Intimate Quarters

Winged Beasts

Winged BeastsIt was the early nineties, the interregnum. The old had passed and the new was not yet born.

Nelson Mandela had been freed from prison. But the shackles of the former system were still in place. Despite this, one could say the dove cot had been opened. And the winged beasts of the heart were set free, dappling the autumn sky.

I was working for a parastatal on an ad hoc basis on a project called “The State of Prostitution in South Africa,” specifically the section “Prostitutes and Female Clients.” None of the field workers wanted this section because it was not in vogue to think such a thing was taking place.

And how the word “prostitution” would later strike me as ill-fitting for the care and imaginative planning that went into some of these adventures.

So, I volunteered for the shunned section. The best interviews were person to person. If you could track down the interviewees. With the shadowy parts of a repressed society suddenly being researched in haste to make up for lost time, there was always a little work for an aspiring writer like myself.

On the day of this interview, I found myself on the stone stairs leading up the terrace of a well-to-do colonial-style house in the capital. I was already behind the high perimeter walls with their large, square inlays of stones. And I looked around me from the height, taking in the view.

It was the kind of place you don’t see from the street. The private security guard had let me in.

* * * *

Beautiful bay windows in wooden frames complemented the house’s roughly hewn stone facade. The front door opened.

She was about thirty-five years old and recently married. No children, not yet. But time was running out, she confessed. We seated ourselves in an anteroom next to the larger living room. She belonged to the association, as she called it, for a year up to two years before our meeting. That was when her neurosurgeon future husband saved her from working in the document filing section of the State Library in the city center.

It was bound to happen, I thought, sizing her up, the salvation doctor husband thing. She was really attractive and those types would come knocking.

Sitting cross-legged in her knee-length two-piece on the settee, Martina cut a striking, lithe brunette. She sat slightly turned away from me and told her story with arms crossed, a guarded stance, while often glancing passed me through the windows with their curved bay sills. Maybe to mediate moments of slight embarrassment.

But I also noticed she spoke with a suppressed relish which became more noticeable as the conversation took flight. I thanked her several times for her willingness to talk.

“Oh, it is nothing. But no names, confidential, as you say?”

“Of course.”

* * * *

She was working late on the evening in question. At a desk surrounded by high shelves stuffed with overweight files. It was a sunken, partly underground part of the library. Only one window high up against the wall: at pavement level. Only library staff ever went in there. It was a “secret” room, one of many, and the lights would burn day and night.

Martina was the last person on her shift that night. She was cleaning up her desk to leave. She had all but forgotten about the association by then, she told me.

Yes, the one she joined in jest at a Tupperware party for a girl set to get married a couple of months before. She had pitched up as a friend of a friend of the future bride. The association called itself Dumb Waiter.

It was a fantasy s*x ring for women, based on the idea of making “girls’ fantasies come true, any fantasy,” according to the brochure. Was such a thing allowed? Martina mused at first. And are all fantasies allowed, even demeaning ones?

The night at the party everyone signed up except the bride to be, by virtue of a small debit order which she, Martina, was drunk enough to think was a party trick. She noticed only months later that a debit order was in fact running off her bank account.

Some of the partygoers were girls only recently let loose on the world. The people they knew best were their parents or brothers.

“Girls,” said the hostess to be betrothed, “membership will get you through the dark nights until you go where I am going now.”

The thing had indeed been no joke. There was the knock on the door, left slightly ajar by the last library assistant who had left. She would soon find herself accepting what was happening to her, like a fate. He walked in confidently and without a trace of hesitation. Announced himself and his association. She recalled, didn’t she? The fellow looked at her quizzically. He was dashing. He had to be. It was his job.

She did a double take. Yes. She remembered…And?

“Who are you?” She could not help blushing. Dumb Waiter was, after all, just girls’ talk? Well, he said, he is her fantasy guy.

“The one you ordered, Martina. I hope I am not a disappointment?” He said this with such bashful apprehension that her first thought was to put his mind at rest about his desirability. But she found herself off-guard and speechless.

He was rather strapping, not too much; she herself was not a very big or tall girl. A shock of black fringe fell sideways over the side of his slightly bony face. A face that did not seem to fit in with his rather thickset wrists and workerist hands.

“Anyway, it is too late,” he informed her, glancing at his watch. “My job is to make your wish come true, even if you’ve changed your mind. Which is what most of them do.” He flashed her a grin, all-knowing now, and shrugged his shoulders.

He spoke Afrikaans, at that time the main language of the capital, the language everybody shared in one way or another, the language of the former repression. The capital? It was a place passing over into a new something, a beast nobody could yet imagine.

She could feel herself becoming stern. She flicked a glance sideways. But there was nowhere to run.

“Something which she had ordered?”

Yes, he said.

And it was this, she now remembered: It had to happen swiftly and take her by complete surprise. The surprise part was essential, she recalled herself as having told her company that night so many months ago. Martina was already drunk when she wrote down her fantasy request, which she read out aloud to her party mates when her turn arrived.

He had to be handsome and not take no for an answer. And “it” had to be ravishing. There were giggles, laughs. It had to be over, completely, as in a disappearing trick, before she had time to think about it.

“Like my first orgasm, on the lawn, when I was eight years old and I rubbed my legs against each other out of boredom. It must come from nowhere.”

He, the order, walked closer to the side of her desk now. He had a piece of paper with her wish in her own handwriting written on it and he read it back to her. Then he stuffed the torn out slip back in his pocket. He was right next to her now. As if in a trance, she got up out of her chair to face him. He was only slightly taller than her. And much stockier than his face suggested.

She was not normally inclined to instant arousal, but this was different. Being taken by the surprise recollection of her fantasy propelled her into a state of excitement she could hardly contain.

He took something else from the pocket of his cotton jacket, which he wore over an open-neck shirt. Flashed it. A condom in its wrapping. Meant to reassure her. Then he deftly unbuttoned the frontal buttons of her gossamer-light mixed-fiber one-piece working dress, and pulled it up off over her head in one seamless go, her lifted arms conceding. It was a close-fitting but stretchy garment and deserted her like a breath, falling soundlessly somewhere behind him.

It felt to her as if she were watching a shadow dance with other people in it. The bra went flying over her head and a clasp of cold air hugged her. And her panty left her skin as surgically as gauze. He swept it down over her legs and knees. Unceremoniously he then knelt at her feet, like a valet, to lift her feet one after the other to free the slip of clothing, after he slipped off her shoes.

She felt flat-footed, she could hear her soles make pat sounds like dough on the cold cement.

She was super-aware of her breasts because they were smallish. Her n*****s were erect and straining slightly and she was hiding her crotch by crossing her legs.

“He then lifted me by the crook of my knees and put me down with a thump, naked butt first on the desk, just as he dropped his loose-fitting summer longs,” she recalled.

I asked: “You didn’t feel…invaded?” The field workers had to ask about emotional reactions.

“Yes and no.”

Then he pulled her by her buttocks up close to the ridge of the desk. She flipped open. Where he was standing, he was framed by the V of her thighs. He looked like the head of a grasshopper, her snapped legs being its wings, from where she lifted her head lying on the desk, to look at him.

“Believe me,” she told me. “I am a karate expert. I am not the kind that gets put down for nothing by a man. But I found myself part of the game somehow.”

His face and upper body came closer through the V, as he leaned forward. Her calves dangled in the air. He looked at her unblinkingly. And she lay back and closed her eyes.

* * * *

Then he was gone. An inexplicable time lapse followed. Nothing of him remained. Except an au de cologne whiff. She was spent and her sweaty hair was pasted against her neck. No name, no details, only his shadow, also gone. She pressed herself up on her elbows, catching her breath, which sounded like a sob to her.

Maybe she just dreamt it? But, no. There were her clothes on the floor. She inquired from the other party guests. They had their own revelations. Like the one who ordered a woman on the night of the party to up the impossibility stakes. And then was brought a woman, in a sedan chair borrowed from the museum, carried by six men. And questions. Was it…nice? Yes! Embarrassing, but…yes!

Who was he? She had to know. Nobody knew. It was one of the rules. She as well as the others had paid for that. Fifty rand a month.

She checked her bank statements. She had indeed been paying. For something like a dream, for the sake of a dream, for something she thought would never happen. Or might. And then it did.

Not again. Unfortunately. It was never repeated. Though the debit orders still went off for a whole year.