The Secret Lives of Married Women (19 page)

He sat back in his seat, defeated.

“I shouldn’t have let her go,” he said after a while. “I handled it all wrong.”

“Why
did
you let her go? I mean, you told me she crossed a line, but you didn’t say how. It didn’t matter then, but now it does. You need to tell me what happened.”

“It’s hard to explain.”

I waited.

“She had an unnerving past,” he said eventually.

“Something that could discredit her as a witness?”

“Oh God,” he said. “I don’t want to go there.”

“What? Why the hell not?”

“She was so devoted to me.”

“And now she may well be just as devoted to destroying you.”

“That’s not fair,” he said. He was very distraught. “It’s not fair to her. Why should she have to pay for my mistakes?”

“Abel,” I said. “Do you want Lulu to have a father in prison?”

He sat there in agony.

“Listen,” I said after a long moment, softening my tone. “I need to understand what we’re dealing with here. I can’t get at Nan’s motives or her state of mind or her weaknesses as an adversary without information. To have any hope of neutralizing her testimony, I need to know everything about her that you can tell me.”

“She worked for a place called the Nutcracker Suite,” he said finally. “It was a place where people pay to engage in S&M.”

I went still, staring at the ruled yellow paper of my legal tablet. Here it was. Confirmation of something I’d felt all along.

And then, just as quickly, this dark thrill of recognition was displaced by professional assessment. My personal response had no place here. This kind of compartmentalization was as natural to me as breathing.

“Ah,” I said. I looked up at him. “This is good for us. So she tied men up and whipped them? Stuff like that?”

“No, she played the slave. Presumably men tied her up and whipped her.”

And here I felt the first surge of optimism since seeing Nan’s name on the witness list. “Well. That is good news—very good news. You do realize this is priceless for the defense? I mean, a job like that would discredit any witness. Frankly, for most jurors I think it will call her sanity into question.”

He went silent again and I realized I could not let myself gloat over her undoing. Not out loud. Not to him.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “I understand that you have some ...residual sympathy for her, and I don’t doubt that you have good reasons. I mean, she sounds like a troubled person. Do you have any sense of what drew her to that line of work?”

“I never asked her,” he said.

“Really? In more than two years of—as you put it—a very intimate relationship?”

“It was intimate,” he said, “but it was still very much a formal working relationship, and to be honest, a lot of that formality came from her.

“It’s not that I ever forgot about her past. You don’t forget something like that. And just between you and me, I should acknowledge that there was something between us, something we never talked about. As I’ve said before, nothing sexual happened with her, and in fact I don’t think she even
wanted
anything sexual to happen. But she took pleasure in serving me. I knew that. And look, I’ll admit that I liked it. I mean, Christ, who wouldn’t? She would have done anything for me. And so our interests were perfectly aligned. She didn’t hope to be promoted. Didn’t want to learn the business, climb the company ladder, advance her career.

“She wanted a place where there was no room to move,” he concluded. “I gave it to her.”

* * *

As soon as Abel was gone, the call button on my phone began to flash and I let Penny put Leda through. Not because I was ready to forgive her, but because I realized that the angrier I seemed about what she had said, the more implicit validation I was giving it.

“Lily,” she said. “I’m so glad you took my call.”

“Well, don’t be, not yet,” I said. “I’m still angry. But not for the reason you think.”

“Well, why then?”

“I don’t care what misguided ideas you have about what turns me on,” I told her. “But I still can’t believe you never told me about that movie. That in all these years, you never said one word.”

“Oh come on, Lily, how could I? You know how you are.”

“No, I don’t. How am I?”

“You’re a great lawyer,” she said, “and someday you’ll probably be a judge. And you should be. Because at the end of the day, that’s what you are. All right?”

It stung. I felt my throat close over, and I didn’t answer.

“And that’s why
I’m
angry at
you
. I hate that you called Darren a fraud and a hypocrite. You have no idea how lucky you are. You think it’s easy to find guys like him? Smart and supportive and loyal? Not to mention handsome as hell.”

“Well, you two are quite the mutual admiration society,” I managed to say. I heard the way I sounded: catty and jealous. “And apparently hot for each other to boot. Maybe
you
should have married him.”

My husband’s words of the other night came back to me:
What in the name of Christ is the matter with you?
I didn’t know. I had a sudden urge to cry.

There was a long silence, maybe a whole minute. But when Leda finally broke it, her voice had gone soft and wistful.

“Oh, Lily. You know what I’m thinking of right now? Lily, are you there? Remember when you first stopped eating meat? You probably don’t remember this, but you and Darren and I, we were out somewhere for Mexican and you were totally miserable. You couldn’t have a single thing you wanted. It was just starting to dawn on you how many different things you liked that you could never have again. You were going to get the lentil soup or something, but you were bummed.

“Darren asked you what was wrong. You sat there staring at the menu and you didn’t answer. So I told him you wanted the steak fajitas. And do you remember what he said then?”

I sat waiting to hear. Leda continued.

“He said,
You can, you know.
He was looking at you with so much love. I was so jealous of you right then. I wanted a man to look at me that way. Do you remember, Lil?”

But suddenly I didn’t trust myself to speak.

After a moment, Leda went on. “He said:
You can have them. I won’t tell anyone.”

* * *

When I hung up the phone, I was no longer angry, just bewildered and sad. When had I become this version of myself? But as usual, I didn’t have time to think about it. I turned my attention to the task at hand: finding out exactly what went on at the Nutcracker Suite.

As I was leaving the office that evening, Penny hailed me from the reception desk. A few hours before, I’d asked her to clear my schedule for the next morning. I said something unexpected had come up and apologized for the short notice.

“I’ve canceled your 10:00
A.M
. meeting with Tam MacNamara,” she said. “But she’s out of town next week, so she—”

Just then the UPS man buzzed and I told her I’d wait. As she went to meet him at the door and sign for whatever had arrived, my glance went to her desk, where a paperback copy of
The Maltese Falcon
had been laid face down, open to the page she was on. There was something odd about the cover, and after a moment I realized it had been ripped from another book and scotch-taped in place. The back cover was intact, and before Penny returned, I was able to read a fragment of the copy.
Prince Alejandro Del Castillo is used to taking what he wants...and he’s determined that his lovely chambermaid will be no exception!

The Nutcracker Suite was a surprise. It was more upscale than anything I’d pictured. Expensive leather furniture in the win-dowless waiting room, a mahogany executive-style desk in the reception area. I didn’t see the other rooms right away. The madam of the place, Mistress DeVille, interviewed me in the kitchen, which was clean and well-lit. The fridge was stocked with bottled water and on the counter was coffee, tea and a jar of red licorice.

The mistress herself was tall and lean, with high cheekbones and fiery hair. I thought she was probably in her early forties. She wore a black latex jumpsuit with thigh-high black boots, but her manner was brisk and friendly.

Setting up this meeting had not been hard. When I’d called the day before, during regular business hours, the boss herself had answered the phone.

“Nutcracker Suite, Mistress DeVille speaking.”

“I’m looking for work as a professional submissive,” I told her, “and I wondered if you were hiring.” I figured they had to be. I could not imagine that professional submissives were easy to find.

“We’re always looking for special girls,” Mistress DeVille confirmed. “What’s your name, dear?”

“Leda,” I told her.

“Leda, do you have any experience?”

“Oh, well, just—just what I’ve done with my boyfriend. That is, my ex-boyfriend,” I improvised. “But he told me I was a natural.”

“Well, a good attitude and an open mind are what matter the most,” she said. “Do you want to drop by tomorrow morning and learn more about the position? Then you can figure out whether it might be for you.”

Why was I doing this? I needed to gather the specifics of what Nan had done for a living—the worse, the better. I needed to make her seem alien and disturbing to the jury.
Here, good ladies and gentlemen
,
is someone outside the bounds of decency, credibility and common sense.
Still, I could’ve had our private investigator get the scope of what went on there. Abel’s retainer would have covered it.

But I told myself it was better if I went. I needed a visceral and immediate sense of the place, the better to glean the stray and unexpected details that were often the most effective.

In trying to look the part of a hopeful applicant, I dispensed with my usual chignon, traded my glasses for contacts, and even put on a little makeup. I wore an old plaid skirt I’d had since college and the closest thing I had to a low-cut blouse. I felt so different in this attire: girlish and strangely vulnerable, as if I really did want this job, and was both excited and frightened by the prospect of getting it.

“How old are you, dear?” Mistress Deville asked me in the Nutcracker kitchen.

“Twenty-nine.” I looked young for thirty-six, everyone said so.

“Well, you’re very pretty. And the fact that you’re a little older is actually a good thing, believe it or not. I’m just not comfortable hiring very young girls. I think this job requires some maturity. Now, Leda, there’s a list of activities that our dominant clients may choose to engage in. You need to be willing to participate in most if not all of them. I’m going to go through them one by one and I advise you to be completely honest about what you will and won’t do. If you misrepresent yourself, it’ll just be a waste of everyone’s time. Am I clear?

“Yes.”

“Okay. Over-the-knee spanking?”

“Yes.”

I had resolved ahead of time to say yes to everything. Otherwise, how would I get to hear all that went on there?

“Corner time? This might involve kneeling for up to an hour.”

“Yes.”

“Mouth-soaping?”

Ugh. “Yes.”

“Role-playing. This might mean being daddy’s little brat, or a naughty schoolgirl, or a careless secretary, and so on.”

“I’m fine with all of that.”

“Golden showers?”

“Well...I guess so. Yes.”

Even as I winced inwardly with every checklist item, I was thrilled by the acts I’d be able to pin on Nan.

“All right, Leda, now I’m going to name some implements our clients might want to use in a session. You tell me whether you think you could handle it.”

“Okay.”

“Do you know what a flogger is? It’s like a cat-o-nine-tails. A lot of leather strands. Ever felt one?”

“Yes. I like those.”

“What about a riding crop?”

“That’s fine. Yes.”

“Paddles?”

“Yes.”

“Canes?”

“Yes.”

And on it went: a dizzying list of tortures and indignities, to which I said yes, and yes, and yes again. And as I sat there imagining these acts and offering my compliance with every one of them, I had the strange sense that I’d opened a window and crawled through it into another realm, another life, one in which erotic desire assumed an unapologetic primacy. It was strangely disconcerting, disorienting.

Here it is,
I thought, though I wasn’t sure what “it” was.
Here I am.
Whatever else it was, it was a place I’d never been.

“Well,” Mistress Deville said after I’d expressed a willingness to take three strokes—the maximum number allowed within a single session—with a single-tail bullwhip. “I’m impressed. For someone who’s only dabbled with her boyfriend, you seem up for anything.”

“Well, um...he was kind of hard-core, actually,” I said.

“Apparently.” She made a note on her paper. “Are you willing to be bound and gagged?”

I decided to show a little last-minute skittishness, if only to lend my performance credibility.

“Well...I would be, if...um, can I ask a question?”

“Of course.”

“Do you do anything to make sure the...girls...are safe in a session?” It killed me to say
girls
instead of
women.

“I’m very glad you asked that. Of course we do. The clients don’t know this, and I’m telling you in the strictest confidence, but we have cameras in the rooms and someone is watching each session at all times.”

“I don’t mind being tied up if that kind of protection is in place.”

“Also, before each session begins, you and the client will decide on a safe word for you to use if need be. Did you and your boyfriend use a safe word?”

“A safe word? No, we didn’t.”

“Well, a safe word solves the problem of how the dominant is to know when a submissive has reached a genuine limit. It lets you beg and moan in character without stopping the action. So for instance, let’s say your safe word is
mercy.
You can whimper and plead, in keeping with your role, for the client to stop doing whatever he’s doing to you, and he can pretend to ignore your wishes. But if you say
mercy,
he knows you truly want or need him to stop. And our rules demand that he do so. If he doesn’t, we will stop the session and throw him out of here, and he won’t ever be allowed back in.”