As She's Told

by Anneke Jacob

  "No, sorry." No explanations, nothing for him to argue with. I didn't owe Isadore anything, had in fact done him more favours than he deserved.

  Only one person I owed my utmost to, and he didn't have to wheedle and manoeuvre to get what he wanted.

  I'd been naked in the mirror that morning, examining the chain around my waist. When Anders had first put it on me I'd hardly dared to touch the lock, but as my confidence in it grew I'd pulled on it gently from time to time. This morning I'd grabbed the chain in both hands and pulled it apart with all my strength. This had made not the slightest visible impression. A bubble of elation had lifted me up and carried me into the day.

  When I was busy I could forget about the chain for whole quarter-hours at a time. But it tugged at my consciousness: a constant presence, a fence that set me off, a property line. Its reality made me so excited sometimes that I could hardly concentrate.

  They were talking to me, laughing at my abstraction. "Maia, wake up!"

  said Heather. "What? Sorry."

  "There's an on-line conference tonight on internet ethics. We can pick up material for the censorship paper."

  "Tonight? No, I can't," I said hastily. Anders was coming at seven, and no way was I going to suggest to him that there was something else I ought to be doing. I gathered up my things and nodded farewells.

  Po Ling caught me up outside the door. "You got a new boyfriend, ah?"

  she said slyly. I flushed.

  "Mind is on other things, I can tell. I saw when he dropped you off at the library." Po Ling eyed me and her smile was arch. No wonder. The goodbye kiss had been epic. "Don't forget your schoolwork, okay? But you're more organized now." She nodded approval. "Making time for the boyfriend I bet. He a nice guy?"

  "Yes," I said truthfully. "Wait a second, I meant to show you, have you 71

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  seen this?" I rummaged hastily in my bag for a job posting I'd printed off that morning, just right for Po Ling. She ran her eyes down it, opened them wide. "Hey, that's a good one!" She looked up. "Why are you – Don't you want it?”

  “No, I'm – looking at other things. Got to go."

  ***

  >Sorry if my cautions sound like the warnings of elders. This is much more your role than mine, I think.

  >You're right. Svend and Janne always used to complain that I took the joy out of life. It's an elder brother imperative, I think. But being over-responsible is no bad thing at the moment.

  >Chain is very nice. Just do not send her through a metal detector.

  She sounds not ready for the humiliation.

  >No problem. It doesn't set off the alarm at the university library, which is all that matters right now.

  >Ria asks if your inexperienced sub has any idea how a whipping feels, before she agrees to stay with you.

  >She'll know how a whip feels soon enough. Before she has to agree.

  Tell Ria thanks. Tell her I still remember her advice on cane technique.

  >She had three men on their knees… I cannot tell you how fearsome and enthralling she was.

  >Enthralling, good word. I remember her in that silvery outfit; she was awe-inspiring. But that tiger growl of hers is even better. Are you two still taking turns being the dom, or are you just taking it out on other people? Vanilla at home? Hard to imagine you two having an ordinary fuck.

  Has Ria made up her mind about Chicago?

  >took Tante Berta home and she will be okay with care. You heard this, yes? Our Mormor is predicting doom as always but secretly is pleased.

  >Of course she's pleased. She's getting the chance to take charge in her sister-in-law's house; it's been her ambition for fifty years. She's probably already using Rationalist principles to rearrange all the kitchen utensils.

  >Tante Berta has the slice back in her tongue, by the way. I did the dutiful grand-nephew thing and called her yesterday. Sweet with me, but took her nurse apart and didn't cover the phone.

  >Is your girl believing yet she cannot leave?

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  >Right now she knows the choice is still there, and hates it. Give me time. The house isn't ready for her yet. And I need to get further into her head.

  ***

  The days went by in a weirdly contrasting diamond pattern: bright, sharp hours with Anders standing out against the ordinary, matte colours of daily routine. Except that gleaming threads had begun to weave themselves through the duller patches. The chain like a silvery cable, keeping me in place for the next encounter. The phone calls. The thrill every morning when I woke up and remembered that I was behaving according to someone else's wishes and not my own.

  My body felt subtly different, more receptive, as if it had gathered an extra layer of blood and nerve endings. As if my skin was one big erogenous zone. I kept searching for the signs in mirrors, but apart from the chain, I looked the same as always. Still, sometimes I felt as if I was moving under water, balletic and weighed down.

  I tried in odd, breathless moments to guess what he might be planning to do with me. He had kept his promise not to consult or negotiate. I turned his words from our first meeting over and over in my mind, like prophecy.

  As promised, we got to know each other better. Stories From My Childhood, that kind of thing. I'd get one view of the younger Anders, and then another that seemed like some other person. Like when you make plans at different times for the same day, oblivious to the conflict, the information filing itself in separate cul-de-sacs in your brain. When the neural pathways finally cross and stumble over each other, it's a bit of a jolt.

  There was the pragmatic northern-European social-democrat side, with eminently sane, rational, socially conscious parents. He told me without irony about family outings straight out of a milk ad, everyone skating and skiing and snorkelling together, collectively blond and wholesome. Even his dour grandmother, who sounded like something out of a Bergman movie, still skated along with the rest. A contrast to my own family, in which my father took his exercise on a keyboard, and my mother preferred hers at her upscale fitness club where she could combine Tae Bo with networking. I grew up thinking exercise was something you drove to. Then there was this other young Anders, still, oddly enough, with family. Brooding and smoking dope in a moodily-lit bedroom with his cousin Karl over Christmas and 73

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  summer holidays, discussing floggers and gags and the rope harness demo they'd used their early height to sneak into. There was a long, licentious weekend in Amsterdam. Nocturnal expeditions in Copenhagen. This driven, dissolute Anders and his cousin biked home at dawn, downed bowls of muesli and got back on their bikes for jolly day trips with their family.

  He laughed at my bemusement. "Did you picture me skating in black leather? Imagine what my grandmother would have said. Though after all I suppose I snorkelled in black rubber; very kinky if you're into that kind of thing."

  I shook my head, unable to explain.

  "You know about living a double life, all the incongruity," he said.

  "Goes with the territory."

  "Oh, sure," I agreed. "But for me the split has been between my – my internal and external – um – personas. My outward face and, you know, the

  'real me.' I didn't do the outward stuff like you did. I mean, you actually had a good time with – and – and identified with both sides, didn't you? I just acted the one and identified with the other."

  "Yes, I see. But why are you constructing them as polar opposites?

  Darkness and daylight, wicked and pure, all that?"

  "No, no," I said, and paused. "Well, maybe. Darkness and daylight, yes.

  Not wicked and pure. They just seem so opposite. But without the value judgment."

  "That's still a construction you're imposing yourself. I don't see them as opposed. Why can't d/s be part of a healthy lifestyle, served with exercise and fresh vegetables?"

  I laughed, and added
this to my list of prophetic hints to be pondered.

  That calm pragmatism of his was like a curtain, occasionally blown aside by gusts of anger and disgust when world's idiocies pressed too hard.

  But unlike my craven, retreating self, Anders actually took some action. I rarely got him all to myself on any downtown walk, because street people got more than money from him; they got camaraderie, conversation, validation. His customers got energy conservation in their renovations whether they asked for it or not. And despite his frustration with the subsidized housing funding situation, he always seemed to be conferring about potential projects that were long on social value, and noticeably short on profit.

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  Anders had some odd and eclectic interests: environment and behaviour, bonsai, the history of technology, jazz violin. His memory for blues and traditional folk songs, both music and lyrics, seemed to me to be encyclopaedic. All sorts of fascinating observations emerged at odd moments; things like why zebras were never domesticated, or what stopped the Mongols from taking over Europe in the thirteenth century. He seemed to know everything about the impact on cities of suburban sprawl and high rises (bad) and of European-style high-density lowrises (good). Anders could name every one of the Toronto projects that met his standards (not hard; there weren't many), and dozens that were nightmares.

  One day he gave me a tour of the work he was doing on his house. We picked our way through the lumber and trestles and toolboxes. There seemed to be an additional wall being built inside the current walls, and there were rolls of spongy material everywhere. This turned out to be soundproofing.

  How something so mundane could shake me up so much I don't know; I had one of those terror-joy moments.

  Anders told me what he'd be doing with this room and that, but a lot of it went over my head. The house all looked pretty deconstructed; I had a hard time visualizing the surfaces freed of their layers of old paint and linoleum and construction debris. His long, self-assured body kept distracting me, moving ahead through the splintery shadows, leading me with a hard hand on my wrist. The resinous smells of cut wood were powerfully like the smell he carried about with him, and made me want very badly to get under his clothes. I did manage to pay enough attention to gather something about the kind of aesthetic he was aiming for. He showed me some of the good wood grain that lurked beneath the grimy paint on the windowsills, and talked about how this would look stripped and varnished.

  There was a fireplace, or at least the outer portion, in amongst the lumber in the basement, a rather beautiful art deco design in honeycoloured wood. But the mantelpiece was missing.

  "It's by Roberts, out of a series of midtown apartments from the early thirties. Which were taken down in the seventies when they were flattening anything with character. Sooner or later I'll find the mantelpiece, and then I'll put it in."

  "Is there a fireplace?" I asked, puzzled. "I didn't see one."

  "It's covered over, but it's there. Side wall of the living room. I could put 75

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  something in there in the meantime, but I want to wait for this one. Look at this carving…." He ran his fingers through symmetrical grooves. Suddenly I could feel those fingers in my own grooves. He gave me a long look over his shoulder, and his smile stripped me bare. Slowly he stepped over to me and ran his hands down my body. I leaned my head on his chest, and let the moan loose. "You'll be installed yourself, soon enough, girl," he murmured.

  A glance at his watch. "You have work to do; let's get you back."

  Anders' work and his other preoccupations – me included – revealed such a capacity for patience that at first I had it filed as a kind of character keynote. Not only the kindness-toweaker-creatures kind of patience, though he had plenty of that. What I also saw was thoughtful deliberation, a capacity for long-range planning and execution; a requisite, I suppose, for the complex, stepwise processes of his job. More than impressive to someone with my last-minute mentality.

  But patience wasn't always his leading a characteristic. For instance, Anders seemed to find formalities or ceremony of any kind quite intolerable.

  I first got an inkling of this when, in the course of a long downtown stroll, we came across a political function of some kind in Nathan Phillips Square.

  I never did get an idea of what it was about, because even though the politicians were the ones he approved of, more or less, he pulled me away, grumbling, "I hate speeches." I had to break into a trot to keep up with him.

  Once the amplified voices were down to a muffled indecipherable shout and I'd caught my breath, I drew back on his arm and said, "What do you mean, you hate speeches?"

  His glance at me as he slowed was grey and chill. That Viking chieftain look had given way to Reformation righteousness. My companion had morphed into a cold-eyed ascetic in a black robe, minus the black robe.

  "Mouthing platitudes," he pronounced. "Repeating the obvious, just for the sake of saying it from a platform. Planting little clues to policy for the reporters to pick over. Nothing but games and bullshit."

  There was that hint of a Danish inflection that meant anger. Not directed at me this time, thankfully. I wondered if he knew he did it. I could feel the nascent fear that anger always created in me, even when it was directed elsewhere. But for the moment curiosity was stronger. "What if it was an OCAP rally? I thought you used to go to them.”

  “Got tired of the speeches."

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  "What about if it was the opening of a non-profit housing project?

  Would you go then?”

  “What for? So I can watch people congratulate themselves for funding something they should have funded fifteen years before? No way. I'd be in the building working, not in front listening to a bunch of crap."

  I couldn't help smiling. "Oh, boy. No wonder you didn't go in for politics."

  He snorted, and then grinned, one side only, and the righteous look fell away. "Not a game player.”

  “Don't you have to be diplomatic with customers sometimes?"

  He laughed. "The truth can be very diplomatic. As long as I only swear in Danish."

  "But the building projects – housing homeless people – trying to get that going – there's tons of politics, surely?"

  The smile disappeared. "Too goddamned much. Coalitions.

  Committees. This and that pointless meeting. Yet another bloody task force.

  Christ!"

  Not surprisingly, Anders was very good at mechanical things. The sort of person you want around in a crisis. We were on our way to his place early one evening when he pulled the truck over to the side of the road without a word, and got out. I watched, puzzled, as he went over to an elderly, heavy man on a motorized scooter. Someone he knew? The man's frustrated movements clued me in at last; the scooter was stuck. The next minute Anders was back at the truck for tools.

  The comments and advice from the inevitable gathering of onlookers seemed to be neither here nor there as far as Anders was concerned; he just focused competently on the job at hand. His confidence was contagious; the old man started out querulous and agitated, but as Anders took on the problem he calmed down, and before long he'd perked up and was making jokes at his own expense. In short order Anders found the problem, fixed it, and had the man back on his scooter. He walked along beside him for a minute, listening to the machine. Then a quick handshake and we were on our way.

  "That was amazing!" I said admiringly, as we pulled out.

  "What?"

  "What you just did. There'll probably be a letter in the Star tomorrow 77

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  about kind strangers. How the world's not such a mean place after all."

  He shrugged, glanced over his shoulder and changed lanes. "Couldn't just leave him there."

  "What if you hadn't been able to fix it so fast?"

  "I'd have
hefted him and his scooter into the truck and we would have taken him home. Which would have been cosy."

  Cosy indeed. There was only the front seat, and the gentleman would have taken some hefting. I thought for a bit. "I think you're even more – how can I say it – more generous with your skills than I am."

  "Possibly. I do have limits." He shifted gears, and flicked a sly glance at me. "If you think I'm such a kind soul, think again."

  My heart skipped a beat or two. "Why?"

  "You're forgetting how to address me, woman."

  The thumping in my chest accelerated, making up for lost time. "Sorry.

  Sir."

  I kept quiet the rest of the way, watching his face from the corner of my eye. Once inside his door he reached for me, then looked at his hands.

  "Damn. Don't move. This is what I get for random acts of kindness – lack of spontaneity – " He went off and washed his hands in the kitchen. I looked around. The construction debris had shifted to a new area; that was the only visible change. Anders came back and briskly stripped my clothes off, trapped my nipples tightly between his fingers and stared down at me. "I think you're taking my sweet nature for granted. Maybe it's time to show you a little less kindness."

  He drove me naked up the stairs again, but this time he was crueller.

  Like before, the first smack almost paralyzed me with lust; I felt it, crisp and heavy, right through me, from the top of my belly to the insides of my thighs.

  "Up!" came the sharp command.

  I managed to take a step and he smacked the other side. "Up!" Another step. He smacked each thigh in turn; two more steps. Suddenly I groaned; there were hard fingers pulling down and back on my nipples, stopping me in my tracks. I could feel my cunt lips swelling slippery against each other.

  The pull continued, harder, and my hands were on the stairs, supporting me while he pinched and twisted. Suddenly his fingers were back in my cunt, his thumb slipping into my asshole. I was breathing in huge gasps. Another 78

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  stinging smack on my thigh. "Up!" The hand inside me pulled up, keeping me flung forward on my hands, and I was forced up the steps on all fours, propelled by smacks and steered at the end of his arm like a household machine, like something you push around on a stick.