by Frank Martinet
You've heard the expression, "Work hard, play hard?" I never knew what that meant when I was young. Playing was, well, play. How could you play hard? Playing was fun.
But as I got older I fell into seriousness. I come from a serious family: doctors, attorneys, engineers, scientists, writers. In high school I became interested in law and followed my father to Harvard. I graduated with honors and took up a position at a prestigious Manhattan firm where I developed an expertise in finance. I made a lot of money for my clients and myself, and with my Wall Street connections, I parlayed that into a small fortune.
By the time I was fifty I had accomplished everything most men dream of accomplishing in their life: I was skilled and acclaimed, wealthy, in wonderful health, and I'd married a beautiful woman and we had three terrific kids. Everything was perfect, right?
Of course not. I worked hard - sixty-hour weeks were the norm, and eighty or more were not unusual. "Play" was scheduled: a weekend at our beach house, a few hours on the yacht, a round of tennis or racquetball at the club squeezed between committee presentations.
One day, as I was rushing to the gym and dreading the workout I had been putting off for days, I suddenly realized the ridiculousness of what I was doing. Life was supposed to be fun. But even my vacations were work. Family was work. I was "playing hard" but playing wasn't fun.
I didn't even stop to reconsider my decision. I just knew, instantly, that it was the right thing. I turned around, went into my boss' office, and gave notice. Then I ignored his shouts and pleas and drove home.
I arrived just in time to catch the gardener with my wife. Julia was flabbergasted - in thirty years I'd never once come home during the day, not even when I had that bout of food poisoning in '93. She lay in bed clinging to the sheets to cover her nakedness and stared at me, aghast. She began to weep and beg and apologize, but I didn't say a single word. Finally, she fell silent and we just stared at each other for a long time.
"You... you aren't mad," she said, suddenly perceptive.
"I'm not. This is my fault. I have neglected you horribly."
She nodded. "That doesn't make what I did right."
"No. But I understand."
It was an emotional and life-changing experience. We wept together and then made love like we hadn't in decades.
Julia was shocked and delighted by my decision to retire. "But what will you do?"
I shrugged. "Whatever we want. We can sail around the world, travel, play golf, anything. The kids are in college, our life is our own."
For the next couple of years, we did do those things, and it was fun. Gambling in Monaco, skiing in the Alps, dining in Tokyo, hiking in New Zealand. We did it all. I had to buy a whole raft of hard drives for all the digital pictures I accumulated.
But after a while, the magic faded. It's hard to imagine, but even lobster gets boring if you eat it too often. Fancy dinners, thousand dollar bottles of wine, beautiful scenery... it just was the same thing over and over again.
Gradually, our adventures started taking a more dangerous edge: sky diving, bungee jumping in Australia, canoeing up the Amazon. But of course even that wasn't satisfying. We were both rather conservative people and the truly life-threatening didn't appeal to us. We just wanted stimulation, not mutilation.
As our boredom increased, our relationship deteriorated. We began snapping at each other. Our minor peccadilloes irritated us to the point we began to sleep in separate suites. One day I saw Julia flirting with a waiter and I absolutely lost it, suggesting she go fuck the pool boy and anyone else with a dick. She retaliated with some choice insults of her own and then I mentioned her affair with the gardener, something we had both agreed to never mention again.
The fight that day was our worst ever; later that night I realized my marriage was over. It was a sobering thought. I loved Julia. There had never been another woman for me. I wasn't even interested in anyone else. The thought of life without Julia frightened me terribly.
I went to her suite and apologized. She apologized also, but then there was an awkward silence.
"What are we going to do?" she asked, and I knew exactly what she meant.
"I don't know."
"We can't go on like this."
"No, we can't."
"I thought... I thought this was the life I wanted, I had always dreamed of," she murmured. "All those years when you were at work I longed for you to be home. Now... now I often wish you were at work." She covered her face with her hands in despair.
"It's okay, I understand." Gently I put my arm around her. "We're just bored, that's all. Life is too good. There's just nothing new, no adventure."
We sat that way for a long time, watching the sun settle on the ocean. Finally, Julia turned to me with her eyes shining. "Do you remember when we first got together?"
"Of course."
"Life was so exciting. Our whole futures were unknown. It was scary, but that made it wonderful."
"True."
"Our problem now is that there is no unknown. Our future is defined. We'll get older, get feeble, and die."
I grinned wryly. "Gee, Grandma, thanks for cheering me up."
She giggled and nestled closer to me, her head on my chest. "You know what I mean."
"I do."
"I wish there was some way we could get back to that old life. Like when we were starting out."
"Shall I give away all our money?"
"Well, I wasn't meaning literally go back."
"You mean pretend."
"Not exactly. I'm not even sure what I mean. I just wish there was a way to recapture that feeling. Life was a bit scary then. You didn't know what was going to happen, what bad thing might be just around the corner. There was pain and hard work, and that made the simple pleasures of life that much better."
For a while we recollected some of our happiest memories: the births of our children, their first achievements, my various career advancements.
"Remember that first condo we bought? I thought we'd won the lottery," Julia said.
"That was special, wasn't it." A decade later and we'd splurged on a house in Martha's Vineyard. That had been for ten times the money and hadn't been half as satisfying. "Things have more value when they're harder to get."
"Maybe that's our problem. Things are too easy, now."
"So how can we make them harder?"
"I don't know."
We fell silent and eventually fell asleep. The next day we were both sober. It had been an emotional experience and we felt closer than ever, but our troubles still hung in the background. We'd hit bottom and knew that our situation was serious; a simple heart-to-heart was not going to magically make our problems go away.
For a few weeks we traveled. We didn't argue, much. The fight was gone for both of us. Our situation was too real. Neither of us wanted the marriage to end, but we couldn't figure out how to make it work. It was a relatively peaceful time, but I wasn't sure how long it would last.
The concepts we'd discussed hung in my head and I mulled them over during that time. Life needed to be more dangerous, harder, more painful. How could we do that?
Late one night in Italy I couldn't sleep, so I got up and turned on the TV. There was an old western playing. The movie was dubbed in Italian so I had the sound on low and wasn't paying attention, just comforted by the flickering images and faint sounds. Then something caught my attention. It was a cowboy arguing with a pretty woman in skin-tight blue jeans. There was an electricity to the scene that caught my senses and I turned the volume up a notch and watched, curious. I had no idea what they were saying, but the shouting was eerily familiar. Obviously, it was a serious conflict between the couple and it naturally reminded me of Julia and myself. In fact, the woman looked a little like Julia in her younger days. I used to adore it when she wore tight jeans like that: they showed off her terrific full bottom.
Suddenly, the cowboy did something shocking. He grabbed the woman by the wrist and yanked her toward him. He sat himself in a wooden chair and crudely pulled the woman over his lap. She was face down, mouth ajar with horror, and her hands were flailing desperately behind her trying to protect her bottom. I knew immediately what the man was going to do and I found myself cheering.
"You go, guy!" I shouted at the TV. I could hardly wait to see him tan the sweet behind of that pretty bitch.
Sure enough, he began to spank her. Now this wasn't some silly two-slaps-and-we're-done spanking. This was a real spanking, long and drawn-out. He slapped her bottom over and over, and hard, too. I have no idea if they were just acting or if maybe she had some extra padding in her pants, but it certainly looked real. The girl's reactions were fabulous: writhing and screeching and cursing and waving her arms and kicking her feet. She was like a trapped feline. But the cowboy was big and strong and held her effortlessly and just kept right on smacking that saucy jean-clad butt. After a minute or two of this the fight went out of the girl. She sobbed and her head fell forward in despair and she hung there, limp across his legs. He stopped spanking her and just sat there with his palm pressed against her bottom. She wept, her body trembling, and I saw the man was openly caressing her bottom and the woman was responding with arousal.
I was astonished. Though I'd been eager for the man to spank her - the girl's prominent rump just demanded such attention - I hadn't thought past that point. I guess in the back of my mind I'd been thinking that things were over between them anyway and he might as well extract a little revenge before they went their separate ways. But after being spanked, instead of being furious and resentful, the girl was passionate and grateful! She wiggled herself into the man's arms and kissed him in a way that was almost violent. She pushed him right out of the chair and onto the floor and they were eating each other's faces.
That's when the scene cut, of course. This was an old movie. It faded to black and then it was the next morning with him riding off on his horse and her, looking gorgeous in a gauzy summer dress, waving a teary good-bye. He was off to fight the bad guy and she would wait for him to return.
I turned off the TV, a wild idea hitting me. Actually, it was just the germ of an idea. The first part of the idea was pure lust: I wanted to spank Julia and then make love to her. It was a bizarre impulse. I'd never had such an interest before, at least not that I was aware of. I knew that I liked women's bottoms, and I knew that Julia had a fantastic one, even today in her forties. It still turned me on when she wore tight pants and though she'd put on a few pounds after having the kids, she kept herself fit and her bottom was still gorgeous to me.
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