Macho Sluts (19 page)

“Am I speaking with the madam herself?” her caller asked.

Tyre chuckled. The woman had a harsh-edged New York accent, and her rich alto sent caterpillar-feet down Tyre's spine. “The very same,” she purred. “My name is Tyre, and you are?”

“Alex. I understand that you sometimes handle special cases.”

“Would you mind telling me how you came to be aware of that?”

Alex gave her the name of an opera singer who had paid a great deal of money to be abducted by an all-woman crew of hardhats and turned inside-out on the bare beams of the thirty-fifth floor of a partially constructed skyscraper.

“Well,” she temporized, “it isn't every day, but yes, we sometimes arrange the extraordinary. Are you one of our regular clients?”

“No. I just moved to the west coast, and I haven't had the opportunity to visit your place yet. But my slave, Roxanne, knows one of your dominatrices, Anne-Marie. Before she met me she saw her fairly frequently.”

“Was her experience with that satisfactory?” On a memo pad, Tyre wrote, “Anne-Marie's file—slave named Roxanne. Okay?” Georgia ripped the note off and disappeared into the computer room to call up the record and get a hard copy. Tyre could hear the printer running.

“Well,
I'm
very pleased with the results since my favorite thing to do is thrash someone severely and then fuck them up the ass, and I never met anybody who could take it like Roxanne. I think she might even be able to get fisted.”

Tyre clicked her tongue. This crude talk was refreshing. “Ambitious, aren't you? Is that what you're calling to arrange?”

“Not exactly. I want something more complicated than that. It would be nice if we could slip that in somewhere, though.”

“So to speak,” Tyre said. Georgia laid Roxanne's file on her desk. At the top, Anne-Marie had entered, in bold capital letters, “BOTTOMLESS PIT.” Tyre raised her eyebrows. Anne-Marie's resources were not easily depleted.

“Perhaps we should discuss your proposal in person,” she murmured. “Are you free for luncheon any time this week?”

“Today, as a matter of fact.”

She wrote, “Company for lunch, make
extra
margaritas,” on her memo pad, underlined it, and showed it to Georgia, who smiled and pantomimed clapping her hands.

Tyre gave Alex the address. “Security will buzz you in, and my private secretary will be downstairs to show you up to my suite. Are you a vegetarian?”

“I am a confirmed carnivore.”

“Excellent.” She put the receiver down very gently. She was excited, and it wouldn't do to drop it. The fact that the next item on the agenda was going through adult-film catalogs and ordering a new batch of lesbian videos did not ease the tension. She kept thinking that she was going to run off to the bathroom and masturbate, but she put if off so often that Alex arrived (ten minutes early, such a top's trick) before she had a chance to find out exactly how wet she was. Instead, she was in the lunch room (and out of character) setting the table.

She had expected someone Anne-Marie's age. But the woman who strode easily, a bit arrogantly, toward her was young—twenty-five at the most. She was tall (although not as tall as Tyre herself) and had the thick neck of a body-builder. She had a broad face with high cheekbones and almond-shaped brown eyes. Her head had been shaved about a month ago, so a short nap of black velvet covered her scalp. She was wearing black-leather pants with a studded crotch-piece, engineer boots, and an old, cracked black-leather jacket. The kidney panel, shoulders, and arms of the jacket were heavily padded.

‘I do so love those zippers that run from wrist to elbow,' Tyre thought, and bit her napkin when she realized Alex was staring at her zippers, too. It took her a few seconds to register the fact that her guest was holding out her hand, apparently wanting it to be shaken. This charmed her completely.

“Alex?” she questioned, in a tone of voice that clearly indicated she was pleasantly surprised.

“Yes. And you must be Tyre. I hope I didn't offend you by calling you the madam.”

“Offended? It is an honorific, after all. Sit down, sit down. Georgia is going to makes us a blender full of killer margaritas. Would you mind hitting the button on the microwave, dear? Do you want to join us for luncheon?”

“Not on your life, boss-woman. I am trotting my tushie downstairs with a hot covered dish for Simba the lion-hearted, who is no doubt exhausted after watching everybody scrub away at the slings and chains and clamps and pulleys until everything twinkles like a little star.”

“And who will no doubt quickly uncover and devour any hot dish within arm's length,” Tyre returned.

“Hope springs eternal. Salt with those margaritas, ladies?” They both said yes, and Georgia dimpled at them and adjourned to the kitchenette.

“Let me help you,” Alex said, and followed her out. She returned with a big casserole dish full of the hot chicken-in-salsa that was the basis for the fajitas, then went back for the sour cream, refritos, tortillas, chopped tomato and lettuce, and other fixings. She didn't sit down until Tyre held out her chair and gestured firmly toward it. Once seated, Alex immediately put her napkin in her lap. A working class girl made good, Tyre thought.

Georgia presented them with two cold glasses whose rims had been rolled in salt and a pitcher full of her wicked concoction. After she left, Tyre and Alex proceeded to get a slight buzz on and stuff themselves silly.

As she scooped up salsa and refried beans with a tortilla, Tyre found herself trying to explain her somewhat eccentric family to Alex. “Great Aunt Anastasia, we called her the G.A., was raised by a British suffragette who was the divorced wife of a coal-mining magnate. A man who would divorce a woman, even one crazy enough to want to vote, was thought to be a real cad then, so she got enough money out of it to start her own manufacturing empire. The G.A. never got married herself, and she always said she would only leave her money to female kin who remained unmarried.

“Mother was leading the chase, but the G.A. just lived too long,” Tyre explained. “At age sixty-two she finally broke down and married my father, who was ailing. So she was disinherited, although it didn't cause too many hard feelings. The G.A. always referred to Daddy as ‘the Stud.' Mother once told her she had forgotten that men could be independently wealthy, too. The G.A. never quite approved of me knowing who my father was, although Mother and I traveled so much Daddy was just one of the relatives we visited. At any rate, when she died five years ago in a car crash in Madrid, I was her sole heir. Except for Consuela, of course. When the G.A. retired as C.E.O., she and Consuela had started an exclusive girl's school in Switzerland for composers and conductors and musicians and singers, and all that property went to her, plus enough capital for upkeep.”

Alex chuckled. “It must take a pile of money to keep this place up.”

“Yes, but I have piles more,” Tyre said frankly. “And most of it is such old and civilized money, it's very well behaved, it doesn't want much minding. It takes care of itself and goes on making more. I have told my business managers to keep it out of South Africa and so forth, or course, but in the grand scale of my 1040 Form, this place is only a hobby. Even if it takes fourteen-hour days to keep it running.”

“So why do this? Why not travel, or take up yacht racing, or Paris fashion shows? You could endow a college, or launch a satellite, or breed thoroughbred horses. You could gamble at Monte Carlo or dabble in international politics or invent new recreational drugs or build yourself an island paradise.”

“Mmm, well, some of that I might do in the future, and some of it I do already, actually. But I wanted to do something for other women. After all, I am a feminist, albeit the fun kind. Something, something revolutionary yet decadent, appealed to me. What I started out with was a vague concept of a combination couturière, opium den, pachinko palace, and paramilitary training camp for an army of Amazon lovers, and this is where I wound up. I must say it certainly has upset an awful lot of people.”

“So I hear.”

“Well, casual, anonymous sex has never been available to women on a commercial basis before. It has changed what it means to be a lesbian, and some women don't like that. Before the Calyx opened, a lot of women did volunteer work for lesbian organizations because it was a way to meet other women. Now they want to be paid. Who wants to do shit-work for free or sit through five-hour marathon meetings when they could be here, checking out the dancers?

“A few of our local sex symbols have been dethroned. It's difficult to manipulate other women by turning them on and then holding out on them because there isn't such a sense of sexual scarcity. You have to do more than just hint you might be available to attract a woman who has already slept with hundreds of other women.

“Maybe for the first time in history, lesbians have the choice to be really promiscuous, if that's what they want to do. There's no more monogamy-by-default, the assumption that monogamy is the way it has to be. Even women who are monogamous are having more sex because you can't expect your lover to be faithful if you quit having sex with her any more.

“I wonder if some relationships aren't lasting a little bit longer, though. Because now instead of falling in love with your next-door neighbor and breaking up over it, you can get nookie someplace that is clearly separate from your relationship. So many women come to the Calyx of Isis that it's possible to have sex with somebody you won't ever see again,”

“If you've got that large a clientele, they're not all lesbian feminists.”

“There are busy female execs who jet in for a quickie before they grab their male competitors by the short-and-curlies at a business meeting. Bored housewives come looking for something more entertaining than an afternoon of soap operas and sloe gin. We get couples looking for a threesome, single women looking for Ms Right or Ms Wrong or Ms Right Away, black and white and Hispanic and Asian women who are bisexuals, transsexuals, homosexuals, heterosexuals, and try-sexuals, as in ‘I'll try anything.' Witches and bikers and real-estate agents and drug dealers and lobbyists and martial-arts instructors and female bankers and mechanics and dentists and housepainters. I'm sure many of the women who come to the Calyx of Isis don't consider themselves to be lesbians. But all of them have lots of hot lesbian sex here. Having that much fun with other women promotes female bonding; it's bound to change a woman's life. We're sort of a lesbian recruitment center.”

Alex said, “It seems to me that this is the kind of place that men can take for granted. I always envied the boys in high school because they had circle jerks and they would egg each other on to get more sexual experience, while the girls were always spying on each other and thinking up new ways to be nasty to the school sluts. It used to scare the piss out of me, because I knew the only reason I wasn't one of the sluts was because I was a lesbian. If all the girls I went to school with had been dykes, they would have been onto me, nothing would have saved me.”

“We have circle jerks here, in the video lounge. Scenes in the jacuzzi that would make Messalina cream. Noises coming out of the maze that you can't imagine women making. Cluster fucks that make the mat-room look like an anthill. Women get outrageous here because they are safe.”

By now the pitcher of margaritas was empty and they were trying to sober up with some coffee and flan. Alex was grinning at Tyre and digging her spoon into the soft custard. “I'm a little confused,” she said. “Is this just a bathhouse, or is it a brothel, too? I mean, these women pay you only for the opportunity to enter a space where other women will also be looking for sex. But they don't pay for the sex itself.”

“Prostitution,” Tyre said primly, “is illegal.”

“Yeah, right, and so's cocaine and going sixty-five miles an hour. You going to try and tell me none of your masseuses are turning tricks in those cardboard booths?”

“Tipping is encouraged.”

“I see. And who do I have to tip to set up the scene I have in mind?”

“Some fantasy productions involve a considerable outlay of capital to bring off. Travel, sets, costumes, props—basic expenses like these must be reimbursed. And some, shall we call them specialists, will not participate without remuneration. Although some find the opportunity to play a part in a piece of high-quality erotic theater is enough of a reward. I do try very hard not to turn anyone away, although some of their fantasies are rather trite. If you can ask for what you want, you ought to get it. So if someone has a skill I might be able to use to work out another client's fantasy, I will front the cash for her scenario and take payment out in kind.”

“And what if the person who owes you some help doesn't like the scenario you want her to assist with?”

“The contract is quite clear. She has the right of refusal. But that creates an obligation to pay some interest on the original debt.”

“What do you mean, interest?”

“She can turn down any offer I make her, but every time somebody says, ‘No, I won't do that,' she owes me help with one more fantasy enactment. It adds up fast.”

“I'm not sure that's legal.”

“Neither are low-riders and MDA.”

“You have enough money to give everybody a free ride.”

Tyre bristled. “That's true,” she said stiffly.

“Doesn't that cause a bit of resentment?”

“Yes, but I'd rather be resented than hated. Somebody who pays me feels that she is in control. She's running the fuck. If I made the women's community a present of the Calyx of Isis, I'd be creating an obligation, a debt that they'd have no idea how to repay. They'd trash the joint and lynch me. But this is academic since I don't know how well off you are or what you have in mind.”