“Do you know what she did when she went off to Europe?”
“I went with her to Amsterdam. Just once—it was enough. She was different in Europe. She hung out with some very strange people.”
“Come on, Boz, please,” Midge demanded, pulling at his sleeve.
“Who? Give me a name.”
“Her name is Veronique Aury. But I don’t think you’ll want to meet her. . . .” He hesitated, gauging my reactions.
“Why not? What do you mean, Rose was different in Europe?”
Once again the desperate note in my question made him pause.
“I can show you something, if you want to see it. Rose let me make a video of her with her friends one evening. It’s quite an eye-opener. Quite strong.”
“Would you show it to me?”
“Come along. The three of us will leave the festivities and go to my studio.”
He swept Midge up, and I followed them down corridors and up a sweeping staircase to the studio where he worked on his videos.
“Are you sure?” he asked me. I nodded. “Then I’ll just pop this in, and you can watch it on that monitor, while Midge and I have our reunion.”
Midge growled: “It’s about time!”
They hurried to a nearby couch and I turned my attention to the monitor, which I watched with a rapidly beating heart, deaf to Midge’s screams of joy in the room. All I could hear were the screams on the video.
23
DEEPER INTO THE NIGHTMARE
THE BIZARRE IMAGES in the brief video I watched unfolded with the ineluctable logic of a nightmare. There is a famous Surrealist film by Dali and Bunuel in which we see a woman’s breasts being squeezed, followed by a razor slicing open her eyeball, and then a cloud scudding across the moon. The cruelty of these images, so convincing and terrifying, had long ago lost much of their shocking impact in a century of horrors; but this video hit me as Un Chien Andalou must have hit viewers in 1928.
Or perhaps it was just the emotional impact of seeing Rose Selavy alive again, doing impossibly bizarre things to people—the collisions of the oh yes! of wish fulfillment with the oh no! of fear and disapproval. She was alive, up there on the monitor, but look what she was doing.
Just look: She wore masks and costumes and cracked a whip: Screams. Then she was naked, bending over a man who was a quivering, bloody mess. When she turned to the camera, she looked like a lioness feasting. Or—even more horrible—like a child who’s smeared her face while picking berries. Over her stood a tall older woman wearing a long black cloak. She reached out to pat Rose on the head and her fingernails looked three inches long. Lionesses with prey.
If you have chosen the illusion that you live a normal life, then you may believe that you can escape a nightmare by waking up. Your forehead may be beaded with cold sweat, and your heart beating at a gallop, but you’re back in the real world. So you believe.
But there is no real world.
The video came to an abrupt stop on the monitor, yet it continued in my head. The images excited me in a way that I had never experienced before. I wanted to follow Rose into the nightmare.
My eye had been sliced open.
24
VERONIQUE AURY
A FEW DAYS later I was wandering along the canals in the sex quarter of Amsterdam. It was evening, and a light rain was falling as it often does at that time of year. On one side the dark waters of the canal glistened with light from the street lamps. On the other, sidewalk level windows displayed the pale flesh of whores. A man walking ahead of me stopped and entered one of the old merchant houses, and the curtains were pulled shut. At the window next door a petite young redhead in red lingerie pulled up her brassiere to show me her breasts. I walked on.
I was looking for a houseboat with tiny red lights strung from stem to stern. When I called her from New York Veronique Aury had given me directions to her red boat, but they were ambiguous.
Veronique Aury was the woman with Rose in Boz Skeffington’s video. She was internationally infamous for having been the most elite dominatrix in America in the 1970s and 1980s, responsible for disciplining congressmen, C.E.O.s and movie stars. She’d left New York a jump ahead of a subpoena, and now lived in obscure retirement in Amsterdam, a small, tolerant city where people can hide in congenial circumstances. Boz gave me her number, and when I got her it was like she’d been expecting to hear from me. I said I wanted to talk to her about the possibility of doing her portrait, and she said she’d heard of me. Come ahead.
I stopped in a cafe called Billiards Reynders—so called because a large pool table dominated the otherwise brown room—to have a bock bier and ask directions. But the Dutch can be a surly, suspicious lot. Although most speak English, they often pretend not to with Americans. So I was lost.
Then I saw the tiny red lights twinkling in the mist, and magically, there was Veronique Aury’s houseboat. I climbed on board and stood for a moment adjusting my balance to the pitch and roll of a boat. There was a sign in Dutch, French, and English on the door: GO AWAY. I knocked.
Veronique Aury opened the door. She was a tall, striking woman my age or older who wore a long leather coat with the collar up, and tiny silver skulls in her ears. She appraised me like a thrifty shopper appraising a brisket. I returned her stare, seeing her as she was in the video nightmare that played constantly in my head.
“Nicholas Wilde?”
I nodded. She held up one hand in what I supposed was a gesture of welcome, and I saw her long fingernails—the claws of the lioness.
I followed her down interior steps into a dark room.
“I hope you don’t need the light. I prefer darkness.” Her voice was more feminine than I’d expected, and I recognized her accent as being from a part of Paris called the Marais.
“Forgive me, but I’m a painter, madame. Light is a requirement.”
“Très bien,” she sighed. She struck a match and touched it to a candelabrum placed next to her on what looked a wooden operating table, complete with leather straps.
She sat absolutely erect and still on a throne-like chair, regarding me with suspicion. “I don’t see Americans much over here,” she said. “They’re not very interesting if they’re not handing over money.”
“I’m not here as a client. I am interested in doing your portrait. I came here to talk about that.”
She shook her head sternly. Her intense scrutiny was hypnotic.
“No. Please don’t waste my time with lies. She said you were a liar.”
“But . . . “ I felt myself trembling.
“You’re here to ask me about Rose Selavy—but you don’t know how.”
A cold breeze ruffled the flames of the candles, as if a ghost blew on them.
“It’s true that I am looking for her.” There was no choice but to submit. My trembling increased.
“Why?”
“I love her.”
“You don’t know what that is. Be specific.”
“She showed me something. I’m still thinking about what it is, but I guess it’s about living your life on the edge.”
Veronique Aury nodded. “Good. I think I can work with you.”
I was puzzled by this, but I was so under her spell that if she said kneel and be whipped, I would have. Gratefully, I let her take me over. She wanted to know about my relationship with Rose, and asked me to talk about it in great detail. When I finished, she nodded. “There’s one more thing you haven’t told me.”
“I’ve been impotent since she . . . “
“I thought so. You look useless.”
I accepted her scorn, as I could not have accepted her pity.
In the next few days we fell into a bizarre routine. She sat for me in natural light in the early afternoon, and I returned to the houseboat every evening to kneel at her feet. Although she was sometimes violent when I was particularly stupid, for the most part she was gentle with me, working by suggestion, and I learned rapidly. “You have a gift for submission,” she teased
.
I thought that Veronique’s face, when I sketched her in the gray afternoon light, was like the carved figurehead of a sailing ship. Viewed from any angle, her features were sibylline. Painting her portrait was exciting, intense work, and when I finished I regretted that it would be hers; but that was our bargain.
I surrendered everything to her in our rituals, everything but my devotion to my work. But even that seemed to change and grow in power as I opened myself to her.
She swore me to secrecy about her methods, which involved dominance and submission, destruction and recreation, and they dug so deep in me I left the house boat at three or four in the morning barely able to drag myself to my hotel, where I would fail to sleep. Sometimes Veronique would complain, “This takes so much out of me, at my age.” I would think of my own age then, but it was not a burden.
My hotel was near the train station. I took to walking certain routes on my way to our sessions. One took me past the red-haired whore’s window in the sex district. I was disappointed when her curtains were closed. When they were open and she was available, we played little flirting games; but I didn’t go in.
My other route took me past Amsterdam’s Sex Museum, on the Damrak. I went in expecting a lurid diversion from my chaste work with Veronique, and found instead a world of art I had never explored: art by masters about the secret erotic life. Here was work by Jules Pascin, Felicien Rops, George Grosz, Schiele, and Rodin, and a copy of a 1640 engraving by Rembrandt, in which the Old Master makes love to his wife in a French bed. The most prolific artist was, of course, Anonymous. I particularly liked to visit the full scale exhibit of fellatio in a phone booth.
Of course I visited the Rijksmuseum during my weeks in Amsterdam, but I soon exhausted my interest in its riches, while becoming absorbed daily in new discoveries at the Sex Museum. I would have liked to see my paintings of Rose Selavy hanging there in such good company.
One day I left the Sex Museum and stood gazing down at the waters of the canal, thinking that my portrait of Veronique was finished, and so was our work together.
When I went to see Veronique we sat outside on the houseboat’s deck. It was an unusually warm evening. We sipped Dutch gin and talked. The portrait hung on the wall inside, unframed yet. It was powerful—almost brutal; by contrast, the essential gentleness of my subject was evoked more surely. She was sibylline yet somehow approachable to the viewer.
I hadn’t asked her about Rose since our first meeting; but now, over Jonge Genever, she brought Rose up.
“You asked about Rose, and I told you nothing. That was because in order to answer you, I had to find out who you are.”
“Did you?”
“The portrait tells me what I needed to know.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ve learned something about love. How hard and indifferent it may seem, how shrewd it must be to survive.”
“Is that all?”
“That you will have to learn for yourself, Mr. Wilde. You have a long painful journey before you.”
“Did Rose start her journey here?”
“No. We met while I was in Washington—four years ago now. She’d heard of me, and just showed up at my dungeon. I thought she was too young—can you imagine that? Rose Selavy young? That mad, bad family—so famous and dissolute.” At twenty, she’d left her Swiss boarding school, traveled the world with various men, supported a drug habit through prostitution on the streets of London, and starred in a low budget film . . . “She survived two suicide attempts, then went to art school, where she developed the passion for art and artists that she’d felt since childhood, but avoided because of her family. This is all before she came to me . . . .”
She paused while a noisy garbage scow passed, rocking the houseboat. “Of course I accepted her into my dungeon. Of course I fell in love with her, and eventually she influenced me as much as I suppose I did her. She knew instinctively how to find the extremes of passion. It was in her blood. Look at her grandfather and his exploits! What she didn’t have growing up with nannies in a great house was love. So she went looking for it in every experience, every relationship—always testing, always pushing things to the limit.”
“She left you.”
“Oh yes. It was inevitable. When she’d learned what she had come to me for, she left. That was when she went to New York with that loud Skeffington fellow.”
“But first you allowed him to videotape you with Rose . . . .”
“She insisted. I’d never done that before. It was a mistake. I thought it best to retire after that. Then you came along, asking about Rose.”
I was afraid to look at her. I sipped my drink. The houseboat rocked. The tiny red lights blurred against the night sky. Party-goers passed on the street, talking and joking.
I thought about all that she had seen in her sessions with the powerful, all the secret longings she’d absorbed into her own psyche, like a shaman, and about how she’d kept herself intact: sibylline. Even love had not shattered her.
After a while I asked her: “Do you think she’s alive? Or am I crazy?”
“Yes to both questions,” she answered.
25
THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW
“YOU’VE MADE UP your mind?” the redhead asked, when I knocked at her door the next afternoon. “I thought you were going to shop the window forever. Or that maybe you just like to peep?”
I stepped inside, and she pulled the curtains on the big window. The room was small but comfortable, with everything in its place and no personal touches. She turned to face me with a wary look in her cat eyes. Up close she didn’t resemble Rose except that she was small and sleek and her hair was red.
“Du bist geil?” she asked in German, letting her robe fall open to reveal red lingerie. “You are horny?” she asked again.
I nodded. I thought I might be. “You’re German? What is your name?”
She sat on the bed and patted the space next to her. She was German, from Lubeck, but she called herself by the Dutch name Saskia, after Rembrandt’s wife. She said she was twenty-seven.
I’d never been to a prostitute before, but just being in that small room with Saskia made me feel powerful. I sat next to her.
“What do you want?”
That was the question. What did I want?
“I want to find out what I want. I guess that’s it.”
“Das kosten,” nodding her head as if she understood. I pulled out a wad of Dutch guilders and put it in her lap, watching her count twice what she usually got. She looked up at me wonderingly as if I was crazy. She squinted, evaluating me.
I told her to take off her bra, and moved closer to her on the bed.
She pulled the red lacy brassiere down, exposing the pear-shaped breasts she’d shown me once in her window. Now that I’d stepped through her door and paid, I could touch them. But I just watched as she twisted the bra around and unhooked it. Her nipples were hard points.
She waited for me to touch her, but I was frozen.
I felt awkward as an adolescent with his first willing girl. Instinctively, I moved to kiss her. She pulled away. “Ich kusse nicht!”
Her refusal had the surprising effect of exciting me. I felt an urge in my wilted stalk. It didn’t get hard, but it tingled.
I took more guilders out of my pocket and put them in her lap, and this time when she looked at me her puzzlement widened her slit eyes. I leaned closer and put my mouth over hers. Her lips were hard and unyielding, but I forced my tongue between them and deep into her mouth. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t respond. Her breath smelled of mints. I thought of all the heavy Dutchmen whose pricks she’d sucked and felt amused at her reticence about kissing.
She was giving me, I realized, what I was asking for: I was finding out what I wanted. Violation was the key. I was paying her well so I could violate her—not as a human being, nor as a businesswoman, but as the role she was playing, the Whore. I’d never understood why men went to whores, when the
re was a surplus of women always available. Now I knew why.
I pressed my mouth against hers while I played with her breasts. After a few minutes, I felt her surrender, and she began to kiss me back.
I licked her breasts, and her soft skin reminded me of Rose. I gently sucked and bit her nipples, slowly increasing the pressure on them. She moaned, and pulled my head away. “Nein, nein,” she whispered gutturally. “You get me too hot, you peeper in the window. Too hot.” Her eyes were squeezed shut.
She was every teenage girl every man my age had failed to get to first base with, grown up. But this time the script was agreed to by both parties in advance. She would do anything I could think of.
I put my hand between her smooth, slender thighs and pulled up the crotch of her panties so I could stroke her bush. She was wet. She grabbed my wrist and held it in surprisingly strong fingers, pulling my hand away. I caressed her flat belly and kissed her again, feeling her fighting against her response. She was hot, all right.
Little by little my erection was growing, and as it did I felt something else returning to me: the sense that I’d had since Rose disappeared into flames that I was two—that “he” was the victim of his passions while “I” watched, safe inside. It was the process of submitting to my passions that my nights with Veronique had shown me. Passion was motion and process. Submission to the power of passion had to be learned. It was what Rose had learned.
“Touch me,” he ordered the whore. He took her hand and placed it on his burgeoning flesh, holding it there with his own, forcing her fingers around it, making her play with him with one hand while he sucked the fingers of her other hand. Her nails were bitten down.
“Get down on your knees,” he grunted, pulling out his soft cock.
She shook her head. “Wait,” she whispered, standing up. She went into the bathroom and he heard her gargling. When she came out she wore only a garter belt and stockings, and she carried a pair of handcuffs. She had painted her lips with a thick layer of red lipstick.
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