The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (28 page)

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Whatever would he have thought, could he have met
this
babe?

Everything is relative to the perspective from which it’s observed. Sitting in front of Justine’s exhibition would have done
less for me than watching her in profile, viewing the attitude of her entire body as she simulated the offering of her most
intimate self. Too many years in joints, I guess.

The music winding down, she leaned back on her elbows, breasts and belly quivering, and gave herself up to the stimulation.
Then she got up, gathered her things, and acknowledged some tips. In exciting counterpoint to her recent minutes, she posed
her nude body with a gracious, almost stately ease. Without looking at me again, she strolled unhurriedly to the stairs.

As expected, she was gone for quite a while. A couple of other girls danced, and I took a sip of the gin she’d left on the
table. It was cheap and metallictasting—how did she drink that stuff? I ordered another Scotch and reflected. I’d little doubt
my earlier account of experiences with her great-grandmother had a role in precipitating this. Just which part had inflamed
her to act out? Was it the torment of the blonde or the “slave auction” that had followed?

After watching the blonde’s ordeal, I’d known that Linda’s flush was not from anger. She’d pressed our hostess, with near
urgency, for the detailed conditions of work at
The Château.
When informed that we were about to see a girl auctioned, the high bidder having the use of her until the following afternoon,
I had thought Linda was about to faint!

Directly, a young woman had been led to the stage, a big girl with the hard musculature of a professional dancer. She’d stripped
off her tunic, with unabashed pride, standing with shoulders back to present her large breasts to the audience. She accepted
a collar strapped about her neck with a heavy leash-chain. It was forked, attaching both to the collar and to bands that had
been locked on her wrists.

The bidding had been spirited and the girl had beamed as her price rose. Members, some who had clearly purchased her before,
had shot jokes to her during the process. When a winning bid had stood, our hostess had laughed that there would be no hotel
room for her. As her purchaser had led the girl, naked in her chains, to a table with two other men, she’d explained that
they were partners in a tree-farm operation. They would take the girl to a bunkhouse they kept there, where they would get
a real bargain and she would get a real workout.

The old woman had expressed doubt, though the girl had been young and strong, that she would make it in to work the next night.
After all the years, I still remembered Linda’s dazed query whether management took the circumstances into account, and the
old woman’s wryly melodramatic response. “But darling, you know the poor dear must get a whipping if she misses work.” With
throaty innuendo, “Suffering isn’t nearly as delightful if it’s entirely fair, is it? You’ve always known that, haven’t you?”

While young Justine’s sacrifice on the altar of lust, symbolic and otherwise, was hardly of that intensity, she was real and
immediate. That other had been in “another world.” When she eventually returned, hair somewhat disheveled, I eyed her sardonically.

“So, what’s real?” She was smirking sexily, but her voice was very serious, again somehow changed. “What would’ve you preferred
to happen? Teased him or gave it up? Hey, as if I went down on him, how ’bout?”

I’ve been around long enough to know that she was trying to provoke and torment me to her own ends. I didn’t want to burst
her bubble but, unlike Seabrook, I had no habit of beating myself up over simplistic Freudian jealousy. My guilt runs a lot
deeper than that. “Which makes it hurt so good that it confirms my love for you?” I offered.

She considered, sipping her drink. “You down for that; getting up on me giving it up? Maybe you
do
love me.” She glanced at me slyly through strands of mussed hair. “Did I amuse?”

“I enjoy watching you offer yourself to others, if that’s what you mean. ‘Amusement’ connotes an undertone of frivolity or
silliness. You looked anything but silly. But, babe, in my mind it raises even higher the improbability of a girl like yourself
having no other involvements.”

She raised her eyebrow and feigned offense. “There
are
no other girls like me. Still being insecure? Pos we’re not guilty about something? Those weren’t really my friends at the
Marriott, you know. I hired them from an agency!” She giddily threw her arms about me and burrowed into my neck, her mouth
working passionately against the side of my head. Once more I felt the sensation that she would open up my skin and crawl
inside.

“You’d better believe that tonight, I’ll show you how totally
not
are offerings to any others, compared to what I wanna give to you.”

While Justine drove very well, she was the bat as if from hell. My determination not to indicate that her speed was well beyond
my comfort zone wasn’t solely a matter of ego. I wanted to avoid any interference with her expressions of youthful exuberance.
If such a policy sounds redundant considering what had just transpired, know that I then perceived so much about her to be
of a wholly different order.

To say this young woman was wise beyond her years would be to minimize. For all her postadolescent energy and mannerisms,
I could about believe that she could back up her paradoxical affects of jaded sophistication, a posture often ludicrous when
struck by many of her young “Goths.” Even the psychosexual twists that dovetailed my own with such eerie neatness, even her
flagrant wildness seemed quite studied.

Maybe
I understood the shape of her consuming passion to cast her instincts in a semblance of submission. She had wrested security
from a hostile world by means of
“owning”
everything. Successfully bending and twisting all to her devices, there had been nothing left that could dominate her.

Or protect her, either—nothing she could lean on. It might be that her passion to give herself over was hardly that of a victim.
Like a senator who seeks out hookers to bind and whip him, it could be testimony to her very power—power that seemed to burn
again from her in a preternatural radiance.

I should mention that, having no natural children, I had helped raise some young cousins, a brother and sister, so had some
experience with young people. Most young adults are quite inhibited. Even when they regard themselves as great rebels, they’re
typically quite selective in their nonconformity. Otherwise, they tend to be more blindly obedient to values and authority
than supposedly sedate oldsters.

Put simply, Justine’s psychology seemed far more complex than her experience should dictate. Her education alone couldn’t
explain this. In terms of the usual emotional spectrum, Justine was phase-shifted beyond the visible.

I was aware that the entertainment districts of many major cities had become liberally garnished with leather and chains from
one end to the other. Nor was I oblivious to the dark sexuality of contemporary film—I was a fan! But the stretch of Justine’s
journey into darkness was not related to any chic system of alternative values of which I was aware. I could get no read other
than her own take, that the emotional vacuum of her childhood had predisposed her to emulate those figures she had lately
discovered to be her antecedents.

This intellectualizing was avoidance of yet something else. That was the sweet hurt in my chest, watching her in the dash
lights while she raced the blue car down the expressways. During her discourse at the
Wild Orchid,
it had come to me that courtship had gone over into honeymoon. I’d already known that, somewhere in the strange dance of
this ritual we’d been performing, in my heart I’d already been joined with her. The only choice I had left was when to confess.
I didn’t even really
want
to have an option.

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S
TONE
M
OUNTAIN,
THE HIGHWAY SIGN DIRECTED US.

So,
I thought,
the black heart of Dixie.
It seemed that we were going directly on to
The Château.
About ten miles beyond the loop, she took an exit onto an access that seemed a remnant of some older artery. Hardly slowing,
she suddenly careened onto the weed-choked remains of a parking lot. The Del Sol slid a bit on the residual gravel, as she
spun it around to park behind a dark edifice.

She retrieved a bag and a long Mag-Lite from the backseat, and we made our way round the front of the building. It loomed
monolithic, in the rising fog, as the granite hills around us. The stone wall beside us in the Southern night told me nothing;
neither did the preframed metal door, with industrial-strength hasps and locks, which Justine was opening.

I held the flashlight, as she bolted and locked up again from the inside, then handed the keys to me as she picked up her
bag. We crossed an empty vestibule to a doorway where another metal door stood open on, I sensed rather than saw, a dark cavernous
space.

Years before, searching for potential club locations on the north side of Fort Worth, I’d stopped to look at a wooden barnlike
building. It had been a long, tall, and narrow structure, someplace around the old stockyards, before the district was restored.
Then I could never find that building again. It had drifted, as though out of a dreamscape, retreating back as I had driven
away. Should I return to my hometown’s streets and happen upon it, it would seem as much an apparition as when Justine turned
on the lights in the big room.

Not much was left, but enough. The old bars, the railed balcony above, the broad stage flanked by the Grecian-looking columns.
Behind it, the reflective paint of the mirrors had decomposed into a mottled iridescence. In light, at once stark and pale,
from a few cleanup bulbs near the high ceiling, the faded murals remained just visible on cracked plaster walls. The real
clubroom lighting was gone, of course, as were furnishings, bar equipment, and almost everything else.

“It’s so
bare.
” Justine shivered with an indubitably erotic thrill. “It’s like a Roman arena. This is it?” She looked to me.

I nodded toward the corner of the balcony. “There is where I sat with her while she elicited my life story. Extraordinary
that she could listen to all that, recognizing JJ in it, without giving up a hint of anything.”

She had followed my eyes and kept on staring while I spoke, as if straining to make out the old woman. I shared the numinous
presentiment, in which the pale light might suddenly warp and twist around the years, tracing a shape of the past.

“Rewind, please. What you did to the blonde girl?” she whispered with a discernible gulp, nearly whimpering.

It had gone down close to where Justine and I were standing. The old woman had invited me to go examine the girl, an exercise
most likely marking Linda’s reaction. We’d been watching from the balcony, as members would stop by the chained girl and play
with her, testing and teasing her displayed flesh. A latecomer, entering from the nippy fall without, had taken the liberty
of warming his hands on her body, furthering her discomfiture.

Approaching her, I could see small bruises appearing on her well-handled skin. When I’d slid my hand between her thighs, she
had compliantly hastened to spread her legs, stumbling on her toes on the carpeted floor. As I had gently stroked her sex,
she’d smiled tearfully at me, though visibly uncertain what I might do to her next.

On an impulse, I had pulled a chair over to her and placed my foot flat on the seat. Then I had reached down and taken her
under her knees and bare bottom, lifting her up to balance on my knee and thigh. This temporarily alleviated the strain that
had been distributed along her body. She had moaned her surprised thanks, but I’d silenced her mouth with mine, then turned
the attention of my lips to her hardening nipples, red and tender from being bitten.

She’d stared at me, wide eyed, as I’d kneaded her clit. I’d understood that her astonishment had been at her own stressed
body, beginning to move toward climax under those conditions. I’d worked her harder, holding her on my knee as she had writhed
uncontrollably. Finally, she had thrown back her head between her bound arms and screamed, as an extended series of orgasms
gripped her.

The members nearby had laughed, some applauding her for giving them a good show. Giving her time to catch her breath, I’d
considerately continued to fondle all her intimate areas while her spasms had abated. Her downcast eyes had beaded with fresh
tears, as I’d restored her to her hanging posture, and I’d slapped her ass hard before returning to the balcony. Our hostess
thought the performance inspired, pointing out that, even from up there, we could visibly see the blonde blushing from hairline
to toes in her humiliation.

“The gentleness was an unexpected counterpoint. She was wholly vulnerable when she knew her most intimate responses to pleasure
had been made into a spectacle, taken from her.” I was working Justine for a reaction, trying to plumb the secret intimated
by her demeanor. “When she was carried to have her responses to pain likewise evoked, she went into the agony sexually aroused.”

As in a trance, Justine stepped onto the low stage platform and approached the columns. “And this is where it ended for her,”
she murmured, embracing one of the columns with her arms. It still sported the rings to which chains had attached. “This is
where they whipped her,” she stated as much as asked. “The other girls beat her till the switches broke.” She recalled the
way I had recounted it, while driving through the Mississippi darkness. “What if someone didn’t wanna do it?”

“If they hadn’t wanted to extend her pain, their only option would have been to strike harder, so that the switches would
break faster. It wasn’t over until all the switches were broken.” Justine was flushed, and her eyes were moist, but I wanted
to be sure she fully understood the intensity of those long-ago experiences, the differing assumptions of the times. For Gen-X,
sadomasochistic sex rituals were more widely practiced; at a minimum, they were known. Now, no kind of sex is ever
approved
in America, but the fact of their popularity was at least acknowledged. In those other times, these had been forbidden pleasures
in the extreme.