Trial of Passion

Help me with this: You and Professor O’Donnell were into this. . bondage and discipline?

Yes, I introduced him to it. We played around with different formulas until we found what he liked, which was the basic spanking of the buttocks. Sometimes he wanted to be the bottom and me the top. We often took turns. Have you ever tried it?

Doesn’t somehow grab me.

Either you create or you’re straight. Ever bite your lover? Everyone does that. Love slaps and bites and scratches. Even tickling — that can be excruciating.

Uh-huh.

No one gets damaged, God gave us ample padding. You only do it out of love, though. You punish what you love not what you hate.

You only hurt the one you love.

Love and pain are twin emotions.

This is getting a little strange, Dominique.

Try it the next time you fuck.

I’ll take a rain check. Have you been served with a subpoena for the trial?

I’ve been told to expect one.

And do you intend to wait around for it?

You mean, what — go to the States for a few weeks? No, I couldn’t do that. I will not hide. Anyway, don’t you think I should discuss B and D with your jury? To help them understand?

I don’t think it can help Jonathan. You said in your written statement you used to paint each other’s bodies. What was that about?

He liked to colour my nipples. I covered him once in coral snakes and painted a serpent’s head on his cock. We worshipped each other’s bodies, why should we not make them more beautiful? Some people wear costumes, some like leather, some like rubber. I like skin. We didn’t wear anything.

You introduced him to B and D?

Yes.

And you initiated these sessions? Usually.

Did he seem to enjoy them?

Of course. And it made for better fucking. He had a problem with shooting off too fast; the playing kept his prick stiff. It spun things out. You know how it is.

I hear you. What else went on?

We played different games, guard and prisoner, master and slave, things like that; sometimes I’d scream a little. But he began to tire of these games, didn’t he? I wouldn’t agree.

You and he had talked of marriage, hadn’t you?

Yes, we had a talk.

You actually proposed to him.

I’m a very direct person.

And he declined the offer.

I assume that’s what he’s told you.

And that’s when he began to draw away from you. He began dating other women. . Are you able to respond to that? You and he broke up with all sorts of recriminations, isn’t that so?

Is that his version?

Is it true?

He was seeing them behind my back. It’s one thing I won’t stand for. Disloyalty. Do you feel vengeful? That’s insulting.

I’m sorry. By the way, did Mr. Sierra make you any offers of money? My expenses. How much?

This interview is at an end.

Sorry, Arthur, I kind of blew it there. My questions got too loaded.

I think she knew all along Sierra was working for the other side. Even if she’s capable of love, I don’t think she loves Jon O’Donnell — she wants to get him. I forgot to mention, earlier she was going on about how she was just scraping by, the whole starving-artist thing. Jon O’Donnell told me she was always talking about money and marriage, that she considered him a kind of lifetime arts grant. Obviously she’s interested in getting some moolah out of this. I wonder how much her “expenses” are.

Okay, the bad news is she did involve him in what he prefers to call sexual “experimenting,” but it was nothing as extensive as Dominique describes. More to please her than anything, he says. The novelty faded — it all got too outlandish for him. He says he’s sick to death at having kept Dominique a secret from us — he was hoping she had somehow disappeared from the face of the earth. Of course, he’s terrified to tell you.

I wish I knew what to do about her.

Augustina

It is the last Friday of August, the beginning of a last, lost, hazy weekend before a trial begins for which I feel ill prepared. Oh, I have read the briefs of law prepared by my junior, a woman of inestimable value. And today I am rereading the transcripts, scrawling marginalia upon them, reminders of points to be made. But I lack even an inchoate sense of how I am to defend this case. I cannot put Jonathan on the witness stand — for fear he will hang himself with his own tongue. I must somehow unmake the Crown’s case, pick away at it until it crumbles.

But is my heart in it? Why does this chronic prevaricator even deserve a defence? Is he also lying about one final, fundamental matter? My belief in his cause has eroded with the housekeeper’s report of screams from next door and with Dominique Lander’s sinful revelations, an account of which has just been mailed to me by Augustina. (Also at the general store was a cheery postcard from Annabelle in Bayreuth, where, Mr. Makepeace informed me, her friend Mr. Roehlig “is working as a conductor on The Flying Dutchman”)

I may make some hay with this devotee of the learned discipline of pain, but the jury will still be left pondering the Honourable Jonathan’s predilection for unnatural forms of Hogarthian lust. They will ask: What in the world was he doing with such a woman if he’s not perverted himself? I wonder that myself. We must strive to keep this dangerous abstract artist off the stand.

But in what shape am I to take on this cyclopean monster of a trial? I have occasionally won verdicts when drunk in court — but never on the dreamy lotus leaves of love. Sleepless are my nights, for as soon as I lay down my work, I am buzzing with Margaret. To help me through this time, I have been smoking marijuana from the small supply that George Rimbold gave me. There’s something to it after all — it relaxes me, but also helps me focus on my work.

In the evenings, stoned in my club chair, I write corny poems to her. I go for long, lonely walks, mumbling lines from Virgil and Catullus. “What a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and running water.” I am love’s victim. Amor proximi.

Outside, the hammers of Stoney and Dog go tap-tap-???. Tap-tap-TAP. Stoney has the radio on in his dilapidated flatbed truck, from which issue commercials, weather reports, jangling rock and roll. I am unable to absorb any more of the testimony of the fumbling Constable Gavin Peake, the blunt Dr. Sanchez. I lay pen and transcript down. Another walk on the beach is in order. Or shall I go tripping through the woods this time on fairy feet?

Good news, said the weatherman. Rain is on the way. The air is musty, prickly, still; cumulus clouds are moving up from the south, scouts for the troops of thunderheads massing at the horizon. I wander into the fir grove and bear not right to the fence of Margaret Blake — my mind seeks peace not turmoil — but left onto the trail Stoney has tramped through my upper meadow, the shortcut to his home and car lot.

Here a smaller trail veers off, a deer path down a recess into an alder bottom, a little hidden dingle I must one day explore — a prospective site for that second orchard I’ve been planning. As I emerge onto Potter’s Road I notice tire tracks leading into the bushes: behind them, a bulky shape, metallic. Closer inspection reveals an ROMP four-wheel van. Potter’s Road hardly seems a prime location for a speed trap, and there is no sign of the driver. Nor are homes nearby where he might be visiting. Curious.

I walk a mile or so up the road, then turn back. The police vehicle is still there. I go down the trail again and stop to inspect the deer path more closely: here is not a hoof print but a boot print, and a discarded butt. I work my way down into the little valley. Why is this soil disturbed — and over there, why have those alder saplings been cut down to form a clearing. .