Feel What You Feel At Your Own Peril
It is a truism in this age, whose insights into human motivation have been shaped by the psychoanalytical hermeneutics that were introduced by the great Viennese physician, that great virtues are often the contrivances by means of which equally great vices present themselves, acceptably, in the social realm, without risking condemnation, and that, frequently, can bring upon their practitioner general approbation and enviable accolades.
Such it was with Martin Bower who from the earliest age found inordinate pleasure in the dismembering of small creatures while they still enjoyed, as it were, to have the breath of life throbbing in their diminutive corpuses. Plucking wings from flies and butterflies, and their thready legs from spiders, as his teeth clenched intent with the discharge of a rage that animated him, affected him with such personal excitement that it was never in the performance of these malicious surgeries but that the configurations of his countenance did not reveal the most intense and furious sympathetic sensibility with the creatures that were the objects of his mutilation.
Rather than being openly performed, these experiments in the assertion of power over nature were enacted secretly. The outward show the boy made as he grew into a handsome adolescent forecast nothing but grace, charm, and a deferential respect for others. This impression caused to be conferred upon him praise and admiration by all who could share in the responsibility for the quality of his growth and by all who were fortunate enough to observe in the young man the happy results of their efforts toward his education. At the age of thirteen he announced that he intended to be a surgeon when he grew up.
At University, his classmates admired him and his teachers esteemed him. He was recognized for intellectual brilliance and for emotional availability. His capacity to compassionate, especially as he listened to stories whose narrators were rightfully angry, and his gratifying response to their tales was an uprush of anger, made him the first ear to turn to.
His first foray into cruelty lasted just under two years and he was done with it by the end of his junior year. Nor did it hamper the reputation for receptivity, availability, and affability, for genuine friendliness that made him shine -- in classes and in general on the campus. His devotion to cruelty was enacted in the odd recess each life can find, and it brought him into a parallel universe where he became someone else who was pretending to be him most of the time.
When he began at the University, Bower's father had given him an open-top two-seater car of a creamy pale Dresden green. The dashboard was of oak wood. The seats were of leather died a deep oxblood. In this car, from time to time, he left the campus and lonely along unlovely highways he watched the road disappear beneath the car's wheels as he raced towards fulfillment of boundless desire.
He had discovered the club entirely by accident when he had gone to a remote village in search of the tranquility that a hamlet near a forest and a gently meandering stream can afford a young man of sensitivity and sensibility who is besieged by the excitements of an urban situation and a busy social routine intermixed, in his case, with an on-going course of rigorous studies, for his desire and determination to be a surgeon never wavered.
Hidden behind an imposing and antique stone wall that stretched along one side of a gently sloping dirt road across from the forest where he had wandered having left his car in a shaded and out-of the-way grove, was a castle – at least a castle was what it most resembled – upon which he had stumbled some weeks ago because, as the day was hot, he had stripped off his clothes and, leaving them on the bank, plunged into the river and begun swimming with a strong and easy stroke until he had reached a turn in the river. It opened onto a prospect that gave him a surprising view of that marvelous stone structure, hidden, for the most part, by the wall he had seen from the road.
It would have been an event of no consequence had Bower seen the grave pile and having seen it turned round to return to the bank upon which he had left his clothes and near which his convertible was parked. But circumstances greatly shaped by chance, a force whose origins are far from being transparent to the understanding, made it otherwise.
On the bank, quite close to the river, there composed into undeniable focus for the powerful swimmer a scene of even more commanding aspect than the edifice itself. It was of someone being beaten, whipped actually. The moment of his apprehension was also the moment of his response. Charging with a powerful stroke, he reached the shore and sprang out onto it from the river, oblivious of being naked. He ran up to the scene of –it was not altercation, but attack, and cried, "Put down that whip. He is bleeding."
"And so will you be. Back off," cried at him the marvelous specimen of brawn brandishing the whip, his erection straining.
But instead of backing off, Martin threw himself forward and, grabbing his opponent by one shoulder, yanked the whip out of his hand.
"What are you doing?" said the boy who lay in the tall grass bleeding, overwhelmed by the swollen masculinity that the naked man inhabited, and in awe.
Having interrupted something he thought he had been drawn to as a courier of virtue, he soon became enmeshed in it to the full measure of his vice. Interrupted in their mystery, the participants were enraged and began together to pound the intruder in an embrace of blows, but with protean magnificence he slipped through their fingers and took his position before them with whip in hand, a naked circus master, as he cracked the whip on the earth before them and sent up clumps of dirt. Astonished they held back and marveled. The whip was an extension of the arm that swung it, and danced in the same way that the muscles in the arms did.
"Who are you?" the one who no longer brandished the whip demanded as if still the master.
"I'd rather you answer that question regarding yourselves," Martin answered.
"You may not be happy if we do. You must come with us if you would know. But you've been warned."
The young man who had been being beaten was hardly less naked than Martin, who let them guide him despite some wariness, keeping hold of the whip, as they walked, in front of him, to the castle, clad in a black leather G-string; the straps of a leather harness, crisscrossing his slim torso.
Inside Bower had to suppress a laugh.
"It surprises you," a young man, some five or seven years Martin's elder, inquired walking into the anteroom where Martin waited with the whipper – whom he had stripped of his whip – and the eager victim.
"No," Martin said looking directly at him with a warm smile, "that is what makes me laugh -- the pleasure of finally seeing openly what had hovered at the edges of my awareness."
When he returned to the University the following afternoon, Bower told no one. He told no one of the cell in which he had spent the night, nor of the half a dozen others, not as a prisoner but as torturer. It was not guilt that kept him from speaking. He did not feel guilty. He experienced the kind of exaltation being in love is reputed to induce. He was walking on air, and like a lover, understood implicitly that speech to anyone about the rituals of love could only dishonor them, especially when the rituals were such as he understood would bring shock and censure were they known. It would be called debauchery, at best, even by his open-minded acquaintances had they known the erotic ceremonies of Cruelty and Suffering that had become his spiritual nurture.
The Student Union was a masterpiece of deception. From outside it seemed to be a drunken and cockeyed, nevertheless perfectly balanced, edifice of mirroring glass. Inside, that glass was translucent and made anyone inside feel as if there were no boundary between the world outside and this protected space. The building's skin from within was a window forked by tough, curving, intersecting, tensile supporting aluminum rods.
It was late in the afternoon. Martin's eyes were tired. He rubbed them as Elsa spoke. When vision came back to him, he turned and looked at the boy passing in the middle distance before them. Elsa felt his attention go. A blank space opened before her. It became impossible to make sense of anything. She forgot what she was saying.
Martin turned back to her. She appeared to blush. It was really anger, but she stifled it and rifled his hair.
To say that she had designs on Martin would be speaking accurately. Her parents would disapprove of him. But that was a big part of the attraction. She was rebellious and she was experimental in her rebellion. Her mother's disposition was starchy. She could tolerate no deviations from the way she thought the world ought to be. But Hanna Blume had gotten under the girl's skin better than Elsa knew, and anyone who gave thought to the matter could see her acts of rebellion as nothing less than the clearest declarations of loyalty. She had entered a fight she wished to lose
"You're not here at all, are you?" she said bringing his head nearer her with the palm of her hand on his cheek.
He responded warmly when she kissed him and felt a frightening possibility of surrender.
"Let's go to my room," she said.
He consented. The day, because it was spring, had extended itself and as they walked in the late evening only the slightest suggestion of night was beginning to plant itself into the texture of the falling day. Across the campus they trod hand in hand with the liveliness of the young when they are imbued with the excitement of budding eroticism and the anticipation of its steep increase before they let burst together the great storm of joy.
He spread himself out above her and became a steely cloud and gently enveloped her in his mist as she dissolved in the moist warmth of their mutual rain. Afterwards he wished for a cigarette because he had engraved in his mind images in black and white from early French New Wave Cinema movies.
"You've changed over the last few weeks," she said looking up at him as he leaned on his right elbow, his entire body twisted somewhat to that side but not so much that he would become unplugged from her, and drawing her to him.
"Oh, yeah," he said. "How?"
"In a good way," she said with empathic sincerity. "It's like you'd grown, like you've settled into yourself." She kissed him and he responded and the last sparks of their earlier explosion flared and spent themselves until after the shimmer of fading all feeling was gone but the utter joy of relaxation.
The top was up and Martin was protected from the downpour as he sped through the unusually dark evening over the dirt road beside what he had called the castle but later learned had been a monastery. He had settled into himself.
"You really intend to become a surgeon," Elsa said.
"Yes," he said.
"And when will you have time for me?" She was flirtatious and petulant and something else was lurking. He had to get away. It did not go on long. Martin told her one evening after classes that he was going to stop seeing her because her demands on him were too consuming and kept him from giving himself to his preparations to be a surgeon.
"You take the time we have," he said to her "and squander it, you ruin it, resenting the time we don't have rather than making the time we do have count for something."
She mocked his sentence but it did not matter. He left her. His heart was heavy -- for her. For himself, he was glad. His heart was light. He was free again of bondage to the conventions he had already managed several times to get free of. The curse of life was to be in other people's clutches.
The wind was refreshing. His head needed to breathe. It was too long he had been holding on. Now he raced down the interstate until he came to the grass-edged dirt roads and took the one on the left through a forest until the meadow by the river where the monastery stood. The sky was drenched with stars. Inside, he sat at one of the long bars and drank a vodka martini. A jazz trio backed a singer going through parts of the Cole Porter Songbook. There were few members at the bar and most of the chambers on the second floor were not being used. But all of that was of no account. Richard walked in and for Martin a cloud lifted. He was tall and although thin, it was a muscular, compact thinness. His sandy blond hair caressed his skull and his head was balanced precisely upon the lean pillar of a strong neck. They kissed in greeting.
"I wanted to see you all week," Martin said, embracing him.
"I could not get you out of my mind."
"I'm hard for you all of the time."
"I want you now," Richard said and pressed his mouth to Martin's.
"Come," Martin said, pulling away. They swallowed the last of their drinks and took the rose marble steps to a chamber on the second floor where the balcony looks down at the fountain in the atrium. The room had been prepared for them.
"Come inside me, please," Richard said. "I am such a vulnerable slut when I am with you. You don't know how much I need you."
This unguarded confession of desire pierced Martin's own reserve and acted upon his nerves with an electricity that is un-representable by language although it is searing in the flesh. It was intolerable to feel. It was a clawing, craving demand on his flesh. He did not want to accede to it.
"Fuck off, faggott," he said.
Richard looked at him with dumbfounded amazement. "But you," he began, but before he could finish, Martin had slapped his mouth shut with a sharp crack on the cheek.
"You still want me inside you?" Martin said.
"Oh, yes," Richard affirmed nodding his head.
Bower pulled open his shirt and stood torso bare, broadcasting his impenetrable masculinity. He raised his chin and slowly turned his back on Richard, who had fallen to his knees. Bower walked out of the room onto the marble terrace outside. He leaned up against the marble parapet and looked down at the powerful spray shooting upwards in the fountain at the center of the atrium.
Richard could not cope with it. He felt a sudden emptying out of his belly. Inexpressible grief and despair overwhelmed him. "Martin," he cried. Bower walked back into the room and locked the door behind him. "It's not a game," he said. "It's a matter of power. I have it. You don't. That says something about you."
Richard did not like hearing what Martin was saying. He knew it was true and it made him numb. He wanted the power of words, tender that becalmed the spirit with abundance of affection.
"You'll sleep on the floor," Martin said, looking down at Richard and opening the door to admit the boy whom he had summoned when he stood at the parapet.
"Take me into bed with you, please," Richard begged.
Martin ignored him. He was excited and like iron: he gazed at the boy: the more he frustrated Richard, the stronger he felt. He swelled with the pride of being unyielding. He held the boy and drilled him with kisses, oblivious to him as he possessed him. He let him go.
Richard stood immobile by the doorway, his gaze fixed on them; his heart, pricked by an icy knife, wept as it beat.
Martin left the boy and approached him.
Richard fell to his knees. Martin pushed him to the ground. When his lips were near Martin's feet, he stretched to kiss them, but Martin kicked him away. Richard curled up on the floor, lay still, unable to sleep, unable to move.
"Are you alright?" Martin asked Richard, the next morning, once he had sent his night's companion scooting out the door. He extended a hand to help him stand.
"A little bit sore," he said, bent.
"This will straighten you out," Martin said, taking hold of Richard's nipples and pinching them hard. It did.
Richard could hardly contain the gratitude he felt when Martin kissed him. Martin sensed it, but it did not infuriate him. It warmed him. He felt tenderness toward the gentle soul he dominated. He was set up as a protector by the natural scheme of things. It could be a burden, but it could also be a joy. He kissed Richard warmly and left him for another time.
The winter sun was strong and already suggested spring's approach. Elsa kept Martin in her sights despite his defection.
"Where do you go to?" Elsa asked, as she walked up beside Martin, acting as if they were still a couple.
"Go to?" Martin said.
"Yeah, when you go away for a weekend or a night."
"Into another world."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"Just what it says."
Elsa frowned at this evasion. "I want you to stay in this one," she said.
"I told you it was no go. I'm going to go into whatever world I want to."
"You want me to be a boy," she said knowingly, as if having unmasked him.
" I want you to get off my back."
"You don't know what you want. You don't know if you want a girl or a boy, and it's for sure you don't know how to make me feel like a woman."
"If that's true, what do you want from me?" he said, guiding them off the cobblestone path onto the grass and then standing beside an old, tall, spreading chestnut tree. He took her in his arms as if he were her father or her brother. "Look, I don't want to take anything away from you," he said, as if talking to a child, looking straight at her, "but I can't surrender myself to you either. Demanding that, you will only frustrate yourself even more."
She heard his words but let them slip past her. She felt his body outlining hers as he held her comfortingly. She sighed and looked up at him and he understood she wanted his mouth on hers and her breath flowing at his rhythm. He was moved by her need and desired it at that moment, too, but he knew that if he recognized and satisfied that need he would not subdue it but stimulate it. And then it would corner him, trap him. He held back and then he withdrew.
"What?" she said.
"I am only cruel to be kind," he said.
"You're full of shit," she said.
"It's getting dark, he said. "I'll take you to the edge of the park and then we can go our own ways."
"I don't need your help to walk across the campus," she said coldly, "even in the twilight."
"I know you don't," he smiled. "I'm going this way, then. Take care of yourself."
He left her in knots. She could not figure out if he was deliberately trying to or if he was just so incredibly stupid. But he was not stupid. She knew that. Her pain was that much deeper. It lasted for several months. The langor lasted with little abatement through the summer and the only thing that defeated hopelessness was the inexorability of routine.
He disappeared, or as good as had. Every now and then she spotted him at a distance and knew not to go near. She cursed herself for spotting him, dreading the grief it would bring to her day.
She learned in the fall that he had transferred. Some kind of fast track program that put him in medical school a year quicker. Whatever. He was gone. And she was glad. So was he. He was living with Richard, not quite as lovers, but with Richard in submission to him. It was very convenient. He began medical studies and was cared for, fed, soothed, stroked and adored by someone.
"It's not that you love me. I can tell you don't," Richard said, placing a mug of coffee on the counter in front of Martin. "You just like how it feels to have someone completely at your disposal, to take care of every need."
"Absolutely."
"I'm a convenience."
"You are a necessity," Martin said, lifting Richard's chin with his index finger and delicately biting his lips, as if tasting him. "Actually, a little bit of a luxury."
The hailstorm had come on unexpectedly; moments before there had been sunny skies. But ice pebbles came with a frightening force banging relentlessly on the windows. Martin stood, still without his shirt and barefoot although he had pulled his jeans back on.
"You don't need a new car," Richard said smiling," for example. "You over indulge yourself. You are just out of school. You've just gotten a job in the best hospital in New York."
"You don't know what I need," Martin said slowly, emphasizing each word with a slight squeeze of Richard's pointed nipples.
"Ok, what do you need it for?" Richard said, hardly able to think.
"I want it. Isn't that enough?"
"Is it?"
"You tell me."
"No, it is not."
Martin tilted his head to the left and jutted his jaw forward. "To each his own," he said.
"Aren't you ever satisfied?" Richard said.
"I'm always satisfied," he said. "You're the one who's continually frustrated."
"That's because you keep leading me on and then withdrawing."
"Poor Uncle Wiggly," Martin said, taking Richard's cock between his fingers pinching it and letting it go after a few searing frets and slides, drawing him near to the edge but pulling him back until he was dizzy.
"Take me there," Richard begged. Martin let go his cock and before he registered, cuffed Richard's wrists together behind his back. Richard froze immobilized, statuesque, surrendering to sensation as Martin ran his hands over his body and dug his fingers into his flesh and made him feel like he was sculpting him.
He stood back, gazed at him, took his jeans from off a nearby chair and got into them, pulled a polo shirt over his chest that showed it all the more, tongued Richard's lips and left him.
Elsa had not had an easy time of it, burned by the anger her failed relationship with Martin aroused in her. She seethed when she remembered, and the only thing, she imagined, that would satisfy her, would be if he could be made to recognize what he had done and be made to repent of it. She bit her teeth. She had no way of getting that. That's what the fall was, the beginning of consciousness, when memory becomes a torment and resentment the dominating passion. He had unfastened himself from her. The best thing she could do, she knew it, was to get purged of it all – get it out of her mind and out of her system. That took discipline and concentration. For their triumph over regret and resentment, she knew, they had to have an object. She needed a discipline, something to concentrate on. It was the law with its precision, particularity, and especially with its dependence on ordered argument that captivated her.
Upon graduating, she was lucky enough to land a job at the Morrison Agency, a firm specializing in public relations and celebrity damage control. She was sharp, incisive, and, when need be, ruthless. She rose from intern to associate in a matter of two years and after another three years in an executive position, she left Morrison to open her own office. She did not solicit any of the clients she had at Morrison to switch, but a number of her clients, hearing of her new venture, followed her, and her agency thrived.
She was often bored when not working. She began a relationship with Tom, a good-looking guy a few years younger than she was whom she had hired as her assistant. But the more she attached herself to him romantically, the less she became able to maintain her superior status with regard to him. Her sense of need humiliated her. She was stuck, and it was only after she discovered, before anything serious occurred, that he had begun doctoring invoices so that he could skim part of the fees off for himself that she dismissed him from her employ and her bed.
It was a transforming experience for her. "I've been a fool," she said, sitting in Bernie's Helicopter, the rooftop bar on Spring Street under a canopy of summer stars.
Marcia contradicted her, as friends will. But Elsa held her ground. "A fool."
"This looks interesting," Richard said as he handed Martin an invitation that had come in the mail inviting him to attend an interdisciplinary conference and moderate a panel on the varieties of dominant/submissive relationships. He accepted and they flew to Seattle.
"You don't mean what you say," a streaky blond woman with dark eyebrows, slim cheeks, and high cheekbones said to him.
The crowd around him had thinned out. Martin was collecting his papers and arranging them on the lectern, looking down, but as she spoke he glanced up at her.
"How can you tell?" Martin said with a smile and a glance at Richard.
The woman would not be put off with a question for an answer. She looked at him intently and he could see what he thought to be a degree of animosity. She was defying him to look at her. That drew his gaze despite himself to her. Each time their gazes met, however, he would not engage but withdrew his. His papers conveniently needed his attention and he turned to arranging them and slipping them into his leather shoulder bag.
"You think you're better than anyone else," she said casually as if their conversation were genial."
"Excuse me," he said, astonished.
"I could destroy you if I wanted to," the woman said.
Now Martin looked sat her.
"Yes?" he said. And there was no doubt about either the power he commanded or his confidence in its depth.
She blinked and walked away.
"What was that about?" Richard said.
"I don't know, but a lot of that sort of thing is happening lately."
"It gets you on edge," Richard said.
"No," Martin said, thoughtful, "I seem to get people on edge."
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