Nine & a Half Weeks (11 page)

“This is a creepy room,” I say. “I couldn’t stand not being able to see, alone in here.” “You can’t stand much of anything,” he says. “Not a whole lot’s likely to happen to you, with me right outside.” “I didn’t know you were….” “Just do it,” he says. “I’m tired of talking.”

I fold the scarf and tie it clumsily at the back of my head. He sticks a finger between scarf and eyebrow, two more fingers; unties the scarf, redoes it himself. I can no longer see the slit of light along its lower edge. There is a rustle of cellophane, a small paper tear, the click of his lighter, a cigarette in my mouth. He curls the fingers of my left hand into the shape required to hold a small ashtray-it feels like glass. When I have smoked two cigarettes I clear my throat, open my mouth-but there is a knock at the door. I hear his footsteps on the wood floor, the lock being opened, low voices. The second one is as deep as his, but different in quality-a woman’s? “About time…” he says, then some mumbling I can’t make out, “All right, then…” and, “… Start now.”

During the following ten minutes I am being dressed again-by a woman, I’m certain now: her breasts keep brushing against me, they feel soft and large. There is the persistent smell of a perfume 1 can’t identify: not cloying, though sweet; not really sultry, though with an unmistakable hint of musk, and there’s some verbena, too. She has long nails, she is shorter than I am, she has recently drunk a small amount of whiskey and has rinsed her mouth with Lavoris. She has coarse hair, quite a bit of it; her hair, like her breasts, keeps touching my skin.

I try to visualize the clothes she is putting on me. The underpants are small, made of slippery fabric, the border scratchy just above my pubic hair. She puts my feet, then my calves, into boots that zip up the inside. The slant at which they support my arches must mean that they have high heels and thick platform soles. A skirt is slipped over my head, zipped in the back. I move the material between thumb and forefinger: it is cold and slippery like a plastic-coated slicker-vinyl: I am wearing a vinyl skirt that ends-my arms hanging by my sides-at the level of my fingertips. A brassiere next. “Lean forward, honey,” says the smoker’s voice in a conspiratorial, girl-talk tone. “Let’s make the best of things here.” I bend from the waist while she adjusts my breasts, taking each into the palm of one hand, squeezing toward the middle, pushing the pillows of padding underneath and toward the underarm side of each breast. When she bids me straighten up I run my fingers over what protrudes above the stiff lace: my breasts touch, something they normally do only under the hands of a man. The thought of my breasts so extravagantly positioned makes me giggle. “What’s funny now?” he says. “Look,” I say. “Put yourself in my place. You’re in a hotel, blindfolded, and someone you don’t know shovels you into a push-up bra that you’d have given your eye teeth for between twelve and eighteen, except your mother would never let you wear one. You picture that and then tell me if it wouldn’t make you laugh.” He says, “I see your point.”

A top of some sort has been pulled over my head in the meantime. It has no sleeves, ends two inches above the waist and begins where my breasts take cover under rigid lace. A vinyl miniskirt, I think, a top with me hanging out all over it, platform boots: I’m wearing a hooker outfit.

There is no time to interpret this newly solved puzzle. The scarf is off my eyes. Before me in the fading northern light shimmers an enormous, white-blond Dolly Parton wig over heavily made-up eyes, a glossy, dark brown mouth. And there’s a black, see-through top, cut low over large breasts in a black lace bra; a purple vinyl skirt ending above mid-thigh, patent leather boots-my twin: two of us in look-alike costumes, contenders in an as yet mysterious contest. I stare.

Neither of the others moves. Only when I sit down on the creaking bed-at last beginning to formulate a question-does he say, “Do the rest.”

The rest, taking nearly half an hour, is a wig like hers and a generous application of makeup, pots and tubes and brushes surfacing in turn from a gold lame kit kept in the bowels of a very large handbag. Though she tries, patiently and with perseverance, she does not succeed in gluing false eyelashes to my lids. I’m not used to the procedure and am unable to keep my eyelids from fluttering hysterically. Instead, she covers my lashes with gobs of mascara, letting one layer dry-fussing with iridescent green eye shadow in the meantime-then applying yet another layer, and another. She outlines my lips with a hard, short pencil, digging in roughly; fills the space so bordered with her dark brown lipstick, then covers everything with a slab of Vaseline. A few more pats and stabs at my wig with an outsize rattail comb and she says, pleased with herself, “Time to check yourself out, honey, mirror’s over there.” I look at him. He is sitting in the one armchair, an ankle crossed above the knee, his hands in his pockets. He says nothing. I walk slowly to the bathroom door and its mirror, a narrow, diagonal crack marking a right triangle off the top left corner.

It is a sight from which one averts one’s eyes if in the company of a man, which one looks up and down quickly and surreptitiously if unobserved and by oneself: an Eighth Avenue prostitute; not a charming Lady of the Night in a Parisian cafe out of Irma la Douce, but a gawky, atrociously painted New York street whore of the seventies, in her cheap wig and come-on sixties gear, as ready to service a john as rob him of his wallet; the woman who shields her face with a large plastic handbag on footage of yet another vice squad roundup on the six o’clock evening news.

I turn back toward the others… can’t even bolt and leave, I think, not like this… three people looking at each other in a forlorn little room: twin hookers and a clean-shaven man at ease in a dark blue pinstriped suit, a crisp pale pink shirt, a dark blue tie with small white dots. “You look terrific, honey,” says one hooker to another. “I’m not paying you to talk,” says the man in the armchair, pleasantly. “Don’t you like how she looks?” the hooker persists. “Isn’t this just what you wanted?” “You didn’t do it for kicks,” he says, still amiably. “And that outfit didn’t cost you a third of what you charged me.” “It’s hard matching a costume thread by thread, a little size problem here too, let me tell you….” “Everybody’s in a chatty mood tonight except me,” says the man. “Take my clothes off. And take your time tonight, we’ve got plenty of time, that one can use a few hints from a pro. Come over here, sit down, watch. There’s a lot you can learn.”

I am rooted to the worn spot on the floor before the bathroom. She has begun to undress him-I have never so much as opened a button on his shirt-casually and efficiently, a mother undressing a small boy for his bath, the child too tired from a day outdoors to do anything but stand quietly, she anxious to get his spattered clothes off and him into the water and pajamas then and bed.

When he is lying on his back he says-not looking at me but at the woman standing by his side-“Get your ass over here and into that chair so I won’t have to go get you.” In a trance I cross the room and sit down. In a trance I watch her climb onto the sagging bed, in a trance I watch her kneel between his legs. I can’t keep from trembling though I press my legs together, my elbows on my knees, knuckles jammed against my upper teeth. Her skirt sticks out stiffly, exposing the black triangle of her underpants and her rear. For some seconds I can think of nothing but how flawless her skin is, my brain commenting objectively and in polite surprise at how graceful a collection of shapes such large buttocks add up to; the wig, pompous yellow curls now tucked back and puffed up in a heap between her shoulder blades, hovers where his legs meet. There are only sucking noises first, later he inhales sharply, then there’s a moan. It is a sound I know well. It is a sound I have imagined belongs to me-based on what, I think, based on what-could be made audible only by my mouth, was worth a prizewinning lottery ticket, a promotion, all my talent and skill… my fists have turned slippery gray with diluted mascara. Her hand is between his legs, her head moves vertically in long, slow strokes. “That’s it….” he whispers and, “Jesus…” There is a scouring pad of yellow steel wool in my fist now, the whole nest gives way under my pull, I fling it behind me, both my hands closing in on her soft, light brown hair, heavily streaked with gray. “What the…” She scrambles up; blurred bodies next and then he is sitting on the edge of the bed. I am bent over his left thigh, his right leg braced across the back of my knees, his left hand clamped around my wrists pinned to the small of my back. He pushes the crackling vinyl back, says, “Hand me my belt,” slides his fingers between the elastic and my skin and pulls the scratchy-hemmed underpants down to the top of my thighs.

I grit my teeth in blind terror and a fury new to me. I will not, will not, he can beat me forever, I will not make a sound…. A teacher in second grade, saying to a pupil-a sullen boy, larger and taller than the rest of us-when he dropped a pencil and often when nothing had happened at all, “Your father should take you across his knees and pull down your pants and give you what for.” Said in a light voice, ominous as a nightmare in its sweetness; once a week an uneasy wave of titters set off to lap across a hushed room, twenty-eight seven-year-olds bending their heads over their desks with a shame as inexplicable to them as it was pervasive. I haven’t thought of this teacher or the proximity of moist swamps she conjured up since being released into the care of gruff Miss Lindlay and third grade. And here it is, revived and let loose, vile: more debasing than anything he’s done to me in the past, the enforced flesh-on-flesh intimacy far worse than being tied to a bed, than cowering on a floor, handcuffs and chains a kindness compared to hanging like this, buttocks as if served up, blood roaring in my ears….

I do, of course, cry out eventually. He stops but does not let me go. A cool palm gently soothes my skin, fingers tracing lines this way and that; a flat hand moves softly down my thighs to where his legs hold them fast, follows the line between the thighs upward from the knees, back down again, another slow ascent.

“Give me that Vaseline you had,” he says, “and hold her hands.” My buttocks are being spread, there is the pressure of his finger in my anus, a hand between my legs, one slippery finger sliding easily into place between closed lips. I tense every muscle. I concentrate on yellow spirals whirling against black on the inside of my squeezed-shut eyelids, I grind my teeth, I dig my nails into my palms, more frantic now than when he first started hitting me: I can’t bear it, not like this, please don’t let me… my body beginning to move under the slow pressure that urges me to arch against it, soon squirming greedily on his hand. “You think you know what you want, sweetheart”-his low voice in my ear, almost a whisper-“but you go by what your cunt wants, every time,” and a fierce blow. “Shut her up,” he says, my mouth covered by a perfumed hand into which I bite as hard as I can, the scarf stuffed between my teeth then and held there firmly by someone breathing heavily to my right; and my mouth free again, his hands fondling me until my body succumbs, much more quickly this time, “Please, 1 can’t stand it, please make me come” changing under another blow to a mere “Please….” My body thrown on the bed, the sobbing under a pillow muffled and distant even to myself, a tongue on me and the pillow off and his face above me but the tongue still there, below, quickly making me wail; my head on his shoulder as he stretches full length beside me, his arm around me tightly, his fingers over my mouth, she rides him sitting astride. Across a narrow space she and I watch each other while he comes.

I AM SITTING in a corner seat on the AA. It’s only been two months, a little over nine weeks, I’ve been out of control for two months. A boy sits across from me, curly hair falling over a round forehead, shirt unbuttoned, an open book held rigidly in both hands. I look at him steadily, my body is liquid, afloat. He stares back, twice he’s tried to smile. My hands are folded in my lap, one open palm inside another. I don’t smile. I am conscious of my new power and the boy across the aisle is, too. Surely not a new power, ancient probably, I just never knew about it; abandon.

At West Fourth Street I get off. The boy cranes his neck, opens his mouth when I look back at him, jumps up in a sudden, awkward rush, but the doors have closed.

The kid in the subway felt it, secondhand. It must seep from my pores. For the past two months I’ve been in the process of being taught about myself, something new every night, the undercurrent getting stronger by the hour; hands pinned down above my head, shallow gasps, “This is new” ticking in my brain. A conscious new power: vulnerability, perverse if only because it is total, natural as grass nonetheless, or asphalt in New York. Abandon. Take me, anything, do it to me, anything, take me, anything, kill me if it pleases you. But try tying me down, first. Look at me, my eyes closed, your fingers outlined on my cheek, damp hair lying where gravity makes it land as my head falls back against the pillow. Better yet, talk about striking me first, in a low voice, and handcuff me to the table leg and feed me, crouching low. Make me eat you between a mouthful of baked cod and one of home-fried potatoes, first, slowly tipping the glass of wine against my lips until the liquid flows onto my tongue, my eyes closed, you have to gauge how far the glass needs to be tipped, I’m not accountable. Wine dribbling down my chin, no one wiping it off, first, and God surely knows what next: thick welts and a stifled scream for the first time. Tracing the welts, watching your cock grow hard again, watching you trace the welts, feeling your cock grow hard again, our eyes locked.

Weeks later, stifling is no longer possible. Maybe later yet a trickle of blood, what would it feel like to be struck so that one bleeds? When you’re four you can’t fathom what it’s like to be five. If you’ve never screamed, out of control, you can’t imagine how it feels. Now I know how it feels, it’s like coming. There is a sound, far away, having to do with me and surely not having to do with me, no responsibility. My body giving up, giving in. No bounds. Foreign sounds far away, I’m not accountable.