Small Town

He was anxious, too, that someone in his office would find out, and what kind of behavior was that for an assistant district attorney, an officer of the court and member of the bar? She didn’t see how that could happen; at his insistence they’d used false names, and of course at one point she’d called him Gary, which no one appeared to notice, anyway, but still he’d reproached her for it on the way home. Didn’t she have any sense? Couldn’t she even keep names straight?

Then two weeks later he wanted to meet another couple, he had their letter and photo, and he sulked and pouted when she said she wasn’t interested.

The incident hadn’t ended their marriage, it was going to end anyway, but the underlying issue was not the least of the forces pushing them apart. He’d long since remarried, and she heard they were happy, and tried not to wonder what their sex life was like.

Since then she’d slept with men she was attracted to. And she had gone to bed a couple of times with a woman, a canvasser for the local Democratic organization. They’d gone to the same college but hadn’t really known each other then, and the lovemaking was good but the woman was too neurotic, and a couple of times was plenty.

When she was living with Marc, he’d taken her once to an S&M club he knew about at Greenwich and Gansevoort, in the old meatpacking district just below Fourteenth Street, and they’d worn leather to fit in and drunk fruit juice at the bar. Nobody was actually screwing, the activity was all role-playing, bondage and discipline, domination and submission. Some of it looked interesting, but in a curiously intellectual way. She felt disconnected from it, and, worse, was very conscious of being an intruder. Her spiked wrist bands and leather pants didn’t change the fact that she was just a voyeuse.

“They don’t mind,” Marc had assured her. “They’re exhibitionists, for God’s sake. If they didn’t want an audience they’d stay home.”

She could understand that. She had a streak of exhibitionism herself, and much the best thing about her half hour with Donna had been knowing she was being watched. But she really didn’t want to stand around like a tourist while a fat man with a too-long goatee had his buttocks whipped by a wraithlike woman in what looked like a black wet suit with cutouts. Nor, God help her, did she want to change places with either of them.

“I just thought it was something you should see,” he told her later, and she said she was glad she’d gone, but wouldn’t want to go again. No, he said, neither would he, but he had the feeling she’d make a dandy dominatrix.

What made him say that, she’d wanted to know. Was he interested in that sort of thing? Did he long to play slave and mistress, did he want her to tie him up, to do any of what they’d seen at the club?

“Not my scene,” he’d said, “but I have to say I can picture you in the role. Maybe it’s just that you’d look great in the costumes.”

Was it something she wanted to do? She hadn’t thought so, but knew there was something she needed to explore, some limits she had to test.

Once the museum in Lausanne had changed her life, she’d been too busy to find the envelope, let alone push it. The gallery took all her energy, and didn’t leave her the time to have a relationship in which to grow restless. There were a few men she saw, two of whom were ideal for her purposes. They were both married, they both lived out of town (one in Connecticut, one in a suburb of Detroit), and she’d met them at the gallery, where they’d bought pieces of art from her.

When the first one had hit on her, the Detroit guy, she’d been concerned about the propriety of sleeping with a client, but she decided she was being overly scrupulous. She wasn’t a shrink going to bed with a patient, or a studio boss nailing a starlet, or a matrimonial lawyer (like hers, for example, the shitheel) consoling an incipient divorcee. He’d fallen in love with Aleesha MacReady’s take on Susannah and the Elders, and she’d sold it to him with the mixture of elation and despair that came from getting a good price for a work she herself loved and would never see again. What was there about the transaction to prevent them from having dinner together? And, afterward, why shouldn’t she go back to his hotel room (the Pierre, a high floor, a view of the park, very nice) and fuck his brains out?

Her life worked, and the gallery was getting a good reputation, and even making a little money. Lately, though, she was feeling a vague restlessness. She couldn’t define it, didn’t know what it was, and found herself talking about it at lunch with an old school friend.

“Tick tock,” Audrey had said. “You need to have a baby.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your biological clock, Suze. You’re what, thirty-six?”

“Close enough.”

“What does that mean, thirty-seven? And don’t tell me about your lack of maternal impulses. Doesn’t matter. Tick fucking tock, and you’ve got the urge whether you know it or not.”