Whip Smart: A Memoir

by Melissa Febos

  All five rejected me.

  “Congratulations!” Jeremiah, my new client, reached across the table and squeezed my hand, though we had only known each other for the length of the current meal. “Sarah Lawrence is a fabulous school! You’ll do so well!” He returned to his salmon fillet with gusto. We sat around the corner from his Bond Street loft at a restaurant where the entrées ranged above $100 and the waiters looked like soap stars.

  A sober friend had given me Jeremiah’s e-mail after learning that he was looking for someone to dominate his girlfriend. Lean and gray, Jeremiah was a millionaire record executive with the overzealous spirit of a dad trying too hard to be cool for the kids. He was old enough to sound ridiculous using adjectives like “fierce” and powerful enough that no one ever told him so.

  “I’m gonna order some more wine,” he announced. “Is that okay with you? I know that you don’t drink and everything. …” He trailed off, waving the waiter to our table as I nodded. The affectation, though embarrassing, made Jeremiah easy to talk with. I could see behind it traces of the weary, shrewd man he concealed.

  “So,” I said, wanting to get to the point before he started drinking and talking.

  “So,” he repeated, theatrically arching his eyebrows and then laughing. “I like that! A woman who gets to the point.” I gave him a big smile, knowing that people with that much money know not to get hustled and that I needed to be canny in my delivery, to nail the right combination of getting-to-the-pointedness and solicitation. He tucked a hunk of fish into his mouth and smiled back at me around his chewing. I sipped my water and waited for him to swallow before speaking.

  “So you have a girlfriend?” I asked. “She’s lovely, I assume.”

  “More than lovely.” He leaned in, resting his elbows on the table. “And very naughty.” I flinched inside, my own weariness sinking in as my endive salad hit my stomach.

  “Interesting …”

  “But here’s the thing.” His voice cleared, and I knew we were going to talk business. “She can’t know that this is a business arrangement.”

  “Sure, we’ll sort that out beforehand.”

  “I’ll slip an envelope into your purse when she’s out of the room.”

  “Perfect.”

  “There’s another thing.” He smirked coyly at me, but his eyes were direct. “You’re a lesbian.”

  “Okay.”

  “She’s very jealous, and it wouldn’t work any other way. So don’t come in any professional-looking outfit, or bring too much equipment, all right?”

  “Got it. I am your lesbian buddy who simply wants to come over and spank your girlfriend.”

  “Exactly.” He smiled at me, leaned back in his chair, and lifted his glass.

  Eva was a beauty. When I stepped out of the elevator into Jeremiah’s living room she hung back, shyly clutching a wineglass. She was dark haired and curvy, and her body had the languidity of those who have borne children, still slender but with skin that moved, was draped more loosely over bones than that of the very young. They’d already had dinner and a bottle that cost more than my monthly rent. I smiled at her with what I hoped was the right combination of a girlish entreaty for friendship and assured desire. I knew how to seduce men and engender quick intimacy with women, but this was more complicated than either. Not only did I have to accomplish both with her, but I also had to seduce Jeremiah without appearing to.

  My palms had gotten sweaty in the elevator, considering the complexity of this task. The cockiness I had felt picking my way through the cobblestones of Bond Street in my designer heels had quickly drained when I faced his door. Walking toward the posh address, I had felt excitement. It tugged, umbilical, on an old pleasure, a swaggering childish exhilaration, like that I’d felt reading in the corner of the bookstore as a kid. I was living that illicit fantasy; I was beautiful, calculated, and adept—a Chandler seductress. It felt simple, powerful. But its dimensions, borrowed from some childhood longing, were limited; there was no room for my fear, the context of my emotional past, my awareness of humanity beyond romance. When these elements entered, the fantasy began to collapse.

  When I tried to lie outside of work, I now failed miserably. I had mostly stopped trying. My fear and hope was that this inability would eventually carry into my sessions, eliminating the need to choose whether I did it or not, eliminating my ability to do it at all. As much as I privately hoped this would happen, I didn’t look forward to the session in which it first did. Let it not be this one, I prayed before every session, and doubly hard before this one with Jeremiah.

  Once I began, though, the performance was usually intuitive, much easier in practice than projection. Like any skill, the idea of managing the individual parts was overwhelming, but the doing was habitual, depending more on motor memory than conscious thought. This session would be like that, too, I told myself. I’d always hoped for more female clients at the dungeon.

  Working with Eva was different from working with my male clients, partly because of her femaleness and partly because she wasn’t really a client. She made me nervous, similar to the way clients close to my own age did. I was afraid that she would see through me. Women were as easily duped as men in their desire; that I knew. But did she have desire? Other than that to please Jeremiah, I wasn’t sure.

  I kissed her. I had never kissed a client before. They asked, sure. But I never did. They always knew (even when they pretended not to) that it was a business relationship. If I were really her boyfriend’s lesbian friend who wanted to spank her, it would seem, at the very least, odd if I didn’t want to kiss her. Probably she would be offended. Ditto for the rubber gloves. I hadn’t thought of this before I got there. After I led her to the bedroom and blindfolded her, took off both of our shirts, and began wondering what to say that wouldn’t sound false, she leaned in and kissed me. She missed the mark somewhat because of the blindfold and left a sticky smear of lipstick half on my mouth, half on my cheek. By the time she leaned back in, I still hadn’t thought of a believable reason not to, and so I kissed her back. I felt a fleeting flash of disgust but suppressed it, concentrating on what to do next. Under her jeans she wore black lace panties tied at the sides with pink ribbon, obviously expensive and new.

  When I had my entire hand inside of her and Jeremiah was masturbating beside us on the bed, murmuring encouragement, I realized that I was working a lot harder than usual. Look how elastic her cervix is, I told myself, trying to summon the clinical anthropologist, to remember how exciting it was to be working with a woman—a baby’s head is actually bigger than your fist. I did my perspective trick, pulling away from the present to look at it objectively, as a stranger would, or a younger version of myself. It wasn’t working. Even from that distance it didn’t seem wild or glamorous or shocking; it seemed grotesque. It was Jeremiah, I thought. If only he would shut up. But when I imagined him gone, the scene became even scarier. His presence provided a buffer between her and me, and whatever I feared there.

  Here was the thing: I wasn’t buying it. All her mewling and writhing wasn’t convincing me; I thought she was faking it. Here was an intelligent, experienced, successful woman, and she was going to believe mine and Jeremiah’s bogus story? Some mysterious lesbian shows up with a bag of rope, fists you, and goes happily on her way? It sounded ridiculous. I knew that experience skewed my perspective. None of the women I knew, lesbian or otherwise, would be interested in doing this for free. I told myself that probably she didn’t know the kind of women I did and could imagine that such a lesbian was out there being friends with her millionaire boyfriend. Still, my intuition told me otherwise.

  Sometimes, back when I was a pot smoker, this awful thing would happen. I would be in a social situation, a party, dinner, or just hanging out with friends, and suddenly all of the embedded social dynamics would be exposed to me, like a sheet stripped off of a stained mattress. All the unspoken desires, motives, resentments, and insecurities of everyone in the room would be revealed, on
their faces, in their movements and words, emanating from them like body heat. I would tell myself that I was just paranoid, but I wasn’t; I knew that what I was seeing was real and was always there, and it filled me with terrible sorrow. Everyone was so afraid, so needy. My session with Jeremiah and Eva had an element of that. I didn’t know how Jeremiah felt at that moment, but the fact that he had gone to such lengths, felt the need to go to such lengths, to feel desire, well, it suggested desperation of some kind.

  Eva and I were performing for Jeremiah. We also performed for each other. I was on to her, and I think what frightened me was the prospect that she might have been on to me. The truth hovered between us, as we moaned and whispered not of lust or pleasure but of what? Our desire for what? We did share something and could not avail ourselves of the comfort, could not even look into each other’s eyes for fear of seeing ourselves. What did that make us? It made me feel like howling with sorrow.

  After her yowling climax, Jeremiah gestured me to the side and climbed on top of Eva. I watched his bobbing behind, a buoy glowing in the dark of the bedroom, for the two minutes it took for him to orgasm. His, I believed, was genuine.

  As Jeremiah lay stretched out on his bed, grinning, Eva put on an oversize T-shirt of his and sat cross-legged beside him, not meeting my eyes. I sat around with them, chatting about how great it had been for as long as seemed necessary, and then left. I had been there approximately one hour. After changing into my sneakers in the elevator, I felt around my purse for the envelope. Tucked between two books, it was slim, decorated with the bank’s insignia. Inside was $1,500, in crisp hundred-dollar notes.

  By now, Autumn had moved in with her boyfriend and I lived in a loft with two other sober girlfriends. When Jeremiah e-mailed me a month later, asking if I was free that weekend, I turned to them for advice. I was hoping, I think, for permission to say no. They knew all about Jeremiah already; I had briefed them in comic installments. This presented the problem; no one could give me accurate advice, because no one knew the whole truth. It had been the same with my addiction. The stories I told about the dungeon were carefully slanted. People loved them; they were funny. The reasons why I wanted someone to tell me to stop I kept hidden, and so no one did. In my telling, the job became alternately gross, hilarious, tedious, sexy, glamorous, and shocking. It depended if I was trying to befriend or seduce you. I had become an expert at discerning immediately what a person’s response would be and how to play it up or down. No one heard about the real disgust, pleasure, or sexuality my job involved. I wouldn’t have known how to describe those aspects if I wanted to.

  And so when I went to my roommate and expressed my reluctance, she looked at me in disbelief.

  “Yeah, he sounds really annoying. But fifteen hundred dollars? Come on. I would do it if I could.” What she meant was if she had the opportunity. At this point, I was starting to know better. When I began using hard drugs, I thought that if everyone knew how good it felt, they would do the same. I figured it was only social stigma and cowardice that kept other people from going to the lengths that I did. But I could not imagine my roommate going through with what I knew that session entailed.

  Fifteen hundred dollars. For an hour’s work. It sounded amazing, when you didn’t know what the work meant, or when you pretended not to.

  31

  I WAS ENROLLED in Sarah Lawrence’s insurance plan. When I called Health Services and requested a referral for a therapist whose fee my insurance would cover, they said I would have to make an appointment with someone on staff first.

  “I’d rather not, if possible,” I told the friendly receptionist.

  “I’m afraid it’s required.”

  “I’m afraid that I need someone with more experience. Off campus.”

  “It’s just the one appointment, miss, and our staff is very experienced.” Most of the warmth had left her tone. “When would you like to come in?”

  It was uncharacteristic of me to be so confrontational. My fear of conflict in everyday life (however ironic) extended even to phone conversations with strangers. I was much more the be-friendly-and-accommodating-now-and-fume-later type. In this case, though, I was filled with panic at the prospect of saying aloud what I planned to say, to some idealistic ignoramus in a room only yards away from my professors’ offices. It wasn’t what I had imagined.

  Not that I had imagined ever telling anyone the exact details of my sessions. Spilling my secrets was a last resort. Still unsure if I wanted to quit completely, I had tried stopping, to see if I could. It was harder than I’d hoped.

  Most of my private sessions were made by e-mail at this point. My clients would contact me to discuss a session, and then I would either book a private space or have them call the dungeon to make an official appointment on one of my two shifts there. All I had to do was not check that e-mail account. I called in sick to Mistress X’s and committed to no sessions for one week. It would be easy, I thought, a vacation. All I would have to do was my homework. I knew how to not do things, after all, didn’t I? But I couldn’t stop checking that e-mail. I made it the first few days, but my head was crowded with earnest reasons why this was the wrong time to take a break. The holidays were looming; I was still building a private client base, trying to get rid of the Tonys; didn’t I promise to get back to Albert about the following week? It wouldn’t be cheating if I just wanted to reply to someone and let him know I was off this week; it would be professional courtesy. This logic was good enough, and I ended up doing one session that week and scheduling three for the next. I finished the session anxious, instead of exhilarated; I had failed to uphold my commitment. No, the timing had been bad, and I had chosen to reconsider my decision. Who was I letting down anyway? Satisfied with that explanation, I tried again two weeks later, with the same result. When abstaining, I obsessed, and when I gave in, I felt guilty and anxious. The money offered a fleeting comfort.

  When I had first begun working with Greta and was only a few weeks off heroin, she made me look up the word “compulsion.” I had been arguing with her over the idea of powerlessness. She said I wouldn’t stay clean unless I could admit mine. I said that I had survived by my own agency. According to the dictionary, a compulsion was an irresistible impulse to perform an act that is contrary to one’s will.

  “Do you believe in truth?” she asked me.

  “Of course.”

  “How about caring for yourself?”

  “Sure.”

  “And you want to practice these things?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But do you?”

  I saw then that I could not even abide by my own beliefs. I had kept getting high long after it stopped being fun, after I began wanting to stop. In order to abide by my craving, I had acted contrary to my beliefs, to what I knew to be true. I had always suspected that I felt capable of anything because I was morally corrupt, or intellectually superior, or both. I discovered that my compulsions were simply stronger than my will. Never mind taking care of myself, I had tried everything within my power to stop shooting heroin and cocaine into my body. Telling the whole truth had been the only thing that worked.

  “But why?” Dylan asked when I broke up with him. We fought more days than we didn’t, but I had still known that it would catch him off guard.

  “I just don’t think we can change fast enough to love each other well.”

  He squinted at the pillow in his hands.

  “We haven’t been very good at it for a while,” I said.

  True as this was, I had other reasons. I wanted to take a clearer look at my job, and in order to do that I needed to disentangle from his vision of me—and all the omissions in his version of what I did. I wanted a clean palette. I had a list of other reasons for leaving him, including his chronic sickness—which I, ever the psychotherapist’s daughter, considered a somatic manifestation of his anger at his parents. Also, his inability to express verbal affection. And then my general feeling of resentment and malaise in the relation
ship. I didn’t actually count among them the confusion of my desire to get honest. I couldn’t admit then that I resented his tolerance of my job. I didn’t consider how my own behavior had damaged the integrity of our relationship, and underestimated the corrosive power of what I kept from him. I don’t think we ever could have recovered. I had chosen him partly because he would cosign what I did, like the painter had, and my parents, and everyone else I told my half-truths to. In a way, Dylan and I were perfect for each other but also doomed: in our silence we simultaneously protected and betrayed each other.

  The counselor at school was probably five years older than me. I had become nauseous a few hours prior to my appointment. I felt like a defiant child walking into the Health Services office. The counselor looked nice, her face studiously free of suggestion or judgment. It occurred to me, looking at her well-meaning face, that she would pity me for what I did. I wasn’t used to telling anyone about my job who wouldn’t be impressed by it, find it shocking in a good way. I felt angry then, at her, for that pity.

  “I’m Megan.” She smiled. “What’s been going on?”

  “I torture people for money and I can’t stop,” I said, wanting to punish her for my shame.

  They referred me to a woman whose office was on Fifth Avenue, just west of Union Square. Dressed conservatively—as I was most days by this time—in jeans and a turtleneck sweater, I exchanged covert once-overs with the other woman in the waiting room and took that same old pleasure in her likely misconception. I probably looked as if I worked for a magazine, a publisher, a designer. She did. She probably assumed I was just like her: same cool job, boyfriend, sadness. When a man in a jacket opened the door and smiled at her, she followed him out into the hallway. I wondered if I shouldn’t have asked for a referral to see a male therapist. That would have been less intimidating. I would probably have been feeling excitement rather than dread at that moment. Which is why I knew that a male therapist would have been useless. I knew a lot about myself in fact, and when my own therapist led me into her cozy office overlooking 16th Street, I proceeded to inform her of it for the next thirty minutes. I needed her to know exactly how knowledgeable I was.