Folie à Deux: A Novel of Erotic Obsession

Chapter One

　　Chapter One
　　Melissa
　　My name is Melissa G. I am, among many other far more embarrassing things that you will learn about me if this missive catches your fancy, a Board Certified psychiatrist in private practice in a major West Coast city. I am also a wife for several years now, and this memoir is being written in parallel with one composed by my husband, Eric. Actually, he is a good deal more than just my husband; he is also my...well, I guess there’s no more accurate term than the one that makes a certain telltale organ between my legs demonstrate the signs that are its sole means of communicating its approval: Master.
　　Now you might reasonably wonder what exactly I mean when I call him by this rather heavily charged name. Well, I’ll tell you: it means that when we are together and either of us feels an erotic hankering, we have choices of which most other couples probably don’t avail themselves. We have a series of code words that we have worked out to let each other know exactly what each of us desires in the way of naughty fun without breaking character from whatever roles we end up in. So for example, let’s say I am in the mood to be topped rather intensely. I might cuddle up to him and ask all innocently,
　　“How is my dear husband’s energy level today?”
　　If he (quite rarely) responds that he is tired, that ends the topic for the time being and I get to practice patience, always a useful activity for a girl who tends to want what she wants when she wants it. But most of the time my Eric is remarkably tuned into my moods and quirks, and responds to my inquiry with his own,
　　“Why, I’m feeling quite lively, dear love. Why do you ask?”
　　Then I get a surge of excitement between my legs as I become more certain that sexy fun is in the offing, and snuggle deeper into his way-hot body as I reply,
　　“Well...you know how wicked my mind can be...”
　　He sighs dramatically, clearly warming to the prospect of a long encounter with the part of my body we both agree to be my most attractive feature. His hard right hand will then find that nether portion of my anatomy and squeeze and caress it possessively as he muses,
　　“You’ve been having salacious thoughts again, darling wife, haven’t you?”
　　I fall seamlessly into role,
　　“God that feels good...funny how the part of me that most needs to be handled...strictly...so loves to be fondled... But yes, I’ve been thinking about my spin instructor again...imagining him...giving me a very private class...”
　　Now this is true, as I have a notoriously wandering eye and a lively imagination about matters carnal. But it is also true that reminding my husband of this well-known quirk of his bride is a sure fire (pun intended) way to get my rear end the kind of attention my twisted mind seems to think it needs. Eric continues to caress our mutual favorite of my erogenous zones as he muses,
　　“Such a naughty little slut I seem to have married...what was I thinking, I wonder sometimes? But there’s only one thing for it, don’t you agree, my love?”
　　Well, in point of fact, my own self was sharply divided about that very issue. My poor buttocks, had they been given a say, would have chosen quite differently from my brain, where some wires apparently got crossed sometime during my psychosexual development. You see, I seem to enjoy certain activities that are sexual for me, certain intimately painful attentions to my vulnerable derriere, that the majority of people would experience as traumatic. But the clear plurality of my inner demons voted to let him have his way with me as usual, and I reply,
　　“I’m sure my exceedingly wise Master knows far better than I do what should be the fate of the part of my body he claims was constructed so perfectly by Mother Nature to receive his disciplinary attentions. I will cheerfully trust him to handle me towards my best interests, even if I must endure some discomfort for a time. Tell me where and how to present myself to be properly punished as we both know I need.”
　　****
　　Our parallel accounts of our evolution into this rather outré state of affairs are based on a habit we both share: the keeping of detailed daily journals on our laptops. As we grew into our relationship, we both had to laugh that after the most intensely erotic encounters that would leave us both spent and trembling with exhausted passion, our evenings would end up with us both tapping away on our keyboards next to each other in bed. A wee bit OCPD, you think?
　　Even though our erotic life has evolved in a direction that gives him the power to violate my most intimate boundaries at his pleasure, our journals have remained sacrosanct in their privacy. I will not be reading his version of our evolution until the first draft of mine is finished, nor will he see mine. This is in order for my musings not to be even more influenced by him. Since what he thinks and feels about me are probably way too important to my world-view.
　　I am of such mixed feelings about my dependency on him. I remember well the radical feminist 40-year-old self-made professional woman who didn’t need anyone else’s validation that I thought I was when he and I met. She no doubt would cringe in judgment of how much I hang on his every word or gesture. Of course, we both know that her hard-ass facade was what we shrinks call a ‘reaction formation’. That’s when you defensively do something that is the opposite of what you’re really feeling; think ‘whistling past the graveyard’. In my case, my strident feminism was at least in part a feeble attempt to deny how desperately lonely and vulnerable I truly felt beneath my ‘I don’t need your ass’ pose. It took him awhile to fully see through that camouflage, as I suspect you will discover when you hear his side of our story.
　　But for now, it’s my turn, and I will begin by describing my former self as I recall her on the day when Eric and I first met. We’ll start with the setting, which is a fine Spring afternoon in a great City known for its maritime beauty. We are in a small amphitheatre style lecture hall holding perhaps a hundred or so seats. It is the monthly continuing education meeting of the local psychoanalytic community. This means the attendees are serious about their inquiry into the deeper meaning of human feelings and interactions. The people who self-select to be in this room are mainly sincere in their commitment to reducing human suffering, even if their egos too often get in the way. At least they’re trying, and that has to count for something, right?
　　The lecture hall is a part of the local medical school, which has maintained its affiliation with the local Psychoanalytic Institute in spite of the total conquest of our field by the drug and insurance companies. They think we shrinks should be spending our days in a never-ending back-to-back series of 15-minute medication checks. This would be the polar opposite of psychoanalysis, which still holds sacred the 50-minute hour and remains skeptical of drugging our patients into mental health. So those of us in this room are already bucking the trend of our field, which is to outsource the therapy end of our work to less expensive Masters-degree level practitioners. What that says about us all is complicated, and perhaps to be explored at least indirectly in the course of this story.
　　And as to Melissa G on that fateful day, she is best described as a slender Jewish woman of medium height with short curly dark hair and big brown eyes. (Note: I will refer to myself in third person when discussing my history, with the journal entries in first person as I wrote them). She used to have the characteristic substantial nose of our tribe. That was until her domineering Mother insisted she have it sculpted to a cute little Gentile button at age 16. This surgical intervention happened very much against the will of its victim, and only after intense psychological pressure was applied and oceans of adolescent tears shed. Truth to tell, the outcome was impressive, enabling her to ‘pass’ as a non-Jew if she chose. Which was an odd concern given that she had never encountered any anti-Semitism that she was aware of.
　　As well, the rather dysfunctional home she grew up in was as secular as it could have been. Her intimidatingly accomplished parents were far more concerned with how their only child’s academic and athletic successes confirmed their excellence than about anything remotely deep or spiritual. In order to make them proud, Melissa was to be perfect in every way, body and mind, and the nose job was just the most overtly invasive strategy to achieve that goal (and far from the most harmful, as prescient readers will surmise).
　　So our heroine (I love calling myself that out in the open, though I started referring to myself that way in my head and journal as a little girl) grew up trying hard but seldom succeeding in satisfying her parents. As informed readers might suspect, she flirted with anorexia as a teenager, abetted by the rigorous requirements of her lifelong hobby of gymnastics. She was good enough to routinely triumph at local and even regional tournaments, but never quite at the national level. She always suspected that this was due at least in part to her breasts, which annoyingly insisted on growing 2 cup sizes larger than the A cup which was de rigeur for her sport. The overt disappointment etched in her parents’ faces every time she was not on the top tier of the awards podium can still bring a queasy twist to her stomach even on recalling them decades later. On the other hand, all those years of rigorous training did lay down the best possible foundation for an ass that her eventual husband, a connoisseur of such attributes, describes as ‘world class’. And as persistent readers will soon learn, his actions regarding that part of her anatomy affirm the sincerity of that opinion.
　　As long as we are on that topic, let’s take a little detour and dwell for a time on my peculiar relationship to my rear end. As an analytically trained psychotherapist, I am endlessly curious about my own and others’ deep motivations for all of such peculiarities. My very fastidious surgeon Mother prided herself on her only daughter’s precociousness in achieving all developmental milestones, and toilet training was no exception. So that desperate-to-please girl made her Mom proud even before she had much language by learning to go on the potty a couple of months before her first birthday.
　　Now consider that the average child is fully toilet trained by the age of three or four. Those who theorize about child development describe a universal battle over whether the child will poop and pee according to their own or their society’s and parents’ desires. This conflict is seen as the primordial root of all power struggles over who will control a woman’s or man’s body and its functions for the rest of their lives. Well, in my case, you can imagine the kind of pressure brought to bear to force my capitulation before I could even speak. My ass was a primary battleground for who would control me from well before my earliest explicit memory. Hardly surprising that it has ended up being such an obsessive focus for that adult refuge of our most primitive drives and urges—my sex life.
　　My parents weren’t big on affection, so hugs came few and far between when I was growing up. But if my Mother sensed that I was constipated, or if my mood was not to her pleasure (I believe the term she used was ‘peckish’, spoken in her crisp New England—yes, they have Jews there--accent), she believed in the same remedy her own Mother and Grandmother had relied on. I would be gently but firmly escorted to my bathroom (yes, being an only child of an eye surgeon and a hedge fund manager meant I always had one to myself). There I would stand to wait in a welter of conflicting emotions as she methodically filled what always seemed to me a giant rubberized enema bag with warm soapy water (the more frustrated she was the hotter it seemed to be). Once it was filled and capped and hung from the towel bar above the commode, she would sit on the commode. I would be drawn over her primly skirted lap with the part of me in question positioned in the place of honor (just as it is at least daily by my attentive husband).
　　My skirt would be raised and my panties lowered to expose my naked buttocks to the cool room air. Then her crisp, professional hands would gently but firmly part my nether cheeks to expose the orifice she was interested in. Before my ‘treatment’, she would always need to assess my health by taking a rectal temperature. The cool glass thermometer would be swirled in a large Vaseline jar before she would gently insert it into my bottom hole. Her firm right hand would then hold it in place between her middle and ring fingers for a full four minutes that she would carefully time. Then it would be removed and the reading charted in a special notebook kept in the top drawer of my vanity where my daily weights were also tracked and recorded.
　　Next the slender white plastic enema nozzle would be similarly swizzled in the lube (I still prefer Vaseline over KY for such purposes, perhaps out of nostalgia) and inserted where the thermometer had resided. Once again Mother’s cool right hand would hold the invading object in place, this time for 5 or 10 minutes while the warm soapy fluids would instill into my bowels. We would both wait a few minutes then as my sense of urgency grew. Once I started wriggling in internal discomfort she would hold the nozzle in place while helping me up and onto the commode after she stood up and raised the lid. At last I would be left in privacy to evacuate the contents my GI tract was quite urgent to be rid of.
　　I detail all of this rather personal business because it bears very centrally on the particular perversion that has come to be such a powerful focus of our sex life. If you want to understand my peculiar relationship to my bottom, there is no other pathway than my otherwise severe and withholding Mother’s uniformly gentle and kind but invasive treatment of that part of my anatomy. This happened at least once a week from my earliest memory and stopping only when I started developing breasts and hips and pubes. Those occasions were hands down (so to say) the most affectionate skin-on-skin touching I received in my otherwise contact-deprived childhood. To be sure I found her ‘treatments’ invasive and odd at first, that wonderful interlude of having my buttocks held for minutes at a time by her cool right hand. Nevertheless it became a source of deep longing for me in spite of how embarrassing it was. I missed it when I started having periods and Mother informed me that further enemas would be self-administered (which I somehow never got around to).
　　Of course, there was the additional complicating fact that Mother would reminisce about her own severe Mom spanking her bare bottom as she gently held mine during my weekly trips over her lap. She would muse that she regretted my Father’s firm prohibition against corporal punishment while regaling me with blow-by-blow details of some of her most memorable chastisings. Mother thought a ‘good sound spanking’ at least once a week might have made me an even more obedient child with a more perfect attitude if he had given her carte blanche to discipline me as she would have preferred. Given that I was in a very receptive state as I mainly enjoyed this precious interlude of being lovingly touched, it is hardly surprising that I became fascinated with spanking from an early age.
　　This was an important factor in how my childish mind processed this eroticization of my ass, no doubt amplified by my habit of masturbating in the privacy of my bedroom after each session. I would steamily imagine her spanking me while playing with myself, the subsequent explosion of pleasure sending me off to my best sleep of the week. Once she stopped this obsessive focus on my ass when I experienced menarche, I expanded my use of self-pleasuring to a nightly routine. I would imagine very naughty girls getting their naked bottoms painfully warmed by calm, handsome males (like my Dad) as my heterosexuality kicked in with the onset of puberty. So I later actually surreptitiously mapped out the part of a friend’s daughter’s life sized baby doll that an adult hand would cover while holding a thermometer where its bottom hole would have been. The result was that my hand covered the identical territory on the doll that seems to crave being spanked on my own derriere. Coincidence? Perhaps...but I don’t think so.
　　***
　　As much as the media have capitalized on the complex appeal of female bottoms being spanked over the years, it’s surprisingly difficult for a lady who fancies being treated in that manner to find a gentleman who is willing and able to give her what she needs. A very brave pair of female authors wrote openly about this in the New Yorker and New York Times over the past decade or two, and their experiences had strong similarities to my own. It’s just not the kind of thing a girl can casually slip into the conversation on a date:
　　“Say, big fella, any chance you might fancy taking me over your manly lap and whaling the bejasus out of my bare fanny?”
　　My efforts to bring up this rather delicate issue before encountering my Eric uniformly ended poorly. One guy, a medical school classmate also headed into psychiatry, suggested I talk to a therapist...(“Can you recommend someone who administers therapeutic corporal punishment?”). After that debacle, the next time I screwed up my courage was several years later. To give him credit, this man clumsily guided me over his lap and delivered a few half-hearted slaps to my pantied behind before going for my pussy (though he didn’t ask me out again). As bad as the ‘50 Shades of Grey’ books and movies were, at least talking about them would have given me an opportunity to ‘innocently’ subject dates to the idea of erotic discipline and see who warmed to the concept. Fortunately, by the time the media had offered up that option, I had found my guy and we could snicker at the godawful acting without any ulterior motives on my part.
　　So between my adolescence and my first meeting with my Viking conqueror (he really is half Swedish and half Danish and is as blonde and blue eyed as could be) I gradually evolved a healthier relationship to my body. I continued to work out like a compulsive gymnast, but stopped throwing up and starving myself as an undergrad after I got hooked up with a decent psychotherapist at the student health center at Stanford. My time on the gymnastics team there was limited by a chronic knee injury, and I withdrew from the team after a couple of years of frustration. This apparent defeat turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The absence of a whole posse of equally eating disordered teammates gradually allowed me to have a more realistic approach to feeding my body. This enabled me to finally develop a decent pair of firm C-cup breasts and some curves beyond boyishness below my waist. Of course, I still spent a couple of hours each day working out but I never did blow up in weight the way so many of my fellow former gymnasts tend to when forced out of the sport.
　　Once my body fat got far enough north of a few percent for me to start having periods again, I was surprised to find that I had a libido. I had maintained an almost perfunctory relationship to my sexuality since my Mother’s eroticization of my ass kicked it into gear, using self-stimulated sexual release as my soporific of choice. Over time, my repertoire of fantasies expanded as I trolled first the library and later the internet for material that quickened my pulse and moistened my crotch. Turns out there’s a rather vast mainstream literature in which submissive women find themselves having their bottoms bent, bared, and beaten. I was totally taken by the ‘Story of O’ and then ‘Nine and a Half Weeks’, but also found very sexy spankings quietly embedded in even more not-primarily-erotic books. For example, there was one delicious passage in Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ in which a precocious teenage daughter is recruited by her depraved mother to stage a naughty entertainment for a very wild party. The girl gives a Shirley Temple-like performance of ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’ for the crowd. She rebels against her mother’s insistence she repeat the song, thereby earning a very sexy over-the-knee spanking on her perfect girlish bottom with a metal ruler. I can’t even count the number of times I got off while imagining my own spanked trembling rear end being the rapt focus of a whole dissolute audience of randy voyeurs. When any particular fantasy wore out its panache, there were always plenty more to be sniffed out.
　　But as for sex with other people, my smart-ass mouth and adamant refusal to restrain my intellect so as not to threaten male egos made me a pretty intimidating target for most guys. A few nerdy men were bright enough themselves not to be chased off, but they tended not to be hunky enough to kindle my interest. But eventually I decided my virginity had persisted long enough, and managed to meet a smart fellow who wasn’t an overt turn-off. I allowed him to clumsily penetrate me (turns out my hymen was long since history, I guess from spending so many hours in the splits). This rather desultory event ended in less than two minutes leaving us both feeling awkward after his way premature ejaculation. Not that any amount of missionary position pounding was likely to get me off in those days before Eric and I unlocked my sexuality.
　　I did encounter better lovers over the years, especially during medical school and psychiatric residency at UCSF. These included several very well-intended guys who were willing to eat my pussy and finger my G-spot as long as it took to get me off—often way more than half an hour. That reminds me of a scene from ‘Annie Hall’ in which Woody Allen goes down on a pretty blonde for long enough that his tongue cramps...female sexuality can be such a conundrum... But no one ever really got to the hidden dark part of me that needed to be understood in order to unlock my erotic potential. Boyfriends tended to last for a year or two and then to drift on once we both figured out that we could not find the pathway towards a deeper, more galvanizing connection. This was the situation when I was turning forty: recently amiably broken up from my latest meh paramour. I was very happy with my burgeoning psychotherapy practice, and working on my Buddhism to try to get peaceful with my abortive love life that had not been able to be unlocked either by lovers or shrinks. And then there was Eric.