Carrie's Story Page 5

  Stuart was, as he put it, more or less bi, but mostly shy. So, though I did certainly listen to his stories about his love life, and pet and comfort him when he needed it, the unfair truth was that he really couldn’t compete with this amazing continuing story I had going and my endless need for comfort. Add to that this other thing we had become addicted to at school, theory. Lying across Stuart’s big bed and talking ourselves silly trying to understand the Jonathan story was how we lived. Was there any other way?

  “So maybe it’s all just, like, object relations?” I’d muse. “Civilization and Its Discontents? Fuckin’ boring early socialization ? Or how about we make it more politically correct object relations—Jonathan was never nurtured by his rich father.”

  Stuart considered. “Well, I think we want an object relations theory that’s at least got a little more philosophical oomph to it. I’d add in all that Hegelian master/slave stuff. Self knowing itself by dominating the other, but not devouring the other completely because that blows the game. Some of that seems true enough, anyhow, though you look in no danger of being devoured completely, at least when you wear your messenger clothes.

  “All that basic social science stuff we had to sit through seems true enough, if you want to explain what’s going on as a pathology. Which I don’t. Not when it gives you such great sex and me such great voyeuristic entertainment. You’re my heroine.” And he stopped being helpful and supportive and just looked expectant.

  “Okay, yes, okay,” I sighed, as I often did. “Yes, you can see the new welts. You can touch them very lightly. First bring me a cup of cocoa with rum in it and two marshmallows. And turn the TV to ‘Cheers.’”

  CHAPTER II

  Krazy Kat

  I didn’t exactly believe any of the theories, but it did look like Jonathan and I had found, as it were, a groove. When, soon afterward, he started fucking me up the ass regularly, I found myself thanking him, which wasn’t according to the rules he’d laid down, but became an extension of them, my own little improvisation, I guess. As a graduation present, he replaced the hated puppy collar and boots with sleek black leather. That isn’t to say that there weren’t still whacks, beatings, and humiliations. That was, after all, the game we were playing. But one thing I did know, perhaps the one generality all the theory was good for, was that the game was played at some precarious balance point, teetering on the edge of shame and the shadow boundary of civilization. That we played this game mostly in that hypercivilized study, among all the art, books, and old furniture, was, I was sure, an ironic signifier he meant us to share. I appreciated that, whenever I was in any condition to appreciate things like that.

  As the winter wore on, he brought more toys—angry little clips for the nipples and other soft parts, sometimes with little bells attached. He told Mrs. Branden to give me a cup of coffee when I came in and not to let me pee; this would increase the chances that I’d have to squat over the chamber pot he kept for me in the corner. And if I dribbled onto the floor, I’d have to lick up the drops.

  He tried different whips on me—whips and broad leather paddles. Once “just for the hell of it,” he said, he tried a stiff hairbrush, which really hurt. Another time, an old-fashioned shaving strop—he’d ordered it from a catalog, Peterman or something, just to use it on me; I don’t think he ever used it to shave with. There was a period—Christmas and through January—when he seemed to have presents for me all the time. Things that hurt and humiliated, which sometimes I’d find beautifully wrapped under a little holiday tree in his study and have to unwrap—of course without tearing the paper—and thank him for. Sometimes I would never have seen them before—strange Victorian posture-training devices, for example—and he’d make me guess what I thought they were for before he showed me.

  And then, after the needles of the little Christmas tree dried up and it got tossed into the alley, there were costumes. Not every time—lots of times he still wanted me naked except for the collar and cuffs—but sometimes, not when I could predict, when I came to the kitchen door there’d be costumes for me to wear. Tight, tight little corsets around my waist with elaborate garter arrangements hanging off them. Black, mostly, but sometimes antique white muslin or canvas, for all I knew with real whalebone. The corsets’ laces and hooks drove composed Mrs. Branden to distraction. She’d actually have to prop her knee against my ass, like in an eighteenth-century engraving, to be able to pull hard enough on the laces. She’d sweat and curse, too, and once she slapped me afterward in frustration.

  If the corsets were period pieces, though, the shoes provided an eclectic counterpoint, as well as an endless outlet for what, evidently, was Jonathan’s trashy side—just in case, like me, you hadn’t thought he had one. Well, it was shoes—glitzy, extreme torments for the ankle and instep. Where did he get them, I’d wonder, the six- inch spikes in silver lamé, or purple glitter, or backless with a million little straps? Where drag queens got theirs, I supposed, or Tina Turner. To wear with them, there were seamed black stockings, which he liked to see in shreds by the end of an evening.

  I’d sometimes think, as Mrs. Branden was tricking me out in this stuff, about what he’d said that first afternoon, about my being willing to put up with the trite details. It was true. I was, and so was he. Well, actually, he was a whole lot more than willing to put up with it—he was utterly, sincerely delighted with Barbie Doll stuff that you’d think he’d be too sophisticated for. The first time, for example, that I wore the white, antique, maybe-whalebone corset, he walked slowly around me. “Oh, yes,” he said dreamily.

  I hadn’t realized originally, even with all my reading and fantasizing, exactly how these fetishistic props worked. It was only after a couple of times wearing them that I’d really gotten it—the way the different elements, these technologies of the profane, worked in ensemble. I began to see and feel now how the corset, when worn with the ridiculously high heels, would thrust my ass out. How my breasts would be pushed forward, while the high collar forced me to keep my back straight and my head up. Sometimes I felt as though my body wasn’t mine at all, but his, forced into a configuration to make it maximally accessible to him, giving me no place to hide. And sometimes I’d be embarrassed to realize that I wanted to hold my body that way in front of him—that I was grateful for the paraphernalia that gave me no choice but to display myself so outrageously. And mostly, I guess, it was a battle inside me between both of those attitudes, neither of which I could entirely control, both of which kept me off balance.

  That afternoon, anyhow, his “oh yes” made me almost dizzy with a kind of power. I loved the feeling of getting him that hot. He pressed against my front, put his hands on my ass, and kissed my shoulders. “Do you think,” he murmured, “that Emily Dickinson wore one of these corsets? Under those white dresses, you know.”

  A question I hadn’t expected. Well, he had promised he’d stay ahead of me, hadn’t he? I tried to keep a straight, respectful face. “I don’t know, Jonathan. I don’t really think so, but I don’t know.”

  “It would have been the right historical period, wouldn’t it?” he said, rubbing and pinching the bottom of my ass. “And if Emily didn’t, what about that sister-in-law? The one who fucked on the pool table.”

  Southern belles wore them, I thought. And he was right, they were Emily’s contemporaries. But I knew he wouldn’t be interested in plantation ladies in big hoop skirts saying, “Fiddle-de-dee, Rhett.” His thing would be to wonder about a spooky woman who could write a line like “I like a look of agony/because I know it’s true.” Still, were the corsets also worn up north in abolitionist Amherst, Mass.? I had to insist on my ignorance, about both Emily and Susan, the randy sister-in-law, while Jonathan maneuvered us toward the couch. “And I thought you were so well educated,” he said. “Good thing I’m educating you now.”

  He sat down on the couch, forcing me to my knees in front of him, and kissed me, holding my breasts in his hands. He often did this, playing with my nipples, making them as har
d as cherry stones. It was usually a prelude to his putting clips on them, but even though I knew this, my nipples would always stiffen obediently, humiliatingly to his touch. I might have my streaks of waywardness; they never seemed to. This time, though, he didn’t stop. He kept kissing me, probing my mouth with his tongue while he rolled my nipples between his fingers. I gave up trying to figure out what he wanted; as far as I could see, he wanted to be doing this. I should have been alarmed—what was I missing? what was he going to punish me for?—but I felt too wonderful, too warm and loose, and a beating seemed like a small price to pay.

  He loosened my collar. It was still plenty tight, but his moving the buckles one hole over (or so it felt), allowed me just a little more movement, a little more ability to throw my head back, to gasp, shudder, and moan.

  He moved his mouth to one of my breasts, and one of his hands to my cunt. His tongue and fingers were insistent, probing, and patient. He had great hands. Once in a while he’d make one of those impossibly delicate model buildings that architects, amazingly, still make in this electronically mediated day and age. I mean, I never saw him at work, but it would be there in the study, glue and X-acto knife on the shelf, growing in size and complexity for a week or so, and I’d go weak with lust, imagining his long fingers cutting and pasting the tiny strips of balsa wood and foam core.

  Right now one—no, two—of those fingers were slowly moving up my asshole, while one from the other hand continued to make tiny circles on my clit. It felt like he’d go on forever, or as long as it would take me to feel as absolutely spectacular as I could possibly feel. I felt like a puppet, as though there were strings attached to my breast and cunt, and they were being tugged, ever so lightly, insistently, making me swoop and dance. I gave in, finally, howling and even laughing a little, hoarsely, deep in my throat, and collapsed against him, trying to catch my breath but dimly aware of the volcanic sensations that were still there inside me.

  “Lie down on the floor,” he whispered into my neck, and began to push me down by the shoulders. I followed the pressure of his hands and found myself on my back. He knelt beside me, pushed my knees up, so that my legs were bent, parted them, and started nibbling slowly at the insides of my thighs, right above the black stockings. I could feel him licking, chewing a little, kissing—lips, teeth, and tongue all somehow getting into the act as though my flesh were some kind of complex salad that he was savoring thoughtfully.

  I felt my belly quivering under the tightly laced corset. And yes, his mouth was moving upward, slowly, almost absentmindedly, but definitely toward my cunt, parting it with his tongue, while his hands on my hipbones held me still. I wanted to move more, to buck. The quiver in my belly spread and rippled, centrifugally. Part of me wanted to try to throw him off—I was almost afraid of the sensations, the intensity of not just his tongue, but his breath as well. It was his warm, even breathing that I could feel up my cunt, that seemed so invasive, in its tiny way, and that was making me moan—was I moaning? I guessed so. But he wouldn’t let me throw him off, I knew, and realized that truly, I didn’t want him ever to stop. All I could do was rock my pelvis back and forth, meeting his tongue, chasing it, and then retreating, pretending to hide from it, and finally just surrendering to it, moaning and then yelling until everything exploded and first I was falling from a very great height and then I was a puddle on the rug, the winter afternoon light slanting in on me through the leaded windows.

  He sat next to me for I don’t know how long, tracing the intricate stitchery of the corset with his finger. Then, finally, he got back up on the couch and said, “Kneel up straight.” Now, I thought, wincing, I’ll find out what I didn’t do—what it was he had really wanted. I looked up at him, lounging with his arms spread against the top of the couch and his legs crossed. And I wondered what I should be doing right now. Should I be thanking him, worshiping him in some way I should know but didn’t? Should I be doing anything at all except feeling splendidly drained and exhausted? He didn’t look angry or even stern, though he did look thoughtful.

  “Well,” he said, looking at me carefully.

  I didn’t know what to say, just stared at him through a kind of haze, as he reached down and tightened the buckles on my collar. “Well, okay,” he said, smiling. “I like the way you look right now. You look surprised and grateful, and frightened and confused, too. Perfect.

  “That,” he continued, “was as nice as beating you or coming in your ass. Different, of course, but lovely all the same. I’ve wanted to do it for a while, you know, but it wouldn’t have worked out. But I can tell you that I haven’t enjoyed holding back on it all these months.”

  I had only a faint understanding of what he was getting at. Actually, at that moment, it took just about everything I had to keep myself upright and scraped off the floor. He wasn’t going to punish me, I was dimly realizing. That was good, anyway. He was telling me something that he thought was important, and I knew I had to listen, though all I wanted to do at that moment was live happily ever after in the way my body was feeling. And to sleep, upstairs in his bed with the window open and a breeze drifting in…

  “Listen to me,” he said, raising my chin and slapping my cheek lightly.

  “Yes, Jonathan,” I murmured. “I’m sorry, Jonathan.”

  “That’s better,” he said. “God,” he continued, “I love to see you following the rules when you really don’t want to. Well, but that’s why we have rules, isn’t it?”

  I murmured my assent, according to the rules. Right, the goddamn rules, and I could feel the world he’d built around us taking shape again, disrupting my idyll. This catechism was going to take some time, I was beginning to realize, and I was also beginning to realize that I wasn’t going to enjoy it very much.

  “And you’ve learned a lot, haven’t you?” He was deep into pedantic mode now. “I mean, you’re still far from perfect, but you’ll continue to improve. You’ve learned to be open and available and attentive to me. You’ve learned to accept punishment from me. Well, punishment isn’t so difficult, I guess, compared to gratuitous whimsical pain—pain that I’ve created simply because I feel like it. If I want to see marks on your thighs, I put them there, right? If I want to see you in tears, I make that happen. And now you’re learning that if I want to make you entirely delighted, I can do that, too.”

  I had, believe it or not, forgotten that that’s supposed to be the point of a sexual relationship—usually, that is. Which was more or less what he was saying, now. “The night you met me, at that stupid party, you imagined my taking you home and making you feel this way, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, Jonathan, I did,” I admitted softly. This was about as humiliating as anything I’d been through with him.

  “Well, why shouldn’t you have?” he said. “You deserve it. Someday maybe you’ll find somebody just as attractive and deserving as you are and the two of you will burn up the sheets every night, while you get your PhDs and write books and have babies, all that good stuff.

  “Only,” he continued, “that’s not what I want, and it seems that it’s not what you want either, at least for now. So we’re doing…well, you know what we’re doing. I’ve held back all these months on making love to you this way because you would have misunderstood if I had done it any earlier. And I’m still not sure you understand completely. I didn’t want you to expect to feel like this, or even to think of it as a treat or a reward. Don’t expect it. Don’t anticipate it. I’ll do it when I feel like doing it, and you won’t be able to predict it. And don’t try any tricks to make me feel like doing it. I’ll punish you very severely if I ever think that’s what you’re up to. Got that?”

  “Yes, Jonathan,” I murmured, quite miserably.

  “Yes, I think you do,” he said, and then unceremoniously unzipped his pants. “Well,” he continued, “my turn now. Open your mouth.”

  And afterward, he simply sent me home, telling me that was enough for today. As I was getting dressed I remembered an old mu
sical, Carousel, that they’d done at my high school. Songs like “My Boy Bill” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” We all sneered at its corniness, but secretly I’d loved it: I’d cry at the thought of never, never knowing that someone loved me. And I’d fall asleep trying to imagine a slap that felt like a kiss. I still couldn’t quite imagine such a slap. But trust Jonathan to teach me about kisses that felt like slaps.

  And that was the end of my apprenticeship. That was, in a sense, the golden lesson at the end of the rainbow. No matter what happened between us it was all consequence and actualization of his utter monopoly of power. He’d proved it to me that winter afternoon, like the bomb at Alamogordo had proved Einstein’s physics. Not that I would have denied it before, but now I knew, consciously knew, that there was no second-guessing him. It was a relief in some ways, a letting go. I simply relaxed into it, as though I were beginning to dream in a foreign language—a language of beatings and humiliations, of rare, extravagant pleasure, rituals, formalities. It was a complicated and mysteriously involving language, for all that it was based on only one deep syntactical structure, one rule once again, the rule of his saying, “I want.”

  And—I’ll confess it to you here—I loved to hear him say, “I want.” I’d meditate on it. I’d hear it like a mantra. I got off on thinking how privileged he was. Once, during my last weeks of school, I had to go to the women’s room of the library to jerk off, just from thinking about how exquisitely, consistently unfair it all was. Well, I’d also been reading some theory that seemed quite apposite to my situation. It seemed as though everything we were assigned that semester was about sex—every text in the canon was really an eroticized, sadomasochistic version of some other text. Intellectually, I didn’t quite approve: there must be more to life than sex and power, I’d think, even if there wasn’t much more to my life at that time. But given my inability to concentrate on anything else, I figured I’d lucked out. In a sense, you could say that it was Jonathan who got me through my last semester.