The door outside dinged and her head turned like a divining rod to water. “I’ll be back in a bit.” She disappeared through the curtain, leaving me alone with Mother Teresa’s worst nightmare.
I set down my coat and purse, noticing the full-length mirror in the back corner. I took a good look at myself. Staring back at me was a decent-looking woman, simple and practical. Straight coiffure—sans curls, sans highlights. No make-up, no manicure, unpolished comfy shoes, wherein toes wiggled with room to spare. The clothes were standard Pacific Northwest casual—jeans and an REI sweater. Nothing stood out or made a statement. My looks were as unassertive as my personality. I was, through and through, a sideline observer of the Strange and Unusual, reporting all that I saw in vivid Technicolor but leaving behind little more than a shadowed impression on the world.
I thought of Asshole Bob, who left his obnoxious mark on everything. My mother with her gypsy heart. Kenner and his Shakespearean commentaire. Even Sal impressed every guy I knew by way of her macro brain and micro waist. None of them were afraid to speak the truth as they saw it.
And then there was Frank.
I gave a big sigh, remembering the book’s recommended path to assertiveness.
I scanned the room again, gestalting what sort of outfit I should wear. Ix-nay on the leopard-ay. A furvert I would never be. The slinky slave wall was alluring, but nothing I’d read said that assertive had to be synonymous with naked. If God had meant for my navel to be exposed, he/she/they would have put it in the middle of my forehead.
So I turned to the Darth Vader wall and began the slow process of assessing each outfit to see if I would a) die of embarrassment wearing it, or b) die of asphyxiation trying to put it on.
After the third outfit, I realized that Darth had a good reason for his breathing problems. Never underestimate the power of the dark side when it comes in the form of a latex rubber overbust corset with steel boning and buckle front fastening.
After an hour of inhaling to close all manner of cinches, straps, Velcro, belts, zippers, and snaps—not to mention a few safety pins and nails—I settled on a short black leather jacket and skirt. The set had a few provocative slits and rivets, but seemed street legal for the most part.
Ms. Duck Barrettes rang up my purchases, looking disappointed that she hadn’t inspired a proper makeover. I had come in a nerd and was going out a nerd in a nicer outfit. But then, as I stood there, waiting for the credit card to clear, I saw them.
A pair of crimson suede stilettos.
Rarely does an item call me as the Sirens called to Odysseus, emanating such desirability that all my normal sensibilities are overwhelmed. A lure that advertises itself in such a way that I know, if only I could have it, I’d possess that same aura and the world would crave me as I craved it.
I stared at those shoes for a long moment. They looked new—virgin whores perched on the pedestal near the checkout counter, taunting each passerby with the promise of a once in a lifetime encounter. And for no small fee.
The clerk noted my expression. With carnivore instinct she deftly lifted the shoes off their stand and scooted them in front of me—pointy toes pointing—exposing the long slope of their insoles. “These would be so perfect with that outfit.”
I remembered the red lacey top that Sal had picked out for me. I could see the entire ensemble coming together in my mind. And I was convinced that the mere act of purchasing these shoes would earn me a passing grade on the assertiveness test.
I picked up one of the shoes and peeked inside. They were even my size. Angels and demons alike joined in a rousing chorus of Hallelujah. I had to have them.
Ms. Ducky rang them up before I could change my mind, taking a few moments to find the original box before loading a shopping bag with the jacket, skirt and shoes.
As I exited the store with my bag, I felt a Scarlett O’Hara moment coming on. “Well Fiddly Dee!” Now if only I had a Rhett Butler to come sweep me off my feet. “Scarlett, kiss me! Kiss me ... once ...”
Of course, that kiss had taken place in the midst of Atlanta burning, when they had lost everything and were headed, potentially, to their deaths.
Maybe I needed another role model.
Chapter 16: Lunch with Pixie
I tossed my bag in the back of the Jeep and hurried to my lunch appointment with Pixie. I wasn’t really all that hungry, but interviews invariably happen over food. Thus my refrigerator is often the recipient of lunch leftovers destined to become science projects.
Pixie and I had agreed to meet at the Cyclops Cafe, a strange little eatery in Belltown. As I drove downtown I was all too aware that I was only a couple of blocks from Frank and our unfinished conversation. I wasn’t regretting our decision to meet up at the club tonight, but I was nervous. So I did my best to put it out of my mind, turning my attention, instead, to the never-ending search for downtown parking. Amazingly, I found a space only a block away. I double-checked that I had my notebook and iPhone—so I could record anything really juicy—and headed for the restaurant.
The Cyclops had once been called the Mars Café, a restaurant that had always struck me as a way station for aliens—and not the illegal type. I loved to sit there and imagine from which planet or star system each patron might have come. Finally I had a use for the college astronomy courses I took during those two quarters when I believed myself destined to become an astronomer. That is, until I realized I’d watched just a few too many episodes of Star Trek and that I didn’t really like staying up late.
The Cyclops hadn’t changed much. The new owners had done little more than convert the great Mars orb that fronted the restaurant into a giant eye, iris and all. As I walked up to the door, it glared at me from overhead, as if judging my hipness quotient.
Pixie had described herself as fortyish with long gray hair and a white widow’s peak streak on one side. That seemed distinctive enough. A quick glance around revealed no such person. I made my way to an open booth surrounded with padded red vinyl and took a seat with a good view of the door as well as the other diners, intending to partake in a short stint of people watching.
The table beside me was occupied by a couple of older women, maybe in their early seventies. They looked like sisters, each thin and overly angular, with short cropped gray hair and ice splinter blue eyes. They were focused on the Seattle tourist map laid out on the table in front of them.
Leaning toward them, I caught snatches of their conversation, which was going on in a syrupy southern drawl.
“I don’t wanna see no silly flying fish or vegetables, Marabell. Nor a statue of a pig, fo’ heavensake. I didna fly all this way to see pigs.”
Marabell responded with a forced exhale. “Well, we hafta see something. The boat does’na leave until tomorrow, and I am not sitting here ’til then.”
The first sister cast a sharp glance over at me, clearly aware that I was listening. “Maybe this young lady would be so kind as to make a suggestion. Where do you go if’n y’all want to see something to amaze a couple of, well, ovahly-seasoned travelers.”
“Willa! Don’t you go a-bothering people,” said Marabell, smiling at me encouragingly.
“Oh, I don’t mind.” And I didn’t. Though I wasn’t sure exactly what to recommend. “What sort of things do you like to do?”
Marabell leaned toward me. “Excitin’ things.”
Willa nodded. “We’re about to be cooped up with a boat full of old folks for two whole weeks and I want some action before I go.”
Action. OK. I wondered what passed for action at age seventy, but, from the intensity of their expressions, I got the sense that these two ladies were no dullards. I glanced at the map on the table. It was unlikely that anything that interesting would show up on a tourist map, so I told them to hold on a moment while I grabbed a copy of The Zealot.
I made sure to avoid Frank’s article on Mistress Maven as I searched for “The Zealot Suggests” section and opened the paper for them. This section normally carried a
nice sampling of Seattle’s Strange and Unusual events. I noticed that El Vez, the local Latino Elvis impersonator, was playing, as were The Bobs, a great a cappella group who sang songs such as “There’s A Nose Ring In My Soup” and “Hey Coach, Don’t Call Me A Queer.”
“You might scan through this and see what inspires you. If anything that might classified as excitement exists in Seattle, you’ll find it here.” Which wasn’t strictly true, but it was close enough for these ladies.
The two women glanced eagerly down at the paper and then back at me. Willa laid a hand on my arm. “Thank you so much, dear. We shall endeavah to keep owaselves out of too much mischief.”
Marabell laughed in that slightly barmy way of someone who really knew how to get into trouble.
I moved back to my table just as a woman who fit Pixie’s description walked in and started looking around. A glare was coming through the windows and obscuring the view, so I stood and motioned her over. Seeing me, she smiled and navigated through the tables, sliding with some grace onto the cushy booth seat across from me. She was short and pencil thin—a tiny flea speck of a woman. However, she radiated a strength I rarely saw in anyone. That quality was certainly not what I expected from a self-proclaimed submissive. Like I would know.
I must have looked stunned, for as she smiled and held out her hand, she said, “Not what you were expecting?” Her long gray hair was half hidden under a Bogart style black fedora. She wore no makeup except for a touch of dark burgundy lip color. She was very attractive in that middle-aged wise woman sort of way, where everything had gone to gray and white, but the result was as richly striking as platinum and diamonds.
“Well, honestly, no. But it sounds as though I’m not the first to think so.” I knew I was staring. I shook her offered hand. Her grip was firm but without any overhand or underhand contortions—polite, straightforward and confident. “I appreciate your meeting with me.”
Laughing, she tugged off her coat and settled in. “I’m not so unusual. I just think the stereotypes are very prevalent.” And, in fact, she was wearing a black leather collar with a silver chain that snaked down her blouse. She tugged on it, rolling her eyes as she let out easy chuckle. “It gets old, seeing the way people, even within the community, respond to BDSM. But we all suffer from stereotyping of some sort or another. I’m sure you get tired of the ‘all journalists are hacks’ kind of comments.”
My face must have registered my annoyance, because she reached for my hand. “Oh, no. Don’t think I believe that. It was just something that Frank said. He was always going on about the lack of journalistic respect in the world today.”
Belatedly I realized that of course she knew Frank. He hadn’t picked her contact information out of the air. But it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that she might know His Royal Suckiness, in a Biblical way. A niggling discomfort descended into the pit of my stomach, which I fended off with a flurry of journalistic hackification. “So. How long have you known Frank?” I tried to avoid the emphasis.
“Oh, I met him at the Salon a few months ago. I was taking pictures—I’m a photographer. Anyway, he was doing this scene with Lil …” She suddenly stopped and looked at me. “I’m assuming that Frank talks to you about this. Right? I’d hate to out him. I just assumed that, since you had my contact information that you would know about everything.”
I suddenly felt a woozy surge of light-headedness, as though all the oxygen in my small lunar module of a brain had suddenly vented into space. And what, in the Good Lord’s Holy Name, was everything?
Just then a waiter with short black hair and long electric blue bangs ambled over at our table and took our drink orders. Pixie was sticking to water and I felt obliged to do the same. Skinny people who drink water always inspire me to drink water. Overweight people who drink water depress me into guzzling super-sized Cokes. I mean, if the water thing isn’t working, why deny yourself?
I scanned the menu, avidly avoiding the unavoidable confrontation with the official, all-encompassing and collectively unknown black hole called “everything” to which Pixie was clearly privy. The Strange and Unusual had arrived, uninvited, on my doorstep.
Pixie allowed a few moments of weighty silence before venturing to speak again. I imagined that, with her photographic eye, she was mentally snapping a series of photos called Freaked Out Ex-lover, Part I. “Hmmm. I take it from your expression that Frank hasn’t really talked to you about, oh, anything.” She looked as if she had just stepped in dog poo, which, of course, she had.
I didn’t want her to feel bad. She wouldn’t be the first person to get the shit because of Frank. “Well, that would be a ‘no.’ But apparently there are parts of Frank’s life that I have yet to discover. At least not directly. I did read his recent article in The Zealot. That was my first hint. Then, when I asked about it, he gave me this list of people and websites for the article I’m writing on the Salon. We haven’t gotten to the place where he tells me how he knows all this. And, since we have broken up, I didn’t feel it was really appropriate to ask.”
“Well, that ass-hat.” She put down her menu. “Didn’t you two date for, like, two years?”
I nodded, surprised she knew so much. “But there was lots of on and off, and we never lived together. So I suppose it was easy to let topics like that slip through the cracks.”
“That’s a pretty big something to be missed.”
“He’s not like a serial killer, right?” How big of a something could it be?
“No. No. Nothing like that. But still …” She let the thought drift.
I shrugged, not knowing what else to say. “To be honest, I don’t think we have ever been good at communicating. He never felt like he could talk to me about it. It makes sense. I was never completely honest with him either.”
But she clearly disagreed, smacking the table a little too enthusiastically and causing the Easter Island head-shaped lamp on the table to jump. “Are you kidding? That’s not something you keep from your significant other. The world is so clearly fucked up that we can’t talk about sex.”
A big uh-oh bounded around in my head. Yes, but what would we say about sex?
I was silent a little too long and Pixie, who was clearly on the en plus side of the IQ scale, took my silence for the obvious sign it was. “You never talked about sex with him?”
“That would be another ‘no.’ I didn’t know how to talk about it. I think I was born with the Hot Chick Sex Talk button stuck on mute.” I was happy to see that my lack of sex speak wasn’t written on my face for all to see. “In fact, I was recently diagnosed as suffering from ‘assertiveness-deficiency’ by a sex therapist, scored as an ‘assertive-sub’ in an online Dom/sub test, and called a prude by my Mother. That should give you some indication of my sex communication skills.”
Pixie laughed. Our blue-banged waiter came back by with our waters, and we took a few minutes to order food.
I took a sip. Summing up these sex assessments made it a little easier, and less painful, to understand why Frank might not have shared his other self with me. I was determined to find out from Pixie what life on the other side looked like, even if she wouldn’t tell me details about Frank’s escapades. I would see him later on this evening and I wanted as much information as possible before embarking on that conversation. I was determined to be clear on the big E. Every Little Thing. Everything.
So instead, I queried Pixie about her experiences. “So tell me about being a sub. Pretend I don’t know anything, which, of course, I don’t.” I tried to act casual, as though it was everyday that I lunched with a woman who knew more about my ex’s sex life than I did.
She sensed the need to change the subject and was kind enough to let me do so without argument. “Well, that could run into a rather long and involved story. How far back do you want me to go?” She smiled, but there was a little pain in that smile, I could tell.
“Only as far back as you feel comfortable.”
“Oh, I don’t
mind talking about it. I was raised in a cult. They abused me as a child—I was tied up by some members of my own family and used for ritual purposes. I can’t really remember much of it, but suffice to say that I came out of it with a few wires crossed.
“It actually feels really good now to be tied up. It allows me to relive those places in myself, but in a safe situation where I have control. It doesn’t really make sense, but I’ve stopped trying to fight it. I just embrace it as part of who I am. I like to go to the edge of myself and the best way to do that is through a Dominant. He takes me where I guess I was taken as a child, but in a safe and loving environment, which isn’t what I had as a child. Now I can control what happens, even while I am out of control. I get to say how it goes and that empowers me and helps replace the bad feelings with good ones.” She cocked her head at me. “Does that make sense?”
I thought about what Dr. Steiner had said. That you couldn’t cure a fetish. Pixie seemed to support that theory. “Sure, it makes a lot of sense. Does it ever bother you that you feel that way?”
She laughed. “Of course. Dating is never simple, but this makes it even more complicated. Regular sex is sort of boring for me, so it limits the pool of men I can draw from. Although Doms typically advertise in some way or you can find referrals, so in that respect it is easy to find possibilities. But it’s no different than dating in the regular world. There has to be the right attraction and chemistry, etcetera. And that is a rare thing.”
“Well, I don’t know if being “regular” is any easier, dating wise. You would think it would be easy. Regular girl seeks regular guy, but I haven’t found that to be true. In fact, it seems as though fetish folks have a more focused group. There are categories!”
I laughed and so did Pixie. She acknowledged my comment with a nod. “True, but then just try to fulfill your sexual preference and have a regular romance. Now that is a trick. They aren’t necessarily connected. While it would be nice if you could get them both in the same place, that’s rarer still.”
Breakfast in Stilettos Page 9