The Other Side of Desire (6 page)

“You’re making me cry,” Jacob said, because I had asked him to imagine a world where almost all men—ninety-four percent was the number I picked out of the air—saw feet as the locus of desire. He removed his glasses, pinching the corners of his eyes and the bridge of his nose to stanch the welling tears. “How about those Yankees?” he joked to stop himself from breaking down. He waited to gain control before he spoke again.

In Toronto, he told me, he’d seen
The Phantom of the Opera
for the first of seven times. It was another reason the city was the place of his dreams. “Colm Wilkinson’s singing,” he said, recalling the actor who played the Phantom, “was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I was shaking during some of those scenes.” Jacob recounted the story of the hideously disfigured man who lives beneath the opera house in subterranean secrecy, thwarted in love. He quoted the Phantom’s wail, “I’ve been denied the pleasures of life.” He described waiting outside the theater’s back door after the performance, the temperature below zero, to have Wilkinson autograph a poster. “I bought the tape and listened to it three thousand times,” he said. Then, for a while, he was silent.

“I can’t imagine being in the ninety-four percent. It would be like I was able to climb up and live in the world.”

D
URING THE ABU GHRAIB PRISON SCANDAL, THE
Baroness received a flood of phone calls. The photographs that ran in the newspapers and on television, the images and descriptions of torture, especially the picture of an Iraqi standing on a box with a hood over his head and electrical cables running to his hands, stirred a surge of requests. Could she do that for the caller, inflict that kind of fear followed by jolts of electricity?

She was a clothing designer. Her sheath-like outfits had been featured in full-page liquor ads on the backs of magazines. Janet Jackson, newly thin, had posed in her clothes. So had Kim Basinger. Music video dancers snaked and twisted in her outfits. A kimono she’d embroidered long ago, when she’d worked with a different aesthetic, hung in the Smithsonian Museum. Her boutique was a narrow storefront in Manhattan’s East Village, and in the basement, with its white-painted brick walls and tightly wedged worktables, she and her submissives constructed the garments.

Her clothing lines were all latex. She liked to show her submissives how to create a seam, setting one piece of material upon another, with adhesive between, and running a finger precisely, sensually, along the overlap. “Latex is a physical thing,” she said. “When I teach someone how to make a garment I teach them about touch. I teach them how to take their finger and
lay
down the seam. Don’t press too hard and don’t press too soft. Just feel it.”

Her basement was a place of pleasure, of lashing, burning, beating, cutting, gagging, branding. “My lips swell,” she described what happened when she gave pain. “My heart beats quickly, I’m sure my pupils dilate. I feel massive.” She stood at a worktable as she spoke, her eyes closed. Her hair was a stiffly teased conflagration of red and blond hues, like a tumbleweed bursting perpetually into flame. “I stay away from small equipment. I don’t allow myself a scalpel. With a scalpel I might just pop it straight through. Skin, muscle, organs. I feel like God. There is a stillness when I’m about to use the bullwhip, or my wand if I’m to set someone on fire. Have you ever watched an animal that is scared, caught in headlights or conscious of your presence, and scared—it just stops. And you, watching, you can feel time stopping. Stopping. It’s not just the animal, it’s time; the animal sucks time out of the air. And you stand there listening to something that isn’t there.”

She wore a red latex dress, cut low and pushing high at the bust, the lacing in back drawn tight. A metal leaf arrangement, fashioned from part of a candleholder, protruded from her hair. She wore emerald-green eye shadow, and as her eyes remained shut while she described her experience, her eyelids—parched and pebbled with middle age—trembled.

The clothes she sold tended to be minimalist in their lines, but some were as flamboyant as she herself never failed to be. She felt she belonged to an era more than half a century past; she drew inspiration from the thirties and forties. She had just begun work on a floor-length gown whose wide shawl collar and ruffled sleeves would be thick with lace—except that she would use only latex. And this posed a technical problem. Latex is perfectly suited to cling, to encase, to lie thin and flat. It doesn’t serve well in creating volume, let alone in replicating blooms and clouds of lace, which was the effect the Baroness had in mind.

She stared at the sketch she had drawn, in which the woman’s face was partly obscured by a bit of veiling that descended from her hat—the hat and veiling, too, would be latex. She contemplated her dilemma. How to make lace from latex? It was the kind of question she liked to consider; for all her sense of fashion, she proclaimed herself a “geek.” She would stare and experiment, toss away and sketch and contemplate again. The insoluble generally got solved. She saw in her own way. “Arrange these,” she said to me, upstairs in her boutique. She pointed to a latex flower in silver and amethyst, a postcard, a figurine, a pliable bit of orange cable, and a few other small objects that happened to lie on the glass counter. I set about making formations, this next to that: simple patterns in two dimensions. The possibilities seemed limited. Then she took over. She bent objects around each other, entwined them, melded them, thus making new things. She saw that, with each other, the objects could be transformed.

She was that way with people. She was an evangelical sadist, offering revelation and aiming to shape a new world. Jacob couldn’t find a place for himself within the world that existed. The Baroness intended to create a world that was her place. “To have someone new is marvelous,” she said in her faint British accent. Her speech combined the clipped and the dramatic, the precise and the ethereal. “To watch the body go from stiffness, from fear, to watch it giving way and leaning into the whip. Once we reach that point I could be in a room of two hundred people, I’m not aware of their presence. I go basically deaf. Wine. The smell of a certain wine: your grandmother’s cheek and blackberries. It rushes over you. It is as delicate as that, but so strong that nothing else can intrude.”

She was happily married, a conventional union of twenty years. She had been collecting disciples for a decade. “I tell them I provide a safe place to do dangerous things. But that is a lie.”

THE
doorbell rang, and the Baroness buzzed the customer in. He had a rim of gray hair and a British accent far stronger than hers. He asked to try on a black bodysuit. She instructed him in how to apply a body lubricant called Eros, which would allow him to slide the latex over his skin. “Okay,” he said.

“It’s not ‘okay,’” she corrected in a voice at once understanding and stern. “It’s ‘Yes, Baroness.’”

“Yes, Baroness.” He went behind the ice-blue satin curtain into the dressing room, its walls draped in satin of the same color. His sharp intakes of breath were audible throughout the boutique as he put on the lubricant and worked himself into the suit.

“I think I’m a submissive,” he said through the curtain.

She let some moments pass. “You think or you know?”

He emerged, and she started to fit him, tugging and smoothing the material. He acknowledged that he knew.

“Are you service-oriented?” she asked.

In this way, or by referral or chance, she was gathering her flock. Some became slaves, others only followers. There was the Girl, known solely by this generic name in the basement workshop. A secretary in her early twenties, tall and chunky, with long brown hair parted in the middle, she had stepped into the boutique to shop several weeks earlier and been drawn to the Baroness right away. She was already owned by a man she’d met online, through Craigslist. But the man, it turned out, was willing to share her with a master whose reputation was national.

The Baroness had requested that formal papers be written up to delineate the terms of their co-ownership, and they met for dinner to discuss the details. The man’s chief request was that he be invited to watch any bodily punishment. The Baroness was known for severity. But she had been holding back with the Girl: rigging her face with horse blinkers and a ball gag, binding her limbs, instructing two assistants to cane her. As she was caned, the Girl screamed in a choked-off, high-pitched way from behind the gag, which propped open her jaw at an impossible angle. Her eyes lost focus. The Baroness didn’t take direct part in the beating, because the Girl was about to serve at her annual Christmas party, and the Baroness, who tended toward the extreme, didn’t want her marked.

There was Greg, a window-washer, his face rugged below short brown bangs, handsome in the manner of a cigarette ad. He wore a black T-shirt, a creased and faded leather jacket. It was easy to place him in a common pornographic scene: washing a large bedroom window, then beckoned inside by the woman sprawled on the bed. When he arrived each afternoon at the boutique, he presented himself to the Baroness, as he’d been trained, just inside the front door: on his knees, arms tight to his sides and wrists bent back so that his palms and straightened fingers were parallel to the floor. His hands looked like paralyzed flippers. She would direct him to hold this posture for several minutes, correcting him if his wrists started to droop.

At last allowed to stand, Greg started to polish the front door’s metal frame, a daily task, the weather quickly replacing any blemishes he managed to burnish away. As he polished, the mailman came. He and Greg said hello, exchanged pleasantries, a pair of simple working men.

“Have you rented
Remains of the Day
?” the Baroness asked Greg one afternoon. He’d just knelt before her, hands in position, to ask what his next task should be, after an hour at the door frame.

“No, Baroness. Forgive me, Baroness.”

“You didn’t expect me to ask?” Two weeks ago, she had instructed him to watch the story of the faultless, self-effacing butler.

“It’s a hard movie to find, Baroness,” he pleaded.

As he knelt, knees slightly splayed, she kicked him with terrific force in the testicles, connecting with the tip of her red boot. He shuddered and bent but made no sound. Next, he vacuumed the boutique. In the back pocket of his jeans he kept a small spiral notebook, as required, in order to take notes. “Please serve obey” were the words printed on one page. Another unpunctuated page read: “Always wear black when serving the Baroness never interrupt the Baroness always clean the front of the shop sweep wipe down never talk to the Baroness eye to eye.” And a third: “When trying to get the Baroness’s attention always be in position to accept any discipline the Baroness feels I deserve.”

After vacuuming, he returned to his knees to pour her a glass of champagne in the basement. Another trainee was bathing her feet in a little plastic tub before giving her a pedicure. The Baroness thought the pedicurist was more promising than Greg; she considered the pedicurist a slave-in-training while she doubted that Greg would ever rise above the level of servant. “The cerulean blue,” she said, choosing a color for her toenails. A pretty young apprentice named Kathleen, whose father was an executive at a billion-dollar food company, and whom the Baroness often led around the city on a leash, leaned over a worktable, making a pillbox hat. There was a technical problem. The latex wasn’t providing enough structure. She brought the hat to the Baroness, and they stared together at the internal band, talking over the design—colleagues.

The Baroness directed Greg to move a cabinet from a corner of the workshop, her tone straightforward, not harsh. She said that the pedicurist should join him. Within their two-man team, Greg took easy charge. “You just lift,” he said in a street-corner accent, nonchalant, confident. “One, two, three.” Deeper into his notebook, he’d written: “Reasons why I want to serve the Baroness. To fix her seamed stocking while she cracks her bullwhip. To make things easier for the Baroness so she can devote more time to her fashion business and make more money and be happier, because she took her valuable time to train me to be the best slave she can ever have. To learn how to take the Baroness 16 bullwhips and never complain or cry.”

ON
a worktable one evening, a man lay on his back in a red latex bodysuit and a black hood whose only openings were a pair of grommets at the nostrils. Blue ropes, run through large metal eyes at the rim of the table, held him down while a small black machine sent an electrical charge to a conductive ring around the shaft of his penis. The Baroness set the machine to respond to voices, told the man to tell me about himself, and closed the French doors on that section of the basement. Whenever the man or I spoke, the current surged, and when he groaned or screamed in pain, the voltage went even higher. She had made me complicit in his torture.

He had retired from Wall Street a few years ago, in his mid-forties. He’d wanted to spend more time with his children, who were in their teens, and now he helped them with their homework and watched Fred Astaire movies with his daughter. His wife, a homemaker who had once had a practice as a psychologist, inflicted pain in their bedroom, but not with the same spirit as the Baroness. His feet quivered, then flapped as the voltage soared.

“It’s about surrendering your ego,” he said, sounding as though he must be gritting his teeth behind the hood. “The first time, after forty-five minutes, I was in another world. It was like onion skins were being peeled off my psyche.” He talked about studying Plato, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard in his retirement. His feet shook so hard it seemed his Achilles tendons might rupture. The Baroness would hold him captive this way for at least twenty-four hours, maybe thirty-six. When the boutique and the workshop closed, she would switch the electrical machine from voice-activated to random, and leave him bound and alone for the night. I wondered about going to the bathroom.

“You either don’t or you make a mess or she applies a Texas catheter. This would be up to the Baroness to decide.”

She told one of her acolytes to start shutting things down. It was around nine o’clock. No one would return until noon. I asked about his childhood.

“I was never raped by homosexual dwarves,” he mocked my question. “Is this a weird way to deal with life? Consider the man who bought Mark McGwire’s seventieth home-run ball for three million dollars. Who’s weirder?”

GENEVIEVE
she’d met at a fashion show. One of the Baroness’s models hadn’t shown up, and Genevieve had taken her place at the last minute. The Baroness sensed something about her, and soon they were out on a date at a mainstream movie theater, where the Baroness taped Genevieve’s wrists to the armrests, taped her feet together, taped her mouth. It was the beginning of one of the great loves of her life, coexisting with her love for her husband. Genevieve couldn’t serve the Baroness in her boutique or in her workshop, not productively, because they could never resist the temptation to “play.” The transcendence that came with inflicting pain depended on a depth of connection—physical, emotional, spiritual—with the one she was hurting. The Baroness had plenty of quick encounters that gave shallow pleasure, and she had an array of regular submissives who might give her slightly more. She and Genevieve had been created for each other; there was a feeling of destiny between them; and now, several years after Genevieve had left New York and gone home to Canada to resume college, the longing that came with remembering left an emptiness in every artery, every vein. Thinking back, the Baroness shut her eyes against the loss, as though her eyelids could keep the void at bay. She could scarcely say what had lain beneath the attachment, only that it had been grounded in something more than the ferocity of their play. Once, the Baroness had threaded the end of her whip through the hoop ring Genevieve wore in her clitoris, then ripped the hoop out through the glistening tissue.