Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

Then she remembered she had gotten Severin at the same time she had met the Representative. Eleven years ago. She had not thought that Severin would outlive him. What had gone on between them in the last couple of years no longer felt like a performance she was being paid to give, but a mutual give-and-take between friends (they had always been equals), between almost lovers. In a certain way, they had loved each other. They were lovers who could do certain things with each other because they had started out without the usual invisible walls, the walls that are there when people meet each other in the “real world,” out there in the wild, with all the complex uncertainties of sex and power and emotion unspoken and unsolved between them — the way it is between two people who are not sure, or who are afraid to say, exactly what it is they want from each other.

However, that simplicity, that clarity, had thrillingly, unsettlingly, gone away. This was not ordinary. This was not responsible. Rebecca had no other relationship like this with any other person who had begun as a client. The first time they’d had sex (ordinary, unadorned sexual intercourse) was two years ago — afterward it had felt to her deeply, inexplicably wrong, almost like incest. She could not forgive herself for a long time, and had refused to see him for months afterward. He had acted in an appallingly unprofessional manner, and she had not stopped him, which was appallingly unprofessional of her. She had allowed the boundary between them that had kept things simple to drop. He had flooded her voice mail with messages, sent her strings of increasingly desperate e-mails, sent her flowers. Eventually, she allowed him back. She had genuinely missed him. She missed his company. She missed his very genuine wit and charm, his warm, confiding conversation in the apartment, sitting around drinking wine after a session, or in one of the restaurants where he wasn’t likely to be recognized. When she returned, something between them had changed forever. There was a new sense of intimacy between them; now they could never go back to the satisfying but emotionally safe relationship they’d had before. They had ruined one thing, and made something new, something else. They showed each other their souls as well as their bodies, and this was when he quit paying her. He still paid for her airfare, her meals, her drinks, her hotel room — everything extraneous that needed paying for — but this was when he quit paying her any money directly, and she never asked for it or expected it again. It was different, now. This became the new norm. Sometimes she would be in character as Mistress Delilah, and sometimes she was herself, Rebecca Spiegel. The Representative was in love with both women, but in very different ways. When they had ordinary sex — when she was Rebecca — she didn’t wear her costumes: no corsets, no wigs, no whips or bondage or toys. They were two people naked in bed together in the most predictable arrangements: an affair that was perfectly legal, but came with all the usual lies and complications of infidelity (on his part). Rebecca had quite recently realized that she had something with Sam (for that was the Representative’s name) that she had never quite had with Richard.

A month earlier they had been in Rebecca’s hotel room in The Fairfax. It was risky for Sam to be seen there, even by the desk clerks. It was after a session at the apartment. The risk was stupid, but they had wanted to have sex as Rebecca and Sam — without Mistress Delilah or the Representative around — and he didn’t want to do it in the apartment, because he wanted to keep his fantasy sex life separate from his other sex life, which was in turn separate and kept secret from the rest of his life. (It was frightening how many lives Sam juggled.) When he came, she felt at once that the condom had broken. He pulled out, and they both looked down at the sleeve of latex with a broken flap loosening its grip around his softening penis. He had a sheepish, embarrassed look. In that moment, Sam, still breathing heavily after coming, naked in her bed in her hotel room, fat and white and growing old, on his knees with his cock retracting between his legs, looked helpless — less than ever like a powerful and influential and principled man, and more like a fragile adolescent boy who did not yet know himself. He began to stammer his way through saying he was clean as far as he knew, and, um, well.

“Don’t worry,” Rebecca had said. “I’ll take care of it.”

LOW PRIORITY

5. The secret

How did she come to be here? — sitting in this chair at the age of thirty-nine, not dead broke, but zero nest-egg in savings, single, growing older, wanting a child but having no one to have it with, and no career outside of sex work, which had always felt like a side career anyway. She’d never really planned on making a living off it. Mistress Delilah got her start back in the nineties, working in a fairly aboveground dungeon in TriBeCa — there were private rooms where things could get a little more intimate, but it was all low-grade stuff — mostly fantasy, role-playing. Nobody came; no fluids other than sweat and maybe a little blood were expurgated from anyone’s body. It was all light whipping and caning, usually with sleazy Eurobeat crap blasting through the speakers. The place had a façade that made it clear what it was. It was a legitimate business, the building passed code. It was decorated to evoke a medieval castle (or something), black iron chains, fake stone walls, spooky candelabras dripping red wax: something about the aggressive fakery of the place she’d found distasteful. She felt the décor called attention to the fantasy rather than melding it with the real. The joint was even still there, though in a reduced state, one of the few true BDSM clubs that survived Giuliani’s Disneyfication of Manhattan. Sometimes gawkers would come just to hang out at the bar and watch. After a year or so there she’d moved on to working at a much sketchier sex club, behind an unmarked metal door on a nondescript side street in Chinatown. You had to get buzzed in, and then push your way through two layers of black velvet curtains and down a set of stairs, then another door, where the guy who scrutinized you and then maybe let you in sat on a stool in the hall. That place had class, a sense of reality, of a little real danger. People really got hurt there. Not badly, of course, but there were definitely patrons who left with marks they would want to conceal with strategic clothing for at least a few days. She’d liked the aesthetic of the place: mirrors everywhere, red floors, all the furniture ornate and old-fashioned, fake Louis Quatorze chairs and tables — it had a very Story of O look. You had to know someone to get in. It was the kind of place where people who were hard-core into the BDSM scene went; you would never see a lifestyle tourist there. That was where Mistress Delilah started picking up her first private clients, and from there she set off on her own. She got Ike to take the first set of photos, got Richard to help her set up the website. That was how she’d met the Representative, through a referral from someone at the club who knew him. Back then he was getting ready to run for city council. He only met dominatrices in private sessions — he was too afraid to show his face at even the most secretive, discreet sex clubs. When Mistress Delilah did private sessions, she let her clients come. Usually not until the very end, due to the nature of the male orgasm, with its punctuative finality. But that was not usual. Those were the ones who made the most money — the ones who let their clients come. It was slightly dangerous: The involvement of an orgasm pushes the session into the gray area of what may or may not be prostitution. Legally, it’s a hard thing to define. Sometimes she let a client see her breasts, or she would push her underwear aside to piss on the floor or a client’s face, but she almost never took off any more of her costume than she began the session in. There was a foot fetishist she had who got off simply on giving her a foot massage and a pedicure. At the end of the session, she would relax in the recliner, wiggling her toes, tufts of cotton stuck between them, toenails freshly filed and lovingly painted valentine red, kissable as lips — why not let him come? Admiring his handiwork, that Goldman Sachs executive on his knees at her feet inhales the toxic sweetness of the drying nail polish and plants timid, delicate kisses on her feet while he masturbates with the feverish, trembling hands of a starving man fumbling with the cellophane packaging of a premade airport bagel sandwich. It had been a jarring contrast, to be pampered, adored, worshiped in this theatrical way by powerful men who paid her to let them do so, while at home, when Mistress Delilah was folded in the black bag in the closet and she was only Rebecca Spiegel, she was being taken for granted and lied to by her husband, treated like shit — treated merely ( merely , Colin) like someone’s wife. At times she wished she could step through the mirror’s membrane where fantasy touches the fingertips of reality.