Whip Smart: A Memoir (7 page)

Fiona ambled back to the office as Autumn kicked off the hoary blanket with a sigh, revealing a pair of boxer shorts and a wife-beater that read:
Oakland
in black Old English lettering across the chest. “They have such a knack for timing, these pervs. If I get the session you should come in, as long as it’s okay with him. It always
is. Two for the price of one? They love a bargain like they love a dildo up their ass.”

“So, I should go in to meet him, right? That’s how it works with new clients?”

“Not just new clients, any client that wants something new. Or just wants to milk his two hundred bucks for some extra time staring at cleavage. But yeah, you should go in for the meet. Ask him if you can sit in.”

The process of “meets” entailed each available mistress getting dressed up and conducting a brief interview with the new client or returning clients who simply wasn’t sure whom he wanted to see, ostensibly to see if their interests aligned. Since so few of us claimed to have any genuine shared interests with our clients, meets were all about winning the session. I found the overt competition of this setup, and its nod to iconic brothel procedure (everyone lining up and batting their eyes), both anxiety producing and thrilling.

I had been instructed to bring, during my training period, a black dress or slip for domination sessions, a white one for medical, and a pair of heels. For this I was grateful, after a quick Internet survey revealed the price of actual corsets running anywhere between $300 and $3,000: far beyond what I was managing to scrimp for MetroCards and occasional weekend drug binges. Still, dress-up was one of my favorite games as a child and I’d be lying to say that the costumes weren’t part of the job’s appeal.

To forestall the discomfort of changing into my black slip in front of both Autumn and the wall of mirrors, I knelt with my cosmetic bag on the floor and pulled out my eyeliner. I rubbed at my smeary eyelid, having yet to master the art of makeup application.

When I looked back up at her reflection, she had pulled off the wifebeater and was studying herself in the mirror, from the front, from the side, then sighing. “God, why didn’t I get big boobs like yours, Justine? I was meant to have enormous breasts.” She unlocked a door from the middle row of lockers that had a Scotch-taped piece of notebook paper stuck to its mirror that read:
CASH
COW
in ballpoint pen, accompanied by a crude drawing of a coyly long-lashed cow with a money sign emblazoned on her flank. The overstuffed locker coughed out a garter belt upon opening. The hangers and plastic drawers were burdened by more lingerie than I had ever seen: a mélange of lace, rubber, satin, and leather, with shoes, wigs, hairbrushes, and other unidentifiable articles poking out from the mass.

I have always enjoyed watching women dress. The appeal isn’t sexual. Most girls’ first glimpse of private female life is watching their mothers dress and put makeup on. It makes sense that we’d find it comforting. Childhood fascinations often crystallize this way. Isn’t beauty forever defined, in a sense, by the first things we found beautiful? Surely part of my pleasure results from the inundation of images that we all experience. But I also love ritual, and it is a mesmerizing one. I enjoy the ritual of dressing myself, too. It is a form of basking in a kind of femininity that I am opposed to as an ideal, but for better or worse, I think we all fetishize the female body, and intellectualization doesn’t spare anyone the obsession.

Autumn replaced her boxer shorts with a tiny black thong, clipping the garter belt around her waist. Digging into the pocket of a shoe rack hanging from the inside of her locker door, she pulled out and unraveled a pair of stockings, diaphanous and flaccid as the molted reptile skin. Sliding them up her legs, she pinched their edges into the eyelets of the dangling garters and pulled a pair of black lace shorts over the whole contraption. This transformation took about two minutes, and utterly changed the lower half of her body. Hooking a black bra around her waist, she pulled the straps over her shoulders and lifted each breast into the cups, whose lacy seam reached just over her nipples. Kneeling beside me, she dug into a bag of makeup too big to carry onto a plane and pulled out a handful of pencils and brushes. In under five minutes she applied foundation; eye-, brow, and lip liner; mascara; sparkles; and lipstick that matched the walls of the Red Room. Her face had become
another, each feature’s elegant dimensions as emphasized as those of a comic book heroine. I had never seen anything like it. She looked like a completely new person. My chin must have been hanging, because when she turned away from the mirror to face me, her smile curled with self-satisfaction and an affectionate condescension.

“I’m going to need your help,” she said, and stood. Out of the crowded locker she extracted a satin corset the bruised color of plums. Sucking in her stomach, she fastened each of the twentyish hooks that cinched the front of the boned, hourglass brace. “Can you give me a hand with this?”

“Um, sure. How?”

“Just tighten the laces in the back, like a sneaker. You’re going to have to pull hard.”

“Okay.” I tucked my fingertips under the crisscrossed lacing, which looked delicate but could easily have docked a small yacht, and pulled, very much like I was tightening a pair of shoelaces.

“Harder.”

“Okay.”

I pulled harder and she jerked back toward me slightly, bracing herself on the locker door.

“Harder, Justine; don’t be such a girl.”

Stepping back with one foot to brace myself, I yanked on the ties with a grunt, my biceps straining. The corset tightened an inch or so, her flesh squeezing out the top in a painful-looking bulge.

“Good.” I continued until her already slender waist was narrowed to Betty Boop proportions. “Perfect. Now just tie the ends together.”

“
He’s here!
” Fiona yelled from the office, where she could see the client at the street level in the little black-and-white screen on her desk.

After stepping into a pair of patent-leather platform stilettos, Autumn appraised herself in the mirror with a sigh and strode out of the dressing room, the staccato tap of her heels fading down the hall toward the kitchen.

Left alone, I sat there on my heels, staring into my own face. It was bland as a hunk of clay after the sight of her, and I found a curious mixture of dejection and curiosity in my own eyes.

Watching Autumn transform herself had awakened a phantom limb of longing. I had always been awed by the transformative power women appeared to have. I also wanted to become something else, to pull that kind of beauty and sexual ease out of myself like a dress from a wardrobe. It must exist in them always, I had thought. It must arrive with the swell of breasts and hips and bellies and thighs, a wisdom and ability like that of survival that blooms in the mind, a kind of built-in manual for use from which mine was missing pages.

“Um, Bella? Could you maybe put some shoes on?” Fiona arched her brows and offered the unshod mistress a managerial smile. Bella responded with a blank stare before sliding into a pair of sandals that could easily have qualified as shower shoes, the sort one might don to take out the trash. As she shuffled down the hallway in her yellow slip, Fiona called after her, “He’s in the Black Room, by the way.”

“Uh-huh, yeah, okay,” Bella muttered under her breath. As she disappeared at the end of the hallway into the Black Room, Fiona turned to Autumn and me.

“Not that it really matters, I guess. If they want an Asian mistress, they want an Asian mistress, shoes or no shoes.”

“Or horrific shoes.” Autumn cracked her knuckles against the hip of her corset.

A minute later, Bella emerged from the Black Room and shuffled away toward the kitchen.

“You’re up, Justine,” said Fiona.

“Me?”

“Knock him dead, sister.”

I traced Bella’s path down the hallway, stumbling only once in my heels. Heart pounding, I opened the door and blinked, my eyes adjusting to lights dimmer than those of the hallway.

“Hello.” The man’s voice came from the corner of the room. Squinting, I saw that he was seated in a tall wooden chair, adorned on its arms and legs with leather straps.

“Oh, hello.” I strode over with what I hoped was an air of blasé confidence and put out my hand. “I’m Justine.”

“Hello, Mistress. Nice firm handshake, I like that.”

“My father told me never to trust a man with a weak handshake.”

“I suppose the same goes for a beautiful woman.”

Now, I’m not certain what I had expected. Toilet Timmy had been naked and kneeling during our introduction, as he’d already chosen me, sight unseen, as his mistress. I had figured that this client would be clothed, but also that his sexual druthers would be somehow more apparent. Instantly I felt embarrassed at my own ignorant dilettantism. Had I expected him to be a slobbering, greasy-haired lecher with a permanent hard-on, muttering uncontrollably about enemas and rubber masks? Sort of.

“I’m Roger.”

“It’s very nice to meet you, Roger.” Roger was sporting a well-tailored suit, a full head of not overly gelled hair, and a pleasant, if somewhat unmemorable, face. As we held our smiles and the comfortable pause became an uncomfortable silence, I realized he was waiting for me to speak.

“Well, I’m new.”

Roger kept smiling.

“Oh?”

“I mean, I’m still training. So I was wondering if I could, uh, assist on your session.”

“Sure. Does that cost me any extra?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Well then, count me in.” His smile returned, with an added solicitousness that made it obvious that he was now the senior in our exchange. Not that I had known what to do when the upper hand was mine, or even that it was mine, but I felt a twang of defiance at his subtle condescension. “Well, thanks.”

“Thank you, Justine.”

With nothing left to say, I turned and left the room, aware of his eyes on my back with every step. I had rarely experienced such explicit appraisal. Living as a woman in New York, you get the once-over a few hundred times a day, but not with the same entitlement as of someone who has paid for the pleasure.

Autumn hopped up from the saggy white chair as I entered the dressing room.

“What does he want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, didn’t you ask?”

“No, it was weird.”

“Yeah, you’ll get used to it. Did you ask if you could sit in?”

“Yeah, it’s fine with him.”

“Great, now let’s get this over with.”

Autumn strode into the Black Room and strode out thirty seconds later, listing the necessary equipment to Fiona as she stepped into the office.

“Latex enema, colon tube, Bardex, clamps, catheter, piercing needles, leather cuffs, and, um, diapers.”

“That it?” Fiona punched the security code into the numbered pad beside her desk, unlocking the door that led to the supply closet where all the valuable equipment was stored. “All that and no dildos?” she asked while sifting through a basket full of rubber bladders.

“And dildos.” Handing Autumn a handful of tubes, Fiona knelt in front of a dresser whose drawers had carefully hand-printed signs that read:
small
;
medium
;
large & fists
;
plugs, beads, & vibrating
. A dildo dresser.

After hoisting her assigned box of personal supplies into her arms—each mistress had one whose contents included a box of rubber gloves, a tube of generic lubricant, a box of condoms (for dildos), and a varied assortment of clothespins, clamps, rope, man
panties (manties!), and hoarded favorite house supplies—Autumn turned to me.

“Give me ten minutes to get started, then come in and just follow my lead.”

“Should I know anything else? What’s his fantasy?” “Don’t worry about it; it’ll be obvious.” I hoped so.

“Come in!”
After a few moments poised outside the door of the Black Room, listening to the rhythmic slap of what I assumed was her hand on some part of Roger’s body, I had given a tentative knock. The lights had been turned up, and this time it was Autumn seated in the pseudoelectrical chair. Roger was bent awkwardly over her knee, his tailored slacks around his ankles, his face flushed. He craned his neck to see me, peering around the slope of her calf. “What the fuck are you looking at, Roggie?” Autumn bellowed, and reached her right hand down to grab a handful of his coiffed hair. “Why don’t you keep your goddamn eyes in your head, huh? Your auntie has come over to help me discipline you, you little shit.”

I was speechless, awed by the facility with which Autumn’s entire personality had shifted, disappearing beneath the sheath of her role. In her domme persona, even the subtle nuances of her personality were absent. The characteristics that almost instantly identify a person, those we like to believe cannot be erased at will, she had erased. The force with which she inhabited her body and the space around her, the way she spoke and gestured, had all been eradicated.

“Noooooo!” Roger whined. “You’re not going to tell her what I did, are you?”

“Would you like to hear what sort of trouble this little
asshole
has gone and gotten himself into now, Auntie?” Autumn raised her brows at me and smirked. It was as if she had lifted a veil with that smirk, revealed her personality to me from wherever she had folded
it up and tucked it away to. Such is the disconcerting miracle of good acting; at its best it implicitly challenges our faith in who we are, who anyone is.

“Well, I’ll tell you what he did, Auntie. This.” She whacked his rosy ass cheek for emphasis. “Little.”
Whack
. “Creep.”
Whack
. “Ate a bunch of garbage.”
Whack
. “A bunch of the sugary,”
whack
, “salty,”
whack
, “
crap
that he knows is forbidden.” Autumn winked at me as Roger flinched in anticipation of the whack that never came. She leaned over his back and hissed, “Don’t be such a drama queen, darling; your punishment hasn’t even begun yet.” Roger moaned, and I felt my lip curl involuntarily. The poised man whom I had introduced myself to a mere fifteen minutes ago had also disappeared, and with him, any advantage he may have held over my inexperience. “Have you ever seen such a despicable excuse for a man, Auntie Justine?”