Punish Me with Kisses (20 page)

Jamie arrived at eight, took me to Le Cirque. He was carrying his camera bag. "You'll be scared," he assured me. So—it's really going to happen, I thought. Blow my mind. WOW."

Outside the restaurant a long black limousine. We got in, then the scary part began. "Put your head down on my lap." I obeyed, he stroked my hair, explained I wasn't to know our destination, where we were going, and even afterwards where we'd been. The windows were shut tight. All I could hear was the hum of the car. "Poor baby," he said over and over "Poor, poor baby, about to enter the abyss." We were driving fast, must have been on a speedway, FDR Drive or something, uptown or downtown I had no idea. "Poor baby, poor little girl—oh, what are we ever going to do with YOU?"

We drove for an hour. The car finally stopped He warned me not to look. I had to be blindfolded first. Outside I smelled flowers, lawn, heard crickets, distant howling dogs. We were in the country someplace. I fantasized a powerful man's estate.

The doorbell chimed "You're not
Suze
anymore," he whispered "You're S tonight, S like 0 in
The Story of 0
." Was I dreaming? Should I laugh, rip off my blindfold, run away giggling in the night? As much as I wanted to flee, I wanted even more to stay and to endure.

Door opened. Jamie gripped me tight, led me across a deep pile rug. I sensed the others. Six or seven, I thought, men and women, too. "This is S," Jamie announced. "Curtsy to them, " he whispered. I obeyed, heard approving "
oohs
" and "ahs."

"You're going to like her, " Jamie said. "S is insatiable. You'll all be able to drink your fill." Already he was
unzippering
my back. Soon I was naked except for my necklace, and of course the blindfold tied around my head. More approving sighs, mutterings. "Isn't she special?" Jamie asked "Yes. Yes she is." I don't know why but it was the women I really feared. I sensed they were hard, fortyish, severe, not sweet pathetic things like
Cin
, but cruel, and I wasn't pleased by the thought that soon I'd be in their power. It was the men I craved, the older powerful ones.

CLICK! Steel handcuffs snapped around my wrists. I started to protest but Jamie shushed me up. "You've got to be helpless—you agreed to that." I was led about the room, their hands stroking, feeling me up. Someone pinched my nipples. Someone else put his hand around my neck. "I think she's hot already," one of the women said. A hand thrust into my pussy, two fingers hooked in, probing up. "Yes, she's wet. She'll be ready soon."

"Look how straight she stands."

"She's proud, isn't she. She won't be later, though."

The bed was huge. My wrists and ankles were tied to the corners. I was open, stretched, available to be used. And they came in succession, a lone man first—he was heavy and breathed hard and sweated as he thrust. A wait then—who would have me next? Two of them, I thought, then I suspected there were three—mouths on my breasts, a tongue wagging fast and taut against my clit, fingers everywhere, tickling, stroking, a thick cock thrust suddenly against my lips.

"Deep throat!" he ordered. Flashes of light. Jamie was taking pictures. Will he sell them to a split-beaver mag? The idea appealed to me. My punishment. What would HE think if he saw me like this? I struggled and writhed to enhance the effect. And then the thought of being photographed made me come.

"She's got a lot more in her," a woman said. She went down on me, ate me for an eternity. Then they left me alone. How long? Half an hour? After that it was all cocks, each bigger than the next, hard savage ones banging in and out until I ached. I was gang-banged, ravaged, turned over, taken from behind. Jamie's flashbulbs popped. I was
Greeked
and then released. Jamie led me to a bathroom, unknotted my blindfold, watched me while I bathed. "Thrilling enough?" he asked. I shrugged, blasé. "Shot seven rolls," he said "I'll make you a scrapbook as a souvenir."

 
Up yours, sweets, I thought. Thanks a bunch for the trip, but I'm afraid it didn't help. The memory wasn't blotted; all I felt was dry and rather pained.

 
"So—?" he asked later in the car. "An experience," I told him, lying in his lap. "I'll write it up in my secret diary. I'm glad I did it, but I wouldn't go through that again. I'm more of an S than I am an M, I think. I'll tell you one thing,
dearie
. Being
Greeked
isn't all that big a charge. I feel sorry now for all you fags."

Today I snuck into the darkroom. The scrapbook he made was filled with shots of me, close-ups of various and sundry genitalia, and the backs of peoples' heads. He cut out the rest, evidence of who the people were. But I wanted to know what I was screwed by, so I went into his safe, found the
negs
and made up a set of contacts for myself. JESUS! The men were flabby, middle-aged, the women lined and old. Couldn't he have set it up with a black basketball team, anything except this overweight suburban bunch? The one with the thick dick has a face like John Mitchell. The cruel lady looks like Walter Cronkite in a fright wig. Jesus, I've been gang-banged by Great Neck! By Scarsdale blue-hairs for Christ's sake! I've been had by the sort of people you see sitting around in airports, white tufts of chest hair sprouting out of polyester shirts—

A
fter Penny read this passage she felt filled with sadness and shame. There were many pages like it, tales of orgies and self-debasements, scornful references to inadequate lovers, shrieks of discontent. The diary upset her, but not because of sex. It was the pathos of it, Suzie's misery, that filled her with despair.

There was another thing, too, something she didn't understand: the diary turned her on. How strange to react to her sister's escapades as if she were reading a pornographic novel. But that's what was happening; she was aroused by what she read. Peering into Suzie's sex life was to discover bizarre longings—to be tied to bedposts and probed by strangers, to be ravished by armies of men.

Jared said the diary just showed how screwed up Suzie had been. "There's this guy she seems to be hung up on, someone vague who won't see her and apparently feels about her the way she feels about Cynthia. And then there's the bisexual photographer, Jamie, but she doesn't seem to like him all that much, and he doesn't come across as the impassioned killer type."

"So where does that leave us?" Penny asked.

"Back at zero, where we'll always be."

Still the diary fascinated her. It was as if Suzie were calling from the pages, crying out to her for help. Maybe it had been silly to think it would give her the murderer's name, but now she was interested in other things: why Suzie had lived this way, what had made her so unhappy, what was behind her will toward self-destruction, what she had been looking for.

She wanted to meet this Jamie
Willensen
, wanted to put a face on this person to whom Suzie had relinquished so much. Jared told her to leave it alone, stop prying around in Suzie's life.

"She's my sister. I don't feel like I'm prying."

"She's dead now. What difference does it make?"

"I want to understand her."

"You're getting obsessed."

"I just want to understand."

"You can carry that too far."

Her interest annoyed him. He complained again that she was talking like Suzie and that her gestures were sometimes the same. "Next thing you know you'll want to start re-enacting scenes," he said.

"Sure. Why not? Why don't you tie me down and fuck me in the ass?"

"See? That's just what I mean. And you think it's just a joke."

"No. I'm serious. Maybe I am obsessed. I care about her. What's wrong with that?"

He shook his head. "Caring won't bring her back." Then he looked at her. "Maybe you ought to see a shrink."

She didn't want to see a shrink.

She wanted to see Jamie
Willensen
. She looked him up in the phone book. His studio was just a couple blocks away. She asked Jared to walk over there; maybe they'd catch a glimpse of him as he came or left. Jared wasn't crazy about the idea but finally agreed to come along. They went over after work.

It was an old carriage house conversion on East Seventy-Eighth, a narrow two-story building, the kind that was cheap thirty years ago, worth a fortune now. The carriage entrance, two huge doors facing the street, was sealed up, but there was a little doorway to the side and two doorbells, one marked "residence," the other "studio." Penny knew the sort of place. She'd seen spreads on fashion photographers' studios in magazines: a cavernous downstairs filled with lights and expanses of fabric and paper hanging on rollers from the ceiling like giant shades and various props spread around; upstairs would be the apartment where he lived.

The place was shut tight, though she could see some light escaping through vertical blinds on the second floor. "What are we supposed to do now?" Jared asked. "Ring the doorbell and introduce ourselves?"

"I just want to see what it looks like," she said.

"You said you wanted to see him. There's a phone booth on the corner. Call him and tell him we're here. Tell him your Suzie's sister and you've been reading her diary, and there's a lot of stuff about him in there, and we wondered if he had any of those old orgy photographs around, and if he does could we come up and take a look."

"You know I'm not going to do anything like that."

"You want to see him—OK. I'll call him, tell him there's a baby on his doorstep. That should lure him out and then you'll have your look. Then maybe we can get out of here and go eat dinner someplace."

He was taunting her. She turned to him and asked why he was being so mean.

"Because this whole scene is ridiculous, standing around out here looking up at his windows, hoping by some fluke he'll come out and show his face. I know you're into that sort of stuff, but isn't it usually the other way around?"

"
What
?"

"Well, aren't you the one who's usually up there in the window, and aren't the people you're spying on usually standing around outside?"

She looked at him, unbelieving. "That's a lousy thing to say."

He seemed confused. "I'm sorry, babe. I just feel like a fool standing out here. It just came out. I didn't mean it. I don't know what I meant." He reached out for her but she stood back.

"Things like that don't just 'come out' unless they're already in your head. Since you're so hungry," she said, turning, walking away, "why don't you just bug off and eat."

He called after her. "Where are you going?"

"None of your business." And then, as an afterthought, she turned and stared at him. "Fuck off!" she said sharply. And then to herself:
That's what Suzie would have said
.

T
hey made it up later that night. He was waiting for her when she came back from a Woody Allen movie. She'd gone to it hoping some laughter would do her good, but she hadn't laughed; the picture had made her sad. Jared apologized again, this time earnestly. He said she'd been right—the idea that she was a voyeur had been in his mind, and because it was her one weakness, he'd used it against her as people who know each other very well sometimes do, to take out his own frustrations and bitterness which had nothing to do with her or even with having to stand outside Jamie
Willensen's
carriage house, but with the fact that he was a failed actor, maybe even a failed human being.

"There's that creep of a photographer," he said, "a piece of human garbage, if you can believe half of what Suzie wrote, making big bucks, being touted as a Big Talent, who can afford a suede couch that cost thirty-five hundred dollars three-and-a-half years ago, which means, if you take inflation into account, it probably sells for four grand today. And to top it off I was thinking about how it had 'come' dribbled on it by some asshole named Dave, and how, probably, instead of having it cleaned he's just left on the stains to make it more of a conversation piece. So I turned on you and said something lousy, probably one of the lousiest things anyone's ever said to you in your life, which puts me, I suppose in the same category as prosecutor Robinson. And so, on that note, I was thinking maybe I should just pack up and move into the Y or someplace, or maybe better, more in keeping with the sort of bastard I am, that bug-ridden whorehouse down by the Port Authority from which you extracted me so kindly, and for which I've repaid you by acting like a shit."

Penny had begun to laugh halfway through his little speech, and Jared could barely keep a straight face himself as he came to its end.

"OK," she said. "Apology accepted. Now please, for Christ's sake, shut up."