Carrie's Story Read online

  “You pay for that kind of stuff too? Regularly?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m rich, or rich enough, anyway. And I know pretty much what I want, and I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to get it. When you’re rich, price isn’t important. The main point is getting things to be the way you want them. So I pay. Your job is to work that beautiful butt off to be as perfect as the scenery around you. Oh, speaking of scenery. You know, if this works out, we could go to Provence.”

  “No!” I shouted, before I was even aware that I was saying anything.

  We were both surprised. “What I mean is,” I stammered, “Provence is a real, historical place, not a fucking virtual reality. And it’s a place I care about and want to learn about and understand. And when I go there, I go as me, wearing my glasses and my own clunky shoes. It has nothing to do with this.”

  The ironic lines around his mouth deepened. “Rio maybe, then.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  It took about two weeks to get all the arrangements made—the doctor, the haircut, all that. Nobody in the expensive, tasteful places he sent me to seemed to think it was weird when I asked them to bill Jonathan, though I found it humiliating in the extreme. They had to know, I kept thinking, these polite and urbane functionaries. And certainly, the haircutter did seem to know exactly what Jonathan wanted, and no, it didn’t exactly make me look butch. When he finished, I stared at myself for a long while in the elegant chromed mirror. I looked terrific, actually, in a cold, high-tech sort of way. Jonathan must have a great eye, I thought, to know I’d look this good in such an extreme haircut, but I also knew that wasn’t the whole point. I looked familiar, but not in a way that I could place.

  I stared at myself all the rest of the day, in every mirror and store window I passed, but I couldn’t figure it out. Not until I woke up, startled, the next morning at about 4:00. What I looked like, I realized, was a collaborator, one of those sad French girls who’d slept with a Nazi soldier, and after the war the whole village takes its revenge, which includes shaving her head. My god, I thought, was this what he’d intended? A little message about sleeping with the enemy, brought to you—and paid for—by the enemy. I paced around for a few hours with a quilt wrapped around me and a cup of coffee in my hand, distractedly shuttling between my mirror and the window, where a cold gray dawn gathered light.

  And then I also had to give Mrs. Branden about a million of my measurements, and she took about a million more, odd sections of my body that I didn’t like to think anybody was going to deal with. Which just shows how realistically I was going about this. Of course, if I’d been a more realistic person, no way would I have gotten into this thing in the first place. Then, finally, on a Thursday night just after Halloween, it was showtime.

  But it’s hard for me to describe those first sweaty, embarrassing couple of weeks. Probably because I looked like such a klutz for so much of it. I like to remember the parts where I felt halfway pretty, and I also like to tell about some of my wisecracks. But those first few agonizing weeks…like, for example, the very first time I actually went to his house after all the fittings and appointments. I was on my knees, trembling with fear and excitement, tethered to a hook in the wall near the fireplace, waiting for him. What would he say, I kept wondering, and what would it really be like to fuck him? I even wondered—I’m embarrassed to admit—if he’d like the haircut. I waited there for about ten minutes, until finally he came in, looked me over impassively, and asked, “How do you greet me?”

  Trick question. Of course I didn’t know, but I thought of porn novels I’d read, so I put my head down and kissed his shoe. And got my new crimson lipstick, that he’d bought for me to wear, all over the toe. He thwacked me hard with the riding crop he was carrying (I’d never seen a riding crop, but I recognized it from my porn reading) and told me to lick the lipstick off his shoe. And then he said curtly that of course I didn’t know how to greet him, because he hadn’t told me yet, and that the first thing I should learn was that I shouldn’t pretend to know anything I didn’t, and to please spare him the benefit of all my damn adolescent jerkoff reading.

  The thwack from the riding crop was a shock, but it was his cold and contemptuous tone of voice that really got to me, that first time and in the weeks after it. I knew that it was ridiculous to feel this way, but he’d fucking hurt my feelings. Not that he’d been exactly affectionate in our first conversations, but he’d been forthcoming and appreciative. I knew that in the two weeks before I’d begun coming to his house, I’d caught myself replaying bits and snatches of those conversations in my head, and yes, his compliments “you’re pretty” and “you’re smart”—and even “that beautiful butt”—were among my favorite selections. Pretty soon into the training process, though, I resigned myself to never hearing stuff like that again.

  Because that’s what it was, training. And even though a big porn reader like me should have known exactly what to expect, I was shocked and insulted. Somehow I’d imagined that of course I’d immediately know how to give him everything he wanted—hell, I thought he’d take care of all that, maybe with mirrors, I don’t know. Somehow, when it was me and not O or Jamie or others of my beloved literary bottoms, I’d shifted gears, or genres, in my imagination, thinking it would be more like one of those pseudorape scenes from a novel you buy on a rack in the supermarket—you know, “He held her in his granite-hard grasp, his hungry desire making her swoon.” I think I’d expected to do a lot of swooning, while his “hungry desire” did all the work. Wrong.

  He did know what he wanted, though—what, when, where, and how. I was amazed, and oddly comforted, that he knew so exactly. I hadn’t known that was possible. Nobody I’d ever slept with had known, I thought, considering my last few years of boyfriends. Or if they’d known, they certainly hadn’t let me in on it. Even Eric, who had been the major love of my life—we’d played at living together for a few months during my junior year—he hadn’t known. We’d been really proud of ourselves, Eric and I—lots of loud sex all the time and everywhere—we’d thought the shower was especially cool. And we’d been considerate, going down on each other as often as we thought the other guy wanted it, though we’d been guessing, really, because we’d both been shy about asking.

  Well, forget shy. Jonathan wasn’t shy, and he also sure didn’t ask. He used precise, grammatical sentences to demand exactly what he wanted, and the operative word was “exactly.” And I began to wonder how people ever knew what each other really wanted, without, you know, somebody demanding it. Well, maybe people who’d been married a million years and had hit it by trial and error, but that didn’t sound like an attractive way to go about it. So in an odd way I was beginning to think the deal we’d made had a kind of logic and integrity. His getting what he wanted was his right and my obligation was to hit it exactly.

  Meanwhile, since most of the time I wasn’t even near perfect, he treated me like a new puppy that was constantly making messes. Only he was a whole lot less affectionate than you’d be toward a puppy. Still, if I had to come up with a metaphor for that awkward early period, it would probably be dog obedience school. Not that this would be such an original insight on my part—he set the mood by hanging a humiliating little oval brass tag with the name “CARRIE” etched on it from the new, stiff, brown leather collar Mrs. Branden buckled around my neck those late autumn afternoons.

  It was hard, it was humiliating, and worst of all, he hadn’t even kept one of his promises—remember that impressive little speech about my being aching, exhausted, and fucked out? A big shocker was that he rarely fucked me, preferring, nine times out of ten, to use my mouth—my mouth and particularly my throat.

  And that was embarrassing, because I wasn’t even that good at it. I gagged the first few times, defending myself against that moment when he most wanted me defenseless, that moment when not only would my mouth be entirely molded to him and my nose entirely full of his smell, but when my throat would open, when I’d abj
ure any choice about what went deep, deep down into me.

  He was icily patient—“Pay attention,” he’d insist—and he beat me a lot, as well. He was abstract, precise, and he scared me; I wondered if it would go on like this forever. I felt I had little choice but to keep trying, and, yeah, I did get better at it, feeling little proofs of my own power in the shuddering strength of his orgasms. Of course he wanted me that way, I realized one late afternoon, looking up at him through a haze of pain and tears. My mouth, that motormouth, the orifice that had the most to do with consciousness, intelligence—he wanted me to use it, consciously and intelligently, to learn, adore, accept, and caress his every fold, contour, and smell. And when he was ready to come he wanted to overpower it all, transforming active intelligence into pure receptacle. It was a hell of an exchange, involving a whole lot more than bodily fluids. I became oddly proud to do it.

  And then, of course, there was lots of crawling around, ass high, lots of being cuffed, smacked, and thwacked—puppylike—for clumsiness or messes I’d made (and might have to lick up), lots of strokes of the cane for talking out of turn or disrespectfully. More subtly, maybe, there were the beatings for what, that first time, he’d called “lapses in form or sensibility.” This could mean anything at all, I learned, but in practice it usually came down to having gotten too turned on and carried away and not noticing fast enough what he wanted next. Or being overwhelmed by some rare instance of tenderness, like after I fetched him something with my mouth, and he’d taken it and stroked my cheek. And I’d hoped that his hand might come close to my mouth, so I could kiss it, maybe even lick it or suck his finger. And I did, a little, and it was worth it, even though he cuffed me for being sloppy and silly.

  Not to worry, though—there really wasn’t much tenderness. Just mostly lust. Overriding the awkwardness, incoherence, embarrassment, and confusion there was wall-to-wall, overwhelming, dizzying lust. And even though I’d go home those evenings sore, humiliated, miserable, and vowing never to return, I always did return. Promptly.

  And then he switched gears on me. This happened—no kidding—on a dark and stormy night. And if you think I’m trying to make it sound all gothic and sucker you with the pathetic fallacy, well, maybe I am. I mean, it was dark and stormy; it was November, after all. And while I don’t believe that nature was reflecting my emotional situation, I know that nature was putting me in a mood that matched its wildness. Because I was certainly feeling dark and stormy that night, trudging up the hill with the wind whistling and the rain falling around me, wondering why the hell I was out there just to get my ass whipped.

  I can’t speak for Jonathan, though, meticulous Jonathan who probably never strayed from his lesson plans, no matter what else was going on. I suspect that any correspondence between his emotional situation and the weather is total coincidence. Or maybe not.

  In any case, I was as wet, dark, and stormy as the weather when I rang the kitchen doorbell. Mrs. Branden came to the door, cool, friendly, and quiet, as usual. I took off my clothes, shook off the water, and hung them on a hook in the corner. Then I went to the little room off the kitchen, turned on the very bright light near the little table, and made up my face, very, very carefully, as usual.

  I came back into the kitchen and sat down on one of the chairs, and she knelt down to lace up my boots. They were little brown ankle lace-up boots, with hooks at the ankles so I wouldn’t need ankle cuffs, and crazily high spool-shaped heels. I could have put them on myself, but the rules were that she was supposed to do it. Then the collar, with its awful name tag, and matching cuffs around my wrists. The collar and cuffs were so stiff that I felt them all the time, even when I wasn’t wearing them. She hooked the cuffs together behind my back, attached a leash to the collar, and, as usual, led me down the hall to the study. But this time, instead of leading me to the usual spot near the hook in the wall, she led me to a leather ottoman placed in front of the fire.

  “Kneel down on it, put your head down. Get your ass up and spread your legs way apart,” she said, in an entirely neutral voice (her deadpan delivery was every bit as good as Jonathan’s, probably better). And when I did, she attached the collar’s loop to a hook attached to the ottoman, so my face was against the leather. She pushed my knees apart some more and attached the loops at my ankles to two more hooks in the ottoman. Then she put her cool, capable hands at the sides of my hips and angled up my ass a few degrees, lifting it up a little too. And then, silently, she left.

  From experience, I knew I’d have to wait for Jonathan. Maybe two minutes, maybe twenty. I always felt fortunate to have this room to wait in—leaded windows, brilliant oriental rug, real art on the walls, books and books and books, though of course I never touched them, and the fire. The room was perhaps a little phony—a little too Brideshead Revisited or something. I mean, the rest of the house was airy, simple, some Arts and Crafts and some high tech, more like a house I’d expect him to live in. This study was definitely a stage set, and I liked its hyperreality, its surfeit of deep colors and textures, its thickness, perhaps you could say. Even this evening, with my face pressed against the soft leather, I could still more or less see the fire, hear it crackling. I concentrated on it, partly to drown out the sounds of the wind, the rain, and the evergreens blowing against the windows, not to speak of my thoughts about what was going to happen next. So I missed the sound of Jonathan coming in behind me and started when I felt his hands unhooking my wrists.

  “You can use your hands to part your ass some more,” he said.

  I grabbed the cheeks of my ass and felt a rush of coldness as he pushed some cream all the way up. “Open,” he repeated very softly and began, slowly, slowly, to push in a big rubber dildo, the size, I guessed, of his erect cock. He pushed so slowly and so relentlessly and seemed to be tracing such a tortuous, meandering path, that even though I wanted to resist, I couldn’t quite find the moment, or the muscular center, for actually doing so. Instead, some part of me was discovering, as he kept breathing the word, that there was a way to be utterly, terrifyingly “open.”

  He got it all the way in. Perhaps I’d screamed; I was moaning and trembling terribly. I felt coldness again against my ass. There were three little chains attached to the base of the dildo. One went up the crack of my ass toward the base of my spine, while the other two went between my legs, outlining my cunt. All three hung from a little black leather belt that he buckled in back. I recognized the technology—courtesy of Pauline Réage—but the emotions I was feeling were brand-new. It was as though I needed his hands, his voice, his desire. As though, open as I was, I had lost a kind of authority, both against the world and my own gleeful, brute body. I felt as though I would fall into a frightening, devilish space beyond ego and consciousness if I couldn’t please and obey him exactly.

  He unhooked me and helped me to stand up. And kissed me in a questioning sort of way. Oddly, I found myself kissing him back in a questioning sort of way, too. This was confusing to both of us. His question, I think now, was “What do you feel?” and mine was “What do you want?” but in a deeper way than I’d ever asked before. It was, perhaps, more like “Oh, please, what do you want? I’ll die if I can’t do what you want.” He stepped back and took a moment to consider.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked.

  “No, Jonathan, it doesn’t hurt exactly,” I said, searching for words, “but it’s different from any feeling I’ve ever had.”

  “Well,” he said, “let’s see what it’s all about.” He sat down and proceeded to command me to do this and that, all the puppy tricks—walk, stand, sit, squat, beg, crawl, play with myself, fetch things with my mouth. Everything I did seemed oddly amplified. He made me take off all his clothes, and then—the dildo didn’t interfere at all—he fucked me for a long, long time on the rug. Afterward, he told me to stand up. He lay under a plaid blanket, up on his elbows, facing me. “Tell me about having this dildo stuffed way up your ass,” he said.

  I looked down at him. I felt wea
k, and my pelvis felt bruised and wobbly. I was cold, too, my thighs shivery and slick with sweat and come. I found words, although I was blushing and trembling, and could only speak very slowly. “It makes me feel like a very bad girl, Jonathan,” I said hesitantly and very softly.

  He spoke very softly too. “But you’ve been a very good girl tonight, you know. Isn’t it odd? Well, don’t wear yourself out trying to figure it out.” Then he stood up, found his pants on the chair where I’d put them, and pulled off the belt. “Kneel on the armchair and I’ll beat you,” he said gently, “and then you can turn around and I’ll beat you a little on the tits, just until they get pink. Then I’ll unplug you and you can sleep here tonight. There’s a little bedroom for you upstairs, down the hall from mine. It’s too dangerous for you to drive back across the bridge in this storm.”

  But of course wear myself out trying to figure it out was exactly what I did. Later, my friend Stuart and I would talk endlessly about that night. Stuart and I had been friends since freshman year, but we had become roommates in June, as soon as we graduated. He had continued on as a graduate student in literature, getting the fellowship they probably would have given to me if I’d applied for it. When I limped in, nights I didn’t stay over at Jonathan’s, he’d rub my shoulders and read to me from François Villon or the Brontës. We shared a big flat in the Mission District with a UPS driver and a magician (well, Jo does office temps for a living and magic at kids’ birthday parties, but I think she’s good, anyhow). Your typical twenty-something no-future roommate gang, right?—delivery person, office worker/magician, grad student, bike messenger/sex slave—your low-wage, nonproductive, postindustrial workforce in miniature.

  Only Stuart knew about my life with Jonathan, though Jo and Henry were sweet and wouldn’t have cared. Still, I didn’t want anybody but Stuart to know—it was too difficult to explain, too difficult even for me to understand.