Coda (Songs of Submission #9)(18)

But I couldn’t hesitate. I wasn’t afraid he’d beat me harder. I was afraid he’d think I didn’t want to play. So I stood, already naked, and faced the back patio. I wanted to do this and do it hard, then write the song, because I had no idea what I wanted to write. I had no idea what to say except everything.

“Put your hands on the glass.”

I leaned forward and put my fingertips on the back doors. Behind me, I heard his belt buckle clink and his fly zip as he put on his pants.

“Whole hand. Come on, Monica. Commit.” He spanked my ass playfully.

I put my whole palm on the glass and stretched my back.

“Open those legs.” I did, and he pressed on my lower back until my ass was all the way up. “Good.”

“Thank you.”

He nonchalantly went out the back door and looked out over the ocean. The salt breeze blew his hair back. Then, as if noticing something for the first time, he played with the bamboo stalks in the patio’s stone planter as if they were strings on a harp. Then he stood in front of a pot of rattan. It looked just like any other potted palm in Los Angeles. He’d had it brought in a few days ago to block a sliver of view from the beach. He’d insisted on rattan, and from what I’d heard on the phone, he had to go see it personally. I’d had no idea what his problem was. I didn’t know if it was some obsessive pickiness he’d inherited from his new heart that hadn’t yet had the opportunity to show itself or if it was something I simply had never known about him.

But my king wasn’t impulsive. He bent one of the leaves and snapped out his pocketknife, which also just happened to be in his jeans. He cut off a branch and stripped off the leaves.

He stood right in front of me on the other side of the glass door, as if he were in a different room, as if I couldn’t see him. He rolled the cane around in his hands, then across them, inspecting it for I didn’t even know what.

He walked back in the house with the switch. “Now,” he said from behind me, “I think we’ve talked about your orgasms before, and who owns them.”

“You do.” I looked out the window. Without him in front of me, I felt exposed, my breasts hanging, ass up.

“No one can see you.” He slapped my ass.

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you believe me?”

“I want to.”

He swatted me with the rattan switch, lightly, as if testing. Then he did it harder. It was no thicker than a pinky, and that second time, it made a whipping sound before it landed with a crack. Then he did it a little harder.

I sucked in my breath.

“How is that?” he asked.

“Good, sir.”

He cracked it again, at the topmost fleshy part of my ass. The sting was incredible, searing me. I felt as if my flesh was opening. Then he did it again, an inch or so below the last stroke. I let out an mmm sound, biting my lips. And he did it again. There was a rhythm to it, a slow build as he worked his way down to my knees, searing pain leaving blossoming pleasure in its wake. Two taps to aim, one to awaken the skin, and one to make me scream in pain, and it went thwap thwap thwap THWAP. thwap thwap thwap THWAP. thwap thwap thwap THWAP.

***

In the little studio in the guest house, the piano keys went tap tap tap TAP. tap tap tap TAP as I searched for the notes. I shifted in my seat. Jonathan had given my ass and thighs plenty of aftercare, but I wouldn’t be comfortable for a couple of days. I’d think of him and his mastery of me whenever I sat or walked, which was the point.

I had only a few hours, and I was slow. Slow with words and clunky with melody. I missed Gabby. She made things work in minutes. I’d write a poem to the snap of my fingers, and she would tap out the rhythm and embellish it until we had a song. Not every song was good, but at least I knew what I was dealing with before ten minutes had passed.

But by myself, I had a hard time. I thought the work was good in the end, but I wasn’t producing well under pressure. I didn’t even know what the song was about, except time.

Ten years. It had been impossible to talk about that length of time without impaling myself on it. It was so far off, and tomorrow. It was a lie, because it could be so much more if he took care of himself and played by the rules. Even after his heart gave out, if the doctors saw he ate right and took his medicine, he’d get another heart if it came available. It had been done. And was it really ten? Because there was a very healthy guy in Wyoming who had had his for a record-breaking twenty-five years, and there were new advances in anti-rejection meds every day and and and… .

None of that would matter if he was dead. So I’d planned for that eventuality by girding myself, day after day. It would hurt. I would be in the hospital again, crying over him, alone, vulnerable, and scared. A shaft of ice already stabbed my spine whenever I passed Sequoia Hospital, and the knowledge that one day soon, I would go back for the same reason froze me in panic.

All I did was pray for him. The first six months of our marriage had been one big prayer without end, amen.

I couldn’t get control of it by running or staying, and he wanted children. Children. I’d lost my father, and it had crushed me. But Jonathan wanted to have children and disappear when the oldest was nine. Or eight. Or who even knew. Left with a hopeless mother who had lost the love of her life. No amount of money could cure that.

And now, six months later, with his breath in my ear and his sexual dominance reestablished, was anything solved? No. Nothing was. But God damn if I was going to sing him a birthday song about a house because it was the only thing we could agree on.