Since Sadie showed no interest in the piano, the headmistress thought another instrument might appeal to her. The headmistress told Sadie she should go to the attic to retrieve a violin that was up there. Sadie climbed up the narrow flight of stairs to the attic, whose ceiling grazed the top of her head. She found the violin, took it out of the case, and tried playing a note on it. It sounded like a black cat who was on the gallows confessing to all the bad luck it had caused. Sadie decided she might like the violin. She closed the lid and tucked it under her arm like a gun. While she was headed back to the stairs, she noticed a small trapdoor in the floor. She opened it up and saw a single book lying at the bottom of the shallow hole.
The book had paper wrapping on it, as though to further hide it from the world. Sadie picked up the book, undressed it, and then opened it up. She knew immediately the contents would be provocative. But she was not quite prepared for how they made her feel, given it was her first encounter with pornography.
She read the book as quickly as she could. She wanted to get through it and retain all the information, knowing it might be confiscated at any moment. Its existence was a miracle in itself. The minute it was discovered it would necessarily be burned. She read cross-legged in front of the trapdoor, ready to toss the book down it if anyone came up.
The pages of the dirty book seemed to glow when she looked at them. She was so turned on by the pages, she wanted to rip them out and eat them. Her whole body felt electrified. She was experiencing sensations she didn’t know she had. Her desire was too intense. She felt as though she were made entirely out of water. She wasn’t able to stop herself from masturbating. It would be painful to try to keep in all that desire. She needed to release it by having an orgasm. It was like a stick of dynamite that had been lit. It was going to explode. She reached under all her skirts, through the opening in her bloomers, and began to touch herself. The second she came, her whole body crashed to the floor. The book collapsed on her chest like a spent lover who had come at the same time as her.
* * *
There was no way Sadie could take the book downstairs with her. It was too risky. Perhaps it was meant to stay here anyway, for another girl to find. She wrapped the book up again and placed it back into the floor, like she was placing a heart in a chest.
It was a revelation. She was normal. All her life she had looked for someone else to acknowledge how good the feelings between her legs were. There was perversion everywhere.
Later, she lay on her back on the large rug in the center of the tearoom. The flowers on the carpet made her feel as though she were lying in a garden filled with roses growing all around her. She imagined she was lying next to Marie. And she imagined the tips of their fingers touching. She closed her eyes. The rosebush grew denser and denser all around her. The matron walked by the room. The rosebush had grown too dense and thick for her to see Sadie lying there sleeping.
Her deep snoring made the sound of water disappearing into a gutter.
Sadie decided to write her own book of pornography. She began to write down her fantasies in her drawing book. She hid the drawing book under all her things in the chest at the bottom of the bed. She knew what a risk it was to have such a book. If it was found, it would be more than enough to send her to the insane asylum. It was a giant atlas of the land of sexual perversion.
It was the moment of her breakthrough. She had discovered the themes she would write about for the rest of her life: the violent delight of female desire.
* * *
And then, to further cement her themes, Sadie was punished severely for laughing one afternoon. The girls were being instructed in how to converse with young men. They were to express no opinions of their own. They were to nod and say, “Is that so? How fascinating!” All the girls said it at once. The absurdity of this struck Sadie, and she began to laugh uproariously.
Sadie was brought to the front of the classroom for a caning. She climbed up the two steps and she knelt beside the pulpit. She leaned her head forward. She felt as though she knew precisely what it felt like to be decapitated before a crowd. She also knew this to be the most exhilarating of experiences.
She was turned on by what was about to happen to her. That the other girls were standing around made her more excited. What a spectacle this was! She looked around, taking note of her riveted audience. Their eyes were wide with horror and fascination. Their cheeks were flushed with what she interpreted as a sexual desire to witness Sadie’s bodily abnegation. Would she ever be able to procure this level of engagement with an audience again? Once she had a taste of it, would she ever be able to live without it? She would not.
The stick went down on her shoulders. The smack emptied all the thoughts from her head. She felt as though she were a pure being. The next one came down. She felt an erotic charge in her body. The sexual pleasure to the pain liberated her from any fear of it, and she found her body welcoming it. She felt as though she were on the brink of an orgasm. She had to press her thighs together to both enhance that sensation and to stop from peeing herself. She felt so naked. She wished she could take off all her clothes. She wanted to cry out. But she held her tongue. Not out of shame but out of fear her cries would be ecstatic ones.
Now that her body had been so debased in front of the other girls, she did not feel a need to keep any more secrets. Allowing others to witness your darkest, most ignoble self was a powerful thing. The act of being an artist of any kind was an act of self-confession and debasement. And now that the teachers had acted toward her in the most disreputable manner, did she really have to follow any of their rules?
She decided to read to the other students out loud from her book of pornography. In the evening, the girls gathered around to listen to her stories in her room. They weren’t sure what to expect. Ordinarily they might have turned down the invitation, but the beating had left them susceptible to Sadie’s charms and deeply curious about her mind. Sadie sat on a chair with the book open on her lap, while the girls crowded onto the three beds together. She began.
In one story, she was walking down a country road when she passed by a hole in the wall. She would have passed right by it without considering it at all unusual, but suddenly a prick poked out of it. Her first instinct was to run away. But she thought there would be no harm done if she got down on her knees and sucked it.