The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 (6 page)

A job, like any other, except that what had started off as something she couldn’t even think about had become addictive, an acquired taste, a curious relief. Her body, that hunk of flesh, her life’s work the controlled environment of its skin that she had spent so much time preparing this morning, was slowly being released from her care. The challenges: to get enough sun for it to glisten as a gold-textured surface, shiny, oiled, even, permanent, but never too much. Never to burn or malt. Or to get dry patches. Every day to feel just the right temperature floating in the bath, to scour every centimeter she could think of afterward with man-made bristles of a dry skin brush, savage-thoroughly, and then once again to reassure herself all of the circulation had been moved into life. Prodded. The oceans of buttermilk that have been applied, soaked-in overnight, rubbed off all over her sheets, every single piece of furniture tainted by it, reeking of decomposing grease, her body a man-made pet she can ill afford, and then all the effort, all the expense, only to wash it all off next morning, and the tedious process initiated again. Again and then again. And then the blockages, the buildup of dirty fat, slippery strings of goo, stinking fat and skin residue patties that clogged up the only orifices she relied on: the bath, the shower, the sink. The wooden floors dotted with greasy imprints, like the paws of some alien creature unaccustomed to human habits. The room deadened by the ghost of deodorants sprayed on in the past, sting of perfume catching you raw-boned in the throat, and over everything a dry residue of talcum powder, hovering, waiting to reattach itself to the skin. Even the washing machine reeling from the over-creaming, the careful measurement of the flesh, the smoothing, plucking, surfacing over the cracks.

In the straight world, without the brutal purity of pain, the women who, like Katje, were twenty-eight, youngish, were now often not young enough to face the haughty cameras; or backstage, the nubile makeup assistants, whose average age, like soldiers preparing for war, was nineteen. The irony: just as you reached the point where you had trained enough; been in enough work to have the contacts, experience; reached the point where it could start to happen, along came the first alarming gray hair, gradual dipping of the breasts, a skin change. The professionals, if they could, dated pharmacists, befriended beauticians, worked at it harder, paid for surgery when they could find it, but they expected it. It was their job, they said to everybody. Annoyed boyfriends who couldn’t grip why it took them so long to get somewhere; roommates sick of seeing half-dressed neurotics at any hour, doing something to themselves, stretching, scraping, taking something out of a bottle. Nothing had been given. Not ever. They had been doing everything specially as a way of life for so long that stopping now had to be learned again. Allowed. And it had always been work. Then as children, now.

Katje thinks back to a magazine feature she once read about a model who complained that her “normal” friends didn’t understand how annoying it was not to be able to eat what she wanted. It’s all right for them! But the girl next door, your friends, someone off the street, got it worse. Although in the course of everyday business they could cover up most of the piece, never had to think about spots on their bumcheeks or lighten a strip of pubic flesh, just in case, nevertheless in them throbbed the dirty desire. The desire simply to be adored. Their everyday bodies ached with it just as the models, the dancers, and the actors did, the desire unchanged, but without professional motivation. For them no tax deductible allowances for anything, and mostly hardly any time to keep it up. And other big issues that stood in the way that were always more important. It was the real women who often had the feeling that these bathroom rituals could never be enough. That the minute you started rubbing yourself dry after stepping out of the bath, the skin under your breasts was already leaking sweat. That even as you stood and blow-dried the freshly wet hair, you could feel heat perspiration breaking the barrier of the clean skin. The impossibility that you could ever feel you looked the way you were wanted to look.

And so many normal women had started off as princesses. The pretty ones, those who had emitted evocative poise in their first underage competitions, whooped and danced a-go-go, stammered posturing that was pedophiliac in all but name, metamorphosed into pressured baby flesh worked through a hundred stressed afternoons. The humbling-down local shows with filthy floors; tryouts; Proper School auditions for doll livestock; rigorous tests that began from as young as three, from as soon as the little girls could find their way to the bathroom to pee by themselves and therefore could be herded into halls, dumped in classes. Left to be prompted into positions, shouted at, stretched, blown up, cut down. By now, most of this talent have resigned themselves to their unaccomplishments with grace. Their hope folded away, but buffeted by the sense of a world where they can pay all their own bills. And this can hold them fast, give power in other means, but does not dwarf the desire. That seeps on as years tick past, unrelenting. And the women who are twenty-eight, but can no longer realize their idealized bodies, feel as keenly as a mother for a lost child the sense of missing in action, the emotional pull to recapture themselves as they were in their former picture-selves.

Uhaaaaghhhhhh.
The knife is really wreaking it now, doing something bad. Right arm, top left, a contact point. She moves, tries to escape, even though they warned it would be worse if she reacted. She can imagine it now, pain blasting out raw energy, eco-power for the body system, the body’s defenses springing into life even though it is mute. The body racked in nervousness. Her mind putting it into place, willing it. The glittering knife really another elaborate rubber toy, with a hidden reservoir of fake blood that the user can release with a series of mechanical clicks. The knife in the end as inconsequential as the heel of stiletto shoe, jagged edged, but destined only to skim the surface of the earth, never to force its way through. The pain real where, for what seems like hours but could be only minutes or seconds, time uncountable under the mask, the skin knits in the places it has been tied. The creases white-ringed, uncomfortable. Bondage giving always a throbbing and boiling pain. The jut of the fake blade sometimes had an edge nevertheless, even the droplets of the marketed blood, discernable, another wrench on the sensations. Katje’s skin agonizing as if it were the real thing, the body’s still desperation authentic somehow, even though the experience was not.

Cut to a long shot. Katje’s body now arched, the legs raised, a bondage version of Marilyn Monroe in her first naked shoot. Naked, but for the mask, some rope. But still a dancer on the red sheets, unwieldy breasts thrust defiantly out from the extreme arch of the back, like a stilled limbo dancer ready to spring up, triumphantly. The hip bones rough cut, prominent. Splayed vagina as happy as a dog in mating season, its plump lips loud, one lip hanging, unconventionally lower than the other. Toby sees her pleasure is real, that the horror film mad bitch gets off on it, without telling anybody. She is too well formed to play a nubile virgin, over-muscular in parts from the various energetic training she endures to be a bimbo, but yes, she is interesting, he can use her. And he will. The punters from
Fetish Times
still get off on the fact that they can read her column as well as see her naked pictures in the same magazine. The fact that she is masked and anonymous just adding to the hype, her eclectic persona growing every month. Fans ringing with questions, other press even illegally running stills, passing it on. She remains anonymous. Someone Out There, a real person with a real job, who likes just to play a little for them.

For a moment Katje is fazed, orgasm high. It comes and goes all too quickly. She has to time it right because as soon as she’s come, anything that can will chafe. Moment gone, now the comedown. The mask now sweated beyond use. The clutch of the rope at her wrists and ankles a child’s game that seems sad and has gone on too long. Her bladder as usual, wanting to go. The need to satisfyingly piss, paramount. Above her, the two cameramen are talking intently about a missing light. The extras have vanished. She looks a real sight, tied up, anxiously waiting. The end bit, when all the sex acts have finished and she is herself again, is the hardest of all. Her breasts suddenly incongruous, difficult to manage without a bra. She’s not really a porn actress, only allowing herself to be fucked by strangers’ dildos, aping pain. Unusually shot retro bondage pics for punters who have tired of seeing it all. Who need a bit of safety, someone who won’t kill them while they’re getting off. As usual, the fantasy that she exists as one of those too beautiful to die. That she has to be tortured, finished off like a stray extra who wandered into a remake of
Last House on the Left.
The reality, that the dance lessons were sporadic. She had started gymnastics at fifteen, too late. That earlier she had been a dancer only in her mind, her Barbie doll had had the dresses, the dinky little shoes. And the self-conscious battle ever since to try to catch up with herself. Dancing most days, getting film extra roles, the odd fetish shoot only because she interviews the directors as a part-time journalist. That she is somehow in this world and behind it at the same time. She is everywhere and nowhere.

Now she’s showered again, for the second or third time that day. Her skin is feeling too sore for another layer of body lotion. When she pissed it came with a little sting, today the guys were overzealous, but the sting-pain, though small, feels good, her body shudders deliciously at pain but she has to keep the skin undamaged for potential shoots, other work. The irony is that despite these fake gore photo shoots, she is unable, while still working as a model, to indulge in her predilections for hard CP and cutting. What was it that Brian Yuzna had been told while researching skin cutting for
Return of the Living Dead, Part III?
It’s not the cutting of the skin that’s the problem, it’s dealing with the healing process afterward. . . . And her skin, on the outside at least, has to look patently undamaged.

In her street clothes she becomes a different person. You would never guess. And he doesn’t either. Joachim, her occasional lover, once feted horror director, now reduced to hash ravings behind closed doors, doesn’t want to hurt her, physically. He indulges in mental cruelty, belittling her with tales of his actress ex-girlfriends. And of course she’s not famous, yet. That’s his intention, but it excites her to hear about these other women. The dark pouty one who appeared in
The Witchwoman.
I knew she would make it. Lisa, the daughter of the famous Spanish director who has now started making her own movies. Joachim litters the house with hundreds of naked photos of Lisa and thinks she suffers when he talks so raptly about his ex. That she will feel jealous, deflated by comparison. But, mmmm, the delicious decadence of it. Just thinking about Joachim’s treachery, her pussy juices are warming, tingling on her freshly shaved cunt lips. And they don’t even have to touch each other to get excited, it’s mainly masturbatory. Mind fucking leaves no traces. She walks toward his flat, taking pink, smooth strides, but inside her mind is singing.

My sister stopped by today, not so much to see how I was doing, but rather to scope out which Christmas cards I’d gotten so far. She wanted to make sure that I hadn’t received any more from our relatives than she did. I had to give her credit though. She waited an entire half hour before she mentioned my pile of unopened mail on the counter.

“You’ve got a whole pile of Christmas cards here,” she said. “Why haven’t you opened them yet?”

I shrugged. I hadn’t had the time.

“May I?” she asked.

“Knock yourself out,” I said.

I turned to pour us another glass of Peroni beer when I suddenly heard her choking. At first, I thought she was choking on a feta cheese stuffed olive from Dimitri’s Italian Goods, but I realized she was horror struck by one of the cards she’d just opened.

Looking over her shoulder, I patted her on the back at the same time. It was from one of my publishers, featuring a woman’s genitalia artistically perched on top a Christmas tree like a bizarre pink angel.

“Cool,” I said. “I bet you didn’t get this one.”

Grabbing her camel hair coat and Coach purse, she stormed out. Now she was going to be mad for six months. My sister considered my porn writing to be a short-lived hobby, like when I tried doing needlework or creating mosaics. She is certain I will get bored with it eventually. The only thing was that my needlework looked like a drunken hamster had attempted it, and my mosaics looked like someone had thrown up grout, broken glass and rocks. Believe it or not, I’m good with porn. People actually wanted to pay me money for what I’ve written. What better validation do you need than that? In addition, I wasn’t going to get bored. I usually had sex on the brain anyway. Why not put it to good use?

My sister didn’t see it this way. She hated the whole sordidness of it. To her
Showgirls
should have been rated XXX, and she never let her husband watch the Emmy pre-show because of the nipple factor on the red carpet.

The next time I see her I’m sure she will act as if everything was fine, but it will be in her eyes, a brittle little crack in what was left of our sisterhood.

Today, I learned what a camel toe was. It’s crotch cleavage, the distinct cleft between the legs when a woman wears her pants too tight. I had no idea this existed, that it had a name, or there were even a few Web sites devoted to it. See what you learn on the Internet by just following a few links?

Now, I find myself staring at women’s crotches, in the drugstore, in the library and in the hardware store. It’s fascinating. It’s everywhere. In all shapes and sizes. Then at my favorite corner grocery store, I saw the mother of all camel toes. I didn’t care that this blonde girl had mall hair or that she was wearing way too much makeup for daytime. It was her clothing. She was wearing a skintight black halter-top and the tightest pair of jeans I’d ever seen. She must have used pliers to zip them up. Her camel toe was so tight it looked painful. Just the thought of all that pressure down there made me want to go pee.