Scar Flowers (20 page)

Wednesday, September 6,
4:50 p.m.

Branches rustled in Leah’s yard beyond the fence, and sparrows quarreled in the hedge. Simon
pushed the intercom buzzer at the front gate, its thick oak boards bound in wrought iron. He rang again, glancing at his reflection in the lens of a security camera. This time the gate clicked open.

The
path inside was covered by a trellis draped with twisting wisteria vines and lined by rose bushes. Flowering moss insinuated itself between the bricks underfoot. The effect was of a leafy tunnel, through which he glimpsed the house, a 1960s-vintage two-story affair. A cottonwood loomed over the roof, its silver-dollar leaves fluttering. The blinds were shut on the ground floor, and thick glass blocks served as windows on the top floor. An unremarkable building except for its proximity to the lake, which lapped nearby. A hedge blocked the neighboring houses from sight.

At the front door, another security camera gazed down. He pushed the intercom button, and a buzzer rang inside as the door clicked open.

Inside was a whitewashed foyer with a locked door and a stairway. A row of glass bricks near the ceiling admitted wan light. In the corner, a fountain lulled and whispered: a wall covered with three-dimensional mouths, row after row of them. Most had their tongues out, poised to lick. Water ran down the realistically color-ed lips and teeth—he imagined dozens of prisoners sunk in a pool of white clay, the only trace left of them a frozen depiction of the desire that had trapped them there. A small halogen spotlight targeted the fountain, as if it were an art gallery installation, and the room, with its flagstones and tiny scattered lights, dripped with the sound of moisture running, like a primeval grotto. Carved wooden masks, similarly lighted, covered the walls and lined the staircase.

At the top of the stairs
, he found a waiting room with a table in the center and two chairs against the wall. A red velvet curtain concealed whatever lay beyond a wrought-iron gate. Already, he imagined a dozen different stories about who Leah and her clients were.
Don’t become a director yet. Let the story unfold on its own.

He checked the camera battery at his hip, then turned to take in all 360 degrees. Bondage photographs, a mirror framed with bones carved from ivory, a case containing rococo boots made from high-heeled ballet toe shoes. He lifted the lid of a carved wooden box on the table: empty.
A plain mask of black cloth lay next to it. Judging by the décor, he might have wandered into a museum of perversions and oddities.

Opposite the wrought
-iron gate stood a carved mahogany door that opened into a confessional with a kneeling bench, the smells of wax and wood. He stepped in. Did Leah’s slaves crouch here in the dark?

The holes in the center of the grill were so small
that he had to move his head to see through them clearly, in a pointillist pano-rama: a pair of high-backed easy chairs, a video monitor near the ceiling, a roll-top desk. Slats of light reached through the blinds near the far wall, and incense laced the air. He checked the camera’s focus and knelt so that he could get a shot through the larger holes at the corners of the grill. No sign of Leah.

The thump of a drawer closing in the next room rattled his booth, accompanied by a faint jingle like bracelets clinking. He considered announcing himself, but he had fulfilled his half of the bargain by arriving on time. Whatever he learned before she discovered him was fair game.

A few faint notes warmed the air as she hummed to herself. Another drawer slid open and shut.

The confessional was roughly twice the size of a coffin. He touched the grated barrier of the grill, impatient with his obstructed view of the room next
door. He trailed his hands along the walls. Hanging in the corner, level with his face, he found a length of interlocking rings with a hinged circlet at the end. A rough surface minutely pitted, one that smelled of iron and a trace of perfume. It must be Leah’s.

The hairs on the back of his neck stirred. The heavy spice of Leah’s signature fragrance, sharp clove and moss with a grainy hint of sandalwood, scraped the back of his throat. Disembodied, like a clue in a mystery. Was this object something she wore? Simon touched his tongue to it, the damp-earth scent of metal loud in his nostrils, the links cold and hard against the side of his face. Salt and grit, a metallic stain that reminded him of sweat. So that’s what it was: a chain. And the circlet at the end was a medieval handcuff. Decorative, or antique.

“You’re right on time.”

Simon started. Leah’s voice, rough as a cat’s tongue, tingled in his ears. He searched the last few moments for a memory of when the humming had stopped, an indication of how long she might have been aware of his presence. He took a breath. She should not have been able to see anything in this gloom.

“Very atmospheric setup,” he said. “Are you my confessor?”

“That depends. Do you have any questions before we begin?”

All he could see of her face through the grill was a mosaic of shadowed features, pale against the darkness, like a figure on a stained glass window. Here was the old Leah, the one he knew from the set, only more so. Sure of herself, as if she knew his secrets.  

“Just a second.” Simon stepped out of the booth and returned with one of the chairs from the foyer to sit on. Leah’s eyebrow lifted at his refusal to kneel, whether from amusement or respect he could not tell. “Do I have any questions before we begin
. . . begin talking, you mean?”

She made a sound under her breath as if she had just tasted something delicious and said, “That depends on you. Are you here as a director? Or a participant?”

It was not a difficult question, but he felt annoyed, like a pedestrian pursued by a street performer.

“I’m a filmmaker. I want to know why they come to you. What they find here.”

“Very well.” She settled into a brisker tone, amused but confiding, as if he were an old friend. “Why they come . . . On the surface, it’s different for everyone. If you were a client, I’d tell you people come to prove themselves. They climb mountains or race motorcycles or make films. They need the adrenaline. Then I’d tell any client there are physical limits he thought were carved in stone that I can take him beyond, and transcending them can turn fear into strength. It’s a rather effective speech.”

“You said on the surface
?”

“Underneath, their reasons are all the same. They want me to force them into what they secretly crave.”

“You mean—”

“
If
you were my client, I would give that speech about the surface reasons.” From the window by her desk came the cough and drone of a lawnmower outside. Next to him, a rustle like skin against taught fabric rasped in his ear, as though she had stretched or shifted position. “If you were my client, I’d have been thinking about you, preparing several possible scenarios based on what I know about your psychology.”

He had planned to let her do most of the talking, to
have her fill the silences, but he found himself speaking to cover up the racing of his pulse.

Based on
what I know about you.
Simon thought of the fantasy he had told her in her hotel room. Had she been thinking about him?

“What do you know about me?”

“You’re a sensualist, possibly even a synesthete. And a natural submissive.”

Simon laughed. The wooden box flung the sound back as if it weighed nothing, like torn strips of paper. “I can’t tell if you’re trying to flatter me or sell your agenda.”

“Or both?”

He caught her fragmented smile—an
eye, hooded with shadow, and the curve of a lip, framed with metal.

“All that matters is that it’s true,” she continued.

“Really.”

“Most clients don’t even notice the manacles I hung in the corner. The ones that
do can’t resist touching them. But I’ve never known one to taste them before.”

His stomach went cold. “What do you mean?”

“You’re not the only one with a camera. The one in the confessional is infrared.”

The quartered images on the split screen monitor above her desk were too grainy for him to make out from this distance. He
turned to look for a camera and saw nothing but shades of black. Was she bluffing?

“What does it say about you that you stalked me in
L.A.?”

“Isn’t that what you’ve come with your questions and your camera to find out?”

“So is what you do considered prostitution?” Simon asked.

Leah raised her hand and rubbed the tip of each fingernail
. “My clients sell themselves—
buy
themselves. Not me,” she said. “Is an interview what you really want? I thought you already knew all about what I am.”

Under the breezy tone, defensiveness flavored her words.

“I didn’t mean to insult you back on the set. But you did lie to me, and my film was at stake.” He fought to keep his tone neutral.

The temperature between them dropped like a stone in a lake. Maybe there was too much history between them for this to be a real interview. He could not seem to find his objectivity, and she seemed ready to flee.

“If you’d known about me, about this.” She waved a hand. “Would you have hired me?”

“No.”

“Was my work on the film good?”

“Yes, but—”

“All right, then.” The lawnmower outside faded with a whine before she spoke again. “I was wrong, what I did was wrong, and I am sorry. I broke rules and ignored your humanity. Does that solve it for you?”

Simon made a fist, then relaxed his fingers.

“Why’d you agree to talk to me like this?” he asked.

“I meant it when I said I was wrong. I owe you something. At the very
least you’ll learn something about yourself. Even those who watch are participants.”

He wasn’t going to bite at that remark either.
He had learned from making documentaries that if he sat silent long enough, his subjects offered up their most revealing comments.

“You won’t get what you’re after like this,” said Leah. “Not with talking.”

“What makes you think so?” He had a moment of premo-nition, a shifting of his self. Dizzying, like standing on the deck of a ship.

“Most people live in a world of images or words. But you need to feel something to understand it. You need to hold it in your hands, mold it like clay for it to be real. Like the sculpting scene you added to
Babylon
that wasn’t in the book.”

Another trick like the hypnosis: dissecting his motives, proclaiming a map of his psyche. But he was a filmmaker, he thought in images. He did not kneel i
n the dark, enslaved by emotion.

“Film critics love to play armchair psychologist too, but their guesses don’t help their reviews. You were going to show me what you do. Isn’t that why we’re talking?”

There it was again: he offering explanations and she revealing nothing.
She’s a smug member of the ruling class
, his brain whispered.
Rich and sheltered.

“If you like. Then let’s return to our hypothetical client. B
efore he came to me, we would’ve established on the phone what I won’t do during his session.”

“Such as?” Simon stretched and sat forward to ease the way the camera at his belt had dug into his side.

“Sleep with you. Undress for you. Submit to you in any way. Then there’s the list of perversions
that I won’t perform on you and the menu of the ones I will. Don’t bother asking. That’s for clients.”

For clients. Not for you.

“What about what I could do? If it were my session.”
Sleep with you. Undress for you. Submit to you.
Simon’s concentration melted every time he relaxed his guard. He rolled his shoulders back to shrug off the languor. It was not hypnosis he had to watch out for this time—it was his own ambivalence. Until he understood more about her profession, she could retreat into her stock replies.

“I would choose what would be done to you, determined by my intuition, your medical history, if you expressed an interest in experiencing any pain—and if so, what kind of marks I could leave on you, if any. And you’d choose a safeword, a phrase you’d say if things got too intense, to stop the session immediately.”

“The men who come here—”

“Not all. Some are women.”

“But don’t they desire you? Doesn’t it get sexual?”

“As
sexual as it can while they are bound and unable to touch me. It’s a different kind of thing than you might expect. Call it metasexual. And I control it.”

“Al
l of it?”

“Yes. I enjoy orchestrating it
. That’s why I do this.”

“
What if you desired one of them?”

“
An interesting question.”

“Has it happened before? That you’ve been attracted to
a client?” She might misunderstand the intention behind his questions, but this was his first opening.