The Juliette Society (5 page)

The more I get to know her, the more I start to think of Anna as the best friend who understands you and everything that goes on inside you. I can tell her anything and she can tell me exactly how I’m feeling and why. It’s like we’re two heads with one brain and a shared consciousness. Sometimes she can even finish my sentences before I’ve started them.

We’re thick as thieves. And we complement each other perfectly. You could say we were made for each other. We get so close, so quickly, people say we could be sisters. I can’t see it myself. Anna has the jump on me in most things. She is everything that I’m not.

She’s the beauty. I’m the brains.

I’m the smart girl. She’s the popular one.

She just makes me laugh. She doesn’t have the filter between her brain and her mouth that most people have. She can look at some random guy in class and, apropos of nothing at all, will say cute inappropriate things like,

‘I wonder if he’s cut or uncut.’

And, ‘I’d say he hangs to the left.’

Or, ‘I bet his come tastes of lemon jelly.’

But she doesn’t think it’s at all inappropriate. Just something that needs to be said at that particular point in time. She’s so pure and uncomplicated and free in that way. Sex is as natural as breathing to her.

I’m so into Anna, and everything about her, that I contrive an excuse for Jack to pick me up from class so we can have lunch together. Because I want him to meet my new best friend.

Afterwards, I play our game.

What did you think of Anna? I say.

‘She’s nice,’ he says.

Do you think she’s cute? I say.

‘I guess,’ he says.

If you weren’t with me, would you be with her? I say.

‘I don’t think I’m her type,’ he says.

You didn’t answer the question, I say.

‘Yeah, I did,’ he says.

But is she yours? I say.

‘She could be,’ he says.

She has nice tits, don’t you think? I say.

‘Sure,’ he says.

Do you like her ass? I say.

‘Where is this going?’ he says, frustrated.

Well, would you like to fuck her? I tease.

‘Catherine, let’s talk about something else,’ he says firmly, and it’s not the answer I want.

5

Marcus has set, as homework, a screening of
Belle de Jour
, the Louis Buñuel movie that stars Catherine Deneuve.

I’ve never seen the movie before. I know nothing about it. I have no idea what to expect.

I sit down in the theater on campus and I’m not alone but, when the lights go down and the darkness closes in around me, I might as well be. This is how I like to experience movies. In a theater, in the dark, as a one-on-one communion between me and the screen. As something approaching the quiet contemplation you feel when standing in front of a great painting that awes you into silence.

I sit down to watch a movie and expect to be transported on a flight from reality into another world. I expect, at the very least, to be entertained, maybe enthralled, even appalled. The last thing I expect is to see myself up on the screen.

Bear with me, I’m not completely deluded. I know I’m not the star of this movie, even if I do share a name with the lead. I’m not even a supporting character. But somehow, some way, something about it connects with me deeply. Even if I only have one thing in common with its protagonist, a frigid, upper middle class, French housewife who harbors secret masochistic desires about sex.

Her name is Séverine. Latin for ‘stern’. Imagine going through life, your entire life, and having people decide they don’t like you even before they’ve met you. Just from hearing your name. Séverine. Severe. Stern.

Imagine lumbering a kid from birth with a name like that. You might as well call it, ‘No fun’.

No fun at all.

And it’s not as if that name doesn’t suit Catherine Deneuve’s character in Buñuel’s movie. In fact, there’s isn’t another name that suits her better because, to be honest, she isn’t a whole lot of fun. She’s icy-cold and dispossessed of every quality that could make you like her, stripped of almost everything that makes her human. Everything except her morbid fantasies of humiliation and punishment. Because you’re not meant to like her or even identify with her.

And yet, somehow I do.

Séverine. No fun. No fun at all. Married a year and she’s never let her husband fuck her. Married a year and she won’t even let him sleep in the same bed. Married a year and he hasn’t even seen her naked. Her husband; devoted, protective, dependable and so, so understanding.

Séverine. A virgin in reality, but a whore in her imagination. And it’s her imagination that leads her astray.

Remember. Plot, always subservient to character.

And Séverine, always in thrall to her desires, never in control of them, floats through the movie in a trance. Floats through her life like it’s a movie. Until a friend of her husband’s, an older man, devious and sleazy, who seems to see right through her, implants the idea in Séverine’s head that there is a place where women like her – repressed, immoral, insatiable – can fulfill their fantasies in private and maintain their reputation in public.

A brothel.

He even gives her the address. And so she visits the brothel and she’s given a new name, to disguise her identity. Something that sounds exotic. Not Séverine. Something that will entice the clients.

Belle de jour
.

A cute French phrase that sounds like nonsense in English any way you cut it, which is probably why no one bothered to translate the title of the movie for the foreign market.

Belle de jour
.

Literally, beauty of the day. Or, today’s beauty.

Makes me think, ‘today’s special’.

Maybe that’s how Buñuel meant it too. The woman who has everything and wants for nothing, reduced to the dish of the day on the menu in a whorehouse. Buñuel’s little joke. His little humiliation. She’s always dish of the day, every single day. The special that never ever changes, that’s not really special at all.

The only thing special about her is her beauty which, although divine and transcendent, is ultimately worthless, because the only purpose it serves is to ease her passage into whoredom, to cheapen her.

She’s liver and mashed potatoes. Every single day.

And pretty soon, in that brothel, marked-down and cheapened, Séverine submits to her desires, every single one of them; her dreams now superimposed on reality. And pretty soon, her dreams supersede her reality.

And that’s where I come in.

I’m sitting in the theater watching the movie, and I recognize myself.

I have no ambition to be a whore. Not even in secret. That’s not what I meant.

What I mean is that I recognize something inside Séverine, as unlikely as it seems, that’s also inside me; as far apart as we are in background, temperament and character, there is something that connects us.

I’m not a prude. And I’m not a masochist – at least, I don’t think I am – but Séverine’s fantasies touch a nerve. Her reality, less so.

I’m sitting in the theater and my imagination takes over. I’m watching the movie and filling in the gaps. And pretty soon I’ve lost track of where the film ends and my fantasies begin.

When the movie’s over and I emerge from the dark into the mid-afternoon sun, I feel like I’m walking a high-wire. Teetering on the edge of a precipice, struggling to maintain my balance. I’m shaking inside. I don’t know what’s happened to me. I’m so confused. I can’t work out whether I’ve been overcome by delirium or have given in to mania. I only know that I don’t want the fantasy to stop. I’ve never imagined myself being pleasured in this way, and now that I have, I want more.

I walk home in a trance, navigating on autopilot, running the scenes back in my mind. I forget where I am and I realize I’m back in the movie.

I’m underneath the sweeping branches of a pine, held there against my will by the man I adore. Restrained, beaten and brutalized on his order by two savage men, while he watches, indifferent to my suffering.

My hands are hitched together with coarse rope and hauled so high above my head that the muscles in my arms stretch and burn. My feet claw at the ground as it swings beneath me. My dress has been ripped at the seams and sags from my waist like a wilted petal. My bra hangs loose from my shoulders, the underwire clipping against the nipples and hardening them.

Leather whips bear down upon my back, biting into the flesh, one and then another in quick succession, beating out a vicious rhythm that holds me in its thrall. I hear the crack of the lash, and then… the sting. The crack. And then the sting. As inevitably as lightning follows thunder, so pleasure follows pain. The intensity ratchets up and up and up with every stroke, until both, the pleasure and the pain, are all too much to bear. Adrenaline courses through my body.

I turn a corner.

I’m not even halfway home and I’m horny as hell.

I turn another corner and I’m back in the movie, now in the brothel, preparing to be inculcated into the pleasures of criminal desire by a ruffian with a cane and gold teeth who carries himself with a rough, primal swagger.

If clothes make the man, then this man is a study in contradictions. He has fashionable patent leather Chelsea boots worn down to a dull luster and socks that are threadbare, with large, ragged holes where the heels once were. A metal signet ring inset with a huge, finely cut diamond. And those gold teeth that gleam when he bares them and push his top lip up into a sneer. His hair, his leather overcoat, his trousers, his shoes, all black as night. Everything else, mismatched and fanciful. A purple waistcoat and a loud and lurid patterned tie.

When he takes off his shirt – a white shirt, the only thing pure and uncomplicated about him – there is a lean, hairless torso, as delicately contoured as a marble statue. Skin that’s pale and unblemished; until he turns around.

On his back is a large scar that curves underneath the shoulder blade; a ridged crescent of damaged tissue, even paler than the rest of his skin, although that doesn’t seem possible; an intimation of terrible violence.

He looks at me with an affected aristocratic aloofness. I look at him and I think of Marcus; but younger and rougher and more disheveled; dangerous and unpredictable where Marcus is soft and diffident. I look at him and I think of how I want Marcus to be, of how I want him to treat me.

With disdain.

I start to take off my underwear. He looks me hard in the eyes and says, ‘Leave your stockings on.’

An order, not a request. He unzips his trousers, still looking at me, and adds, ‘A girl tried to strangle me once.’

I wonder if maybe this is a warning. I wonder if this is what he intends for me. A chill runs through me.

But it’s too late for second thoughts because he’s already taking off his underpants, which are white like his shirt and his naked torso.

I lie on the bed, on my front, and turn my head to look at him over my shoulder.

I think of Marcus and his cock, snaking along the leg of his too-tight brown suit pants. And then I don’t have to wonder any more because it’s there, right in front of me, long and thin and majestic, curling upwards in a perfect curve; like a crescent moon at the end of its cycle, like the scar on his back and the blade of the dagger that made it. And he crawls up onto the bed, his long limbs craning over me, a spider closing in on the fly. He kicks my legs apart and lowers himself down between them. I can feel the swell of his cock resting against the crack of my ass. I can feel him raise himself up in a sawing motion.

His hand is flat against my neck, his fingers curving around it, the span between them so broad that he can almost reach all the way around. He squeezes slightly and the pressure feels so good. I wait for him to slide it down and hit all the pressure points on my neck and along my back. Instead, he tightens his grip and puts all his weight behind it, slamming my head down into the mattress.

I cry out, more in surprise than in pain.

I feel him pry open the cheeks of my ass with his one free hand and I prepare to cry out again, this time in pain more than in surprise. Because I know what’s coming. And it’s too late for second thoughts.

Then there’s a horn blaring in my ear. The squeal of brakes from a cab that’s come to a hard stop not six inches from my body, which is not two paces from the curb, where I’ve stepped off the sidewalk and into the street on a green light.

I’m shaking. Shocked out of my stupor. Thrown out of the screen and back to reality. And I do know the difference. I do know which is worse and which will cause more damage – being fucked up the ass by a thug, or fucked up the ass by a yellow cab.

I turn the key to the apartment, and the door’s not even halfway open before I call out,

‘Jack… Jack?’

He steps out into the hallway and I don’t say, ‘I love you. I missed you. How was your day?’

I say, ‘I want to fuck you so bad.’

And I’m on him in an instant and have him pinned up against the wall before he even knows what’s hit him. My mouth on his, kissing him hard and deep before he can say a word, before he can even catch a breath.