With 11 pairs of loving eyes gazing at my every move, with 11 pairs of attentive ears anxiously awaiting my next pronouncement, I delivered lectures to Rebecca alone. The days separating my contact with Rebecca grew longer. Awaiting some gleam to appear in Rebecca's deep blue eyes or some quiver to shoot through her impenetrable calm, however, was futile. I had to settle for gazing at her stomach as she breathed, watching it crease in different ways as she adjusted her slouch.

As the end of the semester approached, Rebecca began to ask me questions about desire and its satisfaction, about pleasure and its thresholds, that made me delirious with curiosity. She was trying to get an answer without letting on the real question. After the final class, I hurried to read her paper first, hoping it would disclose what she had been getting at. It turns out that our quiet, reserved bridal attendant, our bad-ass, not-giving-you-the-time-of-day punk, was also part of the local S/M scene. Her paper, the thesis of which was something like "a good top is hard to find," showed no patience for the swooning lover, no tolerance for the passive admirer. I knew then that the more my desire had been evident to her, the more she would have sneered at my bottom ways. I had been disdained. I imagined my devotion judged pathetic by her cruel regime. And I understood why my pleading gaze had been met by nothing but her icy visage.

I had found Rebecca's brutal indifference maddeningly seductive. And although it filled me with desire, I could never have been the top she was looking for. Ironically, that I loved the adoration of my students was for her the greatest turn-off. I fed off of their adoration and sometimes I pandered to it -- to her, this made me unworthy. I lacked the severe autonomy, the unapologetic strength, that she sought in a top. The very fact that I had won over the affection of the rest of the class made me appear to Rebecca weak, not irresistible. And in Rebecca's eyes, I saw my own neediness reflected. To accompany my shattered self-image, she did leave me one small gift, a token, really, of her cruelty: stapled to her paper were a dozen photocopied pages from "The Story of O." Choice excerpts, for my pleasure. I've returned to these passages often since then, but when I dream, I return to that soft, white triangle of midriff. And although I would have preferred the warmth of human flesh, I still miss my captivity. I have never since been the teacher I was then.
salon.com | May 17, 1999

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