Posted by Verity on July 08, 2001 at 00:10:26:
A Summer's Tale
By Verity Chastain
(Author's Note: There is no such poem by Keats and no such painting by Burne-Jones as referred to in this story. The author misremembered a story by Zola and a couple of bad paintings by other unknown pre-Raphaelites and preferred her version to theirs'. For those who want to see the real thing, look up "The Death of Albine" on the net or in standard reference works.)
But mine is better.
Much. It takes a lot to attract attention on Sunset Blvd. There are a lot of clubs that have ropes that are velvet with steel cores, a lot of hotels with bars you can't get into unless your Prada little-black-dress is size one. A lot of neon and a lot of expensive penis-substitute cars cruising for young flesh. This time of year the lbd's are miniscule, and you can see more skin here, dear, than you can in Jumbo's Clown Club in the Valley. Fashionable is necessary, but sweating is declasse, so all of a sudden, mirable dictu! The mavens proclaim that Skin is In. That's true all up and down the Blvd. this summer. But there is skin, and then there is… Down by the Keyclub was something that had already nearly caused so many traffic accidents the West Hollywood Sherrifs were considering setting up barricades. Lips parted, ice blond in just-got-out-of-bed-but-my- hairdresser-sleeps-with-me style. The expression on that cat-shaped face about as thoughtful as a summer movie plot, but a lot behind it. Some of the tourists (such a dirty word!) who looked at her thought she looked a bit like a 21st century Marilyn. Kinda-sorta. Delicacy here, but that petite beauty and pale hair didn't inspire feelings of protectiveness the way our dear dead Goddess does. Sometime this story is going to get dirty, and here we start, with the fact that somehow instead these bitable lips, too-small nose and too-large eyes made a lot of men think very different thoughts than being a saviour. Different thoughts from this type indeed. Thoughts of damage. Every cry for mercy from those full lips would seem to beg for more pain. Maybe it was in the confidence, how she held herself, how she wore those expensive clothes. Nonchalance. That was the word. It was clear the pashmina and silk would land wherever she threw them at the end of the evening. But maybe it was the way her style, her pose, rejected both the onlookers and the scene. There was nothing anyone in the world wanted to be but one of them, perfection that pretended to nature, but not here. It was the Real fake thing. Too bright-green eyes, too-pale platinum hair. Every girl seeing it felt in her soul that twinge, that knowledge that only the really beautiful could let themselves be that fake. But that was all window-dressing. Mostly, this girl was young with a capital yuh. Young in the way that lasts for the few minutes from puberty to adulthood. Once it was gone nothing could bring it back, that glow girls had before they knew what it was good for, and lost long before they did. The tight parts tight as a jazz quartet, the soft parts soft like pollen-covered butterfly wings. The skin apricot peach fuzz over Chinese silk. The breasts so small, so high, no Baywatch action here, the thing men really want but can so rarely get. Between those slim legs that wet silk would be hard to open with a finger's touch, would grip so tight it would almost hurt. Oh to feel that hurt. This girl had that look you see on every crop of new starlets in Maxim, with all that editorial prediction of future genius and all those pictures that scream another two years, three, and then she's Alicia Silverstone, Kate Winslet, Claire Danes. B movies from now on. Beautiful still, but not nineteen. Hell, let's be real, not sixteen. That's the age, that's the glow, that's the youth. It's a baby girl's mind in that body, but the body has all the action. That body looks like it's never had fingerprints left on it, like a gardenia, one touch and it'll wilt. And it will. Touched or not. But right now this girl has far more going on. No little-girl brain in this head, except for that part we all envy, the part we all pretend doesn't exist after it's gone. Every experience shines like a gem for this girl, it's all new, it glitters. Diamonds or rhinestones, sunset over Malibu or latenight on Hollywood Blvd. That cat you love more than life itself, the bitch in your class you would send to hell if you could. The NIN cd that was written from Trent's soul to yours. The smell of pikake blossoms like summer in a bottle. The taste of blue-cooked ahi, the smell of Pink's hot dogs. Everything feels so strong. Everything is there to be devoured. Remember? Really? And are you willing to admit it? Remember how you thought you'd always feel that way? And now a full moon is something you notice maybe once in six months, and if you go to take a look at the Smokey Mountains in full fall foliage and part of you is just wondering if you should leave early to avoid the traffic? You try, Gods you try, but the songs that speak to you aren't the new ones, the ones that make the kids sweat and turn it up, it's the ones that say what you don't want to admit. I've seen the future brother, it is murder. I used to care but things have changed. I'm sorry, my friend. I wish it were different for you. Screw you, I wish it were different for me. Go ahead, age all you want, I want sixteen and nights that mean everything and a body that never says anything I don't want it to. Jane has all the good and none of the bad. Watching the waves at night and thinking about the bacteria in the luminescence; seeing some That hasn't happened to her yet. But she's done a lot of reading in her short, lonely life, (let's not get too far into it and say plenty of money and not much attention, okay?) and she's discovered that except for a chosen few like William Blake, like Stephen Hawking, she only has a few more years of feeling like…well, of feeling at all. Everyone else goes on and pretends that it's all just as wonderful as it used to be, even as they search for new sensations, new worlds to conquer. Cortez' men wrote that when they saw Tenochtitlan, the city of the Aztecs, for the first time, some of them cried. Many swore something so beautiful must be a dream. They fell to their knees, sobbing, these few hundred men at the edge of a new and glorious civilization. In just a couple of years they had destroyed it utterly, so completely it took hundreds of years just to find the ruins and they built their own image on the surface. And there are plenty of people like that today. They are dead inside, so they try to suck all the life out of everything else. See, feel, be a part of, lose, destroy. She didn't want to be like that. No. She was maybe too aware for her age in that respect. But maybe she was just right. Because the feelings she liked most weren't the ones other kids her age liked. Ecstasy and dancing till dawn. Playacting at love with other kids. Discovering or inventing the latest thing. It wasn't enough. It never had been. No. What she loved so much it nearly broke her heart was to make her brand new fresh nerve endings scream. Three-fifths of a mile in ten seconds of incredible pleasure, of terrifying pain. Overloading her precious new brain with fear, with agony, with ecstasy, sensations angels or demons would envy. She'd had the desire since before she knew what it was, since she'd run her hand through tender little newly-wet slit and thought about being a deer, shot, gutted. Or an abused child in one of those stories on the news. Soon she blessed the internet for teaching her so fast, for helping her avoid the fumbles in college and the inevitable revulsion from her lovers that would follow, avoiding the depression of feeling like a freak, like the only one in the universe. But mostly she blessed it for letting her find out so very fast just how far it all could go. Just how far she wanted it to go. She knew from books and pictures and chats that there were a lot of half-pretty, half-dressed people who'd come to the pleasure/pain she loved so much out of boredom, out of being jaded from the pleasure of their youth. That wasn't true for her. When she was ten, she was reading about it. When she was eleven she was doing it, clumsily yes, but she never made the same mistake, never let some half-assed pedophile who was as scared as her touch her again. Her third time, and the time she lost her virginity, was with some of the best dominant men in the city. By the time she was fourteen she'd exhausted all the men she'd wanted to try, and they'd become to scared of her to come close. Because by then she'd started telling men what she really wanted. "But Jane, dear God, you don't know what you're saying, you're too young, you can't imagine the reality of this, you're too young--" She sighed, feeling older than him, older even than these Hollywood hills he lived in, the ones geologists said were, as mountains go, flying up into the air, becoming another set of Alps although no one could see it. "Peter. I do know what I'm saying. I'm not too young for you to have pierced my nipples three times each. I can imagine the reality of what you can't even say, Peter, the reality of being dead. And you're repeating yourself again, so I will too. I'm not too young. Really, I'm too old for you." She didn't see him again, but there were others like him. They seemed dangerous, edgy as the term went. And they were, they certainly were. One of them loved to hang her until she lost consciousness, waking up wet from her urine with his cock in her ass, his groaning with pleasure as she spasmed and twitched around him. One of them used her in rituals, sacrificing a cat above her nude body then watching as each member of the cult fucked her, finally filling a cup with their mixed juices and the blood for them all to drink. His magic had worked. Everyone wondered why someone who was such a wooden actor was such a star. But he never sounded like a valley boy when he called on the Enochian demons that served him. One of them even stripped her naked and hunted her with bow and arrow across Catalina Island. Her heart racing, a wild grin on her face, she made every second count, fighting for her life as she prayed she'd lose it. And then he'd caught her dead to rights, naked and sweaty, eyes wide as a deer's, frozen with terror and expectation…and he'd shot the arrow deliberately into a tree. She screamed like a panther and launched herself at him, then fought with teeth and nails and all her strength as he tried to fuck her. He'd beat her and then when she was at last subdued, he was too limp to rape her. He was sobbing as he knelt by her, examinining her, apologizing to her. He dressed her after he was sure she wasn't seriously hurt. He was limping worse than she. Then he drove her back to the yacht, and begged her over and over not to tell anyone in The Industry. He offered her anything, everything, for as long as she wanted it. She wanted one thing, the only thing she'd ever wanted, and she told him so. It was all she said the whole long trip home, and for once she didn't look at the water, the dolphins, the sun. At first he said he couldn't. An hour out from the island, her ice-eye fixed on his, he'd cried and said he'd heard things but he couldn't tell her, no one ever told, and it probably wasn't true. She said nothing at all, sipping Crystal and staring at him, a seventeen-year-old with the eyes of a bacchante, and at last just before they docked he asked her for two weeks and swore he'd see what he could do. She'd made him drive her to his safety deposit box for the yellow sapphire he had strung on a cord to strangle her with once and took it with her as collateral. He added a diamond pave bracelet she sold to finance her lifestyle. He was sobbing as she walked away. She got a cab without even trying. She was that kind of girl. Now she paced the Boulevard, as if she were a caged animal. No one who saw her even considered that she'd been stood up, or that she was a hooker. No one talked to her or even smiled. Most refused to meet that emerald gaze. Nobody on the street scared her, none of them ever had. But she was very scared that she had been stood up, and, she had to admit, rather scared that she hadn't. Because Jane had a meeting to attend, people to meet. And while that certainly wasn't a bad thing in Hollywood, in this case she knew for damned certain it was more than a bad thing. It was a Very Bad Thing. And it was the Very Bad Thing she'd wanted since she'd read her mother's copy of de Sade when she was nine. Unlike most little girls she knew what she wanted to be. She wanted to be perfect, and then she wanted to stay that way forever. But before that, she'd wanted to make such an art of her suffering that no one who witnessed it would ever find anyone to compare with her. The world wouldn't know her name, but she'd always be a legend. She was ten minutes early, if she'd left the apartment when she'd been ready she'd have been here an hour ago. She had never been like this, when she'd gone to meet the men who'd fucked her for the first time she'd gotten ready then sat motionless like O by the door until it was time to leave. Now she was so anxious she was chewing on her nails. She didn't really mind so much, she'd carefully cut her nails to nothing, polished them the color of gunmetal and then carefully chipped them just the right amount. But now she was down to her cuticles and tasting blood now and then. The tasted calmed her somewhat, she'd learned that when she was nine and she'd intentionally cut herself in the bathroom so she could feel what it was like. She'd loved it, but she'd left scars on her arms, so she'd never done that again. Only those who knew how to avoid scars cut or pierced her, except for a very few permanent marks she'd begged for. She smiled just a little, red-plum lips open over perfect teeth, as she recalled how it had felt, getting the cigarette burn just at the top of her inner thigh. But it didn't really stop her mind from ratcheting back and forth. Of course everyone thought of her as preternaturally calm. Even with tears streaming down her cheeks, screaming herself hoarse as clamps tightened around her multiple nipple piercings, there was something almost…absent about her. No, that wasn't it, it was the knowledge that when the pain stopped she'd go away again, fading bit by bit till all that was left was her tear-filled eyes, like the Cheshire cat's smile. And she was truly a calm person, she thought carefully about what she wanted, decided exactly what it would take to get it, and worked single-mindedly until she had it. If something happened that wasn't related to her goals, it was ignored, the way the other girls at her high school called her names, tormented her. It didn't stand in her way, so it didn't exist. If something did interfere with her, she calmly decided if she could work around it, or destroy it. If not, then she would vent her anger, seduce and break some boy, ruin some precious object belonging to someone she hated, walk into a bar on the South side of town and fuck everyone there. Then she'd set a new goal and move on. But now she was just too damned close the only thing she'd really wanted since childhood. If it didn't happen, she didn't know what she'd do. If it began only to end badly she wasn't sure she could go on. But worse, if what she'd wanted so long happened and was banal, sordid, if she died with her last thought on what a waste it had been, on how stupid he'd been, on how ugly the carpeting was…then her life would have meant nothing at all. But she took a deep breath, letting the energy of the City flow around, through her. The man with the yacht who'd arranged this had certainly seemed to have the requisite class, even if he'd refused to do her at the end. She'd heard legends occasionally about this man, or men, he'd introduced her to, and although legends grew in the telling, it felt right. In fact it felt as if what was about to happen had been waiting for her as much as she had for it. This could be perfection as nothing else ever had been. She thought about how little she knew. Two weeks after the ill-fated hunting expedition she'd received a letter on the internet to her "Lilith" account from no one she recognized, and it had been very brief, stating only that Barry had mentioned her interest in meeting. Not meeting "a group" or "someone", just meeting. She'd started a half-dozen replies and saved every one of them to the "Draft" folder. Then she'd minimized her mail program and tried to do some work. Brought Yahoomail back up again. Took it down, wrote a brochure for a new club in Word, killed Word without saving the brochure, brought up the letter again. This time she'd left it up as she wandered around her apartment in a tiny brown t-shirt and matching panties, left it sitting there like a ghost as she'd boiled some plain pasta with olive oil and a little rosemary and added a little fresh grated cheese and pine nuts and sat with her feet up on the edge of the computer desk to eat, tasting nothing, not really looking at the letter or anything short of the middle distance. Then she'd in one draft affirmed her interest just as cryptically as the original letter, and an hour later got a letter asking her to secure a mail drop box and check it the following Wednesday. It took forever but Wednesday arrived as it always did, and she found a fairly thin, vellum envelope addressed by hand. When she opened it in the privacy of her room, she found that it was terse but informative. She'd been investigated, it said. There was a chance that she deserved the interest that was being bestowed upon her. Again the passive voice, neither male, female nor plural. There were a series of questions and instructions, and the letter did not bother to say that she was required to answer and fulfill the requirements to the letter. The questions were thorough and far ranging and all of them asked for their answers in detail. They included as a small sample: How old was she? It had taken her fifty pages, typed, to answer all the questions. The last one gave her a great deal of pause. Fortunately because of her natural reticence the number was small. There was a friend, a girl when she was eleven and she was trying to find out if someone nearby felt as she did. She only knew the girl's first name and was sure she didn't remember. Other than that, the internet group was largest, since it was almost a support group. There were perhaps twenty there who knew that "Lamia" wanted to die during sex, but she had lied to them a lot about her "real life". That left four, all "in the scene", as the common and annoying term went. Three were lovers, one the man with the bow and arrow, and two who had claimed they had killed a woman and then backed off quickly when she'd asked if they'd do her. The last, a woman, she'd talked to when she was drunk, and it seemed they had similar desires, although, Jane thought, with the woman's age, weight and natural air of one who feels unselfimportant, the only way she'd achieve her desire would be to put herself in danger and hope to get lucky. Cold, but true. Now, however…she wondered how many of this list would survive, or if the questions were all bluff. She felt guilty. But she didn't even consider lying. Jane had never gone halfway about anything at all. The next letter had thanked Jane for her responses, and asked if she had any desires, wishes or requirements, and if she had any questions at all. While it took no time at all to write this letter, she spent a great deal of time thinking it out. And she was terrified as she did it. She'd had many fantasies, and other nightmares, about how she wanted and did not want it to be. But what was important? If she were too demanding would this happen at all? She finally decided to be honest, even about her ambivalence. She wrote that she truly only had one firm requirement. She wanted to be treated as a creature as valuable as she was. She was an egotist and she let it show when she said that she was lovely, educated, intelligent and sensitive to pain. She wanted to be treated as an exquisite sacrifice, a work of art. In return she would do the same, give all of herself up to suffering, to pleasure, to whatever was desired. She expressed the horror she had of cheap plywood and cork dungeons, of fake leather, of laughable theatricality, of calling a balding, none-too-clean and none-too-confident man "Master". She cared not at all how her tormentor or tormentors looked, so long as they seemed truly worthy to be her superior, her lover, her tormentor and ultimately her killer. She didn't require luxury, but she hoped that the setting would also be worthy, simple perhaps but no matter what not tacky or low-class. After thinking an even longer time, she wrote very briefly that, she gave herself over to him, her or them. It was not her choice what occurred, whether she was tortured exclusively or given some pleasure, whether things proceeded quickly or lasted for years (although it was her hope that she be allowed to die before her beauty faded more than a very little). Of course, any marring that would be done to her body was not her choice. Shuddering, she wrote that mutilation that significantly decreased her attractiveness, such as scarring of her face, amputation of digits, limbs or nipples, or stretching of her taut skin she would not deny, could not deny, but she prayed that it would be the choice of her Master or Masters to appreciate her beauty to the end. She wrote that she never got into some stuff, like dressing up like acting as a maid or pony, or coprophilia, but she wasn't stupid enough to believe that it would matter. Besides, she wrote, chomping the pen she'd unconsciously clamped in her teeth into icky little plastic bits, she never had said no. To anything. Then, after padding into the kitchen for a shot of tequila and a Xanax, she came back and wrote the one thing that mattered in this whole little game. She could smell her own sweat, and she could smell her own wetness. She had, she wrote, one requirement, and one only. She had to know, had to have it proven to her beforehand, that she'd die. That she'd die during sex. Any act of sex. She wanted it to be up to her killer, she wanted to know that her death pleased him, she wanted the last thing she saw to be the pleasure in his face. It didn't matter at all if people watched, if they filmed it, any of that shit. As for how, she wanted to hurt. She wanted to bleed. She didn't want it fast, or mechanical. She'd read Dolcett too and it even turned her on. For about a week. But now she wanted it as she had always wanted it. She wanted to die slowly, even if she'd already been tortured beyond her endurance. And she wanted it to be erotic. Romantic. Sensual. If they had to degrade her, okay, but more than anything… Well, stupid as it might seem, she wanted a death with candles and roses. Beyond that, all decisions were theirs. She added a sentence stating that she hoped she had not been too demanding, and promising utter and grateful obedience once all decisions were made. She said that she had only been honest, believing that her unknown reader would prefer it so. And she mailed the letter, even though in part she wondered what she had done. That night she got smashingly drunk, high and out of her mind on prescription pills. Now that she had made the effort to gain what she had wanted, she felt very near to breaking down completely. She had given complete and utter strangers carte blanche to do anything they wanted. Perhaps she'd spend four or five years scrubbing floors. Maybe she'd walk the streets as a prostitute. If they wanted, they could amputate all her limbs, her breasts and her tongue and have her cunt sewn shut, then leave her in a basket for years. It was virtually guaranteed that she'd spend a great deal of time doing things she would never have chosen to do, left to herself. She was beautiful, rich, and intelligent, and she might end up with her face scarified, a bit in her mouth, and taken only from behind as some anonymous piece of ass. But just as long as they could would assure to her that eventually, eventually, she'd have what *she* wanted. Gods, if she even wanted it by then, if she were even sane, if she weren't wishing she had her life back. She was seventeen. She'd been told over and over that she was so young, she didn't know what she wanted. And if they were right? What horror had she set in motion? Ah, fuck, she really truly wanted this, had been sure just as long as she'd understood the concept. She wanted to die. Bloodily. Painfully. Slowly. Erotically. Why? She laughed and washed down a Valium with some tequila. Hell, she didn't have the faintest fucking idea. She'd just always wanted it that way, the way some guys like to lick women's feet, and some girls like vinyl maid's outfits. So her desire resulted in ending up ultimately on some forensic scientist's table, probably in sections, while that most intimate of examinations tried to find out everything about her. She wondered if they'd be able to see it in her brain, to discover it in a slide-section of her heart. Let fucking Quincy figure out the "why". Mommy didn't cuddle her enough, or Daddy drank too many martinis. She was overprivileged. She was underdisciplined. Who cared. It was her fantasy. She laughed again, a little too loudly. Even that steel autopsy table aroused her. And pretty soon all this would be her reality, too. She'd dreamed of it for half her life, but only recently had she found someone who said he would, that his arrow would pierce her, that she'd die while he took that one last fuck. *That* took it from fantasy straight to unfulfilled reality. She'd had a lot of unfulfilled realities, and she knew how to handle them. It had been that way with anal sex once, until someone had. And golden showers, and being beaten until she bled, and seeing a needle dimple and then pierce her flesh, and a whole host of other things. All of them waiting for her to experience them until someone had taken her, and shown her. Not even unfulfilled anymore. Instead, experience, real concrete experience. But then Barry had decided that for it would stay firmly in that realm of fantasy, and Jane had gone from dreaming to desperate. She stopped thinking -someday-- and furiously started making it soon. And thanks to Barry and all of Barry's friends, supposedly as of now Jane wasn't looking anymore. She could truly anticipate, that brief, endless like feeling that skewer about to punch through her breast. Like feeling that cock leave her cunt and move back that crucial little ways, brushing erotically just...*there*. Yeah, Keats had it right, something about the chase and the wait... Oh, God, though, it didn't mean anything if that chase didn't finish. So our Jane had a lot to think about as she waited on that damned street corner for someone to show up. Of course she had a vivid imagination, and at least she was coming to understand how little this person was like all those people in all those anonymous chats online. Her prospective...lover? Killer? Predator...that was a good one, her predator…seemed educated, got her at least some of her literary references, had some taste in music, even if she didn't share it. She might have been willing to move her toothbrush to his place after a date. But then there wouldn't be an after...well, there would after *this* date, the one she'd required, the proof. She'd been dicked over without actual benefit of the dick more times than she could count. So this time when the guy said he was a stone killer she said "prove it" and was surprised when in the very next conversation he typed back "you want proof, pretty thing? Come get it." So. No slouch, able to come back quick when he needed to. She'd wondered what she'd find. She pictured a Harley pulling up with a guy on the back, leather jacket, more hair on his face than she had on her head. Or some businessman in some status-car, leaning over to open the door for her. Or some pudgy, bearded nerd in a car with a squealing transmission. Or more than one guy in a Caddy, one getting out fast and shoving her in faster. Maybe even a limo…so many possibilities... If he would just fucking show! And still five fucking minutes to go.
When had she first thought about combining pain with sex?
When had she first allowed, or requested, another to hurt her during or before sex?
How often did she engage in sex now and was pain involved seldom, sometimes, frequently, always?
What acts had she performed? Which had she enjoyed, which disliked, why, how much?
Did she have any scars or piercings ? Could the piercings be removed and the skin healed?
What was the best sex she'd ever had? The worst? The most recent?
Did the appearance, age, sex or number of her partners matter?
Had she ever before tried to have someone kill her at the end of the sex act?
List all people, whether sadomasochists, family members, doctors or anyone else, who knew of her most extreme desires or of this recent contact, including those on the internet who might believe she really existed.
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