Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [101]
“Luisa, I want you to take this black candle and introduce it into the bowels of my bound slave.”
She greases a twelve-inch candle and holds it out to me.
I take the candle and thrust. I am a man deflowering a virgin, a pirate raping his prey, a father violating his daughter. The Marquis de Sade penetrating Justine, Stephen penetrating O.
“Now rub your nipples on his rear,” says Ada.
He groans. My blood heats to the boiling point, as I go deeper and deeper.
Now Ada commands Wayne to touch me while I am penetrating the masked slave.
He instantly obeys, brushing his erect cock against my buttocks, then holding very still. Simultaneously woman and man, I am overwhelmed. His slightest touch is as exciting as penetration.
“Do not move,” commands Ada. “And do not orgasm. Whoever orgasms shall be severely whipped.”
At that warning, the urge to come is overwhelming. I hold back only by thinking of my twin girls, of myself as mommy. My sane mind is holding on by a thread. How Wayne does it, I don’t know. But the masked man is not so fortunate. The prohibition has aroused him beyond his power to resist, and he groans and comes in a jet stream that hits the mirrored wall like the juicy whitehead aimed at the mirror by an adolescent squeezer.
“You will pay for that pleasure,” says Ada. “Stand, Luisa. Stand, Blaine.”
We rise and separate. Ada hands us each a riding crop, takes one for herself, and shows us how to whip the masked stranger. First on the thighs, then on the buttocks, then—savagely—on the back. Taught well, the masked man says thank you for each stroke, until he is bloody and whimpering in agony.
“Let that be a lesson to my other slaves,” says Ada in a blood-chilling voice.
The masked man groans.
“Untie him,” says Mistress Ada to the groveling Wayne.
He obeys.
“Unmask him,” says Mistress Ada.
Wayne unzips and peels off the man’s facial mask.
Lionel Schaeffer lies fainting and bloody at my feet.
In another room, a briefcase goes beep, beep, beep.
18
Bye-bye Blues
I’m dreary in mind
and I’m so worried in heart.
Oh the best of friends
sure have got to part.
—Bessie Smith
So I’ve given up booze and Dart, only to take up bondage and discipline. Some progress! Back I go to my silo, to my celibacy, to my twins. I feel sullied by the experience, as if I have gone to hell and been pickled in brimstone. Ada calls and calls, wanting me to continue the “psychodrama.” I don’t call back. I acknowledge my dark side. “If you do it once, you’re an existentialist; twice, you’re a pervert,” my sane mind says. But what a hangover I have! Worse than booze! At the bottom of my despair, alone as I’ve ever been, I try again to work.
Collages of black leather and whips, S&M film stills, sculptures of boots and shoes, shackles and chains, obsess me for a while. I give them up as hokey and decide, quite consciously, to do nothing. I will lie fallow, let the mind drift. I will not paint, not fall in love, not worry about men or money or work. I will only be. I will try to get out of my own way.
Without I, who would I be? Try to abolish the first person. Try to be free of the towering shadow of the ninth letter of the alphabet.
Who is Leila/Louise/Luisa really? Leila could as soon be you or the hand that grasps the pencil. Her hair, her eyes, her profession, her men, may change. All these are flesh. Her children may be different sexes, but Leila is obsessed with the towering figure of I. Leila loves narcissists who cannot love, because Leila cannot love herself.
Having decided to give up painting (because it is so much a product of my narcissism) and become a writer, I toy with writing about my faltering struggle to get sober, to tell my exemplary tale, as a warning, an inspiration, for other women, other men.
I begin with a notebook, writing the day’s events, thoughts, dreams,