A moving shadow revealed him now, in the recess of a side door: average height and looks, thin, indoor-pale, straight sandy hair snipped short in back but with long bangs almost concealing light eyes, probably blue, maybe green. Weirdly, he was young. Usually they were at least old enough to have made a lot of money and sometimes really old, but this guy was maybe thirty. Inherited wealth, this meant, which was rare. Her clients were mostly self-made men, and if she thought about it there was some pride in this for her.
“I didn’t expect you to be on a bike.” His voice was soft but carried, like an actor whispering from a stage so that an entire audience can hear without mistaking the whisper for something louder. “I thought you’d have some sort of costume.”
“Backpack,” she said. “I need to change. And somewhere to lock up my bike — couldn’t very well ride the streetcar.”
“Bring it in.” He went inside, letting the screen door slap closed behind him, forcing her to open it for herself while balancing the bike with her other hand. She negotiated her way in, fitting awkwardly through the narrow side entry with pack and bike. She stood in a library — no furniture but a table and two heavy chairs covered in thick plastic sheeting. Walls of hardcover books climbed to the high ceilings. She tapped down her kickstand, wondering if it would damage the Turkish rug and if he’d hold her responsible if it did. She could see into a larger room, perhaps a living room, with formal furniture, a shiny grand piano, and paintings covering most of the walls.
“I only use part of the house, upstairs.” He gestured toward the second floor with a stab of his head.
Perhaps he was just a house sitter, in which case it would be even more important than usual to make sure up front he had cash on him.
The stairs were broad and spiraled slowly up. Only a huge house could afford to yield so much room to a staircase and have it make sense. He motioned her to go first. Now a gentleman, she thought, but corrected her interpretation as she felt him watching her climb. She wondered what his gaze focused on: legs, ass, waist. She’d been clear, as always, when she’d answered his ad: “No intercourse, and my clothes stay on.”
Upstairs they walked by a bedroom’s open door. On first glance it looked like command central for some sort of low-level spy or police operation in a movie — computers everywhere, some of their lights blinking and others constant. But beyond the distracting barricade of technology were an unmade bed and an almost equally large drafting table covered with neat stacks of paper and pens lined like logs for transport.
“Do you sketch?” Marion asked, remembering the advice that a victim always try to humanize herself to a perpetrator — advice she applied to clients who could become perpetrators, which was potentially any one of them.
“Farther down,” he said, “last door on the left.”
The door opened onto a much larger, grander bedroom with tapestrylike curtains and an enormous canopied bed.
“You can change in the suite bath.”
She turned, almost expecting him to be holding a gun or a knife. With his frail body and slightly entertained expression, he looked harmless, at once belonging to and seeming out of place in the stuffy, old-money room decorated by someone else.
“Great,” Marion said. “First, we’ll go over what you want, special requests, your no-list, limits.”
“Doesn’t that undermine the whole experience, if it’s choreographed, if I know you won’t go too far?”
“It just gives it a container. Once I come out of that bathroom, we’ll be in scene. Taking care of this now will make the whole thing better.”
“For you.” His voice was accusatory, but the accusation was amused, and Marion couldn’t tell if it was playful or real.
“And for you,” she said flatly.
“You can do anything to me, but make it hurt. The less I like it the better. But no baby talk either way. I’m not looking for a mother. Just pain. I know some of the men who hire you are just playing. A little rough talk, a little humiliation — kiss my boot and all that — but you can’t leave a mark on them without them crying for real. Am I right?”
She assumed his question was rhetorical, but he waited for a response, and finally she nodded so he would resume.
“I’m different. I want you to hurt me. I don’t care about the rest of it.” His blink was deliberate.
Marion did the sorting: more masochist, less submissive. “Do you want any kind of frame?” she asked. “You know, roles? Cop and speeder, teacher and student.”
He shook his head but then said, “Sadist and captive, if anything. Or better, let’s just be who we are.” Again the blink. “Or best, tell me what you would pick if we switched places.”
She didn’t know why, because she generally followed her instincts and this violated them, but she answered with the truth. “I would start with who we are. You’re rich, and I’m not, so there’s power already there. Maybe you had me taken here because I insulted you, and I know I can’t get away because you could find me again.”
“Psychological power is better than locks and chains?”
“Always. So maybe I’m an intruder — a looter or trespasser or something — and you discover me. I do what you say, submit to your form of punishment, or you call the cops.”
“The cops are too busy to answer the phone these days.” He tossed his head once, flopping the bangs out of his eyes. Blue, not green, and unattractively pale as though whoever colored them hadn’t finished the work.
“They’re never too busy to answer calls from this address,” Marion told him. “I bet you have all the direct lines, red buttons or whatever, but we can say you’ll call the asshole security guards who patrol this place now, like that goon I had to pass through to get here. So I’d be better off taking my chances with you, or so I would wager.”
For just a moment, his mouth collected itself, became smaller, as though stopping itself from saying something he had thought better of saying. Instead he said, “We’ll just assume that you have this house’s power and that I have no means of escaping lightly. As I said, I don’t care much about the frame. You can change in there.”
The bathroom was as large as she would have expected, with a separate walk-in shower and huge soaking tub rising into a wall-sized mosaic of tiny multicolored tiles, ridiculous bidet next to the toilet, triple sinks, and what even she could tell were expensive fixtures. There were three small paintings of blue horses on one wall, paintings she recognized well enough to wonder if they were real. It took her a moment, but she came up with the artist’s name: Franz Marc. She’d liked him when she was young — in high school — and then convinced herself that she wasn’t naive enough to like Marc until a teacher she admired gave her permission to like him again. “There’s a lot more irony there than you might think,” he’d said, but mainly what had won her back were his brushstrokes and the deceptive saturation of his colors, especially the blues. She looked more closely now: definitely paintings and not prints but perhaps copies all the same. There were people who collected such things, she knew, because she’d looked into every potential career choice before she’d settled for what she’d settled for. She’d have broken into real forgery if she’d known how to and had that particular artistic gift. But, no, these paintings were probably originals, and she wondered how much something like that cost.
Her hands trembled as she rolled up the stockings and hooked the absurd bustier. Even with dark red lipstick, she looked like a freakishly dressed-up child. The man wasn’t tall, but he would still be taller than she was in the spiked heels. He was right about it being all play. She had never really hurt anybody before. It interested her, but only indirectly, as a student of herself. In the end she was nothing like her clients, not in life situation and not in the way she was wired — not that psychology interested her as anything other than instinct.