The Juliette Society (8 page)

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she says, tracing her fingers lightly across the grooves, as if in a trance.

It looks grotesque. And painful.

She has such pretty, delicate wrists. They look swollen and deformed.

‘What happened?’ And I try not to sound shocked, but it’s hard not to.

‘They tied me up,’ she says, as if it’s the most obvious answer in the world. As if she expects me to know.

‘Who’s they?’

And Anna tells me everything. She tells me all of her unbidden secrets. She tells me things about her that I’d never have guessed.

She tells me about the website she models for.

‘It pays really well,’ she says. ‘All my tuition, all my bills.’

The reason why the money’s so good, she says, is because the site ‘caters to a very select group of people’.

‘What kind of people?’

‘People who know what they like,’ she says. ‘People who want to see a particular type of girl in specific kinds of situations. Pretty, willing young girls restrained, tied, chained, disciplined and kept.’

I try to imagine who those people are, what they do and why they would want to see something like that. I look at Anna’s wrists and imagine what she could possibly get out of it, other than severe bruising.

I wonder if she self-harms, or if she used to, like the cutters I knew at high school. Those weird intense loner girls from good families who were so screwed up about their bodies and everything else that they harm themselves even further, beyond repair, inside and out.

And I wonder if this is what cutters do when they outgrow their teenage obsessions and move on to adult ones. I can’t imagine any other reasons why someone would submit themselves to that. For all the college tuition in the world.

‘It’s not about the money,’ Anna says, almost as an afterthought, as if she heard what I was thinking. And I almost believe her.

I look at her wrist again and then notice two large yellowing bruises on her upper arm. She’s wearing a sleeveless blouse, so she couldn’t hide them even if she wanted to. And I don’t think she does.

Did those come from the same place, I say.

‘These?’ she says, stroking them lovingly with her index finger.

‘No,’ she smiles, as if recalling some pleasant memory. ‘Fuck bruises. You know?’

I don’t, but I can probably make an educated guess.

Anna tells me she has a boyfriend. Actually, she tells me she has many boyfriends, other than Marcus, and they all provide something different, they all satisfy a different part of her. But this one guy, he likes to treat her rough and leave his mark for others to know where he’s been. And that’s fine with her too.

‘I love to feel them on my body,’ she says. ‘As long as I can see them and feel them, I remember how they got there. I remember how he put his hands on me. How he fucked me. And I like to watch them fade. From red to black to green to gold. And when they fade away to nothing, I know it’s time to hook up with him again.’

Out of all her boyfriends, she thinks she likes him the best of all, because he’s the only one who thinks the way that she thinks. Who believes, like her, that ‘sex and violence are two sides of the same coin’ – who not only believes it, but acts upon it.

‘You know how at school they tell you they’re going to teach you about the birds and the bees?’ Anna says. ‘Well, they don’t tell you everything, not the whole truth. They only tell you part of it. Only the stuff they want you to know. About the birds. All the fairytale stuff about courtship and mating rituals and raising children. They don’t tell you about the bees.’

‘Sure they do,’ I say. ‘They tell you how bees go from flower to flower and spread the pollen.’

Anna shakes her head and rolls her eyes.

‘So it should be the birds and flowers then,’ she says. ‘Not the birds and the bees. Do you know how bees fuck?’

‘I guess I don’t,’ I say. I don’t think I ever even thought about it.

‘It’s violent,’ she says. ‘Really violent.’

When bees fuck, Anna tells me, it’s like rough sex but the boy bee gets the hard end of the bargain, not the girl.

‘When he puts his penis in the queen, it turns inside out,’ she says. ‘And when he comes it’s like a firework going off. It’s so explosive that it rips his cock off and sends him flying. And a few hours later, he dies from the trauma.

‘If a guy ever hits on me too hard, or he’s being a pain in the ass, or I’m just not into him, I always tell him about the birds and the bees,’ she laughs. ‘They never ever know about the bees. And, afterwards, they wish they never did.’

She giggles.

‘One fuck and it’s all over,’ she marvels. ‘If it was like that for guys, think how different the world would be? And if we learnt about the bees at school, and not just the birds and the flowers, think what kind of sex we’d want to have later on.’

Listening to Anna talk about sex makes me feel like a virgin all over again. No, that’s not right. She makes me feel like I did on my first day at elementary school, freshly graduated from kindergarten, so proud and thinking I was an adult now – the way you do as a kid every time something significant happens, like attending a new school or getting your first bike – when I really knew nothing. Nothing at all.

That’s what I feel like now. Like I’ve been playing doctors and nurses all this time and I’ve only just worked out how sex works in the real world. I’m trying to digest all this information, but Anna hasn’t finished yet.

She says she remembers why she started telling me about the bees. That when the boy bee dies, its castrated penis stays stuck half-in and half-out of the queen’s vagina, like a cork in a half-drunk bottle of wine, as a cue for other boy bees to impregnate her – like a mating sign.

‘That’s what these are,’ Anna says, as she rubs her hand slowly over the bruises on her arm again. She wears them like a temporary tattoo because she wants everyone to know what she’s into – the way people wear badges of their favorite bands on the lapels of their jacket – so others who are into the same thing will recognize and respond.

‘And if they don’t?’ I say.

‘I guess they just figure I’m really clumsy,’ she shrugs.

I’m looking at Anna, at her bruises, and I see her in a completely different light now. But she hasn’t answered any of my questions. Just left me with a whole set of new ones.

8

I’m thinking about everything’s Anna told me about Marcus, herself, and the birds and the bees. About fuck bruises. And I want to know what it’s like to feel Jack on my body. Not just his come. His mark. I want to know if that’s what’s missing from our sex life. Rough sex.

Jack is fucking me in bed. He’s sitting on his haunches with my legs resting against his chest and my feet over his left shoulder. He’s holding my ankles and fucking me like he’s playing the cello. His cock is sawing back and forth in my pussy. His balls are slapping against my ass cheeks, and his hand is spread across my lower belly and down into my crotch, his thumb plucking at the hood and button of my clit. He’s running through all the scales, pushing my passion up by octaves and I’m singing for him.

I’m singing for him and I decide I want to hit a higher note.

I say, ‘Hit me, Jack. I want you to hit me. Hit me hard enough to make me scream.’

I say it on the spur of the moment, and because I’m feeling good and I like the idea. But it doesn’t quite work out that way.

He stops mid-thrust.

‘What?’ he says.

‘I want you to hit me, I want you to hurt me.’

He pulls out and sits at the end of the bed, just looking at me.

It’s dark and I can’t see his expression clearly, but I know it’s not good.

‘What’s the matter?’ I ask.

There’s a long silence.

‘What did you say that for,’ Jack says. ‘Why would you even ask me to do something like that to you?’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to… I thought… ’

And I give up, because I can’t really think of any good reason why. It wasn’t something I planned, it’s something I felt and acted upon. So I don’t have an easy answer for him. I don’t have any answer at all.

‘Even if I did it, I couldn’t pretend to like it,’ he says. ‘I can’t pretend I even want to do it. I just don’t. Why would I want to hurt you.’

And I can hear in his voice that he’s not just upset and puzzled, he’s angry and fuming.

He gets into bed, all the way over on the edge of his side, and wraps the covers around him.

I’m left feeling frustrated, unsatisfied and deeply confused. I feel clumsy and dumb, so dumb, to even think that Jack would be into it.

We’re lying in bed. Together, but so remote, as if there’s a wall between us.

I start to hear Jack’s breathing getting heavy, but I can’t sleep.

I go into the living room, sit on the couch with my laptop, in the dark, and find the porn website Anna works for. I’ve been thinking about it all day, ever since she told me, and I want to see for myself how those marks got on her wrists and what she does.

I’m going to hold up my hand here and admit something embarrassing. I don’t have a whole lot of experience with internet porn. Porn movies, yes. Internet porn, no – two different beasts. And, yes, I do know it’s almost as impossible to avoid, but it’s just never been my thing. Maybe Kinsey was onto something after all with his little theory about women and visual stimuli.

When I think of internet porn, I think of video games, Star Wars figures, Marvel comics and science fiction, and all the things that geeky virgin teenage boys develop obsessions with as a cover for their one overriding obsession:

Jerking off to search terms on Google Images.

I think of geeky adult men who never outgrow their obsessions, just upgrade them. From toy cars to real cars, action figures to pussy-in-a-can. From Google Images to YouPorn.

I think of all the billions of guys, in every country of the world, who are jerking off to internet porn at the same time. Or maybe not even internet porn. Maybe just Kim Kardashian’s website. Jerking off over badly retouched and barely titillating photos of the Kardashian sisters. I think of all the billions of men ejaculating gazillions of spermatozoa simultaneously over images of Kim Kardashian’s digital ass.

I think, what a waste of good sperm.

What a waste of precious energy.

If only someone invented a way of tapping that energy at source. Or found a way to turn the billions of come-stiffened Kleenex tissues discarded daily into a source of fuel. If someone discovered how to do that, most of the world’s energy problems would be solved in a snap. No more wars for oil. No more carbon footprints. No more nuclear waste.

No more wasted tax dollars needlessly spent trying to achieve cold fusion.

Just billions of hot, sweaty guys sitting in front of their computer monitors with their pants around their ankles, furiously jerking themselves off over internet porn and Kim Kardashian’s ass, day and night, night and day.

Without ever feeling guilty.

So I guess what I’m saying is this, when it comes to internet porn, I’m on the fence. Not a user myself, but I can definitely see the potential benefits for everlasting world peace.

But this porn site, Anna’s site, even with my limited experience of the genre, must be the strangest porn site I’ve ever seen. Starting with the name.

Sodom.

Or rather, SODOM, all caps. Because the last thing anyone requires from pornography is subtlety.

Sodom. And not Gomorrah. Not because it’s too subtle, but probably because it’s too hard to spell and sounds like an STD. Because pornography and STDs, well, let’s just say they’re never going to be the best of friends.

So, SODOM. An acronym of sorts. For the words splashed across the home page, also in caps.

SODALITY OF DOMINANTS.

Whatever that means.

I’m looking at this website and I can’t make head or tail of it. This isn’t pornography as I know it or understand it. For a start, there’s no sex on display. None at all. At least, none that I can see. Just a gallery and a search engine.

I don’t know what to search for and afraid of what I might find if I do. I scan through the gallery instead. An endless scrolling collection of girls, in portraits that look like yearbook photos, all exceptionally pretty, almost every one college-age. I scan through the gallery looking for Anna, half-expecting to recognize someone else I know too.

I wonder how many girls there are like Anna who pay their way through college like this, in porn. If I’m the only college-age female who doesn’t. I wonder why pretty girls, whose looks give them such a natural advantage in life, choose to turn what they have to their disadvantage.

I think of Séverine. Who had everything, wanted for nothing, and how that wasn’t enough. Séverine, who, more than anything, wanted to
be
nothing.

I think of Anna. And then I see her.

I click on her picture. It brings up another gallery. All of Anna’s scenes, each one illustrated by a thumbnail. I scroll through them. There’s a lot, too many to count. And the thumbnails, they look like minutely detailed tableaus of medieval torture from an illuminated manuscript.