Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  After a while, there came a gasp, then a sniffle. The mattress shuddered lightly, the sheet tugged. “Donna?” Joey said, his voice scarcely more than a whisper. “Please, Donna. Don’t leave me?”

  All night, and well into the next morning, my mind revolved like a rock polisher, sifting over the fragments of my marriage, trying to smooth the edges, make them something I could grasp. So, okay: Joey liked dressing up as a girlie maid. Really, was that so terrible? Wouldn’t it be worse if he’d wanted to dress up, as, say, a Nazi? I was actually beginning to feel more sanguine about it until, after breakfast (largely uneaten) I went to get the “12x = 1 Free” card for the dry cleaner. Shuffling through Joey’s assorted fidelity cards, it dawned on me that he was more faithful to the local car wash and frozen yogurt stand than he was to our marriage. “You bastard!” One by one—in perhaps the most pathetic act of wifely vengeance in history—I tore the cards into confetti.

  But then again, I thought grudgingly, had he really committed adultery? Joey claimed he wasn’t paying this dominatrix for sex—and that no bodily fluids had ever been exchanged between them (except, perhaps, during teeth cleanings). So how unfaithful had he been, exactly? Was it not that different, really, from paying a shrink, as he claimed?

  I honestly didn’t know. Why weren’t there different degrees of cheating, say, like there were with murder? First-degree, second-degree, premeditated, and so forth?

  Inevitably, of course, I blamed myself. Those ten pounds, which came off, then back on, like a tide. And our sex life? Sometimes, getting Joey to give me an orgasm was like teaching a teenager to parallel park. A little more to the right; now slow down…Once, in the middle of it, I noticed our bedroom ceiling had a crack in it shaped like Florida.

  Also: How could I possibly not have known? I’d found a few websites in the cache of our old computer: Frisky French Maids with peek-a-boo décolleté and white lace panties, bending over with feather dusters to expose pert little buttocks. But I’d assumed Austin had been looking at them (Had I even mentioned them to Joey?); I’d never dreamed they’d been a how-to manual for my husband.

  “How long?” I asked as I emptied the dishwasher.

  “How long what?”

  I tried to sound casual. “How long have you had, you know, these urges to dress up?”

  Our basement still held all the equipment from Joey’s Brew-Your-Own-Beer phase, including four cases of unused 12-ounce brown glass bottles that he kept insisting he was going to sell on eBay. There was the foam mat and his extensive Bruce Lee DVD collection from his kung fu period. His Star Wars models (the Millennium Falcon! X-Wing Starfighter! Still in the trophy case). His teach-yourself-Polish kick (in which he stuck Polish vocabulary stickers all over the house. I was still finding little labels reading filiżanka do herbaty or sos łodzi taped to the underside of our good dishes). Over the years, Joey had acquired fishing poles, night goggles, an archery set, bird-watching magazines, an infrared camera, rock-climbing gear, and how-to books for his disastrous foray into day-trading: mercifully short-lived. Wasn’t it possible that his desire to dress up as a chambermaid was just another hobby?

  Joey shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said plainly. “Years. Maybe always? Ever since I was a teenager, I think. But in the past few years it’s gotten harder to ignore.”

  This was not, of course, the answer I’d been hoping for. It was starting to dawn on me: My husband was the Other Woman.

  “You know,” I sighed, running a clump of steel wool around the sides of the sink to scrape off bits of congealed oat bran. “We’ve spent over two grand on a puppy shrink, Joey. Shouldn’t we maybe see a marriage counselor ourselves?”

  Joey set down his coffee mug and looked at me, his face arranging itself into an amicable grimace. “Sure,” he said, his voice cracking. “If that’s what you want.”

  It wasn’t what I wanted, of course. I’d spent enough time, it seemed, sitting on folding chairs in church basements with strangers, discussing my neuroses and cravings and fears in great detail. But I just didn’t know what else to do.

  There was exactly one couples’ therapist covered by our health plan who could see us the next day. Her name was Cheri Marciano; she looked to be about twelve. “I know, I know, my name. It’s like maraschino cherry in reverse, right?” She laughed, waving us toward a large Naugahyde couch across from her swivel chair. There was a dying ficus in the corner and a small rock fountain plugged in on the windowsill. The constant burble of water made me instantly want to pee. “So,” Cheri said cheerily, “Mr. and Mrs.— Wow.” She moved the clipboard closer to her eyes as if trying to get it into focus. “That’s a mouthful. How do you say it?”

  “Koczynski,” Joey said murderously. I looked at him. He was staring at her teeth. They were crooked and unusually large for her small, pointy jaw. She also had a pronounced overbite. Once I noticed this, it was hard for me to stop staring, either.

  “So tell me, Cheri,” I said, glancing quickly away at her bookshelves. “Are you married yourself?”

  “Me?” She laughed, tossing her head back. Her voice was as light and watery as her electric fountain. “Oh, God no. God no. Why?” She grinned. “Do you know someone who’s single?”

  I glanced at Joey. He was still staring at her enormous teeth.

  “Yeah, well,” I said, standing up. “I don’t think this is going to work for us.”

  In the parking lot, Joey gallantly opened the car door for me, helping me into the Subaru as if it were a limousine, his hand on the small of my back.

  “Have I told you lately how beautiful you are?” he said when we stopped for lunch at a Panera’s. He leaned across the table to brush a lock of my hair out of my eyes. Neither of us was eating, but we hadn’t known what else to do with ourselves for the rest of the hour. I reached for my phone, but Joey stayed my hand. It was midday, and around us, families shuffled back and forth squinting at the menu over the counter, trying to decide what to order. An elderly couple collected two paper containers of soup and a turkey sandwich they were sharing. Watching the husband help his wife into a booth, I felt a bolt of grief. “Especially right now?” Joey continued, “with all the lights in your hair?”

  I set down my sandwich. “Stop it. Just stop,” I said.

  “But it’s true,” he said, reaching over to give my hand a squeeze. “You’ve never looked more beautiful, with your hair all tousled—”

  “Don’t be so goddamn nice to me,” I said in a low, vicious voice. I withdrew my hand from his. “It’s insulting.”

  The only reason he was flattering me now—as we were both too well aware—was for penance, for absolution. It only underscored how strained and unnatural everything between us had become. The Joey I’d known for twenty-six years was jocular, never courtly. Seeing him so suddenly eager to please, so obsequious, repulsed me. The more he showered me with love and compliments, the more petty and vindictive and nasty I felt. We were becoming grotesqueries.

  “But it’s the truth,” Joey insisted. “You have never been more beautiful, Donna. I love you, you know.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I looked him dead in the eye. “Oh, suddenly, we’re all about the truth here? Truth and love?”

  His face crumpled. I pressed my fists against my temples and squeezed my eyes shut. “Goddamn therapist,” I said. “Who the fuck names their kid ‘Cheri Marciano’ anyway?” I started to cry. I felt Joey’s hand grip mine, though I still didn’t open my eyes. After a while, I whispered, “I just want things to go back to normal.”

  Joey looked at me, pained. “I know,” he said miserably.

  Yet my words, as they hung there in the air, seemed childish. I just want things to be normal? Since when had I become so besotted with, so dependent upon normalcy? Kim Gordon, I thought suddenly. Joan Jett. Siouxsie Sioux. Patti Smith. Debbie Harry and Suzi Quatro. I hadn’t thought of my idols in years—not in the iconic, shamanistic way I had as a teenager—but it suddenly occurred to me: What would Kim fucking Gor
don do? More to the point, what would I do? Not the me right now—the married, mother-of-two, kitchenware saleswoman, weeping pathetically in a chain restaurant with a soup-and-salad “heart smart” lunch special before her on a plastic cafeteria tray—not the Botoxed woman in the suburbs with her brain stuffed with to-do lists and two disgruntled teenagers—but my long-ago, punk-rock, best badassed self? Joey had clearly transformed himself into some alter ego buried deep within him. What if I did the same? How would the younger, renegade, nineteen-year-old me have responded to all this?

  My adult life pinwheeled around me. Our children, our idiot dog, our bills, our mortgage, all that we had endured and built together, everything we owned and owed in this world. I saw suddenly, too, that man in the restaurant in Las Vegas, turning to paraffin as the life drained out of him. All of us were just cells and bones and circuitry, as fragile as lanterns sheathed in Japanese paper. I’d loved Joey for twenty-six years—longer than I’d loved anyone else in my life. Our situation was ridiculous beyond belief. But maybe he was right about something. Maybe I, of all people, had to understand compulsion, the dark and twisted ways we all tried to mask and channel our pain. Joey had gotten me sober. He had once helped save my life. Surely, I at least owed him now some compassion, some generosity of spirit.

  I blew my nose and balled up my napkin. I took a deep breath. I didn’t like what I was going to say—I had not really warmed to it at all—but I’d be damned if I folded so easily. Surely I was made of tougher stuff than this. It seemed like the best I could possibly manage.

  “Okay, Joseph.” I swallowed. “Show me. Show me what you like. Show me what to do.”

  Chapter 3

  The Pleasure Chest was located toward the end of a strip mall between a Quiznos sandwich shop and a dry cleaner on the outskirts of Pontiac. I must have driven past it a dozen times taking Mr. Noodles to his puppy shrink without ever noticing. Three mannequins in the window were posed as a French maid, a tarty nurse, and a Chippendales cowboy holding plastic jack-o’-lanterns, their limbs draped with cottony bunting meant to approximate cobwebs. At first glance, it looked like any other Halloween display; the only giveaways were the candy-colored dildos with stick-on bat wings bouncing overhead on fishing lines. Otherwise, the sign reading TRICK OR TREAT!—well, it could’ve meant anything.

  “Oh, very tasteful,” I said, motioning with my chin. “Especially those bat vibrators.”

  I was determined to be a good sport. The Halloween decorations were actually a relief. God forbid, if Joey and I ran into anyone we knew, we could always claim we were shopping for costumes.

  Over the weekend, in preparation, Joey had shown me various websites (BDSM for Dummies; Wiki: How to Act Like a Dominatrix). “Sissy Maids” were a subculture within a subculture; some men simply liked to cross-dress as ultrafeminine maids and wait on people hand and foot; others wanted to be emasculated, punished, debased. Joey, unfortunately, leaned toward the latter. “Are you sure you’re okay with this?” he kept saying. “I know. It seems really freaky.”

  The truth was, I wasn’t sure—it did seem freaky—but the alternatives were infinitely worse. Being a dominatrix was simply a type of theater, I told myself. It would be like glam rock, no different from, say, Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Marilyn Manson, the band KISS. You dressed up, slipped into a persona for a performance—the parameters were well defined—and here, of course, I’d be playing to an audience of only one, who’d be playing a role as well. All I’d have to do was boss him around for a bit—he’d clean the oven, maybe mop up the floor—I could spank him with a wooden paddle if I thought he was being “bad”—okay, whatever—then, tah-dah. We could take off our makeup together with cold cream and order in a pizza. It would be a new kind of “date night.” Outside the box: yes. Preposterous: absolutely. But manageable.

  In the years since I’d given up drinking, I’d worried I’d grown dull. Yeah, sobriety was healthier—it made you more “present,” “alive,” “in touch with your feelings”—blah, blah—we all know the benefits—believe me, I don’t need to be convinced. But sometimes, when I was having one of those 4 a.m. existential crises when your eyes snap open in a panic and you start inventorying all the deficits of your life, I worried that by giving up booze, I’d forfeited the last of whatever had made me really interesting and edgy and effervescent.

  Well, if I’d wanted some iconoclasm back in my life, I was about to get it.

  Besides, from what I’d seen on the internet, a dominant was supposed to “control each aspect of her submissives’ lives, forcing them to obey her, disciplining them when needed.” Frankly, the skills this required didn’t seem that much different from those of being a wife and a mother. So much of my time was spent nagging, cajoling, threatening: Austin, feet off the table, please. Joey, would it kill you to actually put your cereal bowl in the sink? Ashley, did you get the money we sent you? If so, could you please let me know?

  I’d never asked to become a shrewish, banal person (the “enforcer,” Austin sometimes called me). It made me unrecognizable even to myself. But if I didn’t oversee all the daily detritus of our lives, who would? It had gotten to the point where every time I opened my mouth, my kids began texting and pointedly putting in their earbuds. “Okay, okay,” Joey would say without looking up from his iPad. I couldn’t remember the last time Ashley or Austin had called me Mom, in fact, without stretching it out to at least three syllables. Mo-o-om. The verbal equivalent of an eye-roll.

  The one difference between being a dom and a wife seemed to be that when you were a dominatrix, people actually listened to you. So, okay. If my donning a bustier and a cat mask was what it was going to take to get my husband to fold the damn laundry and empty the dishwasher: Fine. Sign me up. Surely other women must have become dominatrixes simply because they wanted some help with the goddamn housework.

  Joey pulled open the door of the Pleasure Chest. “After you, mistress,” he said merrily. In his corduroy hunting jacket, his U-M baseball cap, his relaxed-fit jeans, he looked like any other Midwestern dad en route to Home Depot. Ever since the night I’d agreed to try out the lifestyle, though, he had been as adoring as a groupie. We even made love with an urgency and a passion (and okay, with the help of a pill—Joey was nearing fifty, after all—let’s not kid ourselves here—time happens) that we hadn’t experienced since the earliest days of our relationship, since before we’d had kids—hell, since before we’d had jobs.

  I’d be lying if I said I’d never been in a sex shop before. Back in high school, there was a sordid little boutique on the outskirts of Ypsilanti called the Pink Pussycat. It catered mostly to gay men, but my friend Ann-Marie and I once drove there on a dare, pretending to be completely blasé about it. We were just browsing, we told each other, of course we weren’t turned on or grossed out or fascinated whatsoever—we just happened to be in one of the most decrepit areas outside Depot Town. And we’d glanced cursorily at the vibrators, cock rings, and lubricants trying to absorb as much as we could while feigning disinterest.

  The Pleasure Chest, by contrast, had the cheery, drafty feel of a discount supermarket. Joey and I walked through a black velvet curtain cloaking the entrance and found ourselves in a reception area equipped with a zebra-print love seat and two hot-pink tulip chairs. A glass case on the wall behind them had a series of dildos arranged sequentially like musical notes; they were so painfully enormous, I assumed they were for display purposes only. They didn’t look like anything you’d remotely ever want to use to have sex with—unless, perhaps, you needed to inseminate a horse.

  “Well, this gives the phrase ‘big box store’ a whole new meaning, doesn’t it,” I said.

  Joey barked with laughter. “You did not just say that! Wow.” He shook his head. “Come. Let me introduce you.”

  He led me past the reception desk to the main floor; it was lined to the ceiling with racks of clothing like a costume warehouse: frilly lingerie in all sizes and colors, catsuits, more French maid outfits,
sexy medical uniforms, a whole leatherwear section. Mannequins suspended overhead were completely mummified in patent leather with only zippers for mouths. The sheer volume and tidal garishness of it all was decidedly unerotic. See enough rubber vaginas and latex dildos and squeeze bottles of lube displayed in bulk, and it starts to look like what it really is—just so much plastic crap likely manufactured in China. If you squinted your eyes, it didn’t look any different from the junky accessory stores that I used to take Ashley to for Hello Kitty backpacks and rhinestone birthday tiaras. It made me curiously melancholy. Clearly, there was a market for all of this. So many people needed all these props in order just to love each other. Now, I was one of them.

  Canned music played just as it did everywhere else: some Bruno Mars, then some awful, toothpasty song that turned “Marvin Gaye” into a verb. Being a child of Motown, this seemed like perhaps the most obscene thing in the store so far. Let’s Marvin Gaye and get it on. Really? Nearby a young couple was fondling a few different pairs of faux-fur handcuffs by the SALE bins. The boy still had acne and a rabbity face; he kept yanking at the cuffs to see how much resistance they offered. The girl was glancing around self-consciously, saying loudly, “Well, these could be good for our HONEYMOON.”

  “Let me see if I can find Vicki.” Joey scanned the aisles. “She’s the one I usually deal with. You’ll like her. She’s from New York, actually.”

  On the ride over, Joey had briefed me about the Pleasure Chest. Since I was what was known as “vanilla” in BDSM parlance, he worried that I’d be turned off by the more hard-core aspects. But really, it was the store owners I was most worried about: Vicki and Diane were a former porn star and a stripper who’d been privy to a side of my husband I’d never known existed until a few days ago. I pictured them fawning over Joey with their melony breasts, their asses plumped with injectables. I imagined when I was presented to them to be outfitted, it would be like one of those British makeover shows I used to watch on BBC America, where they took a dumpy woman with bad English teeth and osteoporosis and dressed her up in a silk coat from Top Shop.