Nine & a Half Weeks (5 page)

The nights were palpable and fierce, razors, outlined so clearly as to be luminous. A different country, its landscape and currency plain: heat, fear, cold, pleasure, hunger, glut, pain, desire, overwhelming lust.

There was sharp pepper that made me gasp, and the shock of chili burning my throat, and Chablis like gold smoothing my vocal cords, a simple chocolate pudding he’d made from a Royal mix invading my blood. My body alive and pliant around me, soon to turn liquid or afire, either way. Every night, looking down at myself after a bath—flecks of foam on my nipples and pubic hair, one palm docile inside the other, wrists accustomed to lying against one another, glinting steel as natural as silver combs in one’s hair and as decorative—every night now, I reveled in my beauty.

Years ago, once the frenzied adolescent obsession had calmed itself, I had sized up my body and decided that it was all right. I knew very well which parts of me would look better were they shaped differently, but had not worried over such acknowledged deficiencies for over a decade. Whenever I did fall into the trap of criticizing too harshly, I told myself that for every demonstrable inequity there was something pleasing to point to, resulting, all together, in an acceptable balance. But now, under his eyes and hands…

1 had neither jumped rope nor jogged in the park, I had not lost or gained a pound, it had to be, after all, the same body in which I had lived since adulthood. But there it was, unrecognizable, transformed: supple, graceful, polished, adored. The flesh leading to the crook of an elbow, where two cerulean veins fade into opaque skin, exquisitely soft; a belly like silk sloping gently toward hipbones; an upper arm joining my torso to form a delicate fold like that at the center of a young girl’s pubic mound; a shallow, oval hollow at the inside of a thigh, leading upward from the knee, smoothing gently, giving way to a slow ripening, downy white infinitely sensitive, the finest fabric in the world …

“I HAVE TO go to a meeting,” he says. “It’s the wrap-up of the Handlemayer thing, just a formality, it shouldn’t take long.” He is getting dressed again, having finished the dinner dishes: a different suit, though identical in cut to the one he took off two hours ago, dark gray now instead of dark blue. A fresh, light blue shirt, twin to the one I’m wearing, a dark gray silk tie with small, wine-red dots arranged into diamond shapes. He says, “I’d like you to do something before I leave.”

He leads me into the bedroom and says, “Lie down.” He ties my ankles to the footboard, my left wrist to the headboard. He sits down on the bed beside me. He slides his right hand up my right thigh, polishes my hipbone under his palm, brushes the skin on my stomach with that part of the hand with which TV Orientals deal karate chops. He rests his thumb on my navel for a moment, exerting the gentlest of pressure, then opens the two fastened buttons of my shirt and, with both hands, slowly pushes the fabric aside. The sleeves of his suit jacket brush my nipples.

My breathing has been irregular since he first told me to lie down; whenever he touches me I hold my breath, then breathe rapidly and shallowly until his next touch. I cannot keep my head still on the pillow. He takes my free right hand. Holding my palm, looking at me all the while, he sucks each of my fingers until they drip with saliva. He guides my hand between my legs and says, “I’d like to watch you make yourself come.”

He is sitting idly, comfortably, one leg crossed over the other, the creases sharp in the freshly cleaned suit. I do not try to move my hand. He waits. “You don’t understand.” My voice cracks. “I never…” He is silent. “I’ve never done that in front of anybody. It embarrasses me.”

He picks up the package of Winstons from the bedside table, puts a cigarette in his mouth, lights it, draws on it ineptly, eyes squinted, puts it between my lips. A moment later I need to move my hand to hold the cigarette. “It embarrasses her,” he repeats. His tone of voice is bland, there is no mocking inflection, nor is there a trace of anger in what he says next. “You’re pretty dense, aren’t you? You haven’t caught on yet what we’re all about.”

Without disturbing the cigarette, he takes my watch from my free wrist. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours, no later.” He turns off the bedside lamp, then the lamp in the corner, and closes the bedroom door quietly.

I am shaken and, at the moment, concerned more than anything that I should be able to light another cigarette after this one. There is the saucer I use for an ashtray on the bedside table and the pack of Winstons, but he has put the lighter he bought for himself—to light my cigarettes—back into his pocket. There are no matches in sight. I put the half-smoked cigarette into one corner of my mouth, retrieve the pack, shake one cigarette loose, put the pack on my stomach, move the ashtray next to my right hip. Then an awkward turning and reaching and stretching, but I manage it, though crushing the pack as I roll over: I transfer the half-smoked cigarette to the hand bound to the headboard, hold the fresh cigarette to the lit one with my free hand, wait, put it into my mouth. The third time it lights. I do not ask myself why I’m not thinking clearly enough to simply put an unlit cigarette in my mouth and hold the lit one against it; nor do I ask myself why I refrain from untying myself, something I could accomplish more easily and surely more quickly than the sweaty fumbling I’ve just been through….

My face burns again at the thought of him— anyone—watching me. I think: this is the first time I’ve said no. Then: that’s nonsense, melodrama. I’ve explained something to him, that’s all, something he doesn’t know about me. “He knows I’ll do anything,” I say out loud, though tentatively, into the faint whir of the air conditioner, at the shadows on the ceiling, to the shape that is his tall chest of drawers. I am appalled that it was me who said the words that now ring in my ears. I try to count what I wouldn’t do. I once had anal intercourse with someone and it hurt and we stopped—but I would surely try it again, with him, should he want to. I’ve read how people urinate on each other, shit. I’ve never done that and the thought of it nearly makes me ill—surely he’d never want to do that, either. But how did I feel about being tied up and beaten, only weeks ago? And why should there be any difference between the various ways in which he makes me come and masturbating in front of him, if it pleases him? Yet the shame of it squints my eyes shut, turns my legs cold, grinds my teeth.

Nearly a decade ago, a good friend of mine had described to me how she and her lover masturbated together and how much she liked it. “Don’t worry,” she had said to me when I blurted out—not haltingly that time but with spontaneous horror—that I could never do that, would not, ever. “It’s just your particular hang-up. We’ve all got them. I can’t stand it when a man puts his tongue in my ear, gives me the creeps.” She had laughed uproariously.

1 say it out loud: “Hang-up. My hang-up.” All at once 1 respect the word. No longer a flabby, anonymous catchall, a dark specter suddenly, precise: gallows in marketplaces, lynchings at noon, and then there he is at the door.

He turns on the bedside lamp, slips my watch back onto my wrist, carefully pushes the thin strap through both loops; I’m too impatient to do that and always stop after the first loop is secured, so that the second one is stiff from disuse. He says, “You started masturbating early.” 1 laugh. “That’s either a hunch or an accusation,” I say. “How was the meeting?” He says nothing. I focus on the brass handles of the chest of drawers, fixing them sharply in my mind. “I guess, six, I don’t remember.” He prompts, “And often, as an adult.” 1 begin one of the sentences I have rehearsed in his absence, reasonable sentences, adult sentences: choice and preference and the delicate balance of intimacy versus… I falter, leave the brass handles behind, face the window now, the need to turn away from him overpowering. He takes my face into both hands and draws it slowly back to the side of the bed where he is sitting. He speaks deliberately. “I want you with me, but I won’t force you to stay.” The air conditioner shifts gears, purrs. I open my mouth, he puts a finger gently across my lips. “This is how it is with us, listen. While you’re with me, you do as I say. While you’re with me,” merely repeated, without added gravity, “you do as I say.” And a moment later, disgruntled: “For Christ’s sake, what’s the big deal?” And finally, casually: “You could give it another try. You might want me to get you some cream. I could lower the lights.” “It’s the only thing,” I say, my face turned back toward the window. “Ask me, I’ll do anything else.”

He picks up the bedside phone, dials a number from memory, gives his name, his address and mine, and says, “Fifteen minutes.” He takes the largest of his suitcases from the top shelf of the closet, lays it open on the bedroom floor. I have brought those belongings of mine that are now scattered throughout his apartment in separate installments: a large straw basket once, a canvas overnight case another time, sometimes just things stuffed into a shopping bag. He takes my clothes, all on the left side of the closet, off the rod, folds them in half—still on his wooden suit hangers—and they lie neatly on the bottom of the suitcase. A scarf here, another one, the fountain pen he bought for me, so that I would stop using his, some books in the living room, half a dozen records, four pair of shoes, underwear jumbled in his second bureau drawer, the unopened bottle of Miss Dior he bought me last Saturday, and a second one, almost empty.

A trip to the kitchen. He returns with a large plastic garbage bag, I hear the bathroom paraphernalia clatter into the bag, he is back in the bedroom, the plastic bag takes up most of the suitcase. My hair dryer, my diary, the suitcase snaps shut. It has not taken him five minutes.

He unties me and rubs each ankle and my left wrist at length, though they were fastened loosely enough to show no marks. He gently tugs his blue shirt off my back. He has left out a summer sweater of mine, folded on a chair. I raise my arms automatically and he slips the pale~wool over my head. And a gray linen skirt. I’m so used to being dressed by him that I wait for him to kneel before me on one knee while I step into the waistband. I think: I’ve never told him that I always put skirts on over my head; he thinks of skirts as the equivalents of pants, so naturally one steps into them, pulls them up. And: he’s forgotten underwear, I surely can’t be on the street at midnight with a skirt on and no underpants. Stepping into the open waist, watching him get up while he eases the skirt up over my hips; the lifting of the sweater while he pulls the zipper at my left side and fastens the hook and eye, the smoothing of thin wool over raw linen.

He holds up my sandals now and motions for me to sit on the bed. I hold out each foot in turn, flex the arch, watch him slip on the sandal and fasten the buckle. He stands behind me and brushes my hair. “I’ll take you down to the taxi. If I find other things of yours, I’ll drop them off.”

His brush in my hair, the slow seductive strokes, the faint crackling of electricity. I turn and clutch his thighs. He holds very still. 1 am crying loudly as a child. Both of his hands are in my hair, the brush has fallen on the carpet.

“The cab’ll be here any minute,” he says, and the doorman’s ring at that very moment. My voice, raised, “You can’t,” his bland at the intercom, “… kind enough to tell him I’ll be right down,” and to me, “I thought you had decided.” And then the kneeling before him, not to satisfy him with my mouth as so often before but in abjection, the pleading incoherent yet clear: “Anything,” and “Please.” And his voice at the brass box again, smooth: “Give him five dollars, Ray, and tell him to wait, thank you very much.” And his few steps back down the hall and into the bedroom and a thug’s growl: “All right, then, now, do it.” My body pushed prone and the hem of my skirt scratchy around my neck. He takes his father’s ring off his right hand, throws it on the bed above, holds me by the throat with the left hand, uses the ring-free right to slap my face, palm on left cheek, the back of his hand on the right, the palm again, “All right, then, let’s see her do it.” My own hand shoved into my mouth, “Make it easy for her, good and wet” and in the softest voice, a murmur, “I’ll get you started, sweetheart, it’ll be so simple.” My thighs spread apart, heat springing up under his tongue and only a slight shift when he lifts his head and brings my hand to where he has begun what I am far too familiar with to try or want to fight, my fore and middle finger slipping down as always, and coming.

“I loved this,” he says. “I love watching your face. You look so extraordinary when you come, you stop being pretty and turn into this thing, ravenous, with a stretched open mouth.” And in the hallway, “Give him another five, Ray, tell him to go home.”

NOTHING HAD PREPARED ME. Some years back I had read The Story of O, intrigued by the beginning, horrified after a few pages, repulsed long before the end. Sadomasochists in real life were black-leather freaks, amusing and silly in their ridiculous getups. If a friend, a peer, had told me she had herself tied to a table leg at home after a full day’s work at the office—well, it has never come up. God knows I would not have believed it.

AT FOUR-THIRTY ON a Friday afternoon he calls me at work: “You’ll be in room 312 at the Algonquin, at five-thirty.” I’ve had lunch there once. A few days earlier, during yet another one of our interminable talks (“Let’s compare restaurants”—“and hotels”—“there’s the Paris Ritz”—“ridiculous”—“ZumZum, then”—“good bratwurst”—“lousy sauerkraut”—“mediocre coffee…”), I had told him how romantic the lobby had seemed to me, and the plush red corner where I had sat with two clients. They had long been inured to Algonquin charm and I told him how I had to suppress my enjoyment sufficiently to be able to concentrate on what they were saying.

I intend to go by subway but an elderly couple climbs out of a Checker in front of my office building just as I walk through the revolving glass. I hold the car door for them, listen to my thigh muscles ache as I repeat to myself, “You’ll be… at five-thirty” and walk through the Algonquin doors minutes later. I knock at 312, twice, but there is no answer and the door is unlocked. I have assumed he would be waiting for me. I say his name at the bathroom door, which stands ajar, even—on an impulse only half-playful—open the closet. There is no one there.