The Signature of All Things

binding closet again!
    The binding closet had become, ever since the autumn of 1816, a place that Alma visited every day—indeed, sometimes several times a day, with pauses only during her menses. One might have wondered when she found time for such activity, with all her studies and responsibilities, but simply put, there was no question of not doing it. Alma’s body—tall and mannish, flinty and freckled, large of bone, thick of knuckle, square of hip, and hard of chest—had become, over the years, a most unlikely organ of sexual desire, and she was constantly overcongested with need.
    She had now read Cum Grano Salis so many times that it was emblazoned in her memory, and she had moved on to other daring reading material. Whenever her father bought up other people’s libraries, Alma paid most careful attention while sorting through the books, always on the lookout for something dangerous, something with a trick cover, something illicit hidden among the more innocuous volumes. This is how she had found Sappho and Diderot, and also some quite unsettling translations of Japanese pleasure manuals. She had found a French book of twelve sexual adventures, divided by month, called L’Année galante , that told of perverse concubines and lecherous priests, of fallen ballet girls and seduced governesses. (Oh, those long-suffering seduced governesses! Reduced and ruinedby the score, they were! They showed up in so many naughty books! Why would anyone be a governess, Alma wondered, if it only led to rape and enslavement?) Alma even read the manual of a secret “Ladies’ Whipping Club” in London, as well as numberless tales of Roman orgies and obscene Hindu religious initiations. All of these books, she separated out from the others, and hid in trunks in the old hayloft of the carriage house.
    But there was more, too. She also perused medical journals, where she could sometimes find the queerest and most outlandish reports of the human body. She read soberly recounted theories of Adam and Eve’s possible hermaphroditism. She read scientific accounts of genital hair that grew in such freakish abundance that it could be harvested and sold as wigs. She read statistics on the health of prostitutes in the Boston area. She read reports of sailors who claimed they had mated with seals. She read comparisons of penis sizes across different races and cultures, and across different mammalian varieties.
    She knew she should not be reading any of this material, but she could not stop herself. She wanted to know all she could learn. All this reading filled her mind with a veritable circus parade of bodies—stripped and whipped, degraded and debased, yearning and disassembled (only to be put back together again later, for more debasement). She had also developed a fixation with the idea of putting things into her mouth—things, to be specific, that a lady should never desire to put into her mouth. Parts of other people’s bodies, and the like. Most of all, the male member. She desired the male member in her mouth even more than she desired it in her quim, because she wanted the closest possible engagement with the thing. She liked to study things intimately, even microscopically, so it made sense that she longed to see and even taste the most hidden aspect of a man—his most secret nest of being. The thought of all this, coupled with a heightened awareness of her own lips and tongue, became a problematic obsession, which would accumulate within her until she was quite overcome by it. She could solve this problem only with her fingertips, and she could solve it only in the binding closet—in that safe and insulating darkness, with all the familiar smells of leather and glue around her, and the good reliable lock on the door. She could solve it only with one hand between her legs and the other inside her mouth.
    Alma knew that her self-violation was the very pinnacle of wrongness,and that it might even bring harm to her health. Again, unable to stop herself from finding things out, she had researched the subject, and what she had learned was not encouraging. In one British medical journal, she read that children brought up with healthy food and fresh air should never feel the faintest sexual impression whatsoever within their bodies, nor should they seek sensual information. The simple amusements of rural life, the author claimed, should entertain young people sufficiently that they should not be overcome with a desire to