The Juliette Society (4 page)

She tells me that the other painting is so odd that it’s difficult to describe. At first, it looks like three female bodies in fishnet stockings engaged in a ménage à trois. But when you look closer there are male body parts mixed up with the female ones. Sex organs and limbs sprouting where they really shouldn’t be. Phantom hands that seem to push and pull and grope. It’s all confused and a little disturbing. She’s decided that what she’s looking at is one body made up of many, a creature of indeterminate sex.

And as she tells me about the painting, I start to think, all this time, Marcus’s sexuality has been a mystery to me but I never ever questioned his orientation, never even considered.

‘Is Marcus gay, or bi?’ I blurt out.

‘Oh, no,’ Anna says, ‘I don’t think so. He’s just really, really strange.’

‘It sure sounds like it,’ I reply. A home with no furniture, no food, but books and papers and erotic art. It sounds as if Marcus finds comfort in austerity. As if his brain is so busy that he doesn’t have time to take care of his body. And that’s fine with me. Because I would want to be fucked by his brain.

Anna says that whenever they meet, which is twice a month, Marcus has everything planned, every detail, and it has to be carried out to the letter, like a ritual. And the same thing occurs between them on every single occasion. She is told to arrive at a specified time.

‘I can’t be late,’ she says. ‘Not one minute, not even thirty seconds. I’m always right on time for his private sessions. And I have my own key to the apartment, so I let myself in.’

Now I understand why she’s always late to Marcus’ class.

Just to fuck with him.

‘Marcus is already in place when I arrive,’ she continues. ‘In the back room. In the closet. With the door closed. And he’s so silent, so still, that you wouldn’t even know he’s there, that there’s anybody else in the room. The curtains are closed and the lights are off. It’s dark, but still just light enough to see.’

She says the closet has two holes in one of the doors, like two knots of wood fell out of it. One small. One larger. One at head height, the other lower down.

‘Marcus swears it was like that when he bought it,’ says Anna. ‘But I don’t believe him.’

When Anna arrives, she’s meant to be wearing the uniform that Marcus has told her to wear. The same clothes every time.

How does he make you dress, I say.

‘Guess,’ she says.

This is a game we like to play, Anna and I.

‘Like a nurse?’ I say.

‘Nope,’ she says.

‘Like a schoolgirl?’

‘Uh-uh.’ She shakes her head.

‘A whore?’

‘Not even close,’ she says.

‘OK, you have to tell me.’

‘Like his mother.’ She giggles.

I just look at her in surprise, and Anna can’t wait to reveal more and tells me that she has to wear a loose flowery sack dress, flat-heeled dress shoes, flesh stockings and really, really large underwear that looks and feels like a chastity belt made of polyester. She dresses like Marcus’ mother, in clothes that used to belong to her. Clothes that Marcus’ mom owned since the fifties, wore up until her death, but still look perfect and new, as if they’d come off the rack the day before.

‘Is this getting freaky enough for you? Too much?’ she asks, smiling.

‘Getting there… ’ I say. Because now Marcus is sounding less like Jason Bourne, which is a good thing. He’s sounding less the way I imagine Jason Bourne would fuck. With the lights off and his socks on. In the missionary position. Like a real man.

And he’s sounding more like Norman Bates, which is even better, because I’ve had a huge, huge crush on Anthony Perkins since the very first time I saw
Psycho
and fell head-over-heels in love with his clean-cut, buttoned-up preppy look. It seems Marcus is completely in thrall to his mommy fixation, just like Norman Bates or Charles Foster Kane.

‘So let’s recap,’ I say to Anna. ‘You’re in the room, dressed like a prim fifties housewife from an episode of
The Twilight Zone
, and Marcus is in the closet with the doors closed and his eye pressed to one of the holes, watching you.’

‘Right,’ she says. ‘And I do exactly what he’s asked me to do. I turn my back to him and I start to undress, taking off each item of clothing in the order and way that he’s asked me to.’

‘Exactly the same way every time?’ I ask.

‘It has to be,’ says Anna, ‘Choreographed to the second. I feel like an air stewardess demonstrating safety procedures. And I’ve done it so many times now that I’ve made it my own, adding my own little flourishes, things I think he’d like.’

Anna’s not shy with the details and as she talks I can see it all happening in my head.

First she takes off the sack dress, which she unbuttons at the back, slips off her shoulders, one by one, and lets fall to the floor, stepping out of it, and looking over her shoulder and down at her feet as she does so to make sure the dress doesn’t catch on the shoes. Then she unhooks the bra, hiking it up her chest so her breasts fall out to their natural position, bouncing a little as they do. And she hunches her shoulders forward so the straps drop off them.

‘He likes to see the bra slide down my arms,’ she says. ‘Then how I catch it and swing it free of my body.’

At that point, she’s naked from the waist up, standing in dress shoes and flesh stockings held up by suspenders. And I’m imagining Anna’s near-naked body. Her round ass and breasts that are just too big for her frame.

There’s only one thing wrong for me about this fantasy, Marcus’ fantasy. She’s wearing an old-fashioned girdle that covers just about four-fifths of her ass, giving a slight peek of those large polyester panties with the broad gusset seam that firmly grip and hold her cheeks like rubber. Which is just the way Marcus likes it, but next-to-useless as jerk-off material for anyone else.

‘He likes me to extend one leg out and bend over it as I unhook the suspenders,’ Anna continues, ‘all the way over, so he can see my tits hang. I let the suspenders ping up around my thigh, one by one, then wiggle my tush as I peel off the girdle and step out of it.’

And then she peels off those large, ungainly underpants, but slowly because she says, ‘Marcus is an ass man and, for him, it’s all about the long tease.’

That’s as far as she’s meant to go. Marcus wants her to leave the stockings and the dress shoes on. And a long string necklace of pearls, alternating black and white, that hang down between her breasts. ‘They’re his mother’s pearls,’ she says.

While she’s doing all this, she’s not allowed to look in his direction. ‘Marcus is very firm about that,’ she says. ‘I snuck a glance at the cupboard once, out of the corner of my eye. And I saw this large eyeball pressed right up close to the door, framed by this ragged knothole. And I think he caught me because it didn’t know where to look.

‘The eyeball got embarrassed. It moved from side to side, up and down, frantically scanning the room, looking for somewhere to hide. And it wasn’t Marcus. I didn’t register it as Marcus. It was just an eyeball in a long narrow wooden slit. And I was so weirded out that I never looked again.

‘But’s the only way he can get fully erect,’ she adds.

I think of Doctor Alfred Kinsey, because from what I know he could only get off in one way too. This is the bit they left out of the movie. Kinsey liked to stick things in his pecker. Stuff that didn’t belong there. Objects that didn’t always fit. Items that didn’t appear anywhere in the data he meticulously compiled, ordered, tabulated and analyzed. Grass, straw, hair, bristle. Anything long and flexible that tickled.

I’m listening to Anna’s story and realizing that my fantasies of fucking Jack in his boss’s office are pretty tame. That all my fantasies are so, so tame.

Anna says that once she gets down to her underwear, she’s allowed to turn around and look. She picks up the clothes that are gathered in a heap at her feet on the floor, and takes them over to a wooden chair on the other side of the room, near the cupboard. Lays the dress over it, hangs the bra from one strap over the back, and neatly folds the girdle, suspenders and panties, placing them on the seat. And that’s when she’s meant to look towards the cupboard.

‘I’m supposed to gasp,’ she says, ‘and Marcus told me it has to be the perfect combination, in equal measures, of horror, surprise and delight.’

The object of her attention is Marcus’s erect penis, which she sees slowly inching its way out of the lower knothole in the closet, like a snail emerging from its shell.

Anna’s supposed to stay there, rooted to the spot, staring, open-mouthed, until almost the entire shaft has presented itself and his balls pop out from the hole and hang over the door.

‘His cock twitches, as if it’s beckoning to me,’ says Anna. ‘So I sit down in front, and lick it the way you lick melted ice cream that’s dripping down the cone. I imagine I’m licking drips of cherry ice cream.’

And this is just foreplay, right, I ask.

I just want to be certain, because it all sounds so involved.

‘Yes,’ says Anna, ‘just foreplay.’

She says that even though she’s right on the other side of the door from him now, Marcus doesn’t make a sound. She can’t even hear him breathe. No little gasps of excitement to let her know she’s doing the right thing, just little twitches in his cock as it bobs away from the attentions of her tongue. Little reflex motions, the way your knee shoots out from underneath you when the doctor hits it with his little silver hammer.

So how do you know when to stop, I say, so he doesn’t come.

‘When he’s had enough, when he’s good and ready, the door opens,’ she says. ‘It’s kind of creepy.’

I imagine a door creaking open in one of those really old black-and-white haunted house movies that play on TV at the dead of night and there’s no one and nothing behind it, just an inky blackness.

‘That’s my cue to step inside,’ she says. ‘And I can feel my heart beat faster every time, even though I know exactly what’s going to happen and who’s behind the door.’

She steps inside the closet and she closes the door behind her. And now she can’t see a thing, because Marcus has plugged the holes with tissue paper so no light can get in.

‘It takes a while for my eyes to adjust,’ she says. ‘Even then, all I can see are shadows in the gloom that move like vapor trails and feel like hallucinations.’

‘How big is the closet? Doesn’t it feel claustrophobic?’

‘Big enough for my feet to be the only part of me that touches the sides,’ she says. ‘It’s scary how quickly I lose track of the space around me. And it’s also super hot in there, a steamy-wet dry heat like in a Turkish bath, because Marcus has already used up so much of the air, and I feel myself starting to sweat almost as soon as I’ve stepped inside.’

‘What happens next?’ I say, eagerly.

‘Then I feels his clammy hand on my breast. And you’d think that’d feel real creepy,’ she says, ‘but it actually turns me on. Really turns me on. Being touched like that, by someone I can’t see, in a confined space.’

It makes all the other stuff worthwhile, she says, the annoying preamble that Marcus insists has to be carried out to the letter.

‘And anyway,’ she says, ‘once we’re in the closet, in the dark, with the doors closed, and he’s initiated physical contact, there are no more rules. He’s not shy any more. Marcus fucks like a madman, like a beast, like a different person entirely. And the closet rocks on its feet.’

‘But how many ways could you fuck in a closet?’ I wonder aloud.

‘You’d be surprised,’ says Anna. ‘We must have gone through the entire Kama Sutra five or six times by now,’ she says.

‘One time,’ she says, ‘he was fucking me so hard the closet fell over onto its side. Onto the door. We were trapped inside. Marcus didn’t care. It turned him on even more. We fucked for hours. Then he punched out the top and we crawled out, naked and bruised.’

After they emerge out of the closet, there’s one final duty Anna has to perform. She has to wash him. So they move to the bathroom.

She says it’s a really old bathroom with a tiled floor and paint peeling off the walls from damp. And Marcus has one of those old-fashioned ceramic tubs that looks like a dinghy, with a shower hanging above it at the top of a long steel mast that extends up from a spout.

‘Marcus only ever takes a shower, never a bath,’ says Anna.

‘Why?’ I say.

‘He told me people drown in bathtubs.’

When Anna says this, I let the comment pass but I wonder if she realizes he was quoting Cassavetes.

Once they’re in the shower, Anna soaps and lathers Marcus, vigorously scrubbing his back, his chest, around his thighs, under his arms and behind his balls. But after she’s toweled him dry, he walks out of the bathroom without saying a word. Leaves her there alone, to dress and make herself up. And when she’s done, she lets herself out.

‘This is the way it always is,’ she says. ‘Without fail. And never any other way.’

‘Did you ever fuck in a closet?’ she asks, matter-of-factly.

I have to admit to her that, no, I never did. And, after hearing all this, I feel so depressingly ordinary.

We sit there under the tree for a few minutes, in silence. And a line of dialogue pops into my head that Marlon Brando says in
Last Tango in Paris
, one throwaway line that I’ve always loved from the monologue he delivers to his dead wife, as she’s lying in the casket in front of him:

‘A little touch of mommy in the night.’

And if that’s what Marcus likes, I’m fine with that. Because a lot of great men had mommy complexes.

I’m taking in everything Anna’s told me. I take a sip from my coffee and wince when I realize it’s almost gone cold because we’ve been here so long.

‘Did I ruin all your fantasies?’ Anna says. ‘I hope not. Underneath it all, Marcus is really rather sweet.’

Oh, no, I say. Absolutely not.

Now I want to know even more. Now it feels like I can read Marcus like a book and find out something new about him with every turn of the page. And I wish Marcus could teach me what it means to be freaky.

But then I realize Anna could teach me a lot about being freaky too.