Chapter 5
"Case goods is the name given furniture that isn't upholstered and isn't bedding. Recently moldings of plastic wood have been replaced with other, similarly-colored simulation of fine carvings, panels, carved medallions and other costly, ornamental touches in the cabinet and furniture field. Today you're likely to find that the supposedly wrought iron grille-work on your television cabinet is plastic as is the wood, the gold escutcheon plate and the other details.
"Even the veneer, bonded to the composition wood base or the standard plywood interlayers is bonded with the modern successors to urea formaldehyde and phenol formaldehyde which were our first great bonding materials when plywood came into its own."
The big, handsome woman addressing the Society of Plastic Engineers on how their field could better serve the furniture one was absolutely self-assured, certain of her topic, her control over her audience and herself. Notes were being taken at frantic speed. Faces in the audience were turned up toward Thelma, fascinated, as she spun for them a picture of rich, ever-unfolding markets.
"While the most common fibers in the indoor-outdoor carpeting in use today, such as the Ozite Town 'n Country, are the olefin vectras, we must also recall that others, such as 3-M's Tartan and the U.S. Rubber Company's are pure plastic products.
"Transparent plastic furniture and blown up bubbles for pillows and upholstered pieces have come in and chromium tubing, the insulation, thin-wall material, now in refrigerators and ranges, foamed and sturdy. Today Borg-Warner is rapidly gaining acceptance for Cryolac. Gentlemen, the home of tomorrow will be almost entirely constructed of plastic!
"It will be your imaginations, your ingenuity, your technological progress that will bring the color, the beauty, the economy, the tactual satisfactions and the efficiency and cleanability of plastic totality to the American home of tomorrow."
At the back of the room Mildred sat listening, wondering to what extent she had contributed to this attractive, authoritative performance. Certainly she was responsible for some of the poise shown, the sense of being of personal value. That awkward, oversized kid in school was a far different person from the beautiful Amazon, her hair streaked artfully with silver to give her an aura of more mature authority, her beautiful satin blouse and smart black silk suit looking both feminine and professional. She had done things with her eyes, expertly applied artificial lashes, shiny liner, subtly smoky shading, that gave her an impression of real beauty.
At the projector, Eric sat. He'd caught her every cue, worked the carousel perfectly so that the visual material always matched her verbal presentation, that it was done unobtrusively without obvious bell cues or her having to hold a cord and button in her hand.
The ringing applause, the standing ovation were for Thelma and he took a strange sort of pride in this. After all, he was her husband. It was he, in his own strange way, who had given her the fulfillment she required as a woman, even though Mildred had been an invader in their romance both before and after it was consummated.
He thought back on this morning. What strange contrast it presented to this public appearance!
Thelma's king-sized bed was canopied with pink and gold taffeta ruffles at the top. Her sheets, too, were pink and gold, though satin, and she wore a beautiful green satin nightgown.
Eric's cot was at the foot of Thelma's bed, its sheets and piHow cases of black satin as was the nightgown she made him wear with its matching nightcap. She had caught him once taking off the nightgown at night. Now she insured against this recurring by slipping his arms into a black satin pillow case behind him and secured to his shoulders with wide, sturdy ribbons so that his arms were around in back of him crossing in an elbow square-cornered "U" and unavailable to him.
If he had to go to the bathroom, Eric had to wake up Thelma and ask her permission. Frequently she went there with him, pulling up his gown, directing the stream into the commode, or requiring him to sit down like a woman to urinate.
After that she insisted on wiping him off with a tissue and powdering him. Then she would tuck him back in bed, pulling the sheets up over his satin-covered breasts and stroking his nipples through the thick, smooth layers of voluptuous fabric until he was thoroughly aroused.
Then she would either go back to sleep or make him gratify her orally. On very rare occasions, she would straddle him and mate with him, at her pace, for her pleasure.
This was a special morning, though, so she simply awoke him and freed his arms. While she was bathing in the scented tub she had made him draw for her, he made their two beds, wearing the full-backed, flowing pregnoir of black satin Thelma had selected for him, an old reject of hers, and then he prepared Thelma's breakfast. While she ate it, he bathed and put on the lingerie she had laid out for him.
This was the tough part, having to squirm into this tight, long-line black girdle that pinched his crotch so cruelly and chafed it during the course of the day, then having to put on those opaque black silk opera-length stockings she had found somewhere for him. She always made him keep his legs shaved and she knew how to stir him by stroking those stockings. Yet, whenever she got him aroused thus while he was wearing that cruel girdle, it hurt him!
The long-legged black nylon panties she made him wear were gleaming, beautiful things and he had to admit that he loved the touch of them, but they, too, sensitized his skin to her demanding touch and made his every erection a cruel punishment.
The undershirt he wore had once been a white satin woman's slip. It was cut to the shape of a man's' undershirt so that if he took off his coat it didn't' show through his shirt, and yet the knowledge that there was a woman's satin garment stroking his nipples disturbed him in an exciting way.
While they were still around the home, Thelma insisted that he wear high-heeled women's shoes. In fact his bearing and his leg muscles had become so accustomed to them that he was uncomfortable in ordinary men's shoes, so she, despite his exceptional height, dressed him in elevator shoes when he wore men's apparel on the streets.
Thelma inspected her husband in his lingerie and smoothed out everything for perfect fit, lacing the flaps on the girdle in back so that it tugged him in even more tightly.
"I want you to be alert today, Erika," she said, "so I'm making this so uncomfortable for you that your attention will never waver a second from my talk."
She made him serve as her maid in dressing her, smoothing her hose up her legs with the hands she always made him get manicured in the beauty parlor while she went there for her own treatments, dressing her completely, applying her make-up, using the knowledge she had forced on him in the cosmetician's course she made him take.
He brushed her hair carefully, painstakingly, for he well remembered the time he had snagged it and hurt her. That was the time she had hung heavy fishing sinkers from the ends of clusters of his blond hair so that it was constantly being tugged and then made him jump rope five hundred times!
Then he dressed her, fastening her blouse, fitting her suit onto her, attaching her jewelry, buckling her shoes, even putting her gloves on her.
As he stood back to admire her beauty, she asked, "Why aren't you dressed yet? Come on, Eric, don't delay me."
With frantic speed he changed shoes, put on trousers, shirt, tie and jacket, grabbed up her brief case and the projector, rushed them to the car, ran back for her purse and his wallet, and then he drove her to the meeting and her talk.
Sitting there, listening, admiring, feeling the pressure of the tightly laced girdle, aware of the punishment garments she had made him wear beneath his men's clothing, Eric thought, "What an amazing woman that wife of mine is!" Then he had an afterthought. "But really I'm more her husband than she is my wife. Surely she posseses me more than I do her."
And yet he found it thrilling to see this commanding woman stirring this enormous audience, even though he was in physical misery and excitation.
But there was another member of the audience who looked at Thelma from a less familiar viewpoint. Mil looked at Thelma from a less familiar viewpoint. "Mildred told me that F had to be here," Gary thought, "and so here I am. But why? What do I care about plastics or furniture design that that big woman is talking about?"
Yet, despite himself, he found himself drawn into the meeting, intrigued by the occasional flashing smile, the intelligence in those dark eyes, the very size of the woman and the aura of personal authority she exuded.
The crowd gathered around the podium after the talk and Mildred came up with the blond man who had been working the projector to introduce Eric to Gary. They were almost the same height. Gary was broader-shouldered, stronger, more the extrovert. Eric seemed the more sensitive. "He's the husband of the speaker you just heard, Gary," Mildred said. "Wasn't Thelma magnificent? She's one of my closest friends."
Gary, ever the salesman, assured Thelma's' husband and closest friend that she had been, indeed, magnificent.
Now the crowd around the podium was thinning and the chairman had taken the microphone to make an announcement about the next afternoon session on reinforced plastics and Thelma was working her way through the last few human barnacles to her progress, toward the little group of three.
"Gary Worthington, Thelma Garrison," Mildred said, introducing Gary to her tall friend. "That was her maiden name, too, so when she married Eric, since she was the dominant member of the pair, she made him adopt her name, didn't she, Eric?"
Unblushing, Eric said, "When Thelma insists on any thing, good sense says do it now or she'll make you do it later."
Gary laughed uneasily. "I've always recognized that women had certain superiorities over men, but this is the first instance I've encountered where it seemed to, actually, be physical."
"I am extremely strong physically," Thelma said quietly, "and merciless toward those I defeat."
For some reason Gary's face turned red and his smile seemed to be a frozen thing.
"The reason I brought you here," Mildred told Gary then, "is that you and Emily will be spending next weekend as guests of Thelma Garrison and Eric. It's' their turn with you and, I suspect, you'll learn much that will prove valuable later in life to you. I've briefed Thelma on what I know about you so far from my own experience and what little Emily would tell me. Now I'll be briefing Emily about Eric."
"Wait a minute," Gary said. "That's not fair. Who's going to brief me about Thelma so that I can make like the great lover with her?"
"Thelma will take care of that;" Eric assured him quietly.
Gary had a strange feeling meeting the husband of the unfamiliar woman with whom he was going to go to bed, meeting him with the knowledge that he was going to cuckold him. And then the shock was doubled when he recognized that he, too, would be cuckolded when Eric went to bed with Emily!
To himself, he said, "And, really, Thelma's not my type of woman nor is Eric Emily's sort of man."
But he'd made a deal. He saw no reasonable way to escape it now.
They set their time, place, route. "Anything special you want us to wear or bring?" Gary asked.
"Dress your wife in a leather skirt, wide belt, and high-heeled, high leather boots," Mildred said. "She's going to beat hell out of Eric here and he's going to like it."
Eric's expression was bland. Gary's was shocked.
"And how about me?" he asked, gingerly.
"Just bring me your tender pink and white body," Thelma said. "I have everything else I need."
Involuntarily, Gary shuddered.
"Okay," Gary told her. "I may put up something of a fight for it, because I've had it so long.
"I'll take it when and as I please, I assure you," Thelma said, leading Eric away.
Emily lay abed, stretching cat-like, luxuriating in these stolen hours away from duty, from putting up with Gary's petty vanities and his quick self-gratification. Through her mind coursed memories of that glorious session with Charlie. The skill of the man! The understanding! He knew how to see to it that a woman had pleasure. And yet it wasn't that he was so very well endowed physically; it was that he was all man mentally, that he understood the mechanism of a woman and how to reach her sensitive regions as well as how to pleasure his own!
She thought of the sweetness of being in bondage while such a man worked on her, pleasuring her and himself and relieving her of all sense of responsibility or guilt for anything that went on between them.
And she contrasted it with big, handsome, impressive-looking Gary and Gary came out negatively.
Still there had to be other men in this world. Tall, short, fat, thin, older, younger, with all sorts of special tastes and interests, talents and desires. How much of this was any one person ever to be privileged to learn? Certainly within the restrictive rules of our society, any one prseon's knowledge had to be very limited, so meager as to be infinitesimal compared to all that was available.
"I'd like to know a hundred different men without messing up the values of home life," she insisted aloud to herself. "Then I'd know how to gratify Gary more, how to make him give me more satisfaction, how to live life to the fullest! I'd want them dominant and submissive, dark, blond, bald, every sort, every nationality, every degree of endowment. It'd be fun working up my own rating system for them, giving them various numbers of stars based on their performances, or maybe grades in numbers or letters. Maybe they'd have whole report cards, with desperate grades for their basic equipment, how long they can sustain action, their ability to reach sensitive portions of a woman, their ability to repeat the action, and perhaps something on special skills.
"I've heard about what they call 'going down' on women, where men pleasure them with their tongues. I'd love to have one do that to me, without a scratchy beard of course, just to say to myself I know how it feels. Maybe even Gary will do it."
She dozed off then and Gary returned home, sat beside her on the bed, played with her strangely cone shaped breasts and kissed her. "I'm home, Emily," he cooed softly.
"Bully for you," she said, stretching sleepily. "Knock 'em dead in the field again today?"
"As a matter-of-fact, I wasn't out selling much of this afternoon. I saw an old friend of yours and met a new couple."
Emily was alert now, listening carefully. "Mildred?" she guessed.
"Right, and then the Garrisons. Her maiden name was Garrison and she made him change to it. I guess he's the one who wears the skirt in the family." He laughed then at his own humor.
"Don't laugh, knobby knees, or I'll get you a kilt," Emily said, slipping out of bed and getting a robe from her closet. "Tell me about the couple."
"Big woman. Named Thelma. Tall blond guy named Eric. She evidently has the money in the family and probably the brains. He's quiet. I think she pushes him around something fierce."
"Doesn't sound like either of us is going to do too well this time. You never did give me a reading on Mildred."
"She says I'm square," Gary admitted. "Am I?"
"I don't really know yet," Emily said. "I had the feeling that Charlie Greco was a lot more experienced than you, but if we keep meeting many of Mildred's old friends, that won't be the case a lot longer!"
"Hey, they want you to wear leather boots and a skirt and a wide leather belt and look dominant as all get out," Gary recalled.
"Me dominant?" Emily asked. 'I hardly know how to go about it. Mind if I practice on you a little?"
"As long as you remember that it's just practice," Gary said.
"Then undress this very minute," Emily demanded.
Good-naturedly, Gary stripped off his clothes and stood there naked before his wife.
"Take down my pajama bottoms."
He unsnapped the pale blue crepe pajama trousers at the side and slipped them off of her.
Emily put one foot up on a footstool and beckoned to her husband. "Now I want you to put your tongue in there and stroke the outer, upper side of me with your finger the way you do when we're partying, dear."
"Not me," Gary spluttered. "I don't go that route! What the hell do you take me for, some lesbian or fruit or something?"
Pulling up her pajamas, Emily decided, "You're square, Gary. Real square."
He was wearing an open-necked sport shirt, white to set off his tan, when he arrived at the Garrison home. She walked beside him wearing a short, wide tan leather skirt and matching, high-heeled boots. Her yellow blouse was opened wide at the neck and she had a green and yellow silk scarf knotted to one side, cowgirl fashion, around her neck. On her head was a wide-brimmed Spanish style hat of brown patent leather, the cords from which hung down beneath her chin rather rakishly. She even had on elbow length brown leather gloves and brown silk stockings ran from her boot tops to under her skirt.
Eric looked out the window and licked his lips.
Thelma, beside him, watched the couple approaching their front door. "Go admit them," she commanded.
"Not like this, Thelma, please," Eric pleaded. The short-skirted maid's uniform and the little white-cap on his head, the black mesh hose and high heels, the strong perfume, eye make-up and lipstick still failed to conceal his identity as the projectionist Gary had met at the lecture.
"Alright then, if you prefer to go just dressed in your lingerie without the maid's uniform on top of it, go that way," Thelma said. "But either way go within the next thirty seconds or they'll be admitted to the sight of you sprawled over my knees while I spank you. One, two, three, four...."
"I'll go like this," Eric practically sobbed.
He opened the door while Thelma, in a flowing hostess pajamas with wide-legged pants and a beautifully full-sleeved printed silk top stood well behind him.
"Curtsey when they come in," she ordered.
Eric's face was scarlet.
"How do you do, Mr. and Mrs. Worthington," he said as they entered. Then he curtseied.
"Costume party or something?" Gary asked disapprovingly.
"Punishment," Thelma said. "He incurred my displeasure and so I'm punishing him." She advanced and took Emily's two hands in her own. Smiling, she said, "Emily, I've been looking forward to this meeting. I hope you find it fun."
"Thank you, Thelma," Emily said shyly, looking up at the tall beauty, violet eyes through dark-fringed lashes. "I hope that you'll teach me much that I don't know."
"I'll concentrate my principal teaching on Gary," Thelma said. "You see to it that Eric does anything and everything you tell him to do. You'll find that, generally, he's a very obedient girl, aren't you, Erika?"
"Erika?" Gary exploded. "What in hell is he, a damned faggot?"
"He is a well-trained and submissive husband, Gary," Thelma said. "Would you be less of a man if I called you Geraldine?"
"No, but you'd damned well better not," Gary said.
"Careful, Gary," Eric said. "You're getting off on the wrong foot with her and she can be dangerous."
"So can I," Gary said stiffly.
"Why don't you go with Erika into the guest house, Emily?" Thelma said. "You'll find him pleasant and amenable. Later you'll find Gary just as tractable."
"In a pig's ass you will," Gary snorted as Erika went to the car with Emily for her baggage.
"May I please take off this maid's uniform now that we are alone?" Eric pleaded after they hung up Emily's things in the guest house.
"Not quite yet, please," Emily said. "I never was with a man wearing women's things before. Please tell me why you dress like that or what makes Thelma want you dressed that way. And how does it affect you?"
Heaving a sigh, Erika sat on the footstool facing the easy chair in which Emily sat tall and straight in her leather costume.
"I must confess that I love it now. There's something about the feeling of feminine, perfumed silken things against my body that makes me feel closer to women, whom I simply worship. It's punishment, of course. To be seen like this is most humiliating. A man without his trousers is always at an extreme social disadvantage.
"Thelma makes me wear women's things under my men's clothing even in the business world. I'm in constant terror that I may get hit by a car and have to go to the hospital, or maybe snag my trousers or tear them, or be caught in the lavatory without the door locked or something. How can a man explain that he's wearing things that are obviously women's because his wife makes him?"
"Have you any idea why Thelma makes you wear those things?" Emily asked.
"She's a dominant woman. It puts her at a distinct advantage. At best I could never really pass for a woman. In women's clothing, I'm definitely and obviously inferior."
"And as an inferior, you carry out orders unquestioningly," Emily said, her voice hardening.
Erika's long lashes dropped and threw shadows on his cheeks. "Unquestioningly," he admitted.
"Then keep that woman's outfit on, Erika, and kneel in front of me," Emily said.
She stood now and the meaning of the leather costume was suddenly clear to her. Raising her skirt, she commanded, "Pull my panties down, Erika-with your teeth."
On his knees he pulled the front down, then the hips. On his knees he crawled around in back of her-Emily wouldn't turn around-and he pulled them down over her rump. Soon she could step out of them. Erika knelt there, the panties between his teeth like a well trained dog.
Emily took them from his mouth and slipped them over his head where they hung like a pink smoke ring around his neck.
"Leave those there, Erika, until you have made me have a complete orgasm with your tongue," Emily commanded. To help him remember to hold his head in the right place, she put her left leg through the leg of the panties not occupied by Erika's neck.
His tongue pleasured her again and again, curling upward, supported by expert, gentle fingers that parted the waters and brought the clitoris upward like a prize pearl to be lapped into its finest response.
Clad in his shameful costume, the man-maid served this strange, leather-clad mistress as eagerly as if she were a queen and he her lowliest subject. The feel of the leather against his cheeks, the sweet scent of her, the knowledge that he was granting pleasure to a superior creature inspired him to curl and point his tongue with maximum effectiveness, to probe and pleasure the woman so that soon she was squirming with delight and pulling on his ears, holding him in deeply, guiding his head, flowing sweetish-tart love juices into his vacuum mouth and delighting in the experience.
"Glorious," Emily said as she lay back still in her leather outfit, while Erika, his maid's cap askew and his make-up smeared ana raamg, lay on the bed between her legs.
"Now, Erika," Emily said, "I want you to put on just a woman's blouse and stockings and garter belt-nothing more-and then bring me silken bonds I can use to tie your arms and your legs to the four corners of this bed."
"Are you going to beat me?" Erika asked. "Cut me?"
"Silence, slave," Emily said, her girlish voice belying the positiveness of her statement. "You will know what I will do when I am doing it."
Even with this incertainty of what would happen to him and with Emily far smaller and physically weaker than he was, Erika obeyed and appeared before the woman in a white silk blouse and nylons and garter belt.
"Bind your ankles well," Emily insisted. He used sashes and scarves for this. Then he laid back and she lashed his wrists to the two upper corners of the bed so that he could do nothing.
His erection was firm and impressive.
Now Emily took her panties and made a nest of them around Eric's basket and his tool. She played with it with her fingers until it was as hard as she could envision it becoming, and then her lips encircled it, her tongue stroked its base, a vacuum was formed strong in her mouth.
"Tell me when I'm pleasing you by saying hot' or 'cold' 'dear," she told Eric. Thus, with her man-subject completely helpless, herself fully gratified, Emily began her research into the right way to give a man oral gratification.
Much was instinctive, such as the exact spot at the base of the head where the principal sensitivity reigned. Such as the use of her hands and the soft, fragrant silk to supplement the work of her lips and mouth and tongue, such as the letting of her long, pretty, scented hair stroke his bare belly as she studied the art of pleasuring him.
Much he taught her, as not to squeeze too tightly, and not to work too deeply on the shaft; not to let her teeth scrape and to fondle his nipples through the silk blouse he wore.
Then she felt it coming, felt the shock of spasms in her hand and in her mouth, far more specifically and personally than when she had been receiving men Gary and Charlie-in the customary place.
The fluid flowed and she caught it, swallowed it, enjoyed the knowledge of a new art she was just starting to master.
When she was through she looked down at the contemptible, helpless, effeminized creature with whom she had been experimenting-and the expression of gratitude and love she saw in Eric's eyes more than compensated her for the experiment.
Quickly she released him from his bonds and he brought her some strong, hot coffee with which to rinse out her mouth.
"You may dress as a man now if you wish, Eric," Emily said. "And thanks for the lesson."
"Would you like me better dressed as a man?" he asked.
"Frankly, I think you look fascinating like that, but you should put on panties and a skirt and high-heeled shoes," Emily divined by studying his face. The happiness he showed indicated that she had guessed correctly.
Then he re-joined her, his make-up and perfume freshened. He brushed out her hair and put the hat on her again. He used a suede brush to restore the nap to her skirt.
"Now come with me," Eric said. "Let's peek in and see what's been going on between your husband and my wife."
"Is that part of the rules of this game?" Emily asked.
"Thelma told me to tell you to come when we finished so that this whole thing can be as instructive to you as possible."
"Then let's go," Emily said.