Cryptonomicon

I finally came clean to her about the stockings. It felt good. I'd been reading a lot about how the brain develops and had finally come to accept my stocking kink. It seems that when you are a certain age, somewhere between about two and five years, your mind just gels. The part of it that's responsible for sex becomes set into a pattern that you'll carry with you for the rest of your life. All of the gay people I've ever discussed it with have told me that they knew they were gay, or at least different, years before they even began thinking about sex, and all of them agree that gayness cannot be converted into straightness, or vice versa, no matter how hard you might try.

The part of your brain that handles sex frequently gets cross-wired into other, seemingly irrelevant areas at this age. This is when people pick up an orientation towards sexual dominance or submission, or when a lot of guys pick up highly specific kinks--say, rubber, feathers, or shoes. Some of them are unfortunate enough to get turned on by little kids, and those guys are essentially doomed from that point onwards--there is nothing to do except castrate them or lock them up. No therapy will unkink the brain once it has kinked.

So, all things considered, being turned on by black stockings wasn't such a bad sexual card to have been dealt. I laid this all out to Virginia during the trip home. I was surprised by how calmly she accepted it. I was too big of a jerk to realize that she was thinking about how it all applied to her.

After we got back home, she gamely went out and bought some stockings and tried to wear them on occasion. This was not easy. Stockings imply a whole lifestyle. They look stupid with jeans and sneakers. A woman in stockings has to wear a dress or a skirt, and not just a blue denim skirt but something nicer, more formal. She also has to wear the type of shoes that Virginia didn't own and didn't like to wear. Stockings are not really compatible with riding a bicycle to work. They were not even really compatible with our house. During our frugal grad-student days we had accumulated a lot of furniture from Goodwill, or I had hammered it together myself out of two-by-fours. This furniture turned out to be riddled with hidden snags that a person in blue jeans would never notice but that would destroy a pair of stockings in a moment. Likewise, our half-finished house and our old junker cars had many small sharp edges that were death to stockings. On the other hand, when we went away for an anniversary trip to London, getting around in black taxis, staying in a nice hotel, and eating in good restaurants, we spent a whole week moving in a world that was perfectly adapted to stockings. It just went to show us how radically we would have to change our circumstances in order for her to dress that way routinely.

So, much money was spent on stockings in a fit of good intentions. Some good sex was had, though I seemed to enjoy it much more than Virginia did. She never achieved the shocking, animal intensity she had shown at Granny's house after the funeral . Attrition reduced her supply of stockings very quickly, sheer inconvenience prevented her from renewing it, and within a year after the funeral we were back to square one.

Other things were changing, though. I made a lot of money by cashing in some stock options, and we bought a new house up in the hills. We hired some movers to come pick up all of our junky furniture and move it into that house, where it looked much shabbier. Virginia's new job forced her to commute in a car. I didn't think our old junker was safe, and so I bought her a nice little Lexus with leather seats and wool carpet, all of it nicely snag-free. Soon, kids came along and I traded in my old beater pickup truck for a minivan.

Still, I couldn't bring myself to begin spending money on furniture until my back started going bad on me, and I realized it was because of the slack, twenty-year-old Goodwill mattress that Virginia and I were sleeping on. We had to buy a new bed. Since it was my back at stake, I went out and did the shopping.

I 'd rather stub out cigarettes on my tongue than go shopping. The idea of hitting every big furniture store in the area, comparing beds, made me want to die. All I wanted was to go to one place and buy a bed and have done with it. But I didn't want a shitty bed that I'd be sick of in a year, or a cheap mattress that would mess up my back again in five years.