Whip Smart: A Memoir (4 page)

It read:

REMEBER:

We think may be not body Understand if we found more of one girl in the Kitchen You have Fine and We discount money from you Paid.

We have Camera in Kitchen (everybody Know) this camera is recording 24 hours at day, every week we check that camera and if we found more of one girl in the kitchen we discount from you Paid without Advice.

Later no Ask why we discount money from you Paid. We have few reason to not admit more of one Girl in the Kitchen.

“Um, is that a joke?” I asked.

“Oh no.” Fiona waved a hand dismissively. “That’s just Remy having a hissy fit. There’s always a new note appearing somewhere. Right now he’s obsessed with the noise. You’re only allowed to eat in the kitchen, so everybody gets dinner delivered, and it gets noisy in here. Sometimes you can hear it in Med Three.” She shrugged. “Everybody listens for a little while, because they don’t want to get fined, but then things go back to normal.”

“So, English is his second language?”

“You could tell?” She cackled.

A small television protruded from another wall, mounted on a metal arm. Below it a large wicker hamper overflowed with laundry, mostly sheets and towels, a few frilly underthings peeking out from the folds.

“Goddamn it,” Fiona grumbled, striding over to it. “Nobody’s in session, and nobody’s doing laundry.” Turning her head over her shoulder, she said, “Excuse me while I put a load in.”

“Of course!” I was glad for a little time to observe my surroundings without her observing me.

Fiona pulled a pair of latex gloves out of a box sitting on the washer-dryer unit and put them on before loading the machine. Next to the washer-dryer was more countertop that led to a deep metal sink holding a few dishes and something else, which I stared at for a few seconds before recognizing it. A dildo. It was enormous, pink, and sheathed in a condom. As worldly as I considered myself, this was the first actual dildo I had ever seen. I must have inhaled sharply upon recognition, because Fiona turned her head and followed my gaze.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” She slammed the lid on the washing machine and peeled off one of the gloves, tossing it into a nearby trash can. With her still-gloved hand, she retrieved the dildo from the sink and headed back out into the hallway. “C’mon, I’ll introduce you to our illustrious mistresses.”

When Fiona pushed open the dressing room door, six pairs of eyes shifted from a wall-mounted television over the door onto us. The shame of being overdressed is a very specific feeling, and I felt it then. They were all wearing sweatpants, jeans, or hot pants. One woman knelt topless in front of the mirrored wall of lockers, a faint smile visible in her reflection as she puckered her lips to apply liner. The others lay draped across a white leather sofa and love seat. They all had a fluidity of body that is particular to those accustomed to being perceived sexually. They slouched over the over-stuffed furniture looking bored and normal, some of them heavily
tattooed, some fat, many older than me, and a few younger. They could have been friends of mine, schoolmates.

“Who left this in the kitchen sink?” Fiona demanded, dangling the dildo between her thumb and forefinger by its big pink balls.

“I did,” volunteered the topless woman, without pausing her lipstick application. “It isn’t
used
, obviously.”

“It’s still not okay, Georgina,” Fiona scolded. “Remy would shit if he came in here and found a dick in the sink.” Someone giggled from the couch.

“Yeah, yeah,” grumbled Georgina, hoisting herself to her feet and breezing by us, breasts bouncing. She grabbed the dildo from Fiona as she passed.

“
Anyway
,” Fiona glanced at me and then pointed with her long finger at each mistress as she said her name, “this is Camille, Autumn, Miss K, Bella, Lena, and that was Georgina.” She then motioned to me. “Girls, this is the interview. She doesn’t have a name yet.” I gave my second feeble wave of the afternoon. They coolly scanned my interview outfit, a few offering lukewarm smiles before their eyes shifted back to another wall-mounted television over my head.

Fiona interviewed me in an office covered with monitors. They revealed any activity in the elevator, the outside stoop, all of the hallways, the entryway, and the stairs. Her desk faced the screens, and on it sat a phone and an open appointment book, crammed with names and notes in various colors of ink. I later learned that each manager, or phone girl as we called them, had a color, so that Remy knew who to give the commission to for every session booked. The phone girls earned an hourly wage between $15 and $20, in addition to a $5 commission per session booked with a repeat client; new clients got them $10. The opposite wall boasted a complicated stereo system and a smaller desk with a computer monitor. At this smaller desk sat the topless Georgina, furiously typing.

“Okay, get out of here so I can interview this nice girl,” Fiona demanded after my tour.

“Let me just finish this forum post.” Georgina kept typing.

“Out!”

The interview lasted about four minutes. I didn’t have professional experience, I said, but I did have personal experience. The look on Fiona’s face made it immediately clear that this was a common lie. I didn’t realize I was hired until she asked me what days I’d like to work the following week. Of our conversation, mainly I remember this: $75 per one hour session, plus tips, which could range anywhere from $5 to $500. I told her I’d be in on Monday, 10:30
A.M.

I WAS NO STRANGER
to what I recognized in the women of that dressing room. All women are used to being perceived sexually to some degree, especially in New York. Still, not all of them acquire that mesmerizing sheen, which is really self-consciousness hammered into a kind of grace. They shone, mirrors of desire, their images pliant, shimmering with mutable fantasy. I wanted that—to effortlessly seduce, to reflect desire rather than emanate it. I’d been practicing for a long time, but my skills were amateur in such company; those women were professionals.

The year I turned eleven, I had transformed from a bookish tomboy into a sex object, at least in the eyes of men. I felt their gaze everywhere: men in cars, men in coveralls, men in suits, men at chalkboards. Men behind desks, men married to my schoolmates’ mothers, and the nascent men of my middle school classrooms. At twelve I passed for sixteen; at fourteen, eighteen. I didn’t need to be in New York to discover the duality of sex appeal. I had lost the ability to be invisible and the immunities of childhood—but to be seen! I couldn’t escape it, and mostly, I didn’t want to. Desire intoxicated
me. Seduction became my primary pursuit, my first and most compelling drug. In ju nior high, I filled my diaries with lists of names: conquests and conquered; the daily entries mainly consisted of logs of my progress. It seemed that I could will boys to want me with force of mind, by invisible waves of provocation, a kind of magic, really. My peers proved easy marks, so I collected girlfriends with homes less supervised than mine, girlfriends with older brothers, older brothers with older friends. The thrill of older men, their deep voices and sinewy limbs, was sharper, alluring as only danger can be without any knowledge of consequence. My hunger to be desired was bottomless, consuming. I sensed that it was a thing to hide, and I did so reflexively.

I found that the high of seduction didn’t translate to sex, though. Once the chase ended, so did my confidence. I loved the taut line of seduction, but what I reeled in was often unwieldly, a slippery, writhing thing, bigger than me. I hated the child I reverted to in sexual situations—awkward and strangely numb, shy in my body, unable to conceal my innocence. I strategically avoided technical intercourse until the age of seventeen. Nothing else really counted, I thought, and became, in addition to an adept rationalizer, a master of placation, granting lesser acts in place of actual sex. I figured a hand job was worth the pleasure of seduction that preceded it—though the disconnection between the two confused me. By the age of thirteen, I had developed a reputation as a slut. Though I was unsure what I was being punished for, the humiliation drove me away from men for a while.

For the next few years, I experimented with girls instead. They were different, but not that different. I could swoon over them, too, even love them, or as close as I knew to it. But I couldn’t stop aligning myself with their desires, and I was disappointed when they didn’t intuit mine. What were mine? I didn’t have an orgasm with another person until I guided the hand of a girl at summer camp, and suddenly I hated the feeling of being in control. Though addicted to the power of seduction, I didn’t want to play the man.

At eighteen, after more than two years of dating women, I thrilled in love with my first real boyfriend. In the year that followed losing my official virginity to this sweet, stoned, boy, the monotony of his sweetness became tedious, his adoration irritating. Out of fear of hurting him, I ended it the most painful way: by slow, unexplained secession. I avoided him, claiming everything was fine. I moved to the other side of the city and stopped answering the phone. He didn’t know that we were broken up until he learned I was dating someone else. When I didn’t know how to leave gracefully, dropping off the face of the planet was my go-to. I quit jobs, apartments, friendships, and relationships this way for years. My history was scattered with people who hated me for this.

Even my friendships adhered to this model, to some degree. As a kid, rather than groups of friends I’d always had one best girlfriend with whom I was emeshed for a period of time, often years. These girls were my soul mates, for as long as our love, and the insular world we created, could last. A point would always come when they’d tell me their secret histories, the abuses they’d suffered from mothers, stepfathers, brothers, or unknown men. I wondered whether everyone had such hurts or these wounded were simply drawn to me. I felt privileged to be the keeper of secrets, to be so trusted. But inevitably, I’d feel the burden of too much power; like my future lovers, they needed me more than I did them. When I became an adult, my friendships became less dramatic, less fraught with need, but still singular in their intensity. I was never, my entire life, without a best friend. At the time that I started working at the dungeon, my roommate Rebecca was one of these.

By the time I got to New York, I’d fallen in love a few times and had plenty of happy orgasms. But even with long-term lovers, my need was bottomless. They could not want me enough. I always managed to love those who loved me more, but after some months of feverish infatuation I’d grow bored and become repulsed by their desire. Paradoxically the craving to be desired never abated and was only temporarily soothed by the next smoldering gaze.

. . .

What my neighbor had referred to as “paying your dues” meant the apprenticeship that all novice dommes must complete as their training. Being an apprentice entailed sitting around the dressing room for untold (and unpaid) hours until an appointment came in and then asking awkwardly to sit in on the session of a more experienced mistress. The goal of these was not only to pick up what technique I could while trying not to get in the way but also to do more than stare dumbly from behind the door, blushing. Unfortunately, on my first night of “training” I gathered only a small amount of experience witnessing the expertise of Mistress Bella, whose session consisted of putting her potbellied slave into authentic wooden stocks and jerking him off into a Dixie cup. Bella, a thirty-two-year-old Chinese-American woman who could pass for preadolescent, had issued a stream of expletives as she reached around his paunch from behind, her black tresses sweeping across his hairy back in time with the mechanical thrust of her arm. She might have been reading aloud a car manual.

“Just imagine my sranted yerrow pussy under my panties you srobbering pig wouldn’t you just rove to fuck my rittle Asian pussy you big perverted cow’s ass too bad I’ve got you stuck in tose tings rike a piece of meat and I’m gonna torture you so bad you won’t even be abre to diddre your rittle tiny … tat’s a good boy. Drink up now.”

My lack of interest in her methods aside, Bella had little wisdom to offer on anything except for
The Rules
, a battered copy of which she carried around the dungeon at all times. Perched on a kitchen stool with her dog-eared book and a pack of Virginia Slims, her child’s body curled in only a yellow slip, she would meet most addresses with silence. Did her appointment show up? Nothing. Did she want to add anything to the sushi delivery order? A twitch that could be liberally interpreted as a negative. Did she have a light? Nothing. But ask her about
The Rules
and she would go on at such
length about the differentiations between first, second, and third date etiquette that you would be forced to walk away from her mid-sentence, at a loss for an appropriate pause. Specterlike, Bella would drift from room to room, spraying Lysol disinfectant in a fog behind her, all the while quietly humming Top 40 radio hits.