Whip Smart: A Memoir (23 page)

We made our way northwest, toward Chelsea, where I had made reservations at a Thai restaurant. We were a sizeable group for Manhattan sidewalks and fell into single file by twos. There was my mother’s sister, my father’s tiny Puerto Rican mother, my maternal grandmother, and my three immediate family members.

As we walked together, my brother handed me an envelope.

“Open it!” he said. Tearing the seal, I pulled out a handmade card. On the front was a colored pencil drawing of me, in graduation cap and gown. From under my hem poked out a pair of stilettos, and my hand held a whip that wound its way around the card. The drawing was good, and I laughed.

“Let me see!” demanded our father from behind us.

My brother and I exchanged a look. I felt my mother’s look as well, though I didn’t turn to see it. Sometimes I regretted having told her. Like the moment when she spotted the leather strap-on hanging from the back of my closet door and simply looked at me and said, “I know what they make you do with that.” For as much as she didn’t say, she saw a lot. I didn’t know if I wanted her to see less or say more. We both feigned comfort with the knowledge of what I did between us, but every time it was mentioned the look on her face sandpapered my insides.

So I handed my father the card. The silence while he examined it shimmered between my brother, mother, and me, disrupted only by the scrape of our shoes against the sidewalk and the murmur of my aunt’s telephone conversation ahead. My grandmothers lagged
a few yards behind in silence, having accepted the failure of Grammy’s hearing aid.

My father looked up at my mother and brother and me, and I didn’t need to turn my head to recognize the furrow of his forehead, to feel a pang of anxiety and faint revulsion at its innocence.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“I guess I have to tell you something, Dad.”

“What?”

“I’m a dominatrix.”

My dad has an assortment of laughs. His loudest is reserved for moments not necessarily of great hilarity but of surprise. The three of us, my mother especially, had spent many moments blushing with embarrassment in the darkness of movie theaters as my father bellowed with laughter at dinosaurs tearing human bodies apart with their teeth or scenes of bloody murder. When other people gasped, my father shook with uncontrollable laughter, his hand clamped over his mouth. I knew it was a nervous instinct; I had experienced the occasional spasmodic smile while being reprimanded as a child or in reaction to a piece of shocking information. But other people didn’t know that, and to them there was simply a sadist in the middle row.

This was the laugh that greeted my news. While it lasted, I chose to look at my brother but not my mother. What had shimmered between us in my father’s silence continued for his laughter. When he stopped and wiped the tears from his eyes, his first question was, “For how long?”

“A few months.”

He laughed briefly again.

“Wait, so you guys both knew?” His eyes shifted between my mother and brother.

They nodded.

He looked back at me. “I can’t believe I was the last to know!” he shouted. “
I’m
the cool parent!”

As it turned out, a young coworker of his at the Berkshire retreat
center where he had worked between voyages had also worked as a domme. I gathered that she had censored her anecdotes as I would have, saving me the assurances of my safety and dignity. He was delighted.

Something relaxed in me that afternoon, but not the part that held my dread. A future was sprawled out before me, one in which I was free to continue on the path I had taken. No one was going to protest; I had made sure of that.

TOWARD THE END
of my second year at the dungeon, I had started cruising the craigslist job listings outside of “Erotic Services.” It was a response to the gnawing feeling that my eligibility for other kinds of work was slipping away.

As a young teenager, I would ride my bike to the ocean at dusk. When the sun landed on the horizon, the beach would be empty except for a few people with their dogs, and couples in parked cars watching the sunset spill red across the water. The lifeguards were off-duty, and I would swim out until my shoulders throbbed. Right at the point where I tired there was a buoy moored. It was an old nicked thing, white with a red stripe around its potbelly. I would cling to its neck and catch my breath, watching the dogs on the beach glide like gnats in wide figure eights. Without the buoy I probably couldn’t have made it back. I had been foolish enough to try the distance once, and then it became my routine. Sometimes, bobbing there with the waves softly slapping my back and no human sound except for my breath, I would hallucinate the shore receding, the tiny figures of people becoming tinier. Panic crashing
through me, I’d be certain that the buoy had lost its mooring, that I was drifting out to sea.

I had moments like that at the dungeon. When I heard news of an acquaintance’s success at a normal job, acceptance to graduate school, or engagement, panic would again crash through me. I was drifting too far away; by the time I turned back the swim would be too long, the water too cold, the fear too great.

It was a slow but insidious transformation of my thinking. “You are what you do, not what you say,” they told me in meetings, and it was true. What I did dictated who I felt like, and in direct proportion. When I was getting A’s in college and shooting up every day, I felt like a smart junky. When I ran twenty miles per week, I felt like a runner. By my third year of being a dominatrix, I felt like a sober sex worker. I spent all of my time concentrating on not getting high, and becoming men’s sexual fantasies. Being in recovery was the first time I felt like an honest person, and not that deep-down-inside-God-knows-I’m-good feeling, but like someone who actually tells the truth. You can’t get as honest as I did about my drug use and still do it. You also can’t spend every day banking on your sex appeal and not start feeling like it’s the most valuable part of you.

When I sent my résumé out in response to the editorial assistant position, it didn’t feel like anything. I had no plan to leave the dungeon; I just wanted to know if I could still get a real job, if I could still pass so easily for normal. I just pressed a few buttons on my computer and a list of my accomplishments up until college graduation zipped through the Internet ether. I didn’t tell anyone, so I wouldn’t have to tell them that I had been ignored, or rejected. My whole life I had expected to win things. School readathons, friends, spelling bees, lovers, internships, attention, permission—I just always had. I didn’t think twice about dropping out of high school, I was so sure that it was an obstacle to my success. It was childish grandiosity and my intelligence helped, but hunger is what made it so powerful.

The office was in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, an industrial park that looked across the East River at lower Manhattan. I wore the same outfit that I had to my interview at the dungeon. All my business clothes purchased in the last few years had been for sessions, not actual offices, and I knew better than to show up at an interview dressed like a pending sexual harassment suit.

I took the bus through Williamsburg, watching the skinny hipsters with asymmetrical haircuts change into Hasids with all their black wool, beards, and kerchiefed women ushering broods of children across the streets. I glided by men in suits, clutching briefcases and barking into cell phones. One in particular—a thick, jowly man with a clipboard, leaning against a sedan—struck me as familiar. Whenever I vaguely recognized a man on the street, I felt a pang of anxiety, my mind flooding with all the things I might have done to him, the ways he might have seen me. Occasionally, I did see clients out in the world. How many did I not recognize? How many of the men I passed in the street had been to Mistress X’s? What did they think when they stared at me deboarding the bus? I knew that all of them weren’t perverts and that it was wrong of me to think that way. Still, I couldn’t help feeling as if they recognized me, too, as if in the meet of our eyes all pretenses fell away and we were simply dominatrix and client, meeting in the street. I  couldn’t help feeling that we knew each other’s secrets, as if in passing each other our clothes fell off. It felt both humiliating and privileged. I had lost my anonymity, in a sense. If I could not see these men without imagining them groaning in a puddle of urine under me, how did they see me? I did not even share their obsession. How did any of my clients see women as anything else?

The press’s office was in a large, open space on the fifth floor of a warehouse. The editorial, payroll, and copyright departments were separated only by tall, metal shelves full of collections like that of their annual volume of Dickens criticism, from the last fifty years. I was interviewed by a woman my own age. The first minutes were awful. It felt like the first date after a divorce. To be questioned
by this stranger, to even be sitting so close to her, felt oddly intimate. I was so used to being immediately privy to the needs and shame of strangers that I almost felt I knew hers already. I could see it when she tucked her hair behind her ear and in the bulge of her belly when she sat and plucked at her blouse, in the shift of her gaze. It took me a while to turn that off. I didn’t have to find her shame to get this job, as I did at the dungeon, but I looked for it habitually. I took control of the interview the way I did pre-session consultations. I began asking the questions, squinting and nodding at her answers as if in careful consideration. She had to want
my
approval. I left feeling that I’d won. Two days later she called to offer me the job. Impulsively I accepted. It felt so good to be wanted.

The job paid $12 an hour and required a minimum of twenty-five hours per week. I hadn’t worked more than twenty-five hours per week in years. There was no way I could maintain my lifestyle on $12 an hour, but I had wads of cash hidden all over my bedroom and wasn’t thinking longitudinally. I didn’t want to quit; I just wanted to know that I could. I considered it an experiment, a way of assuring my easy assimilation back into the real world, whenever the time for that arrived. Keeping the wheels greased. Remy agreed to give me a few months off to take some imaginary classes. Autumn was skeptical.

“You’re going to work in an office? Eight hours a day? You’re going to hate it.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know
you
, stupid. You are going to be bored out of your mind. Have you ever worked in an office?” I hadn’t really. “Why don’t you just swallow your pride and get a job waiting tables?”

She had quit for good a few months before, under more dramatic circumstances. Remy had used spyware to break into her e-mail, and when she found out Autumn had raged through the dungeon, cursing at him while packing her things. A blowout like that was something to be grateful for, she said; it made it impossible for her to go back.

“You could always go somewhere else,” I had told her.

“Yeah, but I won’t. I’m done.”

I both pitied and envied her. While I was expecting to feel as she did, what I was doing felt less like putting something down than running away from it. I was afraid of drowning, not sick of swimming.

Having cobbled my concept of office life together from movies, I was surprised to find that I did not spend my days clicking around the office in heels, answering phones, and flirting with handsome coworkers. Nor was I actually editing, or wrangling with difficult though genius writers over the phone. My days were an endless spool of quiet, miserable boredom, punctured only by the scrape of metal from the construction site outside my window. My coworkers were all women. The one with whom I had the most contact was Ilse, the office manager. Ilse had been with the press for thirty years and was easily in her seventies. She must have once been beautiful, with an angular face that years of scorn had sharpened into a shingle. Shrewd and efficient, with no use for social niceties, she would have made a great domme fifty years ago, I thought. I had joked many times about wishing I had a domme of my own in college or at the gym, someone to make me get my life in order. I always knew I could do more to please someone else than myself. Ilse was not this person, although she acted like it.

“Melissa!” she would bark my name across the office. When I made it over to her desk, she would glower at me, her eyes pointedly resting on the tattoo peeking out of my sleeve. “What are you doing?”

“Uh, I am proofing the Dickens annual.”

“Stop that. File these.” She would point to one of the decrepit towers of paper on the wall of shelves behind her desk, which held all the company’s records before 1980.

I didn’t have a computer, only endless yellow pads of Post-its.
Ilse was in at six every morning and left at three in the afternoon. After the click of her heels faded down the hallway toward the freight elevator, I would read novels and sometimes the
MLA Style Manual
, picking choice citations from it, or the payroll secretary’s personal calls, to write on the yellow squares.

After a month at the new job I went on a fast. “The Master Cleanse” limited my diet to laxative tea and a mixture of water, lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. Maybe I missed the extremity of the dungeon, or maybe I just wanted to quit. Boredom was something to withstand, but it wasn’t what I was used to; there were no sharp corners of boredom, no distance to fall. Monotony has blunt edges, unchanging landscape. It was an Oklahoma highway of time, my month there.