Any Woman's Blues (30 page)

“Why? You could ante up the tab out of your pay, sell the bill to
any
reputable art dealer, repay yourself, and pocket the difference. You’d be nine thousand nine hundred dollars richer. How can you turn this down?”

“Sir,” Bruce says, “I j-just c-c-can’t.”

“So split the difference with your boss, if it makes you feel any better.”

“Please, sir.”

“Well, it’s my duty to warn you that you are giving up a year of life by doing this. Also that you clearly do not have the
risk
-taking necessary to the true artist. If you can’t make this clear and simple choice tonight, how will you ever survive in the lists of art? Talent is common. So are good looks. What’s rare is risk-taking. What’s rare is the ability to follow your talent off the edge of the cliff and see if you can fly. What’s rare is to follow your talent into the underworld and see if you can sing your way out. What’s rare is to follow your talent into the labyrinth and see if you can slay the Minotaur. Are you Icarus? Are you Orpheus? Are you Theseus? Or are you just Bruce, condemned always to be Bruce?”

Bruce is crying.

“Amex, Master, Visa,” he says through his tears.

Wayne heaves a deep sigh and hands Bruce an Amex card. Then he holds up the re-created one-hundred-dollar bill.

“Bruce, I want you to pay attention. I am giving this bill to this lady because she is a true artist, a true risk-taker. Watch closely.”

And, extracting an old Rapidograph pen, he signs the bill “To Leila with love and blood and guts from Wayne,” then hands the one-hundred-dollar work of art to me.

Bruce hurries away with Wayne’s Amex card.

I decide to go to the dominatrix with Wayne.

 

 

Madame Ada lives in a prewar building in the West Village. There is a doorman. Wayne and I travel up to the penthouse level, where we ring the bell of PhD. A white calling card on the door says: “
Psychodrama Institute.
” Silence.

“I wonder if she’s home,” says Wayne.

I’m relieved she’s not. Then we hear the click of heels on a hard floor, and the door swings back.

A Slavic-looking square-jawed blonde in her forties wearing a white leather skirt, a blue silk blouse, and black stiletto heels opens the door. She shakes my hand firmly, then kisses Wayne on both cheeks, Italian style.

“Hel
lo,
” she says, smiling and at once biting off her smile. “I’m Ada,” she says, with a strong Russian accent, “or, to my slaves, Madame Ada.” She laughs. “Come in, come in.”

The large living room is bare, but for a huge leather couch—white—and a few futuristic Italian lamps. The walls are mirrored. There is no art at all. There is, however, an immense terrace, which looks out over the low roofs of the village toward the midtown skyline of New York. A dazzling view. What any struggling Russian émigré in New York would wish for.

We sit down on the leather couch, which makes a U in the middle of the bare room.

“So . . .” says Ada. “Wayne has told me wonderful things about you. He says we’re so alike.”

“How did you get into your line of work?” I ask.

Ada laughs. “Everybody asks the same question.”

She crosses unshaven legs, swings her foot in its black stiletto heel, and laughs her trilling musical laugh.

“Let me tell you what I told Phil Donahue. When I first came to this country from Russia, I was brought by a Mexican friend to a club in SoHo where they did S&M. The Dungeon, I think it was called. I went for curiosity’s sake, like you, not knowing what I would possibly make of it. At the club, I saw men bound and gagged, spread-eagled on bondage tables, their scrotums bound in leather thongs. I saw dominas in black leather whipping these men, allowing them to kiss one toe—or perhaps not even that—and I felt disgusted, detached, fiercely superior toward the people who were doing it. That gave me the first clue that I must be attracted to it. Then, suddenly, I was given a cat-o’-nine-tails and asked if I wanted to participate. I had no special feeling about it, really, one way or the other. A man’s buttocks were bared before me—a young man, young and handsome, with firm buns—and I began to flog him. It was then that I discovered a great heat in myself to continue. I was wild with a passion to do more, and more, and more. I really
wanted
to hurt him, to draw blood, to lacerate his flesh.” Ada said all this precisely, overaccenting each consonant, giving the vowels a musical Slavic lilt. I was riveted.

“What danger is there, if any?” I asked.

“Ah,” said my professor of S&M. “You ask the right question. This kind of sex can easily make you
jaded
. It’s a drug. It takes you to extremes, after which other sex, friendly sex, seems tame.”

“
Is
there any friendly sex?” I ask.

Ada laughs as if she knows what I mean. The dark-blue eyes twinkle.

The conversation drifts to other things—vegetarianism, books, travel. (It strikes me as inconsistent that a leather fetishist should refuse to eat meat—but let that pass. Life is inconsistent.)

As we talk, two young people wander into the room. One is a slim, boyish blond young woman in jeans and a cowboy shirt, the other a smallish young man wearing a ponytail and an aviator scarf.

“My two personal slaves,” says Ada. “Roland has my initials branded into his thigh, and Lavinia has my hoop earring through her nipple. Perhaps they’ll show you later.”

Lavinia shrugs shyly; Roland smiles.

I exchange glances with Wayne, who laughs. “Hooked yet?”

“Perhaps Leila would like to meet one of the mistresses?” says Ada.

“Yes, I would.”

“Hooked,”
says Wayne.

“Let’s go to the studio, then,” says Ada.

We leave the penthouse, take the elevator down to the lobby, and, personal slaves in tow, walk a few blocks in the West Village until we come to a narrow brick house that seems all garage door.

Ada opens the door with an electronic beeper. Within is a garage containing two cars and behind them another door, which leads into a mirrored waiting room.

Two young men in yarmulkes sit there, hunched over, looking down at the floor. One is twisting his
payess
nervously, the other leafing through a magazine called
Puss n’ Boots.

Lavinia, the “personal slave,” whispers: “We get lots of religious types here. Jews and Roman Catholics particularly.”

Dear God—I would like to paint these two young men in yarmulkes waiting outside the dominatrix’s door, waiting to worship. I dare not—“not good for the Jews,” I hear my mother’s voice saying.

Ada sweeps on past the waiting room to an adjacent room, which is fitted out with a sort of massage table with holes for the face and genitals.

“This is a bondage table,” she says. “You see? From underneath, you can do things.”

She leads me to a mirrored closet, shows me a whole wardrobe of leather, rubber, fetishy shoes and boots.

“Come,” she says. “I want you to meet my star mistress, Larissa.”

We proceed down the hallway to another door, knock tentatively, whereupon a cultivated voice answers, “Wait, please.”

The two slaves hang back with Wayne; Ada takes me by the hand and says, “We two shall go in alone.”

“Come in!” sings Larissa.

Ada and I enter a darkened chamber, in which a man is tied face down on a bondage table.

He is youngish and blond like Dart and has lovely buns, wonderfully shaped calves with long muscles, and a glorious muscled back. It could be Dart lying there, his bulging cock bound in leather, his eyes blindfolded, his hands tied above his head in an attitude of supplication.

Mistress Larissa is pacing about the table, talking to him in imperious but mellifluous tones.

“What a bad boy you are to orgasm so quickly. You could
never
satisfy a woman that way. What do you say?”

“I’m sorry, Mistress,” mumbles the man.

“What is the proper punishment for your transgression?”

“I don’t know, Mistress.”

“Bad boy,” says Larissa, lashing him with her riding crop. He cries out.

“Think harder, pet,” she says, pacing, caressing the crop.

Larissa is a glorious creature—tall, dark-haired, almond-eyed, with a wonderful voice, extraordinary erect carriage, and body language that says “Touch me not.”

She is wearing her long chestnut hair in a ponytail, bound, like her victim’s cock, in leather thongs. Her longwaisted, long-legged body is clad in a black leather minidress with a laced waist and thigh-high laced-up black boots. The heels, like Ada’s, are at least six inches high. I am amazed that she can walk in them at all—but walk she does, and as elegantly as a prize Arab mare.

“The punishment?” she asks. “Or rather, the implement for the punishment?”

“As you wish, Mistress.”

“What’s that,
boy
? Louder.”

“As you wish, Mistress.”

“Mmm,” says Larissa, brandishing her leather crop. “I’m thinking. Shall it be the crop, the cat, the rubber hose?”

“As you wish, Mistress.”

She runs her lacquered red nails along the crop as if to test its sting, then hits him with it. Again. And again. And again. She smiles, her red lips curling up in a little crimson crescent of pleasure. He cries out, his beautiful back covered with red welts.

“You shall not cry out,
boy,
” she says. “For every stroke, you shall say, ‘Thank you, Mistress Larissa,’ or I triple the strokes. Do you hear me, boy?”

“Thank you, Mistress Larissa.”

“Very well, then.” She begins to flog him in earnest. He suppresses his cries, muttering instead, “Thank you, Mistress Larissa. Thank you, Mistress Larissa.”

My heart is pounding with each blow. I am growing wet.

Larissa, a very sensitive receptor, feels this. Without a word, she puts her crop in my hand and takes another from the wall for herself. It is as if she has given me her cock.

“Another beautiful lady is going to assist me now,” she tells the slave.

“Thank you, Mistress Larissa,” he says.

I bring the crop down on his buttocks, lightly and tentatively at first, then harder. Larissa and I sting him in alternate strokes, responding to each other’s motion, each other’s rhythm.

“She’s a natural,” Ada says to Larissa.

My sane mind stands apart, watching me beat the man harder and harder, astonished to be causing him pain (for which he thanks me). One touch and I might come, but I linger on the edge, amazed to find pleasure in raising red welts on the slave’s back and buttocks.

Slave, master—what does it mean? A jumble of images from my past life fills my head. I am whipping Dolph, Elmore, Dart, Dart, Dart. I am revenging myself on André, on Dolph, on every art critic who has ever attacked my work. I understand the lure of this place, the feelings discharged, their heat. Elsewhere in society the power struggle between men and women is disguised. Here it is naked. Elsewhere people pretend to be civilized; here they do not. Elsewhere men and women kiss, cuddle, and lie. Here they lash each other and tell the truth. The truth, however horrible, does make you free.

 

 

I whip the man harder and harder, until his mumbled thanks are incoherent. I do not know who he is—all I know is that he is a man, and that the anger I feel against him is fathomless and deep. On one of my strokes, he groans and comes in a spurt of white over the thongs that cover his cock.

“Thank you, Mistress,” he mumbles. And I almost double over in a spontaneous convulsion of my own.

Larissa has resumed torturing the slave, her cruel crimson lips turned up in mischief as she holds high a long black candle. He thanks her as she thrusts it into his bowels.

 

 

I feel that I am truly in hell, dedicated to the dark gods, with this man in bondage playing out his own private drama. We are all here because somehow love has not worked for us, because our sane minds have deserted us, so we are seeking pure sex, and pure power. I give myself over to Kali—I who formerly loved Demeter and Persephone. Whoever is not a cynic at forty can never have loved mankind.

“Larissa has still not released her slave,” Ada says. “But you, my pet, are a natural for this sort of psychodrama.”

Wayne looks at me and laughs. “Well, well, well,” he says. “I can’t say I’m all that surprised. Leila has never been afraid of her dark side.”

The bathroom door opens, and the blond young man emerges. He does look a bit like Dart, but he is only another Dart look-alike. The world is full of them!

Wayne was right to bring me here. This was what I needed to finally break the Dart obsession, my way of understanding it. How could he have known?

The blond young man bends down and kisses Larissa’s pointed black toe.

“Thank you, Mistress,” he says. “Next Tuesday at four.”

“Begone, pet,” she says coolly.

“Thank you, Mistress,” he says, and goes home to beat his wife or girlfriend.

Wayne catches my eye.

“At some point,” he says, “I’m going to find a way to make this into art. I don’t quite know
how
yet. But it’s critical that
some
one do it. I want to be the Francis Bacon of S&M.”

“Francis Bacon already
is
the Francis Bacon of S&M,” I say. “You’re late.”

Wayne laughs.

“Do you know what he said to an interviewer who asked him where he drew his images of horror?” I ask.

“No,” Wayne says.