The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus

by Jeremy Reed

  The car was eating up the road. They were on the outskirts of the city. Suburbs defaced by the anonymous years flashed up and dipped behind the car. A green van was off-loading, a woman dressed in a sari was recruiting her three children from a road ditch. Only a week before Leanda was sure she had seen a military youth marching on the city. They looked like gay clones. Dressed in black leather uniforms, pink caps and biker boots, earrings glinting in the sun, they were involved in an organised march. Leanda wondered if there had been a war which had passed unannounced. Was insurrection no longer in the hands of armies, but with gender minorities? Had the gay youth been preparing for combat rather than peace? She tried to imagine pink armies looting towns, a queen with drop earrings commandeering the château. The remains of a carnival were strewn across the precinct. Bunting, pennants, paper lanterns, junk food cartons, dead carnations. The car sped through the debris. Leanda sat back with abandon, taking in what looked like the props of a deconstructed film set. This drive into the city was her little drug. It wasn't that she needed to be there, it was more that she expected the marvellous to happen on her arrival. Would the chemist have prepared a formula for her on the lines of the cult drug that Nicole had described? Would she find clothes in colours that occupied her imagination, and which couturists never seemed to use? There was always something unfulfilled in her life, some distinction missing which belonged to the gap between inner and outer realities. The books she was looking for had never been written, her psychic needs didn't belong to life as she experienced it.

  She had the chauffeur cruise the red light district next to the port. The lights were starting to come on, a yellow rectangle high up, an orange one down below. A black transvestite hooker was in a doorway. Dressed in a beret, a blond wig, and a short leather skirt, she was looking to right and left not for sex, as Leanda surmised, but for a meeting that would shift her dimension to somewhere else. Leanda ordered the car to turn round at the top of the street, and come back. She wanted a second look at the transvestite. And the latter, knowing she was being watched, stepped back into her heels, angling her body from different planes towards the spectator. Leanda could see that she was wearing green earrings and a matching necklace. She had the chauffeur stop the car and reverse to the doorway. The face that met hers through the window was gashed with red lipstick. The rhinoplastic alteration given to features which had once been masculine was sufficient to suggest a new category of art — the re-creation of gender. Leanda knew that she would pay for this hooker to come back for dinner at the château. Nicole might do something bizarre with her, like force her to strip slowly to a reading of Anne Radcliffe's The Castle Of Udolpho, interspersed with songs by Juliette Greco. They had their favourites. Deshabillez Moi and Dans Ton Lit were lyrics that never ceased to evoke the atmospherics of the sultry chanteuse slipping out of a black dress. Transvestites were a serious distraction in Leanda's solitary world. They had to be interesting as well as physically perverse. This one was worth the risk. A black male body had adopted white feminine looks. It was the sort of anomaly suited to life at the château. Dinner would be followed by relaxation in one of the house's deep chambers. Leanda most often favoured the room decorated with frescoes modelled on those which De Sade had in his bedroom at La Coste. Piecing together information about De Sade's interiors at the infamous château, Leanda had attempted to recreate something of its 18th century gothic terror. In one corner of the room a gutted piano had red geraniums escaping across its lid. Seasonal flowers had been planted inside it. Seraphim in the process of being buggered by black angels were contorted across walls and ceiling. The one table was a polished coffin. A buried stereo system had strains of ambient music open up occasional harmony clusters. Admission to the room was by a prayer found in De Sade's private papers, and Leanda had set herself to pursue the latter, buying at great expense whatever she could purchase of his Personal belongings. His whips and instruments of correction had eluded her, but she compensated by having made for the dungeon items in accordance with those he described in his novels. The room was conducive to letting go secrets. Something within Leanda still remained insatiably curious about sex.

  The transvestite was called Betty. She was uneasy at first about the idea of going to a house out of town. She began negotiating sums to compensate for danger and inconvenience. She'd be away from work for an evening. Time was money. People had hired her for a week at a cost of five thousand dollars. She wasn't that expensive. She would come to an arrangement. A thousand dollars for five hours. We were having her cheap. She got into the car, and arranged her long legs. Leanda could see that she was trying to create a distraction from her nervousness. She was like so many of her kind, hooked on the money, but resentful of the ways in which she earned it. Leanda wasn't sure of Betty's sexual orientation. Out of drag she may have been straight. Betty may have been a man who lived with a girl, and who simply undertook this role as a lucrative form of income, although there must have been something within her that sided with the psychologically extreme.

  Leanda spoke minimally about the château. Betty appeared to have had an education, for she professed an interest in books. She had read Burroughs and Genet. She was surprised to find that her tentative enquiries into the form of sex required of her were repulsed. She wanted to know if it was to be A or O. Leanda expressed disdain at this presumption. 'It's not my way,' she told Betty, 'to engage in things so basic, that they're being done all over the world at this moment.'

  Betty withdrew into her corner of the car. She was curious, but the need for money kept her silent. She looked out at the landscape as though she was seeing it for the first time, warehouses on the city's fringe were giving way to trees and the kinetic displacement of fields. Her familiar geography was a diminishing parallax as the car pursued its accelerating trajectory into the countryside. Poplars flashed up, cows resembled tree stumps lying on their sides in a meadow. A field of rape seed punched a yellow square at the eye, a Van Gogh implosion settling in mid-brain. The road was deserted. Leanda's chauffeur remained impeccably non-committal, screened off behind his glass partition. Betty took out a nail-file and brushed up her nails. She seemed temporarily cut off from speech. Leanda had observed this sort of resentment so often. It often conformed to a pattern. The initial confirmation of a deal was followed by a hostile silence to be succeeded by a partial thaw. Betty was giving nothing away. Leanda knew she would have expected payment in advance, but didn't dare offend by demanding money. The September night was dropping early. Orange and red fires underlit a stormy sky. Leanda felt confident she had captured the right person. The extraordinary dish prepared as the main course for dinner would be enhanced by Betty's savouring it.

  Leanda always felt comforted when she knew the safety of the château's walls were within easy reach. She cradled herself deep in the headrest, and blanked out Betty's presence. Oak trees and farms were thrown fluently over their shoulders. What they appeared to be approaching they were in the process of leaving behind. The Bentley kept in third and they were there, tyres scrunching the impacted gravel. Lights were on in the house, and a maid dressed in an ankle length scarlet coat, with shiny boots, came out and opened the car door for Leanda.

  Betty was led up black steps and conducted through an entrance hall. It wasn't like anywhere else she had visited. The atmosphere was particular, and a sense of expectancy charged the silence. For Betty it was like walking into a novel. She was about to enter the first chapter and then proceed to the interior. She had been back with clients to all manner of places, but rarely had their tastes shocked or excited. She had known one man who had made montages out of his lovers’ bodies, the original photographic image being deconstructed to a series of violently juxtaposed anamorphs. These assemblages had been mounted on the walls. A bright pink refrigerator had stood central to the room. The man had claimed that his soul was inside. He wanted to live by no other dictate than his sexual needs. Incidents like that were not uncommon to Betty. The people who picked up tr
ansvestites were usually obsessive and often so deeply fetishistic that their world had been narrowed to the realisation of this thrill. But she couldn't figure out Leanda's intentions. Every prostitute gets used at some time as a sympathetic ear. The client's lonely, it's not sex he wants, but human contact. Betty had sat and listened to so many psychological dilemmas. She had heard people out and been paid for listening. She began to think that Leanda may have intended a video shoot, and that she was required to act out a perverse role. There was a limit to what you can do with someone, she had told herself that in every feasible situation, but the château carried with it the presentiment of potential horror — dungeons, sealed rooms, corridors that may have continued to the centre of the earth.

  Betty was shown into a drawing room, and told that dinner would be served soon. A fire had been lit, and a resinous crackle of flame jumped from the logs. The room was predominantly green, the chairs and sofa covered in velvet, and prints by De Chirico, Ernst and Giacometti afforded an imaginative space to the closed dimensions. There were books heaped on a table, and Betty noticed that one of the chairs had legs which terminated in stilettos. There were bottles of spirits on a black lacquered table.

  Betty sat down and touched up her face, a nervous reflex she had developed to offset stress. Whatever the demands made on her at the château, its inhabitants were clearly aesthetes with a perverse set of values. There was a red suede shoe mounted in a hand, placed on the table nearest her. When Betty who was curious, moved over to examine the object, she noticed that a magnifying lens had been inserted into the shoe, and through it she could see a black spider twitching its antennae. The thing was hairy; a trickle of yellow juice exuded from its mandibles.

  Betty poured herself a drink, the large scotch hitting her system immediately. She needed alcohol to eliminate sharp edges. She sat there waiting, cursing herself for having accepted the price. Even if she left abruptly now, there was the problem of transport. She had no way of getting back to the city. Each time she looked round the room she discovered some new curiosity. There was a small erotic sculpture on a glass shelf. A woman with her skirt at her ankles was placed over the lap of another, her bottom presented to the correcting hand about to make contact with her cheeks. There was a clue here, but Betty hardly considered she would have been hired to give something commonplace like discipline. She had been paid at times to serve as an ashtray, a repository for excrement, a duct for olive oil, a whole range of peculiarities which had in time become normalised by repeat experience. She had grown unshockable. She had learnt that sexual fetishes were interminable. They were often not connected with the body. They were the directives aimed at depersonalised parabodies. They lived as obsessions which connected with fantasies. They were everything and nothing.

  Betty sat apprehensively and waited. She expected anything. A gorilla to be led in wearing handcuffs, a black goat to be tethered to the chair with stiletto feet. The delay was unnerving. She had the feeling the house was ruminating on a story by Poe.

  When the door opened, Leanda entered with another woman, tall, dark haired and dressed in a tight leather skirt. Both women appeared to be wearing an identical red lipstick. The other woman, who Leanda introduced as Nicole, was carrying an entomologist's container, and after removing the lens that capped the red shoe on display, she tapped a number of spiders inside, and resealed the lens. Betty assumed the spiders were left to eventually suffocate, if they didn't tear each other apart, leg by leg.

  Betty had the sensation she was observing people who lived in a parallel dimension. No concession was made to her being there. The two women busied themselves in rituals. Nicole picked up the red suede shoe, and carried the exhibit out of the room. Even in Betty's profession she had never observed so provocatively unrehearsed a walk. Nicole's natural movements involved a belly dancer's distribution of weight from the hips. Her spike heels emphasised the slow rotation of her bottom.

  Betty was told to come and meet the dinner guests. She was conducted out of the room by a midget who appeared from behind Leanda. A diminutive oriental, dressed in a black jumpsuit with sparkling rhinestone buttons, he trotted along at the height of Leanda's hip, carrying a large book under one arm, and a small bell in the other hand. His manners were ceremonious. He was like a priest about to officiate over a ritual.

  Betty was conducted through two ante-chambers. A monkey in a red conical hat was perched on one of the bookshelves, chattering excitedly to itself.

  She was shown into a dining hall. Black candles were burning in human skulls, and a bronze cupid placed central to the table, was holding a lit torch. Even Betty's experience of visiting simulated gothic penthouses, and executive torture cells, didn't lessen the impact of surprise. There were three guests seated at table. Nicole who was at the head, and on opposite sides two men, one of whom had flawless emerald eyes, which could have been coloured lenses, and who wore a white suit, and the other who was busy contemplating the cranial fissures of the skull placed in front of him.

  There were no acknowledgements or introductions, just a formal disquieting silence. Betty was placed opposite Leanda, and the midget served a marginally chilled Brouilly, its tang sitting on the tongue like an autumn leaf. Betty noticed that a pair of black gloves had been arranged beside each plate, as though in preparation for a rite. A monkey ran into the hall and out again, pursued by the midget. Betty waited for the extraordinary to happen. It wouldn't have surprised her if she was to be the main course, wrapped in gold foil, and made to lie on a giant serving plate. She could imagine such perversity. There was no end to sexual preferences. She had licked chocolate mousse off managerial cocks, and savoured caviar on a swollen vagina. Edibles were one fetish, and there were a million others. It was the serene detachment unnerved her. The people appeared to be spectators of an invisible film, and little connected to any form of shared reality. There wasn't any point in starting a conversation, and Betty wished she was back on the street in her precinct. At least there was an external world to which she could relate in the familiar streets that she had made her own. Here she was displaced and disorientated. She wondered if the two male guests were automatons, and if at some point the women would consult their artificial intelligence. Betty hardly touched her starter, a particularly fine consommé perles de Nizzan. Her adrenalin was fired, and she found it difficult to eat. Not that she had any reason to be self-conscious. No-one made any reference to the food or each other. If a coffin had been brought to the table, the wreaths spilling whitely across the dark wood, she knew it wouldn't have drawn any comment.

  The midget assiduously poured wine. There was a pause between courses, before Betty and the other guests were advised to put on the black silk gloves beside their plate. Leanda and Nicole accomplished this with finesse, the two male guests and Betty achieving it by slower degrees. The gloves were fitted to the elbow, and ruched across the fingers. A wine was poured, before the midget, commanding silence by the smallness of his body in proportion to the book, began to ask for absolute concentration prior to reading a prayer written by the Marquis de Sade. The voice that issued was an unwavering baritone.

  ‘Lord of the penis spiced to please the tongue

  and testicles like full chestnuts, well hung,

  accept my litany that I may know

  the ways in that I should and shouldn't know.

  Accept the provocation of a bum

  divided neatly like a purple plum.

  And may I stand at dawn like someone who

  identifies with those whipped black and blue.'

  The midget closed the book, and placed it on a purple cushion. Now that the rite had been performed, the silence seemed even more oppressive. Betty waited for the main course to be brought in, conscious all the time of the contrast between the guests who appeared outwardly to be refined aesthetes, and the apparent debasement intended by the prayer, and the erotic accoutrement attached to everything at table. The cultivation of the weird seemed less an affectation as a gloss
on some deeper aberration. Betty sniffed a rat in their motives. She was increasingly anxious to break the silence. And now the midget had reappeared with a silver serving dish. He carried it, eyes focused on the lid, his manner one of having been assigned a hieratic task.

  And in keeping with the unorthodoxy of the occasion, Betty heard Marc Almond's buried vocals accompany the midget's serving. She had heard this song The Slave played in select clubs. It concerned a man who relates his experiences in a Byzantine harem. Naked, kept in a cage, his overriding desire is to become a real woman. The impassioned emotions communicating through the lyric seemed in keeping with the place, but in contrast to the imperturbable cool of the guests.

  After removing the lid, the midget stood back and contemplated the chef's preoccupation with aesthetic detail. The meat or fish, and Betty suspected it would be the latter, was wrapped in gold foil with tiny black crosses standing along its length like hatpins. The artefact might have been something belonging to post-modernist art. A way of spelling out gothic to a race of computer buffs.

  The dwarf unwrapped the foil as though he was unbandaging a mummy. The music cut out, and Betty was again made conscious of the programmed stylisation that informed each act in this house. The main dish had been cooked in a wine sauce, a lid as yet, no-one commented on its possible identity. Betty noticed that the man wearing emerald lenses had a clip-on fax attached to his lapel. The other man wore a black wool suit, and a blue oxford button-down open at the neck.

  ‘Did I tell you,' he said to Nicole, 'that my mother is in a cryogenic unit? She wants to be around when neuroscientists re-plug consciousness into the mains. She read up on the subject extensively and decided on cold storage. She said that they'll all have it. Jane Fonda, Raquel Welch, Joan Collins, Madonna. She's even asked that her wardrobe and jewellery are kept on hold. Sometimes I wonder what century she'll come out in.'