He opened his eyes and saw the smirk of satisfaction on her face. He looked glazed, delirious. He moved a hand to her trimmed bush and searched inside with his finger for her magic button of instant orgasm.
“Don’t bother,” she said contemptuously but gently: not with anger, with knowing patience.
“You bitch,” he said weakly, and his eyes rolled in their sockets. “Ohhhh,” he moaned as she moved up, his butt bucking to stay completely inside.
“Lie still,” she suggested.
“I can’t I can’t,” he said, and then, from his stomach, loud groaning. She felt his penis swell suddenly and then jerk. “No no no no,” he sang, writhing so violently that she had to drop all the way down to prevent being thrown off. She bent forward, running her hands up his hairy, big chest while she felt herself get wet inside from him. The publisher of Garlands squeezed her right nipple hard and whispered over and over: “I love you I love you I love you,” while she, his former assistant, said back in a seductive whisper: “No you don’t no you don’t no you don’t.”
David dialed the numbers. They had become as familiar to him as his own. He must have telephoned her a hundred times, although they had had only two real conversations.
She always answered the same way: “Yes …?” as though irritated by the interruption.
“Hello, I’ve called you before—”
“Age and occupation?”
“I’m thirty-one. I’m an executive.”
“Name?”
“Bill,” he said quickly, having decided to tell this lie, though he really didn’t see what safety it provided.
“Do you want to make an appointment?”
“Yes,” he said. This time there was no rush of panic, of coursing adrenaline.
“It’s important for you to understand that I offer dominance and submission. There’s no sex.”
“I understand,” he said.
He could hear a smile in her voice. “My sessions are on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I don’t have anything open until next week unless you can come today at eleven o’clock.”
Now the pressure began, powerfully present in his system. “Okay,” he said dully, automatically, unable to cry out his fear, his dreadful fear of giving in to this obsession.
“Come to Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue. There are phone booths on the corner. Call this number from there at eleven. I’ll give you the address then. I’m a minute away. All right, Bill?”
“Yes,” he hissed like a creature from the dark, from the muddy swirling slime of the underworld.
“See you then.”
His hand trembled while putting the phone back, an addict suffering withdrawal. It was nine-thirty in the morning. He had only an hour to decide if he was going through with it. He had told himself he would make an appointment, because, after all, he didn’t have to keep it. There would be no penalty — except, of course, that if he changed his mind later and wanted to see her she might remember his voice and refuse to give him another chance. He was convinced she already recognized him from their two conversations, both of which ended with her hanging up on him. Each time he had tried to get an assurance that the experience would be pleasurable, that he could control what she would or wouldn’t do. Despite all his cynicism about the world, no matter how often he told himself that she must be a whore who would do what the customer wanted, he couldn’t rid himself of wild and terrible fantasies. That she might be mad and actually beat him mercilessly, perhaps cut off his penis, maybe kill him. How did he know? There would be no Better Business Bureau, no other employees to stop her, nothing, no restraint. It was an illegal act — and at that, an unusual one. Not a visit to a traditional whorehouse with bouncers, a madam, a clientele. This would be in some room, isolated, no one knowing where he had gone. Who would hear his last cry, his final whimper of agony?
He could disappear completely. One of those mysteries that haunt American cities. Perhaps, like a character in a Twilight Zone episode, he had found the answer to all the missing persons in the world, only to reject the answer as paranoia and then at the fadeout become one himself. A victim of some diabolical group picking off those who are vulnerable to perversion.
He got such a clear image of being chopped to bits by gruff hooded men, his money stuffed away, his clothes and identification burned. How could he be traced? Naturally they would assume he’d make every effort to get there unobserved and alone, with no record of the appointment or location left behind.
But, ultimately, it couldn’t be. She had ads on television, for God’s sake. If her clients were all being murdered, someone would put it together. Anyway, this was big money. Someone, probably the Mafia, was making a ton off the pathetic obsessions of people like himself. Why kill the golden goose? No, the truth, like always, was probably much duller than he imagined. Just a service, provided gruffly and sloppily, like all the other services to the middle class in New York.
But that was what the character in the Twilight Zone episode would tell himself, and then walk in confidently, a lamb to the slaughter.
He looked at the clock. Nine-forty. He’d have to leave in fifty minutes to be sure that he’d be at the phone booth on time. Why a phone booth? Why didn’t she give him the address right away? Probably some screening procedure. But if you were going to murder people and wanted to reduce the chance they’d write down the address somewhere, somewhere that the police … He’d have to cut this out. It was stupid. Paralyzing. An excuse to avoid what he knew, sooner or later, he would inevitably do: go and find out if these fantasies were something he wanted to be real.
He stood up. His feet almost gave out from weakness. “I can’t do it,” he said to the empty loft, a bent figure alongside the straight ridged columns, aloof with dignity. “I can’t do it,” he pleaded.
Fred walked into his apartment, his old apartment, the one he had lived in with Marion for years, but hadn’t seen for over seven months. “This is weird,” he said to her.
She laughed. Her mood was light, girlish. She seemed tipsy to him, not because they had had champagne at dinner, but generally in a state of amusement, giggles bubbling throughout her, sparkling in her eyes, lifting her shoulders, opening her heart. He kept having flashes of worry that this was some sort of practical joke. In the couples therapy everything that she said had been bitter — complaints about him, his treatment of her, and then of the world in general. More than ever Fred had realized that her gloomy existence with him, the frowns, the rushing off to bed to read alone, the sudden fits of irritation about trivialities, had all been little eruptions of a buried, boiling volcano of disgust, hatred, and resentment.
Months ago he had given up on the marriage. And even begun dating, not simply to get laid, but with a view toward the future. But the therapy had made it hard for him to see new women, he thought. Hearing the endless list of Marion’s fault-finding left with him a dim view of his own attractions. He almost felt at times that he should warn women that he was, apparently, a colossal bore to live with. Finding himself convinced that Marion’s criticisms were valid, he became enraged. Within the last few sessions he had lashed back, fighting for himself, advocating his good qualities with a passion and conviction he never guessed were in him. Then the doctor said they should see him individually and see each other socially if they wanted.