“It was kind of kinky,” Jim told me.
“Hey, I sympathize,” I said. “What does this make you, only the second or third luckiest man on the face of the earth?”
Well, it was a turn-on, Jim admitted that. And it wasn’t that he’d never done anything like it before. It was just that, in Jim’s experience, you had to get to know a girl a little before you started clobbering her. It was intimate, fantasy stuff, not the sort of thing you did on a first date.
Plus, Jim genuinely liked Susan. He liked the tough, working-stiff jazz of her and the chip-on-the-shoulder wisecracks with the vulnerability underneath. He wanted to get to know her, be with her awhile, maybe a long while. And if this was where they started, he wondered, where exactly were they going to go?
But any awkwardness, it turned out, was all on Jim’s side. Susan seemed perfectly comfortable when she woke in his arms the next morning. “It was nice last night,” she whispered, stretching up to kiss his stubble. And she held his hand as they hailed a cab to take her home for a change of clothes. And she wowed and charmed him with her office etiquette, giving not a clue to the world of their altered state, giving even him only a single token of it when they passed each other, nodding, in the hall, and she murmured, “God, we are so professional.”
And they had dinner together up on Columbus at the Moroccan and she went on, hilarious, about the management types in her department. And Jim, who usually expressed amusement by narrowing his eyes and smiling thinly, fell back in his chair and laughed with his teeth showing, and had to wipe tears out of his crow’s feet with the four fingers of one hand.
That night, she wanted him to thrash her with his leather belt. Jim demurred. “Don’t we ever get to do it, just, the regular way?” he asked.
But she leaned in close and smoldered at him. “Do it. I want you to.”
“You know, I’m a little concerned about the noise. The neighbors and everything.”
Well, he had a point there. Susan went into the kitchen and returned with a wooden spoon. They don’t make quite the crack, apparently. Jim, always the gentleman, proceeded to tie her to the bedposts.
“The woman’s killing me. I’m exhausted,” he told me a couple of weeks later.
I put my hand under my shirt and moved it up and down so he could see my heart beating for him.
“I mean it,” he said. “I mean, I’m up for this stuff sometimes. It’s sexy, it’s fun. But Jesus. I’d like to see her face from time to time.”
“She’ll calm down. You’re just getting started,” I said. “So she digs this stuff. Later, you can gently instruct her in the joys of the missionary position.”
We had this conversation at a table in McCord’s, the last unspoilt Irish bar on the gentrified West Side. The news team does tend to drift down here of an evening, so we were already speaking in undertones. Now, Jim leaned in toward me even closer. Our foreheads were almost touching and he glanced from side to side before he went on.
“The thing is,” he said, “I think she’s serious.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’m all for fantasy stuff and all that. But I don’t think she’s kidding around.”
“What do you mean?” I said again, more hoarsely and with a bead of sweat forming behind my ear.
It turned out their relationship had now progressed to the point where they were divvying up the household chores. Susan had doled out the assignments and it fell to her to clean Jim’s apartment, cook his dinner, and wash the dishes. Naked. Jim’s job was to force her to do these things and whip, spank or rape her if she showed reluctance or made, or pretended to make, some kind of mistake.
Now there’s always an element of braggadocio when men complain about their sex lives, but Jim really did seem troubled by this. “I’m not saying it doesn’t turn me on. I admit, it’s a turn-on. It’s just getting kind of… ugly at this point. Isn’t it?” he said.
I wiped my lips dry and dropped back in my seat. When I could finally stop panting and move my mouth, I said, “I don’t know. To each his own. I mean, look, if you don’t like it, eject. You know? If it doesn’t work for you, hit the button.”
Obviously, this thought had occurred to him before. He nodded slowly, as if considering it.
But he didn’t eject. In fact, another week or so, and for all intents and purposes Susan was living with him.
At this point, my information becomes less detailed. Obviously, a guy’s living with someone, he doesn’t go on too much about their sex life. Everyone at the net knew the affair was a happening thing by now, but Susan and Jim remained entirely professional and detached on the job. They’d walk to work together holding hands. They’d kiss once outside the building. And after that, it was business as usual. No low tones in the hallway, no closed office doors. The few times we all went out drinking together after work, they didn’t even sit next to each other. Through the bar window, when they left, we’d see Jim put his arm around her. That was all.
The last time Jim and I talked about it before he died was in McCord’s again. I came in there one night and there he was sitting at a corner table alone. I knew by the way he was sitting-bolt upright with his eyes half open, staring, glazed- that he was drunk as God on Sunday. I sat down across from him and he made a sloppy gesture with his hand and said, “Drinks are on me.” I ordered a scotch.
If I’d been smart, I would’ve stuck to sports. The Knicks were getting murdered, the Yanks, after a championship season, were struggling to keep pace with Baltimore as the new season got under way. I could’ve talked about all of that. I should’ve. But I was curious. If curious is the word I want. “Prurient,” maybe, is the mot juste.
And I said, “So how are things going with Susan?”
And he said, as you will when you’re serious about someone, “Fine. Things with Susan are fine.” But then he added, “I’m her Lord and Master.” Sitting bolt upright. Waving slightly like a lampost in a gale.
Susan had scripted their routines, but he knew them by heart now and ran through them without prompting. This was apparently more efficient because it left her free to beg him to stop. He would tie her and she would beg him and he would beat her while she begged. He would sodomize her and grab her hair, force her head around so she had to watch him while he did it. “Who’s your Lord and Master?” he would say. And she would answer, “You’re my Lord and Master. You are.” Later she would do the chores, naked or in this lace and suspender outfit she’d bought. Usually she’d fumble something or spill something, and he would beat her, which got him ready to take her again.
After he told me this, his eyes sank closed, his lips parted. He seemed to sleep for a few minutes, then woke up with a slight start. But bolt upright always, always straight up and down. Even when he got up to leave, his posture was stiff and perfect. He wafted to the door as if he were one of those old deportment instructors. He was a funny kind of a drunk that way, even more dignified than when he was sober, a sort of exaggerated, comic version of his reserved, dignified sober self.
I watched him leave with a half-smile on my face. I miss him.
Susan stabbed him with a kitchen knife, one of those big ones. Just a single convulsive jab but it went straight in, severed the vena cava. He bled out lying on the kitchen floor, staring up at the ceiling while she screamed into the phone for an ambulance.