Permission Page 14

  It felt good to be directed.

  Told when to touch their extremities to see if they’d gone cold. To listen to the breath, to loosen the rope. They liked hearing her tell me why, where, and when. To hear her in control.

  Here is where you land a blow. Avoid bones, the kidneys.

  Take a large sip of wine, do not swallow. Purse your lips and make it stream onto his tongue. Fast. Before it gets too warm.

  This one will ask for more but cannot take it. This whip makes a big sound, but not much of an impact.

  Stroke the hair, but do not pull. (Hair plugs.)

  Note the weak left knee.

  This body bruises easily.

  Watch.

  I watched these men who came to her door and put their bodies in our care. They asked to be seen, and here they found their pleasure. In pleasure, they didn’t have to be men anymore, only bodies in stillness and motion. Bodies of memory and yearning. Trusting her to sail them down currents of the unknown, and then to retrieve them, transformed.

  We could have done anything to them. ‘But we don’t,’ Orly said. The sense of responsibility was humbling. How tenderly I felt toward them. The way their skin changed colour when they strained against rope and the dark of their throats moved me deeply. Bodies I could break and people I could ruin, but who trusted me not to. Their trust made me attentive, and in our most brutal acts, their trust made me care. I wondered if this was what the men were feeling when they said they liked to watch me eat. It was a feeling like love.

  I started to think I could face life in the city again. That I would be able to navigate it better and maybe even rise. I imagined how good I could be at making an appearance, using my powers not to be pleasing but to take control. I’d cultivate a new look. I’d drive to meetings in my father’s car. I ran my hands around its tires, along the shelves in his closet, and I welcomed his smell. I couldn’t find the keys, but I found his porn, and thought it sweet that he chose to look at women who had my mother’s shape, sweeter even that he had such mild taste. There were handcuffs and nipple clamps, an enema kit in places that suggested they were no secret. I searched through drawers of permanent miscellany. Souvenir matches I’d collected after business dinners with other business families that had been dull but pleasant enough until the car ride home, the pen from a hotel we’d stayed at in Naples where he’d spent the last night of our vacation in his own room. I stuck the post-its he’d used to organize the books in his office to the windows of his car: Field Guides, Business, American West, and Fiction. I lined the grooves of the hood with trinkets. I leaned against the car with the garage door open, thinking of places we could have gone. In his baseball cap and university-logo shirt, I found my way down to the ledge and lay still in the sun and wind. Three planes overhead, Stearmen that had been flying this path for years. A man was paddling parallel to the coast. Pelicans flew low. His board slid into the sun, silhouette, shark, shard, swallowed by the light. I pressed my palms to the rock and shut my eyes. How long had he floated, had he floated past sunset, past sunset had there been another night of stars?

  In these weeks, my blood was heavy with our erotic charge. Bliss dulled my mind, and I felt happy to be here in this charged system. With her, desire livened the days, and gave new life to the mundane. Nothing was itself alone, everything was a trigger for a fantasy, those of clients we had seen and my own. Lust was in play and in this free space, it grew in unexpected ways. When I came, it was because of her.

  Orly ignored Piggy during these weeks we worked together. He continued to serve up his need alongside her, now our, morning coffee. I asked for cream, my colour was 15-1040. On his days of service, Piggy kept the couch cushions fluffed. He tidied up after us, ran Orly’s errands and cooked dinner for three. Even then, she treated him coolly, as though he weren’t really there. The things she made him watch, her focus on me, the warmth of our conversation, her casual touch. Of all we did in that house, Orly ignoring Piggy was the only thing that seemed cruel. He seemed to subsist on longing, and that didn’t seem like enough. Once when I knew Piggy was looking, I slipped my foot from my shoe, baring my arch and heel. I thought she wouldn’t notice, but Orly noticed everything.

  ORLY AND I HAD SPENT the last hour puppy-training a new client who did everything he could to make us punish him even though he hadn’t earned it, but Orly wasn’t about to let us get pushed around. The naughty puppy had been a gift from my boyfriend, and I had to train it so it could stay with us in our dorm, undetected. Orly was the stern RA with a weak spot for puppies – and for female co-eds. Orly had him on a choke chain. He wouldn’t stop straining. We were teaching him to sit. I had a bag of treats. He wanted them.

  He charged at me, tearing the leash from her hands.

  The hair on his shoulders, the strength of his back, his beastliness apparent, the bulk of a man. His grabbing hands. I couldn’t overpower him, so I stepped aside.

  He skidded across the floor and knocked into her large oak chair. That’s when he snapped. He planted his hands on the seat of the chair, hoisted himself onto two feet, turned to us and said: ‘I want my treats.’

  ‘That’s not how it works. Should we pause and go over what we discussed on the phone?’

  ‘You can dress up what you do all you like, but the truth is you’re a whore, and I paid for you.’ He grabbed Orly’s wrist, and she clenched the wooden paddle more tightly. ‘So reward me, whore.’

  Orly jerked her hand free. She didn’t even flinch, but what flickered across her face made something crack inside me. I pictured Orly in a black bob that contrasted with her lunar skin, waist cinched to a wisp. Orly, wreathed in smoke, a long cigarette holder in her gloved hands. Orly bending a stingray cane. Orly in a candy-pink latex dress, breasts pushed up to her chin. And then this Orly, swimming in her leggings and my dad’s university T, which she’d knotted above her belly button. Clothing not worn but put on. Her persona shaped by the men against whom she was braced. She could speak to me of goddesses – of Inanna who stole from her father the wisdom that laid the foundation of our first great civilization, point to her vulva and command a man to kneel before her fearsome power – but what we created in her space fell apart if not everyone was playing. We might play at power, exploring roles not yet available to us outside these four walls, but for the space to be sacral, it had to be held sacred by us all.

  Orly flicked on the overhead light and opened the door, shouting into the house for Piggy, except she used his Christian name, those blunt syllables a warning, which sent the man scurrying into the bathroom to fetch his everyday clothes. ‘Crazy bitches,’ he hissed when he emerged, swatting Piggy away. The man was much bigger than Piggy, who in his khakis and button-down shirt looked harmless, but Piggy used persuasion, not force. I listened to their footsteps on the stairs, to the front door open and close. Orly was typing on her phone. She smirked and said, ‘He’s done for,’ and showed me a post she had left on a forum, but I saw her hands were shaking. I reached for her, but Orly didn’t want to be touched. Still I didn’t want to leave her alone. A sharp smell came from the bathroom. There was a puddle on the floor.

  Piggy came back to say he had watched him drive away, the man was gone. Then he smelled it too. As Piggy walked into the bathroom, Orly didn’t even look up from her phone when she said: ‘This isn’t your mess.’

  He stopped in the doorway and she pushed past him, unspooling the toilet paper and balling it up in her hands. ‘It’s not for you.’

  I couldn’t move. As Piggy led me out of the room, I was sure I heard her crying. My lover is crying, I thought. I had thought she was invincible, which meant I hadn’t really been thinking about her at all. And now she didn’t want me, us, near her. Of course not. I heard my heart inside her beating. I’d forgotten about you.

  ‘It’ll blow over,’ he said. ‘We need to give her some space. What’s left on your to-do list?’

  I didn’t feel fit for anything, but my mind seized the idea of a task, and it was as tho
ugh an automated process was set in motion. Doing the tasks she’d set out for me was a way to stay close to her. It would do for now. I clung to Piggy’s words. It would blow over.

  ‘I still have to take care of the mail,’ I said.

  We took storage boxes from the bookshelf, which were filled with envelopes, photos of her, plastic bags, as well as used tissues, T-shirts, briefs, thongs, and sweaty socks. All to be packaged and sent off. I had printed the mailing labels the day before and put them in a plastic sleeve with a spreadsheet detailing what was to go where. We set up a production line on the table.

  I sealed a pair of worn panties in a plastic bag, put the bag in a plain white envelope. A note on top, written by Orly and sealed with a kiss. I handed the package to Piggy, which he placed in a padded envelope and stuck the mailing label on. I marked the first item on the spreadsheet as having been processed. From my hands to Piggy’s hands to the postman’s hands, every pair of hands handling it until it landed in a PO box in Arizona. What would be left of us when it arrived?

  We took Piggy’s boxy, brown car to the post office. He drove. The sun was harsh, and inside the car the hot air was thick with new-car-smell air freshener. I rolled the window down. Exhaust and salt cut through the heat.

  ‘Is this because I showed you my feet?’

  ‘No. She never minds when her girls play with me.’

  Girls. Play. I knew I wasn’t the first to assist with her work, but I didn’t like to think of myself as ‘girls.’ It felt like sitting in a waiting room before an audition. A roomful of girls each one like the other, each of us replaceable.

  ‘All I’ve ever wanted in life was for a woman to let me have access to her feet, you understand. Until you flashed me…’ He inhaled deeply. ‘I was scared. Orly really likes you, and I didn’t know where that’d leave me.’

  ‘Where does it leave you?’

  He gave me a panicked look. ‘What if she gets bored of me?’ I thought he was going to cry.

  I put my hand on his shoulder, and he shrugged it off. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said.

  And so I let him be. I leaned back in my seat and into the dark mood in the car. Orly, a fickle figure looming large, and the two of us reading her signs, wanting to do nothing but please her and still getting it wrong. I had gotten lost in a fantasy of Orly, Orly my lover, my healer, my authority figure. In my fog of lust and sorrow, in all my need, I hadn’t seen her. I hadn’t given her the space she had given me to unfold, to get to know her. And if I did… The thought felt like falling.

  The post office sat atop a hill overlooking the harbour. Cruise ships were lingering out in the water. The parking was impossible. We found a spot around the corner and a young punk, shaky on his legs and hanging with his friends, started barking at Piggy about what he was hiding under his shirt. I caught a glimpse of red rope knotted around his neck and chest, the lines it made under his clothes. He caught me looking, and buttoned up his shirt so the strip of chest no longer showed.

  When I went home that day, I didn’t go to the garage. I sat with my mother in her room. I asked her what she needed. I cleared away her dirty dishes and orange peels. I brought her dinner and then breakfast the next day, tea and fruit because the volume of casserole I’d heated up the night before seemed to overwhelm her. I visited the mailbox and tugged the mass of envelopes free. I set up automated payments for the bills. I encouraged her to wash. I washed her clothes and bedding. I set traps for ants seeking respite from the heat. Whether or not she was awake, whether or not she was kind, I wanted her to know I would not be like my father. I would not abandon her.

  PIGGY REMEMBERED HIS early days with Orly.

  The night they met in the strip club, she’d seen inside him like no one else had. She understood him, and this alone would have been enough to secure his devotion. But after that came the hard work: learning about each other, setting boundaries so they knew where her work and his service ended and their friendship began. But there was a learning curve: what was good pain, what did compassionate cruelty look like, how would they manage their desires between them and with the outside world? He recalled her hunger for pain. In her first year working with him, she’d been quick to strike, giving no thought to her poison, what it took out of her, or how her wild pain affected him. To balance herself out, she craved a pain equally wild and unchecked. She found people who would hurt her. Cruelty for cruelty, pain for pain. But it was unsustainable: to be filled only to be drained.

  One day she asked him if there was anything more she could do. He considered the cycle they were in, and wrote this letter:

  For much of my life, I wanted nothing more than to be intimate with God, but I found no model for myself in the Church. I briefly considered joining the priesthood, just to have a sanctioned way to mortify my flesh. I was already largely celibate. I didn’t identify as a virgin – the word contained too much hope for a future I knew would not be mine. I’d listened to other boys boast about their conquests, imagined or real. I understood my interests were abnormal, I kept my mouth shut or repeated what they had said. I cut off this dialogue with myself and when I did dare to fantasize about what I wanted, it involved a punishment because there was no way I could seek pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Each orgasm confirmed what I thought to be true: I was a freak. I lost my self-respect. I dreamed of violence.

  I did not know where God was in all of this. If I had forsaken him. Periods of celibacy in adulthood did not grant me a return. For in those years – and I was a late-bloomer, losing my virginity long after everyone else had, to a woman who was sure I was a good Christian man – not a day went by that I could keep my fantasies at bay. I wanted. I did not allow myself to want. But what if this force was part of God? It was stronger than my will, it overtook prayer and confession.

  I did what I knew how to do. I turned my focus to worship. I imagined a woman with a heart large enough to contain me. I focused my desires on her. I collected every scrap of her I could find. I adapted a psalm and it became my prayer: ‘One thing I ask of Woman, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of Woman all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of Woman and to seek Her in Her temple.’ I wished to serve a Goddess who takes genuine sadistic pleasure in my submission to Her Will. I wanted to be in a cage of lust, to be taunted with the key that could release me. I wanted Her to render me helpless. Poke and prod. Restrain me. Penetrate me. (But no electro-play or needles.) I wished to be humbled in the presence of Her Superior Sex. It is the power of Her Sex after all that makes the world turn; it drives us to industry and makes servants of men like me. Men who know their rightful place is at her feet, nose to ground and lips to the dust.

  I showed my love for Her through ritual and obedience, caring not if my love was returned. I was sure that an intimate connection would appear to me should I seek it. And then You appeared, and the glory of You was greater than what I’d known of love.

  He had watched her read the letter. She set it aside. After that, she no longer let herself be beat black and blue only to turn the same rod on him. She let his words sink in. She let herself be exalted. He found a new vitality. He lost eight pounds and regained them in muscle. Gone were the bags under his eyes. He felt bold and returned to his career. And he found new ways to delight her: taking classes that ranged from boot-blacking to the culinary arts. He learned to braid hair. Tenderness tempered cruelty, patience mixed with pain. Whenever they met, there was an exchange. There was a calibration.

  IT WAS A REGULARLY scheduled session, but everything I had been doing for Orly was done. The curtains were drawn, the room was cool. The room with its dark walls and strange angular furniture seemed liquid in the glow of the candles Piggy was lighting.

  When I joined him and Orly in the sanctuary, I noticed a change. Piggy wasn’t asserting himself, and he was focused on his tasks. Orly waved a burning smudge stick in my direction. She said: ‘I thought we could clear out the space. Reset the energy.’ There was something conspiratoria
l about them, playful.

  ‘OK,’ I said, but I was nervous. I didn’t understand who the room was being prepared for. Orly’s other clients existed only in these confines – it was part of what I enjoyed about engaging with their desire. It didn’t follow me into the real world. If she asked me to play with Piggy, I’m not sure that I could. I’d be self-conscious, or perhaps his devotion to Orly, the claim he had on her, might manifest in an unpleasant way. But I wanted Orly to have her ordered world. The sage smoke made me feel heavy and slow.

  The leather bench was oiled, the wooden floor waxed, and the paddle, razor strop, and flogger laid out on a cloth on the table. I grabbed the flogger as one would a ponytail and brought it to my nose, its leather fresh and soft. ‘Will we use all of these?’ I asked.

  ‘If you want,’ Orly said. ‘They’re for you.’

  ‘It was Piggy’s idea,’ she added, and he smiled at me, a smile that ceded the space. It was a generous act, and I was grateful to him. He finished lighting the candles and left us alone. Orly stood close to me and ran her hands over my neck, down my shoulders and arms. ‘He thought you maybe needed a little special attention.’ She put her hand to my heart. ‘A release.’

  I nodded. I wanted to know where she would take me. I put the flogger aside and asked for her hand because I wanted nothing between us but skin.

  I bent over the bench, as she instructed.

  Orly said: ‘Repeat after me.’

  She spoke slowly to me. Six simple rhythmic lines. A melody of maidens and the sea. Repeating after her, the words became my own. She smoothed her hands over my bottom. I felt it warm. When I found my rhythm, she began to spank me. Fluttering smacks and some that stung, running her fingers down my parting line, spine and cunt. The lines began to break, and my words fell to pieces, and when I faltered, she said, ‘Begin again.’ Each syllable a blow, harder with each mistake.