Chapter 10
Henry and I were together for two and a half years, from the night I sat on his hand until the summer following our college graduation.
I don’t remember at what point we conceived our perverse layaway plan, but I’m sure I could narrow the time frame by digging through my archived Facebook albums and finding the first appearance of the silver heart necklace from Tiffany.
I had started using Henry’s laptop for all my writing assignments.
It was not a decade-old Dell and therefore compatible with the Final Draft screenwriting software I’d purchased in a vain attempt to impress Jonathan Granger.
And on Henry’s laptop I developed a bad habit that continues to plague me to this day, which entails losing long hours to finding the perfect free porn clip when I do not know where to go next with the story I am trying to write.
The name of the site I like to visit has changed over the years, but it’s essentially a massive search engine for all kinds of porn and every porn-hosting site.
I cannot recall how I stumbled upon it, but I imagine it was by typing something like girls getting spanked, because that’s what I thought I was into.
And I am, but in a very particular way, and some of what I found led me to other things I realized I might like too.
Over time, Henry started doing to me the things the men were doing to the women on his computer screen.
I realized he was going into his history after I returned his laptop and watching what I had watched, and this was how he knew that I liked to be folded over his lap and that while his hand was fine, his belt was better, and also that he was not just allowed to hit me anywhere, but encouraged.
Then one day I stumbled onto this series between a husband and wife that documented her pursuit of a designer handbag.
He would have her clean the kitchen floors on her hands and knees using a toothbrush and not wearing underwear.
He’d fuck her in church clothes before they went to mass on Sunday so that he knew she was leaking next to him while she recited the words to Our Father.
And then, for the grand finale, he bought her the bag and had her unwrap it with his cock in her ass. Pure cinema, I tell you.
I showed Henry one clip and he grabbed me by my ponytail, bent me over, and took me from behind.
We watched the rest as our bodies slid and slapped together and our throats made strange, nearly soundless sounds.
After, we lay in bed and devised the rules to our game.
Henry would buy me anything I wanted but not that hideous bag.
Why was it hideous? I wanted to know. I listened, propped up on one elbow, while he outlined the contours of his fascinating and foreign world.
There were appropriate things to spend money on, respectable even.
Travel, leisure, and real estate. Clothes should be worn to death and food unfussy—full of chemicals designed to keep you thin, I’d soon discover while rifling through his parents’ cabinets for a midnight snack.
Jewelry appreciated, so that was fine too, but it should be kept relatively simple.
Designer purses, even the unassuming ones but especially the ones with the labels smeared all over like dog feces, signaled the carrier was of the lowest form of human intelligence.
Though I had always admired those bags from afar, none of this I took personally.
I was intrigued by the way other people thought, the way they behaved, their beliefs and their prejudices.
I have always been more curious than contemptuous, and later, when I was approached about acting, when I said, But I don’t know how to act, I was told that it was my curiosity about the human condition that mattered more than technique.
A couple of girls on campus had those Tiffany heart necklaces, and they were pretty and inexpensive compared to the pearls Corrine wore and even that so-called hideous bag, which somehow retailed for over two thousand dollars at the time.
It was less about the price of the object and more about the financial imbalance between Henry and me, anyway.
In how many ways can I say I was a scholarship kid while Henry knew how to sail, shuck oysters, to not wear your sunglasses on your head because it would weaken the hinges and, just as important, never place them face down on the table, because that’s how the lenses end up scratched.
Henry had nice things and he knew how to take care of them, and I liked the idea of being another one of his nice things.
I wanted to be objectified and infantilized.
This was the crux of what I was into, I realized with Henry.
And Henry was excellent at coming up with ways to manufacture my helplessness.
He bought me that Tiffany necklace, but I never got the chance to wear it.
He showed it to me, in the little blue bag and everything, and I was supposed to earn it outright before we broke up.
I might think he brought me here to collect if I had not heard what he said right before he locked the door behind him.
I’m trying to save your stupid fucking life.