by Lucy Taylor
Despondent and heartsick, he asked about Myriam, but the few people who admitted to knowing her said only that she moved around. Here a few days, then somewhere else.
On the fourth day of useless searching, furious and frustrated, he picked up a hooker and took her back to his room, where he tried to recreate the experience he was seeking. When that failed, he found another young woman and did coke with her before they had sex. On coke, Nicholas could stay hard almost indefinitely. But nothing happened, except that both he and the girl were sore the next morning.
His stay at the upscale Harbor Castle was becoming too costly, and he decided to move to a modest, inexpensive hotel near Queen’s Park. The phone rang as he was packing his suitcase. He hesitated, then picked it up. Wished that he hadn’t. The pain in Beth’s voice stabbed his temporal lobe like an icepick. Worse, though, was the fact that he had to jog his mind to recall the face belonging to that distraught voice. He felt as though decades had passed since he’d last seen her. Since he’d lain down with Myriam and everything changed.
“I’m sorry, Beth, but I can’t come home yet. There’s a deal in the making, some more property that I want to look at –”
“Stop lying to me, Nicholas.”
“Beth, listen –”
“I’m sick of excuses. I want you to come home now. Whatever’s happened, whatever you’ve gotten involved with, I can forgive it, but you have to leave now, just leave and come home. Can’t you do that?”
He wanted to tell her, yes, yes, of course, I’ll come home, but what he heard himself say was, “No, I can’t do that. This deal is too important. Leaving here now is out of the question.”
She gave a long moan that escalated into a wild wail, like an animal lost and wounded. He held the phone away from his ear, but the sound still reverberated chaotically through his body, ripping synapses with its discordant notes of anguish.
“Don’t give me that bullshit, Nicholas. Don’t treat me like an idiot. What is it? Are you in love with someone else? Is that what it is? Are you leaving me?”
“No, Beth, no, I mean, I don’t know what I’m doing. I just know I can’t come home yet, I have to stay here a little bit longer. I can’t explain. I want to, but I just can’t.”
Then there was silence, which was scarier somehow than the grief-stricken wail of a moment before. “This has something to do with that Sonny Valdez character, doesn’t it?” she said finally, her voice flat and jagged, like ice chipped from a block with an axe. “He’s got you involved in something illegal, some drug scam. Jesus, Nicholas, are you that big a fool? Do you want to go back to prison?”
“No, no, I don’t.” Tears started pouring out of his eyes, heartfelt and wrenching, but responding to her words in a way completely different from how she meant them. He didn’t want to go back to prison: that was the whole point. Prison was what his life had been like before, prison was his separate identity, his separate skin. Prison was his narrow, rigid identity as Nicholas Berringer. It was the same realization, the same awakening, that must have turned Sonny Valdez into a paranoid recluse. But how could he tell her that, how could he say it so she didn’t think he’d gone back to drugs, think him insane?
“It’s this, Beth,” he said finally. “I know it sounds crazy, but I had – how do I put this? – some kind of experience. It was something spiritual, something so incredible – I can’t just walk away from it now.”
She gave a high, raucous hoot. “A spiritual experience? You, Nicholas? So what are you saying? Did you get Born Again, join the Moonies, give up your soul to Lord Krishna?”
“Please, Beth, I’m serious.”
“Then fucking tell me what you’re talking about!”
“I can’t. I want to explain, but I can’t. I do love you. Please just believe that. Please just be –”
“Are you leaving me, Nicholas?”
“I just can’t come home yet, I –”
“Then you know what, Nicholas? Go to hell. Just go to hell!”
She hung up the phone.
“This isn’t enough. I want more – everything you can do to me,” Nicholas said to the dominatrix. “I don’t give a damn about pain. I don’t care if you make me bleed. What I want is to go beyond my normal limits, to be outside myself. Whatever it takes, I want you to do it.”
Madame Yvette was gossamer pale, ethereal-looking with grey eyes like circles cut from glassy envelopes and long hair, braided down her back, a violent shade of red. Her milky, finely freckled skin contrasted vividly with the black leather regalia, the fetish boots and studded wrist bands, the black lipstick and the riding crop that Nicholas had watched her wield with delicate precision against the buttocks of the bound and blindfolded “slave” that he’d just fucked.
“You’re not one of my regulars,” she said. “I like to move slowly with a new client. I need to determine your tolerance for pain and humiliation. I’ve had clients lose it in the middle of a scene and try to rip my throat out.”
“My tolerance for pain is high,” snapped Nicholas. “And if I were going to ‘lose it’ in the middle of a sex scene, I’d have done that long ago. What I want –” he hesitated, groped for the right words “– is to be transported mentally, to lose myself so where I end and you begin becomes unclear. Does that make sense? Can you give me an experience that’s so intense it clouds the mind and yet, at the same time, clears it?”
“Short of killing you, you mean?” said Madame Yvette.
“Short of killing me.”
“You don’t mind blood?”
“Not if bleeding gets me to the place I want to be.”
Madame Yvette considered this. Finally she said, “I don’t like dealing with crazy and unstable people. They’re dangerous to me and to my business. Neither am I interested in assisting suicide. So tell me, Nicholas: are you one of the crazy, unstable people?”
“I don’t know.”
Madame Yvette touched his wrist with her bright, black nails and left a tiny scratch. “Then perhaps we will find out.”
Her dungeon was considered the priciest and best equipped in Toronto, where Madame and her girls had served the masochistic needs of some of the city’s wealthiest and most powerful for many years. Suitably foreboding, it was a pod of individual cells connected to a central hall. Gloomily, it reminded Nicholas of the time he’d spent behind bars, although the prison accommodation he remembered had been vastly more cheerful and definitely better lit.
She ordered Nicholas to strip, which he did, then manacled him to a crossbeam, arms above his head, legs splayed. His first instinct, when the manacles were tightened painfully around his wrists, was to try to free himself and fuck her till she screamed. Submissiveness was not his natural inclination. All the more reason then, he figured, that he should experience it. Maybe that was the key, he reasoned. Maybe subservience and suffering would bring him to that transcendent point where Nicholas ceased to exist and something else filled the void.
And though she whipped and paddled him until he screamed, tortured him with excruciating nippleclamps, choked him till lights blinked on and off in his head and his orgasms were broken up with spaces of unconsciousness, nothing occurred that ever exceeded the realm of the physical, and Nicholas was always Nicholas – more than ever, in fact, when his ego raged at Madame Yvette’s humiliations, the sadistic whimsy of the many degradations to which she subjected him and the undeniably sweet suffering inherent in each one.
At last, towards dawn, he left the Madame’s establishment – tormented and pleasured to equal degree, physically sated and emotionally drained, but most of all, wretchedly disappointed.
For the third time that evening, Nicholas trudged along Yonge Street, head lowered, oblivious to the sex shop windows full of leather toys, the sibilant whispers of hookers cooing from the darkening doorways. He’d visited every purveyor of erotica that he could think of, questioned anyone who’d talk to him, even tracked down the young hustler who’d originally told him where Myriam could
be found.
He got nothing but blank stares and, occasionally, bitter laughter, as though the mere fact that he searched for Myriam rendered him an object of pity and disdain.
Now the hopelessness of it was settling over him. Of course someone like Myriam wouldn’t stay in one place. Or at least wouldn’t permit the illusion that she remained in one place, he thought, remembering how he had begun making love with Myriam in a hotel room and then found himself back in the basement room where he’d first seen her.
She’s gone, he thought despairingly. I’ll never find her again. I’ll never experience that feeling again.
Which is worse, he wondered, to have an experience so life-changing that you’d spend the rest of your life longing for it, dreaming of it, trying fruitlessly to find it again, or never to have had the experience at all? The first seemed a prescription for wretchedness, yet the second seemed an unthinkable choice.
I’m alive, he thought. I’m cured. The test results came back, and I’m fine. Why isn’t that enough? Why do I want more? Why can’t I give this up and go back to Beth – if she’ll have me, that is? I love her: why isn’t she enough?
He passed a hooker of indeterminate gender thunking along on platform heels, a gaudily costumed creature who licked its lips and swished its silken tongue at Nicholas. There was a flicker of interest on Nicholas’s part, but it was replaced almost immediately by discouragement. Since the session with Madame Yvette, almost a week ago, he’d bought the services of half a dozen professional purveyors of sex, including a buxom she-male with a python-like dick, a Vietnamese whore who claimed knowledge of secret Tantric rites, and a submissive who aroused in Nicholas such powerful aggression that he feared equally for her life and for his sanity.
But nothing, in that smorgasbord of guilty pleasures and perverse games of mind and body, did he find anything that resembled even remotely what he’d felt with Myriam, so he shook his head at the lip-smacking whore and trudged on, headed toward Dundas Street.
Since coming to Toronto, Nicholas had walked past St Benedict’s Cathedral dozens of times without giving it more than a passing glance, other than to note the irony of its presence here at the end of a block comprised almost entirely of shops devoted to the sex trade. But he’d been raised Catholic and still had some fleeting attachment to Catholicism’s rites and rituals. There was a certain comfort in the familiarity of a religion that, for the most part, he’d left behind in boyhood. On a whim, he decided to go inside.
A few people knelt in prayer. At the altar, a priest was preparing to give Mass.
Nicholas found a confessional and slid inside. He confessed to his adulteries, to the myriad indulgences of the past few days – the group sex, the gay sex, sex as dominator and as dominated. But finally, having exhausted that part of his confession, he said, “I met a woman here who worked a miracle for me. Only a few days ago, I had AIDS, and now the results of two blood tests have come back negative. This woman cured me. I don’t expect you to understand this, Father, or to believe it, but she cured me by – well, by having sex with me, and now I can’t get over that experience. It haunts me. Not the sex itself, but something else I can’t put into words . . .” There was a long pause from the other side. Nicholas slammed his fist against the inside of the confessional and said, “Fuck, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You can’t possibly know what I mean. You must think I’m crazy. Hell, I’m starting to think I’m crazy.”
“Don’t go.” The firmness of the priest’s command halted Nicholas as he was rising to leave. “You say you’re haunted by what you felt when you were with this woman. If you could see her again, if you could be with her, do you think this time you could hold onto the experience you describe, that you could absorb it into your soul?”
Nicholas, surprised, responded, “I don’t know, Father. All I know is I want to try.”
“I don’t know if I’m damning you to hell or guiding you along the path to heaven, but maybe I can help.”
Beth had packed the car in a rage, not knowing where she was going, only that it would be in the opposite direction from Nicholas. They’d been married five years. She had known it was dicey going into it, that Nicholas had spent time in prison for dealing cocaine, that his youth was a black hole which he described to her only in the vaguest, most general terms or not at all. She knew the power of his erotic appetites, so the idea that he might cheat on her was more dismaying and disappointing than outright shocking – that he would leave her altogether, though, with no more explanation than that he had no explanation, beggared all comprehension.
She had decided to drive south, with New Mexico as a vague and dreamily envisioned destination. She knew no one there, had never indicated to her husband any desire to visit. It was a destination where, should Nicholas ever tire of whatever adventure he was on and decide to look for her, he would never find her. And, in the meantime, she had her own fantasies of Marlboro Men with studly bulges and swarthy, muscular Mexicans on the prowl for paler flesh. I’ll show him, she thought, before reflecting sadly on the futility of inspiring jealousy in someone who didn’t give a fuck.
All this was on her mind when she got the letter postmarked Toronto. Given the contents, outwardly, it was strikingly genteel-looking. Expensive Mayflower Hotel stationery addressed in an elegant cursive that resembled the handwriting of her elderly aunt, not a psychotic-looking T-bar or manic-looking flourish to be seen.
The very elegance and neatness of it, however, like an exquisitely gift-wrapped package that contains manure, flagged her attention as much as if the letters of the address had been clipped out of a magazine and taped onto the envelope.
Inside she found a sheet of stationery with a single sentence written in that same overly controlled hand, as though the writer were making a conscious effort to contrast the vile inscription with the fastidious lettering. And along with that, a faded Polaroid of a much younger Nicholas. He wore a tie-dyed body shirt that showed off a ripped and gleaming chest. Long hair stringy around his face, eyes blank and strange. Nicky-boy, age 19, the best hustler in the business, the caption read.
Naked, Nicholas sat on the tier nearest the stage, breathing the heady, almost nauseatingly sweet scent of incense and sickness and sex. It was the same basement room that he remembered from the first time he’d seen Myriam, but on a different street in a different section of the city.
A girl so thin, her biceps were scarcely bigger than her wrists, lay on the mattress. Her face was turned towards the audience. Her eyes were huge and frighteningly vacant. The tattoos on her stomach and legs had become misshapen squiggles of color as her flesh withered and shrank beneath the designs. The shroud-color of sickness clung to her.
Behind the blue swirl of incense, Myriam moved over the girl. Her heavy, pendulous breasts lolled against the other’s flat chest, huge, coffee-colored nipples brushing smooth pink ones. She lifted the girl’s head, tongue-kissed her, then lapped her way down the skeletal torso to the straw-colored thatch between her thighs.
The girl didn’t move or give indication that she knew what was happening. Nicholas strained to see if she even breathed. Her eyes were unblinking. He wondered if she might have died.
Myriam angled herself between the girl’s legs. A thick, purple-crowned phallus lolled between her thighs. Never had Nicholas seen a dildo so life-like; nor could he determine where it had been strapped on. For a disorienting moment, he suffered the illusion that the cock was actually Myriam’s, that she had somehow metamorphosed into a male.
As she slid inside the girl, some of the watchers sank into each other’s arms and began to couple with great urgency. Matings of the same and opposite sex in positions both conventional and exotically perverse while, as always, there were men who touched no one but themselves, waiting to anoint the fornicators with their gush of semen.
A woman with long black hair threaded with grey slid her legs through Nicholas’s. She dipped down and took his cock into her mouth, but not even that distr
acted him from what was taking place on stage. The girl that Myriam fucked had come to life now. Writhing, bucking, whimpering, her back arching so the outline of her ribs showed clearly beneath the blue-white skin.
Tears streamed down the girl’s thin face. Myriam stopped thrusting. The girl calmed. While those in the audience continued their mating, the two on stage lay quietly together, neither of them moving, suspended in that moment of sublime transcendence that, to Nicholas, had seemed to last for hours, that moment which had removed one illness to replace it with another, a kind of hopeless longing akin to homesickness.
He put his hands down on the head of the woman sucking him. His fingers threaded through her hair. He held her still and shut his eyes, forcing himself to remain motionless as he willed the experience he’d had with Myriam to return. It was in vain – nothing was recaptured, only a greater and more enervating sense of futility and loss.
Gently he slid himself free of the woman’s warm, willing mouth. Gazed down into her face searching for some remnant of the experience with Myriam – because he felt nothing, did that mean she felt nothing, too?
“Have you been with Myriam?” he asked.
She nodded – but only after a pause, warily, like a child reluctant to confess a minor theft. “I wasn’t sick, though. There was just a lump, a tiny one, that went away on its own.”
“When you were having sex with her, what did you feel?”
She shrugged. “I don’t remember it,” and dipped her head again.
“Wait,” said Nicholas, lifting her chin. “Do you think about how it felt to be with her? Do you dream of being with her again?”
“I told you, I don’t remember what it was like,” the woman hissed. Fear capered in her eyes. She pulled away, and Nicholas let her go.
