Lies & Ugliness Read online

  “Only until closing time, then…” He shrugged, showing more interest in the whip handle than anything. He tapped a finger on a shiny wet spot, then dabbed it to his tongue. “Oh, look. Cleo left some sweat behind. I think this has your name on it…?”

  He pushed the reversed whip at my mouth, touching the pommel to my lips until they parted. He worked it in an inch, another, then held it there until my eyes shut and I tongued Cleo’s sweat from the end, tasting salt and leather, and feeling all of what I was outside these walls melt suddenly away, leaving only the core that wanted to serve.

  “That’s good … that’s very good,” Drake said. “For the first time, I’m actually convinced you’re sincere about this.” He pulled the handle away, and I felt bereft as an infant yanked from its mother’s breast with milk yet to be drawn. “Because, really, you’ve no idea where that whip has been.”

  Aimee was eyeing it too — long, studded, phallic. “Where?”

  “I used to tell people it was an old gift from Robert Mapplethorpe and they might’ve seen it in that rear-view self-portrait of his. But I don’t think anyone believed me, so I quit wasting my breath on them after a time. You can believe whatever you wish.”

  He traced the handle’s wet pommel along Aimee’s nose, and she misunderstood, opening her mouth, tongue creeping forward as if to receive a communion wafer. When her eyes shut, Drake cracked her so sharply across the bridge of her nose that both shocked eyes brimmed with tears.

  “And you,” he said. “That’s the very last time I’ll tolerate an unauthorized question from you. You will not speak to me again unless I’ve told you to do so. And if you ever entertained any sad little thoughts that we were in any way equals? Get over them.”

  After he left us, I dabbed at the trickles of blood from my wife’s nose. The part of me that should have been outraged and murderous was small, getting smaller, might disappear altogether. Aimee and I hugged each other, for some test had been passed, our commitment assured, and when I looked into the quietly suffering depths of her eyes, I knew that we loved enough to each hand the other over to the care and keeping of someone else, who could take us farther than we could ever take ourselves, and this seemed a rare and wonderful love indeed.

  What Drake had hinted about closing time being the end of all capitalist pursuits became clearer once he began demanding that we stay after-hours. Doors were locked, the second floor flushed of dancers and the third cleared of slumming pretenders to leave only those whose commitment to the lifestyle remained sacrosanct, Club Kinque becoming Drake’s personal fiefdom until dawn most mornings. It drew people I’d never seen during regular hours, and the age restriction that shackled Drake in business was given the disdainful boot from his personal life.

  Three nights running, Aimee was given by him into the service of a girl ten years younger, eighteen at most, who would sprawl in a rattan chair, fingering for slow hours the moist tangle between her thighs as she dangled each petite and high-arched foot before Aimee’s hooded face. The zipper was open, stripping from her the status of person, consigning her to that of orifice. I could see the lips that had for years kissed mine now slide exquisitely over each small toe, sucking it in its turn, Aimee’s tongue caressing and bathing the cleft between before moving on to the next.

  My own task was more passive, and generalized, a receptacle of pain for whoever wished to inflict it. Hooded as well, wrists cuffed in thick leather and chained overhead, I was a fixture made available for the supple leather lashes of a twenty-inch flogger. Wielded by hands whose skill ranged from novice to expert, it sent stinging jolts through me, amassing into a raw heat that burned me loose of all that parents and school and church had indoctrinated me I should strive for, while constantly reminding me that I would never be good enough at any of it for genuine approval.

  So they hit me and I endured, and a few would warm their cool hands on my fevered skin, even their faces, my hard-earned sweat to some like wine. Two women and a man lowered me exhausted to the floor one night, spread upon my striped back a banquet of fruit, and ate it all while around us unfolded other scenarios limited only by the imaginations of those who put them into play, and the physical limits of those upon whom they were enacted. They coupled in constantly changing configurations and numbers, mouths and genitals and hands furiously busy. Semen oozed down thighs and throats, and blood was let from willing limbs and torsos, and an ancient marble tub could hold two inside and support four more who straddled its walls and deluged those below with golden showers — I was called on for this duty myself more than once. Thickly oiled fists were forced one quivering inch at a time up pink-rimmed anal canals stretched to capacity. A single woman might exhaust a dozen partners, or punish half as many into insensibility, before she was done for the night. A single man might milk his glands until they scraped painfully dry. From every quarter and every corner, cries of ecstasy rang indivisible from cries of pain, as Drake lorded over all like a satyr.

  “Something, isn’t it?” he said one night, kneeling beside me where I lay chained to the floor, awaiting … something. “Like the ocean: always the same, always in flux. Ho hum.”

  I had turned to the side to look his way, anonymous and safe within my hood, eyes inscrutable behind tiny holes drilled in the center of the buttons. I dared say nothing, for nothing was asked.

  “De Sade was the inspiration. Ever read 120 Days of Sodom?”

  I shook my head; he patted it to reward my obedience to the law of silence. This was why I never feared losing Aimee to him: He showed equal interest in me.

  “Lovely story. If you were to start out summarizing, it would sound like the beginning of a bad joke: A duke, a bishop, a judge, and a banker lock themselves in a remote castle in the Alps. They want to remove themselves from society after they’ve exhausted the passions they can gratify around Paris. So the duke conceives the idea of their establishing a School for Libertinage at the edge of the world. Four months devoted to nothing but limitless hedonism.”

  I became aware that Drake was holding something in his hand, but could not yet see what it was.

  “They assemble around themselves an entourage of wives — they marry each other’s daughters — and retired old Parisienne madames, and a squad of horny fellows with names like Towercock and Volcano and Asschopper — who, if they were around today, would be video superstars — and finally, an assortment of beautiful pubescent boys and girls to gratify their each and every whim, nabbed from across the countryside, and hideous old whores to chaperone them. Not the least among the laws they’ve imposed is that calling upon God for help or deliverance is punishable by death. And so, in that castle, they all stay for four unimaginable months.”

  Drake brought his hand up from alongside his thigh, and the object he held he turned over and over, inspecting it casually.

  “Except de Sade was able to imagine it. Part of their nightly entertainment was hearing stories told by the four madames, each woman assigned to a different degree of passions: the simple, the complex, the criminal, and the murderous. One hundred and fifty scenarios exemplifying each … six hundred in all. And de Sade lists every single one of them. It’s the most astounding collection of eros, perversity, degradation, blasphemy, and atrocity that anyone’s ever imagined, or ever will. The first time I read it, I closed the book and I said to myself, ‘Now there’s ambition.’”

  What Drake held was a tapered iron bulb, the size of a skinny egg. From the narrower end emerged a threaded shaft, topped with an ornate head, like that of an antique skeleton key.

  “Of course I can’t conduct wholesale slaughter, but I believe I still might’ve done de Sade one better, in my humble way. I’ve never needed to kidnap a single soul. So many people walking around today have been twisted into such Gordian knots that, whatever I or anyone else here has an appetite to do, there’s somebody eager to let us do it to them. I built it … and you came.” He ran a hand along the leather contours of my skull. “Never think I don’t apprecia
te how pathetically dependable you are in that respect.”

  He held the iron bulb up for my inspection. It wasn’t all of a single-cast piece — I could see fine cracks running the length of it, between segments.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  I shook my head no.

  “It’s called a rectal pear. They come in oral and vaginal models too, but it’s primarily the use that dictates the name. A lesser-known example of Renaissance-era technology. Can you imagine being the one who first thought of such a contraption?”

  Drake turned the screw and the bulb slowly split apart, three segments opening like a lotus, wider and wider still.

  “Heretical preachers got them in the mouth. Women judged guilty of fucking the devil got them in the cunt, sodomites in the ass. The original models had sharp prongs, too, but don’t worry, I’m not interested in ripping you apart inside. We just need to loosen you up a bit.”

  He turned the screw again, counter-clockwise this time, and the segments drew back together.

  “Some of the lads have their eye on you, and I’m sure it’s not escaped your attention that a few of them are what the Kama Sutra calls horse men. For their needs, you’re what’s called a deer woman. The inequality requires some correction. Take it like a good boy, and this year, for the first day of Christmas, maybe I’ll give you a partridge in a rectal pear tree.”

  Drake oiled the cold iron and I was silent, even in the pain, silent through it all, and when by the tilt of Aimee’s head I saw she’d noticed this new ordeal, I liked the idea that I couldn’t see her true eyes, nor she mine. We could be feeling anything. She watched as long as she dared. And then she turned away.

  Life lived for another can become an end in itself that rearranges everything else to fit, and so it was with Drake and the world that had coalesced around him. Club Kinque became the mold into which Aimee and I had been poured, and it shaped us in its own image.

  Our lives away weren’t lived so much as tolerated, counting the hours until we would be allowed back to take our place among the lowly and the servile. While there we were nothing, but away we were even less. We became purposeless, cursed with too much time and nothing worth devoting it to.

  When Aimee lost her job it was a relief to her, because she no longer had to pretend. And I let the messages accumulate on the answering machine, the fax paper spool onto the floor, and soon Chez Noir Monthly got the idea. There was no longer any point to me writing and editing lifestyle articles. I’d found one.

  When Drake informed us one night that we wouldn’t be allowed in the next, or the next, ad infinitum, we had no idea what to do, and might even have killed ourselves if we’d not clung to the hope that maybe he would change his mind. Drake was not above admitting mistakes, when it suited his purpose.

  “It’s just like when my father walked out when I was twelve,” Aimee said, beyond tears. “All you can do is wonder what you did wrong.”

  But we hadn’t. Break the rules — silence, obedience — and the punishment was swift, its reason clear. Our week of exile seemed like something else altogether.

  And when it ended, Drake coming to us personally to invite us back without explanation, I suppose a part of me recognized that it was only more manipulation, engineered to break down the last fibers of our being before taking us over altogether. I knew this. Maybe Aimee knew it too. But it didn’t matter. We were so grateful to have our place defined for us again that it couldn’t matter.

  Because Drake knew best.

  And when, three nights later, he told us that we shouldn’t count on going back home anytime in the foreseeable future, I for one welcomed the news like a revelation from the one true god.

  The new hood fit me all the better since Drake had shaved my head. He said we would do this periodically, until there had been collected enough clippings with which to weave a hair shirt, like those worn by monastic penitents. Although as far as Drake was concerned I had nothing to repent, unless you counted being born.

  This new hood, a variation on the old one I’d grown so fond of, had no buttons for eyes, had no eyes at all. Blind, breathing behind a closed zipper through tiny perforated airholes, I waited otherwise naked for hours in a small room until he came for me, and clipped a leash to a ring at the back of the hood’s neck.

  “On all fours should do just fine,” said Drake, somewhere in the dark. He tugged on the leash to get me moving, and I found the proper pace at his side.

  “We have a number of voyeurs present tonight, so I’ve been staging quite the theater of the rococo. You’re star attraction number thirteen. Don’t worry … you’ll know what to do when you get there.”

  One corridor, then another, through doorways, the old wooden flooring hard beneath my hands and knees. At last he led me into what I knew instinctively to be Club Kinque’s main room. I sensed around me the great restless stirring of bodies and expectations, and my entrance was greeted by a smattering of ironic applause.

  Another ten feet, fifteen — I halted when I felt a sudden yank on the leash, cocking my ears to each small noise. Drake walked a step or two ahead, and it felt as if he turned the leash over to someone new. The pressure resumed, a gentler hand now tugging me forward, and I groped blindly with palms extended, felt a smooth knee on either side of me. Drake had left me between the parted legs of someone who seemed to be reclining on a padded bench. I slid my hands higher, felt supple and hairless thighs. A woman.

  “And so the dog sniffs out the bitch in heat,” Drake called to the spectators, with some drama, “and nature takes its course.”

  I felt him unclip the leash, then the unexpected attaching of two new clips to the same ring on the back of my neck. What these would connect with, I couldn’t predict.

  He opened the zipper across my hood; an instant later I felt the sole of his boot on the back of my head, pushing me roughly forward and down, until my mouth squashed into the anonymous sex of the stranger before me. She was shaved hairless, her swollen cleft as slick and wet as a peeled plum.

  Drake hadn’t lied. I knew what to do.

  Until we have a cold, we forget how much our sense of taste relies on our sense of smell. As I could smell only leather, I was unable to taste her at first, could only feel the wet velvet folds that parted for my tongue, and beneath them, the hardness of bone as she ground her hips at me.

  My hands moved up, around her haunches, atop her lower belly, and my fingertips brushed a familiar pad of shiny scar tissue just as, from within, some reservoir seemed to open and spill thickly across my lips and tongue. My sense of taste wasn’t gone, only delayed. And just as I knew the feel of where Aimee’s tattoo had been removed, so too did I recognize the bittersalt taste of semen. So much of it, though. It ran down over my leathered chin, dripped to my bare chest, trickled lower.

  I gagged, spitting, trying not to retch, and in unanticipated revulsion threw myself back from the soaked V of her thighs until I felt a hard yank at the back of my head. I’d forgotten Drake had clipped me to something else.

  The blindness was maddening, as around me erupted both gouts of laughter and sighs of disappointment. I clawed at the lacing on the back of the mask, pulled it apart, and peeled the leather from my shaved skull. I knelt blinking and naked in the sudden glare of light, the mask bunched in my hand, and I saw now that a taut pair of thin, stainless steel chains were clipped to the ring on the back. I followed them up, to a pulley suspended from the ceiling over my head. Followed them to another one over where Aimee lay with her knees bent and parted wide as she leaned wantonly back on both elbows. I followed the chains down again, saw at last where they connected.

  The two rings were the diameter of a quarter, pierced through either corner of Aimee’s mouth. As I held the chains forgotten and taut, her cheeks were painfully stretched, as if she were a hooked fish. Watery blood seeped from the unhealed piercings, to run down her chin as the seed ran down mine. I realized what I was doing to her and let the mask go, and her skin drew back into
place.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, in what must’ve been a moment of weakness.

  Aimee’s eyes held mine, beseeching, gone somewhere I’d yet to follow and maybe never could. I wasn’t sure she was even aware it was me.

  “Again,” she murmured. She licked her lips. “Pull it again.”

  Although I suspect I had performed much as I’d been expected to, I still had broken many rules and was treated accordingly. I was taken to the first floor, which I’d always thought was unused except for storage. Perhaps I’m still not wrong.

  I was folded inside a small penlike enclosure, hands cuffed behind my back, allowed less than four feet of slack in the chain between my collar and an iron ring embedded in the cement floor. I could squat over an open drain for my toilet, while descending from the ceiling was a flexible feeding tube whose end bent into my mouth, secured to one cheek with cloth medical tape.

  Water came down every few hours, and twice daily some thicker concoction, bland and powdery tasting, like a protein shake — but really, Drake might’ve put anything in it. It pumped from the end of the tube, oozed between my teeth and across my tongue, and I swallowed.

  For hours each night I could hear music from the dance floor overhead, filtered of treble to a framework of thumps. Whenever it ended and silence fell, I knew that closing time had come again … and my master’s voice was soon to follow, from two floors above.

  “From 120 Days of Sodom, the Complex Passions, entry ninety-seven,” he began, then read: “‘A man is whipped by three girls, alternately wielding a martinet, a bull’s prick, and a cat o’ nine tails. A fourth girl kneels beneath him sucking his cock and reaming his ass while she is being sodomized by the man’s valet.’”

  “Amen,” I said around the feeding tube, imagining myself as that anonymous man.

  “I’ve sent for a bull’s prick, so perhaps we can give this a whirl,” came Drake’s voice. It might’ve been true, or maybe he was just toying with me, making promises he would never keep. “But it may take time. The bulls, you realize, are very attached to them.”