The Juliette Society(4)

Once you know that little tidbit of information, you’ll never watch Citizen Kane again the same way. You hear Rosebud, you see Rosebud. You think ‘vagina’.

You think Orson Welles might have been trying to tell us something? I think he was trying to tell us this: Charles Foster Kane was a real mother fucker. And that, not surprisingly, was the source of all his problems.

Just as an aside, there is one type of movie, and only one, that doesn’t conform. One genre that flagrantly breaks the rule. Not only breaks it but turns it on its head, just because it can, and it doesn’t give a fuck: the porn movie.

But let’s not go there.

Anyhow, this rule, I’ve realized it applies as much to reality as it does to fiction. That it’s not only in the movies that what happens to us is subservient to who we are, how we act and why, but also the stories of our lives, the choices we make and the paths we take.

This path I’m on, you can’t see it. It’s not a yellow brick road, the lost highway or a two-lane blacktop. And I don’t even know that it’s a road I’ve been traveling along until I reach my destination, look back at how far I’ve come, and realize that all this time the choices I made, the roads I took, were leading me to this place.

So here’s the deal. In order to explain how I ended up at the Juliette Society, I have to start at the beginning.

Not right at the very beginning. We’ll save all the embarrassing baby pictures for another day. And all those apocryphal childhood memories that locate the origins of traumas that have stayed with me ever since. Like the time I pissed my panties at Sunday school while Sister Rosetta was telling us about Noah and his ark.

So, no, not right at the beginning, but close to it.

And I need to tell you something about myself, my character, my Achilles heel. I have to start with Marcus, my teacher, on whom I have a secret crush.

Doesn’t every girl have a secret crush? An insignificant other who they can project their wildest sexual fantasies onto. Mine was Marcus who, unknown to him, became my fetish object the very first time I walked into his class.

Marcus: brilliant, rumpled, handsome, shy – shy to the point of seeming aloof – and intense. Marcus, who fascinated me the moment I first set eyes upon him. Nothing inspires the curiosity of a woman more than a man who’s emotionally distant and hard to read, especially sexually. And I just couldn’t get a peg on Marcus.

In film theory there’s a term, ‘frenzy of the visible’. It’s something to do with pleasure. The intense pleasure we feel at looking, seeing, comprehending, evident truths of the existence of the physical body and its workings, writ large up on the screen.

That’s how Marcus makes me feel. When I’m sitting in the front row of the lecture hall, where I can get the best view of him, projected against the whiteboard, illuminated by fluorescents that seem as bright as an arc light on a movie set. I sit in the same spot every class, in the front row of this huge hall that stretches back maybe forty rows, right in the middle of the row, directly in front of his desk, where he can’t fail to notice me. Yet Marcus rarely ever catches my eye. Or even looks in my direction, but addresses the room – the entire room – except me, and makes me feel like I’m not there, that I don’t even exist.

He’s there, I’m not, and it’s driving me nuts – a frenzy of the visible.

And I wonder if he’s just playing hard to get because I’m making it pretty damn obvious.



On the days that I have class – Monday, Tuesday, Friday – I find myself dressing for him. Today is no different. Today, I picked out figure-hugging jeans that show off my ass, an underwired balconette bra to lift and separate, a blue and white striped tank top that accentuates my curves and a navy blue cardigan that frames and directs attention towards them.

I want him to catch sight of my breasts and think Brigitte Bardot in Contempt, Kim Novak in Vertigo, Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.

Is that obvious enough?

I hope so.



So today, as always, I’m sitting in class, pretending to take notes, and undressing Marcus with my eyes. Marcus is talking about Freud, Kinsey and Foucault, about the spectacle of cinema and the feminine gaze, and I’m trying to trace the curve of his cock in brown suit pants that are just a little too tight around the groin not to be revealing.

He’s half-standing, half-sitting against his desk with one leg splayed out along the edge, forming an almost perfect right angle with the other, which is firmly anchored on the ground. And I’m chewing on a pencil, counting a span of inches from the seam of his pants along his inside leg, taking guesstimates of girth and width and length.