Free [sic]: A Memoir by Joshua Cody Page A

the clenching of the stomach muscles, the “let us not lose a moment”—hence on the street, in the cold, I felt the I need it now of the addict, the compulsive, the satyriasic , the manic; her arms outstretched, head thrown back, her lovely midriff rippling, her lovely ankles pinned together.

    Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Slave Market , 1867.
     
    Why relate all this? On October 10, 1985, Merv Griffin, on his television talk show, asked his Wisconsinite guest Orson Welles whether he (Welles) would ever write his memoirs. Mr. Griffin confessed that he was curious about Welles’s marriage to the object of his (Griffin’s) youthful sexual fantasies, Rita Hayworth. Welles replied that the idea of writing a kiss-and-tell repelled him. Of course, there was always something old-fashioned about Welles; maybe he was one of those born too late; and indeed, two hours after he told Mr. Griffin he’d never do such a thing, he was dead. Paul Klee, on the other hand—one of my saving graces in the hospital was an old book on Klee, I’ll talk about this later—once inscribed a painting with a list of his sexual conquests. I’ve been trying to find my copy of this, I know I’ve seen it before, I know it’s in my parents’ collection of art books, but I’ve been unable to find it. Klee, who had originally wanted to become a musician, was enamored of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni , the story of Don Juan. A famous recording of this opera—some will say the best, conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini—was in my parents’ record collection, which I discovered as a child at about the same time I uncovered the art books. There’s a celebrated scene in the opera called the “catalogue aria” in which Don Juan’s valet, Leporello, goes through a list of his master’s seductions. Mozart and the Rolling Stones were the two musicians I had vastly underrated until I was actually in the hospital, and the title track of the Rolling Stones’ album Some Girls is a type of catalogue aria. So why did Klee and Mozart and the Rolling Stones write about all this, while Welles did not? I don’t know. I think one reason I’m dwelling on Caroline is to reflect on the fact that all this tumescent pleasure was squeezed between so much suffering, and that this may not be unusual. Really, if you think about it, a good editor—a real old-timer, a Hollywood pro—could just cut directly from Eve biting into that apple (slightly arching an eyebrow as she catches, with her tongue, a bubble of juice mixed with her saliva) to the final twist on the cross, the expatiation, the inevitable conclusion to sensuality’s vexing irritations. A real editor might tell the director that he can skip all that Act II stuff in the middle where the hero sleeps with a few girls, and somebody tries to seduce him, and there’s a car chase eventually involving a speedboat and a small airplane. Oh and he’s captured at one point, and is tortured, and narrowly escapes.

    Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas , 1575–76.
     
    The dominatrix industry works pretty much along the lines of the Italian Renaissance: there are studios, there are masters, there are apprentices. (You know, like sometimes you’re at the museum looking at a painting, with unbelievable colors, of Apollo or some such deity and it’s attributed not to, say, Titian, but to the “school of Titian.”) Caroline was an apprentice. When one of the masters decided to give up the big city and move back out West, Caroline took her place, took her clients. Caroline, with her theatrical background, her looks, and her intellectual curiosity, was a natural. Here’s the irony: while Caroline didn’t mind stripping and actually sometimes found it enjoyable, it was the domination gig she found degrading, and she did not attribute this to the fact that she was naturally, as she put it, a bottom. Stripping, in its lack of intimacy, in its status as public performance, was “real.” It was anonymous, and Caroline, in an