Friday, May 12
Vicki San Felipe paused in the broad entryway of her house, a rubber band in her mouth, her arms raised to the back of her head where she was gathering her strawberry-blonde hair in a ponytail. She was wearing a pink bodysuit over white leotards. When she had her hair pulled tight, clasped in one small, pink-nailed hand, she took the rubber band from her mouth and wound it several times around the shank of hair. As she did this, pulling at the loose hair of the ponytail to tighten the band, she listened to the television in the family room across the hallway where her children, Gwyneth, eight, and Dennis, six, were eating hamburgers on TV trays with the family maid.
She had already kissed them goodbye, receiving inattentive routine "byes" from them commensurate with her routine trip to aerobics class. But now she paused again, listening for Gwyneth's thin, muffled cough. The third grader had received the first of her series of spring allergy shots earlier in the day, and Vicki was hoping they hadn't waited too long. Gwyneth was prone to chronic sinus infections when the mold spore count was highest. Tugging at the tight leg of her bodysuit cutting into her groin, she wondered if she should take Gwyneth's temperature before she left. The kids laughed at something on television, their small voices nearer, louder, than the canned laughtrack, and Vicki decided to wait until she returned later in the evening.
Grabbing her monogrammed athletic bag from the closet near the front door, she noticed her husband's umbrella hanging against the closet wall. Toby refused to take it with him. "The damn things just clutters up the car," he'd argued, "and it always gets in my way." Besides, he never needed it. He parked in a covered garage and walked to his office through the tunnels. She would remind him of the times he had been drenched----it had happened three times in the last three months---but he would shrug off her cautionary examples as "odd." Toby didn't entertain the unusual.
She took the umbrella off the wall and leaned it against the little Chinese table in the entry to remind her to put it in his car when he got home. It was absurd for him not to carry it with him, especially in the spring. Making a mental note to call Catherine Engel about a fund-raising idea for the children's academy----she thought of it because Catherine's husband had an umbrella with a similar handle to Toby's---she hurried out of their two-story Georgian home nestled in the thick pine woods of Breezy Glen, one of several townships clustered together in west Tolumura, New Mexico, and known as the Paso Bajo Villages. The Villages ranked near the top of the list of the nation's wealthiest suburbs.
A fresh spring rain had moved through the Villages only half an hour earlier, making the woods fragrant and washing the city clean in the dusk. Vicki inhaled deeply of the damp evening smells as she tossed her bag into her dark blue Jeep Wagoneer and climbed behind the steering wheel, flipping on the headlights. It was just now getting dark enough to see them. She started the Jeep, fastened her seat belt, wheeled the Wagoneer around the island of magnolias in front of the house, and drove quickly along the drive bordered by a white fence covered with brambles of pyrancantha. When she reached for the street, she waited for a car to pass as she checked her watch. It was seven-forty. Her aerobics class began at 8:00, and Toby was at a weekly business meeting until ten.
Hurrying along the winding street she came to the major north-south artery of Cumbre and turned left. Within a mile or so she would come to Butterfield Place where she would need to turn left again to go to Donna's, an athletic club that catered to the already sleek bodies of the women of the Villages. But Vicki San Felipe didn't turn left at Butterfield Place. Instead she breezed past the intersection and turned left at the next street, Mago Vista, and pushed the Wagoneer east through the high-dollar neighborhoods of Connierae Trail and Easthead Estates and Jacinta Manor until she made her first right turn onto the fashionably posh Bath Boulevard. Now known as Uptown Tolumura, the Starlight area was the largest suburban business district in the nation. Its newest pearl was the Pavilion Club, Sax Fourth Avenue, a multimillion-dollar complex of elegant shops separated from the boulevard by a phalanx of sixty-foot palms that glistened in the light mist that was now moving on dry air from the Gila National Forest fifty miles to the west.
With the lights of the office towers and high-rise condominiums reflecting back at her from the wet, black boulevard, Vicki San Felipe whipped the Wagoneer into a median turn late and quickly cut across traffic to the Imperial Hotel, a flat-faced structure with an inset glass curtain wall in its middle section that fell to two overlapping half-barrel arches that were also made of glass and formed the hotel's porte cochere. She didn't stop for the uniformed doorman who stepped to the curb to open her door, but continued past him and drove around to the parking garage gate. She took a ticket from the buzzing dispenser, which opened the gate, and entered the garage, driving up to the third level before finding an available parking space. She snatched her bag out of the Wagoneer, locked it, and walked to the elevator which took her back down to the lobby.
At the registration desk she presented a counterfeit driver's license and told the concierge that she wanted to pay in cash. The license was a document that had cost her a significant amount of money as well as considerable trouble. Those among them who were married had to worry about those kinds of things----their wire was stretched tighter, their balancing act a little more delicate than the others'. But it had been worth it. It had served her well for over two years now. She asked for a room facing the boulevard on the highest floor available. After signing the registration forms and paying, she declined the help of a bellboy and walked straight across the cavernous lobby to the elevator, her high-cut bodysuit and stylish figure turning heads. Vicki San Felipe was a beautiful woman.
She found her room on the eighth floor not far from the elevator and slipped the rectangular magnetic card into the slot above the handle, heard it click, and shoved it open. She did not turn on the lights, but tossed her bag and the card on the bed and walked straight to the curtains and opened them. A little to her left a sweep of buildings rose up above her, their lights glittering in the mists like a rainy sky of winking eyes peering at her in the opened window, their vantage points the envy of even the most demanding voyeur savant. And across the shiny boulevard the palm trees of the Pavilion Club stood dripping in a surreal desert of green sand.
Vicki San Felipe walked to the telephone and place a call. She spoke only a few words and hung up, then walked back to the window. Standing in front of it, she reached up and began taking the rubber band from her ponytail. But her hands were shaking, the rubber band was too tight. It snapped, startling her. She raked her fingers through her hair, tossed the rubber band aside, and shook out her hair. She took a deep breath. The room was clean, did not smell of cigarette smoke. It was new and clean.
From this moment on it would be different from all the times before. Until now she'd been learning. It'd been a long apprenticeship, hampered by her own anxieties and psychological impediments. She might never have come to this point at all had she not had help, had she not been coaxed and coached and brought along with patience and understanding. She had reached that stage where she would have to give herself up totally or never know what it might have been like to understand something few people would ever know. It was that simple. It had been explained to her, but she had known anyway, instinctively. The body was the gateway to the mind. She almost had done it before, almost had crossed the threshold, risking her identity until she had grown intoxicated on nothing more than the other's breath, that feather of one's essence that no one could ever alter or destroy.
Her hands were trembling even more now as she pulled off her bodysuit and tossed it out of the way. And then she peeled off the leotards, freeing her body from the tight embracing web, her skin feeling tingly, alive with millions of tiny sensitive fingers. Standing naked in front of the plate-glass window, she let them look at her, let them glitter and wink at her. It was electrifying to have at last made the decision to acquiesce, and for a full week she had been distracted with anticipation. The curtain was about to rise on her regression.
There was a firm knock at the door and she flinched. For a moment she didn't turn around, but remained, nude, facing the night of greedy lights. It really was too late. She picked up the magnetic card from the foot of the bed as she walked by it on her way to the door. For some reason she didn't understand----she had never done it before----she didn't open the door, but instead knelt and slipped the card into the sliver of light as if she were pushing it out into the promised, anxious anticipated dimension. Then she backed away, slowly, listened as the card slid into the slot and clicked, listened to the double click of the turning door handle, and watched the sliver of light widen into a harsh brightness burning around the silhouette like a blinding white aura. Then the flood narrowed to darkness again, the light returned to a sliver on the floor, and the figure stood somewhere in the dark passage.
She waited with her back to the room again, facing the window, listening to the sounds of a small leather valise yielding up its contents behind her in the dark room. Almost immediately she caught the thick, musky odor of lipstick and oils, followed the tinny chinking of buckles, the brittle rustling of new tissue paper, the muffled clacking of ebony wood beads, expelled breath, a waft of Je Reviens. She had planned all this, choreographed these smallest details of sound and smells in their proper sequence. Not only was she trembling because these things accommodated her imagination, but she was delighted that every detail of her design was being followed. By prearrangement, she controlled the events about to happen and she knew they would continue inexorably, no matter how she pleaded for them to stop. But she couldn't control her trembling. The rain, it seemed, was coming through the glass.
Like a Japanese Noh play it took hours, or seemed to, though it was impossible to know. Time quickly had lost its capacity to be measured. And there was talk, an agitated monologue, a hypertensive soliloquy in which she recognized the familiar disquiet of her own restrained arousal. Even though they had talked it though before, every act and scene, every syllable of dialogue, every postured movement of the hand and tongue and pelvis, there were surprises----of intuition and sensation, the mutual unspoken decision to sustain the prelude of erotic tension.
Eventually she lay on the bottom sheet of the bed, everything else having been stripped away and thrown into a corner, her arms and legs extended, her wrists already secured. She listened to the gabbling, felt her right ankle being secured. Sometimes she understood, sometimes she didn't, as she struggled against her body's insistence to hyperventilate, though she knew that it was in the act of her surrendering that she controlled the sequence of the play, and achieved a dimension of experience never before realized. As she felt her left ankle being secured, she took long and deep breaths. Trusting was vital. She remembered: the body was the gateway to the mind. Never before had she concentrated so hard, not in all her life! When the final buckle went snap she suddenly felt lighter than air, as if she had been released rather than bound. In that instant she understood that total helplessness, total surrender, was like a black feather, floating, falling into a vast dark emptiness.
The choreography was followed precisely. She cried, writhed, fought the bindings, she begged and pleaded for it to cease. But on it went, past what she thought she could endure, past the pleasure she thought she'd gain from it and into something beyond, as had been promised. She rolled, tossed upon waves of pleasure she never imagined, she swooned in the troughs and rode the high rolling curls of undreamt-of sensation. Sometimes, through it all, to stay in touch with reality she looked to the rain on the window, fixed her eyes on the stippled, fracted, light that formed a total wall of Brownian motion behind the figure above her. As the tempo increased they approached once again that moment of experiencing each other's breath, that feather of one's essence that nobody could destroy or alter. And then she was heaved upon a dark tsunami, a long, swelling high from which she looked down into real fear. This was it! She was too high, too far, reality was frighteningly small and still receding. She pleaded for it to halt, but it didn't. It was worse, much worse, and for a moment she panicked, almost slid into incoherence before she remembered the safe word. "Pity," she gasped, and waited to be saved. "Pity!
But everything disintegrated in flare of empyreal red.
The first blow shattered her jaw.
And she felt herself being bitten and chewed.
She was stupefied. "Pity."
The second blow shattered the cartilage of her nose.
She listened in horror to the gibbering that was faster than comprehension, faster than lips could form words, it seemed, and suddenly she was called by a name she had never heard and was accused of crimes she did not commit.
"Pity."
Another blow, and the incredible, dumbfounding sensation of being bitten, the teeth everywhere on her, no place sacred.
She gulped desperately at the blood that poured into her throat from the back of her nose and tried to see through eyes bleary with shock. This was wrong, all wrong. She heard the clicking sound of a buckle and then something slithered under her nape and she felt the naked knees on either side of her chest. The belt was thick, like a high collar, and as it slowly tightened her ears filled with a rushing roar and her heart hammered, rocking her as if it would explode. Then she went deaf and her heart became less insistent. She began to drift. She had almost left her body, almost achieved that blessed separation, when she was brutally brought back through the roar and the hammering and the pain and the unimaginable sorrow of her ordeal.642Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡSs17Etj81R
Then the belt tightened again.642Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡzhzXi8Tl7A
Time was meaningless apart from her coming and going through these sounds and sensations that filled the verge of consciousness. It had gone awry, all of it, this and everything, even the years rolling back over memory. She had granted someone license to monkey with her life, neither allowing nor denying it, perversely bringing her back repeatedly, gabbling faster than comprehension, faster than lips could form words, calling her a name she'd never heard, accusing her of crimes she did not commit.642Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡRwH56j3IfI
Only the falling rain was virtuous, and it was through the rain that she drifted for the last time.642Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡTPPwSvWWGh
