The Juliette Society(11)

I imagine a door creaking open in one of those really old black-and-white haunted house movies that play on TV at the dead of night and there’s no one and nothing behind it, just an inky blackness.

‘That’s my cue to step inside,’ she says. ‘And I can feel my heart beat faster every time, even though I know exactly what’s going to happen and who’s behind the door.’

She steps inside the closet and she closes the door behind her. And now she can’t see a thing, because Marcus has plugged the holes with tissue paper so no light can get in.

‘It takes a while for my eyes to adjust,’ she says. ‘Even then, all I can see are shadows in the gloom that move like vapor trails and feel like hallucinations.’

‘How big is the closet? Doesn’t it feel claustrophobic?’

‘Big enough for my feet to be the only part of me that touches the sides,’ she says. ‘It’s scary how quickly I lose track of the space around me. And it’s also super hot in there, a steamy-wet dry heat like in a Turkish bath, because Marcus has already used up so much of the air, and I feel myself starting to sweat almost as soon as I’ve stepped inside.’

‘What happens next?’ I say, eagerly.

‘Then I feels his clammy hand on my breast. And you’d think that’d feel real creepy,’ she says, ‘but it actually turns me on. Really turns me on. Being touched like that, by someone I can’t see, in a confined space.’

It makes all the other stuff worthwhile, she says, the annoying preamble that Marcus insists has to be carried out to the letter.

‘And anyway,’ she says, ‘once we’re in the closet, in the dark, with the doors closed, and he’s initiated physical contact, there are no more rules. He’s not shy any more. Marcus fucks like a madman, like a beast, like a different person entirely. And the closet rocks on its feet.’

‘But how many ways could you fuck in a closet?’ I wonder aloud.

‘You’d be surprised,’ says Anna. ‘We must have gone through the entire Kama Sutra five or six times by now,’ she says.

‘One time,’ she says, ‘he was fucking me so hard the closet fell over onto its side. Onto the door. We were trapped inside. Marcus didn’t care. It turned him on even more. We fucked for hours. Then he punched out the top and we crawled out, naked and bruised.’

After they emerge out of the closet, there’s one final duty Anna has to perform. She has to wash him. So they move to the bathroom.

She says it’s a really old bathroom with a tiled floor and paint peeling off the walls from damp. And Marcus has one of those old-fashioned ceramic tubs that looks like a dinghy, with a shower hanging above it at the top of a long steel mast that extends up from a spout.

‘Marcus only ever takes a shower, never a bath,’ says Anna.

‘Why?’ I say.

‘He told me people drown in bathtubs.’

When Anna says this, I let the comment pass but I wonder if she realizes he was quoting Cassavetes.

Once they’re in the shower, Anna soaps and lathers Marcus, vigorously scrubbing his back, his chest, around his thighs, under his arms and behind his balls. But after she’s toweled him dry, he walks out of the bathroom without saying a word. Leaves her there alone, to dress and make herself up. And when she’s done, she lets herself out.

‘This is the way it always is,’ she says. ‘Without fail. And never any other way.’

‘Did you ever fuck in a closet?’ she asks, matter-of-factly.

I have to admit to her that, no, I never did. And, after hearing all this, I feel so depressingly ordinary.

We sit there under the tree for a few minutes, in silence. And a line of dialogue pops into my head that Marlon Brando says in Last Tango in Paris, one throwaway line that I’ve always loved from the monologue he delivers to his dead wife, as she’s lying in the casket in front of him:

‘A little touch of mommy in the night.’

And if that’s what Marcus likes, I’m fine with that. Because a lot of great men had mommy complexes.

I’m taking in everything Anna’s told me. I take a sip from my coffee and wince when I realize it’s almost gone cold because we’ve been here so long.

‘Did I ruin all your fantasies?’ Anna says. ‘I hope not. Underneath it all, Marcus is really rather sweet.’

Oh, no, I say. Absolutely not.

Now I want to know even more. Now it feels like I can read Marcus like a book and find out something new about him with every turn of the page. And I wish Marcus could teach me what it means to be freaky.

But then I realize Anna could teach me a lot about being freaky too.