“Sit in the chair—for your comfort,” she suggested, motioning to an arm chair. He dropped his trousers and sat in the chair. She stood before him with the handcuffs. “Secure me with these—behind my back.” She turned and held her wrists together for him. Her buttocks were widely separated globes, lightly scarred. He clicked the handcuffs shut and she turned to face him, kneeling between his legs, her cat eyes watching him.
He played with his softness, watching her lick her lips until they glistened. He squeezed her nipples with his left hand, wondering if anything she might do could get him hard.
“Do you want my mouth?”
“Yes,” he said, cupping her head in his hands and pulling her to him, feeling her breath on his flesh. She kissed it and licked it and rubbed her sticky wet lips on it. “Suck me like you need my penis in order to live. Please make me hard.”
She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, sticking out her tongue and inserting its tip into his meatus. Her tongue fluttered, and she closed her lips in an O around the bulbous head of his penis.
It was warm, and then it was warmer as she took more of him into her red mouth. He felt himself growing as she sucked, but he didn’t understand what the heat was. He pulled out, seeing with grateful amazement that he was almost fully erect, and that he was smeared with her lipstick, and wet with her saliva.
“Why is your mouth so hot?”
“It is my secret. Now let me show you. . . .”
Slowly, artfully, like a sword-swallower, she took him all the way into her throat and held him there. It was like he had stuck his hardness into an electric socket, her throat was so hot. Holding her head so she couldn’t pull back, he controlled his mounting pleasure by sliding in and out of her open throat. Her breath whistled in her nose. Her mouth was so hot the sound was like sizzling.
“Yes, yes,” she encouraged, gasping, when he pulled out before shoving his glorious stiffness into her throat again.
The feeling of potency was like walking across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. I was above the roiling torrent, but the walk would not be complete unless I fell in it and let it carry me away.
He wanted to pour a river of semen into her throat. He wanted to come endlessly, till it ran over her chin and down her body, dripping over her breasts and caking in her bush, come until it boiled out of her nose and flowed from her eyes. He wanted her to drink his passion thirstily, until it overflowed, and she could not contain it, and no vessel could hold it all.
But he couldn’t come.
He pulled out of her mouth and stood up, frantically masturbating himself, groaning with the effort, as she watched with rapt professional interest. Frustrated, he collapsed into the chair, shuddering, tears in his eyes.
After awhile she stood up and said, “Unlock me. There is one more thing.”
He obeyed. She rubbed her wrists while staring down at him like a doctor about to take extreme measures.
“It’s no use,” he said bitterly.
“You must let me lock you. You must trust me.”
I got to my feet and put my hands behind my back, and she clamped the cold steel on my wrists. I had learned submission.
She pushed me toward the bed, and I fell face down on it. I closed my eyes and waited, my throbbing, aching hardness flat against the mattress. I heard her moving around the room, and then I smelled fire.
She reached up between my legs and grasped my penis in her hand, and then I felt a branding iron burn into my left buttock. I screamed into the mattress and came copiously in her hand.
Below me was the cataract. I jumped, and joy followed me as I fell.
26
BRANDED
“DID YOU FIND what you went looking for, Nicky?” Midge asked, welcoming me home. Once again, I sat in her comfortable living room sipping bourbon and wolfing down hors d’oeuvres. (That is, I perched awkwardly, so as to favor my tender, branded buttock.)
I told her a little about Veronique, but not about Saskia. How could I explain what had happened with her? She sat across from me with Lola at her feet, wearing her long-suffering expression, and an understanding smile that told me she understood nothing.
But I’m too hard on her. (Although that’s what marriage is about, isn’t it? Having someone to be hard on?) Midge and my dealer Max may have been the only people in New York who would even try to understand what was happening to me.
I talked about learning to submit to my passions, and mentioned a little of what I’d learned of the symbolism of fire, how it transmutes and revives.
Midge looked puzzled. I saw there was no easy way to tell her what had happened with Saskia, the whore in the window, so I just blurted it out: “I got branded.”
They listened raptly to my story.
“You let a strange woman—a whore—burn you while you were handcuffed? Quick,” she said to Lola, “go fetch my butterfly net.”
“You know what? I came like a geyser.”
“You had an erection?”
“It was so hard I could have driven a nail with it.”
“You crazy, dirty man,” she said incredulously. “Show us.”
I stood and dropped my trousers, and they gathered around to inspect my burned buttock. Just exposing myself to them gave me an erection. Seeing it, Midge whispered something to Lola, and they both knelt to take advantage of my resurrection. Lola licked my testicles and the underside of my shaft, before sucking me with a raspy cat tongue, while Midge stuck first a finger and then her tongue into my anus. When I came I growled with power and they scrambled to catch the jets of semen on their tongues. I was back.
I went to see Max and told him about the revelation I’d had in the sex museum. I wanted to go in that direction in my work.
“You’re killing your career.”
“It’s what I have to do, Max.”
“You want to paint people fucking, and you expect me to sell it?”
“You’ll figure out something.”
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Well, you do have to get back to work. But you’ll be branded a pornographer.”
“I’m already branded, Max. Guess what I found out? It turns me on.”
PART THREE
A VICTIM OF HIS PASSIONS
27
STUDIO VISIT
THE STUDIO WAS filled with the rich odor of roses. Nicholas Wilde stood at a large open window gazing out a the immensity of the Atlantic. It was the morning of his fifty-first birthday, and he was considering a challenge he had set himself during another sleepless night. It was a dreamy, half-hallucinatory consideration, blackly edged with self-doubt. The challenge was to paint like a madman through the summer months, burning sun and salt into each canvas. It would require concentration, luck, and an indefinable element he compared to the alchemy of fire.
It would also require him to find models willing to pose in erotic tableaux of his devising. He wasn’t sure he was equal to the challenge. It might be easier to swim across to Spain, he thought, watching the surf roll up on the beach below. Anyone approaching over the high dune would find him framed by his studio window, as he sometimes posed people for portraits—slightly off-center and larger than life.
Behind him stood a huge, battered easel, made from his own design years before. The roses sat on a long, equally battered workbench crowded with coffee cans bristling with paint brushes, crushed tubes of paint and the other occult tools of his art. Canvases were stacked in rows behind the dilapidated leather couch where he’d spent the night. A precariously balanced stack of art magazines stood anchored by a piece of driftwood in one corner. One of these magazines, The Blue Rider, had persuaded him to grant an interview to a free-lance critic about the new direction in his work. The exhibition of his series of erotic paintings of Rose Selavy at the Museum of Current Art had indeed put a spot light on him, as Gavin had predicted. Assured he’d have the cover of the magazine, he agreed.
Now he was regretting his decision. The effort of talking about his work—and, no doubt
, having to defend its direction—would wring him out. He would lose a day of valuable studio time.
But it was his birthday, and it was a fine morning on the Cape, so he tried to relax. He mused about his visitor.
The critic’s name was Natalie Wray. She’d made a reputation for herself by writing a book about fetishism in nineteenth-century painting, and followed that up with a critique of Camille Paglia that earned her the title of intellectual bad girl of the month.
He hoped that despite this reputation, she would be intelligent, and that her questions would surprise him by attempting to explore his work rather than his psyche. Above all, he wanted her to be attractive; but he supposed she would probably be middle-aged, academic, and sexually and aesthetically challenged. Dry and literal and androgynously breastless and hipless like so many of her ilk: no juice.
Therefore he was more than pleasantly surprised to see, coming over the dune toward his studio, a deeply tanned young woman in a straw hat, gray V-necked T-shirt, and white linen shorts. Seeing him at the window, she moved rapidly toward him on strong legs, stepping purposefully up on his deck and striding barefoot across it. Her eyes were hidden by sunglasses. Her hair was jet black, falling over her shoulders like a raven’s wings.
She extended her hand through the window. “I’m Natalie. Sorry I’m late, but despite your excellent directions, I got lost in the woods. So I parked in the public lot and walked up the beach.”
Her smile was dazzling. Her handshake was firm. He was overwhelmed with this birthday present. She excited him.
She removed her sunglasses, and the blackness of her eyes surprised him. They conveyed a challenge—to what? Her mouth was full and sensual, and the only flaw in the beauty of her features was a gap in her white teeth.
She entered the studio and put her beach bag down, taking in the room at a glance and walking straight toward the only art on display, a tattered postcard pinned to the wall of Courbet’s “Origin of the World.” She looked inquiringly over her shoulder at him, catching him openly admiring the way her behind filled out her shorts.
He shrugged. “It’s kind of a touchstone for me.”
She smiled, saying nothing, and went to her bag. He watched as she placed a tiny tape recorder on a coffee table next to an overflowing ash tray and an empty coffee cup. They sat across from each other. He liked the fact that she didn’t make nervous small talk, but jumped right into the interview.
“Have you always sought to provoke in your work? I mean, your show at the Recent Museum has become a focus of controversy.”
He watched the gap in her teeth as she spoke so that he wouldn’t appear to be staring at the pronounced shape of her breasts under the T-shirt. She didn’t seem to need a brassiere.
“There are different kinds of provocation,” he said. “The nature of my work—before I painted my first nude—has been against the grain: it has been figurative and expressionistic, and that direction made me anti-establishment. My subject is not paint, but people.”
He knew this sounded stiff, but he’d wanted to be prepared.
“But this new emphasis on explicit sex. Did you deliberately set out to draw more attention to your work?”
“My celebrity portraits brought me attention—and sales, if that’s where you’re going.” His gaze went to her breasts.
“But this show, and your attack on your most important collector—the publicity from both of them have made you famous.”
“If you can’t get them in the door to look, they won’t see.”
“And if they don’t see it, you can’t sell it?”
“Well, of course. Every artist wants his work to be seen by as many eyes as possible.”
Now as he spoke he stared boldly at her breasts, willing her nipples to pop forth.
“Unlike Courbet, when you paint female genitals, they look violated.”
“Don’t you mean wet?” he shot back. “Excitement is not violation.”
“They’re more than wet. It’s like there’s semen oozing from them.” She looked down at her breasts. He had willed her nipples forth.
“Perhaps the woman has just made love.”
“Frankly, the effect is pornographic.”
“You don’t believe that.”
She shook her head, looked at her nipples, and blushed at last.
“No, I don’t. But the question comes up in every story about you. Pornography or erotica? Which do you do?”
“I do realistic paintings of people having sex.”
“Not making love, then, but having sex.”
“It’s in the eye of the observer. Love is subjective, but sex is observable. I’m a painter. Sex is my latest subject. I used to do landscapes and still lifes, before portraits. Many artists have taken sex for their subject. Look at Rauschenberg in the late sixties, taking photographs of his friends fucking and then painting from them. Look at. . . . ”
“You don’t have to lecture me. I’m aware of the history of erotic art. I’ve even written a book about fetishism.”
She was defensive. They were flirting. He continued to stare openly at her breasts.
“I have a question about your models.”
“Most people do.” Here it comes, he thought.
“You seem to be able to become them—as if they are your own self-portraits—do you know what I mean?”
She was referring to his series of paintings of Rose Selavy.
“I work with certain women for a long time, or sometimes only a short time. I take their photograph hundreds of times. I draw them from life. We become intimate, perhaps. That’s the best scenario. Then they express me as I paint them.”
“You were lovers with Rose Selavy, then?”
“We were lovers, yes.” It always came down to the personal.
“Do you want to talk about her importance in your work?”
“I think that’s obvious.” Now he was uncomfortable. Stalemate.
“Why don’t we stop here?” she suggested, leaning forward to turn off the machine. He was grateful to stop talking about himself, but he wondered why she had stopped so abruptly: her discomfort, or his own?
“Let me buy you lunch,” he said. “We can talk more later.”
After oysters at a cafe on the Bay, artist and critic were more relaxed with each other. Back in his studio, Nick found himself trying to seduce her with words—specifically, his ruminations on the direction his work was taking. Somehow, as they sat together, he thought she understood when she asked him about voyeurism.
“But that is one of the effects of all art,” he said, pacing as she listened. “If you look at an interior by Vermeer, you’re peeking into someone’s intimate life. But that is acceptable, just so long as you don’t show people getting it on. It’s ridiculous for the artist to censor himself and say certain human activities are off limits.”
He didn’t feel defensive with her, as he’d anticipated, and as the hours passed he noticed that she was looking at him differently. It was the way her eyes followed him as he paced, explaining or pursuing some point. It was how her hand brushed against his, accepting a glass of wine from him. It was late afternoon when they agreed to stop. A tension had built between them. A change of scene was in order.
“Let’s go for a walk on the beach,” he suggested. He could see that she wanted to, but she hesitated. “Afraid to cross the line?” he teased, pointedly staring at her breasts again.
“I don’t know what to do.” Her voice was small and soft.
When she confessed her indecision, he realized that the issue of his age and her youth hadn’t come up all day. “Is it because I’m twice your age?”
She nodded. “And your reputation for going after younger women. I don’t like it when things get messy. I like to be in control.”
“Look—you’ve flirted with me. We’ve had a good time talking. Age? You’re not some college student. You’re old enough to handle taking a walk on the beach. I won’t molest you.”
She was pe
rsuaded, and they kicked through the sand to the water’s edge, jumping back when the tide rushed in and sitting to watch the waves. He didn’t speak, or look at her. He was thinking about Rose, and remembering how charged up he’d been by her, while with Natalie, despite her beauty, intelligence, and youth, what he felt was a kind of benign, indifferent lust. A lust he could easily ignore, if she said no.
He wondered, idly, what she thought of him.
Had she flirted with him just so he would open up? Did she understand how serious he was about his views? Did she sense how crazy he was? Did she think him too old? Obviously.
He felt like an adolescent too shy to take his date’s hand—but only for a passing moment. Then he surrendered to his indifferent passions and reached for her. She allowed him to stroke her arm, but when he moved closer to her she stood up, shaking her head. “I just can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
To his surprise, he was relieved.
28
A NEW PORTRAIT OF ROSE
AT EVERY NEW corner the artist turns in his work, he encounters a possible version of himself. Each one beckons seductively. Each one is part of a puzzle that derives as much from mythology as psychology; but he does not know which. When he finds out, it’s too late.
Or so I told myself as I worked daily on a new portrait of Rose that was drawn from memory and from what I’d learned about her. Each night I tore up what I’d done and fell on my studio couch exhausted. It was no longer me drawing, but him—and he was confused. He was unable to turn the next corner. He realized he was avoiding the challenge he’d set for himself, to work all summer on a series of erotic paintings that would bring the wrath of the gods down on him. He would then be Prometheus, not Tantalus. Potent. Rebellious.
Meanwhile, the truth was, I needed to get laid. I tried to tell him that, but he wouldn’t listen. He had taken Natalie’s rejection to heart. He was too old to turn the next corner.
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