Whip Smart: A Memoir (29 page)

WHEN I LAID OUT
all the applications on my bedroom floor, consulting lists of deadlines, addresses, and requirements, I counted five out of ten applications that were to out-of-state schools. Moving hadn’t helped me to relinquish anything in the past, but I still hoped it might this time. Not that I was certain that I wanted to quit domming. My uncertainty was the problem. My hope was that a geographic change would eliminate the need for a decision. I doubted that I had it in me to start domming all over again, especially in some leafy New England town without proper dungeons and S&M weeklies. It was just that it was so
easy
in New York; here, the clients found me. To quit would mean gutting my life, and my identity. What would I be without it? Sober, yes. That was the only other thing I had going for me, the only thing that allowed me to consider quitting my job. But besides that? A drone at some publishing house making enough money to buy coffee and canned beans? I would end up some post-college cliché, worrying about her future, getting older, marriage; I would become
average
.

. . .

“I don’t know,” I said to Greta. “It’s hard to imagine myself without it. What would I do for money?”

She smirked faintly. “You’d think of something.” She pushed a lock of blond off her forehead, and I could see her searching for the right words, her blue eyes resting on something outside her apartment window. “Whenever I let go of something I’m that attached to, an idea of myself as bigger than I am, my recovery grows in a way I couldn’t see I needed before. I have to jump before I can see the other side.” She looked at me. “That’s where faith comes in.”

“You think I should quit,” I said, though I had known that for a while now. “And I will, eventually. I just need to figure out what to replace it with.”

“Sometimes,” Greta said carefully, “when I think I’m afraid of something concrete, like money, I’m really afraid of not being good enough.”

“Good enough for what?” “To have a happy life, be a part of society. To be a worker among workers.”

I cringed at this and made a face.

Greta laughed. “I know that’s not how you want to think of yourself.”

“Not exactly. ‘Not good enough’? It sounds so fucking Oprah.”

Greta laughed again. “Okay, fine. But there is a way that your addiction kept you from participating in life, and—”

“And now you think this is.”

“Yeah, I do. I think that your playing outside the rules has more to do with hiding on the sidelines,” she said. “And you’re outgrowing it.”

I knew it was more complicated than that, and also that she was right. But in getting clean, I had needed death as an alternative to prompt my decision. I had no such incentive here. I couldn’t imagine willfully stopping and had no idea what was on the other side
of it if I did. So I got on my knees and prayed every morning for an acceptance letter from one of those five schools.

All five rejected me.

“Congratulations!” Jeremiah, my new client, reached across the table and squeezed my hand, though we had only known each other for the length of the current meal. “Sarah Lawrence is a fabulous school! You’ll do so well!” He returned to his salmon fillet with gusto. We sat around the corner from his Bond Street loft at a restaurant where the entrées ranged above $100 and the waiters looked like soap stars.

A sober friend had given me Jeremiah’s e-mail after learning that he was looking for someone to dominate his girlfriend. Lean and gray, Jeremiah was a millionaire record executive with the overzealous spirit of a dad trying too hard to be cool for the kids. He was old enough to sound ridiculous using adjectives like “fierce” and powerful enough that no one ever told him so.

“I’m gonna order some more wine,” he announced. “Is that okay with you? I know that you don’t drink and everything. …” He trailed off, waving the waiter to our table as I nodded. The affectation, though embarrassing, made Jeremiah easy to talk with. I could see behind it traces of the weary, shrewd man he concealed.

“So,” I said, wanting to get to the point before he started drinking and talking.

“
So,
” he repeated, theatrically arching his eyebrows and then laughing. “I like that! A woman who gets to the point.” I gave him a big smile, knowing that people with that much money know not to get hustled and that I needed to be canny in my delivery, to nail the right combination of getting-to-the-pointedness and solicitation. He tucked a hunk of fish into his mouth and smiled back at me around his chewing. I sipped my water and waited for him to swallow before speaking.

“So you have a girlfriend?” I asked. “She’s lovely, I assume.”

“More than lovely.” He leaned in, resting his elbows on the table. “And very naughty.” I flinched inside, my own weariness sinking in as my endive salad hit my stomach.

“Interesting …”

“But here’s the thing.” His voice cleared, and I knew we were going to talk business. “She can’t know that this is a business arrangement.”

“Sure, we’ll sort that out beforehand.”

“I’ll slip an envelope into your purse when she’s out of the room.”

“Perfect.”

“There’s another thing.” He smirked coyly at me, but his eyes were direct. “You’re a lesbian.”

“Okay.”

“She’s very jealous, and it wouldn’t work any other way. So don’t come in any professional-looking outfit, or bring too much equipment, all right?”

“Got it. I am your lesbian buddy who simply wants to come over and spank your girlfriend.”

“Exactly.” He smiled at me, leaned back in his chair, and lifted his glass.

Eva was a beauty. When I stepped out of the elevator into Jeremiah’s living room she hung back, shyly clutching a wineglass. She was dark haired and curvy, and her body had the languidity of those who have borne children, still slender but with skin that moved, was draped more loosely over bones than that of the very young. They’d already had dinner and a bottle that cost more than my monthly rent. I smiled at her with what I hoped was the right combination of a girlish entreaty for friendship and assured desire. I knew how to seduce men and engender quick intimacy with women, but this was more complicated than either. Not only did I have to accomplish both with her, but I also had to seduce Jeremiah without appearing to.

My palms had gotten sweaty in the elevator, considering the complexity of this task. The cockiness I had felt picking my way through the cobblestones of Bond Street in my designer heels had quickly drained when I faced his door. Walking toward the posh address, I had felt excitement. It tugged, umbilical, on an old pleasure, a swaggering childish exhilaration, like that I’d felt reading in the corner of the bookstore as a kid. I was living that illicit fantasy; I was beautiful, calculated, and adept—a Chandler seductress. It felt simple, powerful. But its dimensions, borrowed from some childhood longing, were limited; there was no room for my fear, the context of my emotional past, my awareness of humanity beyond romance. When these elements entered, the fantasy began to collapse.

When I tried to lie outside of work, I now failed miserably. I had mostly stopped trying. My fear and hope was that this inability would eventually carry into my sessions, eliminating the need to choose whether I did it or not, eliminating my ability to do it at all. As much as I privately hoped this would happen, I didn’t look forward to the session in which it first did.
Let it not be this one
, I prayed before every session, and doubly hard before this one with Jeremiah.

Once I began, though, the performance was usually intuitive, much easier in practice than projection. Like any skill, the idea of managing the individual parts was overwhelming, but the doing was habitual, depending more on motor memory than conscious thought. This session would be like that, too, I told myself. I’d always hoped for more female clients at the dungeon.

Working with Eva
was
different from working with my male clients, partly because of her femaleness and partly because she wasn’t really a client. She made me nervous, similar to the way clients close to my own age did. I was afraid that she would see through me. Women were as easily duped as men in their desire; that I knew. But did she have desire? Other than that to please Jeremiah, I wasn’t sure.

I kissed her. I had never kissed a client before. They asked, sure. But I never did. They always knew (even when they pretended not to) that it was a business relationship. If I were really her boyfriend’s lesbian friend who wanted to spank her, it would seem, at the very least, odd if I didn’t want to kiss her. Probably she would be offended. Ditto for the rubber gloves. I hadn’t thought of this before I got there. After I led her to the bedroom and blindfolded her, took off both of our shirts, and began wondering what to say that wouldn’t sound false, she leaned in and kissed me. She missed the mark somewhat because of the blindfold and left a sticky smear of lipstick half on my mouth, half on my cheek. By the time she leaned back in, I still hadn’t thought of a believable reason not to, and so I kissed her back. I felt a fleeting flash of disgust but suppressed it, concentrating on what to do next. Under her jeans she wore black lace panties tied at the sides with pink ribbon, obviously expensive and new.

When I had my entire hand inside of her and Jeremiah was masturbating beside us on the bed, murmuring encouragement, I realized that I was working a lot harder than usual.
Look how elastic her cervix is
, I told myself, trying to summon the clinical anthropologist, to remember how exciting it was to be working with a woman—
a baby’s head is actually bigger than your fist
. I did my perspective trick, pulling away from the present to look at it objectively, as a stranger would, or a younger version of myself. It wasn’t working. Even from that distance it didn’t seem wild or glamorous or shocking; it seemed grotesque. It was Jeremiah, I thought. If only he would shut up. But when I imagined him gone, the scene became even scarier. His presence provided a buffer between her and me, and whatever I feared there.

Here was the thing: I wasn’t buying it. All her mewling and writhing wasn’t convincing me; I thought she was faking it. Here was an intelligent, experienced, successful woman, and she was going to believe mine and Jeremiah’s bogus story? Some mysterious lesbian shows up with a bag of rope, fists you, and goes happily on
her way? It sounded ridiculous. I knew that experience skewed my perspective. None of the women I knew, lesbian or otherwise, would be interested in doing this for free. I told myself that probably she didn’t know the kind of women I did and could imagine that such a lesbian was out there being friends with her millionaire boyfriend. Still, my intuition told me otherwise.

Sometimes, back when I was a pot smoker, this awful thing would happen. I would be in a social situation, a party, dinner, or just hanging out with friends, and suddenly all of the embedded social dynamics would be exposed to me, like a sheet stripped off of a stained mattress. All the unspoken desires, motives, resentments, and insecurities of everyone in the room would be revealed, on their faces, in their movements and words, emanating from them like body heat. I would tell myself that I was just paranoid, but I wasn’t; I knew that what I was seeing was real and was always there, and it filled me with terrible sorrow. Everyone was so afraid, so needy. My session with Jeremiah and Eva had an element of that. I didn’t know how Jeremiah felt at that moment, but the fact that he had gone to such lengths, felt the need to go to such lengths, to feel desire, well, it suggested desperation of some kind.

Eva and I were performing for Jeremiah. We also performed for each other. I was on to her, and I think what frightened me was the prospect that she might have been on to me. The truth hovered between us, as we moaned and whispered not of lust or pleasure but of what? Our desire for what? We did share something and could not avail ourselves of the comfort, could not even look into each other’s eyes for fear of seeing ourselves. What did that make us? It made me feel like howling with sorrow.

After her yowling climax, Jeremiah gestured me to the side and climbed on top of Eva. I watched his bobbing behind, a buoy glowing in the dark of the bedroom, for the two minutes it took for him to orgasm. His, I believed, was genuine.

As Jeremiah lay stretched out on his bed, grinning, Eva put on an oversize T-shirt of his and sat cross-legged beside him, not meeting my eyes. I sat around with them, chatting about how great it had been for as long as seemed necessary, and then left. I had been there approximately one hour. After changing into my sneakers in the elevator, I felt around my purse for the envelope. Tucked between two books, it was slim, decorated with the bank’s insignia. Inside was $1,500, in crisp hundred-dollar notes.

By now, Autumn had moved in with her boyfriend and I lived in a loft with two other sober girlfriends. When Jeremiah e-mailed me a month later, asking if I was free that weekend, I turned to them for advice. I was hoping, I think, for permission to say no. They knew all about Jeremiah already; I had briefed them in comic installments. This presented the problem; no one could give me accurate advice, because no one knew the whole truth. It had been the same with my addiction. The stories I told about the dungeon were carefully slanted. People loved them; they were
funny
. The reasons why I wanted someone to tell me to stop I kept hidden, and so no one did. In my telling, the job became alternately gross, hilarious, tedious, sexy, glamorous, and shocking. It depended if I was trying to befriend or seduce you. I had become an expert at discerning immediately what a person’s response would be and how to play it up or down. No one heard about the real disgust, pleasure, or sexuality my job involved. I wouldn’t have known how to describe those aspects if I wanted to.

And so when I went to my roommate and expressed my reluctance, she looked at me in disbelief.

“Yeah, he sounds really annoying. But fifteen hundred dollars? Come on. I would do it if I could.” What she meant was if she had the opportunity. At this point, I was starting to know better. When I began using hard drugs, I thought that if everyone knew how good it felt, they would do the same. I figured it was only social stigma
and cowardice that kept other people from going to the lengths that I did. But I could not imagine my roommate going through with what I knew that session entailed.