“Honey, most men are sex freaks. So many of them are damn perverts who just get off on this kinda sick shit. Masochists, sadists, gangbangers….y’know, men in general.”
Tara felt repulsed. “Clem’s not a sex freak.”
Lorraine was back on her soapbox talking about her favorite topic and she wasn’t listening to Tara anymore.
“Yeah, that kinda porn is all over the internet. Fetish stuff. All kinds of crap like you wouldn’t believe. Some guys like to wear diapers. They get off dressing up like a baby and sucking on a bottle for Chrissakes! I don’t get it.”
Tara was horrified by the visual imagery Lorraine had just put in her head. “So after this Mistress Krystal whacks her clients do they have sex?”
“Beats me!” laughed Lorraine, enjoying her own zinger though Tara didn’t see the funny side.
“I don’t know who I’m married to anymore,” Tara mumbled.
Lorraine tried to console Tara with a friendly arm around her shoulder. “Sorry, baby. It’s not funny, I know.
“I mean, there I am trying to be a good wife, being supportive, running his errands, cooking him his favorite meals…and he’s seeing some woman for sex. Why doesn’t he want to have sex with me? What am I? Nothing more than just his cook and housekeeper?” Tara blathered.
“You don’t know that for sure.” Lorraine squeezed Tara tight.
“I’ve seen the marks on his body.”
“What?”
“Big red welts.”
“Shit. That’s not good.” Lorraine’s sour expression triggered Tara’s waterworks. “But that doesn’t mean this Mistress Krystal chick did it,” said Lorraine, unintentionally coming to Clem’s defense in an attempt to comfort Tara.
“Don’t stick up for him!”
Lorraine sat back and picked up her drink. “Well, did you ask Clem how he got these marks on his body?”
“Playing squash.”
“So he got the marks playing squash. There you go.”
“Clem doesn’t play squash. He doesn’t even have a bat,” Tara shot back.
“Racquet.” Lorraine corrected her.
“Bat, racquet, who cares? If he’s been lying to me and cheating on me then I’m going to catch him. I deserve better than this,” Tara snapped angrily.
“Well, if it was me, I’d taser his balls. Yeah, that’s what I would do but then I’m no Dr. Phil.” Lorraine slurped on her straw. “Mind you, he’d probably get off on it.”
“Lorraine, you have no idea who I’m dealing with here. This could’ve been going on for years without my knowledge. Clem is in the bullshit business. He’s mastered it. That’s why he’s been so successful. He’d spin me a mile of bullshit that’s so good I’d end up believing him because he’s always so damn convincing,”
Tara tossed her protein shake in the trash. “It’s disgusting.”
“You wanna try the banana strawberry?” Lorraine asked stupidly as Tara stood up and headed towards the exit.
Lorraine had never seen Tara angry before. She was always the personification of calmness. Now her eyes were glaring and there was a fire in her voice that Lorraine could relate to. In fact, she felt like she’d finally found a kindred spirit. She scurried after her friend.
“Okay, Tara. This is what you do. Photocopy the card. Put it back in his jacket pocket. Don’t mention it. Then file for divorce.”
Divorce? That really wasn’t what Tara needed to hear at that moment. The reality of her situation suddenly caught up with Tara. She’d stopped crying but her eyes welled up again.
“But I don’t want my marriage to end!” Tara blurted.
They walked quickly outside into the parking lot towards Tara’s Lexus. Tara was now damping her tears with a scrunched up tissue.
“Honey, in my experience, you can’t kick the kink out of a guy. It’s like a disease, an addiction. You’re going to have to deal with the fact you married a kinkster.”
Lorraine’s frankness had all the subtlety of a dentist with a jackhammer. It certainly wasn’t what Tara wanted to hear but it had the effect of turning off her waterworks and giving her a moment of sheer clarity.
“Well, I’ll deal with it then. I’m going to cure him,” Tara said, defiantly.
“Of course, there’s always marriage counseling too but if I was you, I’d be calling a divorce lawyer instead of a therapist,” Lorraine continued her tactless train of thought though she could tell Tara wasn’t interested in that route of treatment for her and Clem.
“I know what to do,” Tara said firmly.
CHAPTER 5
Clem was holding court in his office with Creative Director Chuck Svensen and various writers and art directors from downstairs.
“Okay, guys. We need a concept that’ll play across the board in all media – TV, radio, billboards, hot air balloons, you name it.”
“Hot air balloons?” queried the freckled art director.
“That was a joke, Suzie.”
“I thought Fitz and his team were meant to be in this meeting, Clem,” pointed out Jerry, the senior writer in the group. Clem handed out six creative briefs.
“Don’t worry about Fitz. Here’s the creative brief. Everything you need to know – demographics, previous taglines, you already know the strategic positioning of the brand and where we need to take it, and last of all…budget.”
“Wow! We could get Spielberg to direct with this kinda money,” said Rachel, another of the art directors, staring at the dollar amount on Clem’s brief.
“Chuck, I need to see something from these guys here that we can approve internally by the end of next week.”
“Okay,” grunted Chuck, jotting notes on his iPad.
“What’s this client like?” asked Herman, a chubby writer on the team.
“Conservative,” Chuck Svensen informed the room.
“So no wacky alien monkeys, angry nuns or tattooed babes in bikinis,” Clem added, to a collective groan.
“You account executives have no clue about decent creative,” Jerry complained. “My alien monkeys campaign could have won me a Clio.”
Clem was used to dealing with all the egos of the creative department. “Don’t make my job any harder trying to sell the client stuff we all know he isn’t going to buy. That’ll just piss him off.”
“Heard this speech before,” Herman mumbled to Rachel.
“Come on, guys. You know my job is to sell clients campaigns that actually increase sales and not just give you golden gongs. How about that for a concept?”
“Yeah but Clem,” Herman butted in. “My buddy at Saatchi’s in London won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Advertising Awards two years back. He got a week in the south of France on the friggin’ French Riviera! Parties, Euro chicks -- all expenses paid!”
“Holy shit! Are you serious?” said Eric, the youngest copywriter in the department.
“That’s what we’re talking about!” Jerry cracked.
Everyone in the room knew that accolades led to awards and that awards led to pay raises and bonuses plus a grand old time to boot. In the creative department, there was a healthy competitive environment as each two-person team of art director and copywriter wanted to out-do the others but Clem needed all these guys to pull together now. It was up to Chuck Svensen to rally his creative troops and come up with several stellar campaign ideas but he was being unusually quiet.
“I’m leaving it up to your collective creative brilliance to show me some campaigns that’ll work in all media across the board from TV to point-of-sale. Just make the product the hero and if it has your blessing Chuck, I’ll present it to Rebakor. Let’s have an internal meeting early next week and maybe I can present to Molinaire down in Louisville the following Friday.” Clem smiled at the eager creative teams perusing his paperwork. “Okay, any more questions?”
“Yeah,” Chuck tapped his finger on the table. “Not sure this creative brief jives with the strategy Fitz presented the other day.”
“Just work t
o this creative brief,” said a stone-faced Clem.
“You guys are working together on this, right? I mean, I don’t want my department cranking out concepts to a brief that doesn’t fit the strategy.”
Suddenly all eyes were drilled on Clem.
“Work to the strategy in this brief, Chuck. Right – so are we done?” Clem asked bluntly to the group. The room stayed silent. Everyone knew what was needed. “Thanks, guys. Meeting over.”
Tara propped up Mistress Krystal’s business card on her computer screen. If it was a gag card of some sort it certainly looked very authentic. And why would there be a time of day scribbled on the back of the card in Clem’s handwriting? Tara grabbed the card and looked at the number. She just had to get her nerve up. What would she say if she called this mysterious woman? Tara couldn’t stop herself from turning back to look again at that photo of her and Clem in Santa Monica. It made her sad and angry.
Call, dammit!
Grabbing her cell phone, Tara dialed the number on the card. A female voice answered almost immediately.
“Hello…”
“Hi. Is this Mistress Krystal?”
“…leave a message.”
Hearing the flat tone of the voicemail message caught her off guard. Tara hung up abruptly. Did she really think someone in this line of work would pick up a call? No, that wouldn’t be very discreet at all. This woman was a pro. She’d have to be very circumspect with whom she spoke to on a phone line that might be tapped. After all, this service couldn’t possibly be legal.
Tara spent the rest of the day surfing the web Googling one word after another all with the same theme – Mistress, Dominatrix, Fetish, Sado-masochism, BDSM - the list of terms seemed endless. She understood the basic concept of this sort of thing did but she wanted to know if actual sexual intercourse was involved. It was bad enough that she’d discovered Clem’s secret desire to be beaten and dominated by a strange woman but what was eating her up was whether his motivation was for the pain or for the sex. Or both. Either way, he had broken the trust between them and Tara was feeling betrayed.
The web spilled its secrets to Tara. There were thousands of websites and blogs dedicated to bondage, domination, submission and masochism. Some of the pictures were hard for her to look at, as they were so graphic. Some of the videos she watched were painful to even listen to. But she wanted to know about this fetish of pain and humiliation and why so many people seemed to find it pleasurable. Tara had to understand why the man she thought she knew so well would go seeking what seemed such a strange sexual perversion. She continued to read a blog written by a Dominatrix who called herself Madame Magdalene….
You know I’m talking to you. Mister macho. All strong and powerful. You have an insatiable desire to become a slave to a beautiful, arousing woman such as myself. Like all my male slaves, you desire to be punished, humiliated and exposed in intimate sessions for your deviant needs to really be fulfilled. You might appear to be in control of everything in your life, but to me, you are worthless. You do exactly as I tell you, no matter how belittling, how embarrassing, or how emasculated you might feel while performing such acts of sexual depravity. You are mine, to use, torment and tease and you will obey my every instruction.
Tara soaked up the information on the screen. What was this freaky, warped world she had discovered? While it might seem alien to her, it obviously wasn’t to Clem.
The more she read, the angrier she became. She felt an inner rage. Tara realized she could no longer trust this strange man she shared her life with. Had he been living a lie all this time? How long had this been going on? Was their marriage just a sham? Was this the reason their once exciting sex life was now non-existent? So many questions ran through Tara’s mind but the thought that Clem found her sexually inadequate was killing her. Clem was her dream man. He was everything to her, in and out of bed. Why would he jeopardize their marriage over this twisted, kinky shit?
Looking up from her computer screen she glanced again at the picture of her and Clem laughing together on the pier at Santa Monica back when they were dating. Where was that man? That fun-loving, sweet-talking guy with the big smile and California tan? What had he become? What had happened to that relationship when everything was so wonderful and normal? Even back then when they had little money they still seemed to have everything. Now they were financially in great shape but it seemed they really had nothing after all.
Tara continued to read, searching for the psychological reasons why anyone would seek out this type of behavioral weirdness. Much to her surprise, she began to learn that it was people in positions of power and authority who were more likely to enjoy being submissive. It seemed they wanted to relinquish responsibility albeit for just brief moment in their lives. Instead of telling others what to do, they wanted someone to tell them what to do. So, it was the submissives who were really in control, not the person dominating them.
Relating this to Clem all seemed to make some kind of sense. He fit the profile perfectly. After all, Clem had a lot of power at work and a great fear of losing that power. But would that explain his need to explore this kinky way of behaving? Obviously, he was ashamed of it otherwise surely he would have expressed some of this to Tara. Why did he feel he couldn’t share this intimate side of his nature with his own wife? Was he scared she would leave him? Was it about the sex? Was sex even involved? Getting tied up and beaten is a far cry from the simple pleasures of good old-fashioned fucking. Tara started to feel sexually inadequate. She thought about what they did in the bedroom. He liked oral sex, giving and receiving. They mixed it up pretty often so it never got repetitive. She would straddle him sometimes while other occasions they’d do it doggie style. That was pretty edgy, wasn’t it? Obviously, not kinky enough for her more needy husband. So, was it her fault that she didn’t satisfy Clem in the bedroom? Endless questions were spinning through her mind.
One word kept coming up again and again: Control. It was all about control. This need was controlling Clem, Clem was controlling her, and she had no control over any of this. Fact is, she’d let Clem’s career control her life. She’d never wanted to move from sunny California to freezing Minnesota but she did for him. Now Tara felt like she really didn’t have control of her own life anymore. That would change from this day forth. Right then and there, Tara decided it would be her turn to take control of matters now.
Tara knew the knee jerk reaction for any woman in her situation would be to simply confront Clem and let him explain his actions. But in her mind, she could see Clem reprising Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men yelling at her ‘You can’t handle the truth!’ which she feared might also be true. Confronting Clem was always an option but she had other ideas how to discover an even greater truth that would serve her better because this was now about Tara taking control of her marriage and her life, with or without Clem.
A shot of adrenalin coursed through her veins. It was like a thousand watt light bulb had just exploded in her frontal lobe. Grabbing her cell phone again, Tara suddenly felt empowered. If she didn’t like the situation it was up to her to change it.
Frank Bergenson and Kurt Fitzgerald waited floor for the elevator. “I like the campaign. It’s solid,” Frank nodded approvingly.
“Solid? It totally rocks!” Fitz shot back, surprised by his boss’s faint praise.
“Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t get it. But who gives a shit whether I get it or not? I’m not meant to get it. I’m not the target market. If kids can relate to it, that’s all that matters.”
The two men stepped in to the elevator and descended to the underground parking garage. “I can’t remember the last time I jogged anywhere come to think of it. Has Clem seen this?” Frank asked.
“Very funny.”
“Good. Then I want you to fly down to Louisville. Take Charlie Knutson with you. No one else needs to know.”
”What about Clem? He’s bound to find out.”
“Get the ball rolling. Go sell the campaign
to Rebakor and jump start the approval process. I’ll handle Clem. Tell Molinaire and his marketing department that Clem’s out sick or something.”
Back on Dunkirk Crescent, Tara’s hand was getting clammy holding the card for so long. She paused and thought some more, searching for Dutch courage. She called the number again and once more the voicemail picked up.
“Hello. Leave a message,” said the anonymous female voice at the other end.
“Hi, I’d like to make an appointment. My name is…” Tara paused. A copy of last week’s People magazine was on the table beside her with a photograph of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie holding a baby on the cover.
“…Angelina. My phone number is……” Tara paused again, suddenly feeling very uncomfortable revealing anything about herself, especially her own cell phone number.
“I’ll call back.” She panicked and hung up quickly. “Shit!” Tara said out load to no one but herself realizing that this wasn’t going to be as straightforward as she’d first thought.
She was opening a door to a whole new world. But what was she so scared of? Fear of the unknown? Now she was annoyed with herself. This was stupid. She needed to be stronger than this. She was trying to save her marriage, dammit!
Tara rang again. “Hi, I just called. My number is 952-615-4040.” Tara hung up.
Now what? She wondered. Just sit there and wait for a phone call that might never come? That was no good. That wasn’t being in control. She thought for a minute, then grabbed the Yellow Pages from a cupboard. She started flipping through it. Maybe this would require some professional help. She stopped at Private Detectives and scanned the list of names. There was only a handful. A small box ad for ex-cop Jack Kelsey caught her eye.
CHAPTER 6
Kurt Fitzgerald and Charlie Knutson, a junior account executive at Bergenson & Adler, walked out of the Delta terminal at Louisville International Airport and straight into a waiting limo.
The car sped away towards downtown and the headquarters of Rebakor. Fitz had a large leather portfolio with him. Power Point presentations were all fine and dandy when it came to strategy and planning meetings but when it came to judging creative work, most clients preferred to see and feel hard copies in their hands.
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