Our Ecstatic Days (21 page)

with my uncle and gazed on that strange woman across the river, now here in

than her own, when she did the oracle business—in all the years she did it. It’s about the power isn’t it, and not even so much power over someone else as the power over your own life, and that’s what I like too, that power, I take to it right from the first and you can make of that whatever you want. I can tell you for a fact that as far as I know no one’s ever gotten hurt, so you make of it
what you want. You can spend your whole life, the Mistress says to me one time, making peace with your own true nature.

“What?”

“Something,” she says, “someone once said to me,” and it’s the strangest thing when she says it, I’m not even sure what it means but it unnerves me some because I know I’ve heard it before, that very thing, back before I came up out of the lake, like the thing about sleeping the sleep of the dead. But if domination was about the power of it for her, if it was the Mistress’ true nature just to take command of her life then how is it four months ago I’m calling up an ambulance-boat on the wireless to come pump out her stomach? Unless that’s her way of taking control of her life for good. So it’s a complicated thing, one’s true nature, isn’t it. Sometime long ago something happened to her, something beyond her control, something she’s not been able to escape from or explain to herself in any way that she’s ever actually believed for any length of time, something that won’t heal. Something no act or ritual of domination has been able to get her through no matter how hard she’s tried. Something. I’ve come to learn things about her life but not that. I think awhile after I first come to the Chateau perhaps it’s better for her, it’s like she regained something, but then—I’m happy to be a daughter to her if that’s what she needs. Why not. And one afternoon a few months after I’ve been here I say as much and I can tell right away it’s the wrong thing to say, I can tell from this look on her face. This shattered look. Perhaps

the birth canal of the lake I know this and maybe should be astounded by it if

it’s the casual way I say it, like it doesn’t mean anything either way. Now that I think about it, it’s after that she begins to slip away, except for times we embrace for whatever reason, and I can feel the way she holds onto me that she’s trying to come back, come back from wherever she’s slipping to.

There was a man once, that much I know. That I’ve figured out. And for a time I thought, well then that’s it isn’t it,
a man. He may even have been a client. I’ve never asked, perhaps I’m not the inquisitive sort. Perhaps I have an overly developed male-sense of privacy—that is, for a female. But whoever he was she’s not seen him for a long time. Awhile, though, I thought that’s what it was.

Now I don’t think so.

As for the lake, well for sure there’s something between the Mistress and the lake. She stands on the terrace must be hours every day and she and the lake stare each other down. The Mistress, she thinks I don’t know what she’s thinking, but I do. I’ve figured it out. The Mistress thinks the lake is waiting for her to die before it sinks any further, and I’m not going to be the one to say she’s wrong. God’s little joke on the male gender, that’s what the Mistress says I am, and after a while it becomes clear that her god is full of such jokes, and so sometimes I wonder if the lake is God’s joke on her or she’s God’s joke on the lake. It’s almost six months later I hear the Saint Kristin legend, by then I’ve finally left the Chateau for an afternoon now and then, going to Port Justine for supplies and that’s when I hear, when I’m out among the locals, how the Mistress is Saint Kristin’s twin or Saint Kristin returned from the dead or something, I hear it but don’t make much sense of it and I don’t think anyone else makes sense of it or even really wants to. Four months ago when I call the ambulance-boat, well there’s a commotion then on the hillsides, people skittering back and forth like forest animals smelling

here anything was astounding or, maybe more precisely, if there was nothing

smoke. You might think a pathetic botched suicide attempt would sort of snuff the legend, what? but instead the offerings just start coming more than ever, the stone steps of the grotto laden with bread and cheese and fruit and drinking water. While the Mistress sleeps I go out on the terrace to see boats bobbing on the lake below, people standing in them staring up in anxious anticipation. She’s all right, I tell them, go home. They don’t move awhile.
They’re still suspicious of me, perhaps more than ever, still not sure whether I’m priestess, temptress, judas, magdalene.

After a while they drift back to shore. Return to their vigil. That same afternoon I go out to the back grotto behind the Chateau to find a lone man in a boat leaving on the steps an offering of flowers. Not much good for anything, flowers, I think, but he lays them up and down the stone stairs. The tide will just take most of them, I tell him.

He looks up. He’s in his mid- maybe late-twenties. That afternoon he looks up at me and his jaw drops a bit, and I see that expression I’ve seen before and think, Oh I’m about to become God’s little joke again. But he’s pretty for a boy, I’ll say that for him, eyes the color of the lake and hair like owl feathers. I see him again about a week later, one twilight all by himself on the lake in his boat—what, does he live in that boat? I wonder. He’s all by himself drifting out there watching the Chateau like they all watch it, except that where all the rest of them are waiting for the Mistress, I know he’s waiting for me. We just look at each other and don’t wave or anything, just look at each other till I go back inside, but there are more flowers on the steps the next morning except for the ones the lake has stolen, a trail of garlands leading back to him I’m sure. Then I see him a lot over the next week or so and don’t pay much attention, never wave or say anything, thinking I shouldn’t encourage him too much. I like the notion of men under my spell, I confess, it’s the whole point of what I do,

that was not astounding, and I can’t help wondering how my life might have

but if I’m to be God’s little joke then I don’t want it to be any crueler than the sport of it calls for. And then I don’t see him at all awhile, perhaps another week, and then he’s there one night on the grotto steps again not with flowers, not delivering anything except himself. He’s there as a client.

By now I’ve really got the business going. Twenty or thirty steady regulars, more than I can handle really, and then all the
semi’s who drop in and out of the picture, and new ones showing up fairly often and a lot of them come back. From the short time I’ve been here already it seems to me nothing in L.A. ever quite fits any sort of real pattern anyway, and this sort of work is volatile by nature; sometimes when the fighting up north gets worse or there’s especially ominous news from back east you can almost predict an upturn in traffic, men wanting to explore their dark sides before the end. More often than not these are men of some power or influence, men in control of others, men in positions of responsibility who long to be free for an hour or two of power, control, responsibility, free of themselves—men who want to turn power and control and the Self over to someone else. Perhaps they feel guilty about the way they fuck over other people all the time and want to be fucked over by me in return as a sort of penance—every client is different isn’t he. Some have lives they need to escape from and others have no lives at all, that is no lives of emotional connection or intimacy, and they’re the problem-ones because then they want
me
to be their life, and I can’t, can I. I just can’t. Those are the ones who start hounding me till I have to cut them loose. You probably think they’re all creeps and losers in which case you would be in for the surprise of your life, I won’t say most of them are nice normal men because, take it from me, there
are
no nice normal men—nice perhaps but not normal. But some of them are actually a bit sweet—sad and messed up yes but a bit sweet and like I told the Mistress that very first day it’s not

been different had I known, how far I might have gone with him to unlock the

like I don’t like men, sometimes they actually can be easier to deal with than women because everything’s so straightforward in terms of what they want. So don’t get the idea I do this because I hate men. Perhaps back somewhere in my mystery past before I came up out of the lake I was a cliche, you know, the molested daughter or whatever—but I just don’t think so. So before I take on a client we’ll usually talk awhile and I’ll try to figure out what
his story is and why he’s there and whether what he wants is something I can give him, and I make it clear then that there are things I don’t do and I don’t need to go into those here, just things that cross my own line of dignity if not the client’s. There’s humiliation and then there’s humiliation. Like I said before, there’s a line drawn on the discipline I’ll inflict, because while it’s all very amusing to blindfold and harness a naked man by his ankles and wrists and beat him awhile, it’s not like I’m a sadist or something. Erotoasphyxiation, electrocution, cattle prods, I don’t go in for any of that. It’s all about limits isn’t it, the ones you test and the ones you observe. There’s a code word the client and I agree on that he’ll say if things are going farther than he wants or he changes his mind about something, something besides “no” or “stop” because in such situations people say no or stop all the time without meaning it. For a while I was coming up with a different word for each client but that became confusing and I was always afraid I might forget, though I imagine I would have remembered when I heard it, but anyway now I have a one-code-fits-all policy and the word is
zed.

But no one’s said it yet.

There’s no sex. Not with me, anyway. Do you get that? I’m not a hooker. The need and situation may be sexual to the client and I understand that in the submissive’s own weird way I’m an object of sexual interest. At the end of the session, before releasing him, if he’s been obedient and I feel he’s done well in his

riddle of how every life is a millennium unto itself, of how the single smallest

training, I’ll give him permission to pleasure himself if he chooses. But that’s up to him, he does it without any help at all from me, though if he wants to do it in front of me I may allow him, depending. A female client, she’s different, to the extent I’ve had any and can really tell. I confess I wouldn’t mind more female clients. For a while I was a bit surprised I didn’t have more but that was me being naive, women just aren’t wired that way are
they. Someone else will have to explain that, I can’t. Perhaps for women submission has been such a fact of life for so long that they don’t have the luxury of making a game of it. I’ve had two female submissives but I’m not sure they count, the first was part of a couple, she and I performing for her man and while I think perhaps she liked it more than he did or more than he wanted her to, she wasn’t really my type; the second wasn’t really one client but several thousand, the all-female Freek Recherche that’s the most famous of the movable lunatiques that take place clandestinely night to night in one canyon or the other ’round here. Which in a strange way doesn’t count either. By then I had a reputation and while I usually don’t like doing outcall I confess I was flattered that they came looking for me, a couple of the women putting on the fete sailing out to the Chateau and offering me the job. It would be an honor, one says to me—how do you resist that? Flattery or not I’m not sure I could have anyway.

This was the night I found out something interesting about myself. After all the days and weeks and months of wondering about my past, of wondering who I was before I came up out of the lake, this was when I found out perhaps I don’t really want to know. The night of the Freek Recherche the two women come back for me and sail me over to shore and drive me in a beat-up thirty-year-old Jag through the pass in the hills to Nichols Canyon and I think I’ll remember till the day I die the sight of
all those women
there by Nichols Pond that looked like it was on fire from

human experience like losing a child can be a universe of meaning unto

the melody-snakes imported and dumped in, flashing and singing. How did they get all those snakes? Where did all those women come from? I didn’t know there
were
that many women still in L.A., they had to have traveled from all the far reaches of the lagoon thousands of them, a vast memory-carnival of women dancing to the music of the snakes and drinking lapsinthe like there’s no yesterday. My job is to stand on this little platform and
crack my whip at the girls dancing ’round me as well as the blindfolded man fastened naked to the spinning wheel behind me ’sinthed out of his mind voluntarily or not—I don’t know and don’t want to—erection subject to the whims of centrifuge and the object of much collective amusement. At some point in all this someone presses into my hand a shot of ’sinthe and instead of drinking it down right away I stand there looking at the shot glass in my hand thinking about it and considering whether to drink it—that is, do I
want
to remember, after all? Face to face with the prospect of actually knowing what came before, I balk. What if it’s something terrible? What if there’s a very good reason I’m not remembering? So I just set it there on the small table next to me trying to decide, and it’s very distracting. In a lot of ways it’s the best time I’ve ever had, the best time of my life, well the best I know of anyway, cracking the whip and dancing with the women like I’m Queen of the Zed Night like they used to call the Mistress, all of them worshipping me and cheering and wanting to touch me as I stand over them on the platform and getting paid for it on top of it, what can be better, except the whole time all I can think about is whether to drink that little shot of the sepia-colored liqueur.

The strange thing now is, I don’t remember whether I drank it or not. Don’t remember, I just look at the glass in my hand at one point as dawn’s coming up over the hills and the medicine is gone—did I drink it, spill it, try to seduce some woman with it? I swear I don’t remember. Perhaps that in itself means I must have