“ ‘I just look down at the lamb chop on my plate,’ he said. ‘That’s all the horror I need.’ ”
“A convert,” says Wayne. “And in just one evening.”
The room is lit with candles. This “Psychodrama Institute” seems written by Genet. Mistress Ada is standing center stage, testing a riding crop with her hand.
“Welcome,” she says to her victim.
A smallish man in a full facial mask of leather is bound and gagged and fastened with leather thongs to invisible hooks in the mirrored wall, held in a cruciform pose. The mise-en-scène invites serious meditation. Madame Ada is not kidding.
“I shall ask you,” Ada says to us, “to drop your normal identities and become Mistress Luisa and Master Blaine. I invite you to choose your costumes next door, with Mistress Larissa’s help.”
It is a command. We obey.
In the bedroom, I pick out a red leather corset with a dozen garters, red leather stiletto boots, and a curly black wig.
Larissa laces me into the corset so that my breasts tumble over the top.
Laced, I become excited.
Larissa finds me a pair of black silk stockings and helps me hook them all around with the garters. Then she laces me into the high red boots—which are, amazingly, just my size.
The curly wig is a lion’s mane. It makes me
feel
like another person. Larissa does my makeup and styles my hair. My lipstick is crimson, my eye shadow green, my cheeks russet. She rouges my nipples, exciting me as she touches me with her long sensual fingers.
Master Blaine, meanwhile, is transforming himself into a stand-in for Errol Flynn.
“This is who I’ve always wanted to be,” he says, pulling on black leather knee breeches, an eye patch, and a leather vest. A gleaming sword dangles at his side, and the eye patch gives him a sinister look.
“Don’t touch,” Larissa cautions. “Only I can touch her,” she says to Wayne. Pinning me against the wall, she strokes my nipples until I am almost ready to explode. Then she stops.
“It is good to linger on the brink,” she says. “It makes the creativity that much greater.”
Wayne is watching us and growing harder by the minute. His leather breeches have a laced opening where a codpiece may be attached. His cock emerges, long and well-shaped. My eyes linger. “He is not wont to love who is tormented by lewdness,” I remember from “The Rules of Love.”
“Come with me,” Larissa says.
I stagger into the living room, getting used to the boots. The tightness corresponds to the tightness of the corset. As Mistress Luisa, I may do anything I please. I am liberated again, as if I were a beginner, regaining my beginner’s mind.
The Zen of S&M! I laugh aloud to myself at the very notion. And, simultaneously, I am thinking how I might make this into a piece called
The Zen of S&M.
Being an artist is a curse. You can’t even sink into depravity without thinking of how to turn sinking into depravity into art!
“Master Blaine,” says Ada, “fall to your knees.”
Wayne obeys.
“I want you to follow me around on your knees, assisting me with everything I command. You are my personal slave for the night. It is a great honor to be chosen as my personal slave.”
“Thank you, Mistress Ada,” says Wayne.
“And you, Luisa, are to follow orders as strictly as any novice in a nunnery.”
“Thank you, Mistress Ada.”
The man in the mask who is lashed to the wall moves at the sound of my voice, then clears his throat.
“Silence, slave,” says Ada.
“Yes, Mistress,” says a voice I almost recognize. I must be mistaken. The atmosphere at Ada’s is the atmosphere of The Land of Fuck, the lagoon of dreams—identities mingle and merge. I remember how the blond man turned out
not
to be Dart. This familiar voice is also a mental mirage. I run the cards in my head, trying to place him. André? Someone from one of his parties? But on a Saturday night? Married men see their dominatrices on weekdays!
“Luisa, I want you to take this black candle and introduce it into the bowels of my bound slave.”
She greases a twelve-inch candle and holds it out to me.
I take the candle and thrust. I am a man deflowering a virgin, a pirate raping his prey, a father violating his daughter. The Marquis de Sade penetrating Justine, Stephen penetrating O.
“Now rub your nipples on his rear,” says Ada.
He groans. My blood heats to the boiling point, as I go deeper and deeper.
Now Ada commands Wayne to touch me while I am penetrating the masked slave.
He instantly obeys, brushing his erect cock against my buttocks, then holding very still. Simultaneously woman and man, I am overwhelmed. His slightest touch is as exciting as penetration.
“Do not move,” commands Ada. “And do not orgasm. Whoever orgasms shall be severely whipped.”
At that warning, the urge to come is overwhelming. I hold back only by thinking of my twin girls, of myself as mommy. My sane mind is holding on by a thread. How Wayne does it, I don’t know. But the masked man is not so fortunate. The prohibition has aroused him beyond his power to resist, and he groans and comes in a jet stream that hits the mirrored wall like the juicy whitehead aimed at the mirror by an adolescent squeezer.
“You will pay for that pleasure,” says Ada. “Stand, Luisa. Stand, Blaine.”
We rise and separate. Ada hands us each a riding crop, takes one for herself, and shows us how to whip the masked stranger. First on the thighs, then on the buttocks, then—savagely—on the back. Taught well, the masked man says thank you for each stroke, until he is bloody and whimpering in agony.
“Let that be a lesson to my other slaves,” says Ada in a blood-chilling voice.
The masked man groans.
“Untie him,” says Mistress Ada to the groveling Wayne.
He obeys.
“Unmask him,” says Mistress Ada.
Wayne unzips and peels off the man’s facial mask.
Lionel Schaeffer lies fainting and bloody at my feet.
In another room, a briefcase goes
beep, beep, beep.
18
Bye-bye Blues
I’m dreary in mind
and I’m so worried in heart.
Oh the best of friends
sure have got to part.
S
o I’ve given up booze and Dart, only to take up bondage and discipline. Some progress! Back I go to my silo, to my celibacy, to my twins. I feel sullied by the experience, as if I have gone to hell and been pickled in brimstone. Ada calls and calls, wanting me to continue the “psychodrama.” I don’t call back. I acknowledge my dark side. “If you do it once, you’re an existentialist; twice, you’re a pervert,” my sane mind says. But what a hangover I have! Worse than booze! At the bottom of my despair, alone as I’ve ever been, I try again to work.
Collages of black leather and whips, S&M film stills, sculptures of boots and shoes, shackles and chains, obsess me for a while. I give them up as hokey and decide, quite consciously, to do nothing. I will lie fallow, let the mind drift. I will not paint, not fall in love, not worry about men or money or work. I will only
be.
I will try to get out of my own way.
Without I, who would I be? Try to abolish the first person. Try to be free of the towering shadow of the ninth letter of the alphabet.
Who is Leila/Louise/Luisa really? Leila could as soon be you or the hand that grasps the pencil. Her hair, her eyes, her profession, her men, may change. All these are flesh. Her children may be different sexes, but Leila is obsessed with the towering figure of I. Leila loves narcissists who cannot love, because Leila cannot love her
self.
Having decided to give up painting (because it is so much a product of my narcissism) and become a writer, I toy with writing about my faltering struggle to get sober, to tell my exemplary tale, as a warning, an inspiration, for other women, other men.
I begin with a notebook, writing the day’s events, thoughts, dreams, snatches of dialogue. Enough of my friends are writers for me to know that writing is not any easier than painting. But for me it is a pleasure at first because it is a sort of holiday from expectations, a hobby, not for sale, not to be bartered by André.
I take a little marbled notebook bought once in Italy and begin to scribble at random, catching stray thoughts like threads snagged by a crochet hook.
What am I here to learn? [I write] for there is no other point to this passage that I can see. As far as I can tell, I am here to learn how to pass on, how to flow, how to greet and how to take leave, but above all how to take leave, for life is a perpetual leave-taking.
I believe I am here to learn to praise. Before AA I would never have said that. I thought it was my job to learn how to curse—I thought this was the essence of sophistication, of satire, of art, but now I know it is praise that is rare and blessed.
A glad heart is a perpetual feast.
Wayne wanted to take me to the dominatrix supposedly to show me the essence of our society but really to share his cynicism and pain with me. Perversion is curdled love. I wanted to be like Ada, to be a bitch who could command men, but back here in the country, I know that is
not
what I want. I want to learn how to love—no matter how many times I fail, no matter how unworthy the objects, no matter what betrayals I experience—for nothing but love is worth the passage through life.
But I have defined love too narrowly. I have defined it as sexual love, as the love between a man and a woman. It’s that, and it’s far more than that. Writing in this notebook is love, feeding my twins is love, nourishing my roses is love, painting is love. . . .
At Madame Ada’s Psychodrama Institute I saw children playing with power and pain, in despair because their limited notion of sexual love had failed them. I found myself intrigued, convinced, converted—for a night. I, too, believed—briefly—that curdled power was what I sought.
Wrong. Love does not
seek
an equally weighted scale (and is not angry when the weights are unequal); love does not speak of give-and-take, of dominance, submission, of slave and master. Christ spoke of love, but the church that bears His name deals in power. Every proselytizing religion eventually is corrupted that way. The only pure religions are religions of attraction; we come to them when we are ready. The closest clue I have to love is how I feel about my twins. I do not count the cost, I do not measure. If I could love myself that way, my work that way, the world that way, nothing would be impossible for me. Perhaps someday I could even love a man that way, but if not it would hardly matter, for I would have transcended “I.”
Everybody writes about alcoholism and cocaine addiction, but no one tells the truth about it. It’s fashionable to convert on the cover of
People
magazine and make a sober comeback. Getting sober is far more complex; it’s really about getting
free.
The disease is cunning, baffling, powerful. The grand pronouncement of sobriety is, in reality, another layer of the disease. To pronounce yourself “cured” is to remain incurable. To pronounce yourself “sober” is, in reality, to remain drunk. To pronounce yourself “recovered” is to be unrecoverable. The disease is like an onion; it has all these layers. You can peel forever and never get to the bottom. Therefore, to write about getting sober is the ultimate danger—danger of drunkenness, danger of death.
The only safe thing to do about sobriety is to shut up about it. “Love seldom lasts after it is divulged,” say “The Rules of Love.” I feel the same about AA. Hence the importance of anonymity. You could lose the magic by writing out the process.
And yet it could be important to tell my story, any woman’s story. I would certainly write it, heart in throat, knowing I was breaking the last taboo, endangering my own sobriety, my own life.
All the great secrets grow only in silence. To write is to betray the deepest truth the heart knows: that silence is always wiser than any word.
That must be the paradox of writing for publication, as it is even of journal keeping. You die into the word, and only silence can redeem.
Wayne calls.
“You’ve disappeared again,” he says. “Ada has fixed another scene for you. She’s gone out of her way. You don’t know her, but she never does this for
any
one.”
“No,” I say.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” asks Wayne. “We’ve hardly begun.”
“I’ve done it,” I say, “seen my dark side, you win, I give in. Enough.”
“You’re scared,” says Wayne.
“Maybe so. Maybe I’m scared. And maybe I’ve learned what I needed to learn. But I’ve had enough for the moment.”
“Leila, this isn’t
like
you.”
“Good.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, maybe the old daredevil Leila is growing up. Maybe I’ve had it with experience for experience’s sake. Maybe my thick skull is finally able to take something in. Enough.
Genug. Basta.
Give Ada my love. And take some for yourself. Come visit me in the country when you’re in the mood. I can’t deal with New York right now.”
“Boy—I
really
blew your mind, didn’t l?”
“I thought that was the whole
point
—blowing my mind. Or did I get that wrong?”
“You’re a quick study,” says Wayne. “Or else just chicken.”
“Maybe.”
“Leila, this isn’t
like
you.”
“You said that already.”
“Look—if you use the S&M material before I do, I’ll kill you.”
“Don’t worry. I’m working on something else.”
“What?”
“Myself. My sane mind.”
“You’re really nuts,” says Wayne.
A few days before I was to leave for the Viva Venezia Ball and meet Lionel (my would-be lover, whose dirty secret I now knew) and Julian (my astral pal), Dart called.