kind of foot play?"
"I've heard that," Janet smiled. "But I find it hard to believe."
"Do you, Doris? Do you find it hard to believe?" Rebecca smiled mischievously as she. asked me this.
"Me? Oh, well ... I really couldn't say. I ... oh, oh ... yes! I do believe it! Yes ... I ... I ... really do."
Rebecca's toes had found their mark suddenly; she was wriggling them with remarkable control and I was beginning to find it more and more difficult to keep a straight face. Her toes were very warm and very personal and very, very flexible and exciting. My thighs began to quiver a bit and I began to squirm around on my chair as if I had ants in my pants. Janet still didn't notice, though. She was still gazing raptly at Rebecca.
"Liking to be spanked is a fetish, isn't it, Rebecca?"
"Yes. And so is spanking. And peeking. And then there are hair fetishes and shoe fetishes and all sorts of clothing fetishes. And they're all part and parcel of the same sex drive that made all of us. Think of the average man and woman, Janet. They're satisfied to turn out the lights and bang away like animals. Oh, once in a great while I suppose they get a wild hair and the woman climbs astride or some such. But mostly its pretty much of a wham bang affair with the man getting the best of it and the woman being expected to act as if she's just been treated royally and with consummate skill. If that's sex, no thanks.. That's why I'll probably never marry. Oh, I'm not knocking it. It's fine for some. You gals, for instance, have very unusual husbands. And that's why, while I'm on the subject, that I'm so anxious for us to have our little ... party."
"Party! Party! Party! Oh, yes, yes! Let's have it right away!" I clapped my hands and nodded energetically and jerked around all over the place in a frantic attempt to disguise what was happening to me. Rebecca's toes vibrated blissfully and it was all I could do to refrain from reaching down to grab hold of that precious pleasure-sending foot.
Janet looked at me as an adult looks at a naughty child. Rebecca's ironic chuckle filled the room. I groaned openly then and gnashed my teeth and rolled my eyes and nestled against that flailing foot like a starved kitten nestles against the hand that strokes it.
"I'd say something, Rebecca," Janet said, grinning, "but I'm afraid if I opened my mouth you'd put your foot in it."
Saturday night (three nights away) was set to be "orgy night". When I broke the news to Charles, telling him that Rebecca was going to "join us", he tried to act very blase about it; he nodded and smiled faintly and said "that's nice" and then adroitly changed the subject.
He didn't fool me, though. For the rest of the evening his voice was high pitched and kind of brittle, and he paid me several little compliments he hadn't paid me in a long time. He was unusually ardent in bed that night, too-and I thanked my lucky stars that Charles didn't fit Rebecca's description of the average "wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am" type at all.
But he wasn't Rebecca. Charles couldn't've sat across from me at a table and done what Rebecca had done; he couldn't excite me to near distraction by a glance or by his voice; his mouth (while very, very nice) couldn't bring me to the peak of passion by a mere kiss. Charles was still very much my husband, and I loved him, but Rebecca had by now become the one most important thing in my life. She was my need, my quirk, my fetish, my obsession. She filled my thoughts with the same nagging cravings that I suppose a heroin addict must experience. I was hooped on her. But to illustrate just how "hooked" I was, let me tell you of two incidents that transpired on the two days preceding our planned "orgy" with Charles and John.
It was mid-morning when the first incident happened. I was at Janet's watching her do Rebecca's hair. (I envied Janet; more, I was jealous of her. She performed the job as if it were a task-and I would have dearly loved doing it for Rebecca.) In the course of the operation Janet suggested cutting a bit of Rebecca's hair at the back. Rebecca shrugged and told her to go ahead. So she did. Two raven locks. And as they fell to the floor and lay there like two black wisps of silk, I felt an irresistible urge to possess one of them for my very own. Reaching out slowly with one foot I managed to slide one of them close to me; leaning then, as if to smooth my stockings, I picked it up and stuffed it in my blouse pocket. Then, making some excuse, I went home
Once there, the door closed and locked, I pulled that shock of hair from my pocket and put it up to my face: my nose, my eyes, my lips. I bit it. I licked it. I tickled my neck with it, my ears, my tongue. I felt myself becoming calescent; a tingling flush consumed my whole body. I undid my blouse, unhooked my brassiere, began stroking my nipples with her hair. Down to my navel, running that raven shock in and out and around. I squirmed ecstatically.
I removed my skirt next. Then I sat down on my sofa and slipped Rebecca's hair under the top of my nylons. I sat there staring at it. I began to undulate my hips. Raising up, I quickly slipped off my panties; then, clasping her hair tightly between my thighs (high), I began to thresh about on the sofa like a severed worm. It was madness and I knew it. But I didn't care. That shock of hair between my thighs was indescribably thrilling and titillating and I" gave in to every primal urge that it evoked. And in my fevered mind that small slip of hair became Rebecca herself, I began moaning her name in a very frenzy of lust. "Rebecca! Rebecca; You sweet little slut! Your hair and mine are one! Together! You're where you belong! Rebecca! Rebecca! Rebecca!"
Then an even greater madness suddenly seized me! I reached down and separated a plait of hair from the rest and jammed it into my mouth where I began to chew on it and suck on it hungrily, savagely! And when the throes of peak began their pulsing stabbings I arched like a contortionist and with one frenzied finger I poked that wisp of hair where I needed it most and where my libations could oil it with the balms of utter lasciviousness, depravity and lust. And I quivered there and lived the bittersweet torments of a fanatic who is enduring the intolerable itch of a rough hair-shirt against his tenderest flesh.
And then the second incident. Going out for the morning paper I discovered a pair of Rebecca's shoes. They were heels; she'd kicked them off the evening before while she and Janet had stood at the door for some time talking to me. As I recognized them a sort of lilting thrill (like you get in a swing or on a roller-coaster) flipped my stomach. I picked them up and carried them inside.
Lifting one of them to my nose I sniffed it. "Rebecca!" I cried aloud, as the pungent scent made my senses reel. I became giddy, actually giddy with a soft personal pleasure and excitement! I brought both shoes to my face and pressed them there and breathed in their odor as if there were something tangible or sustaining in it. I kissed their toes.
They were expensive shoes. Their leather was soft and flexible and their heels were terribly high. The curve between the soul and heel was deep and dramatic. They were a dull dark brown. I sat down, kicked off my own shoes, slipped on Rebecca's. They were a little tight but they felt good on my feet. I stood up, approached a full-length mirror, lifted my skirt high, turned my feet this way and that, delighting in the effect achieved, pleasuring in the way they enhanced my calves and ankles. I was breathing heavily now.
I sat down again. I removed her shoes. Shoving one of them up beneath my skirt I pushed it between my thighs and then clamped them tightly. The leather felt warm but the sole was rough and it scratched and hurt just a little. But I liked that. (It seemed a composite of the masculine and feminine.) I brought the other shoe to my face again and-loosing a long sigh of resignation and desire-began nuzzling it with my nose and lips, like a god nuzzling the shoe of his master. I felt abject as I did this: low, utterly debased and corrupt. There was something about making love to a shoe that was horribly revolting and self-destructive. But that element, curiously enough (wretched though it was), lent me a sense of cringing servitude that I welcomed and found morbidly enjoyable. It was as if an overpowering need to feel humiliated and depraved were being exercised to their utmost limits. I was the lowest of the low, and with my tongue lolling the instep of Rebecca's shoe, and with her other clamped securely between my thighs, I was soon swept with a most salacious reward. And as I got it I sank my teeth into the toe of that shoe as a rutting wolf might bite the nape of his mate's neck. I growled nastily. I snorted. I crushed down with my thighs so viciously that I felt the tough sole of that one shoe actually give and bend a little. When it was over I lay back with a tremulous sigh. I felt effete, satiated-but at the same time I felt far from used up.
Confusing? No doubt. But all I can do is try and report what I felt. Have you every been thirsty and seemed not to be able to quench your thirst; You drink glass after glass of water, you feel bloated and full, but you're still dry; Well, that's how it was after those two perverse incidents with Rebecca's hair and shoes. I was tired, exhausted even. But perhaps because her hair and shoes were such poor substitutes I still felt the pilot-light of passion burning steadily within. I wanted the complete Rebecca. Oh, how I wanted her! And the next night I'd have her too! Even though I would have to share her ...
When Charles came home that night and greeted me with a warm hug and a kiss I felt ashamed. And that surprised me. I couldn't understand it. Why, when I had been indulging in vis a vis deviations with Rebecca and Janet (and Charles and John), should a couple of simple fetish indulgences cause me shame? It didn't add up. As far as I could see my little games had been no more perverted or worse than ordinary self-relief. Rebecca's hair, her shoes, had simple been ersatz symbols of Rebecca herself, and I had used them as such. Shame, I decided, was a strange kind of sickness; it could come and go in the twinkling of an eye but it always left you with a bad taste in your mouth (as if your tongue were coated with hair or as if you'd been chewing on someone's shoe or something).
Feeling somewhat penitent, I induced Charles to initiate a front-room (in front of TV) affair that night. It was really wild and wooly! That reserve energy I mentioned came in awfully handy. We began on our sofa, migrated to a table, ended up in front of a mirror in an upstairs bedroom. And as usual Charles had me wear a pair of heels. I saw him looking at them rather hard when it was all over and we were preparing for bed. And I wondered, feeling a stab of shame again, if he had guessed they were ... Rebecca's.
I slept rather badly that night.