Sunday, December 17, 2006

Wax

My high lasted all afternoon.

As I wandered camp—smiling at the naked lesbians, nodding at the school girls, waving to the copulating couples—I would absentmindedly finger the string around my neck and remember how it felt when Lolita had me dangling in midair, my cock sailing in and out of her laughing mouth.

“Where did you get the gay necklace?” Marcus asked.

“Girl give it to me,” I gushed.

“You’ve got a crush,” my boyfriend teased.

“So what if I do, li'l bit?” I said.

By this time, Marcus had gone native. He no longer wore clothes, just a Speedo and his crutches.

I would never wear a Speedo. I think they look ridiculous on most men. But Speedos were designed for men like Marcus. His long, lean body carried off the swimsuit with considerable panache—not to mention the swimsuit’s accentuation of the considerable panache within.

“I’m going to finally see Lolita teach this afternoon,” I said. “You want to join me?”

“No, thanks,” he said. “Actually, I’m kinda bumming about my leg. Are you guys still leaving tonight? Maybe I’ll go home too.”

“We’re leaving after the awards presentation,” I said. “Are you hurting?”

“Nah, I’m just bummed. Don’t worry. Go have fun at class.”

“Okay, sugar.” I kissed him. “Send for me if you need me. Okay?”

“Thanks.” Marcus turned and began to head to the pool, slumping slightly in his crutches.

I watched him go, then turned to head back to the dungeon.

Lolita was going to teach us how to set people on fire.

I fingered my string, humming the Kinks. El oh el ay, Lo-oh-laa.

Viviane and I sat in the front row. Selina sat behind us with Neil, a handsome fellow she had met the night before at the Garden. He had be impressed by her treatment of Windsorina. She had been impressed by his huge cock as he fucked another woman or two.

That, and a conversation about Marc Bolan, was about all the aphrodisiac Selina required.

Lolita had set up her class in a dark corner of the dungeon. A long table was covered with plastic sheeting and absorbent pads. Lolita was busy at another table covered with her materials, all neatly arrayed for easy access.

“God, I’m schvitzing,” she said turning the class. She began to lift her shirt. “It’s really hot, so I think I’ll make this class ‘clothing optional,’ if no one minds.”

“Lolita, the whole camp is clothing optional,” said the naked woman to my right.

“Right, well, today the instructor is naked too,” Lolita said, unfastening her bra. As it fell forward on her arms, I could see that my bite on her breast was bruising nicely.

Viviane nudged me. “Take off your shirt, sweetie.”

“Yes, let’s,” I replied.

A moment later, Viviane and I were topless. She circulated the air around us with her omnipresent fan.

The pink string remained on my neck.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Lolita muttered, collecting her thoughts. “Okay! We’re ready. Hello, everyone, I’m Lolita Wolf . . .”

“Hello, Lolita,” someone called.

“Hello,” she curtsied. “I’m teaching this class on fire and wax play. Of course, I need someone to play with, and so I’ve got permission to play with Tatsumi.” She indicated a pretty woman wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Tatsumi smiled and said hello in a bubbly voice.

“She’s cute,” Viviane whispered.

“Yeah, adorable,” I nodded.

“Tatsumi’s daddy is a real sadist, just the meanest ever,” Lolita went on. “So I know she can take whatever I dish out.”

Tatsumi smiled and nodded enthusiastically. We laughed.

“So, why don’t we begin with fire?” Lolita said. “Tatsumi, you should undress and get up here on the table, face up.”

“Okay, sure,” Tatsumi said. She pulled off her shirt and lowered her shorts. When she was nude, she pulled back her long hair and then put out her arms as if to say “ta da!”

The adorable girl was gone.

In her place was a work of art.

Tatsumi has been in BDSM for most of her young life. By trade, she’s a fetish model and professional dominatrix. By nature, she is endowed with the type of perfectly proportioned body that would have kept her very much in demand in art academies once upon a time.

Gerome would have drooled.



Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Slave Market, 1866.


“Did you just get hard, Jefferson?” Viviane whispered.

“Quiet,” I answered. “I’m trying to stare.”

“She’s so . . .”

“I know.”

My brain scanned sensory memories to imagine the feel of her skin, even as my mind was casting her in bronze.

Oh, to fuck her in her simple beauty.

Or to have merely replicated that beauty in a fountain a century ago . . . I would have repeated her body three times as dancing fauns in diaphanous clinging drapes, frolicking in a pond as sprinkles rained from enthusiastic spouts . . . the results would have made her an instant celebrity . . . she might have toured vaudeville as the famed “fountain dancer” as I made the Grand Tour to collect my Prix de Rome . . . we would have been universally celebrated, meeting now and then in Paris or St Louis or the Ritz-Carlton to make love and toast champagne glasses to our eternal connection realized as the century’s most touted public art . . . until we were each knocked from our pedestals, she by the advent of sound in moving pictures, me by the intrusion of modernism in art . . .

“Hey, pay attention,” Viviane nudged.

“Oh, sorry,” I said, sitting up.

Tatsumi turned her back to the table, rested her hands on its edges, and pulled herself up. She sat, then turned to recline.

“Like this?” she asked Lolita.

Precisely like that, I thought.

“Yeah, that’s great,” Lolita smiled. “Hmmm, you are scrumptious.” Lolita rubbed her hands on Tatsumi’s torso, acquainting her assistant with her touch.

Those hands that had so prepared me just a few hours earlier.

Lolita talked us through fire play as she torched Tatsumi. It was a great effect, but as she broke down the steps, it looked simple enough. I had been torched for the first time the night before. It was an exhilarating experience. I thought this would be a grand skill to add to my bag of tricks.

I came to the class to see Lolita work. I knew nothing about fire play, so I assumed that the fire lesson would be the main attraction.

I hadn’t figured on Tatsumi’s beauty, so I couldn’t have imagined the effect she would have on my connoisseurship.

“Now we’re going to play with wax,” Lolita said. “I make my own wax, and my own candles, so that gives me some flexibility about sensation—for you, Tatsumi—and also about how it looks.”

Lolita talked as she rubbed Tatsumi’s body in baby oil, explaining that this would help to remove the wax later. She also pointed out that it was a sensuous experience in its own right.

A century before, I had used olive oil on Tatsumi. Just like this day, she had shimmered in candlelight, undulating to my touch just as she now moved to Lolita’s hands.

Lolita told us to avoid tapers. Wide candles produce more wax, allowing more to use as it allowed more control in dropping it on flesh.

The first splashes hit Tatsumi’s body. She writhed and laughed.

Lolita raised and lowered the candle over Tatsumi, alternating the heat of wax as it impacted on flesh. At least, that was the emphasis of Lolita’s lesson.

I could see that she was also alternating splatter patterns.

Lolita traded one candle for another. She talked as wax splashed.

Tatsumi writhed, trying so hard to be still and yet so clearly enjoying the sensation as wax fired her skin, then quickly cooled as it dripped to dead ends on her body.

Lolita explained about having used a double broiler to heat wax before she decided a fondue simply worked better. She pulled a glass of wax from a pot and reached for a small ladle.

Green wax streaked across Tatsumi. She yowled.

Lolita spoke to Tatsumi as she returned the green wax to the fondue and reached for a vial of blue.

Lolita never lost her train of thought, never veered from her lesson, as once more, she splashed Tatsumi.

Blue went to red. Red to yellow.

I watched as the ideal artist’s model gave herself over to an ideal artist. I watched as the woman who had hoisted me into elation took another person into her genius.

I was aroused by the image of Lolita as an artist.

Was I the only person in the room conjuring Jackson Pollock as Lolita buried a canvas of flesh under loops and skeins of color?

Given the shimmering sight of Tatsumi’s beauty, I was given to minor inspirations. I could fuck her, or I could turn her into an obsolete fountain in a minor park.

I would have wasted a stellar muse.

Lolita’s imagination was not so restricted. Her skills put her into another realm entirely.

Ladles of wax piled one on to another.

Tatsumi grew still.

Her body was sweating. We were all glistening in the summer heat, but she was the person on stage, enduring the impact of dripping wax.

The wax caked and pulled from her oiled and glistening body.

Lolita took up a smaller candle. She put flame to the bottom, loosening wax. She planted it on Tatsumi’s chest.

She lit the candle. An open flame burned over Tatsumi’s wax-covered body.

She repeated this again and again with other small candles, lighting each in turn.

Tatsumi soon resembled a birthday cake that might have graced Stanford White’s table. Lolita’s bare skin glowed above as she dripped more icing on her creation.

“Okay, well, I think that’s that,” Lolita said, dropping her ladle into a glass. “I mean, I’m just dripping wax on wax at this point. She can’t feel it. Come on up if you want to look closer.”

We stood as a class and stood to examine Lolita’s work.

There was a close press, as might be expected. We had been invited to look at a pretty girl lying naked on a table.

The aesthete in me was politely perturbed. I felt the familiar impatience of attending a museum blockbuster. Yes, yes, it was genius at work. Yes, yes, adoring philistines, push in and then get to the gift shop.

The experienced aesthete in me was smart. I took a position to appreciate the colors that had caked on the canvas’s belly, and those that had overlapped on her sides, braiding in her crevices.

Tatsumi was buried under layers of wax and numb nerve endings. She was quiet, her writhing now quiet.

Her mind and cunt were entirely enclosed.

I looked to Lolita. She smiled. I didn’t want to distract her from her lesson, so I melted into the crowd as best I could. I was just another admirer. She had done great work.

Our “scene” that morning had been ours, an experience between two participants. Despite the witnesses and flashes, it was private.

But even this public lesson had sent Tatsumi into bliss.

Lolita saw me fingering the collar on my neck. She grinned. I smiled back.

Lolita pulled out a long blade. It was a dull edge, she explained, before she began to whittle away at the colors layered on Tatsumi.

“It’s all about the mind fuck,” she teased, brandishing her weapon against Tatsumi’s torso. Layers of wax piled at Tatsumi’s feet as Lolita sculpted her model back into reality.

When it was over, I commended Tatsumi on a job well done. She told me she liked my blog, saying she had been moved by my post on Allan, Sketchpad.

We talked about art.

I was polite, if a bit reserved.

There are times when the appreciation of art can leave you feeling acquisitive. You can’t bear the thought of walking away to leave a splendid canvas on a bare white wall. You want to bring it home and just stare at it forever.

I had just been witness to Tatsumi’s transformation into an object of transcendent beauty, shimmering in ecstasy under layers of color and light.

As we spoke, each so nice and smart, some part of me wanted to whisper an invitation to walk with me nude into the woods, to shut out the busy noise of the world for a while, to make love and kiss and talk as we had a century before, before modernity took away the elementary magic we possessed.

But of course, one doesn’t say such things.

I shook her hand and thanked her for her kind words about my writing.

I wondered if I would ever see her again. I knew that, in my mind’s eye, I would always see her, floating as a glowing canvas. No matter how transient the art, I would keep the memory.

I delighted that the artist had taken a shine to me.

Visit Jefferson’s holiday wish list at Amazon, brought to you by candlelight.

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7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Aside from the fact that I think that would have been a really cool class to be at...you have no idea how your posting a Gerome painting might help me on Thursday at my final. Thanks! lol

Viviane said...

That's the perfect painting to compare the odalique Tatsumi to. Her Daddy would be proud.

Madeline Glass said...

Man, I was just thinking about this story yesterday. I was thinking how awesome it would be if Lolita would be open to, you know, light me up on the 8th night of Chanukah.

Damn.

Anonymous said...

You are good to help others with their schoolwork, Daddy.

Meg said...

oh right, that reminds me...

i've been meaning to write lolita a thank you card.

(you know, for a certain wax-filled evening in late september.)

Anonymous said...

Wow ... Thanks, Jefferson! You have no idea how much you've made my day.

Lolita said...

Oh, yes, Jackson Pollock was a definite influence on my art. It is about reacting to the art that is there and adding media to it, a sort of process of disappearance as you will have it.