Page 53 of Fire Under Glass
“Sir,” her sweet voice intruded into the conversation, but not so Karl took any offence. He had his hand on her head, deferentially, while he gazed down. “Should I get dinner for you and your friends?”
“Yes, and take Gail with you.”
Ah! He did remember me!
Susan turned to me, and smiling, motioned me to follow.
Normalcy seemed to return to my baffled consciousness once the two of us hit the kitchen. We chatted easily as women who’d just been introduced. She wanted to know everything about the Renaissance Faire, which was an easy subject to talk about. Even when the topic turned to the “rites of submission” as she called them, I had no problem detailing some of the scenes I’d seen and even endured. She flushed with excitement hearing my tales, just as I did telling them.
“And you’re new to these rites?” she wondered.
“In a way. I had a dominant lover… a husband when I was in graduate school, almost ten years ago.”
“Did you?” She stopped chopping onions and looked me in the eye while dwelling on this bit of information.
“And how did you come to leave him?”
“He wasn’t the right man—at least not forever.”
“You’d think if you could give your heart to a man that you’d never want to take it back.”
“I think the truth was, I never gave him my heart.”
“Then you played games,” she said, almost scowling.
“It was more than that. I needed his discipline, but where there’s no love, being subject to a man won’t last.”
“I’ve never known anything like that,” she turned thoughtful, staring out the window to her gardens. She still didn’t understand. Though Susan was several years older than I was, she appeared far more innocent. “So, you’re with KC now?” she revived at last.
“I think so.”
She smiled, and we talked more, working side by side, as though we’d known each other for some time. When we finished preparing a meal of beans, meat, rice and Mexican vegetables, she happily re-entered the great room, stood behind Karl with her hands resting on his shoulders, and when the conversation took a break, announced the meal.
I understood them because I understood Rossi and me, and I understood what happened at the Renaissance Faire. But seeing these two inside their unusual life—the firm demarcations between dominant master and submissive slave, her happy, servile attitude, his strict demands, and the way they seemed to fit as one—I was enthralled and scared. Were Rossi and I ever like this to those who saw us? Was this what KC wanted? Why were we here? And why had my body begun to pant with unquenched thirst? It seemed that the quiet sensuousness of my soul had been enough until we roared into this strange world.
Susan wore dresses, never pants—even to work in the gardens. I doubted she wore underwear, though I wouldn’t know that for sure for some days. She held a part-time job at a daycare center—which seemed to be compensation for their lack of children. At home, she was the perfect domestic. She cooked, cleaned and tended the garden. In her husband’s workshop, she worked alongside Karl—responsible for much of the delicate handwork tooled in wood and leather. I learned that they’d met in college sixteen years ago. He’d been in his twenties, teaching life drawing, she’d been his student. I was uneasy noting the parallel between Rossi and me. Though the parallel seemed to fall apart from this point. For the first few years of their marriage, they’d been unacquainted with the lifestyle they now practiced, until Karl stumbled on a diary written by a submissive woman to her lover. It had struck him so keenly that he shared it with Susan.
“She fell in love with the life,” I was told.
Since that time, the couple embraced their life in its extreme forms. She never was without her collar at home, and never without a permanent ankle bracelet—even in public.
They called their home The Refuge—which I would not completely understand right off, though I presumed it was the Joyce’s refuge from a real world that would certainly frown on their chosen life.
Our first several days in their home there was little show of extremes, other than Susan’s obvious obedience to her husband’s rule, and a set of routines permanently ingrained in her psyche. She deferred to him for all decisions—not as though she was mindless, but because she honored him for his guidance. Unlike my life with Rossi, there was not the disquietude in her manner—that constant wariness I remember clearly every day I lived with my professor. Susan was at peace, I never was.
When I was alone with KC that first night, I had to ask him why we’d come.
“He’s my friend.”
“But you haven’t seen him in years… why now?”
“We have business to conduct.”
“That could be done over the phone as easily.”
“No, more easily in person,” he countered while finally catching the drift of the conversation. “Besides, you said yourself, you needed more.”
I stopped right there.