Punish Me with Kisses

by William Bayer

  "So—?" he asked later in the car. "An experience," I told him, lying in his lap. "I'll write it up in my secret diary. I'm glad I did it, but I wouldn't go through that again. I'm more of an S than I am an M, I think. I'll tell you one thing, dearie. Being Greeked isn't all that big a charge. I feel sorry now for all you fags."

  Today I snuck into the darkroom. The scrapbook he made was filled with shots of me, close-ups of various and sundry genitalia, and the backs of peoples' heads. He cut out the rest, evidence of who the people were. But I wanted to know what I was screwed by, so I went into his safe, found the negs and made up a set of contacts for myself. JESUS! The men were flabby, middle-aged, the women lined and old. Couldn't he have set it up with a black basketball team, anything except this overweight suburban bunch? The one with the thick dick has a face like John Mitchell. The cruel lady looks like Walter Cronkite in a fright wig. Jesus, I've been gang-banged by Great Neck! By Scarsdale blue-hairs for Christ's sake! I've been had by the sort of people you see sitting around in airports, white tufts of chest hair sprouting out of polyester shirts—

  After Penny read this passage she felt filled with sadness and shame. There were many pages like it, tales of orgies and self-debasements, scornful references to inadequate lovers, shrieks of discontent. The diary upset her, but not because of sex. It was the pathos of it, Suzie's misery, that filled her with despair.

  There was another thing, too, something she didn't understand: the diary turned her on. How strange to react to her sister's escapades as if she were reading a pornographic novel. But that's what was happening; she was aroused by what she read. Peering into Suzie's sex life was to discover bizarre longings—to be tied to bedposts and probed by strangers, to be ravished by armies of men.

  Jared said the diary just showed how screwed up Suzie had been. "There's this guy she seems to be hung up on, someone vague who won't see her and apparently feels about her the way she feels about Cynthia. And then there's the bisexual photographer, Jamie, but she doesn't seem to like him all that much, and he doesn't come across as the impassioned killer type."

  "So where does that leave us?" Penny asked.

  "Back at zero, where we'll always be."

  Still the diary fascinated her. It was as if Suzie were calling from the pages, crying out to her for help. Maybe it had been silly to think it would give her the murderer's name, but now she was interested in other things: why Suzie had lived this way, what had made her so unhappy, what was behind her will toward self-destruction, what she had been looking for.

  She wanted to meet this Jamie Willensen, wanted to put a face on this person to whom Suzie had relinquished so much. Jared told her to leave it alone, stop prying around in Suzie's life.

  "She's my sister. I don't feel like I'm prying."

  "She's dead now. What difference does it make?"

  "I want to understand her."

  "You're getting obsessed."

  "I just want to understand."

  "You can carry that too far."

  Her interest annoyed him. He complained again that she was talking like Suzie and that her gestures were sometimes the same. "Next thing you know you'll want to start re-enacting scenes," he said.

  "Sure. Why not? Why don't you tie me down and fuck me in the ass?"

  "See? That's just what I mean. And you think it's just a joke."

  "No. I'm serious. Maybe I am obsessed. I care about her. What's wrong with that?"

  He shook his head. "Caring won't bring her back." Then he looked at her. "Maybe you ought to see a shrink."

  She didn't want to see a shrink.

  She wanted to see Jamie Willensen. She looked him up in the phone book. His studio was just a couple blocks away. She asked Jared to walk over there; maybe they'd catch a glimpse of him as he came or left. Jared wasn't crazy about the idea but finally agreed to come along. They went over after work.

  It was an old carriage house conversion on East Seventy-Eighth, a narrow two-story building, the kind that was cheap thirty years ago, worth a fortune now. The carriage entrance, two huge doors facing the street, was sealed up, but there was a little doorway to the side and two doorbells, one marked "residence," the other "studio." Penny knew the sort of place. She'd seen spreads on fashion photographers' studios in magazines: a cavernous downstairs filled with lights and expanses of fabric and paper hanging on rollers from the ceiling like giant shades and various props spread around; upstairs would be the apartment where he lived.

  The place was shut tight, though she could see some light escaping through vertical blinds on the second floor. "What are we supposed to do now?" Jared asked. "Ring the doorbell and introduce ourselves?"

  "I just want to see what it looks like," she said.

  "You said you wanted to see him. There's a phone booth on the corner. Call him and tell him we're here. Tell him your Suzie's sister and you've been reading her diary, and there's a lot of stuff about him in there, and we wondered if he had any of those old orgy photographs around, and if he does could we come up and take a look."

  "You know I'm not going to do anything like that."

  "You want to see him—OK. I'll call him, tell him there's a baby on his doorstep. That should lure him out and then you'll have your look. Then maybe we can get out of here and go eat dinner someplace."

  He was taunting her. She turned to him and asked why he was being so mean.

  "Because this whole scene is ridiculous, standing around out here looking up at his windows, hoping by some fluke he'll come out and show his face. I know you're into that sort of stuff, but isn't it usually the other way around?"

  "What?"

  "Well, aren't you the one who's usually up there in the window, and aren't the people you're spying on usually standing around outside?"

  She looked at him, unbelieving. "That's a lousy thing to say."

  He seemed confused. "I'm sorry, babe. I just feel like a fool standing out here. It just came out. I didn't mean it. I don't know what I meant." He reached out for her but she stood back.

  "Things like that don't just 'come out' unless they're already in your head. Since you're so hungry," she said, turning, walking away, "why don't you just bug off and eat."

  He called after her. "Where are you going?"

  "None of your business." And then, as an afterthought, she turned and stared at him. "Fuck off!" she said sharply. And then to herself: That's what Suzie would have said.

  They made it up later that night. He was waiting for her when she came back from a Woody Allen movie. She'd gone to it hoping some laughter would do her good, but she hadn't laughed; the picture had made her sad. Jared apologized again, this time earnestly. He said she'd been right—the idea that she was a voyeur had been in his mind, and because it was her one weakness, he'd used it against her as people who know each other very well sometimes do, to take out his own frustrations and bitterness which had nothing to do with her or even with having to stand outside Jamie Willensen's carriage house, but with the fact that he was a failed actor, maybe even a failed human being.

  "There's that creep of a photographer," he said, "a piece of human garbage, if you can believe half of what Suzie wrote, making big bucks, being touted as a Big Talent, who can afford a suede couch that cost thirty-five hundred dollars three-and-a-half years ago, which means, if you take inflation into account, it probably sells for four grand today. And to top it off I was thinking about how it had 'come' dribbled on it by some asshole named Dave, and how, probably, instead of having it cleaned he's just left on the stains to make it more of a conversation piece. So I turned on you and said something lousy, probably one of the lousiest things anyone's ever said to you in your life, which puts me, I suppose in the same category as prosecutor Robinson. And so, on that note, I was thinking maybe I should just pack up and move into the Y or someplace, or maybe better, more in keeping with the sort of bastard I am, that bug-ridden whorehouse down by the Port Authority from which you extracted me so kindly, and for which I've repai
d you by acting like a shit."

  Penny had begun to laugh halfway through his little speech, and Jared could barely keep a straight face himself as he came to its end.

  "OK," she said. "Apology accepted. Now please, for Christ's sake, shut up."

  They got into bed, and he made love to her very gently, doing everything he could to please her so she would know that no matter what he'd said it wasn't sex that held him to her, but love. When they were finished and had turned off the lights, she lay on her back and tried to sleep. But she couldn't. So many things were whirling through her mind. She turned to him and finally whispered in his ear.

  "What was she like?" she asked. "What was she really like?"

  "Suzie?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "You knew her a lot better than me."

  "I mean—you know: what was she like in bed?"

  "Jesus, babe." He propped himself up so he could look at her. "I don't know. Jesus. I can't remember that."

  "Come on," she coaxed him. "You can remember if you try."

  "There's no way to describe something like that. It was so long ago. What difference does it make?"

  "I'd like to know."

  He shook his head. "I want to forget it. I want to forget what she was like." He turned his back, then fell off to sleep.

  Either he really couldn't remember, or couldn't bring himself to tell. In either case she was annoyed. What use was he if he couldn't tell her the things she wanted to know? Jamie Willensen would tell me, she thought, if I could ever get close enough to ask.

  Jamie and I had a deal. If he satisfied my fantasy, I'd satisfy his. His is complicated, baroque, reeking of faggy S&M. But hearing him tell it gives me a charge. Humiliation—maybe that's my game!

  The scenario is set. We go to The Underground on West Street Saturday night. The place is jammed, people staring, tittering. Slave masks hang from the ceiling. Rubber underwear. Leather jockstraps. Vibrator kits. Dildoes in assorted sizes. Lotions, creams, a whole wall of bondage devices, another of paddles and whips, a chart showing the "handkerchief code." Three skinny guys in T-shirts are waiting on the mob. Everyone very polite, very proper and correct. Merchandise is ordered in hushed tones. Items purchased are handed over in discreet black paper bags.

  "Can I help you?" asks one of the salesmen.

  "Yes," I say, loud enough for everyone to hear. "I'm interested in looking at male genital restraints."

  "Ah—" He leads us over to a counter where all sorts of wicked-looking gadgets are displayed.

  "I like that one," I say, pointing to a mean-looking gismo, all black leather and chrome studs. The salesman pulls it out. "Do you think this will fit you, sweets?" I ask, giving Jamie a withering look By now the entire store is silent. You can cut their fascination with a knife. Jamie shrugs, embarrassed. "Looks like it might be a little small," I say. Then to the clerk: "He's hung like a horse—can you BELIEVE it? Well, the tighter the better I suppose. Twenty-four hours in that ought to teach him who's the boss."

  I snap my fingers. Jamie, blushing to his ears, fishes out his wallet, forks over twenty bucks. "No need to wrap it," I tell the salesman. "It's going on him the minute we get home." The salesman, I'm certain, has a hard-on. The women are incredulous. A young college couple examines us as we turn around.

  "Yes," I say as we leave the shop, "twenty-four hours cinched up tight as I can—then you'll REALLY be sorry for what you did."

  Out on the street: "God, you're dynamite," he says.

  "Get your charge, sweets?"

  "Did I ever."

  "Shall we go back and buy a pair of clamps to torture your little nips?"

  He's on fire now—I can tell. Back on Seventh Avenue I feel his crotch, find him hard as steel. "You really are an M," I tell him.

  "Yes," he says. "Oh, yes!"

  For a week we play out the charade. He gets more and more into it—I less and less. Finally when he asks me to beat him with a riding crop, I scornfully refuse. "Get one of your numbers to do that for you," I say. "Go to a leather-bar. I resign my role as Queen."

  He's crestfallen, and I'm glad. All this kinky stuff leaves me cold. I loathe my brassy wise-ass act, my good-time-outrageous-bitch routine. I long so much for tender love, to be held and cuddled, the great strong chest to weep upon, to cling to in the night—

  After Jared's refusal to describe what Suzie was like in bed, Penny decided to keep her thoughts about Suzie to herself. They were her problem, her obsession—no reason to bother Jared with them anymore. She carried the diary in her purse, brought it out at odd moments, reread certain passages again and again. She didn't know why it obsessed her except that by telling her about Suzie it seemed also to be telling her about herself. Why had they been so different? What had made their lives diverge? She believed that if she studied the diary hard enough the answers would be revealed.

  The tantalizing mystery now, she thought, was why Suzie had lived the way she had, as if she'd been controlled by something, driven by some controlling power. As for their sisterly relationship, the more she thought about it the more convinced she became that beneath her own bookishness and voyeurism there was a lot of Suzie, too.

  She didn't know why she thought this. It wasn't clear. Sex—that was part of it; she thought about sex a lot now, sometimes for hours at a time, and had begun to fantasize in ways she'd never done before. She thought about seeing Jared in one of his porno films, wondered what she'd feel if she saw him big on the screen, naked, savagely screwing someone else. And then she began to think about seeing that in real life: a threesome, a foursome, an orgy, with lots of faceless men and Jared, too, and herself, of course, being screwed by all of them, taking them on one at a time and then by twos and threes.

  Maybe she and Jared should go to one of the swingers' clubs. He knew people who held sex parties—they should go to one of them. It seemed peculiar to her that she should be thinking things like this, and when she hinted to Jared what she had in mind, he said he found it peculiar, too. "That's not you," he told her, shaking his head. But then, later, she wondered: If these are the things I think about, if these are my fantasies, then they must be me.

  Another thing that struck her in the diary were those points where Suzie's life had intersected with her own. That dinner in Greenwich when Suzie had said she found her reading list "jejune"; that time when they were little and their father had spanked Suzie for knocking down her blocks. She barely remembered those things, but reading about them brought them back. Differently, of course—her own memory of the jejune incident was so vague she could only remember the sting of her tears as she stared at the toppled blocks.

  Suzie wrote odd things about her: "I want to grab her by her ears and shake her till she pees"—"I sometimes wonder if Child will ever get her shit together." But there was a strain of tenderness, too, a concern for "Child," a hope that "Child" wouldn't suffer the way she had. There was a cryptic reference to a conversation about Scott Fitzgerald they'd had once driving up to Maine. She remembered it as a casual bit of talk, but Suzie evidently had found it intense:

  —listening to her chatter I feel like flirting with danger, skirting close up to the edge. Child sniffs at "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me." Thinks Fitz got Tom and Daisy Buchanan all wrong, too, with his accusation that they "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness." Finds Baby Warren's final dismissal of Dick Diver ("That's what he was educated for") implausible. "Fitzgerald never really understood," she says. "We ought to know, don't you think? We're rich and not like that at all." She talks on and all the time I'm touched and moved and also screaming wildly inside. Who says we're not like that! What about Devereux and Nicole? I guess Fitzgerald got that stuff balled up too—

  There was something else that surprised Penny—she'd no idea Suzie suspected she was being spied upon in Maine. But there it was in black and white: "I know she's watching me all the time now, sad-eyed, hurt.
I think she's trying to figure me out. (Well, best of luck, Child!)"

  She'd been so careful, but now she saw how easily she'd been found out:

  Feel the prying eyes, the glowing eyes, staring out of the darkness, watching me with envy in the night. The cottage is my stage, but where is the applause? Nothing coming to me from my audience, no tears or laughter, not even a snicker or a hiss. I can only imagine the effect, and it's very spooky. Someone sitting there watching me, envying. The more wildly I perform the more tightly hands grip the chair. Jesus! I'm giving a sex show! Where are my watchers? Where are the faceless men? Where are their hoots, their pants? Do they whack off silently to my noisy humping on the stage?

  There was something mystical about that, and other passages as well, a wild leap from Suzie's awareness of being watched to her fantasy that she was giving a sex show for an audience of men. But Suzie had been uncanny in her accuracy, had guessed at details she could not possibly have observed. It was true: Penny's hands had gripped the rocking chair and she had been stimulated, afraid to make the slightest noise, even afraid her chair would squeak. How could Suzie have known about that? Had she possessed the "genius of the mad?"

  Yes, there were strange passages, and lurking always in the background was the unnamed indifferent lover, the "Dark Man" of the diary, the one who'd be sickened by her love-sick eyes just as she was sickened by Cynthia French:

  Whenever we see each other he's so goddamn cool. All those nights I spent in his arms—it's as if they mean nothing now, as if they're part of a deep and ancient past. What is it that makes him so special? Why do all other men seem so meager by comparison? I make up prints from the orgy, send them to him wondering what he'll think. Will he call me in the middle of the night? Tell me he wants me? Will the sight of my pussy, spread out, hungry and wet like a skinmag model's, like a whore's, a cunt's—will that turn him on again? Or will he be disgusted? Enraged? I barely sleep the next three nights, so great is my suspense. Then my envelope comes back. It's been misaddressed. Such an obvious slip—I'm totally disgusted and don't send it off again—