by P. J. Fox
Gathering for the porn parties was no different than gathering for any other movie night. Only there had been a rule: no masturbating. For most of them, this hadn’t been a challenging rule to follow. Even the most intrepid thrill seekers usually drew the line at wanking off in front of other boys. It was different than having an underclassman do it to you, too. That was purely physical. But fantasies were personal and it was the fantasy, the idea that something had spoken to him on even that base and disposable of a level, that Ash would never share. So he’d been both mortified and amused when he discovered that the boy who lived down the hall was fondling himself under his blanket.
Soon it got to the point where, every time the boy showed up in the common room, he did so to a chorus of jokes. He wasn’t a bad sort, not really, just…not the sort you’d leave alone with a child. Or your sister. Ash couldn’t put his finger on what had bothered him so much about the boy. He was so inoffensive. Yet he’d raised the hairs on the back of Ash’s neck nonetheless. Then and now, remembering. Sipping his Macallan, he wondered where that boy had gone off to. What kind of man he’d become.
The fat man was bidding on the next girl. A Nubian princess type. Bright beads of sweat stood out on his brow, reflecting the glow from the stage. The room buzzed, not with the erotic tension of flirting with a beautiful woman at a dance but with the low urgency of pigs rutting in the mud. The room was small, but better appointed than Ash’s old common room had been. He’d been here before, of course. He’d originally been invited to join the club by a business associate. Memberships were by invitation only, for obvious reasons. Although no one seemed to care, including Ash, that what they were doing was highly illegal. Not to mention morally repugnant.
Did the fact that he knew that, and accepted it, make him better or worse than his compatriots?
He enjoyed the Macallan, which sold for over ten thousand American a bottle. It was peaty and powerful, with dried fruit and sweet toffee flavors. He’d grown up in a country where the average citizen lived on half a dollar a day.
“These chairs are comfortable,” said the fat man.
Ash made a noncommittal noise. No expense had been spared to make what, for lack of a better term, could be called the viewing area as pleasant as Heaven itself. That is, if Heaven were populated with hard-eyed houris. And flesh peddlers, hawking one drug-addled ware on stage after another.
The fat man won his Nubian princess. “My wife,” he began hesitantly, “my wife doesn’t…like to do things anymore.”
Ash wondered why he felt the need to explain himself.
Another man, who looked too young to afford the cover charge, spoke up. “No one will marry me. I’m too ugly.” And he was ugly. But his whiny tone was what made him unattractive. No woman wanted a man who felt sorry for himself, or who thought about nothing beyond his own looks. Unless, of course, he had something else to offer.
“You’re rich.” Ash was unable to keep the scorn out of his voice.
“They don’t care.” The man shrugged.
Ash knew, from personal experience, that wealth was all that mattered. A truth that had embittered him, along with all the other truths he’d learned over the course of a life that had made him feel far older than he was.
His full name was Ashwin Shivendra Jayachamaraja Hari Singh, a complex name with an illustrious heritage that he’d shortened in the business world to Ashwin Singh. His associates called him Ash. His friends, such as he had, called him Ash. He’d been Ashwin only to his mother. Once.
His fortune exceeded the gross domestic product of some small countries, and he was proud of the fact that he’d earned much of it himself. His conglomerate was one of a handful that’d successfully pillaged Conrad’s Dark Continent for the minerals necessary to cell phones and indeed their entire modern communication network. Most of Africa was as lawless as the island in Lord of the Flies, the soldiers who overran its meaningless political borders just as young. He maintained a compound in Bukavu, in the so-called Democratic Republic of the Congo, but he traveled enough that terms like home base were meaningless. So he kept his primary residence where he chose.
There were those who castigated him for what he did. They, he noticed, offered no alternative solutions. Nor did they invest in research that might render these materials obsolete. Nor, of course, did they offer Africa anything but sympathy from afar. And the chance to star in their political rhetoric. Rhetoric learned, not in the jungle but at the knees of professors who themselves had never left their universities.
He finished his second drink. The alcohol had no effect on him. Not much did. He was a narcissist and a workaholic, mean-spirited and too disinterested in others to be thoughtful although he was certainly imaginative enough to be if he tried. He used and discarded women like tissues. Sometimes he found himself being purposefully cruel, far past the point of rationality, just to see if he could crack their perfect façades. But for the most part, they just smiled. Through tears, even. They were determined, he’d give them that. Determined to win him over, because he was—for reasons that had nothing to do with him, personally—such a wonderful catch.
Women flocked to him. They had all his life. They didn’t care what he wanted, or liked, what he found funny or what bored him, although they pretended they did. No woman had ever told him, you’re too boring to date. They just smiled and nodded and fell over themselves to be interested and supportive. In whatever drivel he spouted, and in whatever schemes he laid out before them. Sometimes he amused himself by making up wild stories about his business exploits just to see what kind of reaction he’d get.
Even the story about the two male elephants, borrowed from his mother’s favorite musical, hadn’t managed to raise more than a how fascinating, tell me more.
“Wait,” another man asked, “what happened to the last one?”
“She left me,” the pathetic one said miserably. “She took all the things I’d given her and left me.”
“What about you, Ash?” This newest voice had an accent, as though he’d learned his excellent English from foreign tutors. His skin was the color of coal, so black it was almost blue. He was the business associate who had invited Ash here. He had, as he’d put it, a thing for white women. Particularly Americans. A native of the Congo whose parents had grown up under the brutal repression of Belgian rule, he enjoyed reversing the roles. So far as Ash knew, he’d never bothered to learn any of his pets’ names.
“What about me?”
“How fares your stable?”
“Well enough.” His tone was noncommittal. He didn’t want to talk. The pathetic man—boy, really—was still complaining about how he couldn’t get a girl who stayed. He showered them with presents and told them how beautiful they were and they still left. Well of course they did; this wasn’t a dating game. Kidnapping a girl wasn’t a way to make her like you. Unless, of course, you were a character in a fairy tale. Then it seemed to work just fine. But in the real world, these women hated them.
Even the ones who wanted to be here—and there were a great many women, and men, who flocked to the sex trade because they had romantic notions of sexual slavery—hated them. They’d seen too many of those Raj-era paintings: of alabaster-skinned women lounging around nude in some British artist’s rendition of a harem. The basis of the fantasy was narcissism, something he well understood. The woman in question was so beautiful, so desirable, that an incredibly rich and powerful man couldn’t stop himself from ravishing her. A man who could have anyone. But she was so fascinating that he fixated on her. Sex wasn’t enough; he had to provoke a reaction from her. Make her feel what he wanted her to feel. Love inevitably ensued.
In truth, though, slavery—real or pretend—wasn’t about the slave. And the kind of sex a man wanted when there were no emotional strings attached, could be none, wasn’t about anything except gratifying his own lusts. Nothing prevented two people from falling in love like one owning the other. Ash preferred it; there was no pretense.
As far as he knew, his own women were happy enough. Not that he inquired. Occasionally they asked to leave and he let them. He got bored of them, anyway. Keeping them wasn’t worth the effort. Overcoming a little resistance was fun, a challenge. Doing more than that wasn’t. He simply wasn’t invested enough. And there were always more women. The longest he’d had one, he thought, was about six months. Although he couldn’t be sure; he didn’t keep track. He’d sold her to one of his friends, who’d grown quite fond of her during the parties Ash hosted. Ash hadn’t minded, although he hadn’t really understood what his friend wanted with the girl.
The popular consciousness made the sex trade out to be evil. Particularly this form of it. Feminists liked to demonize those, both male and female, who bypassed the ritual dance of dinner and flowers and jewelry. They were labeled as predators, for refusing to pretend.
Somehow taking without pretense was worse, in their minds, than lying. Buy a woman dinner in return for sex, you were romantic. Pay her directly for sex, and you were a monster.
The sex providers, in turn, were made out to be all innocence. But the truth was—the politically incorrect truth that no one wanted to admit, because it might tarnish all those bright line rules—that for the most part these women were greedy and grasping. They came to his house, and were impressed. They were, for the most part, poor and ill-educated women with delusions of grandeur. Some member of some organization, somewhere, had promised them wealth and power if only they signed their name on the dotted line. It had never occurred to them to question, why them. That narcissism, again. Somewhere, in the back of their minds, didn’t they know? Didn’t they at least suspect?
With him, they lived in luxury. And none of them were new to the game; most of the women he bought had been in the sex trade a year or more and whatever reservations they’d had had long since dissipated. Ash didn’t have a virginity complex, like some men; he was fine with a woman having had multiple partners, so long as she didn’t while she was with him. He didn’t share.
And he was realist enough to know that the kind of woman who ended up in his bedroom—however she got there—wasn’t a good girl. Virgins, the kind of girls who wanted flowers and chocolates and romance, avoided him. As well they should.
Had he forced himself on women? He’d…overcome their reluctance. Did that make him a rapist? He supposed it did, in the crudest sense. But as he’d pointed out before, the game was older than he was. And he, like all good criminals, avoided harming civilians. There was plenty of action to be had with the pieces already in play.
It had been so long since he’d talked to what his eldest brother would refer to as a normal girl, he wouldn’t even know how. Perhaps that was why the girl from earlier had arrested him so. He wondered how old she was. She looked like little more than a child, especially in that getup, but she’d spoken with the assurance of someone much older. A precocious child, play-acting in someone else’s clothes. And she’d been so rude. She’d seen right through him.
Part of him had wanted to kiss her, and part of him had wanted to hit her. In the end, of course, he’d done neither. He’d let her pass, onto whatever narrow-minded life she’d planned for herself. A life replete with folders, and articles, and inflexible moral standards. She was precisely the sort of innocent civilian of which he spoke.
Even if, in another life, she might have been for him, he’d made himself into the kind of man that girls like her should avoid. He’d made himself into the kind of man that girls like her did avoid. Loathed. They had nothing in common. She was undoubtedly the beloved child of some middle class household. American, or perhaps Canadian; he hadn’t quite been able to place her accent.
He was a criminal many times over.
And part of him, realizing how far outside of that world he’d brought himself, was sad. If sad was an emotion he felt. He didn’t know what he felt, anymore. He did know that there was no point in considering the question; he was too far gone to come back.
Still, he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Hadn’t been able to all night. And try as he might, he couldn’t put his finger on quite what had captivated him so much about her. Perhaps that was why she’d stayed on his mind: she was a puzzle. Was it that she’d seen right through him? Was that it? Or was it that she’d had the courage to tell him exactly what she’d thought? He’d brought the whole thing on himself, he supposed. What did he expect, ambushing her outside the loo like that? A strange man, much taller than she and easily twice her weight? Demanding to know why she’d refused his drink? She must have been terrified. Girls like that, he had to remind himself, weren’t for sale.
He realized with something like regret that he’d never gotten her name. She was gone forever, then. Truly. So much the better for her, he reminded himself.
And then the curtain opened, and there she was.
EIGHT
He couldn’t believe it.
Naked, she looked even younger. She also looked terrified, her eyes bright with a cruel awareness of her situation even though she’d obviously been drugged. She held up her hands in a vain attempt to cover herself even as she listed to the side, barely able to stand. She was very thin. A bruise was purpling on her upper arm, and another near her knee. Seeing this, he felt obscurely angry.
A disembodied voice announced that she was a teenager, and a virgin.
Her name was Belle.
Oh God, he thought. She must’ve been taken right from the club. The club was a well-known hangout for the…again what Anish would call the lesser element. But he’d watched her all night, sitting at that table with her gaggle of friends and then alone, and doubted that any of them knew much about the place. The taller girl who’d appeared to be the ringleader must’ve read about the place in a travel brochure and decided to visit. Tourists, particularly American tourists, tended to be naïve. And wherever Belle had been born, her friend was definitely American. Ash had seen her dancing with abandon on the club floor, unaware that a lone girl with no friends in a strange city might be in danger.
He doubted that Belle had even wanted to come tonight, given that she’d brought her homework with her. Stripped of her dress, he saw how little it had suited her. She’d managed to make it look, not like the come hither getup it was intended to be but like a costume. A dancer’s, or a figure skater’s. She was confident, until she remembered not to be.
“Bidding begins at fifty, American.”
Fifty thousand, he meant. The fat man raised his hand. Ash felt a fresh wave of revulsion, and found himself raising his own hand. What that man would do to her. The man-child didn’t bid, but others did. A man in Saudi robes, whom Ash didn’t know. A Nigerian in an expensive suit whom previous business dealings had given him a reason to distrust.
Turning his gaze back to Belle, he saw too that someone had written on her with a grease pencil. Casually, marking that she was a virgin and disease free. No scarring, no prolapse or other indication of anal usage. It was the same kind of pencil used to mark vases at auction. So there would be no mistake. No one wanted to bid on a Ming, only to discover that he’d accidentally purchased a Tang.
Her feet arrested him the most. They were so tiny, so delicate, and so damaged. A dancer’s feet. He’d been right. He knew from growing up in a world where nearly every girl danced or rode that a dancer’s feet were a private hell. Blackened nails and bone spurs were only the beginning; girls were trained early that—in this arena as so many others—pain didn’t matter. They went en pointe with stress fractures and broken bones, rather than risk losing their places in their companies, or their mothers’ regard. Or being thought weak, the worst of all. Corns developed sinuses and became ulcers; nails thickened and grew hard skin underneath, skin as hard as the nail itself. Even after she stopped dancing, a ballerina’s feet were always permanently deformed.
He wanted to protect her. He paused, taken aback by the totally alien impulse and unsure of how to act on it. Or whether he should. But the very thought of another man having her
was unsupportable. Of even his hand so much as resting on her shoulder. The vision, flashing in his mind, brought a white-hot stab of rage. No. It would be his hand on her, he who took her from this place. He didn’t just want to protect her; he wanted to own her.
Had to.
“Fifty-five.”
“Sixty.”
“Sixty-five.”
The girls he’d molested behind the drapes at his parents’ house, growing up, hadn’t danced. They’d gone to parties, and laughed, and been sophisticated, and had fun.
But he knew all about not appearing weak.
She was lovely, even if she looked barely old enough to be with a man. Was she even at university yet? She must be, if she was here as an exchange student; she and her friends had all been speaking English. Her hips were very slender. He estimated her to be a 34B; he’d bought enough lingerie to know. He liked dressing women up and then taking their clothes off, for his own amusement. And he, like most of the other men in the room, had…exotic tastes. After one had reached a certain point, the prospect of straightforward sex was no longer arousing. More and more was needed: birches and hot wax, on one or the other, for some men. Other methods of giving and receiving pain. Orgies. Drugs.
“Eighty-five.”
“Ninety.”
“One hundred.”
The fat man was still bidding against him. There was a piggish, anticipatory light in his eyes. Like a toddler who’d just seen a cream puff. The very idea of his continued existence on the planet was revolting.
“One and a half,” Ash said quietly.
In the end, it wasn’t her nudity that made her seem so vulnerable, standing there on the small stage. Waiting to be sold, to be owned. Locked away, in a strange place, for some strange man’s pleasure. He’d be lying if he said the idea didn’t give him a twinge of arousal. More than a twinge. No, it wasn’t her nudity or her vain attempts to cover it, with hands as small and long-fingered as an ancient rani’s. Or her tears, trickling silently down her cheeks.