WE ALL GIVE WHAT WE CAN. 6-20-11
Roy Garde.
When it got to be obvious that Rob Harris was getting serious about his wimpy, close-to-being-faceless girlfriend, Pamela, all of his family and, separately, all of his friends wondered what he could possibly see in her.
None of them arrived at a satisfactory conclusion.
They all knew that there was very little that she could give him – or to anyone else – and yet he kept boasting about her as if he’d found his soul mate.
They became even more incensed when they found out that she didn’t read any newspapers and had never been known to read a book since leaving high school but when it also became known, from Rob’s own lips when he’d had a few too many beers after a touch football game, that he wasn’t even allowed into her bed they all gave up on him entirely.
What Pamela did read, besides skimming through fan magazines if that can be called reading, was any and all fashion catalogues and it followed that her favorite past time was shopping. She regularly went to the malls with her mother even when neither of them needed anything.
Another gauge of how much Rob was enamored with her was the fact that, believe it or not, he actually took some afternoons off from work to be able to accompany them to malls but only to the ones in other towns where it was unlikely that he’d run into anyone that he knew.
Pamela had a good, bordering on voluptuous, figure and nice hair but her blade of a nose was so prominent that it was all that people saw and it put them off her because they knew that, face to face, it was difficult to not stare at it and, while she seemingly stayed oblivious to that staring, it made them feel uncomfortable because of the rudeness aspect.
After they got to be formally engaged Rob was allowed to undo her bra and get at her breasts – she’d heard, over the years, that that was the fair minimum that had to be ceded if the girl wanted to keep her guy interested – but positively no other privileges of that kind were allowed no matter how much pleading he subjected her to. She didn’t like to French kiss at all, ever, and that, and the fact that she never showed much enthusiasm and engaged in minimal participation with ordinary kisses, should have warned him as to who and what he was dealing with.
It didn’t.
They got married on a day that she and her mother had picked out because it wouldn’t interfere with important sale events.
On their honeymoon – five days and nights in a hotel that was a short bus ride from the Niagara Falls and that was picked out by her mother because, “What’s the point of spending good money on luxury accommodations when, knowing men like I do, he won’t want to leave the room where the bed is except for a few meals?” – he found that the indifference to making-out that she’d shown clearly through their engagement was also evident when it came to making-love.
She knew that she couldn’t withdraw completely from the fray, although it was very evident that she’d like to, and she knew enough, from her mother, to get undressed for him down to her panties and then lie down and, when he got around to it, to lift her bottom to let him slip them off.
When he mounted her she turned her head away from his and braced herself against the coming pain by straining all of her muscles taut but that, as he soon found out, made it impossible for him to enter her and when he’d explained his predicament it took all of her will power to make her lower body relax enough to – “How is such brutality possible? We’re not animals, are we?” – allow the act to proceed.
When he broke through her hymen she made him stop and wait until the pain had dissipated somewhat and when, reluctantly, she opened up for him again she came close to ruining the once-in-his-lifetime experience by constantly and fearfully telling him to go slowly. When he had, inexorably, penetrated her fully and their pubic areas had met, bruisingly, she pushed him away – thinking that that had signaled that the mission had been accomplished! – and then got off the bed and walked, ever so slowly, into the bathroom to deal with the blood.
When she came back to him she saw that he was still erect and it puzzled her enough to ask, “But – – what’s this? Surely you don’t want to do it again so soon?”
He was already frustrated and her remark made him angry on top of it and so he stopped being considerate and he told her, brusquely, to lie down again and then he forcefully re-entered her and that time he didn’t have to tell her when the act was completed and she was so contrite at her own naïveté – and awed with the decisive way that he’d taken charge and with the overall primitiveness of the act and with the fact of being flooded and realizing exactly what she’d been flooded with – that she stayed still and quiet and put up with the ongoing pain and allowed him to wallow in her for as long as he wanted which, seeing that they were on their honeymoon and that he was in his prime at twenty two and that he’d been looking forward to this occasion for so long and that he genuinely loved her, he took full advantage of the situation by staying in place until they’d done it two more times.
On the second and third times she moved her hips for him a little and he hoped that when she’d healed, and they’d settled into sharing what they had, she’d thaw enough to want to participate properly and find out how wonderful love-making can be but it didn’t turn out that way because her prudishness came flooding back a second after she’d felt and seen and smelled what ran out of her when he pulled out. She emitted several variations of the word “Yech” as she scuttled as best she could to the bathroom and it was only then that she knew why her mother had given her a douche set just before she left home.
After that, during the entire honeymoon, it was obvious that she was loathe to ‘accommodate’ him again and every time that she was persuaded to she allowed him no variation from the missionary position and she’d only put up with some general nuzzling after he’d explained that it was essential to help him get properly ready and as soon as the, uh, required result manifested itself she’d sigh with relief and disgust as she was pushing his head away and then she’d turn her own head into the disengaged side and resignedly open up for him.
Every time that he finished and wanted to rest with it still inside her, ‘to soak’ as he thought of as being his right and certainly his inclination, she’d push him off her and say something like, “There. Happy now, you insatiable man?” even if they had just returned from an outing or if eight hours of sleep had gone by since they’d last done it.
When they got home to the house that her father had provided the down payment for – neither he nor his wife let him forget that and once she went so far as to tell him, after a minor contretemps, “I’ll have you know that we’ve got money invested in this house.” – they settled into ‘domestic bliss’ and he poured his talents and energy into his job, which saw to it that he got regular promotions and raises, and because he had that outlet he found that he could put up with the restrictions that she put on him without too much rancor albeit with a great deal of disappointment.
His anguish was eased when their children came along but he knew that his life should be much more than it was and so, inevitably, his love for his wife was put to the test more and more frequently.
His in-laws loved to babysit and so they were able to go out to restaurants and into the city regularly and also to the movies. They chose which film to see in turn and when – always in one that he’d picked – they saw a couple taking up an interesting position or practice between the sheets he’d hint to her, when they were home and getting ready to go to bed, that they should try it themselves but she’d invariably dismiss it out of hand and stayed oblivious to possible repercussions because, to her, procreation was the only valid reason for having sexual intercourse and so she figured that letting him get at her, always conventionally, twice a week was already far too much to ask in all fairness.
One evening, seemingly straight out of the blue, she asked him to please tell her what exactly it was that gay men did to each other and when he’d described their two main habits she’d taken some time to work out that both things are possible and then it took her several more minutes before she could dismiss the grossness from her mind and then she asked, with her utter disgust showing, “But why, for heavens sake?”
He answered that clearly both things had to give them both a whole lot of pleasure and that perhaps they, he and Pamela, should try both acts themselves as an experiment, even if it was for one time only, to see if they were missing out on a great deal of fundamental pleasure. He never forgot the look of scorn, combined with horror, that she gave him before getting to her feet and leaving the room.
She gave birth twice in the first three years of their marriage – she’d left the taking of precautions up to him and he presumed that she’d be savvy enough to do it – and when he and her parents were in the waiting room – awaiting the news as to the gender and name of the second one – he overheard her mother, deliberately not-quite-under-her-breath, making insinuations as to the manner of man her daughter had married who, “clearly had to be an insatiable beast,” seeing that he was making her poor darling go through hell again so soon after the first time.
A month after they’d taken their son home both women put pressure on him – the one physically by threatening to deny all access to herself indefinitely and the other one verbally – to get a vasectomy.
It took him a full week to recover from the operation and when he, tentatively, told his wife on a Sunday afternoon when the kids were with their grandparents, that he wanted to take her upstairs and try out his altered equipment she was startled but she complied although with little grace.
He proceeded, gingerly, and was vastly relieved when he found that everything worked properly and provided the same amount of pleasure and relief as it had always done. When he’d finished he stayed where he was, ‘letting it soak,’ and she eventually realized, to her utter dismay, that he wanted to do it a second time – he had, after all, suffered through a long hiatus – and she actually asked him what was the point of having a vasectomy done if he wanted to have sex just as many times afterwards as before.
Her unbelievably stupid question marked the beginning of his disenchantment with her – she’d equated a vasectomy with being a close cousin to a castration! – and he felt further and further apart from her every time that that fact re-occurred to him which was around ten times a day for a week or two and maybe three times a day from then on.
Making love to her had always been only marginally better than masturbating but, of course, it had always been potentially better and she did have a nice body even if she wouldn’t let him do a half of the things to it and with it that he wanted to. He’d become very aware, in the course of time, that the only reason that they were still living together, besides inertia and apart from the financial considerations, was because of Nature’s cleverness in seeing to it that about one second after a man has transferred his juices every thing else seems to be paltry and all is forgiven, if not forgotten.
Added to her list of shortcomings was the fact that their second child had had a large head – she’d been in labor with him for close to thirty-six hours – and by the time that he’d finally forced his way out of her he’d stretched her birth canal so severely that it never contracted enough to be a viable, friction-providing love canal again.
However, fortunately for him she was ultra conscious of that fact and knew the seriousness of it in that it adversely affected her fundamental role as a woman – being a woman who didn’t want to do it was entirely different from being a woman who couldn’t do it – and so, without discussing it, they worked together to find a way around it. They got into the habit of having her open up for him in the usual way and once he was all the way inside her – he never needed any guidance or much thrusting to get that done – he’d lift up to allow her to close her legs and she’d then concentrate on coordinating the tightening of her thigh muscles and her internal muscles with the rhythm of his pounding.
By never discussing it she didn’t need to feel ashamed of her inadequacy and he quickly resigned himself to merely ‘finding relief’ in her rather than ‘making love’ to her.
A few months after their youngest child went off to college Pamela was returning home from a shopping mall with her mother, they were in her mother’s car and so she was doing the driving, when a huge eighteen-wheeler lost its brakes at a crucial time and it ran through a red light and broadsided them.
Her mother was killed outright and Pamela was left paralyzed from the neck down.
Her eyes were always on the move and she could suck and swallow but not much of anything else including not being able to speak. The hospital, and then the nursing home, arranged for several different therapists to be brought in and they tried various pet therapies but they all failed to find a way to get her to communicate. They all thought that she should be able to learn a code by blinking her eyes but she either couldn’t, for some unknown reason, or didn’t want to.
Even if she could have communicated she wouldn’t have been able to tell them when she was hungry or thirsty because the signals weren’t arriving at her brain and so sustenance had to be given to her at fixed intervals either with a spoon or a straw.
Rob couldn’t afford long term nursing on his salary so when the insurance company found a way to not have to pay for it anymore, after one year, Pamela was brought home and he hired a day-care nurse to come to the house at eight and stay until four in the afternoon.
By then Pamela had learned to ask for water when her mouth got dry by trying to moisten her lips with her tongue and saying something like, “Plss. Wwwt. Plss.” But apart from that she just lay there and no one could tell what was going on in her head.
The day-care nurse had to feed her twice during the day and give her a massage and a sponge bath and, well, all the rest of it and it would be Rob’s job to feed her at seven o’clock at night and again at eleven and he would also have to change her diaper every night before he went to his own bed. Over the weekends and holidays he’d have to feed her four times a day and change her diaper twice or, ‘as called for.’
On the first night that he was alone with her and it got to be time to change her diaper he got on with it with a good deal of trepidation but he found that it was no big deal because she ate so little, and that mostly pap, that although the thing was soaking wet it was barely stained.
He didn’t have a problem with taking the thing off her but he’d been told that it was important to wash and dry all of her crevices before putting a clean one back on and that meant that he had to open her legs wide and – well – there IT was. Staring back at him.
Always a very pleasing sight for any man but to him, having gone without for more than a year, it was both intriguing and exciting and alluring and, more than all that, besides staring at him it was also calling to him.
He had to muster all of his self-control to stay clinically professional while he was washing and drying the whole area but when his administrations had made her mound of pubic hair become soft and fluffy he couldn’t keep his hand from going into an automatic fondling mode and it closed with her perfectly and his middle finger found her effortlessly and it thought that it had found a welcome so it lingered, as it were.
Pamela felt nothing, of course, but she got to be aware that he was taking far longer than her nurse had done earlier that day, and the nurses had done at the nursing home, to complete the same task and so her eyes started to look daggers at him.
That gave him pause and he withdrew his finger but then he reminded himself that she was his wife after all and then he took another mental step, a giant one, to get into a rationalizing, self-serving, self-justifying mode by telling himself, and then her, that a good fuck could well be therapeutic and who could know how many benefits it might bring to her general health?
He bent down and did some nuzzling and got overcome by lust and so he switched off his conscience – and then the lights so that he didn’t have those eyes of hers to contend with – and he got undressed and climbed on top of her.
He knew all too well that he’d find that she was – “I’ll bet you a dollar, it’s like a horse’s collar” – uh, overly open down there but he wasn’t prepared for the fact that she was also peculiarly and disappointingly slack too.
It was only because he hadn’t had sex for so long that let him get off in her and, even with that, to get it done he had to constantly alter his angle of attack and increase the ferocity of his strokes to provide enough friction.
Afterwards he was grateful for the long-awaited relief but, even so, he lifted up enough to be able to tell her, “Thank you, I guess, but listen, you don’t have to be concerned about this because I’ll never want to do it again, ever.” and then he got off her and switched the lights back on and he got dressed and then he cleaned her up and put a new diaper on her.
He tucked her in and he looked into her eyes – not expecting to find any gratitude in them for his promise to leave her alone from then on but it would have helped – and he saw at once that there was no room for gratitude in them because they were brimming over with contempt and with searing, almost frightening, hate.
The first week went by with no further incidents of note and he got into the routine of caring for her but when the weekend arrived he got horny again and every time that he had to wash her after taking her soiled diaper off he necessarily had to look at the curly mound below her nice soft belly and his need increased.
Sunday morning came around and he was eating brunch at the kitchen table when he got fairly swamped with lust.
So much so that he couldn’t keep eating.
It was all pervading and he knew that there was no point in trying to fight it because there was clearly no way of succeeding in that at that moment nothing in life mattered to him but finding some driving relief.
He hated himself for doing it but, overwhelmed, he pushed all thoughts from his mind – except for the insistent one that didn’t let up, ‘She’s a woman and she’s your wife, for crisake.” – and he stood up and headed for the stairs.
On the way up he experimented with the idea of masturbating while touching and looking at her nakedness but when he got to her bedside he remembered the ferocity of the look that she’d given him and he knew that he could hardly enjoy looking at her if the room was dark.
So, he was in a quandary and he stood there, still very, very hard, and he looked down at her and at her potential just by the fact of being a woman and he told himself again, and over and over again, that she was his wife and wives are there to give their husbands relief and that doing so was not only completely legal but was actually expected of them.
Yes. Yes. Very true but how, remembering . . . ?
And then the solution came to him.
He pulled the bedclothes down and off her completely and let them drop to the floor at the foot of the bed.
He undid her nightgown all the way up but when he saw that her once wonderful breasts had become blubbery and had collapsed in on themselves, and were therefore decidedly unattractive, he wanted nothing to do with them so he did up the top four buttons again and he bunched the material at her waist.
When he took her diaper off he saw, with relief, that it was only a little damp and was clean, although he knew that even if it hadn’t been cleaning her up would have taken only a matter of a minute or two and wouldn’t have deterred him for longer than that.
He pulled the pillows away and then he turned her head to one side and then he rolled her body over until she was lying on her stomach.
He lifted her hips up and eased the pillows under belly.
He didn’t want to hurt her or, God forbid, tear her so he went into the bathroom and took the jar of Vaseline out and scooped out a finger full.
When he got back to her he eased that finger into her and he worked it around to open her up some.
He washed his finger and then he got undressed and he opened her legs just so and climbed up onto her and got between them. Gaining entry was difficult indeed but it could not be, and wasn’t, denied.
The all-round pressure and the tightness gave him a great deal of pleasure as he inched his way in until she was accepting all that he had to give.
After achieving that goal he knew that he should control his strokes carefully, so as to not hurt her or himself, and he found that doing that suited him anyway because the intense pleasure that even the smallest of movements gave him was as much as he could handle.
However, Nature soon took over and he lost control to Her and consequently he had to start driving in and out just as hard and as fast as he could move his hips and while doing so the thought came to him that it was just as well that she couldn’t move at all because at the pace that he was going at it if she’d done so it would have changed the correct line of attack and, being rock hard, would have almost certainly injured him especially towards the end when he was forced to move in and out like a madman.
When he came there was so much pressure needed to eject, or maybe to inject, that the eventual release made him shout out with joy and triumph.
He stayed where he was, as the joy slowly dissipated, until he felt strong enough to move and then he disengaged and went into the bathroom to wash himself and when he did so, without letting himself look down, he felt a very real stab of pain and when he could look he saw that there was blood coming from where he’d torn the ligament that leads to the foreskin. He dried himself and put balm on the wound.
He went back into her room and got dressed and then he cleaned her up and put a new diaper on her and then he did up her nightgown and then covered her with the bedclothes. He then made the mistake of looking at her face and was startled to see burning hate in them that was several degrees stronger than what he’d seen there when he’d had sex with her in the conventional way on her first night back from the nursing home.
She had always hated blasphemy and, it goes without saying, bad language but anyway he rarely employed either of them except in a gathering of guys when it comes easy to the tongue and is often needed to provide the proper amount of emphasis, but the sheer fury that he saw in her eyes provoked him enough to come out with, “Jesus H. Christ woman, you’re my wife for fuck’s sake. This is what women do for their husbands – they give them pleasure. You know?
“Jesus! When I think about all of the pleasure that I’ve missed out on over the years it makes my blood boil. D’you understand me? Now then, listen to this next part and you’ll be amazed – it was nothing short of fucking marvelous! Wonderful! D’you hear me? Can you believe it? That fucking you, my prim and uptight Pamela, was great? It’s true! Well, because of that, I’m going to be doing it that way to you again and often from now on and maybe, eventually, who knows but maybe I’ll be able to fuck some sense into you. Did you get that? Isn’t that exciting news? It’s something for you to look forward to, right? Ha!”
He left her then and went downstairs to finish his meal. His anger with her had squelched his elation but it slowly seeped back in and by the time that he’d finished a beer it had grown back so thoroughly that it permeated his body as strongly as lust had done earlier.
The euphoria stayed with him through the afternoon and he would have gone up looking for more of the same at around four o’clock but he remembered that he’d torn his foreskin and that it needed time to heal.
The next morning he cleaned her up again – more carefully this time so that the day nurse wouldn’t see any evidence of the goings-on of the day before – and then he checked her for injury.
There was none and he kissed both buttocks with relief which made him remember how pleasurable it had been to pound away between them and he kissed them several more times before he could tear himself away.
He turned her over and fitted a clean diaper and then he went downstairs to fix breakfast and to make a sandwich to brown bag for lunch.
On the subway into the city the car was more crowded than usual and not only did he have to stand but there was no room to open his newspaper and so, when he’d read all the ads several times, he closed his eyes and almost immediately the wonder of what had happened the day before came back to him and he had to keep one hand in his pocket to make sure that his erection kept pointing northwards and out of harm’s way.
All through the day at work he was much more affable and polite than usual and his colleagues all came to the conclusion that he’d found himself a viable girlfriend at last. Which, as he came to see, was true.
He found that he was constantly slipping into day dreaming about his marvelously rejuvenated love life, and its prospects, and it badly interfered with his concentration so he caught up with some correspondence and, that done, he gave in to his mounting urges and he quit work two hours earlier than usual.
When he got home the day-nurse was still there and she greeted him and said, “I’m glad that you came home early, Mr. Harris, because now I can tell you face to face that your wife is trying to tell me something but I don’t know what it is. Perhaps you’ll know. It sounds like this, ‘Pls. Eye, Pls.’ but sometimes more like, ‘Pls. Tie. Pls.’
“I figured, at first, that her eyes were bothering her so I checked them out and they seemed fine to me but I put some drops in them anyway, just in case. Later I thought that maybe she wanted to read something – to use her ‘eye,’ d’you see? – so I held up some magazines but she closed both eyes right away so that wasn’t it either. Well, she kept making the same request all day so I thought about it some more and I came up with the idea that she was afraid of falling off the bed and wanted me to ‘tie’ her down. D’you see? Well, seeing that she can’t move a muscle I doubted that but I put rolled up blankets on either side of her to see if that was what she wanted but it was immediately evident that that wasn’t it either. So, do you have any idea as to what it might be?”
He told that he had no idea and had never heard her ask for anything that sounded like that and then he thanked her for her efforts and assured her that he’d try to reason it out.
He went into the kitchen to fix a drink and a moment after he’d heard her call out that she was leaving, and had had time to close the front door behind her, he put down his glass and went over and slipped the bolt and then he hurried upstairs and his erection grew so quickly that halfway up he had to slow down until he’d come to a working compromise with it.
The first thing that he did when he got to her bedside was to put the eye mask that he’d bought in a drugstore on her and then he followed the same routine as the day before and, if it was possible, the initial procedures gave him even more pleasure although the white hot intensity at the end was the same because, he figured, it was physically impossible to improve on that.
Never in life had he gotten such gratification and that fact interested him enough to want to look it up and he eventually obtained enough facts to let him reason out that the anal aspect didn’t play a big part in it – if, all other things being equal, it played any part at all – and after more thought he saw that that had to be true because Nature doesn’t make that big a mistake and still have one of her species survive.
So no, the inordinate amount of pleasure that he was lucky enough to being subjected to, late in life, had little to do with what orifice he was using but the manner of that usage did so significantly.
It didn’t take much thought to let him work it all out.
Homo sapiens have always – that is for around two million years and until relatively recently – fornicated in the same way that most four legged and some two legged animals, like apes, do today. That is by the male mounting the female from behind.
However, nearly uniquely, women developed, over many affluent years, prominent and cushioning buttocks and so, for some number above thirty thousand of those two million years, men became accustomed to having those buttocks play a big part every time that they got to mount a woman and concomitantly that information has been integrated into the core of their very being and that’s the reason why they, especially men like our Rob who was deprived of that experience for so long, react so strongly when they take up that position and feel them fitting wonderfully well against their bellies and upper thighs and, especially, slamming hard up against them at the end of every ingoing, incoming, stroke.
Rob’s idyllic love life continued for more than a full year and all through that time he felt bodily complete and mentally replete for the first time in his life and all was well with his world.
Pamela’s Doctor visited her regularly and after each examination he always asked the day nurse to compliment Rob on the good job that he was doing with caring for her and he once confided, privately, to her that he was astonished that their patient was still alive because he’d given her three or four months to live, maximum, when she’d left the nursing home.
On the very day that Rob had mused about it being about time that he left off Pamela’s eye mask – to see if he’d fucked some sense into her yet as promised – he arrived home from work and found a note from the nurse, on the table in the hallway, that told him that Pamela had gone into a ‘full coma’ – at a time that was less than an hour earlier when he was on the subway and incommunicado – and that she’d been taken to the local hospital in an ambulance.
He drove there at once and he saw that she had several IV’s coupled up to her and he stayed near her but couldn’t get her to open her eyes and the only way that he could tell that she was still alive was by seeing her pulses, made visible in peaking yellowish-green waves, streaming left to right across a monitor near her bedside.
The doctor had told him, when he’d arrived, that there was little hope and, sure enough, at around ten o’clock that night she tied.
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