My time with the Captain built more self-esteem than confessing to an angel for forgiveness. I told Gabriel there was nothing wrong with him. Now, I told myself there was nothing wrong with me. The truth was different. It was a memorial that caused another.
Who am I?
The funeral was for an acquaintance, a minor ghost from the past. She attended Notre Dame with me but never rode in my Desoto. She looked me up after she moved to the Pacific Northwest. Despite her Notre Dame diploma, her funeral was a secular service that lacked the propriety and spiritual ambiance for the mystery of death found in a Catholic religious service, at least for me.
Reposed in her open coffin, lifelike, black coiffured hair, fingernails polished pearl white, hands holding a red bouquet, dressed in black and white, the impression was, she would rise up, smile and participate with us. Instead, she was dead, never to move again, a corpse, no longer among us, her body discomposing indecipherable as we watched. The lid, soon to be closed, she so neatly tucked into her coffin, it to be lowered into the damp earth, all to rot.
Oh God, poor Rickie, Mom, Dad what do they look like now?
We weren’t close when attending Notre Dame. The truth, I didn’t like her. She was proud, stuck up and only responded to a hello if in the mood, a corridor passerby ignored by other students as a snob. Years later, after she looked me up, we met over coffee in Seattle. She’d changed. She was bubbly to the point of felicity, no longer stuck up or arrogant. As we reminisced of school days, the café door jolted open, a customer walked in, she jerked her gaze to see who, her shoulder-length hair flitted in a flutter askew. I saw the hearing aid.
Her curiosity about who entered placated, her attention back to me, I spoke slowly in a soft but audible tone.
“You’re hard of hearing, are you not?”
She smiled, looked afar, waited for me to say more, confounded and finally replied.
“It’s okay. What do you think?”
A few more verbal tests, as she fidgeted in ascending anxiety, her insecure replies and attempts to continue a conversation beyond heard grasp, confirmed, she was bluffing. She was trying to be “normal” when not. She couldn’t hear me. It explained her proud, stuck up, school demeanor. She didn’t respond because she didn’t hear the hellos. Like at the café, she faked her way through school.
How difficult a life, such a terrible card dealt, not being in the conversation, isolated, no one understanding your deaf plight, instead traduced to classmate scorn, our scathing, clever epithet quips trailing her passage through corridors and classrooms. It reminded me again, what is, is not what is.
How wrong to judge when we knew not who she was. The crude names we assigned her, hopefully at least not heard, as she passed among the student throng, a persona non-Grata to the Desoto and slumber parties.
Then another revelation crept up, one about me. Would it have mattered? High school, it’s a time of sycophantic peer pressure. Any association with a pariah is a coup de grâce expulsion from the “chosen”. Yes, I would have had empathy. But why? Because I was an outcast once too.
Driving the Desoto for girls' night out moved me to among the “chosen.” I loved my accepted status, the slumber parties and learning about makeup. My sin would be one of omission, silent sympathy while ignoring her plight, unwilling to relinquish the dive-in and slumber parties.
I’ve committed more sins of omission than commission. Don’t worry about what you do, it’s what you don’t you need to change.
With a louder than a normal voice, we became semi-friends of sorts, exchanged public personas but never knew one another close. In middle age, it was too late to connect intimately. My funeral attendance was a duty without tears except for my sins of omission. I prayed she could hear wherever she landed in the other world.
Did she have a secret puppet shadow? Who was she? I never knew her secrets, didn’t even know she was so deaf. Deaf and dumb, true. She was deaf and I, dumb.
During funerals for parents and those of their era, my mind dwelt on their life summaries, what they did and didn't do. For those younger, it was their tragedy, of a life story cut short, their uncompleted actions. This funeral was of my generation, now beginning to be sporadically called to the other world, a pace that would accelerate. As the sterile, macabre platitudes of the secular service droned on, my mind wandered afar.
Death, it’s final. Tomorrow the world goes on without her. She’ll soon be forgotten, yesterday’s newspaper. Death, the stop button on our life’s tape, a tape soon erased, a fading memory among those who knew her, probably knew her not, now an evaporating mirage.
I shifted to reminiscing about myself.
Soon I’ll be in a coffin, never to move again. When young, I walked through the Mission Cemetery with Julie, my one St. Clare’s school friend, to her mother’s grave, awed. The cemetery, row after row, beneath our feet or in little stone houses, real people, with life sagas, stuck now, silently rotting away. They can’t move, they lived but are dead, their stories over.
We were careful to step around the grave edges; thought they’d know if we stepped on them. I stood before the graves, read the names, the dates, stared at the photos of the ones with a picture. They stared back. In my mind, I visualized them in coffins, rotten, horrible to look at, unlike their picture. What would they say if they could?
The cemetery, its graves, composed undeniable credence to the nun’s admonishments, death is certain and possibly hell. Closing my eyes, I imagined their bodies dressed in goodbye finery, cold, damp, shriveled, decayed and rotten. It made me morose even after hopping on my bicycle and peddling back into the real world. God’s predestined future fate, its imprint retained, followed me home until forgotten by a living distraction. Watching TV or playing diverted my melancholy, yet I still retained death’s eventual claim mind-set frame.
I’m going to die.
Mom’s there now, beneath the grass and dirt, her headstone above. She’s in her cedar coffin, wearing the special dress I purchased for her, her favorite apron next to her where I placed it. Oh God, she’s shriveled, decayed in the cold earth despite the protective vault, the dress and apron ruined.
Dad's next to her in his favorite suit and tie, his fedora I, personally set at the angle he liked, rotten too. What will I wear lying in the cold earth? No, I’m being cremated. Who wants to rot in the ground? Better ashes to ashes than dirt to dirt.
Now this woman lies in her satin-lined coffin, so still, soon to rot in the cold earth too, no matter what she wears. No brush strokes are to be added to her life's portrait. Those departed, they paint no more. Their remaining blank canvas has no sequel, no happily ever aftering, not a stroke more of their brush. They’re just gone.
Morbid thoughts racked me; my mind strayed further afield.
With Mom and Dad gone, I’m scheduled next, the natural order of things.
Then my mind tripped a thought mine, the explosion rocked me awake.
I'm now know more dead than alive!
I ran a quick inventory.
The generation before is gone, now mine’s departing, it’s close, maybe true, I know more dead than alive, if not today then next year or the year after!
I switched from knowing I was going to die to believing it. The revelation wasn't fear of dying; it was fear of not living. The nuns' hell of burning sulfur pots seared in my young mind was long gone. The worse I could conceive happening on death was nothing.
I can accept nothing but not my life’s portrait unfinished. I need to splash paint!
Leaving the service, I gulped in fresh air, raced home on Interstate 5, radio music playing loud, mind churning and with the mind refrain.
I’m alive! I’m alive! I’m alive, not in that coffin, not next to be transferred to the cold earth beneath the grass. I’m alive!
At home, I removed my black mourning garb and evaluated myself, still alive, naked before the mirror.
Still trim, only a few wrinkles, I look ten years younger than the calendar says. Boobs sag a bit but aren't floppies. They're like ripe fruit, to be enjoyed. With money to dress well, my hairdresser, makeup, I can be a stealth forty-three. Menopause, and grandchildren, so what? I can still paint, paint with hues unused.
Looking at my eyes in the mirror, her occult eyes shone back, Succubus, Lilith, my secret puppet shadow stared back. She’s arisen!
After seven years imprisoned, she’d broken the silver chains restraining her. She was out, out for a last spree of libidinousness. It was she who agreed to meet the Captain. She was in command, my guardian angel trussed, unable to stop me.
If the worse is nothing, let her roam.
I redressed, in white, then changed and put on a yellow dress, then changed again and again to dispel the funeral’s death shadow. With each change, my rationalizations grew more complex.
Parochial school, poverty, early marriage, children when young, they snuffed out the real me. Who was I? Who could I have been if not suppressed by fate? To know who, without the cards dealt when young, I must roam unfettered by fate’s picture frame.
Lies to excuse what I couldn’t admit, fear of being old, an unacknowledged passerby with an unfinished painting prior to my death. I wanted to be a woman; still sought as a woman, not as a matron, Nana, or granny. All a complex web of delusions spun to deny.
A woman’s appearance determines her rank. After menopause, her rank degrades at an accelerating pace. The clock is ticking against me.
Handsome, professional, intellectual men will restore my rank. They don't need it all, just some, well at least one. With heels, makeup, the right dress I can still proclaim, “Look at me!” and get hit on.
Finally, with a mid-calf red skirt, white blouse with lace, a pearl necklace, and belly dance hoop earrings, I put on three-inch heels to leave the funeral’s shadow. Smiling before the mirror, hubby walked into the bedroom.
“What happened, room tornado?”
“No, no, just going through the closet. It needs re-arrangement. I’m sorting things out, what needs to be discarded, what needs replacement. It’s a female midlife crisis thing. I’ll be down shortly to fix dinner. Anything you want to see me wear?”
“No, I let that be up to you. I like your hair up. Don’t throw any of my old shirts out, especially the flannels; they’re a part of me.”
"Well, I'm thinking of getting some clothes, different than you’ve seen me wear. Don’t be shocked to see a new me.”
I bagged my castoffs for Salvation Army deposit; added one of his old paint smeared flannel shirts, went down and fixed dinner. I hummed in my renewed age, still a woman.
The next day I went shopping, shopping for sex.
By the time I went to the next book club meeting, Succubus was dressed to roam and meet a Captain with complex rationalizations for her freedom.
Succubus, first acted out imagined, “I should have beens!”, to be who, I really was, unfettered by fate’s imprints of poverty, dysfunctional family, Catholic schooling, seventeen-year-old engagement, eighteen-year-old marriage, and young motherhood.
I want to be me! She screamed.
Despite makeup and attire changes, even once a blond wig, I remained a Catholic, Asian, married, mother from a poor dysfunctional family who married and bred young as Santa Clara Valley morphed into Silicon Valley. There was no alternate universe. I was who I was, period.
Rationalization then shifted to a scientific inquiry justification. What attracts a man to a woman? It didn’t matter. What mattered was splattering more paint before the coffin. I feared to rot in the damp soil of oblivion as an unfinished portrait.
Was the wantonness urge strong? How was it possible to succumb to infidelity after seven years of marriage re-commitment?
The infidelity barrier, breached frequently in the past, resulted in its taboo rampart eroded until the adultery path was a level one. I casually trod astray again, just another walk of wantonness.
If I’d been caught outside Camelot’s castle, I’d have done anything to save my marriage. I would have deepened its moat and rebuilt its walls higher than agreed to at the church’s vows. Instead, I’d wandered afar, unexposed and unfettered. Infidelity was a stroll outside Camelot, the portcullis always open, the drawbridge down and the guard tower unattended.
Downtown Seattle's night clubs and cultural events were my hunting grounds. I dressed for wanton attention. Too old for fuck-me pumps or mini-skirts, I let my attentions known by middle age sexual response readiness with pencil skirts, lacy blouses, heels, nylons, cosmetics, peeks of lingerie and sensual perfumes. Spotting an interesting prospect, I flashed a come-hither flirt smile. If reciprocated, I boldly introduced my nom de plume “Cobra” and wrote his name and number in a little leather book.
I never gave my phone number, name or address. I phoned them. Via phone conversation, if innuendos were positive, Cobra agreed to meet at a downtown hotel for dinner which inferred sex. I came from and went back to the condo by taxi, without identification, a shadow known only as Cobra.
It was dinner over a bottle of wine, a ride in the elevator to the hotel room and anonymous sex with a new restriction, no kissing. The hotel dinners were once a month or less. Only the Captain was a regular. While sex was the culmination, it wasn’t the motivation. The quest was what was important. Search, pursuit, and preparation threaded through the month but home to the condo to hotel and back was never longer than six hours.
Postmenopausal, I needed to know what garnered my quarry’s attention, my scientific experiment rationalization. I knew some male sex fascination things, like lingerie, but remained perplexed why males tend to be sexually obsessed with things often odd. I told myself, I needed to know why men are often transfixed by particular things.
After experimentation, I concluded men are sexually fixated by age sixteen to something associated with their initial ejaculation. Its initial intensity imprints them. Like baby ducks, the arousal trigger on sexual hatching results in their following it again and again. Subsequent repetitions form a pattern that triggers their particular sexual stimulus. A common example could be staring at a Playboy centerfold while first stoking their penis that results in a breast fetish.
The evidence indicated initial male stimulus variations are individualistic and era influenced. Once stimulated, they hone them over time to fixation. Some are complex, like Edward’s Asian doll. There are examples in the news of odd male sexual imprinting. Pastor Jimmy Swaggart, despite marriage to a beautiful wife, is fixated on seedy prostitutes. Arrested twice, it drove him to risk everything for his teenage initiation probably by an elderly, unattractive black-haired prostitute. He couldn't help himself, he was fixated.
Prior to a dinner date, I’d inquire what might be their thing. In the center of my phone chatter, I’d ask, “Do I turn you on because I’m Asian, married or my hair? Is there a special something that trips your wire, something I wear? Can I do something specific you want?”
Instead, they would initially answer something like.
“I think how beautiful you are. Everything about you turns me on.”
Platitude lies, not their puberty’s imprint.
I interrogated hubby.
“What do you think about just as you spew into me?”
I knew belly dancing, lingerie, high heels, eye makeup were honest answers and suspect being Asian, my almond eyes, straight black hair and even my long-ago admission of, “We screwed.” were too. With his declining libido, he finally saw me wear a garter belt and nylons which perked up his saddle horn. It proved my hypothesis about male imprinting. Afterward, quizzed about it, he fibbed it was his love for me, a lie to cover his puberty imprinting, evidence males are embarrassed to admit what turns them on.
His porn voyeurism was too varied to define a particular fetish. Was it Asian women in lingerie? Hopefully, it wasn't old National Geographic photos of Bali native women.
The men I dined with had imprints associated with my physical appearance otherwise they would not return my come-hither smile. Asian eyes, straight black hair, refitted boobs, something tripped them. In America, the media portrays Asian women as sultry which results in an Asian fetish for some. The cameo Asian Princess Aura, Emperor Ming’s daughter of the old Flash Gordon series is an example of an Asian temptress who tests Flash's faithfulness to the wholesome blond Dale.
Most of the men, however, were opportunity hounds. My physical attributes only needed to pass an acceptable stimulus level for them to take the flirt bait. It was wine, dine, wham, bam, thank ma’am, and goodbye for them and no second call by me.
A few revealed truthfully what excited them. All, except two, were married and all were white except one, a Japanese businessman.
Four revealed complex fetishes that piqued my interest.
There was one with a dark secret stimulus.
He was married with three kids, respectable, pleasant, even chivalrous. He didn’t expose his dark thing until our third time together. After the first date, he openly admitted my being Asian stimulated him and only with me was he ever unfaithful to his wife. I double down on being Asian.
Lying in bed after our third wine, dine date, I inquired, “Who was the Asian girl that you became sexually stimulated by?”
I wanted to know more about this particular fixation.
“You don’t want to know.”
“No, I want to know. I’m trying to understand male sex motivation. Should I dress in a special way? It was not an American Asia, was it? It was a girl in Asia, right?”
“You’re warm, but you don’t want to know, at least not for me. It would, make you uncomfortable, think less of me, scare you, make me a scoundrel, even worse.”
I took a stab in the dark.
“It’s an Asian girl or girls in Vietnam?”
“Yes.”
Getting nervous, I reached deep into the dark side.
“Bar girls dancing on a stage?”
“Worse, much worse, I said you wouldn’t want to know. It was a different time. I was young.”
“Your wife, you fantasize using her too?”
“Sometimes, just as I finish.”
“Me being Asian, made it more real?”
“Yes, now I’m sorry I told you. With kids, my daughters, I'm ashamed but still, the image comes. It's something I can never tell her, my wife. You’re the first I’ve admitted this to. Only with you have I been unfaithful. Now you know why.”
“Don’t apologize. I’m thankful you told me. I might even have acted out the part for you better but then again maybe I would have been afraid to meet you. War, it exposes deep secrets best left unknown. I knew a Vietnamese woman who told me something like this. I don’t know what to tell you other than say perhaps your sex life is another causality of the war. Maybe if you think of it that way you can mend.”
Dressed and leaving the room, I thanked him once more for his honesty but told him I wouldn’t call again. He understood.
Another’s phone chatter also revealed an Asian fetish but one which made my Asian physical characteristics a long stretch of his imagination to fill. His symbolic sexual desire was a Japanese Geisha with silk kimono, Okubo sandals, fan, and hair up with cloisonné chopsticks and hanging tassels.
To accommodate, Cobra developed an authentic costume and learned a little about being a geisha but then did an act of faithfulness. Having gone through the trouble of acquiring the outfit I wanted to play geisha for hubby too but didn’t want him to be in second place nor buy another expensive costume. The solution was to act out the geisha role with him first. He perked up sexually, enjoyed her act but his thing was not geisha.
At the date, after wine and dine, Cobra changed into costume in the hotel room and performed tea ceremony but instead used sake. She acted demurely, accommodated his every whim, including sex.
By the second date, Cobra realized she was only acting out his Japanese prostitute fetish and she didn't call for a third date. The costume joined the belly dancing outfit in attic storage.
A man in his forties wanted Cobra to be Mrs. Robinson but he failed to act the naïve teenager and instead relied on her to act out the well-dressed older woman with heavy makeup and old fashion lingerie. Acting the older woman's role was too close for comfort. There was no second call for hotel dinner.
Initial phone sexual innuendos revealed another seeking Cobra to act out a complex thing which she shifted character to accommodate. He wanted subjugation to a dominatrix.
He was married, an important software business owner and insisted we never touch, his code of honor to keep his marriage fidelity intact. He obeyed my commands, which were really his once Cobra understood what he wanted.
In the hotel room, he crawled naked before her, in a dominatrix outfit.
She spanked him with a ping-pong paddle he provided while verbally belittling him. The final was his standing naked before her masturbating. She gave directions with butt paddle slaps to stroke or stop as her whim desired until finally letting him squirt his manhood on a hotel towel spread before him on the floor.
Initially interesting, it is soon boring. Cobra gave him a second date sendoff with a very red fanny to remember her. His wife never suspected his sexual kink but his secret puppet shadow needed periodic release. It made me wonder if hubby played ping-pong on business trips.
Surreptitiously I checked for a paddle or other fetish material but never found any.
Male fixation things meant they were not fixated about me. I was Edward’s China doll, Enrico’s mistress, Daryl’s art piece, Elliot’s trophy, William’s booty, Paul’s object of abuse, me the reflector of their particular sexual fixation.
My physical features, makeup, lingerie, attire, hairstyle, fingernail polish, shoes, costumes, acting were things that ensnared men. By association, I was transformed into their “thing”. However, my dressing up, applying makeup, putting on lipstick aroused me because I became their stimulus.
It was the males’ initial attention, subsequent pursuit, arousal of their penis and its ejaculation, all caused by being their stimulus which stimulated me. The build-up to my climax was centered on an affirmation I was the desired sex object. It was about me being the object of desire. I climaxed inwardly, not outwardly.
At the nirvana flashpoint, I was the receptacle. I made love to myself by being what they wanted. It empowered me. I enjoyed looking in a mirror during sex, at the two of us, with my reflection being their thing and they ensnared by me. My last thought at the climax was being the thing that caused their ejaculation and subsequent dissipation.
I’m what makes them spew!
I made love to myself, from perfume, attire, makeup, flirt to climax.
Thoughts about male stimuli made me think of mine. In puberty’s soapy shower, it was a galloping horse I rode as the climax swept over me. While I’ve never owned a horse, riding one was often incorporated in my sexual fantasies. I rode atop the stallion, in control.
What about white men and blue eyes? What does that mean? Is it my fetish thing?
In sex, there is control, power, domination. Does a man think he subjugates a woman by spewing into her, marking her as his, impregnating her with his offspring? Does a woman think she subjugates a man as he spews into her, dissipating his manhood and capturing him by having his offspring?
Is the sex act, a man controlling by ejaculation into a woman or a woman controlling him by being his thing? Who’s the aggressor?
Love, it’s when two are one? Sex can be an expression of love but it’s more complex. I don't know if all this applies or if it’s true. I’m probably wrong but my difficulty is explaining it to me and to you.
I tried new things for hubby but he responded best to old ones, belly dancing costume, three-inch pumps, nighties, and my hair up or down. It’s different for me. Our marriage, his children, the joint accounts, he’s my captured male. I oblige his things but doing so is to please him, my pleasure pleasing him. His security, safety, commitment, family, perhaps love is my sexual stimulation.
After seven years my “scientific inquiry” ceased. Shopping, seeking, flirting, acting, conversation, dinner, and sex, while enjoyable, were no longer worth the effort of balancing two lives with one hidden. I wanted one life, at home, with my husband, cuddling in bed even with a limp saddle horn.
At menopause, I’d doubled down on the roulette sex wheel and won. Luck is best not pushed to the edge. It's better to leave the table ahead than an eventual loser. I finally accepted life's next stage role, granny, Nana, as my final portrait of brush strokes. My secret puppet shadow also had run out of good cards to play. Fewer men chosen with a winsome smile, smiled back. It was time to fold my hand. I called only the Captain to say goodbye.
I set out to enjoy what time God lets me have with the cards I have remaining, family.
Staring in the mirror, I saw her, my secret puppet shadow, now the girl of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. She too knew it was over.
I donate unwanted items to the Salvation Army as they long ago assisted Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners in my youth. Every time I bake a turkey, I remember their food baskets, dropped off at our home by the uniformed Salvation Army people. How they knew our predicament I never understood but once a recipient in need, you never forget the kindness. It’s the poor and former poor who are most generous as they know what poverty's edge looks like and sympathize with those on it or who have fallen off it.
At the condo, however, I put my secret affair attire in plastic garbage bags and dropped them in the trash chute. I didn't want them worn by another actress. I changed my wardrobe to one expected for a granny, cleaned my makeup counter and left only what's appropriate. My libidinous life was over. We sold the condo, at a loss.
I thought retired, I’d learned who I was but hadn’t. It took the death of one loved to look at myself honestly.
