The image jumped. The tall woman was now standing next to a long black leather table. The man was strapped down, facedown. She raised the riding crop. “You want to be fucked up the ass, don’t you, slave?”
“No,” he cried in horror.
She whipped him on the ass twice. She was really hitting him. David realized, flabbergasted, noting the red marks the blows left.
“Yes you do. Tell your mistress you want to be fucked up the ass.”
The image jumped again. The man was now standing, his wrists and ankles bound so that he was spread-eagled. She stood in front of him, her riding crop slowly stroking one side of him. With her other hand she brushed a nipple. He moaned. “Sensitive, aren’t you?” she said, mocking. She took the nipple between her index finger and thumb and squeezed.
“Oh!” he yelped, his body trying to arch away from her.
She flicked her crop against his flank. “Don’t move! How dare you move while I punish you!”
The screen went black and silent. David swallowed. His throat was dry. He stared at the blank image, angry. He desperately wanted to see more. It blipped and a telephone number appeared. “Call now, slave! And get the punishment you deserve!” a husky woman’s voice said, recognizable as belonging to the redhead he had seen. The telephone number stayed on while he heard the man’s voice say in a penitent whisper, “Yes, mistress.”
It was replaced by another advertisement, this time for an escort service, a euphemism for prostitution. He knew there were explicit sex programs on cable television, but he hadn’t heard or read of what he was now seeing, a program which consisted of a series of commercials for various sex services. There was an ad for a massage parlor, but most were for the escort services, which David assumed were used by traveling businessmen, since the commercials stressed they served all Manhattan hotels. He sat through fifteen minutes of them (usually they showed a girl dancing, doing a striptease, or putting something — a lollipop, a banana — in and out of her mouth while a telephone number was superimposed), waiting for a recurrence of the redhead’s spot.
He kept a good check on Patty, who, to his annoyance, seemed to be getting ready to quit. She was leaning back reading pages, her typewriter off.
The erection he had while watching the redhead’s ad dwindled the moment it was off, and, to his amazement, no amount of girls, in bikinis, topless, or totally nude, with or without banana in mouth, stirred him. The implication was clear. He judged himself quickly, the defense having no evidence. He wondered how he could have had this sexual longing, or perversion (he reminded himself), without a hint or a prelude of it until that night. If he were a henpecked husband or a clumsy fool who pursued women that rejected him repeatedly, then it might make sense.
And then she returned in a close-up. Her face was angular, her eyes black, her thin lips painted a vivid red. “Do you have a secret desire to be punished?” she asked contemptuously, as though she knew the answer was yes. “Mistress Regina will force you to admit your submissive desires. Call now for a consultation, worthless”—she made a solo of the word, drawing it out, chopping it into extra syllables, pausing both before and after it and then finishing with a hiss—“slave!”
His throat was dry again, he was hard. His absorption was so complete that he hadn’t noticed his penis become stiff and large. But he felt it yearn against his pants for freedom. He had been struck a blow, deadening his brain, making him dumb with fascination.
“How do you spell …?” Patty’s voice said, sounding nearby. David leaned forward to hit the off button so abruptly that he lost his balance and had to grab the set to prevent himself from pitching forward onto the floor.
“What?” he said, breathless, his face feeling hot. She stared at him. Damn. I’m blushing, he though with horror. He spoke through it. “I didn’t hear what you said. What do you need to spell?”
She looked at his cheeks, then at the television, and then back to David.
Why is she so fucking smart? he thought furiously. “I was watching a girl strip-tease on cable,” he said with a sheepish laugh. “When you startled me, I turned into a teenager. Hiding Playboy under the sheets.”
Patty smiled, satisfied. “Is she still on?” she said, reaching for the television.
“No!” David cried out, but to no avail. The set was still tuned to the channel David had been watching, but what appeared was simply a crawl listing the schedule of programs. David glanced at the clock. It was past the half-hour. The show he had seen was over.
“Oh,” Patty said, disappointed. She smiled at David. “You don’t have to be embarrassed you like watching naked women.”
“Thanks. That’s big of you.”
“You pig,” she added with mock coolness.
“Maybe you should punish me for it,” he said, his voice casual. He was horrified that he had said this, contemplating quickly that if he revealed this interest in sadomasochism she would be sure to put it in her novel. Even if she went along with it. Nothing she exposed about herself in her writing seemed to worry her.
“My, my, we are getting kinky,” she said, walking away, staring at the pages she had brought with her. “Oh,” she said, turning back. “How do you spell ‘prosthesis’?”
“P-r-o-s-thesis. What’s happening? You introduced a dentist to the story?”
“Sort of,” she mumbled, walking off, back to her typewriter.
He watched her back, disgusted. He wished they lived in an apartment rather than the open loft space, so he could go into a room and slam the door behind him. Then at least he could masturbate. He made that casual joke (maybe you should punish me for it), and she knew right away. Not all of her, but her instinct for the truth behind every casual statement was infallible. Both real privacy and real intimacy were impossible with her. She could penetrate any defense, and if you didn’t have one, she considered you contemptible and boring.
He was nervous. Between the sexual excitement and the rush of horror at being caught, his body was confused. He paced into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, seeing not food but the leather-clad redhead holding her long crop, her face an unforgiving mask of ironic disdain. He was appalled and excited, afraid of his thoughts and obsessed with them. He wondered about a slew of practical matters. Was she really a prostitute? Of course. Presumably, if you wanted, after a nice spanking you could ball her, or whatever. What if she really liked beating men? Maybe she wouldn’t stop if she really hurt you. That possibility terrified him, but strangely caused his erection to return. So the danger excites me too, he observed clinically. There seemed to be no bottom to the depravity of his perversion. David had always thought of himself as a shrewd survivor, someone who looked out for himself thoroughly, perhaps even too cautious, unable to take the kind of risk great men needed for a final boost to attain an orbit of success. What could explain this thirst for harm? He didn’t ski or cross in the middle of the street, take any chances with his body. He always pointed the knife away from his body when slicing a bagel. How could he want to put himself at the mercy of a stranger, tied up, whipped, with no guarantee that it would stop short of real damage?
Impossible. His thrill came from the security of voyeurism. Surely he would find being a participant disgusting and unpleasant. His erection would certainly disappear quickly when that crop left marks on his behind and not someone else’s. Maybe that was it. Maybe he was sadistic. Maybe he wanted to punish others.
Oddly, this perspective comforted him. He wondered about that too. How despicable that being the tormentor seemed more respectable than being the victim.
But another image of her, tall, scornful, her charms encased in seamless impenetrable leather, seduced his imagination and argued against the notion that watching the beating was the cause. He believed in that vision, the punishing unyielding woman. Is that the true nature of my mother? His stubborn, solicitous, small, overweight mother? Sure she had demanded a lot from him and his brother. They had to be successes, but there was no punishment, no going to bed without meals, certainly no physical discipline. Apparently amateur psychology couldn’t help him.