Ela's Performance: A Romantic Wife-Watching Novel

by Arnica Butler

  The same kinds of guys she was likely to run into at school now.

  They were non-threatening somehow: their ultra-long beards, crappy clothes, whining metro-sexuality had not been particularly threatening.

  They just weren't Ela's type.

  Ela's type had to be a little more manly.

  I knew I didn't precisely fit that bill, but I was, in Ela's words, just so ugly that I was attractive, in a manly way. And she forgave me any lack of true, American manliness because I was from the UK and she “had a thing for that.”

  When Ela's eyes wandered, it was always to a guy who was distinctly different from her music crowd. Like her ex-boyfriend Christian Neilsen, the Danish soccer player she had dated during our “open relationship” while she studied in Denmark.

  Christian was another story, a guy who kept me up at nights for another reason.

  I returned to my current issue:

  What was I worried about with these music students?

  With her profs?

  She wouldn't really sleep with a prof, would she?

  But then she had. I knew she had, she had told me so. I had never been able to pry any details from her – it was one last, little secret she didn't reveal to me, but that I knew, I knew was true. There was some nugget of truth to what she had said at the Mexican restaurant so many years ago, no matter how much she tried to blow it off as a joke or not reveal any details to me.

  But was this the only thing that was gnawing at me?

  I lay awake staring at the ceiling. Listening to Ela practice.

  You might be wondering, why it is that I had gone so utterly paranoid in just one day.

  There were just a few other things.

  T HING #1

  There was this:

  It was an odd night. Ela had more than usual to drink, and we went to a party with a lot of grad student friends of mine from the Philosophy department.

  The jokes about Ela and I had, by then, gotten old for most of my friends. We'd been dating for six months in the open, and we looked like the kind of couple that was going to stay together. When I had first brought her around, there had been a lot of ribbing, references to Lolita (which Ela had quickly dismantled as making, literally, no sense to anyone who had actually read the book), and requests to see Ela's ID.

  It was summer, most of us were graduating, and the streets around campus were filled with swarming, shifting party-goers, moving from one house to the next. Our own group somehow merged with some music students.

  For this crowd, Ela's TA love affair was apparently still a source of jokes.

  But the jokes were strange.

  It was something I thought about only later, later in the evening when Ela did the strange thing she did.

  I overheard things, only half-listening. Snippets of conversations. Or maybe I saw things, in the corner of my eye:

  “This is Peter..” Ela lowering her head in a slight nod, while a thin, raven-haired girl named Lucie followed her gaze and her lips, her mouth open to ask a question and cut short by Ela's narrowing eyes.

  “Oh!” A sudden, too-sweet, too-knowing smile. “The philosophy TA.”

  Or:

  In a whisper, behind me, “Which one is this?”

  Or:

  Raised eyebrows. The scraggly, former violist of the quartet raising a glass to me with a shrug.

  Did I see these things? I don't know. Many years have come and gone, and memory is a tricky thing.

  At the time, I know I didn't think about it. Ela was drunk and kept leaning against me. Her hair smelled like lavender and she had an apricot tube-top on, and when she leaned close to me I could gaze into the dark shadow between her breasts, and imagine my face there soon. She kissed me on the lips and did something unusual, biting me lightly. Her eyes were full of vibrant mischief.

  We ended up in her apartment, and her roommate was gone. We had seen her leave with her boyfriend and knew she would not be back. Ela's energy was strange and much more sexual than usual.

  She turned in my arms and threw her hands around my neck.

  “Everyone is so scandalized that you were my TA,” she said, out of the blue.

  I slid my hands under her shirt. She had gotten me worked up all night, cozying up to me and pressing her lips to my neck, my lips, my throat.

  “Too bad,” I murmured, my fingertips reaching the underside of her perky tits and delighting in the slight dampness from her sweating, and the firmness of her flesh that I was just about to stroke, “there isn't anything particularly scandalous to that story.”

  She grinned. “It is too bad. Too bad that you didn't try to take advantage of me.”

  Her mouth was close to mine now. She had a strange energy about her suddenly, a lot like the first time we were together in the classroom. Since that day she had been more demure, much more willing to let me take the lead. Now she seemed to have a plan and want me to follow her.

  “Too bad you didn't make me...you know....do more for my grades.”

  Idiotically, because I was so surprised by her strange behavior, I said:

  “But you were already getting good -”

  “Mmmm,” she said. Or rather, she purred. “That would have been even better. You could have made me your sex slave just to get the same grades I would have gotten anyway.”

  Of course, this thought was as searingly delicious as it was morally repulsive, and so it quivered around in me, pulling me in several different directions before I got that she was only playing a game.

  A very sexy game.

  She moved a finger down my chest and flicked open a button of my shirt. She was mildly annoyed that I wasn't playing along, and I struggled to recuperate.

  It's just hard, you know...to know if you're going...too far.

  “What would you have me do,” she said, “if I wanted...I don't know...a 'B'?”

  She was already answering for me, sliding down to her knees on the ground. With her eyes locked on mine, she unfastened my belt, and grinned as she unzipped my pants.

  But then she waited, as though she had really asked a question she wanted an answer to, and I blinked for a moment before I caught up to the game.

  I reached down, and pulled my cock, which was hard as a rock and practically swollen, out of my underwear. I held it for her, and then I used my other hand to grasp her head. “If you wanted a 'B', you would have to be a very good girl,” I said.

  And she smiled. She opened her mouth and let me push her head onto my cock. She kept her eyes lifted, and looked at me, as my cock went deeper and deeper into her mouth. Not wanting to gag her, I began to move her head up and down my shaft.

  Her mouth was hot and wet, and her cheeks hollowed as she sucked my cock. I gasped at the sensation, and looked skyward. When I looked down she was still gazing up at me, and my hand was still on her hair. She lifted her head to pull my cock from her mouth, and now I was so hard that it remained, pointed straight to her face.

  She licked around the hole, making a little circle as she asked her next question.

  “And for an 'A'?”

  I sucked in my breath. She smiled at me, and I knew I had the green light. She opened her mouth again, and then I pushed her down, down all the way to the base of my cock.

  This is all I had meant. In truth, this would have been more than enough to make me give her an “A,” had we really been negotiating. My cock was enveloped in the soft, heated silk of her mouth, all the way to the base. It would only take just a little motion to make me come.

  I started to tug on her hair, to pull her up and then push her down on my shaft.

  She resisted, and I was confused. But then, incredibly, she began to do a thing I had never felt before:

  She began to move the muscles of her throat, massaging the length of my cock inside of her. She squeezed and swallowed around my shaft, and the muscular ripples stroked me while the sounds of her gagging and the sight of her eyes watering in complete submission, for my pleasure, for her imaginary A, r
eached my brain and it was over in little more than ten seconds. I tried to pull away from her mouth as I felt my cum surging up, but she remained as she was, my cock clamped in her juicy, wet mouth. And then her throat and her mouth were filled with my cream, and it burst out of the side of her cheeks, between her skin and my pulsing cock. It dribbled down her face, but the rest she swallowed, her mouth still massaging my cock.

  She reached up and grasped my shaft at the base, and then slowly pulled her mouth from me, licking up all of the sticky cum from my cock as she went. Her eyes had dropped to my cock now, and she watched it with great interest as she slurped up my cum.

  Then her eyes fluttered up to meet mine. She was glassy-eyed and quite drunk, smiling, licking her lips.

  “Was that good enough for an 'A'?”

  A smarter man might have said no, and seen what else he could get her to do.

  I just nodded, still in utter shock from having gotten the best and the filthiest blowjob of my life, from the sweet-faced little violinist student I had fucked in a classroom.

  After that incident, she collapsed on the bed, and we fell asleep.

  In the morning, I told her that was a lot of fun, and she held her head as though she was trying to remember. In a strange voice, she said, “Good.”

  She kissed me.

  And that was that.

  She never repeated that particular fantasy. Not even drunk. And so I have been left to wonder, late at night, about all of it. How much did she like her fantasy of trading grades for sex? And did she have another TA, one who her friends had seen? Had she perhaps enacted her fantasy with him, for real? Why did her friends feel the need to say “philosophy” in front of the word TA, as if I needed some other title to distinguish me? Perhaps from someone else, someone else that Ela maybe played a more realistic game with?

  But we went on to date seriously, to get married, and I was left only to wonder about these things because...well, honestly, Ela was pretty good at steering a conversation in her own direction.

  And maybe I didn't want to know. Maybe I just wanted to think about it late at night.

  T HING #2

  There was also this:

  After I graduated, I went to law school in Chicago, which was one and a half hours away by plane. We kept up our relationship all through the first two years, but then Ela decided to go study with a violinist at the Royal Danish Academy

  By then, our long-distance relationship was getting taxed by...well, distance. I was frazzled by the amount of work in law school, nothing more. Ela was frequently unable to answer the phone, or out with friends. When we did speak, she seemed distant. There was something about the extreme time difference, the being in two different countries, the living in two different worlds, that divided us in ways that Chicago had not.

  And particularly troubling, of course, especially for me, was that I couldn't have sex nearly every weekend.

  We decided to have an open relationship while Ela was in Denmark.

  Decided.

  The conversation about it got strange, and I found myself suggesting the idea almost vengefully. I had grown tired of Ela's yammering on about weird things in Denmark, her not answering the phone every time I called, the fact that she was often sleepy and just getting out of bed at ten when I called. She was smoking pot with her friends and seemed to be having a great time, whereas I was miserable, lonely, and overworked.

  Tell you what, Ela, I remember saying. Maybe we just need to give each other permission to...you know, see other people while you're there.

  It was one of those mornings that Ela seemed foggy, maybe stoned, maybe just sleepier than usual. She was laconic and her voice sounded sticky. When she answered me she seemed to be completely indifferent.

  Is that what you want?

  She didn't yawn, but she might as well have.

  Her indifference raked through me, cold and hot, erotic and anger-inducing. I felt my cheeks color with that particular kind of male rage that is both desirous and murderous.

  I think it's for the best, I said cooly.

  I didn't of course. I wanted Ela to start crying, and for her to ask me if I was seeing someone else and that was why I was saying such a thing. I wanted her to be shocked.

  Do you think that kind of thing actually works? she said, instead.

  I had derailed now. I couldn't backtrack on what I had suggested. Now I had to go with it, and as I spoke, my mind was racing ahead to all the possible outcomes of what I had just set in motion. Some of them were enticing, uncurling in my chest, hot fingers of pain squeezing at me. Some of them were terrible, like Ela falling in love with some other man, dragging me along not wanting to hurt my feelings and then finally coming clean, leaving me at an airport.

  I think it can work if we promise to be honest with each other. My voice was calm, as if this were something I had given a lot of thought to.

  There was a silence, and hope fluttered inside of me that silent tears were sliding down Ela's face, and that any second I would hear a sniffle and she would tell me she didn't like this idea at all. That she didn't want to share me with anyone, and that she certainly had no interest in any man but me.

  Ughhh, she said. I'm so tired. Let's...it sounds like you've thought this out though. So walk me through your ground rules.

  And just like that, I had boxed myself into an open relationship. I delivered the “ground rules” as though I had spent a great deal of time thinking them through, an easy task for my nimble, law-school mind. I was used to thinking on my feet and spitting out contractual obligations in garbled legalese.

  We tell each other everything.

  We tell each other if we start having an emotional connection to the other person.

  It's just for fun.

  We try to come back together in our own relationship afterward.

  We tell the people we date that we are in a committed but open relationship.

  Complete transparency.

  Ela yawned, for real this time.

  It sounds good. I'm so tired now. Let me sleep on it.

  A pause.

  Peter?

  Yes?

  You didn't have anyone in mind already, did you?

  I didn't answer right away.

  No.

  You'd think Ela would have said, 'me either.'

  But she didn't.

  One week later she told me about Christian. A soccer player, a dark blond, brown-eyed Dane who was tall, athletic, and flirted constantly with her. He was perfect, she said, because there was no way she would ever become emotionally attached to a jock.

  What do you like about him?

  I listened as though she were dripping opium onto my tongue, filling my veins with drop after drop of heroine, blowing cocaine through my nose. In reality she probably said only one sentence, but my memory tricks me, as though she had spent an hour telling me all about Christian, describing his male virility, his tan skin dripping with sweat, his biceps and chest carved into sharp, stone-like muscle, his stamina...

  What she probably said, in reality, is 'oh, he's kind of sexy.'

  I've likely taken my later memories, put them together with what I later saw, and created a memory of Ela droning on and on, over the phone, in her sexy voice, about Christian the soccer player, who she thought was perfect because he was sexy, and she could use him for sex without becoming attached.

  The deal, as I had envisioned it, would be to have complete transparency.

  I wanted Ela not only to tell me when she fucked this guy, but I wanted details.

  At first I thought I merely wanted some details. Like, where they had done it, how good he was, and if she had liked it.

  She had called me to check, to verify that in fact it was okay for her to go through with it, and actually have sex with him.

  I think tonight’s the night, she had said. It's still okay, right?

  I had given her the green light.

  All day, eight hours behind her, wondering what she was doing. If
they had gone to some party (did Danes have parties?) and stood around, only seeing each other, until the had gone home, drunk and horny, and slammed against the walls of his apartment until they were naked on the floor, writhing like snakes. If he had made her some kind of candle-lit dinner, and smoothly seduced her, rubbing her small feet on a couch by a fire.

  When she told me about it, though, it had been a walk along the canals, a weird Danish pastry, a few beers at a bar, and then she had gone home with him.

  And?!!!! I remember wanting to scream.

  So what happened? I said, instead, my voice calm.

  I mean...yeah. It was okay. You know...first time.

  Was he good?

  Ela sighed. I guess so, yeah. I mean...yeah. He's fun.

  As I listened to her, in the middle of the night, early in her morning, I realized I didn't want to hear anything like this.

  I wanted to know how big his cock was. I wanted to know if she had come, and how many times, and if she screamed while she did it. I wanted to know if she had licked the length of his cock, and I wanted to imagine it all while she told me about it in vivid detail.

  Tell me what happened.

  There was a pause.

  Look, okay Peter – here's the thing, I don't actually feel like giving you all the details, okay? I know we said honesty, and I'm being honest, I'm telling you what happened and how I feel about it. But I'm not going to say, like...exactly what happened. That's too much. It's too... you know. Private.

  I told her it was fine.

  But it wasn't.

  Three months later, I was on a plane to Copenhagen with a freshly-issued passport and a cluttered, slow-moving mind. I had requested early tests, crammed for them, and left for Copenhagen without telling Ela.

  This was a long-term plan of craziness, not the spur-of-the-moment idea I claimed it was when I finally saw Ela. She has never confronted me about it, not in all our years of marriage. But she must have known I needed time to get a passport, to arrange my tests to be taken early. Surely she realized all of that as soon as she finally saw me, and I claimed to have wanted to surprise her.