As we had discussed, Simon and I had a very long and very frank talk about the night we had shared and the language I had used.
It seems so odd to imagine that a couple who had been together as long as Simon and I could be so nervous to talk openly about sex, but just the same we put off discussing what had occurred for a few days. I think both of us were trying to collect our thoughts and examine some things about ourselves that we had never taken the time to consider.
For Simon, I had no doubt that his main concern was propriety and politics, but not simply as it affected his career. We had both always known that as an interracial couple we had something of an example to set for the world. It was important to us both that we be regarded as normal and healthy people in a normal and healthy relationship, and that desire manifested itself in every aspect of our lives.
It informed the way that we had raised our three children and it informed the way we presented ourselves in public together, just as it affected the way that we presented ourselves in our separate work lives. It was always important to us that our relationship not be seen as one primarily driven by sexuality. I remember how angry Simon had become when we first started dating in college, when some of his white friends joked with him about having jungle fever. It had always annoyed me when my black friends used my marriage to a white man to lament the absence of good black men in America, had always tried to point out that our marriage was not based upon convenience or lust or lack of options. It was not any sort of fetish for either of us, it was a marriage.
It had always been important to us, and we both felt that it was worth the price that we sometimes paid for such a stance. I think that we had always come across as a little uptight, we were not an easy couple to joke around. When it came to matters of race I think that people of all colors tended to avoid the subject in our presence as though suspecting we might be inclined to lecture. In some ways it had lead to ours seeming like a marriage of politics or something we had done as a social statement, which was not the case at all. Simon and I loved each other, had since we first met at Georgetown, and politics and society had never entered into it at all.
But all the same it was fair to say that our choices and beliefs had an impact on the way we lived our lives. Certainly it had always affected our sexuality.
Simon loved my body, I never had any cause to doubt that, but when we were in public together he was always careful where he put his hands. He would never put his hand on my waist in public, he would certainly never have let it fall to my ample rear. He was so careful that I not be seen in a salacious light, in most of the public photographs that had ever been taken of us at his political functions the most intimate moment captured was us lightly holding hands.
In private of course things were different. Simon loved to fondle my firm round ass and my full breasts, he loved to compliment the beauty he found in the color of my skin and the tight curls of my hair...he loved that I was a woman of color but did not love me because I was a woman of color.
I loved Simon's body in turn, there was not a request he could have made of me that I wouldn't have considered at least, bu we had never really pushed those boundaries. We had always been happy with the way that things were, regular missionary sex, usually once or twice a week but never patterned or planned always an act of spontaneous love. I would suck Simon off on his birthday, but in all the years of our marriage he had never gone down on me, it would have been strange, I thought, if I were to ask him to. He almost certainly would have done so, it only seemed to me like a transgression of the delicate and proper lines that we had drawn for ourselves.
So it would never have dawned on Simon on his own to throw me on a bed and take me doggy style. It would never have occurred to him to slap my ass as hard as he could or to pound my wet pussy until it was sore. I had never imagined that I would ask him to call me a bitch or a whore, certainly not a black bitch or a black whore. It had never crossed my mind to use the word slave during our lovemaking.
But then, in one moment of passion, I had. We had gone further together than we had ever gone before, and we had said things, done things, that we had no place for in our ordered world. As embarrassing as it seemed to be, it was not something that we could just ignore. That is not the way our marriage worked.
Of course I also had concerns that were all my own. Simon must have imagined that my behavior was simply born of desire, that it came from nowhere and was simply something that had manifested itself quite unexpectedly. How could I tell my husband that I was going through something incredibly strange and incredibly improper? How could I explain to him that my actions and my words that night had been informed by a memory of my mother's youthful sexuality and by a photograph of our own daughter?
What could I have said?
Certainly I could never have admitted that the emotions and thoughts that had come out during our somewhat aggressive sex had not ceased with our shared orgasms. As much as it embarrassed me, as much as it frightened me, the origins of my behavior were still very much upon my mind. I confess, I had honestly gone a little further in my mind since that night, down a path that was both fascinating and frightening to me.
The first time I had masturbated to the Polaroid I had found, the one which showed my daughter Corrie holding a young man's penis in her hand and licking as his ass with he tongue, I had excused my behavior by telling myself that it had simply triggered a fantasy, that the image, combined with the memory of my mother being roughly taken on my childhood breakfast table, had simply provoked in me a desire to imagine myself in the same position. I had not brought myself to orgasm while thinking of my daughter with a man, I had done while imagining myself in a similar position with my husband. In the same way, I had not cum with Simon that night because the image of my mother being taken roughly had popped into my head, I had come because Simon was fucking me, and it simply reminded me of something that had already been upon my mind.
But in the days that followed that first passionate night, I found myself returning again and again to those images in my mind, to the fantasy I had constructed around them. And if I am honest, I was not only imagining myself in the place that my family members had occupied. Instead, more and more, I found myself thinking of those images as they were, as other women caught in a moment of erotic delight. And as much as I tried to ignore the fact that it was my own mother and my daughter that I was using as the fodder for my fantasies, I had to admit to myself that in part that was what made the fantasies so thrilling.
Quite frankly I had passed the point of confusion and entered into a territory stranger still, a mental space of creeping fear. For what did it say about me that I could find pleasure in such things? In the sexuality of my own mother and of my own beautiful daughter? What kind of mother was I, what kind of person even? On that same note, it troubled me what I had cried out to Simon during sex, the desire I expressed to be treated as a slave. How was I to explain such a thing to Simon when I could not fully justify it within myself?
When a few days had passed and we finally sat down to talk, I was relieved when Simon took the initiative, as I really had no idea myself of how or where to begin.
