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Authors: Daniel Bergner
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the Baroness so she can devote more time to her fashion business and make more money and be happier, because she took her valuable time to train me to be the best slave she can ever have. To learn how to take the Baroness 16 bullwhips and never complain or cry.”
ON a worktable one evening, a man lay on his back in a red latex bodysuit and a black hood whose only openings were a pair of grommets at the nostrils. Blue ropes, run through large metal eyes at the rim of the table, held him down while a small black machine sent an electrical charge to a conductive ring around the shaft of his penis. The Baroness set the machine to respond to voices, told the man to tell me about himself, and closed the French doors on that section of the basement. Whenever the man or I spoke, the current surged, and when he groaned or screamed in pain, the voltage went even higher. She had made me complicit in his torture.
He had retired from Wall Street a few years ago, in his mid-forties. He’d wanted to spend more time with his children, who were in their teens, and now he helped them with their homework and watched Fred Astaire movies with his daughter. His wife, a homemaker who had once had a practice as a psychologist, inflicted pain in their bedroom, but not with the same spirit as the Baroness. His feet quivered, then flapped as the voltage soared.
“It’s about surrendering your ego,” he said, sounding as though he must be gritting his teeth behind the hood. “The first time, after forty-five minutes, I was in another world. It was like onion skins were being peeled off my psyche.” He talked about studying Plato, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard in his retirement. His feet shook so hard it seemed his Achilles tendons might rupture. The Baroness would hold him captive this way for at least twenty-four hours, maybe thirty-six. When the boutique and the workshop closed, she would switch the electrical machine from voice-activated to random, and leave him bound and alone for the night. I wondered about going to the bathroom.
“You either don’t or you make a mess or she applies a Texas catheter. This would be up to the Baroness to decide.”
She told one of her acolytes to start shutting things down. It was around nine o’clock. No one would return until noon. I asked about his childhood.
“I was never raped by homosexual dwarves,” he mocked my question. “Is this a weird way to deal with life? Consider the man who bought Mark McGwire’s seventieth home-run ball for three million dollars. Who’s weirder?”
GENEVIEVE she’d met at a fashion show. One of the Baroness’s models hadn’t shown up, and Genevieve had taken her place at the last minute. The Baroness sensed something about her, and soon they were out on a date at a mainstream movie theater, where the Baroness taped Genevieve’s wrists to the armrests, taped her feet together, taped her mouth. It was the beginning of one of the great loves of her life, coexisting with her love for her husband. Genevieve couldn’t serve the Baroness in her boutique or in her workshop, not productively, because they could never resist the temptation to “play.” The transcendence that came with inflicting pain depended on a depth of connection—physical, emotional, spiritual—with the one she was hurting. The Baroness had plenty of quick encounters that gave shallow pleasure, and she had an array of regular submissives who might give her slightly more. She and Genevieve had been created for each other; there was a feeling of destiny between them; and now, several years after Genevieve had left New York and gone home to Canada to resume college, the longing that came with remembering left an emptiness in every artery, every vein. Thinking back, the Baroness shut her eyes against the loss, as though her eyelids could keep the void at bay. She could scarcely say what had lain beneath the attachment, only that it had been grounded in something more than the
ON a worktable one evening, a man lay on his back in a red latex bodysuit and a black hood whose only openings were a pair of grommets at the nostrils. Blue ropes, run through large metal eyes at the rim of the table, held him down while a small black machine sent an electrical charge to a conductive ring around the shaft of his penis. The Baroness set the machine to respond to voices, told the man to tell me about himself, and closed the French doors on that section of the basement. Whenever the man or I spoke, the current surged, and when he groaned or screamed in pain, the voltage went even higher. She had made me complicit in his torture.
He had retired from Wall Street a few years ago, in his mid-forties. He’d wanted to spend more time with his children, who were in their teens, and now he helped them with their homework and watched Fred Astaire movies with his daughter. His wife, a homemaker who had once had a practice as a psychologist, inflicted pain in their bedroom, but not with the same spirit as the Baroness. His feet quivered, then flapped as the voltage soared.
“It’s about surrendering your ego,” he said, sounding as though he must be gritting his teeth behind the hood. “The first time, after forty-five minutes, I was in another world. It was like onion skins were being peeled off my psyche.” He talked about studying Plato, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard in his retirement. His feet shook so hard it seemed his Achilles tendons might rupture. The Baroness would hold him captive this way for at least twenty-four hours, maybe thirty-six. When the boutique and the workshop closed, she would switch the electrical machine from voice-activated to random, and leave him bound and alone for the night. I wondered about going to the bathroom.
“You either don’t or you make a mess or she applies a Texas catheter. This would be up to the Baroness to decide.”
She told one of her acolytes to start shutting things down. It was around nine o’clock. No one would return until noon. I asked about his childhood.
“I was never raped by homosexual dwarves,” he mocked my question. “Is this a weird way to deal with life? Consider the man who bought Mark McGwire’s seventieth home-run ball for three million dollars. Who’s weirder?”
GENEVIEVE she’d met at a fashion show. One of the Baroness’s models hadn’t shown up, and Genevieve had taken her place at the last minute. The Baroness sensed something about her, and soon they were out on a date at a mainstream movie theater, where the Baroness taped Genevieve’s wrists to the armrests, taped her feet together, taped her mouth. It was the beginning of one of the great loves of her life, coexisting with her love for her husband. Genevieve couldn’t serve the Baroness in her boutique or in her workshop, not productively, because they could never resist the temptation to “play.” The transcendence that came with inflicting pain depended on a depth of connection—physical, emotional, spiritual—with the one she was hurting. The Baroness had plenty of quick encounters that gave shallow pleasure, and she had an array of regular submissives who might give her slightly more. She and Genevieve had been created for each other; there was a feeling of destiny between them; and now, several years after Genevieve had left New York and gone home to Canada to resume college, the longing that came with remembering left an emptiness in every artery, every vein. Thinking back, the Baroness shut her eyes against the loss, as though her eyelids could keep the void at bay. She could scarcely say what had lain beneath the attachment, only that it had been grounded in something more than the
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