Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [100]
Wayne catches my eye.
“At some point,” he says, “I’m going to find a way to make this into art. I don’t quite know how yet. But it’s critical that someone do it. I want to be the Francis Bacon of S&M.”
“Francis Bacon already is the Francis Bacon of S&M,” I say. “You’re late.”
Wayne laughs.
“Do you know what he said to an interviewer who asked him where he drew his images of horror?” I ask.
“No,” Wayne says.
“ ‘I just look down at the lamb chop on my plate,’ he said. ‘That’s all the horror I need.’ ”
“A convert,” says Wayne. “And in just one evening.”
The room is lit with candles. This “Psychodrama Institute” seems written by Genet. Mistress Ada is standing center stage, testing a riding crop with her hand.
“Welcome,” she says to her victim.
A smallish man in a full facial mask of leather is bound and gagged and fastened with leather thongs to invisible hooks in the mirrored wall, held in a cruciform pose. The mise-en-scène invites serious meditation. Madame Ada is not kidding.
“I shall ask you,” Ada says to us, “to drop your normal identities and become Mistress Luisa and Master Blaine. I invite you to choose your costumes next door, with Mistress Larissa’s help.”
It is a command. We obey.
In the bedroom, I pick out a red leather corset with a dozen garters, red leather stiletto boots, and a curly black wig.
Larissa laces me into the corset so that my breasts tumble over the top.
Laced, I become excited.
Larissa finds me a pair of black silk stockings and helps me hook them all around with the garters. Then she laces me into the high red boots—which are, amazingly, just my size.
The curly wig is a lion’s mane. It makes me feel like another person. Larissa does my makeup and styles my hair. My lipstick is crimson, my eye shadow green, my cheeks russet. She rouges my nipples, exciting me as she touches me with her long sensual fingers.
Master Blaine, meanwhile, is transforming himself into a stand-in for Errol Flynn.
“This is who I’ve always wanted to be,” he says, pulling on black leather knee breeches, an eye patch, and a leather vest. A gleaming sword dangles at his side, and the eye patch gives him a sinister look.
“Don’t touch,” Larissa cautions. “Only I can touch her,” she says to Wayne. Pinning me against the wall, she strokes my nipples until I am almost ready to explode. Then she stops.
“It is good to linger on the brink,” she says. “It makes the creativity that much greater.”
Wayne is watching us and growing harder by the minute. His leather breeches have a laced opening where a codpiece may be attached. His cock emerges, long and well-shaped. My eyes linger. “He is not wont to love who is tormented by lewdness,” I remember from “The Rules of Love.”
“Come with me,” Larissa says.
I stagger into the living room, getting used to the boots. The tightness corresponds to the tightness of the corset. As Mistress Luisa, I may do anything I please. I am liberated again, as if I were a beginner, regaining my beginner’s mind.
The Zen of S&M! I laugh aloud to myself at the very notion. And, simultaneously, I am thinking how I might make this into a piece called The Zen of S&M. Being an artist is a curse. You can’t even sink into depravity without thinking of how to turn sinking into depravity into art!
“Master Blaine,” says Ada, “fall to your knees.”
Wayne obeys.
“I want you to follow me around on your knees, assisting me with everything I command. You are my personal slave for the night. It is a great honor to be chosen as my personal slave.”
“Thank you, Mistress Ada,” says Wayne.
“And you, Luisa, are to follow orders as strictly as any novice in a nunnery.”
“Thank you, Mistress Ada.”
The man in the mask who is lashed to the wall moves at the sound of my voice, then clears his throat.
“Silence, slave,” says Ada.
“Yes, Mistress,” says a voice I almost recognize. I must be mistaken. The atmosphere at Ada’s is the atmosphere of The Land of Fuck, the lagoon of dreams—identities mingle and merge. I remember how the blond man