Sex Log
RICHARD WAS PAST THE GUILT. EVEN THE EXCITEMENT—THE aching indecision and wild anticipation of the past few weeks—had pretty much run its course. What was left, now that he’d taken what only a short time ago had seemed like an unimaginable step, was a calm sense of detachment, as if he were watching himself from a great distance, wondering if there was any chance he could stop before he did something he might regret.
But he also knew that it was beyond his power to stop, now that he’d come this far. Besides, if there was one thing life had taught him, it was that it was ridiculous to be at war with your own desires. You always lost in the end, so the interlude of struggle never amounted to anything but so much wasted time. It was much more efficient to give in right away, make your mistakes, and get on with the rest of your life.
The irony, of course, was that he had so strenuously resisted his own inclinations in the present case. He’d agonized over his decision for weeks, mainly because he couldn’t accept the reality of his desires. Day after day he’d laughed at himself, and said, You don’t want this. You can’t want this. You’re not the kind of creep who orders a pair of used panties over the Internet.
He was a married man, after all. If he wanted to get his hands on a pair of unwashed panties, he didn’t have to look any farther than the bathroom hamper. But the panties within easy reach held no erotic interest for him whatsoever. They were just his wife’s dirty underwear. The thong he’d received in the mail that afternoon—a wisp of white silk decorated with lime green polka dots, to be exact—was a different sort of garment, worn by a different sort of woman, and Richard could not have found it more fascinating.
At the moment, the thong was still enclosed in a Ziploc freezer bag—he was unaccountably delighted by this odd domestic touch—the kind that had a white bar running beneath the seal. On this bar, where the user was meant to identify the food in the bag and the date it was frozen, was the following message, written in big, flirty cursive: “Worn by Slutty Kay, 6/02/01. Enjoy!!!” Inside, along with his purchase, was an envelope containing a photo of Slutty Kay wearing the thong, and a detailed log of her sexual activity for the day on which she’d worn it. Richard knew all this without opening the bag or the envelope; he’d had a long e-mail correspondence with Kay before placing his order, and she’d walked him step by step through the process. The only thing she hadn’t told him was the thing that couldn’t be put into words, the mystery that was about to be revealed to him.
He could easily imagine what people would say if they could see him now: exactly the same thing they’d say if someone had told them that Ray from work was a transvestite or that Ted from next door had anonymous gay sex at highway rest stops. They’d shake their heads with the standard combination of amusement, pity, and smug superiority, and say, Ha-ha-ha, poor Ray. Ho-ho-ho, poor Ted. At least I’m not like that. But we want what we want, Richard thought, and there’s not much we can do about it.
He took one last glance at his computer screen. In a rectangular box that took up a little less than half of the available space, was one of his favorite images of Slutty Kay. She was sitting naked in front of her own computer—if you looked closely you could see that the picture on her screen was identical to the one on yours—and smiling over her shoulder with that look of friendly complicity that always undid him. Hey, she seemed to be saying, isn’t this fun? Richard’s hands, he was pleased to note, were almost completely steady as he peeled open the bag and pressed his face into the aperture.
He had stumbled upon sluttykay.com nearly two years earlier, while doing research for a client. Richard worked for a consulting firm that specialized in marketing and branding—his own area of expertise was in company and product names—and was trying to devise a clever take on “Y2K,” a phrase that had worn out its welcome well before the arrival of the new millennium. In the course of compiling a list of domain names that utilized some combination of the three constituent parts, he found himself staring at a digital photo of a woman, neither particularly young nor particularly beautiful, standing on the beach at sunset, her back to the ocean. With her hair scraped back and her long, almost horsey face, she might not have even seemed sexy, except for the fact that she was lifting her tank top to flash her decidedly natural and—or so he thought at the time—none-too-fetching breasts. Hi, said the caption, bright pink letters on a pale blue background, I’m Slutty Kay, a 36-year-old married bisexual exhibitionist actively pursuing a swinging lifestyle. To read more about me and the unique ways I’ve chose to explore my God-given sexuality, Click Here.
Richard was at work at the time, his office door wide-open, lots of activity in the hallway, but he clicked on the link anyway. There was something in Kay’s voice, some combination of the brazen (calling herself “slutty”) and the banal (“actively pursuing a swinging lifestyle” “my God-given sexuality”) that threw him into a state of high alert. In some dim intuitive way, he sensed the presence of a real, possibly somewhat confused person speaking directly to him. It couldn’t have been more different from the boilerplate you came across at most porn sites, greedy male businessmen speaking through the mouths of young women with big fake tits: “Hi, I’m Amanda, and I love to suck cock!”
On the “Read More About Me” page, Richard found a series of questions and answers from Kay, the terseness of which reminded him of the catechism he’d had to memorize some thirty-odd years ago, back when he’d made his confirmation.
Q: Are you married?
A: Yes.
Q: Does your husband approve of your lifestyle?
A: Absolutely. He’s a swinger, too, but not bi (sorry, guys!).
Q: Is this your only job?
A: No, I’m a corporate professional with advanced technical and business degrees.
Q: Are you worried that your business associates will see this web site?
A: What I do on my own time (and on this web site) is my own business and has no connection whatsoever with my professional life.
Q: What kinds of sex do you like?
A: All kinds! Straight, bi, group, phone, solo. I also like integrating toys, vegetables, and household objects (bottles, utensils, etc.) into my sex play.
Q: Are you doing this for fun or money?
A: Both! Isn’t that the American Dream?
He was halfway through this catechism when Ray knocked on his door, taking orders for a lunch run. Casually, but with great haste, Richard banished Slutty Kay from his screen, told Ray that he’d like a small chicken caesar, and reentered the flow of an ordinary day. He didn’t think about Kay or revisit her web site for several months, but a seed had been planted in his brain. She was out there, and he knew where to find her.
Like a lot of men, Richard was of two minds on the subject of pornography. Part of him was a responsible adult who disapproved on moral grounds and understood quite clearly that the porn industry exploited and violated young women, and part of him was a horny teenager who just thought it was incredibly cool to see pictures of naked ladies doing crazy stuff.
After his first marriage collapsed, Richard had gone through a period when he was more or less addicted to pornographic videos. Alone at night in his grim little townhouse, he’d jam Dirty Debutantes 3 into his VCR the way someone else might pop a bag of Orville Redenbacher’s into the microwave. Hours upon hours of his life were devoted to the activity of watching people he didn’t know have sex. He was a fan, fully capable of conducting an intelligent water cooler conversation on the respective ouevres of Nina Hartley and Heather Hunter, had he known anyone who would’ve been interested in hearing his opinions.
At some point he just got tired of it—the sameness of the acts, the histrionic moaning, the god-awful music. What am I doing? he asked himself. Is this why I was put on the earth? Fueled by a sudden burst of moral fervor, he tossed all his tapes into a garbage bag, drove to a construction site a few blocks away, and flung the bag into a Dumpster. This act of self-purifying rebellion left him feeling righteous and exhilarated.
A period of unusual physical and mental health ensued. Richard joined a gym, took some yoga classes, started reading books again. No longer distracted by the fantasy women on his TV screen, he began paying closer attention to the flesh-and-blood women he encountered as he went about his day, including the sullen, but obviously very intelligent young woman who took his orders at Starbucks, and who, to his amazement, agreed to go out with him the very first time he asked.
Lately, though, Slutty Kay had become a problem. He thought about her far too often, and visited her web site several times a day. He was neglecting his work and his family, and staying up until ungodly hours composing lyrical e-mails in her honor that he couldn’t quite bring himself to send. It was as if he were back in high school, pining after some girl in chemistry class, knowing he’d never find the nerve to talk to her. Only this time he didn’t have to go to the trouble of fabricating his own fantasies. They were all right there for him on his computer screen, thumbnailed and neatly archived.
Some of Kay’s practices struck him as bizarre, even off-putting (she had a thing about kitchen utensils, spatulas, barbecue forks, and the like), and some were inexplicable (dressing up like a little girl and playing with balloons), but who was Richard to judge? She traveled to national parks and sites of historical interest—the Redwood Forest, Civil War battlegrounds—where she would invariably be photographed in front of some monument or marker, sans underwear, with her skirt hiked up to her waist. She had a vast collection of sex toys and used them in every possible permutation. The web site contained literally thousands of still photos of Kay alone and with various admirers, including a voluminous series memorializing a “hot tub encounter” she had with eight male members of the Slutty Kay Fan Club. The youngest guy looked like he’d just finished final exams; the oldest looked like he’d slipped out of the nursing home for the day. Kay didn’t mind; she took care of everyone with the same no-nonsense air of friendliness and good cheer that made her seem so paradoxically wholesome, as if she were convinced that being a slut and being a really nice person were just two things that naturally went together.
The niceness—it verged on a kind of innocence, Richard thought—just radiated from her face. When people were mean or selfish you could see it even when they smiled. By the same token, Kay’s sweet nature was unmistakable, even when she was performing unspeakable acts with a champagne bottle. She just did what she wanted, sharing her pleasure with the world without shame or apology. Richard wished he’d attained her level of moral and intellectual clarity; it would have saved him a lot of mistakes and would have kept his face from looking so tense and furtive all the time. If he’d been more honest, he would have had a smile like Kay’s, joyful, self-assured, and full of kindness.
But as close as he sometimes felt to her—as much as he believed that he knew her—he could never get past the uncomfortable fact that she existed for him solely as a digital image. He’d never heard her voice, never touched her skin, never made her laugh. The more he dwelled upon this inequality, the less satisfied he was by her pictures. Sometimes he’d have to click through dozens or even hundreds of images before finding one that brought him to the state of arousal that a single picture used to inspire. It had gotten to the point where she was just taking up too much of his time.
The panties were an attempt to solve this problem. He thought they might provide a connection to the actual woman and her physical body, liberating him from the sanitized stillness of a photograph. Maybe a sniff or two would hurry things along, so he could get back downstairs to his real life, where his wife and daughter were waiting for him, their impatience increasing by the minute.
Though it had lasted for almost twenty years, Richard’s first marriage had been wrong from the start, based as it was on a serious misunderstanding. Peggy had become pregnant during their final semester of college—this was in 1975, two years after Roe v. Wade—but they’d decided, in a fit of self-defeating undergraduate bravado, to do “the difficult and honorable thing rather than the shameful, easy one.” Actually, this was Peggy’s formulation; Richard just wanted her to get an abortion, though he never quite got around to stating this preference in so many words.
His silence and passivity in the face of an event that so profoundly transformed his life was something that still baffled him. He didn’t love Peggy, didn’t want to become a father. And yet he married her and accepted the burden of parenthood without a squeak of protest. To make matters worse, “the baby” turned out to be twins, a much more difficult and honorable project than even Peggy had bargained for. Their domestic circumstances were so chaotic and relentless for so long that Richard was in his midthirties before he realized how badly he resented his wife and children for imprisoning him in a suburban cage and forcing him onto the hamster wheel of corporate drudgery while his college buddies were off backpacking through Asia and snorting coke in trendy discos with high school girls who looked much older than they actually were.
By this point in his life, Richard had a night school MBA and a series of professional triumphs under his belt, mostly in the fast-food sector—The Cheese-Bomb Mini-Pizza© and The Double-Wide Burger© were two of his notable achievements. He traveled a fair amount on business and consoled himself with a string of hotel flings, as well as a long-term affair with a client’s receptionist in Chicago that went sour after he forgot her birthday for the second year in a row. She retaliated with a long, informative letter to Peggy, complete with surprisingly well-written excerpts from her diary.
His daughters were sophomores in high school when this bomb-shell struck; Richard and Peggy agreed to stay together until they graduated. Oddly, those last two years were their happiest as a couple, though they rarely slept in the same bed and kept their social calendars as separate as possible. Something about the expiration date on the marriage made each of them more generous than they’d been in the past—your spouse’s annoying habit becomes a lot less oppressive if you don’t have to imagine putting up with it until the day one of you dies. By the time they split, he’d developed a real affection for her, and still called once or twice a week to see how she was doing.
The envelope in the bag contained not one but three Polaroids of Slutty Kay wearing the polka-dot thong, each of them bearing a scrawled inscription. In the first one (Hi, Richard!), she was standing otherwise naked in front of what must have been her bedroom closet, looking unusually contemplative as she brushed her hair. In the second, she was wearing a sleeveless turquoise minidress and sitting in a car in such a way—open door, one leg in, one leg out—that you got a very clear glimpse of her crotch (Hope this gets you hot!). The trio concluded with a rearview shot of Kay bending over and smiling up at the camera from between her knees (Love and Kisses, S.K.). The enclosed sex log was written in the same girlish cursive on a sheet of plain yellow legal paper:
7 A.M.—Up and at ’em…first orgasm of the day (silver bullet vibrator)…mmmm…quick shower
7:30 A.M.—Put on Richard’s thong
8 A.M.—Coffee at Java House…Window seat so I can flash the businessmen…Hope they like polka dots!
8:30 A.M.—Stuck in traffic again…Why not masturbate? (Wow, these panties are getting moist!)
9 A.M.-12 Noon—Work (illustration of frowny face)
12:14—Lunchtime sex with girlfriend Trudy from Personnel Dept.—all she can eat! (Ha-Ha)
12:46—Tuna sandwich, light mayo, Diet Coke
1-5 P.M.—Work (frowny face)
6 P.M.—Masturbate while cooking dinner (roast slightly burned)
8-11 P.M.—Hotel room orgy with members of Slutty Kay Fan Club—and I do mean members! (panties off for most of this time, but back on for drive home)
12 Midnight—too tired to remove panties before falling asleep…but NOT too tired for one last orgasm (trusty blue dildo)
7 A.M.—Up and at ’em…remove yesterday’s thong, still wet and very fragrant, and seal them in bag for my good friend, RICHARD.
p.s.—They’re autographed too!
Richard had been divorced for almost two years when he started seeing Sarah. They hit it off right away, though he suspected later that this instant intimacy had less to do with any real connection between them than it did with the fact that they were both desperately lonely and waiting for someone to rescue them. At the time he’d been drawn to her bitter sense of humor, her youthful body, and her enigmatic sexuality (she claimed to be “basically straight,” but spoke frequently about the Korean woman she’d been in love with in college). She seemed to appreciate his social ease, his liberal politics, and, though she never actually said so, the promise he held out of liberation from Starbucks and long-term financial security, at least once his daughters graduated from college.
They’d been married for less than a year when she got pregnant. This time around Richard had no mixed feelings—he was thrilled with the idea of bringing a child into the world, consciously and without regret, correcting the mistakes he’d made with the twins (they blamed him for the divorce and were no longer speaking to him, though they were happy to accept buckets of his money). He vowed to himself and to Sarah that he would be involved and available in this new child’s life. He would work less, spend more time at home. He would coach soccer, sing songs in the car, organize memorable birthday parties. He attended Lamaze classes, read a slew of child care books, and coached Sarah successfully through labor and delivery, a miraculous (but also disturbing and horrible and nearly endless) event that he had completely missed out on with the twins, whose birth he’d spent pacing the hospital waiting room like Ricky Ricardo, and then passing out cigars to the other expectant fathers when the doctor gave him the thumbs-up.
He tried, he really did, at least for the first year. He said all those things new fathers are supposed to say and changed his share of diapers. But sometimes he found himself wishing that Lucy was a boy. He’d had two girls already, why did he need a third? And sometimes, when he was stuck at home with the baby on a rainy weekend, he found himself overcome by a familiar sense of claustrophobia and resentment, as if he were once again a young man throwing away the best years of his youth.
His sex life suffered, too, of course. How had he forgotten about that? Sarah was too tired, her nipples were sore, she couldn’t even think about it. When he suggested leaving the baby with her mother for a few days so they could take a quick getaway to the Caribbean, she looked at him like he was crazy.
“My mother can barely take of herself,” she said. “How’s she going to care for an infant?”
It was around that time that he started logging onto swingers’ web sites and thinking, Why not? It looks like fun. He printed out a list of “house parties” in their area and decided to approach Sarah about the possibility of attending one, just to see what it was like. They love bisexual women, he would tell her. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want. But when he went downstairs to talk to her, she was sitting at the kitchen table, expressing milk from her engorged left breast with a loud electric pump, looking pale and haggard as she flipped through the newspaper, and for a second or two, he felt an emotion toward her that was a little like contempt.
He still hadn’t gotten over how completely he’d misread his own needs. He’d assumed he was evolving and improving as a person, but all he’d really done was repeat his own failure, this time with his eyes wide-open and no one to blame but himself.
The panties weren’t working as well as he’d hoped. It wasn’t that the thong wasn’t as fragrant as Kay had promised—that was definitely not the problem—it was just that the fragrance wasn’t as distinctive or evocative of Kay’s unique sexuality as he’d expected. For all he knew, it could have been worn by any woman in the world, including Sarah.
Which got him thinking, at a very inconvenient time, about a troubling possibility: What if Kay hadn’t worn it? On her web site, she claimed to provide the panties to her devoted customers as a labor of love, but Richard wasn’t sure he believed her. After all, didn’t Kay have an advanced degree in business? For the panties to be really profitable, she would have to deal in bulk. She couldn’t just wear one pair per day, as the sex log suggested.
If I were Kay, he thought, I’d subcontract the panty-wearing. It was all too easy to imagine a sweatshop full of bored women—Chinese and Latina seamstresses—all of them wearing polka-dotted thongs as they worked their sewing machines, then wearily slipping them into plastic bags at the end of the day, along with a completely fictional “sex log.” What kind of fool would that make Richard?
He pressed the thong over his mouth and nose and inhaled deeply, trying to banish these inappropriately commercial considerations. This was no time to be thinking about business, his pants around his ankles, his palm slick with Vaseline Intensive Care. These are Kay’s panties, he chanted to himself. These panties belong to Kay. But then, just when he got himself going, he’d think, Maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re outsourced.
It was hard to know how long he’d hosted this dialogue in his mind before the whole issue of authenticity suddenly became moot. His eyes were darting in a regular pattern from the sex log to the Polaroids to an image on his computer screen of Kay leaning on a guardrail overlooking Niagara Falls, discreetly lifting her dress to give the camera a glimpse of her bare ass. He was breathing deeply, taking her essence deep into his lungs, into his bloodstream—
“Ahem.”
He whipped his head around, the panties still pressed over the lower half of his face. Sarah was standing in the doorway, her expression wavering between revulsion and amazement.
“Is this going to take much longer?” she asked. “I’d really like to go for my walk.”
Richard understood that something terribly embarrassing had occurred, but all he felt just then was a profound annoyance at the interruption.
“You could have knocked,” he said, his words disappearing into the undergarment.
“I did.”
It took an effort of will for him to remove the thong.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This will just take a minute.”
“I think we need to talk,” she said, but to his immense relief she backed out of the room without another word, pressing the door shut with the gentlest of clicks, not unlike the sound your tongue makes against the roof of your mouth when you think something’s a shame.