Carrie's Story: An Erotic S/M Novel by Molly Weatherfield Page B

of the little pedestals, was Kate. She was supposed
to be at Sarah Lawrence, but she'd somehow engineered
this stunt. Her parents found out afterward, and there was
a big stink, but it was too late then. She was a sensation, of
course, brought in more money than anybody had before. She
got famous in those circles, wound up running a remarkable
establishment in Napa with maybe the most gorgeous slaves
in the world."
    "She's the one with the poker games, right?" I said. "I
would like to see it sometime, you know," I added.
    "Forget it," he answered quickly, and rather grimly. "I've
changed my mind about that one."
    I was surprised. I guessed I had overstepped some
mysterious boundary. He looked a little frightening. He lit
a cigarette, and I hugged my knees to my chest in the big
armchair. We both were quiet for a while. Then I almost
whispered, "Jonathan, am I really so badly trained?"
    "That's a tough one," he said. "Yes, I guess so, I guess
by Kate's standards you are, but Kate's standards are astronomical. For God's sake, a lot of this is sensibility, after all.
And anyhow, there are different standards, different games,
different coordinates for plotting reality. I, for example... oh
come on, Carrie, if we can talk about Kate we can talk about this-don't play dumb. You know very well what I'm talking
about, even if we've never talked about it before.

    "The game we play is objectification, right? You are
what I want you to be, or you get thrashed, as you well
know. Of course, we both know that there's got to be a you'
to actively `be' what I want you to be. But there's no simple
reversal. There's something I can only call originality, your
jagged little edge of critical intelligence that could go home
and turn this all into a story and write it down. It obliterates itself at my command and then what's weird is that I feel
as though I'm compelled to search for its trace. The story is
written somewhere under its erasure, maybe. Or something
like that, like something out of that god-awful fancy frog
theory you read so much of at school. Ridiculous, obscure,
pretentious, but still ...it seems to describe something that's
really happening. Something about the ass-backward way,
excuse the expression, in which we-all of us-feel and perceive and communicate. I mean, here I am, not even letting
you speak most of the time but still straining to hear it, that
calculating, deadpan, cranky, comic narrative little voice
saying, `And thezz Jonathan said...' and making me sound, oh
quite sexy, but just a little ridiculous and full of myself too.
Anyhow, that's what interests me. It's pretty elusive."
    "Gosh," I said. It was about all I could think of to say.
"I didn't know you thought about stuff like that," I added.
I was pretty blown away. I certainly hadn't been playing
dumb. I had genuinely beezz dumb. I had been playing so hard,
so sincerely (his word), that I seemed to have missed a whole
level of the game.
    "I know," he said. "You wouldn't. You're not quite openminded enough to expect stuff like that from somebody as boozhie and mainstream as I am. Still, I try. I read a lot. I
read what I think I need to read to understand what I want
to understand. It doesn't match your "Masterpiece Theatre"
image of me, but there it is."

    "I've got to think about this some more," I said slowly.
    "That's exactly right," he said. "You do. You're a kid,
after all, and sometimes I forget that. Sorry. Really, I mean
that. You know a lot more than you think you know, and I
know you think about it a whole lot, but you haven't really
thought it through. After all, it's a shocker, and a blow to the
ego, to consider that sex might be as difficult and complicated
as literature."
    I was beginning to wonder if these seemingly ruleless sessions were where he scored his biggest points off me. Perhaps
the rest of the arrangement he and I had wouldn't work without these talks.
    "It's getting late," he said. "We