The List, Part 7 · Part 1

The List, Part 7 · Part 1 (1/2)
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The List Column 1 Item 13

Exactly in the middle of my orgasm he took a handful the hair on my forehead and snipped it off. I screamed against the gag. He was cutting my hair off! I strained against everything that was holding me. I heaved against the chair, trying to tip it, the vibrators forgotten in my fear, but I could barely move. I twisted frantically inside the torso, my movements made uncoordinated and spasmodic by the ongoing orgasm. I couldn't even stretch the tape. I could turn my head a few inches to the side, but that was all. I tried to jerk my head away from his hands, but he easily took another snip, again from my forehead. And another.

In my panic, I actually forgot about the gag and continued futilely to scream at him to stop, even though I could hear I was just making squealing noises. My heart was racing. How could he do this to me? My orgasm wound down rapidly, leaving behind a near-hysteria. I hadn't really meant this to happen. At all. He worked across my forehead, from my ears forward. I stopped fighting it for a few breaths to try and catch his eye. If he could just see the expression on my face, I thought, he would have to stop. I looked at my forehead in the mirror and went back to futile hysteri- cal struggling when I realized it was too late to stop him.

My scalp was showing through; for a distance of three or four inches back from my hairline, my hair was less than a half-inch long. Over my entire forehead, in a line from the fronts of my ears to the top of my head in front, I had a crewcut. He stopped snipping and I tore my eyes from what he was doing long enough to look at the rest of me in the mirror. I was crying. Mascara streaks ran to my chin. Air was hissing through my nostrils like a steam engine, cheeks puffing out, nostrils dilating; my nose was running down to my lips and over the gag, mouth leaking saliva that dripped on the black plastic neck and breasts of the torso. My breath was ragged, my eyes red-rimmed and round.

I was making little whining noises through the corners of my mouth around the gag. He smeared shaving cream on my forehead –my new forehead– and began shaving me with a disposable razor. Funny, the scraping noise of the razor was the only sound I could hear–even my labored breathing faded into the background of my awareness. In shock, I thought, stupidly: "At least it isn't all of my hair," as if it mattered. I can't go out in public the way I am now. It will be months and months growing back. As the razor scraped over my forehead, I became aware again of the vibrators inside me.

It had been less than ten minutes since he had put them in, but it seemed so long ago I had nearly forgotten them. I shuddered involuntarily. They didn't feel sexy any more. I just wanted them out. I didn't want another orgasm. I just wanted it to stop, to be undone. He was through. He damp-wiped my forehead and face and fluffed out what was left of my hair. Through a film of tears I could see a totally different person. My forehead was incredibly, impossibly high. Like those old portraits of Elizabeth I of England. My head was completely bare in front of my ears. He removed my gag. I said nothing. There was nothing to say. It was too late.

I just stared at myself in the mirror, horrified and quaking, a jumble of conflicting emotions and sensations. He must have cut away the tape, but I just stared at myself, seeing nothing but my forehead. He helped me to my feet and half-carried me to the bed, where he tenderly took off the torso, unzipped the bodysuit, and gently removed the vibrators. They were still going strong. I was in a daze. I didn't even help him when he rolled me over to remove the second vibrator. I don't think I even blinked. I felt ruined. I wanted to cry, but I couldn't. The only thing I could think about was my hair.

Without the vibrators in me I continued to experience a kind of visceral nervous tremor, like when you get off a lawnmower or a tractor you have been riding all day. My body was thrumming with the sudden absence of vibration. But that didn't matter. Nothing did. "Look at me," he said. I couldn't. I just stared dully at the ceiling, the bodysuit open, my feet in the boots hanging over the foot of the bed. He sat on the bed beside me and turned my chin with his hand. My eyes met his. "I love you," he said. Suddenly my emotions all boiled to the surface. "My God!!! How could you do this to me!!?" I wailed, rolling over and burying my face in the pillows.

While I was face-down sobbing hysterically, I felt his hand on my shoulder. "Don't!" I said, jerking away as if I had been shocked. I rolled away from him to the side of the bed and got up, unsteady on the hooker-heels with my legs still strapped together. "Look at what you've done to me!!" I cried, dissolving into tears again as I hobbled to the mirror and turned to face him, fists clenched at my sides. He looked so dismayed at the vehemence of my reaction, I realized he was expecting something completely different from me. "You're beautiful to me. And I'm not going to apologize. I did it because I love you and I am going to make you mine." Strange way of showing it, I thought.

"I don't believe this is happening!" "I want to own you. Now I do, more than before. Try to understand that I care more about you than anything else in the world. You are a treasure to me." Right, I thought. Sure. His voice told me he was beginning to worry that he had gone too far. Or too fast. "Yeah, well you just disfigured your treasure," I said bitterly, turning away and looking in the mirror again. I was quite a sight: with the unitard flopping open, I was a slash of white nakedness from the crown of my head to my hairless sex. "No," he said quietly but forcefully. I have never heard him so intense and adamant.

"No…" he said again, gently, turning my face to him and looking me in the eyes. "I stripped away more of your digni- ty." Oh great, I thought. Now I get pop philosophy to make it all better. As I said, I was feeling a little bitter. "Doing this makes it easier for you," he went on. "What the hell are you talking about?!" "Dignity and pride obscure our relationship and our sexuality the way a fire is obscured by its own smoke. I didn't disfigure you. I took away some dignity. To me you are more beautiful than ever, because you are almost completely mine. If you want public dignity you can go out in public with a wig. I even have one for you, but you will wear it when I allow it.

You will have no private dignity. "You are not disfigured. You are changed. It is important that you understand…. " "I don't believe this," I interrupted. But he went on and on. There was more, but he wasn't connecting with me. It sounded rehearsed. I didn't even listen to most of it, and I wasn't buying it, but on the other hand, now, I can see what he had intended, what he wanted to happen. J has always preferred subtlety as a way of getting what he wants. I know that shaving me doesn't sound subtle, but he would prefer to give me the superficial appearance of freedom if there were hidden chains holding me. Best would be no restraints other than my own fear of embarrassment.

Up to now I've had complete freedom to walk around the house and yard, but total inability to go out in public, whether it was chains, weights, lack of clothing, or the plastic torso that kept me home. Now it is my appearance that chains me. In public, my wig chains me, since he can always take it from me. While we lived in Chicago he studied martial arts. He drove an extra hour every Tuesday night to study judo rather than take karate within walking distance. He explained he prefers the "soft way" to force. Somehow it is more satisfying, he says.

He is strong enough to overpower me easily, but he would prefer not to use strength and chains except as a temporary technical means to an unfettered but rigidly confined end. Invisible chains may or may not be the stron- gest, but J thinks they are the best, for some reason. Even as I write this down, the words sound unconvincing, and at the time I thought it was a line of bull. I'm still not sure. It was definitely hard to take at face value. I thought he was merely justi- fying what he had done, and that he had in fact done it simply in order to exert control over me. A power trip. But in this regard he has always been something of a mystery to me.

He has been in a position to control other people a number of times, [partial professional record deleted] but even then, whenever possible without shirking his responsibilities, he refused to use the authority inherent in his position. He is genuinely more interested in personal self-understanding than in the public trappings of success. His desire for control has always been directed toward himself. So his desire to exert control over me has been a mystery. Unless he regards me as so much a part of him that I fall into a different category than the public. No, that's not it. I don't know. Anyway, his "will to power" (if you read your Nietzsche) is inwardly directed.

So calling this a "power trip" for him may be a little unfair. Maybe. And of course it IS on the List. Still, this was one thing I just didn't think he would do. When he suggested it I just laughed and said, "Sure, if I can do the same to you." I was simply thinking of this in a different way than he was. He actually intended to DO this to me; but I, instead of thinking of something I really wanted (enough to trade my hair for), I just thought of a fair retaliation for such a terrible thing. I thought: He wouldn't do that to me because he wouldn't want me to do it to him. The key point I had missed was this: I didn't want to do this to him. But he did want to do it to me. Why? Who knows?

In the end I came to the conclusion that he might just mean what he says. He always has in the past. And I like having him in control. It makes me feel safe. But God. My hair! Even just this morning, a week later, I don't know how many times I have thought to myself: "What in God's name have I gotten myself into?!" I've been round and round with myself trying to figure out why he would want to do such a thing, and I have no answer. The only thing I am sure of is that there's a lot more psychology than philosophy behind what he did. I just hope there's no pathology. I sometimes think the inside of his mind must look like a painting by Heironymus Bosch (for that matter, mine does, too).

Why he did it wasn't upper- most in my mind at the time, though. My hair was. In fact, at that particular moment I wasn't thinking about anything, just feeling pretty goddamn miserable. Listlessly, I stared at myself in the full length mirror. He stepped in front of me, still holding the damp washcloth. Tenderly, he wiped a smudge of mascara from below an eye and even kissed me. "You are beautiful," he said, "Half a century ago you would have been a great beauty exactly as you are, so don't dismiss your appear- ance just because it is different.

If you can't see your beauty, then see this as a new kind of nakedness: a new source of that embarrass- ment that I value so much as a gift." I wanted so much to believe in him, to believe he wasn't crazy. I just wasn't sure. How could he want me like this? The only thing that really touched a part of me was the idea that he wanted to make me his completely. He stepped aside and let me look in the mirror. It was hard to look without bursting into tears again. I looked at my feet in the boots, still chained. The chained wrists rested on my thighs, hands trembling. He reached behind me and rezipped the bodysuit, down my back and between my legs, up my front almost to the top.

There was a wet patch between my legs. My eyes followed the zipper to my chin. I looked at my face again. It was genuinely shock- ing to see myself that way. I couldn't help it. Tears flowed and ran down my face again, and my lower lip began to quiver. A pathetic specimen. I turned and looked up at his face. I saw admiration, love, and concern there. I looked back at my shaved forehead. Back at his face. "You can't…. I look so…." I said in a tiny voice. I wanted to believe him so much, but when I looked in the mirror it was so awful. He took me by the shoulders and turned me to face him. "Really," he said, looking straight into my eyes.

"To me you are beautiful, and not just because you are mine, but also because you are just plain beautiful." I stood there, still in a daze, my eyes unfocused, my thoughts turned inward. I just wanted reassurance. I wanted to be sure he wasn't weird. At least not pathologically weird. I wanted to know he loved me. I reached up and zipped the front of the bodysuit back down to my waist. It took both hands with my thumbs inside the gloves. "Show me….?" I said, resentful and uncertain. He looked into my eyes and nodded. He picked me up, carried me back to the bed, and sat, holding me in his lap. He took the key from around his neck and unlocked my wrists and kissed each one.

He stood me on my feet and knelt to unlock the leg straps and the chains that held on the boots. When he stood and kissed me again, I could feel a tremor of suppressed emotion in his arms. He held me by the shoulders at arm's length and stepped back, just looking at me. I was still ashamed and resentful and wouldn't look up at him. It was approaching sunset and we hadn't turned on any lights yet. The late afternoon sun slanted through the windows, casting shifting leaf-shadows on the wall in the dim light. It was very quiet. He held out the hood. I took it and put it on, bending to tuck the remainder of my hair inside.

At least the hood covers my forehead, I thought, and with it on he couldn't cut off any more hair. But I still felt sick inside. A wave of near-nausea swept over me whenever I thought about what he had done to me. He zipped the bodysuit the rest of the way up, and zipped the neck of the bodysuit to the neckline of the bodysuit. He knelt and undid my boots; while I steadied myself on his shoulder he helped me out of them. He stood and did something under my chin to the three zippers where they came together.

I could feel with my gloved finger- tips that something joined the zipper of the bodysuit with the neck- line zipper and the one that closed the hood under my chin. (That, I realized, was why he had me get zippers with holes in them, so he could join them somehow). I was enclosed completely except for my nostrils, and I could do nothing to release myself without scissors. The gloves were too clumsy to figure out what held the zippers togeth- er (it wasn't a lock), and I didn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that in the game of "find the scissors first", having to use the thumbless braille method would not give me a very big advan- tage. I didn't even try.

I heard him sit on the bed and felt my way to him. He kissed me through the bodysuit and said "I can give you what you ask, but that doesn't mean I will relinquish control of you." He kissed me again, lingering over the mask between our lips. I held my face blindly out toward his kisses. There were still tears leaking out inside the hood. He stroked my body in a way that wasn't exactly nonsexual, but wasn't foreplay either. We leaned on pillows propped against the headboard, his arms around me. I felt safe, protected.

As we cuddled in the darkening room, I could tell his attention was completely focused on me, and I felt as though I was enfolded in the center of a private little world, like I was a little kid again, sharing secrets under a blanket. Or an embryo in the womb. But every time I began to relax I would think of my hair. It kept coming back. He made me feel secure and safe, but it was always there at the back of my mind that something was wrong, and back it would come and I would feel sick all over again. I would think: "W

The List, Part 7 · Part 1 (1/2)
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