The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (19 page)

There had been service bars on both floors and, when we had been seated at her reserved table at the corner of the balcony,
we could observe the entire operation. We beheld a staff of dancer-waitresses, a practice on which we had not been too keen
back then, outfitted in short tunics. They worked the tables, kneeling slave-fashion, and danced barefoot on the carpeted
stage. The carpet prohibited real dance as we knew it, and the performance in progress was more a posed classical vignette,
portraying some mythological theme.

Aside from the fanciful aspects, the decor had been distinctly early-century. There had even been glass fruit on the tables!
The entire ambiance had been something one would have imagined from some exclusive underground establishment forty years earlier.
I’d no idea that something such as that existed, but none of it equaled the most unusual aspect of the place.

It was after hours, and many of the patrons were leaving when I had visited the rest room on the lower level, amused to meet
an attendant attired, like the other male personnel, in formal evening dress. I would not see that affectation again until
the advent of “gentlemen’s clubs” of the later century. Returning to the clubroom, noting that the inner security door had
been closed, I’d almost bumped up against a completely naked girl—hanging by her wrists from chains that dropped from the
railing of the balcony above.

The very young, peaches-and-cream blonde, with a soft-looking but nicely shaped body, evidenced understandable discomfiture.
She could only just reach the floor with her toes, so that her straining legs and feet could only partially support her weight.
Though a small spotlight illuminated her plight, her trembling muscles and face reflecting her pain, the staff had continued
about their business around her as though she were merely part of the decor.

For long minutes, we had drunk in the exhibition. Our hostess had been explaining to Linda that the hapless blonde, who was
fully visible from where we were seated on the opposite balcony, had been accepted to work at the club. She would be “initiated”
that night with a gratuitous experience of the corporal penalties meted out for infractions of policy.

“It’s a game we play sometimes to thrill the supporting patrons,” she’d shrugged. “And, as you observe, it keeps the girls
on their toes,” she had punned with a gravelly laugh. “It’s all understood.” Though we might find it strange, she’d told us,
the girls performing the roles of slaves held veto power, in many affairs of the club, over the members who supported it.

Not so strange, I’d thought as I had begun, with some excitement, to surmise what additional diversions
The Château
might offer. That way, no one could claim that she had been victimized.

The old woman had gone on to clarify that the girl had been brought around by her husband, a young Army officer who was also
present that night. There had been a noticeable component of military couples involved with the club, and our hostess had
educated us on that point. She told us that she had a strong affinity with Réage’s erotic classic, which had been released
in the States a few years earlier.

I’d read it then, and had turned Linda on to it, but our hostess had the distinction of having read the original
Histoire d’O
just after it had mysteriously appeared before the French Academy in 1952. She’d advised us that one could only grasp its
full meaning by appreciating its extraordinary use of the French language. The British edition had been widely circulated
among the armed services for years before the American publication.

It had found a ready audience among the young marrieds in base housing, she’d explained. There, “wife swapping” and other
late-century variations on the old free-love theme had been popular throughout the Cold War. Only much later would they catch
on within a campus counterculture, many of its constituents military brats themselves.

“Again the lie was given to the conceit that the Baby Boomers discovered everything,” I remarked, then began to digress onto
these practices in relation to Seabrook, hoping to tie all this to Justine’s immediate interests.

“I wanna hear what happened to the blonde!
Tell!
” I told her, as I will tell all, so just have patience. I would soon have more occasions to recall the sadomasochistic rituals,
which I had found meaningful beyond the obvious. Linda and I had both believed that there was something more to it than an
erotic display alone. It had been as though the old woman had hoped something specific to be evoked in that temple she had
built to her erotic preoccupations. I did tell all, with what I was to fear might be a calamitous result.

I broke off as I realized that Justine had been silently weeping.
Oh man,
I thought,
I’ve done it now,
and thinking I was on the right track, too! I carefully touched her hand on the wheel. “Is this freaking you out?”

She gripped my wrist and drew a labored breath, “I’m good.” She wiped her eyes, “That was intense. You never went back?” I
relaxed a bit. Maybe I’d chanced the gauntlet and gotten away with it again. I didn’t want to get into my misgivings about
the effects our experiences might have been having on Linda.

“We had to go fulfill other contracts back in Texas. Then the agency closed and the old Southern circuit broke up. We wrote
them the next year when we saw they had actually advertised for ‘slave-girl dancers’ in one of the big ‘swinger’ magazines
that were around back then. I think it was a matter of management changing and the club closing down before we could get back
there.”

The way things had gone for Linda in the end, I’d often wondered if I had made a terrible mistake by not simply staying there.
Yet another might-have-been, on which I withheld commentary. I didn’t know how deeply I might be getting in with Justine as
things were. I could read nothing in her face in the dim lights of the dash.

“Of course, that was another time,” I tried to back water. “Today, with all the crazies, the disease, and everything, I’m
not sure how far I’d want to push something like that anyway.” Still nothing. The rain was growing heavier again. “Are you
ready to stop for the night? We can get some sleep anytime.”

“I
said
I’m good!” The green eyes flashed a sideways rebuff.
“Damn!”
She harnessed the attitude, and continued, “We’ll pack it in soon. You’re saying you talked much with the old woman about
your lives? What was that like? Who was she?”

“We only knew her as something like Madeline, some name like that. Remember, it’s been nearly thirty years. As to being pumped,
couldn’t avoid it. She could read me as clearly as you can,” I said sardonically, though the equivalence wasn’t the truth.
Many of the memories had been painfully fresh then, and much easier for the old woman to elicit.

“You talked with her about JJ? That’s a lovely poem you have with her picture, by the way; it would’ve made me give it up.”
There was the strangeness creeping into her voice again, and the sudden shift did not bode well. There is some limit on how
much a young woman wants to learn about her predecessors, especially one still living. They certainly don’t want comparisons,
even favorable ones.

I did not trust this a bit, but as if reading my mind, she commanded, “Excuse me? You must have affection for the past, muchly,
to revisit like you do. I wanna know about it all—what you are looking back at that makes life seem so wrong and horrid. Why
does a man who’s done such interesting things wanna, like rewind and start over?”

“It’s not JJ alone, babe,” I protested lamely.

“But that’s where it begins, yea?” I was in the deep shit then. It seemed that I’d run my mouth and exposed myself to the
point that there was no way out. The damned little psych grad had me trapped. After starting neatly to confess everything,
there would be no way to explore the issues that bound us together—without admitting to the obsession that had led me to discover
Seabrook’s influence. I began to tell the rest of the story, and not just of JJ, but my lost ones as well—all the sadly truncated
lives with which I could not, would not, come to terms.

————————

W
E’D CROSSED THE
“S
TYX RIVE
R,” as a road sign in the Mississippi darkness had demarcated some whimsical place-name. I felt that Charon’s barge was indeed
bearing me into the land of the dead. About me were the ghosts that I could no longer hear “in the whispers that had followed
me since we were lost to each other.”
⁶⁰
The past had caught up with the present, and I could feel all those years coming for me now.

When we finally had exited the interstate and dropped down to Gulfport, checking into a motel near the shore, we were both
so run through that sex was not an issue. Justine had peeled off her jeans and burrowed directly into one of the beds. I’d
hit the other one and turned out the lights. I’d lain there watching the white line continuing to roll behind my eyelids,
wanting to say,
good night, I love you,
but not speaking. I had said more than enough that night. My life had spiraled wholly out of control.

Now, it was the classic anonymous motel morning with gray light through Venetian blinds. Uh-oh, the morning after; just delayed
by twenty-four hours and several hundred miles. I was alone in the room, but Justine’s bag reassured me that I’d not been
ditched outright, not yet at least. “On the pier,” a sheet of motel stationery advised me. While I smelled like a skunk and
thought about washing up, I had to know where her head was at before my heart dropped through my bowels.

What in God’s name was I doing in a motel room in Gulfport, with a girl half my age, whom I’d found myself called upon to
torture with my reminiscences? Soon, I’d likely be hitting my bank account for a ticket back to San Antonio, having blown
everything.

Outside, the sky was slate gray, welcome relief from the Texas inferno. I walked to a gazebo in a beachfront park across the
street. Down the beach, the skeletons of new casinos were stark against the gray sky. I squinted at tiny figures out on a
long fishing pier. Flaming red hair whipped about one beneath the sheltering eaves of the roof at the far end.

As I trudged out along the pier, the rain was approaching like a gray wall across the water. The fishermen were packing up
and heading in. Even if we started back at once, we’d never make it before the squall hit. Rather, I wouldn’t, I thought morosely.
With her body, so different from mine, still able to run and play like a child, she would have no trouble at all.

I could see her clearly in profile, shoulders hunched with elbows on the railing, pensively watching the approaching storm.
Barefoot in her jeans, spray from sea and sky soaking the halter top against her breasts, she looked so damned
young!

Approaching her, I registered the tension in the taut muscles of her back, my eyes following where they ran down enticingly
below the beltless top of her jeans. I wanted to touch her once more, one last time before hearing what I had to hear. What
could I have been thinking, fantasizing possession of a creature like her? I could hear it already, “This was a big-assed
mistake; how can we get you home?” then running downstream from there. Might as well just throw myself into the Gulf.

I placed my hand on the small of her back, appalled at my skin, which looked to me like crepe paper against the smoothness
of hers. She turned her head, creases in her tawny, resilient flesh disappearing without a trace, but her tendons were like
steel cables. She looked up with a haunted expression, her eyes changed to some nameless color by the gray light. “The scary
thing is that I almost wish you had been my father,” she began without preamble.

All right, at least
this
was original. But her wistful tone seemed to confirm my fears and bore me down, as if the lowering sky was falling on us.
“I suppose you know how that resonates?”

“Believe me when I say aw-hunh!” She almost spat the words as her tension snapped, her voice filled with pain and anger. “As
if, walking home from school, I would daydream of somehow finding my real daddy there. Of being so extreme happy that I would’ve
done anything to please him?”

She wiped at her eyes. “This is so
hard.
Way sure I’m still that little girl and being an adult is just for pretend. I have a psych degree, but I’m still afraid of
the dark.” I started to respond, but checked myself. Of course I knew that I’d been flying on father-issues, and those are
double-edged swords. Pop-psych is like arguments of faith; both are no-win games, which is why people are fond of throwing
them at you. I waited to see where this was going, and she pushed ahead.

“What was wiggin’ me was knowing how it felt, even before I knew it was you looking for Seabrook and all. Dead on that I had
met something I couldn’t walk away from. I already knew you were all that. Believe that I never would’ve said a thing, till
you had already had me and it was too late to go back! I do go way too far teasing and provoking, I really do, but I don’t
want you to believe I drop my pants for every random hookup.”

This sounded as though it had an internal logic, but there were pieces missing. Clearly, I’d walked into the midst of a lot
of things she’d been mulling over. I remained silent, but kept my body language open and accepting. Maybe what had risen between
us the night before had been simply the first predictable emotional crisis and, just possibly, I might run the gauntlet once
again. She relaxed a bit with a little rueful grin.

————————

“F
UCKIN’ MY DADDY,
the concept did work on my head. I’ll own that. Totally Gothic!”

O-kay,
I thought,
now I really don’t have a clue.
“Drop back, there?”

She shrugged impatiently, as though I should have already put her outpouring all together. “Yesterday morning, JJ’s picture
on your desk,” she scolded me. “As if I’m to believe you never knew her middle name?”