The Juliette Society

7

Marcus is leaning against his desk, dissecting Belle de Jour scene by scene. He is talking about Séverine’s need to submit to her desires, completely and absolutely, until her fantasy and her reality are merged and she is unable to distinguish one from other. And I am on my knees in front of Marcus, licking his outstretched hand.

I am on my knees. I have a collar around my neck with my owner’s name on it. It tells me:

I am the teacher’s pet.

I am Marcus’ dog.

He is my master.

I’m balanced on my hind legs with my paws resting on his torso and my head buried in his crotch. I am a bitch on heat and I can smell my master’s sex. I am rubbing my nose in the crotch of his pants, snuffling his aroma, drawing it into me. The secret musk that tells me I belong to him and only to him. It fills my nostrils, fills my head. I am in a cloud of love and there is nowhere I would rather be. I pant and bark to show my delight.

I look at his crotch and cock my head as I trace a crease in his brown suit pants with my eyes. I lap at his crotch, tracing the crease with my tongue, and feel it swell and bulge against the fabric.

I am staining the crotch of Marcus’ trousers with my tongue and he pushes me off him, roughly, without warning. He pushes me away so violently that I fall hard on my side and sprawl across the floor. He barks his displeasure at me, admonishing me.

Bad dog.

I look up at him and cry out, pathetically. And it just makes him more angry. My master hates my guts and I feel sad. I feel like I want to curl up and hide in a corner and chew on a nice, tasty bone.

Marcus is talking about the secrets we keep in dreams, about the secrets we keep that threaten to consume us.

I am on all fours on top of the desk with my head resting on my front paws and my ass stuck up in the air as high as it will go. Marcus has two fingers deep in my pussy and his thumb lodged in my asshole, like he’s standing on the highway trying to hitch a ride. I’m wagging my behind and whimpering with pleasure. And all is forgiven.

I am my master’s bitch.

Anna is late to class. Anna walks in and all the men stand to attention. Marcus stands to attention. And Anna is on her knees in front of him. She has her head buried in his crotch. She is sucking in the secret scent that was known only to me. She is lapping at the place where I once was. But I’m not jealous. I’m not worried that I’ve lost his affections to another. I’m happy to share my obsession. Happy to share my master with my best friend.

Marcus is talking about Séverine’s need to annihilate herself through sex. And I am my master’s slave. I will do anything he demands. I will submit to his desires and make them mine. I want to annihilate myself on his sex.

But my master has other ideas. He wants to save Anna for himself. He wants me for all the others.

Marcus is directing all the men in class to form a line. One by one. Two by two. Like the animals in the ark. He directs me to turn around, to face away from class, away from the men who wait in line, standing at attention. He tells me to face the board.

On the board, Marcus has written HEGEMONY.

He tells me to say it out aloud, over and over and over, until the word means nothing, until the word just is. As I do so, he instructs the men to take me. One by one. Two by two. And I’m happy to share myself for my master. If that’s what he wants.

Marcus is talking about the unknowable limits of female desire and I think I understand what he means.

I’m sitting in class and I don’t know who I am, what’s come over me or why.

I’m sitting in the front row, as always.

Dressed for Marcus, as always.

But everything else has changed.

I’ve changed.

Marcus is leaning against his desk talking about erotic hallucinations and the capacity of the human mind to process fervent emotional states into phantasmagoric experiences that feel completely and utterly real, indistinguishable from reality itself.

I’m convinced Marcus is talking about me.

He’s talking to me. And only to me.

How does he know?

Marcus is talking about how film can act as a direct portal to the subconscious. How art can stir our unconscious thoughts and desires, often in ways that seem as fantastic and unreal as art itself. How, in extreme cases, our reactions to art can stimulate physical symptoms. Like the way teenage girls used to lose control of their bowels in the presence of the Beatles. Or how in the thirties they used to say that at the end of a Valentino movie there wasn’t a dry seat left in the house.

He’s talking about Stendhal Syndrome, an actual documented phenomenon whereby people experience high anxiety, fainting and even mild psychosis in the presence of great works of art.

Stendhal Syndrome. Sounds like the kind of thing a chronic hypochondriac would come up with if they were to look up ‘art’ and ‘psychosis’. The way chronic hypochondriacs always look up their symptoms, intentionally fuzzy on the details, in the hope of diagnosing some atrocious, incurable malady – the worse it is, the better to calm their anxiety. Stendhal Syndrome almost sounds as bad as it gets.

And here was I thinking it was just the name of a movie. A horror movie by Dario Argento that I once saw and never forgot – The Stendhal Syndrome – about a young female cop, played by Dario’s daughter, Asia, who while investigating a series of brutal murders, chases her prey into an art gallery and is stopped dead in her tracks by the majesty of the works she finds herself confronted by. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Caravaggio’s Medusa; one work of divine beauty, another of sheer terror.

And she is transfixed. Her field of vision telescopes in, towards the painting, until she can see nothing else. Until she finds herself, not looking in from the outside, but inside the painting looking out.

Like Alice through the looking glass.

I wonder if this movie holds the key to what I’m experiencing. And I realize how silly that sounds, as if anyone looks for answers in a horror movie. Or any movie at all, if it comes to that. As if art is capable of doing anything except raising more questions.

I have so many questions and I don’t know which way to turn. But I do know who to ask.

I corner Anna after class and we go to the cafeteria. Lunch is over and it’s almost empty. We sit at a table that’s far away from everyone else. I want to tell her everything, but I know if I do, it’ll sound insane, like the ravings of a lunatic.

Instead, I tell her I’ve been having these really intense dreams.

‘About Marcus,’ she says.

Not a question, a statement. How could she know?

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘About Marcus.’

Anna claps her hands together and giggles, giddy as a child at Christmas.

‘I want to hear all the juicy details,’ she says. ‘Don’t leave anything out.’

‘Have you ever felt so turned on that you thought you were going insane? That you were losing your grip on reality and might never get it back?’

‘In my dreams?’ Anna asks.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Or any time.’

‘In reality,’ she says.

I nod.

Without saying a word, she draws up a large hinged silver bangle decorated with ornate swirls that hangs down on her left wrist. Underneath it, there is a ring of deep patterned livid bruises, like a fossilized imprint woven into her skin, almost as if the pattern on the bangle has been branded onto her wrist.

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she says, tracing her fingers lightly across the grooves, as if in a trance.

It looks grotesque. And painful.

She has such pretty, delicate wrists. They look swollen and deformed.

‘What happened?’ And I try not to sound shocked, but it’s hard not to.

‘They tied me up,’ she says, as if it’s the most obvious answer in the world. As if she expects me to know.

‘Who’s they?’

And Anna tells me everything. She tells me all of her unbidden secrets. She tells me things about her that I’d never have guessed.

She tells me about the website she models for.

‘It pays really well,’ she says. ‘All my tuition, all my bills.’

The reason why the money’s so good, she says, is because the site ‘caters to a very select group of people’.

‘What kind of people?’

‘People who know what they like,’ she says. ‘People who want to see a particular type of girl in specific kinds of situations. Pretty, willing young girls restrained, tied, chained, disciplined and kept.’

I try to imagine who those people are, what they do and why they would want to see something like that. I look at Anna’s wrists and imagine what she could possibly get out of it, other than severe bruising.

I wonder if she self-harms, or if she used to, like the cutters I knew at high school. Those weird intense loner girls from good families who were so screwed up about their bodies and everything else that they harm themselves even further, beyond repair, inside and out.

And I wonder if this is what cutters do when they outgrow their teenage obsessions and move on to adult ones. I can’t imagine any other reasons why someone would submit themselves to that. For all the college tuition in the world.

‘It’s not about the money,’ Anna says, almost as an afterthought, as if she heard what I was thinking. And I almost believe her.

I look at her wrist again and then notice two large yellowing bruises on her upper arm. She’s wearing a sleeveless blouse, so she couldn’t hide them even if she wanted to. And I don’t think she does.

Did those come from the same place, I say.

‘These?’ she says, stroking them lovingly with her index finger.

‘No,’ she smiles, as if recalling some pleasant memory. ‘Fuck bruises. You know?’

I don’t, but I can probably make an educated guess.

Anna tells me she has a boyfriend. Actually, she tells me she has many boyfriends, other than Marcus, and they all provide something different, they all satisfy a different part of her. But this one guy, he likes to treat her rough and leave his mark for others to know where he’s been. And that’s fine with her too.

‘I love to feel them on my body,’ she says. ‘As long as I can see them and feel them, I remember how they got there. I remember how he put his hands on me. How he fucked me. And I like to watch them fade. From red to black to green to gold. And when they fade away to nothing, I know it’s time to hook up with him again.’

Out of all her boyfriends, she thinks she likes him the best of all, because he’s the only one who thinks the way that she thinks. Who believes, like her, that ‘sex and violence are two sides of the same coin’ – who not only believes it, but acts upon it.

‘You know how at school they tell you they’re going to teach you about the birds and the bees?’ Anna says. ‘Well, they don’t tell you everything, not the whole truth. They only tell you part of it. Only the stuff they want you to know. About the birds. All the fairytale stuff about courtship and mating rituals and raising children. They don’t tell you about the bees.’

‘Sure they do,’ I say. ‘They tell you how bees go from flower to flower and spread the pollen.’

Anna shakes her head and rolls her eyes.

‘So it should be the birds and flowers then,’ she says. ‘Not the birds and the bees. Do you know how bees fuck?’

‘I guess I don’t,’ I say. I don’t think I ever even thought about it.

‘It’s violent,’ she says. ‘Really violent.’

When bees fuck, Anna tells me, it’s like rough sex but the boy bee gets the hard end of the bargain, not the girl.

‘When he puts his penis in the queen, it turns inside out,’ she says. ‘And when he comes it’s like a firework going off. It’s so explosive that it rips his cock off and sends him flying. And a few hours later, he dies from the trauma.

‘If a guy ever hits on me too hard, or he’s being a pain in the ass, or I’m just not into him, I always tell him about the birds and the bees,’ she laughs. ‘They never ever know about the bees. And, afterwards, they wish they never did.’

She giggles.

‘One fuck and it’s all over,’ she marvels. ‘If it was like that for guys, think how different the world would be? And if we learnt about the bees at school, and not just the birds and the flowers, think what kind of sex we’d want to have later on.’

Listening to Anna talk about sex makes me feel like a virgin all over again. No, that’s not right. She makes me feel like I did on my first day at elementary school, freshly graduated from kindergarten, so proud and thinking I was an adult now – the way you do as a kid every time something significant happens, like attending a new school or getting your first bike – when I really knew nothing. Nothing at all.

That’s what I feel like now. Like I’ve been playing doctors and nurses all this time and I’ve only just worked out how sex works in the real world. I’m trying to digest all this information, but Anna hasn’t finished yet.

She says she remembers why she started telling me about the bees. That when the boy bee dies, its castrated penis stays stuck half-in and half-out of the queen’s vagina, like a cork in a half-drunk bottle of wine, as a cue for other boy bees to impregnate her – like a mating sign.

‘That’s what these are,’ Anna says, as she rubs her hand slowly over the bruises on her arm again. She wears them like a temporary tattoo because she wants everyone to know what she’s into – the way people wear badges of their favorite bands on the lapels of their jacket – so others who are into the same thing will recognize and respond.

‘And if they don’t?’ I say.

‘I guess they just figure I’m really clumsy,’ she shrugs.

I’m looking at Anna, at her bruises, and I see her in a completely different light now. But she hasn’t answered any of my questions. Just left me with a whole set of new ones.