The following day, Helen rang me at work. It was, of course, a few years before mobile phones and I had given her my phone number at University so that we could keep undiscovered in touch. She was in high spirits, her voice chirpy as she asked me how well I had slept. She giggled, “Did you have any dreams that would worry Erika? As for me, I just hope I won’t moan and gasp in my sleep!”
I would find out that Helen, unlike me, loved the phone. While phones inhibited me, she was as liberated on the phone as she was in bed. I loved her sexy phone talk, and it became right from the beginning a titillating part of our affair.
On this morning, she had to tell me that last night she crawled back into ‘our’ messed-up, lovely smelling bed and how well she slept. Waking up, she missed me badly, but then, Helen changed her voice into a sexy timbre, “I buried myself under the doona, and my fingers brought my lonely night to a quite satisfying conclusion. After, in the shower, I missed you again. I remembered how lovingly you washed me after so thoroughly messing me up!”
Then she complained that she would have another lonely night in ‘our’ smelly, unmade bed and why I couldn’t -? She stopped. “If you were a businessman, you could quickly find an excuse to give to your wife for being away for a night.”
With her voice back to normal, Helen added, “Not that Jurgen ever has or would.” With this hint, an explanation left for the future, and a cheery – “Well, then. See you Thursday.” she hung up.
Over the following months of our relationship, there were numerous such calls. As it had to be always Helen calling me, I often looked longingly at my phone. I shut the doors of my office whenever Helen called, wanting no interruptions.
Helen loved to reminisce in raunchy, explicit detail about our love-making the last time we met, as well as to suggestively speculate how we would drive each other crazy next time. Jokingly, yet more than half-serious, she moaned her lust-filled frustration about our day-time-only affair - and then not often enough - in my ear.
She rang often. Her calls flattered my male ego. But it was their sexiness, hearing the playful modulations in Helen’s voice that always thrilled, excited and aroused me. I lost my habitual reserved manners on the hitherto disliked phone and became a more than willing partner in our phone-sex affair.
There is no doubt in my mind that the above kept our lust for each other at fever-pitch, from beginning to end. Between August and late December, it was only seven times that we could spend significant time together. Twice more, with Jurgen interstate, we spent a Thursday morning till night in Helen’s marital bed! Three times, ten till four, we were in a motel, and twice we drove for the day into the country.
Regarding the latter, neither she nor I relished our furtive shags in the bushes. However, we enjoyed being together and have a day filled with sun, laughter, and affectionate exchanges.
It was paradoxical, yet not surprising, that I felt guiltier about the warmth of affection for Helen that was more and more often welling-up than about the illicitness of our affair and the heat of our sexual passion. The challenge facing me was twofold. I had begun to care about Helen, not just as a sexual partner. Critical was that Helen too offered me more and more her natural warmth of feeling and caring.
Much of such warmth between Erika and me had in our marriage's everyday stresses and minor but persisting conflicts gone amiss. Often, I doubted whether we still liked each other and were, as marriage partners, likeable.
I could not then and cannot now make up my mind about how Helen felt and what unforeseen challenges arose for her out of our brief affair. She steadfastly maintained throughout our relationship that she loved Jurgen, that he was a good man and father, and that she would never hurt or leave him.
Jurgen was undeniable, on many levels, a desirable marriage partner that provided Helen with an affluent lifestyle and a secure future. I did not know him, and Helen never talked at length about their life together. I don’t think they shared many interests, but Jurgen could still have been a pleasant, companionable partner. With these factors added up, their marriage was, perhaps, a successful one, even if the sexual spark was missing. In this respect, their marriage was far from unusual.
While Helen hinted from the beginning about a sexual problem in her marriage, it took her a long time to talk about the details.
After her marriage, she realised that their feeble first-time fucks at the ski-lodge in Bavaria indicated what their sex-live would be in marriage. At first, she thought that Jurgen’s sex drive was simply low. Her sexual experience with previous partners had not saddled her with great expectation, and as he was kind and generous, she was sure he loved her.
She could not fail to notice, however, a variety of behaviours that eventually revealed a pattern. Some of them she thought funny, others strange.
Jurgen was compulsively clean. He constantly washed his hands, never touched a bannister, always wore expensive driving gloves in his car. Although he was a successful businessman and regularly interacted with others, he tried to avoid shaking hands. At weekends, she noticed that he often changed into fresh underwear during the day. He also kept a supply of shirts, socks, and underclothing in his office at work. Even for short business trips, he packed more in smalls and toiletries than she ever would.
When it struck her that blindfolded, she would only recognise her husband because he smelled of nothing but soap, Helen began to connect Jurgen’s phobic cleanliness with his sexual behaviour.
Helen told me then, without any of the salacious bravadoes she enjoyed in our sex talks, that she believed that Jurgen had always sexually desired her and that he still did. When it came to making love to her, however, his phobia of cleanliness and skin contact created for him a, probably, unresolvable conflict between desire and aversion. It was the only time, I thought, there was a touch of bitterness in Helen’s voice: -
“Even in the beginning, we did not make love very often. Then it became weeks, months. Now, when it happens, it’s always a surprise, never after a nice dinner, drinks, a night out, flirting, or sexy foreplay. It’s now always in the morning. I wake up; Jurgen is on top of me. I moisten my bone-dry pussy with spit. He fucks me quickly, rushes under the shower, then hurries off to work.”
Helen laughed, somewhat bitterly, “I started to think of our sex as ‘Jurgen’s hands-off, little morning fuck.” Usually, when he commits this sin, he returns at night with flowers or little, expensive gifts. At first, I thought it sweet. Now I am just sad, uneasy. For him, fucking me is something dirty; it requires a gift as an apology. It’s not his fault. But I feel now defiled; not by his stealthy little fuck in the morning but by his feeling guilty, by his conviction that sex is dirty and that I am unclean, soiled by sex and soiling him.”
Helen told me the above only late in the year, with our parting drawing day by day closer. I was sorry that our so wonderful, sexually so fulfilled and rewarding affair would end. I was relieved that Erika had suspected nothing. I also believed that my affair with Helen had not changed our marital relationship for the worse. I had no wish to confess my trespass and inflict hurt.
However, listening to Helen’s description of her marriage made me feel very uneasy about its future.
At first, I had not taken Helen’s claim that Rilke’s Der Panther and my reading and suggestive interpretation had led her into our affair as fully serious. I had tried to explain in class, in general terms, how Rilke’s poetry transforms the cage from a passive means of housing the animal into an active force that enslaves. Despite the remaining grace and strength in the panther’s circling behind bars, it is no longer just a dance around a centre but around a dazed and barely beating heart!
Now I realised why Helen understood it to be specifically directed at her life. In her marriage with Jurgen, she was not just living with his phobia. She was encaged in it. His aversion formed the soul-destroying bars behind which her life circled. They affected and constrained practically everything in their shared, everyday life. If her marriage was to survive, she had to remain locked in behind the bars of her husband’s peculiar obsession.
Helen’s repressed sexual needs had triggered her temporary escape from the restraints of the cage. However, the restrictions that Jurgen’s aversion imposed on their sex life was only one of many. It was, possibly, not the most critical restriction forced on her. About these, I learned only in snippets, and I was not curious enough to follow up.
In our love sessions, Helen gloried in her nakedness more openly and seductively than even Erika had ever done. Early in our relationship, when I raved about her naked beauty and that I could never get enough of her shame-free display, she told me that it made her happy. Stripping and showing herself excited her as much as it excited me.
“I am probably an exhibitionist,” Helen laughed. Then, getting serious, she said that Jurgen always wanted her to be ”properly” dressed. Through his mother in Germany, Jurgen supplied her with expensive, full body-length, cotton-weave night-shirts. She grinned, “Very dressy! I look like a nun! With Jurgen in his tailored pyjamas and me in my shift, we could go to church instead of going to bed. You know, we are never naked together.”
Another hint of her home-life I picked up in mid-September. We had been lovers for about six weeks. Besides having met twice for a day-long abandonment plus numerous raunchy phone sessions, Helen acquired the habit to park on Thursday nights near my car in her Mini to wait for my delayed departure after class. By then, we hoped, the other students had safely left.
What followed was half an hour or so of hurried, intense, and voracious love-making in my car. Helen began to come to class no longer in jeans but in skirts. On our second night, my hand discovered that she no longer wore panties!
In mid-September, in one of her phone calls, she told me that we had to stop our Thursday diversions. The problem was that it left her smelling of sex. She loved it, but she could not come within metres of Jurgen. Until now, on arriving home, she had plausible excuses. She told Jurgen that the Language Laboratory was unheated, the Mini’s heater was a joke, that she was frozen to the bone, and she needed a quick, hot shower. Jurgen, always considerate, made tea. Washed and warmed-up, in her nighty, she could join him safely.
As Jurgen avoided kissing and cuddles as much as possible, it had until now gone well. Giggling and being naughty, Helen told me that she didn’t need to brush her teeth! But now, it was getting warm. She had run out of plausible excuses.
Our brief affair was, therefore, for Helen much more problematic than for me. The chasm between the experiential freedom as a sexual being that she had wanted and found in our love affair and the enslaving constraints that Jurgen’s phobia imposed on her everyday life were unbridgeable.
While she had temporarily stepped out for a sexual adventure, the cage had remained her home. And Helen believed, at this stage, that it would remain so. It made her avow from the beginning that she loved Jurgen and that he was a good man. Most tellingly, it kept her silent about her life with him until late in our relationship.
For Helen, as for me, ours was her first extramarital affair. Due to her inexperience, she believed that a temporary breaking-out from the stifling confines of her married life could be safely kept separate if it was restricted to the purely physical. But the freedom she discovered and so enthusiastically embraced inevitably set her other confinement in sharp relief.
I, for one, did not believe that she could stay married to Jurgen. Either she would end it wanting to be free of Jurgen’s impositions, or he would end it finding a free Helen untouchably soiled.
These thoughts I kept hidden from Helen. December had come, my Adult Education class had finished in early November. Since then, we managed to see each other twice. There were also numerous phone calls from Helen.
In her last one, she told me that they were packing, preparing to leave for Germany in ten days. If I wanted to see her as much as she wanted to see me, she could free herself the day after tomorrow. I was still at University, preparing teaching material for next year. She would meet me there.
We went to a motel nearby, where we had been before. We had five hours left with each other. We made love; long, thought-filled, gentle love; long periods of just lying still, closely entwined, not wanting to let go, feeling each other’s heart beating.
We said little. Not because we could not find convincing words to lie but because the true ones would have hurt too much. As always before, we stood for a long time under the warmth of the water streaming down on us for our final ablution. Did it wash away our sin?
Without speaking much, we got dressed. I asked her where she had parked her car.
Helen did not answer. She hesitated, stepped up to me, and gave me a hurried kiss. Her eyes were filled with sadness; she looked haunted. “Ben, you better let me leave you now.”
She turned. The door clicked shut.
A few minutes later, when I stepped out onto the street, Helen had gone.
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