I nodded as if I were glad to know this.
“So. Now that you know a little about what we do, would you like a tour of the place?”
She led me through a series of rooms, beginning with a vast space washed in crimson light. This was the main ‘dungeon,’ with two cages, both large enough to accommodate a man. One was on the floor, the other suspended by a chain from the ceiling. There was a St. Catherine’s Wheel, an upright structure on which submissives could be bound and spun; a St. Andrew’s Cross, which seemed to serve as a whipping post; a sling, a stockade, and an entire wall hung with whips and paddles and canes.
“Have you ever suffered from claustrophobia?” Mistress Deville tossed over her shoulder, seemingly as an afterthought. “Any issues with being locked in a cage?”
“No.”
There was a medical room with an examination table, a cabinet stocked with first aid supplies, a row of metal devices laid out on a Formica countertop: syringes and forceps and speculums. Everything was white or gleaming silver: cold and sterile and merciless.
There was a classroom with a blackboard and rows of chairs with built-in desks. There was a pointer and yardstick and a dunce cap hanging from a peg in the corner.
There was a soundproofed room for sensory deprivation, with leather cuffs dangling from each corner of a padded restraint table.
The smallest room was just a jail cell with a walkway in front of it, and a closet full of guard uniforms, handcuffs and shackles.
It was impossible to walk through these rooms without feeling twinges of what they were meant to arouse: fear, dread, fascination, nostalgia. It was impossible not to think of the scenes that had played out here. The overriding aromas of disinfectant and leather couldn’t fully mask the more pungent ones just beneath: the musk of sweat, the gamy tang of struggle and tension and intensity.
When we were back in the kitchen, she said, “Do you have any other questions?”
“Well,” I said, trying to imagine what I would ask if I were truly interested in the job. “I’m wondering what the pay is like.”
She peered at me for a long moment and I had the uncomfortable sense that she was really seeing me for the first time. I made myself hold her gaze until one corner of her mouth went up and she shook her head ever so slightly.
“Something tells me we won’t need to go into that. The money is quite decent, but—regardless of your financial situation—that’s not your main motivation, is it? No. If it were just about money, no one would do it. You’d be looking for work as a domme if that was what you were after. Professional subs are here because they need what goes on within these walls.
“Now, I own this place. I run it. Do you know what it takes to make it as far as I have in this business? Intuition. Radar. The ability to read people. I have that. And do you want to know what my intuition is telling me right now?”
I looked at her in alarm. She didn’t wait for me to speak.
“You’re not seriously thinking of working here. Whatever your need is, you’re not going to satisfy it here and you know that. You’re too controlling to surrender to total strangers, men you’ve never met.
“And that’s too bad, for us at least. Because your boyfriend was right: you are a natural. You do genuinely yearn to submit; I can see that.”
My face became so hot that I could feel the blood pounding beneath my cheekbones and it actually hurt.
“You’re embarrassed. Why?”
“Well, I...because...” I stuttered. “Because you’re probably right, I mean...this seems like a great place, but what you said about strangers and needing control and all that...I think it might be true. That I’m not ready to be a pro. And I—I feel bad about taking your time.”
“Oh, don’t give it another thought,” she said. “It’s a slow morning and I like you. And maybe, given time, you’ll feel differently. If and when that day arrives, we’ll be here. You can count on that.”
And a few moments later, as I stepped through the heavy door and into the corridor, she said, “Good luck, dear.”
* * *
Remembering all this now, in the tavern, a question came to me, one I hadn’t planned to ask.
“Abel told me about the Nutcracker Suite, and your position there,” I told Nan. I didn’t mention I had visited the place myself. “And he said he never asked you this, but I will: what was it like?”
Nan’s name at the Nutcracker was O, after the most famous slave in literature, and she found the initial fitting. O, after all, was for open, for offering and obliging, for obedient and obsequious, for Ophelia and odalisque. O was for order and ordeal, for overtaken and owned. For outcry and orgasm and obsession. For orphan. And like O herself, Nan held her body in a certain way whenever a man stood in the doorway looking them over. She never crossed or closed her legs, never even allowed her knees to touch. Her lips, too, were always slightly apart. She would raise her gaze to the man’s for the briefest moment, then lower her eyes for the duration of his decision. To smile at him or to speak first would have been unthinkable.
She was an unusual submissive by anyone’s standards. Many of the regular clients never once contracted for her, preferring the lighthearted, the childish, the coy or sexually overt. But the ones who did choose her tended to be what she wanted: serious, deliberate, devoted to form, desirous of a regular liaison. Many of them arranged to see her outside the establishment, where they initiated her into their ongoing service.
One of these men, for instance, insisted that she call him at ten o’clock every night. He would accept no reason for her failure to do so. He had a special phone line for this purpose alone, with an answering machine that would record the time of her call in his absence. The hour had to be precisely ten, not a minute before or after. Nan learned not to see a nine o’clock movie, lest she lose several minutes of the film to a payphone in the lobby. She learned never to book an evening flight, nor to go to bed early without setting an alarm, nor to accept a dinner date after eight o’clock. If she were on the subway, she would have to get off the train at 9:50 wherever she happened to be, find a phone in the station, or go up to the street before paying the fare again.
On the rare occasions that Nan was a minute or so off, his retribution during the following session was merciless. Once she was on a train that stopped between stations for half an hour. She pleaded with him to take this into account, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
“You should consider every possibility before putting yourself into a situation you can’t control,” he told her. “You’d leave yourself an extra hour to get to the airport—wouldn’t you?—if you had an urgent destination and a non-refundable ticket. Because if something went wrong, all the good reasons in the world wouldn’t keep you from missing that flight. It wouldn’t matter that it wasn’t your fault, that you couldn’t get a cab during rush hour, that the main roads were closed or that there was a five-mile gridlock. Your plane would be gone.
“I’m sure you play it safe whenever you travel,” he continued. “Your commitment to me should call for the same consideration and forethought. In fact, it should call for more.”
He punctuated this lecture with ten searing stripes of a rattan cane, and when it was over she went to her knees and, still weeping, kissed the full length of it as he drew it across her lips. She loved this man. She loved having some version of a curfew. She slept better, within the inflexibility of his rule, than ever before or since, until she began working for Abel. She was bereft when he accepted a job offer in Hong Kong.
Another man would not allow her to say the word “no” in his presence. This went beyond expressions of refusal or defiance to include any use of the word. She couldn’t say
Oh no
or
No problem
or
I have no idea.
“Sir, may I ask a question?”
“You may.”
“Sir, if I’m not using...
that word...to
defy an order or oppose you in any way, then what is the purpose of this rule?”
“Its purpose,” he said, “is that it will force you, always, to think before you speak to me.”
And it did; in mid-sentence, Nan often had to stop and rephrase what she was about to say.
“What’s the chance of having you accompany me on a business trip next week?” he asked on one occasion. This was in the lounge of the Paramount Hotel, where he liked to have a late-night drink.
“Sir, I’m afraid there’s...that there isn’t any chance, unless one of the other girls is willing to work double shifts every day I’m gone.”
“Well, don’t you get vacation time?”
“Sir, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Miss,” the hostess hailed her on her way back from the ladies’ room. “Would you please tell your companion there’s no smoking in the lounge?”
“Sir,” she said, when she returned to the table. “The hostess has asked me to tell you that smoking isn’t permitted in the lounge.”
And then there was the man who didn’t believe in bondage. He considered the very idea of it an affront to his authority. “If I tell you to assume a certain position,” he told her, “and to hold that position until I give you permission to break it, then you’re not going to move. If I have to resort to physical restraint—if I need cuffs or chains to keep you in place—then there’s something wrong with the way I’ve trained you.”
It felt so strange afterward to be given tips. The man transformed, his pretend rage dissipated. No, not pretend, it was never pretend, but it was no longer apparent or accessible. He would be kindly, distracted, in a hurry.
Out on the street again, Nan would walk gingerly, her body welted and tender beneath the hooded jackets and sweatpants she always brought along to wear home. She often felt hollow, transcendent, as if she were pure spirit and the pain was what weighed her to the earth. Other times, in a way that made no sense even to her, she felt hurt and close to tears. She felt pangs of aftershock, arousal, and bewildered grief all at the same time.
The world outside was always jarring, with its noise and neon, its crowded sidewalks. Making her way home after a heavy scene, the text of the session written into her body, she kept her arms and legs covered even in the summer. If the encounter was a good one, she would stand naked before her full-length mirror, survey the marks on her body with a kind of pride, and savor the sight of them over the next several days. If it was bad, she would hide the bruises even from herself.
Her favorite part of the job was her occasional trips to other cities to visit wealthy men well known to the establishment. It was at these times that she felt most free: moving through foreign airports toward the homes of strangers, where her job would be to endure whatever they brought down upon her. To stand trembling, waiting. To suffer and to beg. She used to dream that she would find her true place in one of these houses. But she always knew within minutes that she would be turning around and coming back.
The opposite happened the day of her interview with Abel. Then she could see that the little room just off his office was where she belonged: underground and spare, threadbare and sad, two floors below his bed, and her covetous heart hurt with wanting it.
In the warm May air outside the Nutcracker, I felt out of sorts. With my girlish skirt and blouse, my hair long and loose, I had the strange sensation that I’d become someone else. And I didn’t want that to end, at least not yet.
It was noon. I knew I should go back to work. But I found my thoughts drifting to a cocktail party being held that night at the midtown Hilton, hosted by the New York Bar Association in honor of some anniversary or other. It was the kind of event reliably attended by that prosecutor, the one whose drunken words I’d been thinking about with alarming frequency.
I didn’t blame him for hating me; I’d earned it and in fact, I took a kind of pride in it. We’d been opponents in three different trials during the past decade and I’d burned him in each one: shredding his witnesses, raising relentless (and sustained) objections to his questions, even laughing in his face on one occasion when he offered my client a plea deal.
An outrageous idea came to me as I walked along, one I knew that I would not, could not, act upon—so why did it leave me in a cold and speculative sweat? I turned the corner and there in front of me was Saks Fifth Avenue.
I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. And yet. It was as if Leda’s movie and the story about Nan and the visit to the Nutcracker had all unhinged me. Made me long for a secret life, a secret self, an hour or two in some flickering chamber beyond a threshold I had never crossed.
I found myself calling Penny. “Please clear my schedule for the rest of the day,” I told her. “I thought I’d be able to come in this afternoon, but it turns out that I can’t.” Next I called my husband and spoke with him about the party, made sure he knew it would be a late night.
And then I went into Saks and bought a daring new blouse, lovely pale blue silk with a plunging neckline. I bought a black silk skirt, its hemline higher than anything I’d ever owned. I bought a black pair of stiletto pumps with five-inch heels, a black g-string and garter belt and thigh-high stockings. I went home—it was the middle of the afternoon—and soaked in the tub with sweet almond oil and tried to steady my own breathing.
Some time later I drew on my new lingerie, then my new blouse and skirt. I stepped into the ludicrous shoes and pressed perfume behind my ears. I pinned my hair up with little jeweled clips, pulling a stray strand or two loose on each side. I put on mascara and lipstick and diamond earrings.
Then I went out to hail a cab instead of walking to the subway. And in the lobby of the Hilton, in the mirror above the courtesy phones, I barely recognized myself.
* * *
The party was on the mezzanine level and I saw him as soon as I walked into the room. He was standing by the fireplace, a drink in his hand, talking to an older judge.
At the bar, I knocked back two margaritas, tracking him with what I hoped were subtle sidelong glances. When the judge drifted away, I stood immediately and crossed the room, clutching my third drink for nerve.