here anything was astounding or, maybe more precisely, if there was nothing
smoke. You might think a pathetic botched suicide attempt would sort of snuff the legend, what? but instead the offerings just start coming more than ever, the stone steps of the grotto laden with bread and cheese and fruit and drinking water. While the Mistress sleeps I go out on the terrace to see boats bobbing on the lake below, people standing in them staring up in anxious anticipation. She’s all right, I tell them, go home. They don’t move awhile. They’re still suspicious of me, perhaps more than ever, still not sure whether I’m priestess, temptress, judas, magdalene.
After a while they drift back to shore. Return to their vigil. That same afternoon I go out to the back grotto behind the Chateau to find a lone man in a boat leaving on the steps an offering of flowers. Not much good for anything, flowers, I think, but he lays them up and down the stone stairs. The tide will just take most of them, I tell him.
He looks up. He’s in his mid- maybe late-twenties. That afternoon he looks up at me and his jaw drops a bit, and I see that expression I’ve seen before and think, Oh I’m about to become God’s little joke again. But he’s pretty for a boy, I’ll say that for him, eyes the color of the lake and hair like owl feathers. I see him again about a week later, one twilight all by himself on the lake in his boat — what, does he live in that boat? I wonder. He’s all by himself drifting out there watching the Chateau like they all watch it, except that where all the rest of them are waiting for the Mistress, I know he’s waiting for me. We just look at each other and don’t wave or anything, just look at each other till I go back inside, but there are more flowers on the steps the next morning except for the ones the lake has stolen, a trail of garlands leading back to him I’m sure. Then I see him a lot over the next week or so and don’t pay much attention, never wave or say anything, thinking I shouldn’t encourage him too much. I like the notion of men under my spell, I confess, it’s the whole point of what I do,
that was not astounding, and I can’t help wondering how my life might have
but if I’m to be God’s little joke then I don’t want it to be any crueler than the sport of it calls for. And then I don’t see him at all awhile, perhaps another week, and then he’s there one night on the grotto steps again not with flowers, not delivering anything except himself. He’s there as a client.
By now I’ve really got the business going. Twenty or thirty steady regulars, more than I can handle really, and then all the semi’s who drop in and out of the picture, and new ones showing up fairly often and a lot of them come back. From the short time I’ve been here already it seems to me nothing in L.A. ever quite fits any sort of real pattern anyway, and this sort of work is volatile by nature; sometimes when the fighting up north gets worse or there’s especially ominous news from back east you can almost predict an upturn in traffic, men wanting to explore their dark sides before the end. More often than not these are men of some power or influence, men in control of others, men in positions of responsibility who long to be free for an hour or two of power, control, responsibility, free of themselves — men who want to turn power and control and the Self over to someone else. Perhaps they feel guilty about the way they fuck over other people all the time and want to be fucked over by me in return as a sort of penance — every client is different isn’t he. Some have lives they need to escape from and others have no lives at all, that is no lives of emotional connection or intimacy, and they’re the problem-ones because then they want me to be their life, and I can’t, can I. I just can’t. Those are the ones who start hounding me till I have to cut them loose. You probably think they’re all creeps and losers in which case you would be in for the surprise of your life, I won’t say most of them are nice normal men because, take it from me, there are no nice normal men — nice perhaps but not normal. But some of them are actually a bit sweet — sad and messed up yes but a bit sweet and like I told the Mistress that very first day it’s not
been different had I known, how far I might have gone with him to unlock the
like I don’t like men, sometimes they actually can be easier to deal with than women because everything’s so straightforward in terms of what they want. So don’t get the idea I do this because I hate men. Perhaps back somewhere in my mystery past before I came up out of the lake I was a cliche, you know, the molested daughter or whatever — but I just don’t think so. So before I take on a client we’ll usually talk awhile and I’ll try to figure out what his story is and why he’s there and whether what he wants is something I can give him, and I make it clear then that there are things I don’t do and I don’t need to go into those here, just things that cross my own line of dignity if not the client’s. There’s humiliation and then there’s humiliation. Like I said before, there’s a line drawn on the discipline I’ll inflict, because while it’s all very amusing to blindfold and harness a naked man by his ankles and wrists and beat him awhile, it’s not like I’m a sadist or something. Erotoasphyxiation, electrocution, cattle prods, I don’t go in for any of that. It’s all about limits isn’t it, the ones you test and the ones you observe. There’s a code word the client and I agree on that he’ll say if things are going farther than he wants or he changes his mind about something, something besides “no” or “stop” because in such situations people say no or stop all the time without meaning it. For a while I was coming up with a different word for each client but that became confusing and I was always afraid I might forget, though I imagine I would have remembered when I heard it, but anyway now I have a one-code-fits-all policy and the word is zed.
But no one’s said it yet.
There’s no sex. Not with me, anyway. Do you get that? I’m not a hooker. The need and situation may be sexual to the client and I understand that in the submissive’s own weird way I’m an object of sexual interest. At the end of the session, before releasing him, if he’s been obedient and I feel he’s done well in his
riddle of how every life is a millennium unto itself, of how the single smallest
training, I’ll give him permission to pleasure himself if he chooses. But that’s up to him, he does it without any help at all from me, though if he wants to do it in front of me I may allow him, depending. A female client, she’s different, to the extent I’ve had any and can really tell. I confess I wouldn’t mind more female clients. For a while I was a bit surprised I didn’t have more but that was me being naive, women just aren’t wired that way are they. Someone else will have to explain that, I can’t. Perhaps for women submission has been such a fact of life for so long that they don’t have the luxury of making a game of it. I’ve had two female submissives but I’m not sure they count, the first was part of a couple, she and I performing for her man and while I think perhaps she liked it more than he did or more than he wanted her to, she wasn’t really my type; the second wasn’t really one client but several thousand, the all-female Freek Recherche that’s the most famous of the movable lunatiques that take place clandestinely night to night in one canyon or the other ’round here. Which in a strange way doesn’t count either. By then I had a reputation and while I usually don’t like doing outcall I confess I was flattered that they came looking for me, a couple of the women putting on the fete sailing out to the Chateau and offering me the job. It would be an honor, one says to me — how do you resist that? Flattery or not I’m not sure I could have anyway.