Holly pulled the curtain back and, with a cosmic sigh, settled herself down into the steaming, sudsy water. When she unclenched her fist, he fell in a crumpled heap near her panty-line, still faintly visible from their trip to the beach a few weeks ago. As she stroked his hair, a few times, he noticed that her nail-polish had flaked off on her pinky and middle fingers. And, as she helped him stand up, she pressed his face directly into the underside of her thumbnail, and there he caught an odor, distinctly feminine, musky and unwashed. He tensed up below, against his will. And then, with that familiar smell invading his consciousness (she must have scratched herself recently, or at some time during the night), he had a moment of clarity. In those brief seconds, as Holly set him down beside her warm, soft stomach, he realized something.

Holly, who normally kept her bedroom, her walk-in closet, and her bathroom door locked, who changed her computer’s log-in password every week, and who used a private land-line in her room for “business- and school-related matters,” who generally kept up a strict silence in all matters touching on her personal and  business life outside the home, must have known, when she left her door open, and her computer out that day, that her husband would wander into her room at some hour during the afternoon, find her computer and, either through boredom, drunkenness, or idle curiosity, learn about everything. As she placed him on her belly, and smiled at him across the bathtub, he realized that she must have planned everything to happen this way. Perhaps she wanted it to be this way. Never, in all the years to come,  could he find the merest little sparkle of remorse or surprise, anywhere on her face, anywhere in her voice. To her, all this was meant to be. It was fated, between him and her, that eventually she would enslave him, and be his mistress. Her voice echoed hollowly across the vast distance that separated them, and then reached him.

“Stand up,” he heard her say.

He stood up, obediently. He flinched, and then cowered, when he saw her left hand rising again. But, as Holly only wanted to pat his head a few times, and stroke his back, he forced himself to calm down, and nervously looked off to his side, where something seemed to glint in the morning light.

Since Holly was in college she always wore a little golden ring in her belly-button. Often, when they lay together side-by-side after going for a run, or enjoying each other’s bodies, he’d watch her fall asleep. Her eyes would close first, and then she’d roll onto her side, cupping her feet behind her, and let her left hand slide down to her middle, where the ring was. And he remembered those days when he would curl up behind her, and feel her left hand on her belly, and her cold feet pressed into his thighs. He remembered also those days when she would curl up behind him, and he’d feel the cold metallic shock of the ring pressing into his back. Uncomfortable as this feeling was, at first, as the little ring warmed up against his skin, its touch, its constant presence there,  between the flesh of their two bodies, snugly held together – her two arms around him and his one arm resting behind him, on her thigh – made him sigh with pleasure.

He thought of this as Holly dropped him just beside that very ring, which awakened a thousand wonderful memories in his mind, a thousand beautiful  associations. He wanted to touch it, be near it, and half-unconsciously he took a step toward it – and slipped. On his knees, as he looked out over her immense body, warm and living, as the waves gently washed against her sides, he could make out all the contours and blemishes, the smallest moles and pores in her skin, nothing was without flaws, not even Holly. But so familiar to him was her body, and so clear and intense his memory – of her touch, her smells, her marks – that, for a moment, looking out on her endless, breathtakingly endless, stomach and chest, he started to feel blessed. And just as this feeling of being blessed started to make its way into his consciousness, and form itself into a thought, her hand came up out of the water and stroked his head a few times, knocking him over. She could do anything to him, and do it while smiling, as she was then. His vulnerability terrified and excited him. But, as in a dream, he could focus only on one feeling at a time, so that he seemed to be knocked back and forth from one mood to another. Everything was very confusing for him – and seemed to be very clear and simple for her. He wanted to ask her, “Holly, what is happening to me?”



Just then, as though to answer his thoughts, she kicked her right leg up out of the water, and rested her foot on the edge of the tub. The morning light was coming in through the window, shimmering off her leg, and droplets fell from her calf and foot back into the water. There was a smell in the air like a dense pine forest – he looked back and saw Holly rubbing some sort of lotion over her arms and neck.  She saw him seeing her, and nodded her chin toward her foot. Did she want him to climb her leg?

“Go on,” she encouraged him, smiling.

He climbed. And as he passed her knee, he saw the little scar where she’d scraped herself playing tag football with him, five summers ago. He noticed these marks, now, as though for the first time, with a shock of warmth and affection, mixed with awe. Her body was a map of their years together, of their love. His confusion seemed to grow, and expand until it touched on everything in his experience. In that second moment of recognition, he started to love and trust this woman again. But there was also the hint of something else, beneath this welter of love, and renewed affection: it was as if, in passing these small scars full of significance and history, he were saying farewell to them, and to her. If he was to be Holly's slave (he had the discernment to see that she was treating him differently, perhaps pushing him that way, perhaps toying with him, perhaps seriously trying to enslave him), then he was passing these scars, in some way, for the last time. He wasn't that person anymore. And, more importantly, she wasn't that woman. 

And then he reached her foot, which she rested on its side, casually. On his hands and knees, so as not to slip, he began to crawl along the side of her foot, from the inner arch to the big toe. On the yellowed pad of her sole, just under the toes, he noticed, looking down (and down, and down), another scar: seven years ago, the first year he met her, they had gone down to the beach by her mother’s house, and walked one evening a few miles through the waves. A shell, he remembered, had cut her sole pretty deeply, and he’d had to staunch the bleeding with his shirt. On their way back down the shore, to the house, he remembered how ridiculous it seemed – even she could step back and laugh at herself, limping home in the half-dark, with a little rag tied around her foot, his arms around her waist. So he picked her up and carried her the rest of the way. His mind snapped back to the confusing present.

“Back to my heel,” Holly ordered him, her fingers locked in her soapy hair. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself.” He crawled the other way toward her heel. She watched him carefully, protectively.

“Now stand up,” she said. He stood up, as commanded. “And dive.” He started, and then stopped short, terrified.

“On the count of three,” she went on, clearly enjoying herself. “Don’t be afraid.” He looked at her, like a frightened animal. “1… 2… 3…” He flinched. “Go!” His tried to push his naked body off her heel, but couldn’t do it. He collapsed in a heap, and buried his head near her ankle bone. “Do it!” she said, yelling at him in the angry voice she used for her unruly students.

“I can’t,” he whimpered. Only a muffled, squeaky little moan reached her ears, and then she began to tilt her foot, very slowly, so that he’d know what was happening. He panicked, and frantically looked for a handhold somewhere on her foot. There was nothing – the flesh around her heel was smooth, and also slick and damp with her bathwater. He could do nothing at all – slipped – and fell with a soft plunk into the water, far below.



What happened between the moment he surfaced between the toes of her left foot, as she pulled his bedraggled, doll-like little body out of the water, and breakfast, passed like a blur. At one moment, he remembered standing on her chin, and watching her slowly sink beneath the water, until he lost her, and started treading. Below, she pushed her body an inch down the tub, until her mouth was directly beneath his helpless little form. Then, her lips opened wide, and she surfaced, gulping him down. She sat up in the tub, cleaning her underarms, freshening up her hair, and shaving her legs, while savoring him for few minutes, salivating copiously, tossing him with her tongue from cheek to cheek, enjoying the touch of his little fists pounding on her lips, her gums, the warm, slippery walls of her mouth. But soon enough he calmed down, and then he was silent – and then she spat him out onto her palm.

Shortly after this, she drained the water a few inches, and rolled over onto her belly. During breakfast that morning, he had a vague memory of climbing up her body, from the bottoms of her feet, splotched around her inner arches and outer heels with stains from the black leather of her boots – difficult to remove and, as he came to learn, seemingly embedded into the flesh of her sole – to her calves, her butt (the word ‘tush’ no longer remotely described those warm, titanic ass-cheeks, strange, massive, endless, soft), her long back, the spine sunken between two low ridges, like an oceanic valley, and the bare neck, from which she pulled back her long, blond hair. He stopped there, as though before some sacred forest. And he waited.

The seconds passed in a blur again. He remembered that Holly stood up to her full height, and set him down at her feet. Then she gathered her thick hair together into a ponytail, twisted it into a cute and messy knot, and then bent down and brought him, her little slave, back up to her face. Biting her lip, she looked quizzically at him, and then brought him back to her ponytail-bun, uncoiled the knot, and re-twisted it, as tightly as she could, around his body. While he was trapped there, like her hairpiece or barrette, bound to her hair, and binding it himself, she brushed her teeth, put on makeup, and shuffled back to her room in her slippers and robe.

It was then, just when Holly’s husband was beginning to feel attached to her again with a strong, silent attachment, and to become reconciled to this dream-world which was hers and could be his, just when she unbound her hair, and let him fall down a few inches onto her soft unmade bed covers (still fragrant and sweet with her body’s smell, after a long-night’s sleep), that she surprised him again. After putting on a skirt and blouse, she unlocked her walk-in closet, and returned with a worn, stained, grimy pair of old socks, once white, but now yellowed by at least a week of sweat and wear. The fibers were loose around the toes and heels, and through one of the holes near her big toe, he saw a tiny arm stretching out, plaintively, in desperation.

Holly seemed not to notice. She pulled one sock on, and picked out a pair of brown, stylish ankle boots from under the bed, popped her socked foot into one of them with an audible whoosh, and then paused. She looked at her husband, and then stuck her left foot, still bare, into its boot. Ready for breakfast, she picked up her case, a few papers, and her purse. She then scooped up the man, and stomped loudly out of the room. It was only after a few seconds that a fact penetrated his astonished brain: that she was holding her other sock in the same hand – and that he was pressed up against the fabric. Something passed through him like a bolt of lightning, and left him paralyzed. It was only a few seconds after, when she set him down on the countertop, next to her awful sock (he didn't know women's feet could smell so terrible, much less his wife's), that he realized it was terror. He loved her again, and she terrified him. That was all he could process, when there was a soft rap at the door.