The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

serves Mistress Barbara with his wife’s reluctant permission.
    â€œMy wife accepts this but she’s not into it,” Bob explains while fidgeting with the change in his pocket. “She knows it’s a big fantasy of mine and I enjoy it. As long as she knows where I’m at and that the people are sane and discreet, it’s okay. I would never lie to or cheat on my wife. I don’t go with other women, and there’s no real hanky panky going on here.”
    Whether it’s with Bob, Stan or any of the others, Mistress Barbara leads a hedonistic life. She spends her free time sailing, flying, or diving. She eats when and where she wants and she never has to worry about sexual satisfaction; she has them trained for that. “Stan’s not allowed to have an erection unless I say. He has learned to function on command.”
    She represents everything a woman is about while at the same time contradicting what we believe is normal behavior. Besides that, she has never been arrested and she makes a hell of a lot of money.
    I decide that it’s time to head back into apple-pie-and-no-sex-until-marriage America, so I don my adhesive eye patches and follow her into the humid afternoon sunlight. As we trod forward by Braille, in search of the car, she concludes by whispering, “They think I’m wonderful. Somebody else might think I’m the biggest jerk. So why not be where you have adoration?”
    *  *  *
    I soon met a woman who would torture me in ways much more subtle and painful than anything Mistress Barbara could devise with her hellish instruments of sadism. Her name was Rachelle. I was nineteen and she was twenty-two when we met at Reunion Room, a local club that, though I was underage, let me in because I was a journalist. She was so beautiful she was painful to look at because I knew I could never have her. She was a model, with red hair in a Bettie Page cut, a gently curving body and a face stretched perfectly over well-defined cheekbones.
    As we talked, Rachelle explained that she had just broken up with her boyfriend, who was still living with her but trying to find his own place. Once I realized she was on the rebound, a slow flush of confidence began to creep over me. She was leaving for Paris for the entire summer in a month, which gave me just enough time to pursue and miraculously catch her. The letters we exchanged across the Atlantic were as steamy as they were inspirational. I was smitten. When she returned, our relationship resumed even more passionately than before. In desperate need of her affection (or just to get laid) one night, I paged her. My phone rang minutes later, and I picked it up.
    â€œWhy are you paging this number?” asked a hostile man’s voice.
    â€œThis is my girlfriend’s number,” I told him belligerently.
    â€œIt’s also my fiancee’s number,” he fired back, and at that moment I felt my heart freeze and shatter, each shard dropping painfully through my insides.
    â€œDid you know,” I stammered, “that she’s been sleeping with me?”
    He didn’t get angry or threaten to kill me. He was in shock, like I was. I walked around for months in a heartbroken daze. Just as I was beginning to pull myself back together, she called.
    â€œI don’t know how to tell you this,” she said, “but I’m pregnant.”
    â€œWhy are you telling me?” I asked as coldly as I could.
    â€œI don’t know if it’s yours or his.”
    â€œWell, I guess we’re just going to have to assume that it’s his,” I snapped back, hanging up before she could say anything else.
    Two years later, I ran into her in a local diner. She looked the same—drop-dead gorgeous—but modeling hadn’t worked out for her. She had become a police officer, and looked like every man’s fantasy dominatrix in her blue uniform, cap and nightstick.
    â€œYou should meet my son,” she said. “He looks just like you.”
    My face blanched and my jaw dropped open in the process of trying to exclaim, “What?!” I pictured child support payments, weekends spent baby-sitting and a husband plotting brutal revenge.
    After savoring my shock, she pulled her dagger out of my chest just as swiftly and cruelly as she had plunged it in. “But I know it’s not yours. I had a blood test.”

    As a result of discovering that Rachelle had betrayed me and