Occasionally, though, the secret can be something so downright creepy that you don’t want to gossip about it.
Hell, I’ve already told you Lady Sally’s deepest darkest secret, something you’d have to be a client to know, something even the cabdrivers don’t know:
She permits puns in her Parlor.
Well, okay, she hasn’t got a lot of choice. Her husband suffers from the filthy habit: she couldn’t very well ban it in the Parlor and then let Mike do it. Not that he’s ever around before closing, except Sundays, but you see her problem. (Have you ever tried to cure a loved one’s addiction? Little joy there.) So any night of the week you’re liable to hear things in the Parlor like:
“Hey, did you hear about the vampire typesetter? All his mistakes are Type Os.”
To which someone is liable to reply, “Then hemostatistically normal than anything else.” And people actually applaud.
If a new client turns out to be a carpenter, someone is sure to ask him, “How do you know your wife is true?” just to hear the ritual response, “I check her out with a plumb bob.” One carpenter achieved instant Parlor celebrity by suggesting in deadpan return that his questioner “go see Uri Geller and get bent.”
All I can tell you is that there’s no such thing as a perfect place to work: not even at Lady Sally’s House. I suppose all things considered it’s not really that big a price to pay. But I don’t have to like it.
Maybe I’m being illogical. I like word games, anagrams, palindromes, verbal puzzles: why are they okay and straight puns abhorrent? I think because in a straight pun, all the cleverness and wit has been used to poke a hole through the very idea of language, the possibility of communicating unambiguously with words—and that’s too dismaying to be funny to me. Puns are my idea of rubber-crutch jokes. I’ll concede that there are some excellent and witty rubber-crutch jokes…but few I want to hear.
Nonetheless a girl has professional pride. If a client thinks a pun will make him or her look more attractive to me—and I’m constantly stunned at how often they do—I’ll try and keep my real opinion my own secret. (In some ways, men have it tougher than women in this business.)
One night in late February, two years after I became an artist, I was sitting by the fireplace at the west end of the Parlor, in the opening stages of conversation with a new client. She was a tall stunning statuesque blonde in her mid-thirties, whose house name was Diana. New chums are almost always self-conscious, so you have to play them delicately: you don’t want them to feel pressured into selecting you out of politeness rather than desire, but you don’t want to give the impression that you couldn’t care less, either. I usually just keep the conversation general and watch their eyes, and if I haven’t seen what I’m looking for within thirty seconds or so, I sadly remember an obligation on the other side of the Parlor and ask if I may be excused.
Of course, this woman could not be too self-conscious, or she would not be here, but in the adjacent Women-Only Lounge, which exists for that very purpose. Still, I was feeling my way carefully with neutral chatter, classic Parlor anecdotes and so forth, and observing attentively: I found her Valkyrie looks quite attractive, and was hoping for her business. She had an intriguing pair of earrings, big dangling milk opals, well domed and full of rolling blue fire; I remember finding it odd that they were clip-ons. There was a matching ring that had never known saw or wheel. I love good opal: these looked Australian. (The world’s best, to my mind.) Her teeth were perfect and uncapped. There was an oddly endearing imperfection in one eyebrow, as though there’d been a slight wrinkle in the blueprint.
One of her conversational responses was drowned out by a stentorian suit full of wind on a nearby sofa, one of those City Hall bureaucrats who’re always going on about what good shape they’re in. “I’m telling you, Phil, right from the factory it had the spokes with that little curve to ’em, like they do, you know? and it kept making this little whicka whicka sound.” Phillip, who hates being called “Phil,” was looking a bit glassy-eyed, but nodded gamely. “So I had my bike man take ’em all out and straighten ’em and put ’em back in, and now it just goes whirr, and I put another point zero one five em pee aitch on my top speed. Just like everything else on a bike, it all comes down to wind resistance.”
Phillip is a dear. I had halfway decided that it would be my good deed for the night to gracefully abort my present contact and go see if I could rescue him from that bore by sacrificing my fair young body in his place, when Diana made it unnecessary. She held up a hand for the bureaucrat’s attention, got it, and said loudly and distinctly, “I’m sure truer spokes were never whirred.”
He frowned, blinked, cleared his throat twice, got up and wandered off to the nearer of the two bars. He looked back over his shoulder on the way, and all three of us were absolutely pokerfaced. When he turned away again, Phillip and I slumped in our seats and let broad grins spread across our faces. Diana too was smiling faintly.
“Perhaps that was a little severe for his offense,” I said, “but thank you on behalf of everyone in earshot. Which in his case was the whole Parlor.”
“Oh, Sherry,” she said, a little disappointed, “you’re not one of those people who doesn’t like puns, are you?”
“Well…honestly?”
“Of course, honey.”
“I’d rather have a rash.”
“Oh no! Oh, it’s so much worse when someone’s clever like you and still dislikes them. Come on, now: won’t you please make a pun for me?”
You can probably think of several reasons why I might have decided to accommodate her. So can I. I didn’t think of any of them then, I just did it.
“Okay. I finally bought one of those newfangled gearshift bikes, after my old clunker finally rusted apart. There’s a dozen dogs in this neighborhood, and all but two of them claim possession of my new bike; so now it smells so bad I can’t ride it. Which proves what I’ve been saying for years: a tens-peed bicycle really stinks.”
Phillip reacted as if a small rat had appeared before him in midair, on fire; he sat up straight and sucked air through his teeth and averted his gaze. But Diana relaxed slightly and smiled with pure pleasure. Her eyes glittered oddly.
“Will you come upstairs with me right now and do anything that makes me happy?” she murmured. “Please?”
“Of course.” I rose from the couch and smoothed my dress.
“Will you excuse us, Phillip?” she asked.
“Certainly, my dear,” he said, raising one eyebrow. “And thanks again. I owe you one.”
“They all do,” she said mysteriously, “and I intend to collect. Don’t worry.”
“I won’t,” he promised, and she took my hand and headed for the spiral staircase in the center of the Parlor.
It’s always a pleasure to climb on that grand old staircase, to feel its sturdy risers beneath my feet and run my hand along its graceful iron drolleries. Some master blacksmith who was also a gifted artist made it by hand, and it may have been the work of more than one lifetime for all I know. It would not look out of place in Buckingham Palace.
I paused at the top, and asked the perennial question.
“Would you like to go straight to my own studio, Diana—or would you care to see some of the function rooms first?”
She smiled. “Now what, in a place like this, would constitute a ‘function room’?”
A common response from a new client.
“Well,” I said, “there’s the Executive’s Office, and Mistress Cynthia’s Dungeon, and the Doctor’s Examin—” I don’t know what instinct caused me to name those two first.
“Do you take many of your clients to the dungeon?” she interrupted.
“No. One or two, as an occasional thing. Folks that are seriously into that sort of game generally gravitate to someone who really enjoys playing it full time. Mistress Cynthia and Master Henry are the best in the world at domination—although the name of the studio is a clue as to which one is tougher—and Bran
di and Tim are absolutely first-rate submissives. I could introduce you to any of them if you like.”
“It’s not your cup of tea?”
“Rarely. Unless you know the client very well it can be like juggling nitroglycerine. No matter which end of the leash you’re on. I’d just as soon relax, as a rule. Uh…I’ve never taken a new client there, for a first time I mean.”
She moved just a little bit closer and bent slightly; the tip of her nose entered my personal space. A pretty nose, I noticed. A good three inches higher from the ground than mine, despite her stoop. I blinked up at incredible turquoise eyes. “If I asked you to come to the dungeon with me and let me put you in chains and do nasty things to you, right now, would you do it?”
“Yes.”
“Does the idea excite you, Sherry?”
“No. It might, once I got into it. That would depend on you.”
She smiled broadly, approvingly, as if I had said something clever. “Yes, that’s right, it would.” She bit her tongue and mock-frowned prettily, a practiced expression that must have kickstarted a thousand prostates. “I suppose it won’t actually be necessary after all. Why don’t you show me your studio, honey?”
“All right, Diana.”
It did occur to me as I led her down the carpeted corridor that I seemed to be in a remarkably obliging mood. What had possessed me to agree, even hypothetically, to a B&D session with a first-timer? I knew what most often makes me agreeable: apparently I found this Viking maiden even more attractive than I realized. Which was certainly odd, despite her beauty. I like sex with women—I’m not crazy—but I’ve always strongly preferred men. And I had not responded so…docilely to a woman since I’d figured out at thirteen that my stepmother and her friend Sergeant Alice were taking advantage of me. In fact, come to think of it, I hadn’t responded to anyone like this since the night four years ago when Big Travis stuck a knife under my ribs, and I was carried bleeding into (Thank you, God, if you’re listening) Lady Sally’s House.
As if sensing my unease, she said, “You’re not afraid, are you, Sherry? Please don’t be.” She was holding back her stride to let me stay in the lead. Amazing legs.
“I’m not,” I said, and I really wasn’t. With big Mary up in the Snoop Room, and Priscilla the bouncer and her lethal hands down in the Parlor, an established maximum of seventeen seconds away from any studio, what could possibly go wrong?
We reached my studio; I let her in, turned on the light, closed the door behind us, and switched on the little red in service light out in the hall. She seated herself with easy grace on the bed, leaned back against the pillows and surveyed the room like a lazy lioness.
“Before we get started there’s a little spiel I—” I began.
“I’ll bet you have a very beautiful body, Sherry.”
I started to show her, and then caught myself. “Can I please just—”
She made another studied gesture, a tucking-one-blonde-wing-of-hair-back-over-the-shoulder, and twiddled her fiery opal earring. “I’d really like to see it,” she interrupted softly.
Again it seemed to take an enormous effort to keep from reaching up and behind me for the zipper. But rules are rules, and all Lady Sally’s rules make sense: if you strip while you’re giving the client the set-speech, you might as well not bother. All right, so I could condense it. “Can I please just—”
Again she didn’t have to raise her voice to interrupt. “Please, Sherry? And please don’t talk unless it’s absolutely necessary?”
The zipper purred.
“Slowly, please. Yes, that’s just fine, honey.”
I wanted to ask if she wanted music of any kind, but I also didn’t want to talk just then. It made a small internal conflict, and that threatened to distract my attention from making Diana happy, so I suppressed it.
“Stop just a minute. Turn around, would you? Lovely. Now back this way. You’re very pretty, Sherry.”
I suppressed the urge to thank her.
“You aren’t afraid, are you, hon?”
“No, you asked me not to be, would you like some music? thank you,” I said in one long blurt. There, that was better.
“That’s right, I did,” she said, ignoring the last two clauses. “But you know what, sweet? I think I’d like it if you sort of pretended to be a little bit afraid. And reluctant. Like you were a successful professional woman, and I was some creepy son of a bitch who could wreck your career if you didn’t make me happy, could you manage that for me?”
“Sure.” I cringed. “All right, you bastard, you win: I’ll do what you want. Will that change your mind?”
She twiddled her earring again and smiled faintly. “An attitude problem like yours could take quite some time to correct. I guess we’ll have to wait and see, won’t we? Continue with what you were doing, bitch.”
Warmly confident in my acting skills, I completed undressing. When I was naked, shifting my weight nervously from leg to leg, making small attempts to cover myself with fluttering hands, she had me twirl slowly around again.
Then she asked me to do something I didn’t want to do.
No, I’m not going to get more specific than that. Even the most oppressed of street hookers have their own standards, their own unique personal and private set of lines they do not ever plan to cross even if their pimp kills them for it, and if you really want to know what mine are then come to Lady Sally’s House and pay your membership and take me upstairs some Spring night and ask me, and if I like the way you ask I might tell you a few of them. What Diana asked me to do was not something I would have rather died than do; more along the lines of a taste I had zero interest in acquiring.
I did it at once.
Then she had me undress her as well, remaining in character, and the moment I had finished carefully folding what were supposed to be her boxer shorts, she asked me sweetly and musically to do something I would have rather died than do.
I never hesitated.
Then she asked for something I would have rather killed a friend than do, and I was genuinely happy to do it for her.
In a very short time, she urgently demanded something I was quite prepared to do at any time, so vanilla that I literally fell all over myself striving to oblige. She had to ask me to stop when I was done. When her breathing had returned to normal, she asked me very politely not to ever tell anyone downstairs what had just happened between us—boy, was that going to be an easy request to honor!—and not to call anyone or go downstairs to the Parlor until tomorrow. I promised. Then she took a silk robe from the closet, tied it around her waist, whistling softly to herself, and left me there in a heap in the middle of the floor.
After a while I got up and blinked at the pile of tangled clothes on the carpet. I had the vague, undifferentiated feeling that something trivial somewhere was wrong, but the warm sense of accomplishment easily overwhelmed it. I found the book I keep around for intervals like that, and stretched out on the bed.
The time passed pleasantly enough. But eventually I looked up from my book, noted that about an hour had passed, and decided it was time to shower. There was a shower in my studio, of course. But Phillip had one upstairs in his personal apartment that was better, with a special pulse-mode, and he let me use it whenever I wanted. Also he had a special shampoo, a new formula that was very good for people who sometimes must wash their hair four or five times in a single night. Diana had only asked me not to go downstairs until tomorrow…
I wandered dreamily out into the hall, and headed for the third floor. A client I passed on the way looked at me a little oddly, but I decided he was one of the rare prudes we get and ignored him. Phillip’s door was unlocked as always.
The shower was already running. When I entered the bathroom I could make out Phillip’s silhouette through the translucent shower curtain. No problem; every shower in the building has room for at least two. I called out a greeting and pulled aside the curtain.
We both cried out.
I had seen a
client in that condition, once. But Cynthia and Lady Sally had talked to him for an hour beforehand, and he had to be carried out, and though he sent flowers the next day (the same ones his wife had given him in the hospital) Cynthia said afterward that she did not ever want to take a client that far again, and lady Sally had said good, she didn’t much want that sort of trade anyhow. To see Phillip’s beautiful body so badly marred was like seeing a beautiful painting covered with graffiti. Drawn in red. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to do such a thing. Such things…
“Oh, my God,” I said. “Phillip!”
“I think so.”
“I didn’t think you went for that sort of thing,” I babbled.
“I didn’t think you went in for that sort of thing, either.”
Oh, that was right. He had cried out when he had seen me, too. And that client had given me a double-take. But I wasn’t cut up anywhere. What could be that wrong about my appearance?…
I stepped back and looked at myself in the mirror.
After a long time I yanked my eyes away and got into the shower with Phillip, and we both burst into tears and sat down together, hugging each other and sobbing under the warm spray.
I washed my hair three times. I had him scrub me, first with soap and then a washcloth and finally with a stiff brush. Then we got out together and I did what I could for his cuts and abrasions. He hissed a few times but did not cry out.
“I’m okay, now,” I said, “but you ought to be looked at by Doctor Kate right away. A couple of these need stitches, I think.”
“Later, maybe,” he said. “First we have to kill Diana.”
“I’m sorry, you’re right. Priorities.”
“All right, let’s plan it. It seems to me the first thing we—”
“Phillip, what is it she did to us?”
“Isn’t it obvious? She made us do anything she asked.”
“But how?”
“She said please! What difference does it make?”
“Don’t we have to know what she’s doing to stop her?”
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