Finally, at midnight, Pat turned to me and asked, “Well, chica, waddya want to know about your sis?”
I was flummoxed at this point, so the questions gushed out of me like an overactive waterfall. None of them actually stuck because I was saying them so fast even Pat couldn’t understand me.
“I have an idea,” Pat said, holding up the shush finger in front of his lips. “Why don’t I take you to the club where your sister liked to play?”
I had never been to a play party or a dungeon or a power station—descriptors Pat used on the ride over, but none of which were listed on the sign outside, which read, “Love Inc. A Private Retreat for Couples.” It was a basement party palace that was only open to private membership. I quickly learned that in the world of sex, “couples only” meant no solo men. Women were always welcome to come alone, especially if they were the pulchritudinous kind.
I followed Pat down an ordinary wood-paneled hall, past a sign in station where we showed our driver’s licenses and he a red members card, and we were on our way to the back where people were mostly just milling about in various states of leather and undress.
“Well, Pat, who’s the babe?” one middle-aged woman asked, leaning in to hear the answer. “Oh, I should have seen the resemblance. I’m Natalie.” Middle-aged pushed her hand toward me in greeting.
“Nice to meet you.” Was this how it was in a sex club, I wondered. Shaking hands with folks who were thirty years older than me, not a speck of sex anywhere in sight? But Pat pulled me away and started showing me around the club, back to the solo and group play rooms, where finally there were couples and groups of average-looking people in different scenarios, sporting leather, uniforms, or nothing but boots, each offering up scenes of submission, domination, and bondage. It would be salacious to Father, but nothing that was remotely shocking to me, especially not after reading Ash’s journals and watching her DVDs.
After Pat disappeared into another room, I wandered around more, mostly just watching the action unfold in front of me. A few of the women looked vaguely familiar. One was that tall blonde who had the threesome with my sister. Another could have been the woman from the group encounter with the bird beak masks. But in this setting everyone looked somewhat recognizable yet wholly strange. One woman even looked a bit like my stepmother, though I was certain she wasn’t. Tabitha would never be at a place like this. The very idea of it made me titter with giggles.
“Enjoying yourself, I see?” The brunette from another video sidled up to me.
“Oh, I was imagining someone here that wouldn’t dare step foot in a joint like this.”
She nodded and smiled and I could see she was quite attractive up close, when not visualized through pixilated video, though I was having trouble imagining her without a ginormous dildo strapped to her thigh. I guess this was the downside to seeing so many folks naked; real life could be a bit of a letdown. No wonder Ash had to keep ratcheting up the tension more and more just to get off.
“You’d be surprised at the people who do come in here,’’ the brunette drawled, her short hair flipping up at her collar, a little shaggy bang showing off her eyes. “Is this your first time?”
“Indeed it is. I’m Megan.”
“I know. I recognize the resemblance.” Like everyone else, she clearly knew my sister. She didn’t offer up her own name, nor did her demeanor betray curiosity. “What brought you here? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“I’m trying to find out who my sister Ash really was. She came here a lot.”
“Do you know why she came here?”
I shook my head. I was mildly curious, oddly fascinated by these naked, blithe people and their willingness to act out roles of power and submission. The scene fascinated me the way many parts of Ash’s world had come to fascinate me, but I still couldn’t say I knew why Ash came here, to this particular place, to this particular club, or why she stopped coming here.
“She was working through something in her past. I can’t say any more, but I think she’d be glad to know that you knew that about her.” The nameless brunette began to turn, to walk away from me, but I stopped her before she did, pushing myself in front of her as nicely and calmly as possible.
“Wait, what do you mean? Please tell me what you mean. I have to find out what was going on with her before she died or I’ll never know who killed her.”
“Listen, kiddo, some questions are better left unanswered. Your sister’s death may just be one of those questions.” That was it. I had had enough.
“Oh, for the love of God,” I said, my voice raising just a pinch. “Why does everyone around me speak in fucking riddles these days? I feel like I’m Alice falling down the rabbit hole, and every time I try to get a logical answer out of someone, something cryptic comes out of their fucking mouth. It’s like living with Mister Miyagi, for fuck’s sake. Don’t tell me to go east or west or feel the wind or learn which questions weren’t meant to be answered. These cryptic answers might be fine for the Mad Hatter, but they’re driving me batty. I have to know what you’re talking about. Please just tell me.”
She looked stunned, which I hoped was a good thing. She didn’t let me know, but steered me rather forcefully down a darkened stairwell that led down another flight below the ground-level club. I began to worry. Where was she taking me? What did I know about this woman, or Pat, for that matter, or any of these people? Nothing. Nobody knew I was even here. For all I knew this woman was a serial killer, leading me to the fruit cellar to carve my body up like a Halloween pumpkin.
Before our feet hit the ground floor, she stopped and turned toward me, whispering in my ear, “Do you really want to know?”
“Of course,” I said with more certainty than I felt.
“Okay,” she said and calmly laid it all out. “Ash was abused as a kid. She was trying to work through it with SM.”
No, she wasn’t. She couldn’t have been. How could she have been abused and not told me?
“You’re lying. She lied. I don’t believe you.” A dozen denials rushed forth all at once.
“I figured as much. She shielded you from it.” The woman was calm, collected. Why was she lying to me? Maybe Ash wanted attention so badly she told the women here she was an abuse victim.
“Who supposedly abused her? I would have known!” We shared a room until Mother died, had all the same uncles and priests and deacons as each other. It wasn’t possible.
“I don’t know. All I know is that she was sexually assaulted as a child and took it upon herself to protect you from the abuse. We don’t normally let abuse victims play at our parties because it can be hard for them to distinguish pleasure pain from what was thrust upon them, but Ash had already gone through therapy, had moved beyond her abuse to this different place. This was her safe space to work out her self-injurious behavior without harming herself. We watched over her to make sure she never went too far.”
But she did go too far at some point, didn’t she? Something must have gone seriously wrong because Ash was dead and I was in the basement of a sex club talking about abuse allegations with a woman with pierced nipples, buttless chaps, and a belly harness.
“I have to go,” I gasped before sprinting up the stairs and out into the night air, choking back tears and swallowing oxygen like I’d been underwater or buried alive. I couldn’t breathe.
Was Ash really sexually abused? Who could have done such a thing to her? All our uncles were old men now, our church elders all the same old men that we had as kids. Nobody sprang to mind. That was the disturbing thing about pedophiles, how easily they blended into society. But why had it never come out over all these years? And who would have dared harm the favorite daughter of Bradford Thomas Caulfield? Surely whoever did such a thing must not have known Father, because if they had they would have known they were risking their very lives by touching Ash. I had absolutely no doubt that if my father had found someone even looking at Ash that way when she was just a child, he would have literally cho
ked the life out of them.
I didn’t recall any of our family friends going missing, or any male relatives dying in suspicious circumstances. Wasn’t that proof that it didn’t happen?
That night I fell into bed without a word to Shane, exhausted from a day of revelations and debauchery. Was this how Ash felt? Sexually stimulated one moment, embarrassed and mortified the next? It left me with both a terrible sense of shame and a burning desire to return as soon as possible.
Chapter Thirteen
It was the fifth round of a knock-down, drag-out match between Shane and me.
In the weeks since the sex club fiasco I’d been back at least half a dozen times, usually for research but sometimes for more personal reasons. I didn’t tell Shane, but she sensed something was up. The girlfriend usually knows. I almost told Tabitha once, too. I ached to tell someone about my sexual odyssey, but the fear Father would find out was too great to make that leap.
Pat had taken me under his wing, introducing me to the other clubs in the city, sending me off alone or with his other friends to the girls-only affairs by the college, instructing me on going incognito to the city’s rarified mixed-gender bathhouse, even accompanying me to the couples swing parties where a girl like Ash—or me—could bounce from room to room only accepting pleasure if she were so inclined.
Pat liked to swing, with girls, with boys, and even though Ash mostly liked women, I could see why she put out for Pat, too. He was all about pleasure, pure hedonism. It was thrilling, living only for that moment, not just that orgasm, or the flush on skin when someone touched me, not even for the sheer joy of having a roomful of people lust after you, if only for a night. It was the moment, being surrounded in that moment by nothing but sexuality. It might be vacuous, living among these denizens of the night, planning nothing beyond my next trick. But I found my new world wholly intoxicating. I was no longer Megan Caulfield, bookworm and little sister. Here I was Queen Christina, Helen of Troy, Xaviera Hollander, Erica Jong. I was the happy hooker, the coffee, tea, or me girl, every erotic icon I had ever read about in literature, and I couldn’t get enough of it.
There was an emptiness inside me that hadn’t been filled, couldn’t be filled until all of me was filled, and believe me, in these darkened nameless sex clubs, I was finally getting my fill—in every sense of the word.
Unfortunately, there was little room for Shane in my new life and she seemed fully aware of it. She never once asked to join me in these adventures, and though she used to complain about my dullness in the sack, now she couldn’t wait to have me scale things back sexually.
“You’re spending too much time in these sex clubs, Megan,” she yelled. “You’re so far into that world that you’re becoming just like your sister. Do you want to end up like her too?”
“My God, Shane, I would think you would care more about me than to threaten me like that.” I was livid. How dare she try to suppress my sexual exploration with scare tactics!
“Babe, I’m not threatening you. I’m worried about you. You go out every night, you stay out all hours, I never know what you’re doing out there. I feel like you’re not just trying to find out what happened to Ash, you’re trying to become Ash.”
Maybe I was. Maybe I liked the feeling. The truth was, I was enjoying the sexual explorations more than I wanted to admit. But Shane, well fuck, Shane was the one who was bored with our old sex life, so I’d think she’d be happy about these changes, maybe even proud of my sexual expansion.
I was enraged that she wanted to thwart everything now that it was no longer convenient for her. I didn’t want to be under her thumb, but she was determined to keep me there. It was like living with Father again, and the whole thing made me scream and cry all at once.
“You know, Shane, this is all rather rich coming from the woman who trolled around my sister like a tabby in heat for weeks on end. If you loathed Ash so much, why did you spend every waking moment hanging on her?”
Shane stared, full of bitterness and rage, but clearly mulling her words carefully. “Megan, your sister was a whore. I hung around for the same reason everyone else hung around. Probably the same reason people hang around you nowadays. Feel better?” With that carefully metered yet bitter retort, Shane just turned and marched off, slamming the bedroom door behind her and then the front door, as she left the house. I heard the engine gun and I knew she and her stupid motorcycle were gone for the night, if not forever, and I threw myself on the bed crying like I had the day we buried my sister. It was a long, tortured night.
*
I was sitting at Father’s office, the gnarled oak desk a rather foreboding presence there. I didn’t know why he commanded my company, but I was there, the ever-dutiful daughter, sitting in the room I was usually banished from. In the very few times in my life that he had asked me to come here, I never noticed before how large and imposing the desk was. I was tempted to make an analogy about my father and this beast of office furniture as my mind was doing its best to not focus on why I had been summoned by the man I so rarely had contact with.
So instead, I wondered why the CEO of a lumber corporation didn’t even have a computer. Did his secretary do all his typing? What about monitoring the stock market or something? It was baffling. Combined with his charcoal leather executive chair—also about three times larger than the visitor chair I was seated in—the giant desk and dark wood walls made me feel like I was tiny and insignificant and powerless, like a third grader in the principal’s office. I supposed this worked for Father, making his visitors and employees feel powerless and malleable, but it made me wonder about his confidence, his virility, even his desire to appear the authority at work and home.
Father was always so powerful, so foreboding, that I never dared cross him. After my mother’s death, he detached himself from the family, sending Ash and me to boarding school for a time, and removing every indication of Mom from the home. I didn’t even know where all her stuff went—maybe to the Junior League thrift store—but a lot of our childhood memories went with it. The dinosaur drawings, the Popsicle stick pot holder, that stupid clay ashtray, the family photos from the Grand Canyon—all of them were gone when we came back from that winter at Hollingsworth Academy.
We never once spoke about her after she was gone. Father wasn’t an emotional guy. No, scrap that. He was a clinical guy, and stern pragmatist, so I figured his aloofness made it so he was insensitive to a fault. He married almost immediately after Mom’s death, when Tabitha was nineteen. It was the first time Father did anything that the country club set might frown upon, but I learned early on that at least half of his peers—the male half—were more than just okay with it, they were envious.
My best friend that year told me Father was having a midlife crisis, but he certainly never talked to us about it. Maybe he was. Maybe my mother’s death jolted him awake and he decided to bank on the youth and beauty of a woman only two years older than his daughter. But the truth was, he remained an enigma to me, and honestly, to everyone around us. If he had a breakdown and turned to Viagra and teen pussy as the cure-all for watching my mother die, I’d never know it. For us, she died, we were sent away, he got a new wife, we came home. Nobody in our home ever discussed emotions after my mother died, least of all him.
When we did have talks with Father, they felt much like they did today, with me sitting in his office, surrounded by the trappings of masculinity, waiting to find out exactly what he or Tabitha thought I had done wrong this time.
“Your mother isn’t happy about the shenanigans.” He didn’t bother filling in the gaps, knowing that with a little information I’d hang myself.
“I’ve asked you not to call Tabitha my mother,” I retorted. The woman graduated high school the same year I arrived there, for fuck’s sake. Why did he have to push this all the time? “And I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”
“I know about your visit to the pool house, Megan. You’re certainly welcome to visit our house any time you
like, but it’s not appropriate for you to be breaking in, in the middle of the night, with some hooligan in tow. I want to know what the hell you think you were doing?” He was trying to sound reserved, but I could sense a darkness underscoring his words. It was my house, too, until last year, and now it was their house and if I didn’t plan to come to Sunday dinner I was somehow breaking in. Well, in this case I did, but still, it was the principle of the matter.
“Fuck. I did not break in!” I protested a bit too loudly.
“Megan,” Father exclaimed in an odd monotone whisper. The yell whisper I liked to call it. “We’re in a professional setting here. I don’t know what your workplace is like, but that’s not appropriate language at my company.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just frustrating. I didn’t break in. I had the key and I let myself in. Is Tabitha upset, or are you upset?” He ignored my questions.
“And what were you doing there? Why did your friend need to be there?” Father said friend like it was an insult, a word that should be spat out in certain circumstances. I wondered what he envisioned when he imagined Shane. Did he simply see the woman corrupting his daughter, or something far more sinister? Did every mention of her and me lead him back to sex? Another irony, given that so few things lead us to sex nowadays.
The conversation continued on for what seemed like hours but must have only been a few minutes given Father’s tight schedule. I managed to stave him off with a confession that I was missing Ash and wanted to feel close to her again—which wasn’t untrue—and I promised not do it again. If I came to the house again I’d have to come alone and plan to stay for dinner per Tabitha’s request. By the time I got back to my apartment, all I wanted to do was throw myself in a hot tub, pop in some schmaltzy meditation CD, and wash away the whole episode. Someone had other plans.
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