Nine and a Half Weeks an Incredible Love Affair

The First Time we were in bed together, he held my hands pinned down above my head. I liked it. I liked him. He was moody in a way that struck me as romantic; he was funny bright, interesting to talk to; and he gave me pleasure.

The second time, he picked my scarf up off the floor where I had dropped it while getting undressed, smiled and said, "Would you let me blindfold you?" No one had blindfolded me in bed before and I liked it. I liked him even better than the first night and later couldn't stop smiling while brushing my teeth.

The third time, he repeatedly brought me to within a hairsbreadth of coming. When I was beside myself yet again and he stopped once more, I heard my voice, disembodied above the bed, pleading with him to continue. He obliged. I was beginning to fall in love.

The fourth time, when I was aroused enough to be fairly oblivious, he used the same scarf to tie my wrists together. That morning, he had sent 13 roses to my office.

•

It's Sunday, toward the end of May. I'm spending the afternoon with a friend downtown and there is a street fair in her neighborhood. I am trying to decide whether or not to backtrack half a block to the table where I've fingered a lace shawl that my friend has pronounced grubby. "It was grubby," I say loudly to her back, a little ahead of me, hoping to be heard above the din. "But can't you picture it washed and mended?" She looks back over her shoulder, cups her ear with her right hand, points at the woman in a very large man's suit who is attacking a set of drums with ardor; rolls her eyes; turns away.

"Better do it, then," says a voice close to my left ear. I whisk around and give the man directly behind me an annoyed look, then face forward again and attempt to catch up with my friend. But I'm literally stuck. The mob has slowed down from a slow shuffle to no movement at all. "This is a street fair," says the voice at my left ear. "People get to talk to strangers. What would be the point, otherwise? I still think you should go back and get it, whatever it is."

The sun is bright, yet it's not hot at all, balmy; the sky gleams, air as clean as over a small town in Minnesota. "Just a mangy shawl," I say, "nothing much. Still, it's intricate handwork and only four dollars; I guess I'll buy it, after all." But now there is no place to go. We stand, facing each other, and smile.

"I'll walk back with you," he says. "You won't lose your friend." He has begun shouldering his way back toward where we've come from and says, over his shoulder, "My name is...."

•

Now it's Thursday. He is cooking dinner at his apartment. We are in the kitchen, talking, when the phone rings. "Well, no," he says. "Tonight's a bad night." There is a long silence while he grimaces at me and shakes his head. Finally, he explodes: "Oh, Christ! All right, come on over. But if you're not set in two hours, the hell with it, I've got plans for tonight....

"This dope, " he groans at me, disgruntled and sheepish. "I wish he'd get out of my life. He's a nice guy to have a beer with, but he's got nothing to do with me except he plays tennis at the same place and works for the same firm, where he keeps falling behind and then he needs a crash course on his homework; it's like junior high. I'm really sorry. You can watch TV."

"If you'll give me some stationery, I'll write a letter I've owed for months; it'll be a boost to my conscience. I'll need a pen, too."

He walks over to a large oak desk at the other end of the living room, comes back with half an inch of fine, cream-colored paper, hands me the fountain pen from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and lugs the TV into the bedroom.

By the time the intercom buzzes, I'm settled on his bed, leaning into one of the pillows I've propped against the wall, my knees drawn up, his thick pen solid and comfortable in my hand. I hear two men greet each other, but once they begin talking steadily, I can rarely make out separate words.

I write the letter, take a cursory glance at the Times, look at my horoscope in the Post. I stretch out my legs, scrunch down on the pillow. During the hours I've spent with him here, I've paid little attention to my surroundings. Now I find there's not much to look at. It is a large, high-ceilinged room, the floor covered with the same gray carpet as the hallway and the living room. The walls are white, completely bare.

I get up off the bed and walk past the chest of drawers. And there is the closet with two doors. The right one creaks loudly when I pull them both open: I stand stock-still, holding my breath. But the unseen stranger's voice has risen to almost a wail, while his purrs along, low and controlled. I feel like a sneak; as you should, I tell myself, that's just what you are.

Not counting the one he is presently wearing in the next room, and possibly others out to be cleaned, he owns nine suits. He will mention at one point that his suits have been made by the same tailor in Little Italy for 11 years.

Suspended from a brass rod on the inside of the left door hang a dozen ties so similar that they seem like one expanse of fabric when I squint. ("I don't like variety in clothes," he will say. "My own clothes, I mean. I like to know that I'll look pretty much the same, day after day.") Lined up on the floor are three pairs of sneakers, four pairs of identical black wing-tip shoes, one pair of plain, oxblood loafers.

I shut the doors and tiptoe to the bureau. I begin at the top. A stack of white, initialed handkerchiefs, a wrist watch without a watch band, an old pocket watch, a black-silk bow tie folded once. Next drawer: two pairs of black-leather gloves, one lined, one not; a tan pair, unlined; large, puffy ski mittens; a cummerbund. Third: navy swimming trunks, a jockstrap, one pair of pajamas—navy with white piping—still in the manufacturer's plastic wrapping. Gift? No, the price tag's still on it. The next drawer holds white Jockey shorts, easily a couple of dozen. Fourteen pairs of white-wool socks and a boiled shirt in cellophane are housed below. The largest drawer sticks and I have to tug at it repeatedly. When I've finally edged it open, I stare in amazement: jammed to overflowing, the drawer bulges with what seem to be 1000 identical long black socks. I think: This man owns more socks than all the men I've ever known combined.

I close the drawer, jump onto the bed, lie on my back, bounce, ride a bicycle in the air above me. I'm beside myself. Falling in love with a stockpiler of socks, a sock stockpiler, a man who socks away socks. I cannot keep from making grunting, snorting noises in my effort not to laugh out loud.

This is an unusual man you're getting mixed up with, I tell myself.

Just before midnight, we are lying on his bed. We made love hastily and with most of our clothes on; we've taken a shower together and I've told him it was my first in a decade, that I much prefer baths. Wrapped in towels, we ate three large pieces of blueberry pie left over from dinner and finished a bottle of Chablis. "I want to show you something." He leaves the room, returns with his shaving mirror, slaps my face, sits down on the edge of the bed. My head has fallen on one side onto the pillow. He takes a fistful of my hair and pulls me back until I look at him. He holds the mirror up for me to see and together we watch the symmetrical mark appear on my cheek. I stare at myself, mesmerized. I do not recognize this face; it is blank, a canvas there to display four smudges, red like war paint. He traces them gently.

•

So it went, a step at a time. And since we saw each other every night; since each increment of change was unspectacular in itself; since he made love very, very well; since I was soon crazy about him, not just physically but especially so, it came about that I found myself—after the time span of a mere two weeks—in a setup that would be judged, by the people I know, as pathological.

It never occurred to me to call it pathological. I never called "it" anything. I told no one about it. That it was I who lived through this period seems, in retrospect, unthinkable. I can only look back on those weeks as on an isolated phenomenon, now in the past; a segment of my life as unreal as a dream, lacking all implication.

•

We're doing errands: supermarket, liquor store, dry cleaner's, drugstore. It's a lovely Saturday in early June.

We spend a long time at the toothpaste counter: He is giving dramatic recitals of competing TV commercials—"Better Checkups" wins. I think: I've never been this much in love before. Twice I ask out loud, "How can I be so happy?" Each time, he smiles at me, a delighted grin, and shifts both shopping bags onto one arm to hug my shoulders with the other.

We are both laden down with packages when he says, "I have to get one more thing," and hails a cab. We end up in Brooklyn, at a small, obscure hunting store. There are two clerks, one dignified and elderly, one in his teens, no other customers. He is pricing insulated vests, the kind to be worn under windbreakers.

I sit down on the edge of an old mahogany desk, pick up a three-year-old New Yorker. "This one, I guess," he says. He is holding a riding crop: "I'd like to try it out." There is a peculiar shift: From one second to the next, I have become disoriented, I am on alien territory, in a foreign century. He walks a few steps to where I am half-sitting on the desk, one foot on the floor, the other dangling. He pulls my skirt up over my left leg, which is resting on the desk, steps back and (continued on page 188)Nine and a Half Weeks(continued from page 146) strikes me across the inner thigh. The searing pain is an inextricable part of a wave of excitement that robs me of breath and speech and the ability to move; every cell in my body is awash with lust. It is silent in the small, dusty room. The clerks behind the counter have frozen. He slowly smooths down my skirt and turns to the older man, who is wearing a suit and still looks like an accountant, though a deep flush is spreading upward from his shirt collar. "This one will do."

•

What He Did

• He fed me. He bought all food, cooked all meals, washed all dishes.

• He dressed me in the morning, undressed me at night and took my laundry to the cleaner's along with his. One evening, while taking off my shoes, he decided they needed resoling and took them to the shoemaker the next day.

• He read to me endlessly: newspapers, magazines, murder mysteries, Katherine Mansfield short stories and my own files when I brought them home to catch up on work.

• Every three days, he washed my hair. He dried it with my hand drier and was clumsy at it only the first two times. One day, he bought an outrageously expensive Kent of London hairbrush and beat me with it that evening. Its bruises persisted beyond all others. But every night, he used it to brush my hair. Neither before nor since has my hair been brushed so thoroughly, for such long periods at a time, so lovingly. It shone.

• He bought tampons for me and inserted and extracted them. When I was dumfounded the first time, he said, "I eat you while you're menstruating and we both like that. There's no difference."

• He ran my bath every night, experimenting with different gels, crystals and oils, taking an adolescent girl's delight in buying great varieties of bath products for me, while sticking steadfastly to a routine of showers, Ivory soap and Prell Concentrate for himself. I never stopped to contemplate what his cleaning woman thought of the whip lying on the kitchen counter, of the handcuffs dangling from the dining-room doorknob, of the snakes' heap of narrow, silvery chains coiled in the corner of the bedroom. I did idly wonder what she thought of this sudden proliferation of jars and bottles, nine barely used shampoos crowding the medicine chest, 11 different bath salts lined up on the edge of the tub.

• Every night, he took my make-up off. If I live to be 100, I won't forget how it felt to sit in an armchair, my eyes closed, my head thrown back, while the gentle pressure of a cotton ball soaked in lotion moved across my forehead, over my cheeks, lingered at length on my eyelids.

What I Did

• Nothing.

•

I am standing nearly on tiptoes across the room from him, my arms raised above my head. My hands are tied to the hook on the wall on which his one large painting hangs during the day. My end of the room is dark, only the reading lamp over his shoulder is lit. He has told me to be quiet. The TV is on, but he is making notes on a legal pad, absorbed in his work, and doesn't look up for what seem to me long periods of time. My arms begin to ache and then my entire body and finally I say, "Listen, I can't stand it, really...."

He gives me a quizzical look and goes into the bedroom, comes back with two handkerchiefs and says in a polite, conversational tone of voice, "I want you to shut the fuck up." He stuffs most of one handkerchief into my mouth and ties the second one tightly across it. I taste the bland flavor of sizing.

60 Minutes begins. I try to listen, stare at the back of the set, attempting to visualize each commercial in order to distract myself from the waves of pain rolling over me. I tell myself that surely my body must soon go numb, but my body does nothing of the sort, it just hurts. Then it hurts even more and, by the time 60 Minutes is over, muffled sounds come through the handkerchief, which is lodged way back in my throat and holds my tongue down flat. He gets up and walks over toward me and turns on the floor lamp next to his desk, adjusting the shade so the light shines into my eyes. For the first time since I've known him, I begin to cry. He looks at me inquisitively, leaves the room and comes back holding the bottle of bath oil he has bought me on the way home from work. He begins to rub oil into my neck and armpits. Everything in my brain is blocked out by the convulsive spasms in my muscles. He massages my breasts and I'm fighting for air through my nose, which is flooded with tears. Now there is oil on my stomach, a slow, insistent, rhythmic, circular motion. I'm suddenly in terror, convinced I'm choking, I am really going to choke, in another minute I'll be dead when he spreads my legs, which stretches me even more. I scream. It is a muted sound, like a child's pretend foghorn, totally ineffectual from behind all that cloth. For the first time tonight, he looks interested, fascinated, even. His eyes are three inches from mine and something is moving very lightly up and down alongside my clitoris. His fingers are slippery with oil, drenched in oil, and in mid-scream my body shifts gear to the sounds—not so dissimilar—that it makes when I'm about to come, and then I come.

He unties me, fucks me standing up, puts me to bed, bathes my face with a washcloth dipped in cold water from a white Tupperware bowl. He rubs my wrists for a long time. Just before I fall asleep, he says, "You'll have to wear long sleeves tomorrow, sweetheart; what a nuisance—it's going to be a hot day."

•

Our evenings rarely varied. He ran my bath, undressed me, handcuffed my wrists. When I was ready to get out of the bath, he pulled me up, slowly soaped my body, rinsed and dried me off. Unclasped the handcuffs, put one of his shirts on me—white or pink or pale-blue broadcloth, shirts made to be worn with a suit, the sleeves covering my finger tips, a fresh shirt every night, crisp from the Chinese laundry—put the handcuffs back on. I watched him prepare dinner. He always drank wine while washing the salad greens and would give me a sip from his glass whenever he took one himself. He talked about what had happened at his office, I told him about what had happened at mine.

When dinner was ready, he put one very large serving onto one plate. We went to the dining room. I sat at his feet, tied to the table leg. He took a mouthful of fettuccini, then fed one to me; stabbed at a forkful of Boston lettuce, guided the next one to my mouth, wiped the salad oil off my lips and his in turn. A sip of wine, then the lowered glass for me to drink from. Sometimes he tilled it too sharply, so that the wine spilled over my lips and ran down the sides of my face onto my neck and chest. He would kneel before me and suck the wine off my nipples.

Often, during dinner, he pushed my head between his thighs. We developed a game: He tried to see how long he could continue to eat calmly; I, how soon I could make him drop his fork and moan. When I once told him that I was becoming particularly fond of the taste of him followed by vegetable curry, he laughed and laughed and said, "Jesus, I'm going to make enough tomorrow to last us all week."

When we were finished, he would go to the kitchen to wash the dishes and make coffee. Then we read or watched TV, or worked. Above all, we talked, literally for hours. I had never talked this much with anyone. He learned my life history, in minute detail, I became equally familiar with his. I would have recognized his college friends on sight, known from his boss's position in his chair what mood he was in. I adored his jokes and his very manner of telling them, in a slow, bored voice, a fiercely deadpan expression. His favorites were stories about my grandfather; my favorites were his tales about his three years in India....

We never went out. Throughout most evenings, I was tied to the couch or the coffee table, within touching distance of him. If a friend, a peer, had told me she had herself tied to a table leg at home after a full day's work at the office—well, it has never come up. God knows, I would not have believed it.

•

At 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, he calls me at work: "You'll be in room three-twelve at the Algonquin, at five-thirty."

In the cab, I listen to my thigh muscles ache as I repeat to myself. "You'll be ... at five-thirty," and walk through the Algonquin's doors minutes later. I knock at 312, twice, but there is no answer and the door is unlocked. I have assumed he would be waiting for me, but there is no one there.

The bed is piled high with packages. Not gift-wrapped but what one spills onto a bed after a day of shopping just before Christmas. The room key is in the ashtray on the bedside table, his handwriting on a note stuck above the dial numbers on the phone. "Open them," it reads, "and take a bath and get dressed."

I start with one of the smaller shopping bags from Brooks Brothers. It contains a light-blue shirt, like the ones I have been wearing at night, but smaller. Men's socks in an Altman's bag. A container that looks like a child's hatbox holds a sandy beard and mustache wrapped in tissue paper. My hands shake a little by the time I unwrap the largest package: a dark-gray suit and vest. Shoes next. A tie. A blond man's wig. A small packet of hairpins from Woolworth's. A white handkerchief.

I push the wrappings aside and sit down on the edge of the bed, holding the wig in both hands. It's an expensive wig, the hair human and soft to the touch. Alarm and excitement race inside me, side by side, like speeding cars on a dark highway. Every few moments, they narrow the space between them and touch without noise or sparks, gently. Once I'm in the bath water, alarm chooses a turnoff. Excitement hurtles me onward, dark miles stretching ahead, headlights illuminating only a few yards of gray road as I turn the virgin piece of soap over and over between my palms.

I dry myself in the sequence in which he dries me every evening: face and neck, feet and calves, back and buttocks. The only thing missing from the costume now spread out on the bed is underwear. The trousers' lining is smooth against my skin. The socks fit, the shirt fits. My breasts are small enough so that the layers of shirt and vest and finally suit coat obscure them completely. I put on the shoes—an old-fashioned wing-tip style, like his, the gleaming leather lining pungent; why don't women's shoes ever smell this delicious?—the left one feels tight at first.

There is a small pot of theatrical glue, a brush attached to the inside of the cap. I'm in a quandary, can't decide whether the glue goes onto the backing of the mustache and the beard or onto my skin. I end up spreading it thinly onto the backing, something like canvas, and position the mustache under my nose. It tickles and looks like it's straight out of a junior high play and makes me laugh out loud. I need to make three adjustments to get it to sit evenly above my upper lip. The beard is harder. Again and again, while the glue is setting and turning sticky, I take it off and start over, until it ends up at the same distance from my ear lobes on each side and stays put under my chin. The wig, by comparison, is easy: I brush my own hair into a scrawny ponytail high up on my head, twist it, pin loose strands close to my scalp all round. Once the wig is pulled over my hair onto my head, it fits tightly. The wig's hair at the back of my neck touches my shirt collar, almost covers my ears at the sides, falls across my forehead in a thick wave.

In the process of replacing the tissue paper in which the mustache has been wrapped, I find, in the same round box, a set of eyebrows. I glue them over my own. I have been scrutinizing myself in the mirror above the dressing table all along but fixed on details. Now the mechanism comes into play that allows one to switch from focusing on a panel of glass, every dust particle and thumbprint important and distinct, to seeing the outside beyond, the windowpane gone. There is a face in the mirror, no longer an isolated beard or the tilt of a wig. I see that he looks ill at ease in a manner familiar to me, but I recognize nothing else. Acknowledging the spark of a preliminary understanding between us, he leans toward me; he, too, likes what he sees. It lasts for only a moment.

I push back the hair over my forehead, open the pack of Camels that is lying on the bedside table. I've never smoked a Camel and begin to cough immediately, my throat raw. But I inhale more deeply the second time and perversely, the rough flavor clears my head. I wonder, briefly, where to put the handkerchief. I can't remember where he keeps his and finally put it into a back trouser pocket. I have never worn a garment with back pockets before and slide my hand in and out of it, feeling the slippery lining and the curve of buttock beneath.

I finish dressing. The phone rings. "I'm in the lobby," he says. "Come on down. Don't forget the room key."

A balding, short man waits with me at the elevator for a moment, then mumbles under his breath and walks rapidly down the corridor. I look after him and realize that he is no shorter than I am. Wearing sandals with three-inch heels, I am tall for a woman; now I'm a man of below-average height.

A middle-aged woman stands at the back of the elevator. I step in and stand near the door. When we come to the ground floor and I am about to walk out into the lobby, I remember, I step aside and she passes through the door without looking at me. I am blushing and have to force myself not to smile. What an astonishing ritual, I think, and simultaneously, gleefully: I passed!

He is sitting on a sofa, motions me to the chair facing him across a low round table with a brass bell, his glass of Scotch, an empty ashtray. He is wearing his gray suit, identical to mine. He looks at me for a long time, taking in the shoes, the fit of the vest, the knot of the tie, the beard and hair. He grins, then laughs out loud, takes a sip of his drink, seems utterly delighted. "You look fine. You look great, in fact." He leans forward and takes both of my hands between his, as if to warm them for a child who has come inside after building a snowman. "Don't be nervous," he says. "There is nothing to be nervous about."

A waiter appears, hovering two steps to one side of us. He orders wine for me, more Scotch for himself. I sit stiffly, erect, my eyes on my arms stretched woodenly toward him. I am overcome by that mixture of contradictory feelings I should long be used to, since one variation or another has assaulted me almost daily since we've known each other. I am deeply embarrassed, I am flushed, I am shaking—and I am exhilarated, drunk before my wine arrives, ablaze with mindless gusto.

The waiter has no reaction at all when he brings our drinks. "It's all inside you, you know," he says. "Nobody else ever cares. But it does make it a lot of fun for me that you do." We move on to a dining room then, where he holds my hand between courses. I have difficulty chewing, even more so swallowing; I drink close to twice the amount of wine I'm used to. He has another drink at the bar, his hand loosely on my thigh.

Upstairs in the room, he propels me toward the mirror. His arm around my shoulders, we look at our reflections: two men, one tall and clean-shaven, the shorter one sandy-bearded; dark suits, a pink shirt and a pale-blue one. "Take your belt off," he says, in a low voice, and I do, unable to take my eyes from his in the mirror. Not knowing what to do next, I coil it into the tight serpent it had been in its box. He takes it from me, says, "Get on the bed," and, when I do: "No—hands and knees." He reaches from behind me to open my trousers, then says, "Pull your pants down over your ass." Something gives way in me and my elbows can't hold my weight. On my knees, my head on my arms, sounds from my throat that I can't interpret: neither fear nor longing but the inability to distinguish between the two, adding up to.... He beats me, a pillow over my head to muffle my cries, then takes me as he could a man. I cry out louder than before, my eyes wide open to the dark of the pillow covering my face. Deep inside me, his pounding stops abruptly. He forces me down flat, his right hand under me and between my legs. Lying on top of me, stretched full length, he lifts the pillow, listens to my sobs subside. When I realize that we are breathing in unison, calmed, his fingers begin their infinitesimal move. Soon I am breathing rapidly agains He pushes the pillow back over my face when I come and soon he comes, too. He puts wadded Kleenex off the bedside table between my buttocks. It is soaked with semen and tinged pink when he removes it, later on. Curled against me, he murmurs, "So tight and hot, you can't imagine...."

•

He shows me the loveliest knife I have ever seen. I am sitting on his lap when he pulls it out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket. Its handle is silver, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He shows me how to make the blade snap out of its sheath with a frivolous click, how to make the shiny steel disappear again between silver scrollwork. "Do you want to try it?" The slim handle lies in my palm, cool and precise and as well known to me as if I had received it years ago, as a gift: to herald the age of consent.

I hand the lovely object back reluctantly. He flips it open once more, lays the tip of the blade very lightly against the skin of my throat. I bend my neck back, back some more, back until it will not bend any farther. The steel tip feels harmless—a toothpick. "Don't laugh," he says. "It'll go right through...." But I do laugh, as he knew I would, and he has long moved the toothpick out of the way by the time I burst out giggling.

"Next week you'll rob somebody," he says. "In an elevator would be easiest. You can dress up in your Bluebeard outfit. Don't tell me about it in advance."

I know immediately which building. The second floor has been vacant for months, its door to the stair well unlocked. The following day, I have an appointment at three. It is over within half an hour and I take the subway to his apartment and change. It's a humid day and the ride back uptown is uncomfortable. How can they stand being dressed like this, I wonder, in the middle of July? I am sweating in shirt and vest and suit jacket, women in sleeveless dresses looking airy to me and as if in flight. I finger the smooth oblong in my pocket, expecting instructions to flow from it as from a talisman-guidebook.

I have, on several occasions, exchanged nods with this doorman. That he does not recognize me makes me feel invisible and giddy. I stand before the board listing the names and suite numbers of the companies in the building, glancing sideways at the people to my left: Two women are waiting in front of the banks of elevators leading to the upper floors, a middle-aged man before those for the lower floors. I walk toward the opening doors of one of the elevators serving floors one through 18.

Three men and one woman emerge and file past me and the middle-aged man. I step into the elevator after him. He presses nine. I push two. Even before the doors have closed, the slim silver handle is out of my pocket. The playful click coincides with the onset of our ascent. There's the tip of the switchblade at his throat, which arches backward at an angle familiar to me. I hold out my free hand. A leather wallet—still warm—lies in my palm just as the doors open. I stand outside. We look at each other, somber as in a turn-of-the-century photograph, until the doors slide shut. Neither of us has spoken. I walk ten steps to the stair well, down one flight and back to the apartment.

There's enough time for me to undress and put my own clothes back on and scrub the glue off my face before he comes home. I am sitting on the couch, pretending to read the evening paper. He says, "Early, aren't your" And, "I bought a porterhouse; the damn thing's worth its weight in gold." I do not look up from the print, which blurs before my eyes. A delayed reaction has set in: I need to make a concentrated effort to keep from sobbing and I am trying to understand why my thighs ache, why muscles deep inside my vagina are opening up and out, why I am aroused as if his tongue were goading me toward air that is dangerously thin and piercing.

•

I am sitting in a corner seat on the subway. It's been only two months, a little over nine weeks, I've been out of control for two months. A boy sits across from me, curly hair falling over a round forehead, shirt unbuttoned, an open book held rigidly in both hands. I look at him steadily, my body is liquid, afloat. He stares back, twice he's tried to smile. My hands are folded in my lap, one open palm inside the other. I don't smile. I am conscious of my new power and the boy across the aisle is, too. Surely not a new power—ancient, probably. I just never knew about it; abandon.

At West Fourth Street, I get off. The boy cranes his neck, opens his mouth when I look back at him, jumps up in a sudden, awkward rush, but the doors have closed.

The kid in the subway felt it, secondhand. It must seep from my pores. For the past two months, I've been in the process of being taught about myself, something new every night, the undercurrent getting stronger by the hour; hands pinned down above my head, shallow gasps. "This is new" ticking in my brain. A conscious new power; vulnerability, perverse if only because it is total, natural as grass nonetheless, or asphalt in New York. Abandon. Take me, anything, do it to me, anything, take me, anything, kill me if it pleases you. But try tying me down, first. Look at me, my eyes closed, your fingers outlined on my cheek, damp hair lying where gravity makes it land as my head falls back against the pillow. Better yet, talk about striking me first, in a low voice, and handcuff me to the table leg and feed me, crouching low. Make me eat you between a mouthful of baked cod and one of home-fried potatoes, first, slowly tipping the glass of wine against my lips until the liquid flows onto my tongue, my eyes closed, you have to gauge how far the glass needs to be tipped, I'm not wiping it off, first, and God surely knows what next: thick welts and a stifled scream for the first time. Tracing the welts, watching your cock grow hard again, watching you trace the welts, feeling your cock grow hard again, our eyes locked.

Weeks later, stifling is no longer possible. Maybe later yet a trickle of blood, what would it feel like to be struck so that one bleeds? When you're four, you can't fathom what it's like to be five. If you've never screamed out of control, you can't imagine how it feels. Now I know how it feels; it's like coming. There is a sound, far away, having to do with me and surely not having to do with me, no responsibility. My body giving up, giving in. No bounds. Foreign sounds far away, I'm not accountable.

Years of intermittent faking behind me. The power to fake ecstasy, the stingy, pathetic control it provides, pantpantpant, ah, darling. "Dynamite in bed," whispers a man to his best friend as I'm about to enter the living room, only a few years ago. I never once came with that man, not in ten months of tireless gyrations, yet he was happy with my responses. Watching him above me as I panted while he came, his eyes squinted shut, red face far above me, I'm in control. No more. This one has taken me on, taken me in, taken me over, he can have it all, how welcome he is to me.

Beyond All Limits is the title of a porn flick on Broadway and 44th. Beyond all limits, what a lovely sound, he's promised we'll see it. "We'll go to lots of movies," he says, "once we ride this out, this ... phase we're in." He's right. One needs to ride out a phase such as this one. Vision's too blurred, dangerously drunk driving on steep, narrow, winding roads, using them as if the New York State Thruway, going 110, oblivious to drunkenness and speed limits. He's moving me, edging me, step by careful step—nothing drunken about it—there goes one limit, another one, limits falling by the wayside. I'm afloat. After three days, I've gone beyond my limits. For two months now, I've been out of control. Long ago, I've lost count of how often I've come, how often I've said please, don't, please, ah, don't. I beg every night, lovely to beg. "Please what?" he says in a low voice and makes me come again, my voice far away, not my voice at all. I plead every night, ugly rapping from my throat, my stomach liquid, warm syrup thighs, out of control.

Listen, holy Virgin Mary, I'm like you now; there's no need for my control, he's doing it all, he'll do it until he kills me. Can't, won't kill me, though, we're both too selfish for that. So many ways to edge on further, a lifetime full. Thick welts and a stifled scream for the first time. I've been with him only nine weeks and we've long moved beyond stifled screams. The things people do before they need to be killed must be legion. A trickle of blood for the first time—legion. And the reminder: If you do kill me, you'll have to find someone else and is it easy to find women like me?

•

That night, a trickle of blood stained his sheets. He ran a finger through it, tasted it, then smeared the last drops across my mouth and watched the blood dry on my lips while stroking the sweat-wet hair above my forehead. "You really do crave this," he said. "You're as obsessed with it as I am. Sometimes during the day I get the most persistent hard-on, imagining how far we'll go." He slowly rubbed at the crusty flakes around my mouth with his thumb. "Other times I'm frightened...." He laughed. "Hey, there's some pie left over from dinner. Let's eat it and go to bed, it's two o'clock, you're impossible in the morning when you don't get enough sleep."

Next day, after breakfast and while brushing my teeth, I began to cry. He called, "Ready?" and, "Let's go, sweetheart, it's twenty of." A few minutes later, he came into the bathroom and set his briefcase down on the toilet seat. He took the toothbrush out of my hand and dried my face and said, "You have a meeting at nine-thirty, remember?" and, "What on earth is the matter?" He kissed me on both cheeks, looped my handbag over my shoulder, picked up his briefcase and took my hand. He locked the apartment door while I cried and at one point, he said, "Do you have your sunglasses with you?" and then took them from the outside pocket of my handbag himself and stuck them onto my nose, fumbling with one of the side bars, unable to find my right ear.

When we got off the subway, I was still crying. I cried up the first set of stairs and then up the second set. Within a few yards of the exit turnstiles, he threw up his hands and pivoted me toward the other side of the platform and downstairs again and into the subway and up the elevator and into the living room, where he half-pushed me onto the sofa and shouted, "Will you please talk to me?" and, "What the hell is going on?"

I didn't know what was going on. All I knew was I couldn't stop crying. When I was still crying at six o'clock, he took me to a hospital; I was given sedation and after a while, the crying stopped. The next day, I began a period of treatment that lasted some months.

I never saw him again.

When my skin had gone back to its even tone, I slept with another man and discovered, my hands lying awkwardly on the sheet at either side of me, that I had forgotten what to do with them. I'm responsible and an adult again, full time. What remains is that my sensation thermostat has been thrown out of whack: It's been years and sometimes I wonder whether my body will ever again register above lukewarm.

"A wave of excitement robs me of the ability to move; every cell in my body is awash with lust."