Virtual Slavery Ch 11

11

Brad, Lynn, Winston

Brad

It was getting to be too much, I thought as I stared down at the lights of some city in the Midwest, blinking up from the flat darkness on the flight back to Los Angeles. Although I fly often enough to have considered buying my own jet, I have decided against doing so. Buying two adjacent first class seats gives me ample room and privacy and I don't like airplanes enough to want to own one. I am, in fact, austere and monkish. Well a sensuous monk, if that is not too great a contradiction, which does have ample historical precedent. My body has long separated me from other people and I have come to need some isolation and silence. I possess different monkish qualities than that of merely disdaining excessive possessions, though I really own very little for a man of my wealth. Accumulation of things does not interest me; accumulation of experience does. That is what Lynn had started out being: a new experience: the corruption and perversion and absolute domination of a woman superior to any other I had possessed, with the additional pleasure that she was another man's wife. Yet now I was thinking of her too much, which perhaps what was caused me to do to her what I did next. These last three days, having her repeatedly and meekly bare her ass for me, knowing she would receive nothing in return, no caresses, no pleasure, no orgasm, knowing that she would only be used, had been extremely erotic and satisfying. Which is something for someone who has managed to have the experiences I have had. What has happened, I thought, to the misogynistic Bradley Rankin aphorisms: A woman is three holes surrounded by fat. Or: Sex is friction with window dressing.

I used the inflight telephone to tell Jefferson not to bring Brandi to the airport as I had previously requested. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. Of Lynn.

Lynn

It was all getting to be too much, I thought, as I stared at the endless taillights and headlights creeping along the Longfellow Bridge over the Charles River on my way home. An appropriate image for life, the blind flow, headlights leaving the bridge as others enter.

It is interfering with my work; it is dominating my life; it is obliterating my marriage. I have never been so aware of my body. Every nerve end is agitated. My skin is hypersensitive. I want to scream at the slightest brush of my clothes against it.

For three days. For forever it seems. He has done nothing but humiliatingly stick his cock up my ass. He has reduced me to a piece of meat. And I can't stop thinking about him, about his fat cock, about sex. it is like some grotesque variant of Beauty and the Beast. I find myself actually feeling sympathy for him. I find myself needing him. If I am honest with myself I will admit I find myself wanting him. And what he does to me. What he makes me do. He exudes power. Mastery. Images of that clinical torture chamber inside the vault keep appearing on the fringes of my mind and fleeting questions about what he would do to me there. No. It isn't 'would.' It is 'will.' If I am honest with myself I will admit that something inside me reacts to the certainly of that 'will.' Is that what I want? What has he revealed in me that I never knew was there? I must regain control of myself. Or do I really what to?

Winston

It is too much, I thought, as the oar blades fractured the smooth surface of the Charles into a million points of light. Or, much, much more accurately, too little. All she does is work and sleep. I didn't think it could get worse, but it has. I can't imagine it will get any worse, but somehow I expect it will. This is not a marriage. At least not my idea of a marriage, though I suppose it is how most people live.

Pulling hard on the oars, I vented my frustration and anger as I drove the shell up the river, in a futile effort to exhaust myself.

She has no interest in sex at all anymore. Then: Maybe she is having an affair. I rejected the thought. The only affair she is having, I decided, is with Broadthroup and Brown and her precious career.

So maybe I should have an affair. But the truth is I didn't want to. Julie and I had sex with lots of other people during our marriage, but openly and usually together. I have never wanted to have to lie and sneak. I didn't want an affair. I wanted Lynn. I wanted the woman I married. Who had somehow disappeared. A nearly universal lament, I supposed. My life had become a cliché.