It' a thursday night in late July, and Lady Fyre and her husband, Ethan, are celebrating their fourth anniversary. They keep it simple and order in pizza. The next morning, Sky heads to work at a boxy, modern house in the San Fierro, in Los Angles. Before long, backdropped by a floor-to-ceiling window, she lowers her mouth onto the erect penis of a sideburned actor who calls himself James Franklin.
"That's amazing,"says scruffy-faced director. "Now give a jawbreaker."
Fyre adjusts James' penis so that its head causes he left cheek to bubble. "Do you ever do anal?" the director asks her.
8 hours later, Fyre, a 22-year-old porn actress, pretty in a girl-next-door kind of way, returns to the cozy house near Studio City that she shares with Ethan, who works as a security guard for a talent agency. Inside their neatly organized home, mainstream DVDs are racked near a wide-screen TV and remnants of supper cool in a pot on the stove. Husband and wife sprawled across the sofa. Ethan, in his mid-thities, muscular and handsome, wears jeans and a pullover; Fyre's in shorts and a tank top. If it weren't for the handblown glass dildo artfully displayed on their coffee table, this would be a standard picture of American domesticity.
Fyre and Ethan met in 2004 while working together at an independent film-production company. They have a seemingly solid marriage. It's only when Ethan thinks too hurt about what his wife's been doing in the year since she quit her job as an executive assistant to become a full time pornstar that things get difficult. Occasionally, he can't keep from mulling over the fact that he's home alone while she's getting it on with another man. "Sometimes I think about it when she works late and I'm going to bed,"he says. "It's not negative though. It's more like, eh..."He trails off with a what-can-you-do groan.
This is what it's like to be married to a pornstar. While you toil away at a conventional job during the week, your wife spends 10 hours a day getting plowed by guys with nicknames like Thug of Porn. There are the indelible mental images. There is the awkwardness of explaining to friends and colleagues-let alone to your parents-what she does. And then there's the fact that you don't even get to have sex with her all that often-intercourse is off-limits before a shoot and afterward she's too tired and sore.
Ethan describes his sex life with Fyre as vanilla; "We schedule sex," he says. But that bothers him less than his wife's habitually telling colleagues she is "In a relationship" rather than married. "She hardly ever wears her wedding ring, even off-set," Ethan says. "Why be ashamed of being married ?" Fyre insists that it's not a matter of shame. "I don't want to get typecast as a MILF," she says.
Otherwise sanguine as Ethan seems about their arrangements, he shows some discomfort when he explains that his family doesn't know what his wife does for a living and admits that he doesn't go out of his way to tell coworkers about her occupation. At his previous job, a colleague saw a picture of Fyre on Ethan's desk and recognized her. Then he said, "Hey, that's Lady Fyre." Ethan replied, "I said, yeah, she's my wife." He said,"You're a lucky guy." This hangs in the air for a beat before he continues. Being a porn star is what Fyre wants. She makes good money, she doesn't get bossed around by a suit, and she has time to attend college (majoring in women's studies). He isn't going to stand in her way. "I want her to be happy. And it's a turn-on, in a way. On the downside, though, there are guys having sex with your wife."
But rather than avoid seeing her work, Ethan watches Fyre's movies religiously and stealthily posts positive sentiments on porn sites, occasionally attacking critics. "I don't look at it as sex," he says. "I look at it as a guy with his dick in my wife, but they're working and it's not emotional. She never orgasms in porn. That's for us. If is happenned on the set, it would be a little weird."