At times, playing the game was hard.
I showered a lot, soaked in the bathtub, did push-ups, read all the James M. Cain again, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity and Serenade, and watched all the films on disc.
There was one film that really got to me. It was brand new, still in the brown paper mailing envelope, and I opened it last. It was a little thing about the gypsies in New York called Angelo, My Love. I wished there’d been a couple of sequels, all about the same gypsies, the same little kid Angelo.
But it seemed strange, a film like that in this collection of Bogart film noir classics and hard glossy Flashdance trash. I took the packaging out of the waste basket. The disc had been sent out express mail from a Dallas video store of all places only a couple of days before we left. Odd. Like maybe somebody saw it and loved it and ordered it impulsively for the cabins on the yacht. I wondered if anybody else on board was watching it. Not a sound ever penetrated the room.
I slept a great deal. In fact, I would say I slept most of the time. I wondered if there weren’t drugs in the food, which was slipped through the door. But I don’t think so, because I felt so good when I woke up.
Now and then I woke up in the middle of the night and realized what I’d done.
I was headed to The Club, this strange place, for two years, and no matter how I begged or pleaded, for two years I wouldn’t be allowed to split. However, that was the least of it. It was what was going to happen there. And I remembered my master, my trainer, my secret sexual mentor, Martin Halifax, saying over and over, right up to the end, that two years was too long.
“Go for six months, Elliott, a year even. You can’t really imagine what The Club is. You’ve never been incarcerated anywhere longer than a few weeks. And these are small places, Elliott. The Club is enormous. We’re talking about two years.”
I didn’t want to argue with him anymore. I had said a thousand times I wanted to be lost in it, no more fortnight trips and exotic weekends. I wanted to drown in it, get so deep into it that I couldn’t keep track of time, believe in a day when the time would be up.
“Come on, Martin, you’ve sent in all the papers,” I’d said. “And they’ve examined me, accepted me. If I wasn’t ready, they wouldn’t take me, right?”
“You’re ready for it,” he had said wistfully. “You can handle what happens there. But is it what you really want?”
“I want to go off the proverbial deep end, Martin. That’s what I’ve been saying all along.”
I had practically memorized the rules and regulations. I’d be paid one hundred grand for my services. And for two years I’d be their property to do with as they pleased. I wondered what they charged their “guests,” the ones who would use us, if they paid us that much.
And now I was on board the yacht, and already there was no turning back. I could hear the sea, though I couldn’t see it or really smell it, and rolling over I went back to sleep.
The truth was, I couldn’t wait to get there. I wanted to be there now. I got up in the night and felt the door again to make certain it was locked, and that made the desire in me uncontrollable so that it erupted in a half tangle of painful and delicious dreams.
I was kind of regretful afterwards, but there was only one mistake—coming like that, like a Catholic boy in a wet dream.
A lot of the time I thought about Martin, about the way it had started, “the secret life” as he called it and I called it to myself.
There had been so many mentions of “The House,” before I had finally made somebody spell it all out. And it had been so hard to call that number, yet so easy to wind up outside the immense Victorian at nine on a summer night. The traffic was almost gusting past me uphill as I turned to make the short walk under the tall, straight Eucalyptus trees to the wrought iron gate. (“Come to the basement door.”)
Forget the hackneyed whores in black corsets and spike heels (“Have you been a bad boy? Do you need a whipping?”) or the dangerous little baby-faced hustlers with the tough-guy voices. This was going to be the Deluxe Escorted Tour of Sado-Masochism to the max.
And the civilized conversation first.
Small lamps in the big, sprawling, darkly paneled room, no brighter than candles as they illuminated the paintings, the tapestry on one wall. Oriental screens, deep red and gold paisley window shades. Dark, lacquered french doors with mirrors for glass along the far wall, and a big comfortable leather wing chair, my foot on the ottoman, and the shadowy figure of the man behind the desk.
Martin, soon to be my lover, my mentor, my therapist, my unstinting partner in the inner sanctum. Tall, black haired, youthful voice, gray at the temples, the fiftyish college professor at home in the brown V-neck sweater with the open shirt collar, small but brilliantly inquisitive eyes. Eyes that seem forever to be examining something wondrous. Gleam of an old-fashioned gold watch against the dark hair on his arm.
“Do you mind the smell of a pipe?”
“Love it.”
Balkan Sobranie tobacco, very nice.
I was nervous, sitting quietly in the chair, my eyes scanning the walls, the old landscapes under the crazed lacquer, the small enameled figurines on the mahogany chest. Otherworldly here. Mass of purple flowers in a pewter vase against the marble clock. The carpet that smooth plum-colored velvet kind you only see these days on the marble staircases in the very old hotels. Sounds from the house above. The creak of boards, the dull resonance of a music.
“Now, I want you to talk to me, Elliott,” he had said with an easy authority, as if none of this was rehearsed, had ever happened before. “I want you to relax and recount for me the sort of fantasies you’ve enjoyed over the years. You don’t have to be graphic. We know how to be graphic. We’re geniuses at it.”
He sat back, his eyes moving over the ceiling, touch of gray in the eyebrows, the pipe smoke rising thickly for an instant, then vanishing.
“And if it’s difficult for you, describing the fantasies to me, you can always write them down if you like. I could leave you alone for a while with paper and pencil, the typewriter if you prefer . . .”
“But I thought you made things happen, that it was an environment, so to speak, a world . . .”
“It is, Elliott, don’t worry about that. We’ll take control. Complete control. Once you go through that door. We have a thousand ideas, a thousand proven ways of doing things. But it’s important that we talk first, about you, about your imagination. It’s a good way to begin. Do you want a cigarette, Elliott?”
How unnerving it had been to realize I had to begin it, start the wheels turning. I had seen myself surrendering when I came to the door. “Yes, I’m guilty. Punish me.” How unnerving to discover myself saying, “I want to go through that door now.”
“Soon enough,” he had answered, with a little smile. Eyes softening, getting larger, more mellow as they studied me. It was the easiness of a man who had known you all your life. A man like that could never hurt anyone. Face of the family doctor, the college professor who understood and respected your mania for the subject matter, the perfect father . . .
“You know, I’m not the type you would expect for this,” I had said uneasily. God, he was a good-looking man. Had some constitutional elegance a young man never has, no matter how beautiful he is.
“As a student I was something of a nuisance,” I said. “In my family, I’m considered testy. I don’t take orders well. I’m almost a cliché when it comes to macho tastes. I’m not bragging about it, you understand.” I had shifted in the chair a little uneasy. “I think it’s ludicrous, risking your life at 150 miles an hour around the Laguna Seca track, skiing down the most treacherous slopes you can find anywhere, pushing a goddamned ten-pound Ultralite plane as high and as fast as it will go on a teacup of gas.”
He had nodded for me to go on.
“There is something compulsive, stupid about it all. For two years I’ve been working as a photographer. But in a way it’s the same routine. More and more da
nger. The scrapes I’ve gotten into are obscene. Last time, I nearly bought it in El Salvador, ignoring the curfew, like some rich kid on vacation . . .”
Don’t really want to talk about that. Those awful endless seconds in which for the first time in my life I could hear my own watch tick. Couldn’t stop running it by over and over afterwards, what almost happened: TIME-LIFE PHOTOGRAPHER GUNNED DOWN BY DEATH SQUAD IN EL SALVADOR. The end of Elliott Slater, who could have been writing the great American novel in Berkeley, or skiing in Gstaad instead of doing this.
Wouldn’t have made the network news for two nights.
“But that’s often the type of man who comes here, Elliott,” he said calmly. “The kind of man who submits to no one and nothing in the real world. The man who’s used to wielding power and fed up with intimidating others. He comes to us to be turned inside out.”
I smiled at that, I think. Turned inside out.
“Don’t edit the fantasies, Elliott. Just talk to me. You’re obviously articulate. Most of the men who come to us are articulate. They have keen and elaborate imaginations, well-developed fantasies. I don’t listen to these fantasies like a doctor. I listen to them as stories. Like a literary man, if you will. Do you want a drink to help you talk? Maybe some Scotch, a glass of wine?”
“Scotch,” I had said absently. I didn’t want to be drunk. “There was one fantasy in particular,” I said, as he stood up and went to the bar. “A fantasy that used to obsess me when I was a boy.”
“Tell me.”
“God, you don’t know how felonious it all was, having those fantasies, thinking I was some sort of lunatic when everyone else was gaping at the Playboy centerfold and the cheerleaders on the football field.”
Johnny Walker Black Label. Good luck. Just a little ice. Even the aroma and the thick crystal glass in my hand had its effect.
“When people discuss their fantasies they often talk only about the acceptable,” he said as he settled behind the desk again, leaning back. He was not drinking, merely drawing on the pipe. “They talk about the clichés, not about what they really imagine at all. How many of your classmates had the same fantasies, do you think?”
“Well, I used to imagine something of a Greek myth,” I said. “We were all youths in a very great Greek city, and every few years seven of us—you know, like in the Theseus myth—were sent to another city to serve as sexual slaves.”
I took a little sip of the Scotch.
“It was an old, sacrosanct arrangement,” I said, “and an honor to be chosen, yet we dreaded it. We were taken into the temple, told by the priests to submit to everything that would happen to us in the other city, and our sex organs were consecrated to the god. It had happened for countless generations, but the older boys who had been through it never told us what would take place.”
“Nice,” he said softly. “And then . . .”
“As soon as we arrived in the other city, our clothes were taken away. And we were auctioned off to the highest bidder to serve for several years. It seemed we brought luck to the rich men who bought us, we were symbols of fertility and masculine power, like the Priapus in the Roman garden, the Herm at the Greek door.”
How strange it felt to be telling it, even to a man who seemed the perfect listener. Not the faintest indication that he was shocked.
“We were cherished by our masters. But we weren’t human. We were utterly subservient, meant to be played with.” I took another slow drink. Might as well get it all out. “Meant to be beaten,” I said, “and sexually tormented and starved—driven through the city for the amusement of the master, made to stand at the gate for hours in a state of sexual tension while the passersby stared, that kind of thing. It was a religious thing to torment us, while we kept our fear and humiliation inside.”
Had I really said all that?
“Terrific fantasy,” he had said very sincerely, with a slight lift of his brows. He appeared to reflect. “All the best ingredients. You not only have ‘permission’ to enjoy the degradation, but it’s religious, good.”
“Listen, my mind is a three-ring circus,” I had laughed, shaking my head.
“That’s the way it is with all sadomasochists,” he said. “The ‘circus animals’ almost never desert us.”
“There has to be the framework,” I said. “All very neat. It would be unthinkable if you were really forced. Yet there has to be coercion.”
I had put the glass down on the desk and immediately he rose to fill it.
“I mean there has to be consent and coercion for it to be a really good fantasy,” I said, watching him. “Yet it has to be a humiliation, with a struggle inside between the part of you that wants it and the part that doesn’t; and the ultimate degradation is that you consent and grow to like it.”
“Yes.”
“We were objects of scorn as well as veneration. We were mysteries. We were never allowed to speak.”
“Just priceless,” he whispered.
What had he really heard in those hours as we talked? Anything really different, new or unique? Maybe all he had learned was that I was like a thousand other men who had passed through his doors.
“And your master, the man who buys you in the other Greek city . . .” he had asked. “What does he look like? How do you feel about him?”
“You’d laugh if I told you. He falls in love with me. And I fall in love with him. Romance in chains. Love triumphs in the end.”
He hadn’t laughed, merely smiled agreeably, drawing on his pipe again.
“But he doesn’t stop punishing you or using you when he starts loving you . . .”
“No, never, he’s too good a citizen for that. But there’s something else.” I could feel my pulse accelerating. Why the hell mention it at all?
“Yes?”
I felt a slowly heating anxiety for the first time, a confusion as to why I had come here.
“Well, just that there is this woman in the fantasy . . .”
“Hmmmm.”
“She’s the wife of the master, I guess. Well, I know she is. And it sometimes works towards her.”
“How does it work towards her?”
“No. I don’t want to be involved with women,” I said.
“I understand.”
“There are a thousand reasons why you choose a man or a woman as a love partner, a sex partner, aren’t there? It’s not like it used to be, when the lines were hard to cross.”
“No, not like that anymore,” he said. But he had paused for a second before answering. “And you’ve been with women as well as men?”
I had nodded. “Too many of both.”
“And she’s in the fantasy.”
“Yeah. Damn her. I don’t know why I brought her up. I sort of look to her for some sort of mercy, tenderness, and she becomes more and more interested in me—her husband’s slave—but then she’s worse.”
“How is she worse?”
“She’s tender, and she’s loving, but she’s harsher, stricter, crueler at the same time. The humiliation is like keening. You know what I mean? Strange.”
“Yes. . .”
“She isn’t always there. But sooner or later . . .”
“Yes.”
“But this is really off the point.”
“Is it?”
“Well, I mean I want male lovers, male dominators, if you will. That’s what I really have to say. That’s why I came here, for men. I’ve heard you’ve got beautiful men here, the best. . .”
“Yes,” he said. “I think you’ll like the album when it’s time for you to make your choice.”
“I get to choose the guys who dominate me?”
“Of course. That is, if you want to. You can always leave the choice to us.”
“Well, it’s got to be men,” I said. “Men are the exotic sex to me, the hot sex. The sex for romps and for rough adventures . . .”
He nodded, smiled.
“There’s nothing like it, that sense of being with somebody as tough as yourse
lf. When women come into it there is something sentimental, high pitched and romantic . . .”
“Whom have you loved in the past—really loved—men or women?” he asked.
Silence.
“Why is that important?”
“Oh, you know why it’s important,” he said very gently.
“A man. And a woman. At different times.” Close those doors, please.
“You loved them equally.”
“At different times . . .”
It wasn’t three months before we were talking again in that same room—though I would never have thought after all that happened upstairs I could sit in a room, fully clothed, and talk to him again—and he was saying: “But there is no need for you to pay me anything anymore, Elliott, that’s what I’m telling you. I can arrange it with three or four interested ‘masters’ who will cover all expenses. You’ll come here as before, but on their nickel. While you are here you will belong to them.”
“No. Money doesn’t mean a damn thing to me where all this is concerned, and I’m not ready for that . . .” The complete domination of another, his fantasy supplanting my fantasy. No, not yet. Keep it careful. It’s hard enough.
But it was like a staircase spiraling upwards from the basement room, and I was going to climb it right to the very top.
“I’d like a woman,” I said suddenly. Did I say that? “I mean I . . . Well, a woman,” I said. “I . . . think it’s time for that, a really good-looking woman who knows what she’s doing, and I don’t want to know anything about her, and I don’t want to pick her picture out of any album. You pick her. Make sure she’s good at it, great at it, that she can take over. It’s time . . . I mean, to be dominated by a woman, don’t you think?”
Martin was smiling agreeably.
“As the genie says when he rises from the lamp, ‘Yes, Master.’ A woman it shall be.”