“That’s great,” Betsy said. “Bring your girlfriend.”
Betsy didn’t know, and he would never tell her, that he and Pilar were going to Portland to spend a couple days with ten thousand fellow perverts at KinkFest.
To his horror—he tried to not even think about it—Betsy might have heard he was kinky. The day after the divorce finalized, Oriana had Facebooked a drunken screed revealing that he’d spent $1,100 on sex toys in the last year, according to financial disclosures. She wrote that he’d been secretly “obsessed” with a “fetish lifestyle.” Seattle was just stodgy enough, even its arts community, that being a freaky two-timing BDSM practitioner could jeopardize his shot at taking over his boss’s job. Have you heard about Gavin? people might whisper, wide-eyed, the assistant curator of the Fillmore? Oriana deleted her message the next day, but presumably a number of her two thousand Facebook friends—among them a lot of the Seattle art world, and Betsy, and some of her friends—had already seen it. No one ever mentioned it to him. But why would they?
* * *
Almost four years before, his heart pounding in his ears, he created a profile on the website FetLife, but obscured his identity: his profile pic only showed his torso, and his biographical details were pithed for charm, not clarity. Among the upcoming event listings in the area he saw a rope-bondage tutorial. He scoured the potential attendee profiles, only signing up once he was fairly certain no one he knew would be there. Seattle was not only stodgy—it was also small. He’d spent twelve years as assistant curator at the Fillmore, and the top position came with a lot of public scrutiny. But he’d spent too long trying to smother his kink, and it wasn’t working anymore.
He met Pilar at that first rope tutorial, which was held in a wealthy couple’s brightly lit basement. Newbies were matched up, wide-eyed and thick-fingered. His rope work was disastrous, but Pilar was nice about it, even when he cinched a knot too tight and she lost feeling in her right hand. Aiming for casual, she talked about her work, but he was evasive.
She’d been designing headstones—“monuments” in that industry’s parlance—for fifteen years, and had a thirteen-year-old son from a first marriage. Her son played bass in a thrasher band. “Thrasher music still exists?” Gavin had said, and she just smiled. Clutching a new coil of rope, he told her that he worked for a museum, and when she asked which one, he complained of being “already bewildered” by this unwieldy length of rope. They laughed a lot. It wasn’t sexy. But it was easy and light, like tying up someone you know well.
They went for coffee two days later, and ended up at her two-bedroom condo just down the hill from the Fillmore. There, she showed him the toys she used on herself—her husband wasn’t game—ones Gavin had seen in porn but never in real life. Nipple clamps, thick vibrators, plugs, a wide flat paddle. As long as he’d been sexually active, he’d fantasized about spanking women, tying them up, using blindfolds, gags. He and Oriana had been together since their junior year at Reed, and she had made a face when, ten years ago, he’d brought home a pair of fur-lined handcuffs that he picked up while in London for Frieze. She tried to seem excited, but she thought he might want her to use them on him, and when he said no, she grimaced. The following day he threw the cuffs out.
But Pilar took the toys as seriously as she took his veneer of confidence. She whispered things she wanted in his ear, things that, in the days and months ahead, led to furtive Google searches on his phone: safer choking, orgasm control. When he pinned her to the bed, she asked him to press harder. He learned to pull her hair at the roots, because he had better control and she preferred that pain. Sometimes after an intense scene, Pilar went quiet, distant. At first, he was insulted, thinking it meant he’d made a mistake. Then he learned to stay, wrap her in a blanket, and whisper that she was good and beautiful.
Pilar detested secrets; her family had nested secrets inside of secrets. The honesty was shocking at times. She told her husband whenever she met Gavin. Initially, Gavin also claimed that his wife knew, but after six months he confessed over postsex scrambled eggs that his wife had no idea. Pilar told him to leave her apartment immediately—they were done. That was the first time she broke up with him.
The following day she texted to say she missed him. Two hours later he was tearing her underwear off her body as she presented her ass to him. She said he needed to match her honesty and he agreed to be honest with her. But he was terrified of removing the secrets supporting the rest of his life, and knew he couldn’t control the consequences of that much exposure.
Over the next stressful two and a half years, she kept trying to end things, and he kept talking her out of it, until the breaking up and reuniting became a ritual, just like when she’d plead to not be spanked, and he’d spank her, and she’d thank him for it and beg for more. Along the way, he learned that she was addicted to BuzzFeed listicles, and she brushed her hair with terrible force. She learned that he liked to ravage her while she feigned sleep. She moisturized multiple times a day, head to toe. “It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again!” she sometimes taunted from the bathroom, aware that he hated The Silence of the Lambs. While they weren’t paying attention, they grew together like trees that share root systems.
During the weekdays, Gavin and Pilar would meet at restaurants for breakfast or lunch and would talk about NPR news, earthquakes, and Brexit over breakfast. Their eyes connected, and their minds swirled with perversions. To a casual observer, they surely looked like old friends, even siblings. The only clue was that Pilar wore a stainless steel Eternity collar and a matching left-hand wrist cuff. The key to the collar and cuff sat snugly in his wallet.
Sitting there, he’d think about her back tattoo, a gravestone with her own name on it. A crow roosted atop, and a pair of butterflies rested in the grass below, near her pelvis. The date of her death on this “monument” was blank, and the epitaph read:
Impatient for it
to end, but never
ready to leave
When fucking her from behind, he used to find the tattoo distracting. But he came to like it, enjoyed staring at the curvature of her hips, her shoulders, her jet-black hair. Even her stretch marks—none of it turned him off. He liked the meat of her, loved to kiss her soft belly—loved her lack of shame about her hunger. He loved the inside, too, wanted to burrow within and make a home there. He loved the sweet taste that flooded her pussy as she came. Sometimes, afterward, he’d lean against her, and plead with her not to break up with him anymore, but she would, again and again, until he finally told his wife.
* * *
By the time he told Oriana, the other, secret life he’d been nurturing with Pilar was bleeding into his secular life. For a prized solo exhibition at the museum, he’d argued overenthusiastically for a trans male artist who focused on the role of sexual pain in their work. His boss, Gertrude, arched an eyebrow and said, “Let’s be honest, the board can only be challenged by a show once or twice a year before they grumble about feeling like they don’t belong anymore.” A concurrent spate of exhibits about poverty and homelessness had earned wary looks from the old guard. “Feels like politics over aesthetics,” the vice president whispered.
When he refused to tell Oriana the identity of this “other woman”—the words sounded like epithets in her mouth—she tried guessing: “That fucking gallery owner, right? Freckles!”
“I’ll tell you later. I don’t want you lashing out.”
“I’m not going to fucking—oh Jesus, tell me she’s not an artist.”
The lack of information was driving her even crazier, so he told her.
She stared at him, dumbstruck. She said, “So you’ve spent three years fucking a middle-aged single mom—a goth, at that—who sells gravestones?”
He nodded. He hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but yes.
“And you love her?”
“I do.” He felt his separate lives colliding like two giant ocean liners at harbor, creaking against each other and
then splintering, shattering. Would one manage to stay afloat despite this violence? Neither? He had no idea.
She sputtered, unable to think of what to say, until she said, “Why?”
No answer would make sense to her. After that, Oriana went eerily cool and explained that he was selfish, lazy, and a snob. Probably all true. She was also a snob, though. He might accuse her of enjoying her marriage to the assistant curator of the Fillmore Museum more than her marriage to the person who happened to hold that job. But he knew his betrayal of her was entirely his fault. It was so brutal, so cruel. There was nothing to be said in his defense.
So he said nothing. He just stared at her, and some secret part left him, some part he hadn’t even known was there, maybe—it slipped out of his body and crossed over to join Oriana. And he worried it would never come back, that from now on a piece of him would be trapped over there, gazing back at him in disgust. What he and Oriana had created together—their terribly photogenic life—felt so impressive, so essential to their individual identities, and he quietly but totally destroyed it without even telling her something might be amiss.
“You need to get out of here right now,” she said at last. He didn’t plead. That was when he knew which boat had sunk, and which had not.
* * *
A week after he separated from Oriana, seizing with guilt, he broke up with Pilar—the one and only time he broke up with her. He dated widely, enthusiastically, but it felt desperate and sad, and he missed Pilar. So they started up again. Slowly, at first. She’d been dating, as well, and had also been disappointed by the experience. They just weren’t very good at remaining apart, or holding each other at a distance. Now they were becoming accustomed to sleeping beside each other, which they’d never done before.
Recently, he’d invited her to an opening. But he knew that any number of Oriana’s friends could be there—even Oriana herself. Pilar knew, also, and said it wasn’t a good idea.
“Are we going to be hiding out, tainted forever?” he asked. But to be honest, he didn’t want Pilar to see him as he was among those people, performing a charming version of himself, or obsequious with benefactors. Gertrude would be there, and she wasn’t aware of his kinky side, as far as he knew. Best to keep everything neatly compartmentalized as much as possible. Oriana never showed that night—no doubt staying away from anywhere he might be.
In the ensuing months, he and Pilar began spending some nights at his postdivorce apartment. They began going out at night without feeling so paranoid. They visited a B&B/sex dungeon in suburban Seattle several times, as well as an awkward swinger’s club near the airport, and two FetLife “munches” (innocuous dinners at well-lit restaurants where kinky people dressed in civilian clothes, ate drab pizza, and chatted about their mortgages, their cats’ kidney problems). But in Portland they could go out together without scanning for familiar faces, or so they told themselves. And that was how they ended up with tickets to KinkFest.
* * *
Now here they were in Portland, without any plans to see Betsy—he hadn’t spoken to her since that call earlier in the week. He’d become busy, he told himself. But wouldn’t he see her? It was one thing to wander around Seattle, his shame dragging behind him like something he’d welded to his spine, but he couldn’t let it destroy his relationship with his cousin—his only family.
Black curtains hung at the back of the conference center’s lobby, which smelled strongly of an airport-style burgers-and-fries place. Once admitted past the first black curtain, everyone flocked past the drinking fountains and the row of bootblacks, waiting for anyone who wanted their shoes shined to KinkFest’s “dungeon.” Gavin and Pilar—both dressed comparatively normally, although her skirt was considerably shorter than she’d wear outside, and she wasn’t wearing a bra—entered the double doors, flashing their wristbands, and found a hangar large enough to hold a 747 with room to spare.
He tried to soak it all in—the people, pieces of equipment (if you squinted, it might look like a vast sex gym)—but his gaze was hijacked by a hairless potbellied white man standing, eyes closed, while a woman—also white, with crimson Manic-Panic hair—sucked his cock. Wearing stockings and a short ruffled skirt, she was topless, head bobbing methodically like a Texan pumpjack.
Gavin averted his eyes instinctively, although the couple surely selected a spot directly in front of the entrance because they wanted to be seen by as many people as possible.
The hangar was arranged in two long walkways with shorter paths cutting between them every thirty feet or so. As Gavin and Pilar began to move down the closer aisle, he spotted a shapely woman with excellent posture wearing leg irons sauntering toward them, topless in patent leather pants, on a leash, and—this was what seized the gaze—her head was gone. In place of her head Gavin observed a giant orange balloon: cinched at her neck, twice the size of a beach ball. A shorter woman clad in latex held the end of her leash.
He reached out and clasped Pilar’s hand, aware that his palm was sweaty. Hers was cool.
“I guess I would like to see Betsy while we’re here,” he said, surprising himself. “It’s important.”
“Being here reminds you of your cousin?” she said and laughed.
He laughed, too, shaking his head. They hadn’t talked about whether or not to contact Betsy since they’d been driving past Olympia. “I don’t know—it’s just…”
“Hey, I get it.”
He shook his head. “Let’s walk.”
So they began to wander through the hangar. “You want to see her alone?” she said. “I mean, I’d really like to meet her, but I guess I can hang out here, or go downtown.”
Self-conscious about his sweating hand, he wanted to pull it back, but she held tighter. To their right, a beefy South Asian leather daddy in chaps was flogging a scrawny white guy.
“No, no,” he said. “I want you to come, too. You should meet her. She should meet you. You’ll like each other. I think. I hope.”
And here: a cattle prod crackling against the thigh of a screaming woman.
“You sure you want me there?” she said. They were not looking at each other, but were staring at everything else. It was hard to focus on anything.
“I am, I am,” he said, although he had no idea. In truth, he was terrified of the thought of the two of them together. They might say anything. Betsy could ask if Pilar would be moving in soon. And Pilar—she was disastrous at withholding information, and knew it. Everything would come tumbling out.
A man with a horse’s head cantered down the aisle toward them, his weirdly long and thin flaccid penis swinging around like a prop.
Above them: a fleshy, naked woman suspended in a cage.
It was as if everyone there was vying for attention—as if the point of the dungeon was to exhibit yourself. Maybe everyone was, first and foremost, either a voyeur, or an exhibitionist? Probably so. Exhibitionist plus pony. Exhibitionist plus masochist. His life with Oriana was intended to be looked at, admired. He’d thought about that before, how he was, after all, a curator.
No curator was in charge here; the result was overwhelming, and somehow not remotely erotic to him. Ten minutes and he was full, couldn’t take in more.
“You okay?” Pilar said, clearly not as overwhelmed as him.
Among the hip collectors and creators he knew, this kind of Utilikilt kink would have registered as sad and profoundly unhip. He nodded. “So many nerds,” he whispered. “I’m guessing there’s a lot of overlap with Renfair regulars.”
“Maybe? I bet most subcultures look down on other subcultures. Like, I don’t think these people would love Seattle’s gallery scene,” she said. “Besides, you’re always worried about someone seeing you. But if someone saw you here, you realize they’re just as much of a freak as—or freakier than—we are.”
“Definitely true,” he said. “I need my hand back,” he said, hoping it didn’t sound rude but knowing it did.
To his left, people were pushing needles t
hrough other people. There was gauze in large quantities, numerous boxes of surgical gloves, antiseptic, bandages—disposable paper on the floor. He glanced, despite himself, and saw black blood oozing from a puncture wound in someone’s bicep.
“You want to go?” she said.
“I just need to sit down.”
They sat on the polished concrete floor.
Although he couldn’t see her body beneath her clothes, he was keenly aware that Pilar’s ass and arms were mottled with dark bruises. She applied hot washcloths to her skin after a session, which darkened the bruises. Just knowing the marks were there was reassuring, calming. Also that her ass still bore red streaks after a recent caning. He soaked the cane in water, because she preferred thud to sting, and waterlogged rattan helped achieve that effect.
He looked around again. No cell phones were permitted, so those engaged in their scenes gazed at each other, not at anyone else or into screens. Everyone was here to celebrate and explore the range and volume of their aberrance. Here, in this place that would soon host the Northwest Quilting Expo. Everyone was sweating and bleeding and pushing their fluids into one another, shoving tongues and digits inside other people, tearing at skin, as if to flay open an entrance, and conquer this problem of being stuck outside.
“Would you like to leave, sir?” she asked again, more gently, and kissed his forehead slowly, wetly, in the way that he loved.
He nodded. “Do you think there’s a—like, an IHOP, or something?”
“IHOP?” She laughed. “Gavin!”
He rolled his eyes. “I haven’t always been a snob.”
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