M. was smiling as I said this, and now he laughs. “That may be true. But it’s not a problem I’ll have to worry about. I won’t be around hundreds of thousands of years from now, and in this day and age women still want men. And you specifically, Nora, want a certain type of man. In bed, you want someone like me. Everything you despise about men—the aggressiveness, the domination—you like in bed. You want the brutishness and the strength and the maleness of a man’s body. Sexually, you want him to be rough and predatory.” He sits up and looks at me. “You like the brawn and muscle, Nora. You like a good cock—that’s what it comes down to.”
He stands up and walks over to me. A trickle of sweat runs down his muscled stomach. “Your problem is you haven’t evolved to the point where you can discard me. Your sensibilities tell you one thing; your instinctual urges tell you another. You’re going to have to learn to reconcile the two.” He leans down and kisses the top of my head, placing his fingers on my breast. I bat his hand away, and he leaves the room.
When he returns, he’s holding a bottle of lotion and a glass of water. He offers me the water, which I refuse.
“Take it,” he says. “It’s just water—nothing else.”
I decline, not trusting him.
He shrugs, then drinks the water himself. He pulls me out of the armchair and says, “Lie face down on the couch. I know you must be sore.”
I am, of course, but won’t give him the pleasure of saying so. I lie on the couch. He kneels down on the floor beside me, uncapping the bottle. Gingerly, he rubs in the lotion. I try not to wince.
“You have a friend in Detective Harris,” he says.
I tense at the sound of his name; neither one of us, until now, has mentioned my theft of M.’s duct tape.
“He gave me a very, shall we say, severe warning. He told me if I ever harmed you, in any way, that nothing would stop him from coming after me.” Carefully, he kneads the lotion into the prickling skin of my buttocks. “What do you think your detective would say now? If he saw you like this?”
I lie completely still, almost holding my breath.
“I should’ve punished you several weeks ago for going to him, for stealing my tape, but you weren’t ready for it. That was a very naughty thing to do. I should give you another spanking right now.”
When he says this I start to jerk up, but he quickly lays a hand on my back. “I should, but I won’t,” he says. “Just relax; I’m through punishing you for today. But if you go to the police again—with anything else you’ve learned about me—the consequences will be harsh. Consider yourself warned.”
Immediately, I think of M.’s friends in Tahoe. M. wouldn’t want Harris to know about the scarification.
Quietly, gently, M. rubs in the lotion. It’s cool on my skin and does, somewhat, ease the pain. After a while, he says, “From now on, I’ll spank you whenever I please. And you won’t know when it’s coming. I’ll discipline you, or indulge you, at my discretion. But don’t worry—I won’t do it very often.” He plants a kiss on my buttocks. “I won’t be excessive, but I won’t always be as lenient as I was today. I may use the back of a hairbrush, a cane, a whip, the belt off of my pants. I’ll spank you the same way I did Franny, and if you resist me, you’ll regret it.”
He says all of this in a soothing monotone, a chilling contradiction of his words, and I can’t help but feel a lurch in my stomach: did Franny resist him? And was her death the outcome? He reaches over and smooths the frown in my forehead.
“I see I’ve already worried you,” he says. “That wasn’t my intention,” but I can tell that it was. He wants me to be afraid.
When he’s finished with my buttocks, he works the lotion into my legs and then up into my back and shoulders, giving me a massage.
“How much further do you plan to go with me?” I ask him. He knows I’m not referring to the back rub.
He kisses my shoulder, then says, “Don’t worry about what’s to come.” He pauses a moment. “I find it exceedingly erotic to punish a woman. It heightens the sex—as it did for you. You’ll come to appreciate my discipline. You’ll anticipate it with both fear, for the pain you know you’ll receive, and excitement, for the sex that will follow. Eventually, you’ll associate pain with pleasure, and when I pull you over my lap, or administer any other form of punishment, you’ll beg for me to stop, yet, inside, you’ll crave for even more. Whenever I punished Franny, she could never enjoy being fucked afterward. But you liked every minute of it, so don’t fret about the future. You’ll enjoy whatever I give you.”
He kisses my shoulder again, a tender, soft kiss, then gets up. He is going to the den, to his piano. On the way out of the room, he says, “I have your best interests at heart, and I know what you need. You need a strong man, Nora. You need someone you can give in to.”
I don’t say anything. I realize, slowly, that I do. I’m not sure how the pain figures into all this, but on some sexual level I like being dominated, being controlled by another person. I can’t explain it. As a feminist, it goes against everything I believe. All my life I’ve worked hard to establish and maintain my credibility. I’ve fought against men who tried to relegate me to a lesser position simply because I was a woman. I proved at work that I could be as strong, emotionally and intellectually, as any man. Yet now I find that M.’s dominion over me, in a sexual context, is undeniably pleasurable.
I wonder what is happening to me.
“He’s just playing with you,” Joe Harris says when I tell him that M. warned me to stay away from the police. I called Joe earlier today, asking him to meet me.
“He’s afraid I’m getting too close,” I say. “I found out about the scarification. I wasn’t supposed to see that. He didn’t know there was going to be cutting. He thought he was taking me up there to see—” I shrug. “I don’t know what, some whipping, some bondage.”
Joe regards me over the rim of his glass. He must’ve just got his hair trimmed because he has that newly shorn look that men get with a cheap haircut. His gray hair is short and crimped now, almost bald around the ears, but he still has bushy gray eyebrows that go straight across the bridge of his wide nose. He’s wearing a tan jacket, polyester, that stretches tight across his broad shoulders and is just a bit too short at the sleeves.
We’re in the Paragon, a bar and grill on Second Street around the corner from the police station, and it isn’t busy yet, just several men sitting on barstools at the counter and two tables of college students at the far end of the room. Davis passed a no-smoking ordinance recently, and the bar is conspicuously absent of the fuggy tobacco smell and the floating haze of cigarette smoke. The lighting in the room is dusky, and the atmosphere casual, with wooden tables, wainscoting on the walls, a steep carpeted stairway that leads down to the card room in the basement, and sidewalk seating outside. Joe and I are sitting at a table by a window painted with the bar’s name in frosted letters. Occasionally, someone will enter the side door, cross the room, and disappear down the stairs for a game of poker.
“Doesn’t that tell you something?” I ask Joe. “He knows all about scarification, and Franny had cut marks all over her. I know he killed her.”
“But you don’t have any proof of that,” Joe says. “And neither do we.” He toys with his beer glass, twisting it, then shoves it away from him. “I checked out the couple in Tahoe. They seemed surprised to hear Franny was murdered. The woman’s a corporate tax accountant, the man’s a lawyer, and they’ve been married twenty-seven years. They have three kids. Other than the fact that they like to mess around with whips and knives, there’s nothing unusual about them. And they have nothing but praise for the professor. They say he brought Franny there several times; she was shy but participated willingly.”
“I don’t believe that.”
Joe shrugs noncommittally. He leans forward and rests his elbows on the table. “If he killed her, chances are we’ll catch him. But so far, there’s no physical evidence pointing in his direction. You’re going to have to face the possibility that we may never know who killed her, or why, or how. A transient may have come through town, saw an opportunity, killed her and left. The killer could be in Florida or Illinois or out of the country.”
I turn my head as he’s saying this and stare out the window at the darkening sky. I don’t want to hear his words; I don’t want to listen to his defeat. I think of M., who is giving a recital on campus this evening. When Joe is through, I turn back to him and say, “Or it could be someone local who’s too smart to get caught. Someone who’s into pain and punishment and seeing women suffer.”
He takes a drink of his beer. Sweat beads on the glass, and there’s a small circle of water puddling on the table where the glass had been. He takes another long drink, finishes the beer, and sets the glass back down. Giving me a steady look, holding my gaze, he bluntly asks, “What are you doing with him, Nora?”
Now it’s my turn to shrug. “Nothing,” I say quietly. What can I tell him, really, of my encounters with M.? How can I explain something I don’t understand myself? I cannot confess my willingness to submit to M.’s domination, however limited; I am unable to utter the words out loud. I know, now, the reason for Franny’s secrecy: shame. Hers was the shame of accepting a man’s infliction of humiliation; mine is the shame of enjoying it. This is not anything you can freely tell another person. “Nothing,” I repeat, feeling myself shrink.
Joe doesn’t say anything. He looks outside at the early-evening sky. A man in a khaki jacket rides by on his bicycle, his front light shining a small cone of white illumination in the street before him.
Finally he says, “What’re you hoping to accomplish with him?”
“You know the answer to that.”
“No, I don’t,” Joe says impatiently. “I don’t know what you’re doing with him—except getting in trouble.”
“If he killed Franny, I’m going to find out.”
“Do you think you’re better trained than we are? We’ve done everything we could to tie him to your sister’s death. We didn’t get a thing on him.”
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t kill her.”
“And it doesn’t mean he did. Her death could’ve been a random killing by a psychopath.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Joe sits back in his chair, scratches the side of his neck. I wish he would be honest and tell me what he believes, his gut reaction, but I know he won’t make unfounded accusations.
“There was no apparent sign of struggle,” I say. “Nothing under her fingernails, no bruising on her body. She allowed someone to bind her. It had to have been someone she knew. And you have no one else. He’s the most logical person.” I add, “Are you going to continue investigating him?”
Joe hesitates before he replies. “We’ve never stopped,” he says. With his middle finger and thumb, he rubs the bridge of his nose, looking frustrated with me, and disappointed. “Why did you really call me, Nora? Do you want me to tell you it’s a good idea for you to stay close to him? That you should keep seeing him? Do you want my permission to sleep with him? Is that it?”
“No. I wanted to tell you what happened, that he warned me not to talk to you.” I sigh, wishing I could tell him everything about me and M. This morning, I woke feeling disoriented. My dreams had left me agitated, as if I’d spent the night in a maze, a labyrinthian puzzle from which there was no escape. The connection is obvious; my dreams are not so subtle. M.’s influence on me is expanding, pulling me, like an unwanted and inescapable gravitational force, where I may not choose to go. I woke feeling the need for balance, and Joe immediately came to mind. I see his badge as a counteracting influence strong enough to do battle with M.
“I don’t know what to do, Joe. I have to find out about Franny: who killed her, how he killed her.”
He reaches across the table and places his thick hand on mine. “He’s bad news, Nora, any way you look at it. Do yourself a favor and stay as far away from him as you can. Get your life back together.”
Joe’s concern touches me, and his hand on mine is oddly protective and comforting. I want him to keep it there forever, but as I’m wishing for this he draws it away. For some reason, I think of his wife and three children, especially the children, and how they’re protected, categorically, under the unfailing aegis of his love, and how I shall never experience that feeling again. I feel tears forming and I blink hard to keep them away. A hint of Franny’s need for a father figure emerges, and with this nascent understanding I laugh out loud, bitterly, at the parallel our lives have taken upon, and only upon, her death. M. was right: Franny and I are like flip sides of the same coin, dissimilar on the surface, yet comparable at the core. Another harsh laugh escapes my lips, and Joe frowns, looking at me strangely.
Today is the anniversary of Franny’s death.
It’s been six weeks since I went to M.’s class dressed as a schoolgirl, but it seems much longer. It seems a lifetime ago. I have a hard time remembering what my world was like before M. entered it. I was obsessed with Franny’s death, I know, but it was a sane obsession, one any sister might go through if she knew her sibling’s murderer was alive and unpunished for his crime. The world I live in now, with M., is not so sane, and my obsession borders on being self-destructive. I am fully aware of this; I am also aware that I’m powerless to stop it.
True to his word, M. punishes me as he sees fit. His brand of discipline comes wrapped in the septic sheets of sexuality, commingling sex with pain, sex with dominance, sex with humiliation, and to seal the bond there is the pleasure, always the pleasure: he takes great care to assure my orgasms are strong. Progressively, he pushes my threshold of tolerance, and the pain is excruciating, but so also is the ecstasy that follows. I know the power of his hand and the slap of his leather belt across my ass; I know the pleasure that follows is almost unbearably sweet, sweeter than anything I’ve experienced before. This is his ultimate weapon: he satisfies me as no other. I have discovered I have a longing, a latent hunger, for the dark side of man’s nature. I like being pushed to the edge, and I can’t stay away. I anticipate, with both trepidation and arousal, what shall come next. I’ve learned to accept M.’s discipline, which, as he promised, he uses sparingly but with complete authority. He gives me no choice but to acquiesce to his punishment. If I resist, he is, also as he promised, more severe. He treats me like a child, reduces me to tears, makes me beg for leniency, but despite my pleas, he shows no mercy. He wrings all defiance out of me until, whimpering, I yield to his control. He does what he wishes, and his wish is to have me under his hand. Still, I know he exercises restraint; a fierce passion, which he has yet to unleash on my body, smolders inside him, waiting to ignite. Several weeks ago, I asked him why he didn’t use the cane on me—I wasn’t asking for it but merely wanted to know his rationale—and he said, “Not now. It’s too easy to cut you with a cane, and you’re not quite ready for that.”