Sadie considered the acts she engaged in at the brothel to be a form of theatrical performance. She contemplated what each encounter had meant. Sex was, like theater, a way of enacting social structures. It was a satire on the relationship between man and woman.
Sadie reflected that both men and women were capable of orgasms. A man’s orgasm was purely functional. It was to create babies. Without a man’s orgasm, the human species would entirely discontinue. But a woman’s orgasm had no purpose other than enjoyment. It existed outside of motherhood. The human race would continue whether or not women had orgasms. All the strict matrimonial laws were put in place because men didn’t want to have to stake their future on female desire.
Each man she was with gave away the secrets of men’s vulnerable relationship to a woman’s sexuality. They came to Sadie because they were tired of battling it all day. They simply wanted to lay at its mercy.
The characters Justine and Juliette began to engage in more and more licentious behavior. Sadie had dabbled in sexual encounters in her first draft of the book, but now she put it front and center. She felt emboldened by Marie’s life, her hours of honing her skill and her experiences in the brothel. There was no situation too perverse for her two young heroines to throw themselves into with glee, and in great detail. She knew her book had moved into the realm of the pornographic. In most pornography women were subjected to the desires of men. But Sadie would reverse that. In her book, women’s desire would triumph. They would enter into this world of the bedroom and they would have their way. The fantasy would be constructed by their imagination and not that of a man. By understanding the landscape of perversion and pornographic desire, she was able to build a world wherein her female characters could act with ultimate freedom and uninhibited indulgence.
There were such new possibilities in writing from a perspective of female desire. That excited Sadie as an artist. Sadie wanted to put things in literature that had never been there before. In fact, putting experiences into books that hadn’t been there before was the modus operandi of a writer. It was like being a butterfly collector. You didn’t want the same common butterflies every collector had. You wanted the rare butterfly with black spots on its wings that only emerges at the witching hour and sheepishly tucks its antennae into the closing mouth of drowsy flowers.
* * *
Sadie wrote in the evenings after her theatrics. Her words squiggled onto the page like the laces of a girl running for her life with untied boots.
Sadie had no interest in making love to George anymore as she wrote through the fall and winter. When she was done with her peculiar shifts, she wanted to go straight to writing. They did not go out drinking at the music hall because the book called to her. Sadie always had a million questions for George. They were always quite technical and about the book. Sadie didn’t think much about George in any respect outside of the book. George, on the other hand, felt bereft. She missed when Sadie would beg her to tell her a story about her childhood.
George decided she was being ridiculous. Writing this novel was the most important thing to Sadie, and George was an invaluable part of the process. The ladies’ society meeting she attended always said women had to support one another’s work, as they were all working on a common goal in the end. But when Sadie slammed her manuscript shut in the evening and stuck her quill in the inkpot, George felt as though she too had been put away for the night.
Sadie was always meticulous about putting her papers and writing instruments away. It seemed she enjoyed the ritual, which indicated that a hard day of writing was completed. George imagined Sadie taking her own skinny body apart as though it were a pen. She imagined Sadie unscrewing her legs and arms and putting them in the drawers of her desk. Sadie would put George’s head in the large bottom drawer, turn the tiny lock, and then go about her business, taking her out again when the need arose.
George thought this bizarrely grotesque image was comforting. Because it would at least make her feel as though she belonged to Sadie. George never considered that it was the subject of the book, more than the act of writing itself, that was shutting her out.
George was perhaps the only reader who would look at Justine and Juliette and not realize Sadie was working on a love story, the aspect of novels she hated the most. George knew Sadie as a disgraced aristocrat who worked as a dominatrix at a brothel in the Squalid Mile. And she knew Marie as a coldhearted celibate business tycoon. But Justine and Juliette were a version of Marie and Sadie who had never been separated. In this story, they had left the Golden Mile together and had gone on their adventures as one. Pornographic as their story was, Justine and Juliette existed in an Edenic land of childhood innocence. George did not recognize the two delightfully perverted aristocratic ladies as being at all psychologically accurate portraits of Marie and Sadie.
CHAPTER 33
The Unborn
George was delivering a baby one winter afternoon for a woman who refused to get undressed. She had on a white coat with blue flowers all over it. George had to beg her to take even that off. George knew this was going to be a difficult birth. Some women were more prepared for the ordeal of labor than others were.
“Please, I don’t want to do this!” the pregnant woman yelled. “I’ve made a horrible mistake.”
“Come back. Don’t be silly,” George cried. “I have something for the pain.”
“This creature is trying to kill me. Let’s wait for it to die inside me.”
The moon was full. It looked like a breast engorged with milk because of all the babies crying in the night.
The women from the brothel came out of their rooms and surrounded the woman. They held her still. George held a little rag with chloroform over her face. She opened her mouth to curse and succeeded only in inhaling more deeply. Everyone was quick to catch her collapsing body. There is something strangely heavy about a pregnant woman. As they carried her, they could see the baby squirming in her belly like a child playing hide-and-seek behind a curtain. Perhaps she was right. Maybe the baby was a demon who was out to destroy her.