by Julie Hilden
‘You don’t love me anymore,’ she declares mournfully.
‘It’s not a crime. I don’t have to love you.’
‘But I have to love you. He made me.’
‘You can stop. He’s not as powerful as you think.’
I back away from her, to the furthest corner of the roof, and there I carefully slip the gun out of my pocket, lift it, and point it toward her.
‘It’s empty,’ she tells me.
‘Not anymore. I knew you might come back. Why do you think I have it up here?’
I begin to walk, with a measured pace, toward her. The bluff of my life – but I know how to suppress emotion, I remind myself. If I had not learned how, I would have broken down. I would have stayed in the psychiatric ward forever. I am far away, I tell myself; I am untouchable. I cannot die, because I am not here. I am inside my still, calm mind instead.
‘If you leave, I won’t call the police,’ I explain to Olivia. ‘I’ll let everything drop. But if you don’t leave, if you try again, I’m going to have to shoot you, not fatally, but I will. And after that, I’ll go to the police. I won’t have a choice – I’m going to have to explain why I did it. And then it will all be over – no more shows, no more clients. I’m not the only one with a life to lose, Olivia.’
‘You were my life.’
‘You have a life without me.’ Now or never: I point the gun at her. It convinces her, at least, to back away. Then, when I judge she is far enough away from me, I lean against the door, still facing her, to push it open.
It does not give – she must have locked it while I watched the city, to trap me up here with her. She still has the key, I realize: it’s the only lock the locksmith didn’t change. It made sense: after all, no one could get to the roof before getting past the new locks first. Except, of course, if someone was already there.
Watching her carefully, I slip the key out of my pocket. There is no other way: I’ll have to turn my back on her for a moment. I can’t open the door and turn the key at the same time.
‘Go to the far corner,’ I command her.
‘Scared of me?’ she taunts.
‘I’m scared, but I’m going to do it anyway. Move or I’ll shoot you. I mean it.’
She moves, and she is as far away as she can be, and I twist the key as fast as I can, and she runs at me with the knife.
In seconds, though, the door is open, and I am through it, and as I try to push it closed, I hear her body fall heavily against it, the knife clatter down.
I fight her – her lacquered fingernails trying to get purchase on the doorjamb, her shoulder firm against the door – for the last few inches of space, the inches between closed and open, between life and death.
With all the strength that is left in me, I push. But she is stronger, and has the advantage of pushing inward, when I must resist the naturally opening door, with its oiled hinge and its smooth swing.
I feel myself shifting backward, pushed back as the door is pushed back toward me. Her full hands appear, grabbing at the door’s edge. In a moment, she will be through.
But then I feel a jolt of emotion, of true fear: I imagine I am closing Ilan’s coffin, and it is that strange fantasy – the bony hand, the struggling skeleton – that turns revulsion into strength. I throw myself against the door, and I hear the satisfying click by which it shuts and then I hold it there.
Suddenly, strangely, in the midst of this chaos, I remember the advertisement: 5"9', 130. We are equally matched adversaries, Olivia and I. But one of us very much wants to live, and the other does not want quite as passionately to kill her, and the story of my life, in the end, is that: the story of that last push, of the life in me.
With the force of that last push, I close and lock the door. I know she can unlock it – she still has the key – but not before I can flee downstairs, lock myself behind the new lock, safe from her in the apartment. And so I do.
I am surprised to find that I have plenty of time. With the door locked against her, Olivia seems to give up; I do not even hear the key slipping into the lock, I never hear it begin to turn, as I skitter downstairs, almost falling in my haste to reach safety.
For hours, Olivia does not leave – I listen carefully at the loft’s door, but I never hear her tread on the stairs. Then, finally, from my window, I see her walk out onto the street.
Looking down at her lovely hair in disarray, I remember the first time I ever saw her – as she scrutinized the tiny piece of paper in her hand, nervous, making sure she had our address right. I remember her pink sweater, her red hair: the fraud, the passion. I wonder if, in this moment, she is remembering too, remembering our beginning.
I wonder if, even leaving, she still feels the spell; I wonder if she is still inside it. I wonder how I ever managed to get free.
That first night in Rome, I do not – though I am tempted to do so – return to the hotel Ilan and I once visited, where he pressed me to the wall. I find another hotel, and in its sink, with a bottle, I become a blonde there, as if I were one of the women he glanced at on our honeymoon, but never touched.
Some change must inaugurate my new life, and I decide that it will be this – this superficial one, as if by appearing different I can hope to be different. A trick, but one that might work, for something has to.
I am a pretty blonde, I decide, but more than that, as a blonde I am different. I seem happier, as if the lighter hair lightens me. My white smile flashes out, my blond hair shines, I am suddenly very American – a girl with a charmed life, who felt entitled, who never cried, who was always loved, who was never lonely. One of my half sisters, perhaps; certainly not myself.
I cannot love Ilan my whole life, I know it now – it would be too lonely, or too lethal, or both. If I learned anything from Olivia, it was that. But I cannot quite leave him behind either. And so I decide I will walk along the streets of this foreign city as he once did – looking at its women as he would have. He was correct: they are beautiful.
Though the men are beautiful too, and I desire them, I feel I need to be with women before I can be with a man again. Before I leave Ilan, I must first become him.
And so I do become him, and I find it pleasurable, pleasurable in the extreme. I avail myself of the women, and I enjoy it, as he would have, and they open to me, as they would have to him.
One night I am with two beautiful women in the white expanse of my hotel bed, and as we writhe I realize, with a shock of loneliness, that he is no longer with me, even as a ghost. There is no one watching.
As I realize this, my pleasure comes to me. I contract and release, kiss and end my kiss, shudder and fall still. I believe it may finally be over.
Afterward, the two women – both Italian, and speaking little English – do not leave: they both sleep next to me, and in the morning I feel spoiled, for it all happens once again.
It should not be permitted to happen again – Ilan, directing it, would never have allowed that – but it does. It is a dream but now I am the one dreaming it. It is a dream of flying, and not a dream of falling. It is a dream in which I am happy, as I have rarely been in life.
On the dream platform I meet these two women and all we do is try to give each other pleasure; there is no undercurrent of sadness, no tainted bargain, no inevitable end. In my heart, as I spend hours with them, something breaks, and I know it is a constraint breaking. It is the feeling of finally moving past that claustrophobic love that has kept my mind in my half of that double grave, long before my body is due to settle there.
Still, one final doubt remains in me: I wonder, as I watch the women – as I tongue their nipples, lick them so suddenly they startle and moan, as I use my hard-won expertise for their pleasure – I wonder whether I want them or whether, in wanting them, I am merely remembering him.
It is hardly a new confusion; I have never, I realize, been entirely able to tell my desire from his – not since the first day I saw him, when he asked me, ‘Are you waiting for me?’
I was not, I t
hink now – answering his question finally, so many years after it was asked. I was not waiting for him. I was waiting for myself – for my soul, in some sense – but it had yet to arrive, and so I took on his instead.
When the women leave – the women I know are the very ones that Ilan, too, would have selected, assessed, considered, seduced – I begin to speak to Ilan in my mind, as if to settle things between us once and for all.
I have thought about it all, Ilan – everything that happened – for a long time, on the plane and afterward, and now I believe it is all clear to me. Only now do I see that my story has two authors, and one of them is you.
It was a test for me, wasn’t it? A test of faith, of sorts.
Once again you must have enjoyed the process of choosing among the women, wished it would never end. You chose Olivia for a special quality, I know it now: a certain instability, a dark capacity. I never questioned her past, the depth of her need, the drugs, her dependence on me. I never questioned anything about her, not really, because you had sent her – when that was the very reason I should have looked closer.
It’s funny, but I still believe that the happiness she offered me – the happiness you offered me, through her – was real. It was not a false promise. It was real as long as I could accept it. But if I could not, if I remained in love with you despite all her efforts, you knew she wouldn’t be able to adjust to that. You knew she might even be jealous enough to prefer killing me to losing me.
And if I still loved you, then wasn’t death what I wanted – what I deserved? How else could we be reunited, you and I? Once Romeo dies, Juliet must soon take up the knife. It is for her to finish it. If she loves him, she will choose to die with him; she will not want to live.
That’s why you told Olivia, though she’d hoped it was a lie, that pain, and even death, were what I really sought. I was your Juliet, and I loved you more than life, so you thought darkness would be what I truly longed for.
You even told Olivia the details, exactly how to do it – and she was weak, as you chose her to be, and she followed you, just as I once did. You opened the way, Ilan, you foresaw and foreordained it all. The pain you coaxed from me while you were alive survived you. After your death, it only grew, until it was almost the death of me.
In some sense, every suicide is also a murder, and yours was more of a murder than I could ever have guessed. It’s funny, all those months, I still imagined myself alive. The only thing you did not predict was that in the end, I might escape – I might not turn out to be the victim you believed me to be.
I had been such a perfect victim, Ilan; it was an understandable mistake. But while I had no gift for happiness, no gift for the exercise of will, I finally had a gift for life. And perhaps that is the most important gift of all.
How sad, how bitter, it is to understand one’s life only afterward, when it is too late to go back and change it. And yet, in another way, I know it is not too late for me – for I’ve survived your death, and my youth, and our love. I lived your death without quite suffering it.
The cut did not go quite deep enough for me, though it came so close. There was a veil of skin, a ribbon – a faith or hope – that intervened at the last minute. There was a grate, an opening, a gun that held one bullet too few. And more than this, there was a girl, eighteen years old, who learned to row, who became strong long before you met her, and later, when she had to, could run.
I am still that girl. And so I have this life, the life I’m left with. What I will do with it remains to be seen.
The next day, it is time for my interview. Looking at the newspaper, I realize that it is my twenty-fifth birthday, and that I had totally forgotten it was coming. I whistle ‘Happy Birthday’ to myself and wonder if the same tune is used to celebrate in Italy, or a different one. I take off my wedding ring and put it in my pocket.
I finally use the cell phone number the actor gave me so long ago; I make the call and he picks up immediately.
When I meet him, he is in the hotel room, alone again. This time, he has no secrets, I can see it in his face. It is me he wants to see; he has nothing to reveal but that alone. This will not be an interview, not exactly.
He sits in a rickety chair and motions for me to come close to him, and I do. Once I have approached, I can sense that he is waiting, and I know he is not waiting for me to speak, but to move: to move toward him.
I swing one leg across his broad waist and mount him, and in this way I conduct the interview – asking the questions I have prepared. As he answers, he does not touch me, except to keep our crotches pressed together. I press against him hard, breathing hard.
We make a sliding, limited, grainy connection through our clothes. It is so modest, so furtive, this grinding, that it takes me back to a time before Ilan, the year I was eighteen. I begin then to remember the two boys I was with before Ilan, and to believe there could be someone after.
The actor is more than willing to go further. He raises my shirt up, unhooks my bra. As he licks my breasts, gentle with my nipples, his touch is nothing like Ilan’s, and I, responding to him, am nothing like the way I used to be.
It is with his own belt that I tie him up – his hands bound together behind the chair – and he does not protest it, and that is the way I ride him.
As I move on him, I wonder if I will someday see him, and not only hear him, cry. And I think of how Ilan never cried – never except on the single day when he finally told me about his mother; and how even on that day, I never saw his tears, I could never be sure.
It occurs to me then that strength and power can be a mistake, and that there can be a kind of strength and power, too, in the ability simply to open, to be courageous enough to be known. It was a strength Ilan lacked, and one I would like to begin learning.
As I move up and down on the actor, I know there is no guarantee I will ever see him again. But in my heart, I believe I will.
I lean down to kiss him, with the feeling that we are beginning. There is another life.
THE END
STORY OF O
by Pauline Réage
One of the most famous erotic novels of all time.
‘A rare thing, a pornographic book well written and without a trace of obscenity’
Graham Greene
‘A highly literary and imaginative work, the brilliance of whose style leaves no-one in doubt whatever of the author’s genius . . . a profoundly disturbing book, as well as a black tour-de-force’
Spectator
‘Here all kinds of terrors await us, but like a baby taking its mother’s milk all pains are assuaged. Touched by the magic of love, everything is transformed. Story of O is a deeply moral homily’
J. G. Ballard
‘Cool, cruel, formalistic fantasy about a woman subjected – at the price of the great love of her life – to the gamut of male sado-masochistic urges’
Birmingham Post
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THE SEXUAL LIFE OF CATHERINE M.
by Catherine Millet
‘One of the most explicit books about sex ever written by a woman’
Edmund White
The Sexual Life of Catherine M. is the autobiography of a well-known Parisian art critic who likes to spend nights in the singles clubs of Paris and in the Bois de Boulogne where she has sex with a succession of anonymous men. Unlike many contemporary women writers, there is no guilt in Millet’s narrative, no chronicles of use and abuse: on the contrary, she has no regrets about a life of sexual activity. Catherine Millet’s writing is a subtle reflection on the boundaries of art and life and she uses her insights on the role of the body in modern art to set the scene for her multiple sexual encounters.
A penomenal bestseller in France and in all other countries in which it has been published, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. is very much a manifesto of our times – when the sexual equality of women is a reality and where love and sex have gone their own separate ways. Like the Story of O, it is a truly shocking book t
hat captures a decisive moment in our sexual history.
‘I thought it was the most honest book I had ever read on the subject of sex’
Rowan Pelling, Daily Telegraph
‘A brilliant testimony of life spent at the sexual front line’
Independent on Sunday
‘Unabashed erotica . . . a straight-talking romp catalogued with savage wit by a Parisian intellectual’
The Scotsman
‘Millet writes extremely well . . . it is neither pornography nor her coy younger sister, erotica, but a work of libertine philosophy’
Times Literary Supplement
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