Sasha Grey - The Juliette Society

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.