Suzanne had balked again when treated as a submissive, and had been discharged. Her probationer's fee was not returned to her, and the note made on her Guild file that she was considered unsuitable for Geisha training effectively put paid to her career as a courtesan-adventuress. Another result of her dismissal was that I only got to witness the training of a Dominant when Nouri Saad joined us. His background was Iranian and Muslim, but it was his grandfather who had come to Canada as a young man - for political reasons. His father had been born in Montreal, which made Nouri third generation Canadian, and no more religious than I was.
He was no more religious, but he was a whole lot richer. His family had made its money pumping oil out of the ground, and his career plan was to travel around the world with a paid companion doing free-lance journalism and writing travel books. He hoped to make money at this - at least enough to break even and not depend too much on the family fortune. But this would be a serious hobby for him, much more than a job.
On his travels, he planned to take along a paid assistant and companion who would be a friend and sex-partner more than an employee. In preparation for this career, he'd decided it would be wise to train as a Dominant, partly for the fun of it, because his tastes ran that way anyhow, but also because he realized that this companion would be his lifestyle submissive whether or not she was labelled as such - even if he married her and called her his wife. He'd already had enough experience with bedroom BDSM to realize that travelling with a sub would be a different proposition. For openers, this sub would be dependent on him, and would have to trust her boss to provide for her needs and not get her into dangerous situations (at least, not without her knowledge and consent).
Also, this sub would not be idle. As well as a playmate, she would be his secretary, proofreader, editor and critic. She would take notes; she would do background research. And, even as his submissive, she would have to be a friend. Whatever they did, they would experience together; and Nouri would learn most on his travels, and get the most pleasure from them, if they could share their experiences in conversation.
Finally, he and this companion would have no respite from each other. Stuck together day-in and day-out, it was only to be expected that they would get on each other's nerves sometimes.
For all these reasons, selecting this companion would not be like hiring an employee - more like proposing to a girlfriend and getting married. You'd want to get it right the first time, or at least, the second, because there would be substantial cost in changing partners. You could write a probation period into the contract, but this would be meaningless unless that period were substantial: at least three months, and six would be better. The relationship would involve significant commitment, and that commitment. would run both ways. Anyone worth hiring for the job would be choosing you, as much or more than you were choosing her. For all these reasons, Nouri's decision to train as a Dom made perfect sense.
Lotte's reasons for accepting him as a pupil were less straightforward. At one point she told us that it would be nice to get her training fee up front instead bit by bit over a lifetime. But that would not have been her main reason. Partly, I think she just liked the guy, but I think the real point was that meeting Nouri, learning about his plans and helping Lotte and Mitch to train him would be a useful lesson for her submissive apprentices like Chantal and Mika and me. Apart from working in a dungeon or being arm candy, companionship of this kind was a good career option for professional submissives, and one that Lotte wanted to encourage. She sometimes joked that marriages would last longer if the training she gave were compulsory for a marriage license.
Since Nouri did not intend to practice as a geisho, it had been agreed that he could dispense with Guild School, with most of the submission training and with an internship at the end. Instead, Lotte would treat him as a special client, design a program for him and, at the end, provide him with a certificate of competence that he could show to any prospective companion, identifying the training he had received and passed. When he arrived, she put him through the same test that my mother had given me, then sat down with him and worked out his program. It would include:
• selected readings on leadership, management and planning and BDSM customs and practices;
• working with Mitch to assist in training her current apprentices (Mika, Chantal and me), and assist in running the school;
• assisting Mistress Lotte in her dungeon, where his technical skills as a Dominant would be tested and refined;
• special courses in survival, first aid, and martial arts at Guild facilities downtown;
• development of formation and maintenance plans for Chantal, Mika and me, individually, as trial companions on a trip;
• at the end, short trips with each submissive, to simulate and gain experience of the life that he had planned.
Because the lifestyle Dom is first of all a leader, the crux of Nouri's training would be in the theory and practice of leadership. To design a program for Nouri, but also to mentor lifestyle couples, Lotte and my mother needed to brush up on existing lore about the training of potential leaders, and extend this for lifestyle Dominants. They had to think through why people often prefer to obey and follow instead of thinking or deciding for themselves. One reason, of course, is that people in leadership positions usually have carrots and sticks at their disposal, which they can use to motivate others. They can dispense rewards (perhaps merely symbolic), or make credible threats (perhaps unspoken). But apart from such tools - and even without them sometimes - great leaders gain followers by convincing them that some surrender of independent volition is in their own self-interest.
Often, there will be a goal that cannot be achieved without collective action. The leader must then convince others that only he or she can mobilize (and organize) the required collaboration. But most people will often seek relief from the burden and responsibility of making certain decisions for ourselves. "That's above my pay grade," we say. And for still others, submissive behaviour will stem from the pleasure of giving pleasure, from the satisfaction of feeling loved or appreciated by someone else.
A great leader (Mom and Lotte agreed) must keep his followers thinking that he will satisfy their motivations, and must contrive that they his authority without resentment. He must win and keep their trust by seeming to understand and deal with their joint situation better than they could. He must appear consistent, clear and just in his decisions. And he must face and must handle the perennial dilemma between kinship with his followers and superiority above them. For his own sake, to avoid becoming the dupe and victim of his own ambition, he must understand that the power his followers concede to him is always earned and paid for.
To train Nouri in leadership, Lotte first taught him about the 'sting of command' (as Canetti called it) by having him take orders from Mitch and herself. Then she had him design training and maintenance routines for hypothetical subordinates - including one that he would want on his future travels - and having him explain and justify these routines to the two of them. Finally, when Chantal was ready for it, they assigned her him as a subordinate (much as they'd given me to Lisa), and had him work her and use her as they might use the sub he wanted. Within her limits of course. They had him keep a log of their doings together, and they reviewed this with him. Then, with some difficulty, they got Chantal to confront him with her feelings and a few complaints. In these ways they tries to prepare him for the role he intended to play and for the life he hoped to lead.
Involved as I was in my own training under Mitch and Lisa, and in assisting with that of Mika and Chantal, I saw little of Nouri while he was with us, except at dinner when we all sat down together. I had scarcely any role in his training. The one exception was a week I spent with him touring the Maritime Provinces of Eastern Canada - with me as Nouri's make-believe companion, and Nouri picking up the tab. By arrangement, Nouri made similar tours with each of us. With Chantal, he flew to Vancouver for a brief anthropological tour of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific coast. With Mika, he took the train to Winnipeg for a brief study of the troubled history of Manitoba, a central province of Canada, torn between English, French and central European settlers, along with the indigenous tribes and the Métis of mixed blood. In each case, the idea was to simulate, as best we could, his global travels in the future. Each of us took a week with him at his expense to collect information on one area. Back at home each of us wrote a report to Lotte on Nouri's faults and weaknesses as a Dom, and then participated with her on giving feedback to him. In this way, he got a preview of his intended future, with lived experience as the Dom of a submissive travelling companion who would review and comment on his performance, after the fact.
Because I was senior to Mika and Chantal, I was Nouri's partner on the first of these week-long jaunts. It went well on the whole, as we travelled well together and did some good amateur research on the history of European settlement in these parts - from the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows around the year 1000 in Newfoundland, to the battle sites of the Acadian civil war, to the battle for Quebec City in 1759 which limited French access to the whole interior of North America (via the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River) after the British took the city. Nouri had me gathering materials and references and taking notes, as if he'd been set to write a tourist guide for the the Maritime region. I loved the work and learned a lot about early Canada.
