“She’s the one with the poker games, right?” I said. “I would like to see it sometime, you know,” I added.
“Forget it,” he answered quickly, and rather grimly. “I’ve changed my mind about that one.”
I was surprised. I guessed I had overstepped some mysterious boundary. He looked a little frightening. He lit a cigarette, and I hugged my knees to my chest in the big armchair. We both were quiet for a while. Then I almost whispered, “Jonathan, am I really so badly trained?”
“That’s a tough one,” he said. “Yes, I guess so, I guess by Kate’s standards you are, but Kate’s standards are astronomical. For God’s sake, a lot of this is sensibility, after all. And anyhow, there are different standards, different games, different coordinates for plotting reality. I, for example…oh come on, Carrie, if we can talk about Kate we can talk about this—don’t play dumb. You know very well what I’m talking about, even if we’ve never talked about it before.
“The game we play is objectification, right? You are what I want you to be, or you get thrashed, as you well know. Of course, we both know that there’s got to be a ‘you’ to actively ‘be’ what I want you to be. But there’s no simple reversal. There’s something I can only call originality, your jagged little edge of critical intelligence that could go home and turn this all into a story and write it down. It obliterates itself at my command and then what’s weird is that I feel as though I’m compelled to search for its trace. The story is written somewhere under its erasure, maybe. Or something like that, like something out of that god-awful fancy frog theory you read so much of at school. Ridiculous, obscure, pretentious, but still…it seems to describe something that’s really happening. Something about the ass-backward way, excuse the expression, in which we—all of us—feel and perceive and communicate. I mean, here I am, not even letting you speak most of the time but still straining to hear it, that calculating, deadpan, cranky, comic narrative little voice saying, ‘And then Jonathan said…’ and making me sound, oh quite sexy, but just a little ridiculous and full of myself too. Anyhow, that’s what interests me. It’s pretty elusive.”
“Gosh,” I said. It was about all I could think of to say. “I didn’t know you thought about stuff like that,” I added. I was pretty blown away. I certainly hadn’t been playing dumb. I had genuinely been dumb. I had been playing so hard, so sincerely (his word), that I seemed to have missed a whole level of the game.
“I know,” he said. “You wouldn’t. You’re not quite open-minded enough to expect stuff like that from somebody as boozhie and mainstream as I am. Still, I try. I read a lot. I read what I think I need to read to understand what I want to understand. It doesn’t match your ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ image of me, but there it is.”
“I’ve got to think about this some more,” I said slowly.
“That’s exactly right,” he said. “You do. You’re a kid, after all, and sometimes I forget that. Sorry. Really, I mean that. You know a lot more than you think you know, and I know you think about it a whole lot, but you haven’t really thought it through. After all, it’s a shocker, and a blow to the ego, to consider that sex might be as difficult and complicated as literature.”
I was beginning to wonder if these seemingly ruleless sessions were where he scored his biggest points off me. Perhaps the rest of the arrangement he and I had wouldn’t work without these talks.
“It’s getting late,” he said. “We should get back to work.”
“No,” I said. “Because even though this is important stuff, you haven’t really answered my question. Am I so badly trained that I’ll be in big trouble out there, wherever it is?”
“Now that’s disingenuous,” he said. “You know there’s no answer to that question. I’m not training you for ‘out there.’ Even up to the last day, I’m training you for me, and don’t you forget that. Of course you’re going to wonder about ‘out there,’ but really, you’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you? I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be paying attention to some technical things. Kate’s right about ballet and yoga and so forth, you can start going next week.” He handed me some more of those little business cards. “And I think you should quit your job and move in here. The auction is in six weeks. Let’s finish these papers. But first, I have a question for you. What are Primus?”
The next weeks were tough and scary, as you can imagine. No more palling around over pizza, and it about broke my heart to pack up and say good-bye to Stuart. Still, it was clear that if I was going to do this thing, I’d have to stop being a part-timer.
And anyhow, all of a sudden Stuart was hardly ever home. Because Stuart was in love. So he was at Greg’s house, or at the library studying across the table from Greg, or maybe he and Greg were working on an AIDS crisis line somewhere, or just sitting on the couch holding hands—all that good stuff, I thought, and felt a twinge of loneliness, as I rang Jonathan’s kitchen doorbell, carrying only a small suitcase and a backpack with a few books in it and my huge desire to find out what would happen next.
It was a whole new ballgame, the intensity, the inexorability, and yes, the boredom of it, the fact that I was on call twenty-four hours a day, except for the welcome relief of the ballet and yoga (and they were tough too, though I was sure Kate was right—they’d come in handy). I slept on a little pallet next to Jonathan’s bed, chained to the headboard. I served his meals, on my knees. In fact, there were days when it felt like I never got off my knees. He used me as a footrest, an end table, an ashtray. He cut short his work at his office, bringing projects home, and I spent some excruciating times staying as still and quiet as I could and waiting for him to look up from his work—his papers, drawings, or the CAD program on his Mac—and command me to lick, suck, spread, or open. There were days when I wasn’t allowed to say anything, days when I couldn’t use my hands for anything, doing everything with my mouth. I’d learned the original rules quite well, but now there were always new rules, new reasons to punish me.
One of the most intense changes, I realized, was not having any money. I mean, I did, really. I had a bank account, with a little bit saved from my job. But Jonathan had me sign it over so that I couldn’t get at it, at least until after the auction if I didn’t get sold, or until I was free, if I did. It was a very lucid contract, written by one of the pornographer lawyers, and given the small amount of money involved, it couldn’t have been worth what Jonathan must have paid him to write it up. But like all the other stage props in his virtual reality, it did its job. Especially in contrast to how I’d felt zooming around downtown on my bike, I felt profoundly unfree.
Jonathan or Mrs. Branden would give me money to get on the bus to go to ballet or yoga, and to come right back home after the lesson, which I always and unfailingly did. There was a great grungy coffeehouse right downstairs from the ballet studio, too, where I would have loved to hang out with a book and a latte, if I’d had the money for a latte. I’d feel like the little match girl, practically pressing my nose against the window, staring at all the normal people at the tables. And then I’d get onto the bus going home, reaching into my pocket for the exact change. Kevin was right, I’d think. Carrie, you are weird.
I’d feel tired, melancholy, disoriented, and a little scared, as the bus strained uphill to Jonathan’s neighborhood. And then, little by little, I’d start feeling really hot. The bus would be chugging and I’d be sort of taking inventory of my body. I’d feel the newly stretched muscles, the welts and bruises. And my wet, warm insides. My jeans and sweaty leotard would begin to feel foreign. I’d think ahead to taking them off, to bathing and drying myself and making myself up, and then silently presenting myself to Mrs. Branden to be cuffed and collared, perhaps shod and corseted. I always shuddered, and probably always would, when she’d buckle the collar in place. And no matter how good my posture was getting, how straight my back, how strong my belly muscles, the collar would transform me. My head would lift, my breasts would thrust, filling me with a sense of how tender, h
ow hurtable they were. I would, in that moment, feel myself become an object—his object, only better than an object, because I had a consciousness and a will and an intelligence that I would knowingly hand over to him. And then it would be free fall, the moment after I’d given him my center. I could feel myself preparing for that moment, that moment when he’d only look at me, for what would feel like hours, until he could tell that my body was begging him to touch me, any way, any way at all.
How could the people on the bus not know this about me, I wondered. Couldn’t they smell it or something? Perhaps they could. Perhaps, I thought, they’d go home tonight and surprise their bored and tired spouses.
So, really, Jonathan’s little lecture about my critical intelligence didn’t really make much difference in practice. I did like thinking that I was making him a gift of my smarts and wit—rolling it up in a ball and tossing it to him to play with or throw away, as he chose. But except for those sweaty bus rides, I didn’t really think much about it. Time hurtled on. Jonathan seemed compelled to plumb the depths of his inventiveness; and all the new rules and rough strife, I just kept trying my damnedest to learn and to obey.
Well, maybe once it made a tiny difference. One day he showed me a dress he’d had made for me—gorgeous, black, very short, and backless, with a high jeweled neck that looked like a collar. “Oh, Mr. Rochester,” I said—it just popped into my mind and I couldn’t stop myself, and I guess somewhere I knew he would think it was funny. He did, too. He was amused and then mightily pissed off when he realized that it was going to be difficult to hit me hard enough for that transgression and not have any stray marks show outside the boundaries of the teeny dress. He managed, though, and I very seriously considered whether I was ever going to try to be even mildly funny again.
Then he had me put on the dress. Underneath, I was wearing a corset and black stockings, with a new, Conan the Barbarian of a dildo belted firmly up my ass. “We’re going to the opera,” he said. A big limo came to the door. We got in; he sat on the seat and I knelt on the floor and sucked his cock the whole way there while he sipped champagne, and then I had to sit through the whole fatuous opera performance—The Abduction from the Seraglio, I guess that was his idea of a joke—with my lipstick smudged and my mouth full of the taste of him, feeling utterly riven up the ass and helplessly exposed (the audience was full of nasty Muffies), while he watched me smugly.
At intermission, he pulled me to my feet while most people were still applauding. I hoped that this meant we could go—maybe he wanted to play some more in the limo—but really I knew better. He led me to a central area where people were buying drinks and sitting down with them at tables. It was already crowded, with people dressed every possible way, and buzzing with all kinds of chatter, but he found us a table. He leaned across it and said very softly, “I’m glad you gave me cause to beat you earlier. I like knowing how bruised you are under that pretty dress. Makes you seem more naked. It’s difficult, isn’t it, being so near to naked in the middle of this scene.”
“Yes, Jonathan, it is difficult,” I replied. Bastard.
“Good,” he answered, almost gloating, but maintaining his stuffy schoolmaster voice. “Now, I want to see you on your hands and knees, here, in this room. Do the best you can. I’ll be over there by the wall.”
“Yes, Jonathan,” I breathed. Oh yes, Jonathan, swell.
The best I could think of was to drop an earring and get down to retrieve it. Pretty tame, but given the shortness of my dress, pretty difficult too. Looking at nothing at all, pretending a kind of idle calm, I fiddled with the post of my left earring, slowly wiggling it off, being careful to keep it folded in my hand. I kept my head very still and the earring stayed in place. Then I moved my head slowly to look at Jonathan, leaning against the wall with his arms folded, watching me intently. Well, I thought, if he knows about my bruises, I know about that hard-on that’s starting up over there, as I glanced at the area of his loose Italian suit that wasn’t hanging exactly as Giorgio had intended. Then I raised my eyes to his, to catch his wry little look of “touché,” and my earring fell to the floor at my feet.
What would I have done, I wondered, if it had rolled all the way across the floor? But it hadn’t, so I slowly got down, keeping my eyes locked to his. I’m just retrieving an earring, I kept repeating to myself, trying my damnedest not to feel too obvious and humiliated in the middle of this shrine to cultural excess and obsession. At the same time, I kept hearing his tone of command and my own tone of obedience, his “I want” and my “yes, Jonathan,” the duet playing on some internal radio that seemed always to be turned on whenever we were together.
Down on the floor, I simply posed for an instant, all meekness and compliance, eyes on his, mouth slightly open. Okay? I wondered, and then, suddenly and joltingly, found myself staring at him as though I had never seen him before. Nothing like being in a crowd of strangers to hype up the familiar a little. I guessed that was what he was enjoying as well. It made me a little dizzy for a moment, and then, mercifully, my head cleared. Ready or not, I’d been down on the floor quite long enough, I thought, and grabbed the earring.
I got up slowly, being careful not to let the dress ride up too high. I felt like a diver surfacing. All of a sudden, I was aware of all the chatter around me again. And, miserably, uncomfortably, I was also aware of several pairs of eyes on me. Just how conspicuous had I been, I wondered? There was no way I could know. I tried to screen the stares out of my consciousness, to disconnect from the lines of force that the gazes described. I knew that if I looked I’d see the kinds of questions that I had seen before in people’s eyes, on the rare occasions when Jonathan and I had been together out in the “real,” nonpornotopia world. I mean, we were hardly blatant or anything, but face it, we’d always get some attention. At first, naively, I’d thought that was because he always saw to it that we wore such great clothes. But it wasn’t, of course. It was that, for those with eyes to see, there was always something extra, some buzz between us, some way that he’d hold my arm just a little too tightly. Somebody would always notice, some eyebrow would always be raised. The clash of our private virtual reality and the real world was deeply disturbing to me, and he was a genius at exploiting my discomfort.
So as I got back into my seat at the table, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see a very queer looking man, dressed all in black with steel-rimmed glasses, raising his champagne glass to me. I got flustered and turned my head away, and my eyes met those of a little girl, maybe eleven years old, her pale face surrounded by unruly curls, in tacky dark green velvet with a white lace collar. Her gaze was calm and steady. I didn’t think that she understood. But I knew that she knew. Oh, what the hell, I thought, and returned her gaze. Don’t be scared, it’s just what it is, I tried to communicate to her. Life is really surprising. She seemed to absorb that, not really to understand it, but in the way of wise children, to file it away for when she’d be ready for it. She’s smart, I thought, a whole lot smarter than I am—and I put on the earring, jamming the post tightly.
Jonathan strolled over, finally. Cheerfully, he kissed the top of my head. “Not bad,” he said. “You were a little rude for a moment back there, but you already know that. We’ll deal with it later, of course. Anyhow, not bad, not bad at all.” He lifted me by the elbow and led me back to our orchestra seats. I could feel a run snaking down my stocking. He’ll like that, I thought. I hardly heard the rest of the opera.
Afterward, he punished and then fucked me in the limo, parked at the top of Twin Peaks, while the driver watched silently through his mirror. And when he’d driven us back to the house, Jonathan asked if he’d like to have me suck him off, as a tip, he said. Of course it really wasn’t a tip—Jonathan just wanted to see what it felt like to watch through the mirror—but I don’t suppose the driver cared about making such a fine distinction. Anyhow, they traded places, and they both got what they wanted, and then Jonathan also gave him some money as well as the leftover champagn
e, before we walked back into the house.
CHAPTER IV
Kibbles and Bits
A few days after our night at the opera, the phone rang in Jonathan’s study. He picked up the receiver, listened for a minute, and started talking loudly. “Doug, that’s ridiculous, the ventilation works fine, it’s a minor adjustment that I’ve planned for already. No, they don’t need me. I can walk them through it over the phone, I don’t have to be there for the whole damn week while they install. Because I’m busy. No. No, personal things. No, I can’t tell you.”
He waited a bit, pushing me off his lap to a kneeling position on the floor, then rubbing my head distractedly. They were probably putting him on a conference call; his quality of life would take a turn for the worse, I thought, when those things all had video components built in.
Anyway, he argued with Doug, and then Doug and Stan and Carol, for about fifteen minutes, speaking that horrible singsong whiny yuppie-ese he could do so well: “But we’ve already completed that deliverable, Stan,” and “Yes, Carol, I understand that your comfort level is not high.” And by the end of it, he’d promised to go to Chicago the following evening, though he was adamant that he was right and they were wrong and that it was stupid for him to go. But the deal was that he’d walk them through the installation, whatever that was, in person, and then he’d be entirely done. No more calls, and no way were they going to mess up his trip to Europe in ten days—that was the auction, though of course they didn’t know it.
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