Carrie's Story Page 6

  On the surface, my life at school didn’t change at all. I wrote my papers, I hung out with friends, some of whom knew I had some mysterious relationship with a guy in the city and accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to tell them any more than that. About the only day-to-day thing about my life that changed was that I ran instead of swimming for exercise that spring—well, I couldn’t change in the locker room anymore, could I?

  In March, I got a thrilling letter saying that one of my papers was going to be published in an obscure academic journal—I’d submitted it the previous fall. The professor who’d persuaded me to submit it insisted on opening a bottle of champagne that he kept in a little refrigerator in his office—for first publications, he said. I just kept reading the letter, over and over again, until I had it memorized.

  That was the only time I ever got to Jonathan’s late, fifteen whole minutes. And buzzed on champagne, too—lucky I didn’t get killed driving over on the bridge. I remember Jonathan’s look of dark concern and restrained anger when Mrs. Branden led me in, flushed and spacey. He asked me why I was late, and I remember the transformation his expression took—God, he has a warm, lovely smile, I thought—when I told him about the publication.

  “That’s terrific, really terrific, Carrie,” he said, taking the chain off my collar. “God, that’s really great, I knew you could do it. Now go get the cane so I can give you five for being late.”

  So my life continued, weird and schizy, but with a kind of logic. It was the future that I couldn’t deal with. I mean I had no problem leading this double life while I was an undergraduate, but I couldn’t make myself fill out graduate school applications. Later for graduate school, I kept thinking. Later for any future at all. I felt as though I was in the middle of reading—of living—this epic story, and it was all I could do to keep turning the pages fast enough. Everything else would have to wait.

  Application deadlines passed and I didn’t care. I started telling people that I was going to take a year off. I even had an elaborate song and dance worked out about how you couldn’t really know postmodern America until you’d put in some time as a slacker. I said this a lot, I think, until one day I goofed and said “slave” instead of “slacker.” People thought I meant wage slave, so it was okay, but I never said it again.

  I wondered, now and again, if I weren’t becoming some kind of crazed cultist, a Manson girl, a Moonie. Was I throwing my promising life away? But I didn’t think so. I mean, I would have done—come on, I did—everything Jonathan told me to do, but it was a different kind of doing what I was told than selling flowers in airports. And I didn’t think it was my whole life. It was just what was happening to me exactly then, in the present tense. Anyhow, as soon as I graduated, I got my bike messenger job. Jonathan had never asked me my plans. I guess he’d been confident, in that smug way of his, that I’d be around for a while. Definitely not flattering, but I was beyond finding any of this flattering. I just wanted it to continue, to develop, to take its mysterious course. I thought of us like Krazy Kat and Ignatz, or Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, an eternal couple, enacting the endless themes and variations of power and desire, ingenuity and redundancy and pain. Someday, I thought, I would look down and see that I was standing on thin air, and then I’d go plummeting to earth. But that was someday, not now. I was glad that when I announced that my schedule was changing, he added a few more hours a week to our routine.

  In July, a month or so after I’d graduated, Jonathan told me that he had to go to Chicago for two weeks on a business project.

  “I want you to come with me,” he said. “It would be bad to break our momentum, and anyhow, I don’t want to go that long without doing this.”

  Obediently—I was on my knees in front of him, back arched—I said I’d find out if I could take some time off work. Actually, the idea sounded pretty awful to me. Chicago in August. Probably he’d allow me to wander around the Art Institute a couple of hours a day while he was working and the maid cleaned the hotel room. Then I’d probably have to wait on my knees for god knew how long until he got back from work, all tense and stressed with yuppie workaholism, tie loosened, oxford cloth shirt and suspenders all sweaty from muggy Chicago. Perhaps, I thought, he’d hire somebody to come in and chain me up an hour or so before he was going to get back (though he’d always get back at least an hour later than he’d planned).

  Concretely, the idea sucked, I thought. Abstractly, though, I discovered that I found it somewhat exciting. I was turned on by the purely objective, instrumental quality of my situation. Why shouldn’t he bring his slave along, I thought. Why have a slave unless you could have her there to stick yourself into when you were hot, stressed, and exhausted? I thought I could arrange the time off. That was one of the good parts of being a bike messenger. I promised to try.

  He stroked my breasts and shoulders and kissed my forehead softly. “Undress me,” he whispered, and I started with his shoes, as he’d taught me, unlacing them with my teeth. He helped me, taking off his shirt, unzipping his pants. We were both very turned on; I realized that we were both imagining this trip, though I’ll never know if our fantasy images matched or not. Everything was going very slowly, as though we were already moving sweatily through heavy, moist air (though in fact it was fifty degrees outside—gray San Francisco summer weather). I sucked him, rolling his balls around my mouth while he stroked my face.

  Then he pulled away from me and told me to choose a whip from the cabinet where they were hanging on hooks. He had several, of different styles. As though in a dream, I chose the heavier of the two cat-o’-nine-tails. It had knotted ends. Why did I pick the heavier one? Maybe I wanted to be hurt more, or I knew he liked that one more, or (this is the way I really remember it) I simply thought it was a prettier whip. I handed it to him silently, and he flicked it lightly over my breasts. “You don’t have to count,” he said. I nodded. I knew he meant that he wouldn’t need the sound of my voice to tell him when I’d had as much as I could take. That he’d know.

  He chained my hands above me and whipped me, almost languorously, from my knees to my shoulders, front and back, the whole strike zone. It felt like millions of little stings, again and again and again and again. I gasped and groaned, and tried to keep my eyes on him, his thighs, the muscles in his forearms, his mouth, his beautiful, erect, reddened cock, with the veins so elegantly articulated and clearly standing out. When he unchained me I slumped against him, and he picked me up. I wrapped my legs around his waist, hungrily and impatiently trying to angle toward his cock, which I didn’t think I could bear not having in me another moment. I knew I wasn’t supposed to act so aggressively, but I didn’t care. What was he going to do, beat me some more? I knew he didn’t want to. I knew that he wanted to be inside. He sat us down in his armchair, moving me up and down, his hands on my burning ass, his mouth on my neck, my breasts. I felt teeth, I think.

  And then later, after we’d both come, there was still his mouth, all over my face, my neck, and me kissing him back, just as hungrily and furiously, the both of us banging teeth against jawbones as though we both wanted to eat the other alive, as though all the whipping and fucking had not been enough, and we didn’t know what would be. I stayed on his lap for quite a while until we got our breaths back, and then I slid off and he got up and we did eat each other, first him, then me, until we both had enough energy to fuck again, this time, though, in his bed—“We should get to do this comfortably once in a while, damn it,” he said, leading me up the stairs—and then to nap a little, until he unbuckled my collar and sent me away, first to raid the refrigerator and then to fall into a deep sleep in my bed in the little room down the hall.

  But I never made it to Chicago. I drifted to work the next morning, feeling like Scarlett O’Hara after the big staircase scene. I liked playing the lurid moments over in my head, and I found myself giggling when I remembered him insisting on fucking in his bed that second time. It was, I guessed, our own little staircase scene.
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br />   And then I got to work and forgot about everything. Because things were wildly disorganized. One of their most dependable messengers had gotten injured the day before, and somebody else had quit. So I really had to hustle all day, and when I finally got a chance to ask for the time off, they told me they were too short-staffed and I was too new. I was disappointed and a little scared of what Jonathan would say. I was right to be scared, too. He didn’t say much when I told him I couldn’t come, but his eyes got stormy and his jaw twitched. And all the sweaty honeymoon vibes in the room iced over. “It’s not your fault,” was all he said, which sounded a lot to me like, “I wish it were your fault so that I could cane you within an inch of your life.”

  He found reasons to cane me anyway, of course. I mean, it wasn’t that hard, since he was making up the rules. Things got very formal, very difficult, almost like the early times I’d spent with him.

  This time, though, it wasn’t my inexperience that was causing the problems. It was our arrangement itself: the emotional challenge of shuttling between real life and whatever it was we were doing in Jonathan’s study. I took this seriously. I think Jonathan hoped I’d volunteer to quit my messenger job, but I wasn’t about to do that, and he wasn’t about to ask me to. So things were not exactly fun for the next week, until Jonathan left for Chicago. I kept coming to his house, kept getting criticized and beaten, spent a lot of time with painful clips on my nipples, didn’t get fucked at all except stiffly, painfully, up the ass. And, yes, I accepted it all without second-guessing it. He would do it some other way, I thought stoically, when he felt like it.

  What I wasn’t prepared for was my almost instant horniness after he’d left. I’d planned, of course, to get lots of rest, read a couple of the books I’d pretended to have already read, that sort of thing. But I found myself nodding off over books and waking up with my hand up my cunt. Okay, I thought, that’s just how it is, he’ll be back soon enough. But I was no longer “aching, exhausted, and fucked out,” and I missed it. And, well, I started to look around me.

  And found Kevin. Actually, I suppose it’s more accurate to say that he found me. I mean, I’d been half noticing him for a few weeks. And if I’d stopped to think about it—which I hadn’t, quite—I would have become aware that he’d been making himself very noticeable, lounging around the lobby of one of the buildings I delivered to a lot, a rather glamorous retrofitted brick coffee factory that now housed computer programmers. He was doing something to the air-conditioning system, something with the ducts—he told me what, but I don’t really remember much except that it paid well and he was a member of the Boilermakers’ Union. Well, for a few weeks now there he’d been, always in the corner of my eye in that beautiful retro marble lobby. He wore torn overalls, wonderful artful rips and holes in them with bright ski underwear underneath. He had blue eyes and pink cheeks in a beautiful boy’s face under a backward baseball cap, with tendrils of dirty blond hair peeking out. I noticed his shoes, too, for some reason, dusty L’il Abner work shoes that looked like they had iron in their toes. Maybe Jonathan was turning me into a shoe freak.

  When you retrace certain paths fairly regularly during your workday there are some people you semiconsciously depend on seeing and smiling at, receptionists or homeless people or flower vendors. Kevin had become part of the texture of my workweek, one of the prettiest parts, I’ve got to say, but still just part of the background scenery. I mean, Jonathan pretty much hogged the foreground.

  But all of a sudden Jonathan was gone and I was horny and opening my eyes, it seemed, to the world around me. God, I thought, one day in the middle of the first week, doesn’t that cute guy with the baseball cap ever do any work around here? How come he’s always hanging around when I come through? Oh. Brilliant, Carrie, I thought next. Well then. “Hi,” I said. Brilliant again.

  Brilliant didn’t seem to be necessary, though. He rode up the elevator with me, asking my name and telling me his, while I realized just how pretty he was and how astonishing it was that I’d paid him so little attention these weeks. I’d always been turned on by boys like him—they made me feel simple, goofy, and sexually voracious. I was a little disappointed that he didn’t turn off the elevator in midascent—don’t all those construction guys know how to do that, with those big bunches of keys that they carry around? But he didn’t, or didn’t want to. He just acted simple and goofy, too, on that elevator ride and all the ones to follow. By Friday, he’d asked me to have dinner at his house.

  “This is a really terrible idea,” Stuart insisted that Friday night. “It’s a great dress, but we should go dancing or something. This dinner thing is not going to work.”

  It was a great dress, droopy flowered silk that buttoned down the front. A genuine thrift store find that looked wonderful with socks and combat boots. And I was having a wonderful time getting dressed up for a date.

  “Damn it,” I said. “Why can’t I be doing this? Jonathan didn’t say I couldn’t fuck anybody else; he just said I wouldn’t. And anyhow, maybe I won’t.”

  “Right,” he said. “Carrie, you’ve been panting and slobbering over this guy all week. You are going to hop into bed with him and you are going to be very sorry. Just how dumb are you being here? I mean, don’t you think he’s going to notice that you’ve got welts on your ass?”

  “I’ll think of something,” I said.

  And I did.

  Dinner was fine—he’d pulled it together from a designer pasta store—and we’d just barely been able to keep a conversation going. His job. My job. Ducts. But there was great eye contact and lots of accidental touching when we reached for the bread or wine. It was sweet, embarrassing, horny, suffused with a sense that something was going to happen. He lived far out in the avenues, a block or two from Ocean Beach, on one of those great plain little streets that smell like the ocean and look perpetually scrubbed by the thick fog. We went for a walk on the beach after dinner, froze our asses off, and ran giggling back to his flat, pulling off all the layers of his sweaters that we’d piled on. He was just about to reach for my hand, I think, but I had bigger plans, if only I could get the timing just right. Okay, Carrie, I thought, one…two…hit it.

  “Take off all your clothes, Kevin,” I said calmly, though it came out about an octave higher than I usually spoke. He was so shocked that it gave me a minute to catch my breath and repitch my voice. I settled down on his couch, crossing my legs and calmly unbuttoning the last sweater.

  “You heard me,” I continued (much better). “I want to look at you. All of you.”

  I thought, for a wild instant, that he might strangle me. Scenes from Looking for Mr. Goodbar flashed across my line of sight. But no. He stood there frozen for a long moment, and I watched his eyes widen and glaze and his mouth hang open. I recognized the look; sometimes Jonathan liked to make me look in a mirror while he buggered me. And then, slowly, he began to unbutton his shirt.

  “Come on,” I said, with just a touch of impatience. And yes, he hurried up a bit. I felt a rush—wow, there’s nothing quite like power. I can do this, I thought. Waddya know?

  But he was taking too long unbuckling his belt. Perhaps his hands were trembling or sweaty. How do you move this along? I wondered.

  “You’re very clumsy,” I observed. “Come here. Put your hands down for a minute.” I took off his old black Garrison belt and played around with it. I doubled it, slapping my palm lightly. He looked at it in my hands, and quickly and rather fearfully took off the rest of his clothes.

  “Shoes and socks, too,” I said. And there he was—blond and blue-eyed and pink-cheeked with a small sweet round butt, golden hair dusting his big arms, and one of those monstrous boyish vertical erections. I looked at it hungrily and he looked at me as though he wanted to die.

  “It’s not that bad, is it?” I asked. (Jeez, you couldn’t relax for a second, could you? I mean, you had to keep the scene moving along. I’d never realized.) He shook his head, mutely.

  “My name,” I said, �
�is Carrie. You know that. You can talk to me if you want. I’m going to call you, uh…Lucky.”

  He didn’t seem to get it, and I wondered why I’d thrown in that gratuitous bit of snobby cruelty. Some day, I thought, a wife or girlfriend would drag him to a performance of Waiting for Godot and his whole evening, his whole week, would be ruined. Probably I was cruel because I was so nervous, so scared of making a botch of this.

  “Kneel down in front of me, Lucky,” I said. When he had, I looped his belt around his neck like a leash. I held his back hair in my other hand and angled his head upward so I could kiss him. He tasted sweet. Partly it was the wine we’d had and partly it was him.

  I unlooped the belt from around his neck, but I held his head still, staring at him. He looked hypnotized.

  “Unbutton my dress,” I said. The dress had two dozen little antique pewter buttons running down the front. He reached for the top buttons and I smacked him on the ass with the belt.

  “With your teeth,” I said.

  It’s not easy, you know, unbuttoning buttons with your teeth. But Kevin did remarkably well, getting down to my waist, while I stroked his hair and gave his ass teeny little slaps. And then I thought he might really beat me up in complete frustration, so I quickly undid a few more of them myself.

  “Take off my underpants,” I continued. “And I’ll let you use your hands for that. But thank me, first.”

  Talking’s the hardest part, I think. It brings your mind, your consciousness, into play, makes you admit to yourself that it’s you who’s bearing all this humiliation, not just your dumb animal body. Kevin gave me a look of pure misery, opened and closed his mouth a few times, and finally muttered “thank you,” so unhappily that I didn’t have the heart to make him add “Carrie.”