Punish Me, Please Me

by Ashley Zacharias

  There was a degree of sensuality in the way that the artist touched her body, constantly caressing herself, but it wasn’t explicitly sexual. Yet. Marcie wondered what she would do after she took her panties off. Would she caress herself between her legs? While Marcie watched, the woman on television stroked her lace-covered buttocks and ran her fingers over her thighs but didn’t get near her crotch.

  The woman on television. Marcie remembered the artist saying that it didn’t matter if it was her body on the screen or someone else’s. That was literally true. There was no way to prove that the television screens were attached to cameras inside the box. The artist had implied that they were, but she could have been lying.

  Her husband, Howard, was still here, watching avidly. Maybe the artist was right. Maybe it was better that he stayed in here and watched this piecemeal show of anatomical bits instead of going out to the other room and trying to chat the artist’s phone number out of her.

  She was annoyed that her husband had been given the option, was annoyed that that he had chosen to watch the video of a naked woman, and she would have been even more annoyed if he had spent this much time talking to the other woman. The artist had presented both Marcie and her husband in an impossible dilemma. Neither of them had any decent option.

  Marcie looked at the other women in the room. She was not surprised to see that most of them were paying more attention to their husbands than to the partial nudity on the screens. Smart ladies. The ones hanging out in the buffet and ignoring their husbands were the ones who were taking the biggest risk.

  This was no time to let a husband think that he was being ignored.

  Then Marcie realized something else. No one had left. The women hanging around the buffet might think that this whole show was in bad taste – offensive, even pornographic – but no woman had tried to drag her husband away. Probably for fear that her husband would refuse to leave, make a scene, and she would lose a battle with him in public.

  The artist was right. There were layers to this piece that bore examination. That didn’t mean that Marcie liked it. It only meant that she would remember it.

  She stayed and waited with her husband while the artist spent the next quarter hour stripping off her shoes and stockings, one item at a time.

  Other women kept drifting in to stand vigil by their husbands. There was a low cheer from the men every time a piece of clothing was discarded, but the cheers became more subdued as the proportion of women in the room increased.

  That said something, too.

  When the artist finally shed her panties, Marcie saw that she had not bothered to get waxed or shaved. Her bush was full and proud.

  The woman on the screen held her hands apart from her body for a minute, ensuring that everyone had time to see her fully nude from every angle. Then the television screens all went dark.

  Marcie and Howard wandered past the buffet into the front room. The box was still there, but the artist’s head was gone.

  Only after they left, did Howard realize that he had not seen Jeff, their host, anywhere at the party.

  His attention had been on other matters.

  The Second Performance:

  The invitation list for the second party was essentially the same as the first but more people came this time. The first time, almost twenty-percent of the RSVPs had been answered with regrets. This time, the regret rate was less than five percent.

  Word had circulated that Jeff’s “artistic performances” were a lot more interesting than people had expected.

  Nothing draws men like the prospect of seeing a nude young woman. And, if their husbands are going, the wives are wise to come along and chaperone them.

  There was a good reason for having the guests wear their golden invitations around their necks while they were at the party. People would want to crash this one.

  Again, there was a black box against one wall of the room. This time, instead of being neck high, the box was taller than a person. There was no head or any other body part to be seen.

  There were half a dozen six-inch wide holes scattered over the sides of the box. They were blocked by black fabric, looking like places where small speakers could be mounted. Howard put his head close to one but could hear no sound.

  Maybe later.

  He grabbed a beer for himself and a glass of white wine for Marcie and wandered past the buffet into the far room.

  Again, there were television screens mounted on the walls. This time, though, they all showed the same image – the artist’s face. She was smiling and talking. “Hello. I hope everyone is having a good time today.”

  There were a dozen people, men and women, in the room. They looked at each other, wondering if she was speaking to one of them, and if they should answer her.

  “This is Jeff’s second art party,” the artist continued without waiting for anyone to answer. “I’m the artist. Most of you saw me two months ago at my first installation. I expect that a lot of you saw a lot of me.” She smiled wryly. “Today will be similar, except that this time I’m in this room and my body’s in the other one. I’m talking to you on television. I can’t see or hear you, so you shouldn’t bother trying to talk to me. I’m going to keep talking, so, just like television, you can keep listening or you can ignore me. Whatever you want. On this program, I’m going to tell you all about myself.

  “I was born in Wyoming in the city of Cheyenne twenty-seven years ago last January. My father was a dentist and my mother worked for a bookkeeper. I was fifteen before I realized that my father cheated on my mother with one dental assistant after another throughout their marriage. I don’t think that he slept with every woman who worked for him, but I’m sure that he always had at least one mistress in the office. He hired women with that purpose in mind. I feel sorry for his patients because I don’t think that many of his hygienists were much good at cleaning teeth.

  “When I was younger, I thought that my mother was nasty to me because she hated me. When I got older, I realized that it wasn’t about me. She was nasty because she hated my father. A lot of things that I didn’t understand when I was young add up to a clear story now. My mother’s boss was a jerk and she didn’t like him but I suspect that she was sleeping with him just to get revenge on my father.”

  Catherine kept talking continuously, telling the most horrible stories about her childhood, beginning with her parents, telling how they belittled her and destroyed her self-esteem, and then telling about how she mistreated her siblings in retaliation.

  Howard was bored. He tugged on Marcie’s hand. “Let’s get something to eat,” he said.

  “Not right now,” she replied, never taking her eyes off the screen.

  “You aren’t listening to this fairy tale, are you?” he asked.

  She looked at him. “It’s not a fairy tale. Can’t you see? She’s telling the truth about herself. That’s the point. This is the room where she strips. Last time it was her body. This time, it’s her psyche. She’s baring her soul like no one you’ve ever heard before.”

  Howard glanced about the room. Men were shuffling their feet and looking bored. Their wives were staring at the screens, barely blinking, rapt.

  “I’ll see you later,” he told Marcie.

  She didn’t reply, just stared at the screens.

  Howard munched a bit of baked brie as he passed the buffet but he didn’t stop.

  In the front room, he looked at the black box. The artist had said that her body was out here. She must be in the box but he didn’t see what difference that made. Last time you could see her head and talk to her in person. This time, she was completely hidden.

  He looked again at the fabric-covered holes. They didn’t look much like speaker covers. The fabric was too dense. He put his ear close to one and could hear the artist’s faint voice but it was too muffled to make out the words. And the sound wasn’t coming from the holes; it was coming from the top where her head should be.

  He touched one of the holes tentativ
ely. The fabric moved easily to his touch. He pushed a little more, being careful not to damage anything.

  His hand was slipping into a black fabric tunnel six inches across. It felt like he was slipping his arm into a sleeve. A few inches inside, he came to a hard ring but the sleeve continued through it. When his arm was inserted past the elbow, he felt his hand slide through another stiff ring and then emerge from the sleeve, deep inside the box.

  He pushed his bare hand a little further and his fingers brushed against something soft and smooth and warm. Real warm. Body temperature warm. He was touching the artist’s body.

  He slid his hand upward over the skin and felt bumps. Ribs. Then he touched the swell of a naked breast. Another couple of inches and he could feel an erect nipple under his palm.

  Hot damn. He was copping a feel from the artist.

  He could feel her chest heaving. She had to breathe heavily to keep talking continuously.

  He caressed her gently and wondered what she was saying to the camera. Was she saying that someone was feeling her up or was she droning on about her miserable childhood, confessing some new, petty sin that burdened her conscience with a great, heavy weight?

  He began to squeeze the tit, not hard but firmly. Suddenly a hand covered his and gently pulled his fingers straight, then withdrew. He understood. Caressing was okay, grabbing was over the line.

  He moved down over her abdomen and it twitched. Somewhere slightly below her bikini line, he hit a wall. He felt around and understood. Her crotch was covered with a shield that felt like a piece of wood. He reached around as far as he could and caressed her ass cheeks. He found a narrow wooden shield that kept him from reaching into her butt crack.

  He was allowed to caress her body to his heart’s content but not her genitals or anus.

  He didn’t have to feel above her shoulders to know that there would be a wall around her neck as well. Her face had to be off limits because it had a television camera pointed at it.

  When he withdrew his hand, the wooden rings attached to the sleeves kept them from inverting and coming outside the box. He could not pull them out and peer down them. Today, her body was for feeling only.

  The other men in the room were watching him.

  “What’s in there?” one of the men asked.

  “The artist.” Howard didn’t want to share his discovery but he didn’t have any choice. Now that they had seen him put his hand inside the sleeve, they would try it too. “You can feel her in the box if you want.”

  “Feel her?”

  “Yes. Feel her body.”

  “Is she naked?”

  “She’s wearing some kind of wooden chastity belt but nothing else. Feel for yourself.”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” The man began sliding his arm into one of the other sleeves.

  “By the way. She doesn’t want to be grabbed. Touching is okay. Grabbing is out.”

  “I can live with that.” Suddenly the other man’s eyes grew wide. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Howard could tell by the angle of the man’s arm that he was feeling the woman’s chest. “It sure is.”

  The other man said no more. His full attention was focused on his hand.

  Howard stepped back and looked at the box again. The half dozen holes were conveniently placed so that a person could feel every part of the woman from her feet to her neck on all sides.

  Another man put a hand into a sleeve on the side of the box and began feeling her back.

  The first man warned him not to grab, just rub gently.

  Howard felt left out of his discovery. He knelt and put his hand in a lower hole to caress her calves. They felt strong and firm. He could feel her muscles flexing as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

  Suddenly a woman’s voice asked, “What are you guys doing?”

  The men looked at each other with guilty eyes. One of them, the one with the least guilty look, said, “Just touching someone’s arm.”

  “Whose arm?”

  “We can’t really be sure of that, can we? I mean, there’s no way to look inside the box.”

  It occurred to Howard that this might not be the artist. It was certainly a woman but it could be some other woman. He doubted that. Why would she substitute another woman? To prove that all cats felt the same in the dark?

  He shrugged to himself. So what did it matter? If she wanted the men to believe that it was her body and the men did believe it, then, for all practical purposes, it was her body. It wasn’t exactly Schrodinger’s Cat in the box, but it seemed to be related. In the absence of any contradictory observation, the shared belief that these men were feeling the artist’s body made that reality true for them.

  Lines were forming behind the men who had their arms stuck in the holes.

  Howard withdrew his arm to let someone else take his place.

  His hand was still tingling with a haptic memory as he turned to walk away.

  There were a handful of women in the room. They were glaring at the men as though they believed them possessed by the devil. Howard supposed that they were, even though their hands were far from idle. These men had never had busier hands.

  Some of the women were standing beside their husbands in line. He heard, “That’s disgusting,” and “You touch that slut and I’ll be seeing a lawyer in the morning.”

  Those men reluctantly stepped out of line; their fear of being deposed by a divorce lawyer was stronger than their desire to feel a little forbidden pulchritude.

  If the artist had not been wearing her wooden chastity belt, the balance might have tipped in the other direction. And the wives would have had a lot stronger reason to hate their husbands.

  What was the real harm in caressing another woman’s breast for a few seconds? It wasn’t like the artist was offering to fuck anyone’s husband.

  Then Howard remembered hearing that this was the second performance out of three. What could the artist do to top this one? Maybe she would get fucked in the end.

  He hoped with all his heart that he and Marcie would be invited to the third performance.

  He had to go back to the television room and see what was happening to the woman’s face when every part of her body was being caressed by strange men.

  The face on the screen was breathing hard but that might have been an emotional reaction to the confession that she was relating now. She had seduced her best friend’s boyfriend in high school. She hadn’t liked the boy at all. She had done it just to prove that she could. She blamed her mother for subliminally sexualizing her childhood home by having a long-term affair with her boss.

  Marcie was still locked in thrall. Her expression reminded Howard of a child watching his first horror movie – frightened half out of his wits but unable to turn away even for a second.

  Almost every other woman here had the same expression on her face. Or worse. A few of the women were crying silently. Presumably they were the ones who had lived through similar situations as the artist was describing.

  These women had been here from the beginning. None of them had a clue what their husbands were doing in the front room. They didn’t care. Yet.

  Howard wondered if anyone would tattle to Marcie about him being the first man to feel up the artist. Later she might ask him, in an arch tone, about what he had done at the party. If she did, he wondered if it would be smart to deny having put his hand in the cookie jar.

  Suddenly he saw a parallel between the guilt that the artist was feeling as she confessed to the sins of her past and the guilt that he felt now about his sin of the present.

  He had no doubt that the women in this room would forgive the artist’s terrible childhood sins more easily than the lesser one that she was committing in the other room right now. Allowing their husbands to get to second base while she was distracting their wives was a personal attack on them and their marriages. At least, it would be perceived so by the wives.

  He spent the next hour traipsing back and forth betwe
en the front and back rooms. He couldn’t be bothered listening to the artist’s tawdry confessions nor could he be bothered standing in line to feel her up again. Been there, done that.

  He was in the front room when he heard a soft clunk, followed by a man groaning in disappointment. Then another clunk and groan. And another. As men were withdrawing their arms from the sleeves, doors were falling down over the holes from the inside, blocking the next man in line from inserting his arm.

  The last couple of men were reluctant to withdraw their arms, realizing what was happening, but it did no good. Howard could tell by the way that their bodies were twitching that they were thrashing around in the box and feeling nothing. The artist had simply stepped back out of their reach.

  When women began streaming through the door, the last two men pulled their hands out of the sleeves and snapped to attention.

  Howard heard women asking their husbands, boyfriends, and escorts what had been happening in here.

  The men universally replied that nothing much had been going on. There was just a box in here. Nothing to see.

  That half-truth was a base lie that would not stand scrutiny for long. Some women had come in here and seen what was happening. But those women and their husbands had almost all left early. It would take days for the truth to circulate among the rest of women.

  But circulate it would. This was too juicy not to pass on.

  Then Howard realized something else. He, like most of the other men in this room, would need to have sex with his wife as soon as they got home. For the older wives, at least, it would be the most passionate sex that they had experienced in some time.

  When they found out why they were being asked to accept their husbands’ sudden torrid passion, they would have a new reason to hate the artist.

  Once again, the guests left without seeing Jeff, their host, at his own party.

  Rather rude of the man to play Gatsby with his guests.