by Patricio
(11/27/02)
It's at an extravagant party -- one she sidles into on the arm of a man she doesn't really like -- where she meets the Butler for the second time. His green eyes hold hers.
She looks away. No, no, her gaze flickers for a moment and then she looks him over. He wears navy blue trousers and a surprisingly bright reddish-brown waistcoat over a white shirt. Dark bow-tie with a pattern of thin blue waves on it. A pale blue cummerbund at his waist. His black shoes are polished. A pair of shiny handcuffs hangs from his right-hand trouser pocket. He is scrutinizing invitations.
The first time she saw him he was in the same role, at some other party at some other swanky house, and she found she kept looking at him, but didn't speak. But this time she's feeling sexy in her black stockings and her little black dress. "And guest," she says to him, with a smile.
"Good evening, guest ma'am," he says, his face settling into a smile that his features are obviously accustomed to.
His voice is almost exaggeratedly English. She's surprised he isn't already looking over her shoulder, at his next obligatory object of politeness. His green eyes still stare into hers. "What are the handcuffs for?" she asks.
"They're for a woman who wants to be handcuffed by a Butler, of course."
And then the man she's with says something, and she wonders if she misheard, and she sways into the party...
The Butler, a tray of glasses of fizzy white wine finely balanced on his arm, is talking about poetry with an older woman. "John Ashbery," he is saying, "is somebody I've never honestly...."
And then the man she's with comes back from the bathroom saying something loud about stock options, and she is whirled back into the throng....
Later she's bored and finds the Butler in a small back room, a sort of pantry-cum-kitchen where he's stirring a bowl of red wine over a hob. The scent of cloves and cinnamon. She's about to speak when she realises there's another woman in the room, over by the window, watching her.
"Guest, ma'am?" says the Englishman, lightly.
She smiles. She doesn't even glance at the handcuffs. She offers him her glass, for refilling.
The man she was with has gone home and she's letting herself get drunk and a little sorry for herself. She speaks an obscenity to an entirely reasonable man who simply happens upon her at the wrong moment.
She finds the Butler resting in the one easy chair in the back room, looking surprisingly old, his grey hair untidy, his right cheek leaning on his arm. She smiles, and his smile returns. "I believe," she says, looking down at him with raised eyebrows, "I should like to try on those handcuffs, Butler."
He doesn't affect world-weariness, as she somehow expected: his revival is instantaneous. "How delightful. And then what would you like to happen, ma'am?"
Is he mocking her? Or is that just his English way? She tries to find a half-mocking drawl in return: "Oh, I should like the Butler to enact some dark dream of his own devising upon me, of course."
"Of course, ma'am."
He stands. He takes her face between his hands. He twists her, so that her back is to the wall. "Just wait here a moment, would you, ma'am?"
"Do call me --"
He cuts across her, in a sharper tone: "I shall call you as I wish."
She doesn't know what to do with her hands. She wants to take back what she said about the handcuffs, and yet she doesn't. He is at the door, turning a key in the lock. Returning, he smiles as he crouches, lifting each of her ankles in turn to remove her shoes. There's a low, carved wooden table where he had been resting his own glass of wine. He places the table beside her legs, against the wall, and offers his thin right hand to her left, helping her to stand on the table.
Looking slightly down at him, she feels like a, like, say -- say, a participant in some sort of religious ritual.
Only now does he take her right wrist, and snap the cuff on it swiftly. It's cold, tight. He lifts her hand up above her head. There's a hook, high up in the wall; he loops the junction of the cuffs over the hook, lifts her wrist above her head, cuffs her there.
He's removing the blue cummerbund from his waist.
"No, please...."
He pauses. "Ma'am? You don't want me to blindfold you?"
"Ahm. Yes. Please."
He knots the cummerbund behind her head. She turns her head, tries to see downwards; can't. "Sir," he says, "would be an appropriate word at this juncture."
"Sir."
"Ma'am," he says softly, caressing her neck and her face.
"Sir," she seems to want to repeat, "Butler, Sir, Butler, Sir...."
Her voice is a stranger's. His soft hands are lifting her dress and removing her underwear. She is trembling. She wants him to hold her, not speak peremptorily:
"You shan't be released until you orgasm twice, for the Butler. Don't let your weight go to your hands or you'll damage your wrists."
The world becomes hot. There's the shock of his hands supporting her stockinged thighs as he lifts her. She is half-sitting on his shoulders, helpless, half-hanging from the cuffs, blind. His teeth take hold of her clitoris, without biting. His fingers penetrate her vagina. She dissolves, with little further ado, into another being...
Later, some indefinable period of time after the wash of the first orgasm through her body, his tongue is performing pirouettes and swirls from vagina to clitoris, and his hands are slapping each of her buttocks in turn, and she's saying aloud, almost laughing, "Butler, Sir, Butler, Sir, Butler, Sir...."
Finally she achieves her second peak and he lifts her down, still cuffed and blindfolded, and places her in the easy chair. He's fiddling with the cummerbund. "Please, Sir. Not yet, Sir."
"I shall be missed, ma'am."
He places his own wine glass in her cuffed hands, drapes something over her legs, and goes. She hears him unlock the door, then re-lock it from the outside.
She goes back to the moment she first, tipsily spoke: "'I believe I should like to try on those handcuffs, Butler.'" She replays all the moments since, wanting to fix them deep, deep in her memory. She realises suddenly that her dream-recollection is already falsifying what's happened: dressing him in darkness and her in brightness. But really she's the one dressed in black: the figure of night. Isn't she?
"Taxi for ma'am."
He is smiling, playing a part. His cummerbund no longer on her face, but back around his waist. His handcuffs dangling again from his trousers. She can't seem to get up. He helps her, his right hand under her left arm. There are marks on her wrists. She looks up at him. His green eyes smile, smile. But is it more than the bland smile of the actor?
Oh: beyond acting, he kisses her left eye, then her right. And then he's guiding her out, and there are other people, and "Did you have a coat? A coat?"
There's no exchange of addresses, numbers, e-mail @'s. She's floating away in the back of a cab through a strange city that's nevertheless her own. The feel of the Butler upon her. An ache in her wrists and arms. And her buttocks. And between her legs.
And between her ears. Butler, Sir. Servant or Master? The downtown lights kaleidoscope her home. Somehow she fathoms the mystery of money, getting out of the cab, keys. She is coming round after anaesthetic. Is she?
Or returning to anaesthesia, after a few rare moments of being utterly alive?
