Dangerous (11 page)

I did. Christ, I’d forgotten that task almost immediately. And she’d known I would, and waited a whole month to pluck the heavy, ripened fruit of my failure. My shame was so great I could scarcely breathe. I lowered my head and fought the urge to kneel at her feet, right there in the restaurant.

“And have you selected anyone yet?” She prompted.

“No, Ma’am,” I confessed dully. She noticed the honorific.
Blood in the water.

“I’m disappointed, doll, but not angry. I’ll just have to lower my expectations of you.” That stung. “Very well. You’re released from that task, but mark this well as your first serious blunder. There will be serious consequences. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Appetite gone, I put my fork down and waited silently as Val paid the bill. She rose and made a point of taking my purse. Then she tapped her left thigh:
heel
. I followed just behind and to her left, beaten.

She stopped by the vacant pool and stood at its edge, as if to admire the still water. A man and woman were dining and talking quietly a few yards to Val’s right, under a large umbrella sprouting from the center of their table.

My anxiety grew for several moments, until Val snapped her fingers and pointed to the gently undulating water before her.
Front. Kneel.

Oh Jesus.

I don’t have to do this. I can say no if I want to.

I stepped forward and tumbled into the pool.

§

“She’s such a clumsy girl,” Val assured the staff, and liberally bribed them into letting me dry off in a vacant hotel room. I sat alone, wrapped in hotel towels, watching television while they ran my clothes through the dryer. Val, of course, didn’t wait around for me, but went shopping until I called to say my clothes were dry.

It was a very humble, quiet doll who finally got back into Val’s car.

I spent the trip home wondering what it was about this woman that made me endure such bizarre trials. It wasn’t the sex, which had only happened twice so far. No, it was the way she enveloped me, defined and restricted me. Valeria amplified my sense of being, of existing in a tactile, physical, unpredictable world. Each day was an adventure beyond anything I could have imagined. With her, the simplest objects or situations took on wholly new meanings. A single word from her could mean bliss, or despair. And as dreadful as they were, my plunges into darkness were always,
always
followed by the sweetest attentions later. I knew it was classic Pavlovian conditioning, yet I learned to welcome her punishments for what was sure to come after. She touched something deep within me which no one, not even I, had known was there, and it made me brave. Because whatever I did, or was made to do, Val was there to assume all responsibility. With Val I felt cherished, and fully
alive
.

She parked by the gate outside my condo.

“Thank you for a most enjoyable brunch,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek. “Do have a lovely Sunday. I expect you’ll be working on your commissions, yes?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” I said, climbing out of the car. I bent down to look at her through the open passenger window and waited for her farewell.

She studied me for a long moment, as if searching for something in my eyes. But then she smiled and released me from her penetrating gaze.

“I’ll be out of town for about a week and a half,” she said.

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Ta,” she said, and zipped away.

9     
commission

FAILING VAL’S FIRST task, that of choosing a confidant from among my long-time acquaintances, troubled me. Of course my initial shock at the brunch stung, but even worse was the guilt that gnawed at me after. The dip in the pool wasn’t the end of the matter.
There will be serious consequences
, she’d warned.

My guilt, and her absence, made it easy to apply myself to my new task of creating four more portraits of Val. And over the next two weeks they slowly took shape.

I called the first one
Benthic
. It started with a photo I’d taken of Val a couple weeks earlier, when she’d worn nearly the same outfit as at our meeting at the jazz club, but with her hair up. My camera had been handy, and she’d permitted me to snap a few pictures. I’d posed her in one of the chairs in her study, in the style of those stiff, long-exposure Victorian portraits with murky lighting. In this photo she presented a nearly head-on angle, sitting up straight with an expression of detached amusement.

The twist, as in the first piece, was the image I used as a replacement head, this time a great white shark. Seen almost head-on, the creature had been photographed with its entire head above water, its blood-smeared mouth ringed with teeth, some of them broken. The perspective blunted the shark’s fighter-jet shape into something more box-like. The eyes were so far around the sides as to be almost hidden, but the nasal openings were in full view, bridged by an arc of wrinkled white flesh beneath the pointed nose. It was more demon than fish, all mouth and expressionless snout.

Blending the two images required clever morphing and paint fixes around the neck, but the resulting join was perfect. I added horizontal motion blur to the head, creating a frenzied violence in an otherwise static pose. With a little vignetting and color-adjustment, the finished piece felt both claustrophobic and menacing.

The next one,
Auto-Matron
, started with some random browsing for pale, naked goth girls. I would have used a nude photo of Val, but she hadn’t yet allowed such a thing, so I had to make do. Fortunately I only needed the torso, from waist to neck, so it didn’t have to be an exact match. What I found was an image of a slim, slightly muscular goth girl with light blue veins crisscrossing her arms and chest. She stood facing the camera with one arm behind her back. The other hand clutched a long pendant, pulling it slightly to the side.

I painted out the pendant and gave her hand a new purpose: peeling open her skin to revel an outlandish bio-mechanical clockwork mechanism. Within that milky flesh were cogs of gristle and bone bound by sinew in a grotesque analog of a pocket watch’s innards. The largest gear, seen partially from behind the curtain of epidermis, had several broken teeth. Fluid the color of oil ran thickly from her nipples.

Tiny, indecipherable call-outs pointed to various features inside the woman, in a style recalling the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. The final result was a exploded view of an impossible living machine.

Doll
, the third image, took the longest. I couldn’t find the right base images, so I was forced to do more actual painting, from scratch. I borrowed liberally from the style of Mark Ryden, an artist Val adored, whose unsettling paintings corrupted the innocence of children’s picture-books with darkly sexual, morbid undercurrents.

Of the three pieces, this image was the clearest in my mind. I saw a little girl in a black dress, huddled in a dirty corner of her untidy bedroom. The bruise on her cheek suggested she was a victim of abuse. In one hand she held a small doll, dressed much like herself. The doll’s left arm had been torn off, but her right was extended to wipe a tear from the little girl’s cheek. The girl did not seem to notice this gesture, as she stared directly at the viewer with a sullen, hostile expression.

I worked on that image for a week, only to start again entirely from scratch. I hadn’t done any real painting in a decade and found I was painfully rusty. But the second try came out better. Not as good as Ryden, not by a long shot, but good enough to show.

When I finished the third piece I put all three on a spare flash drive and tucked it in my purse, ready for the next time I saw Val.

§

Meanwhile, in the real world…

During the first week of Val’s absence I received only one email from her. The time-stamp said 4am, her time, and I knew she was working late.

I still had no clue what Val did for a living, but it was obviously stressful. More than once she hinted that mistakes on her part could put other people’s lives in jeopardy, but I took that to be exaggeration. Still, she sometimes worked as long as 72 hours at a stretch, with only catnaps for sleep. During such crunches she’d call in the wee hours of the morning, and I’d help her stay awake as she pounded on an unseen keyboard. In such times, the stress and lack of sleep made her uncharacteristically silly and random, which only made Val scarier.

Anyway, this particular email read:

Koishi,

Rejoice in your happy, simple life. On days like today, nothing would please me more than seeing the world in flames. Humans are idiots, especially the ones I must deal with. But enough of my complaining.

I am pleased to report that Millie will be flying back to Los Angeles soon. Expect to see her again.

Paint.

—Val

I felt a stab of anxiety. My one encounter with Millie at the party had been difficult, competitive. Now that I was officially a doll, I couldn’t imagine how we’d interact.

Valentine’s Day came and went. I didn’t send Val anything, not even a greeting, because that holiday didn’t seem to apply to whatever it was we shared. I prayed she wouldn’t take offense at the lack, but I needn’t have worried. She never mentioned it.

Val returned home on the second week as promised. To my surprise, she didn’t summon me. I’d expected her to step up my training in preparation for my impending debut. Should I call and ask to see her? Would that incur her wrath? Another source of anxiety.

I wondered if Val’s trip and subsequent aloofness were work-related, or whether she’d grown bored with me and found other amusements. This was our longest separation, and I was shocked by the size of the hole it left in my life.

Millie, however, was the biggest unknown.

§

Val called at 8 o’clock on Wednesday, the 20th.

“I hope you had a pleasant trip?” I said. It was as close to asking what she’d been up to as I dared.

“It was productive. Is doll making progress on her artwork?” she asked. No small talk, just straight to business.

“I am,” I replied. “Well, three of them anyway. I haven’t started the last one. I can’t seem to come up with anything.”

“I’m confident you’ll find your inspiration.”

“Thank you.”

“And you still have eleven days before it’s due. I look forward to the fruits of your labor. Now…are you free Thursday? Say at nine pm?"

Yes!
I thought, but forced myself to sound nonchalant. “I’m supposed to go bowling with a few friends from work. But I can ditch that.”

“Are you
quite
sure? I wouldn’t want to deprive my doll such exquisite pleasures. I imagine the beer is quite good."

I laughed, even as her words stung.

“No, they won’t mind,” I assured her before blurting, “I do miss you, Ma’am."

She heard the honorific, but didn’t take the bait.

“Nine o’clock on Thursday then, my place. Bring whatever art you’ve finished, so I can send the files to the printers."

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Ta."

“Should I also bri—” I began, but the line was already dead.

§

Thursday night was windy, cold, a little drizzly. I wore a gray long-sleeved turtleneck sweater dress which came down to my knees, and Val seemed to approve when she greeted me at the door. I was surprised to find her there, not the maid, and knelt reflexively on the tiles.

“I’m here for you, Ma’am,” I said. The chill wind swirled about my legs.

“Good doll.” She stroked my hair for a moment, and I studied her pretty black wedge pumps as I kept my head lowered. “Do come in.”

She took my purse and brought me to the study, where she sat in her stuffed plum-colored armchair. I knelt on the throw rug before her.

“Yolanda’s away for a couple of days, visiting family out of the country,” she explained, anticipating my question. “It’s convenient to have dolls, at such times."

I nodded, unsure if she was referring specifically to me, or her dolls in general. However deeply I craved Val’s attentions, the thought of doing her housework did not appeal to me in the least. I nearly laughed aloud at this realization. Spanking? Check. Standing nude in the presence of strangers? Sure. Dusting and laundry? No way. I didn’t mention my strong aversion to house chores, however, as I knew Val would find a use for that knowledge, in the most dreadful way.

“I apologize for being rather more busy than I expected. Work has been unusually demanding.” She smiled. “But here you are, and I’m eager to see your creations. Have you made good use of your time?”

“Yes, Ma’am, though I’m still stuck on the last piece.” She nodded. “My phone is in the purse, if you want to see them.”

Rather than puzzle out how to use my phone, Val simply handed it to me. I brought up the first image, the shark, and passed it back to her.

After donning her glasses she studied it for a long time, completely absorbed. “How odd,” she said, with a touch of concern. “I’m quite certain I brushed my teeth that morning, but perhaps I am mistaken.” Because of her grave tone it took a moment to realize she was joking. Now I knew what she’d meant, the many times she’d warned me:
I’m not very funny
. True, her delivery left much to be desired.

I laughed anyway, relieved she hadn’t taken offense at the image.

“It’s well done. I’m sure the large version is even more splendid. Now, how do I…”

She figured out how to flip to the next image with a finger swipe, and came to the cut-away view of the organic machine. I waited anxiously as she scrutinized it.

“I like this one very much,” was her eventual response, and I thanked her.

She swiped to the doll painting. This was the work I’d hoped would please her best.

Like a cloud covering the sun, her face darkened. Gone was her relaxed, somewhat chatty aura; in its place slammed something alien, unreadable, frighteningly intense. She turned to regard me, lips tight and eyes like gunsights. My heart stopped; I had never seen this expression before. Something had gone horribly wrong.