Private Performance

Private Performance

by Ashley Zacharias

The Commission:

Catherine was trying to give Adele’s work the consideration that it deserved, but failing. Her attention was distracted the inane conversation behind her.

“What does it mean?” a man’s voice asked.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” a second male voice replied. “It’s abstract. It’s just a design.” The second voice had a whine that grated on Catherine.

“The tag says that it’s called A Cry in the Urban Wilderness. That has to mean something.” The deeper voice sounded genuinely puzzled.

“That means that the artist spent more time thinking about a catchy title than about what to paint. Look at it. It’s just a jagged red circle on a black background. How much thinking do you have to do before you paint that?”

Catherine knew that Adele agonized for hours over every piece she painted. That piece was her cry in the dark. A raw, red howl of anguish made visual and frozen on the canvas. She was begging for someone to understand her fear and loneliness.

“It’s just a design,” the second voice whined.

Adele’s genius was wasted on these philistines.

“I don’t think I like it,” the first voice replied.

“It might look good in your living room. The red matches your drapes.”

Now it was Catherine who wanted to howl in anguish. Or to shriek in anger. Adele didn’t make decorations; she made art.

“I don’t think so,” the first voice said. “If I’m going to buy a painting, it has to mean something to me.”

“Maybe we can find a nice landscape around here somewhere. You know. With leaves glowing in the setting sun. Or maybe a stone cottage in the evening with a nice flower garden.”

They weren’t going to find any Kinkades in Hon’s Gallery of Urban Visions. Jacques Hon sought out pieces that he thought contributed to a new industrialized primitivism. His interpretation of primitivism was as a sophisticated, highly-developed expression of the semiotics of oral cultures; not the naive, patronizing primitivism that the abstract expressionists like Picasso tried to ape.

Catherine was not entirely certain that she understood the intellectual implications of Jacques’ vision, but she had been to this gallery often enough to have a good gut feeling for what fit and what didn’t. She knew for a fact that the two naïfs standing behind her would never find what they wanted in here.

As though he were reading her thoughts, the first man said exactly that. “I don’t think that they’d sell anything that I’d like in here.”

“So let’s go somewhere else.”

“I think we should give this place a chance first. Marius said that this is one of the most sophisticated galleries in the city.”

“We looked. We didn’t find anything that we liked. We can leave now. Vidi, vici, vamoose-i.”

There was a long pause. Then the first voice said. “I’m lost. I need to talk to someone who can tell me what good art is.”

“Talk to the owner again.”

“That didn’t do any good before. I’m not going to waste more of his time.”

Catherine felt a twinge of sympathy for the man. Even she found talking to Jacques akin to listening to someone speaking a foreign language. His convoluted thought processes were even less accessible than the art that he exhibited.

She turned around and found herself looking into a pair of deep blue eyes. The man frowned and said, “Do you like these paintings?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think they’re any good?”

“Yes. They’re terrific.”

“If money was no object, which one would you buy for your home?”

She looked around the gallery. “None of them,” she confessed.

The man looked puzzled. “But you said that they were good art.”

“Yes. They might even be great art. But that doesn’t mean that I could live with them. David’s painting, The Death of Marat, is a wonderful example of eighteenth century French realism but there’s no way that I could live with a picture of a murdered man bleeding to death in his bathtub. I couldn’t live with The Scream by Munch, either, or almost any other well-known piece that you can name. A work has to be very special to be both fine art and something that you want to live with.”

“What would the right painting look like?”

“I can’t tell you that. It’ll be different for everyone. I can’t live with these paintings because I know the artist too well. You might not be able to live with them for a different reason.”

When the man and his friend turned to scan the gallery once more, Catherine took the opportunity to scan the man. He was older than her, in his mid to late thirties. He looked athletic, healthy, prosperous. He had dark hair and a strong jaw. He wore a black tee shirt, tight blue jeans, and no wedding band.

Most people would call him handsome. Catherine’s single friends would call him a good catch. Catherine would reserve judgment.

“This artist is well-known?” he asked when he turned back to look at her again.

“Not as well-known as she should be, but that’s not what I meant when I said that I know her too well. I meant that I know her personally. She’s a close friend of mine.”

“She’s a close friend, yet you tell me not to buy one of her paintings.”

“No. I never said that. I said that I wouldn’t buy one of her paintings. She’s not a happy person and she pours her pain into her paintings. I couldn’t live with my friend’s pain hanging on my wall.”

“I see.” She let him think for a minute. Then he said, “So what should I look for in a painting?”

“Look for an experience. Look for something that affects you emotionally or intellectually. If you look at a painting, walk away, and then get an urge to come back and look at it again, that’s a good sign. That says that it affected you. If you feel something different the second time that you look at it, then that’s another good sign. That says that there’s more to it than you saw at first glance. Buying a painting should be like getting married. It’s not a one-night stand. You want to develop a long-term personal relationship with the piece. It’s more than an illustration or a decoration. You can look at an illustration once and know everything you need to know about it.  You can live with a decoration because it doesn’t mean much to you. Art should give you an ongoing experience that keeps growing and changing.”

“That’s demanding a lot from daubs of paint brushed on a canvas.”

“Good art is up to the task. That’s what makes it art.”

The man’s friend spoke up for the first time. “How do you know so much about art?” He was short and dumpy, wearing a yellow tee shirt with an ad for beer blazoned across his chest. “Do you work here?”

“No. I’m an artist.”

“Are you any good?”

“Some people must think so because I’m starting my second year of my MFA at Stanford. It’s hard to get into that program.”

The handsome man spoke again, “Maybe I should have a look at your paintings. I might like them better than these.”

“Or maybe you can commission something nice from her that matches your carpet,” the short man said to the handsome one as though Catherine were not part of the conversation.

She couldn’t tell if he was being deliberately insulting or was merely obtuse. She addressed the handsome man with a smile, “You can’t buy my work because I’m not a painter. I’m a performance artist.”

“What’s that?”

“My art consists of public performances.”

“Like an actor?”

“No. An actor plays a role. She represents a character by pretending to be it. I don’t represent any character. Or any real thing, for that matter. When I perform, I am the art. Directly.”

“Do you sing? Dance? Recite poetry? What?” the short man asked.

“No.” She paused then revised her answer. “Maybe. I do different things, depending on what the piece requires. I don’t have a good voice. My singing is terrible. But I would sing if I designed a piece that required bad singing.”

The two men looked confused.

She tried to explain again. “I give people an unexpected experience. I try to do something special. Something so special that it might even change someone in some small way. When I finish the performance, the person who viewed it might see himself and his world a little bit differently than before I started. That’s what any piece of art is about, really. An experience that is so profound for a person that they are changed by it. It doesn’t happen often but it can happen on rare occasions and, when it does, it is magical.”

The two men stared at her for a few moments and she felt a flush of self-consciousness. “That sounded pretentious. I’m sorry. I get carried away when I talk about art.”

“No. No, that’s all right. I think that I know what you mean,” the handsome man said. “I had a friend who went to Rome and he said that when he looked up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel he was so moved that he felt like God was in the room with him. He claims that he will never forget the feeling. I thought that it was just bullshit, but if you say that it can happen, then maybe I should take him at his word.”

Catherine nodded and said, “You should believe your friend. It can happen. The ultimate purpose of art is to give a person that quality of experience. Not necessarily of God but some kind of insight. It can happen the instant that you see the piece or it can take years of exposure to it. Like I said, it’s rare but it happens. It’s worth looking at a thousand pieces of art in the hope that just one of them will be the one that transforms you. If someone tells you that they have an epiphany every time they see a painting or a sculpture, then they are bullshitting you. Epiphanies are rare. But they do happen on occasion and that’s what makes looking at a thousand pieces of art worthwhile.”

“So how do your performances accomplish that? Give people such an experience?”

“I wish I had an answer to that question. I just do what I can and hope that I manage to give someone a significant experience. The first step is to give people an experience that they’ve never had before. That’s obvious. After that, I use my knowledge and intuition to try to make it as important an experience as possible. I have succeeded well enough on some of my past performances that Stanford University admitted me to their program. They don’t admit many. Now, I keep trying to do better.”

The handsome man looked intrigued. “Can I hire you to perform one of your pieces?”

Catherine shook her head slowly. “No, I don’t think so. My best pieces take too much time and effort to set up and perform. I’ve got to produce a set of performances for my thesis before I can graduate. I don’t have the time to rework an old piece.”

A frown furrowed the man’s face. “If you’re making a new pieces for your thesis, then you can perform them for me.”

It was Catherine’s turn to frown. “I’ve just begun. I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet. It may not be suitable for you.”

“I’ll pay you,” the man said.

“You want to commission the series?” the artist asked.

“If that’s what an artist calls it when you pay her, then yes.”

“A commission means that I’ll design the series specifically for you.”

“I thought you had to design it for your thesis.”

She shrugged. “Just because I design it for you doesn’t mean that I can’t submit it to my thesis committee. It just means that I’ll have to document the entire process.”

“Okay, then.”

“Wait,” the short man said. “Not so fast. How much is this going to cost?”

The handsome man grinned. “Marty’s my money man. He needs to know the cost of everything.”

“Five thousand dollars for each performance. There’ll be three of them so that’ll be fifteen thousand dollars total.” Catherine held her breath, hoping that he wouldn’t balk as such an exorbitant sum for art that hadn’t been created yet by an artist whose work he didn’t know.

“I think we can afford that,” the handsome man told the short one with a smile.

“What will we get for our money?” the short man asked Catherine.

“Three performances, to be presented at two months intervals at a time and location suitable to you. I’ll include a video recording of the performances afterward so that you have a permanent record of them.”

“That sounds fair,” the handsome man said.

“But you have to understand that the video is not the art. The performance is the art. You can only use the video recordings to remind you about the art.”

“Okay. I got that.”

“You can’t publish the recordings or use them for commercial gain.”

“Okay,” the handsome man said. “But let’s change the price. I’ll pay you ten thousand dollars for each performance, for a total of thirty thousand dollars.”

Catherine smiled with her eyes. “I appreciate that.”

The short man, Marty, spoke up again. “But the contract can be terminated after any performance if we don’t like the work.”

The sparkle in Catherine’s eyes dimmed slightly. “You can terminate the commission whenever you like but I’m not going to tailor my artistic vision to fit your taste.”

The handsome man looked at Marty with annoyance. “Don’t worry. I won’t be quick to cancel the commission. Just make the best art that you can and I’ll try to appreciate it as best as I can.” Then he added, “What about materials? Do you need to buy props or anything?”

“Probably. I don’t know yet.”

“How about a budget of five thousand dollars per performance for materials in addition to the fees for the commission?”

“That’s generous. Thank you.” She had expected to pay for materials out of her own pocket. Her vision was already expanding to fit the budget.

“I want your best effort. I don’t want you to feel constrained by a lack of resources. If you need more than five thousand dollars for materials, you can explain your need to Marty.”

“You’ll have to submit receipts, documenting your expenditures,” Marty said, darkly.

“Good,” the handsome man said. “Marty will draw up a contract for the commission. You can talk to him directly.”

Marty handed her a card.

“I’m Catherine Dicksen.” She gave each man her own card in return.

“I’m Jeff Lawrence and this is Marty Palmer, my CFO.”

“The contract will be between you and Elegant World Apps. We need to write this off as a business expense to get the tax advantage,” Marty said.

Catherine didn’t care about anybody’s tax advantage. She was already busy thinking about possible designs.

As the two men turned to leave the gallery, she said, “Wait. Jeff. There are a few practical details that we need to work out. Where will I be performing? Who will be in the audience?”

“At my house, of course. The whole point of this is to have some kind of art in my house. Should I invite friends over to see you? Make it like a party?”

“Whatever you want. I just need to have some idea about the venue.”

“How about you come over for lunch sometime and you can see the house?”

“Okay.”

“I live down in Palo Alto. I’ll send a car to pick you up. One of Marty’s guys will arrange the details when you’re ready.”

Catherine was getting excited. She was certain that she could design an interesting sequence of performances in a private, intimate space for a controlled, pre-selected audience. Interesting performances indeed.

* * *

The First Performance:

“Hello. I’m Catherine.” She smiled at the woman in the red dress. Like everyone else at the party, the woman was wearing a gold badge on a gold chain around her neck. The guests not only had to be invited to the party, but they had to wear their invitations while they were here.

“Hello,” the woman replied uncertainly. “Why are you in that box?”

“I’m not completely in the box. My head is sticking out.”

“I can see that.” The top of the big black box was made of heavy black canvas with a hole in the middle. It held close around Catherine’s neck by elastic. “Why?”

“It’s art.”

“Oh.” The woman seemed to accept that as an explanation. “I need to refresh my drink.” She wandered away.

A young man wandered by and looked at her. “Someone told me that there was a lady in a box here. I guess you’re her.”

“I’m not completely in a box. My head is outside.”

“You have a pretty head.” He smiled and sipped his martini.

“Thank-you. Some people have told me that I have a pretty body, too, but I’m not so sure about that.”

“I can’t see your body.”

“You can. You just can’t see it here.”

“I see.”

Catherine knew that he didn’t see, but he would soon enough. The party was just beginning. People were still arriving. The important part of her performance wouldn’t begin for another half hour.

The young man was still looking at her. To make conversation, she said, “How do you know Jeff?”

“I don’t know Jeff. My wife is one of Marty’s people. He invited us.”

“I see. I’m Catherine.”

“I’m Howard.”

There was an awkward pause.

“What do you do?” Catherine asked.

“I’m an IT manager at Stanford.”

“Really? I’m a student there. In the art department.”

They chatted for a few minutes about Stanford. A couple of other people wandered over to look at the woman whose head was sticking out of a big box and she included them in her conversation.

She told people as much about herself as she thought they could stand to know. Her openness encouraged them to ask more questions about where she was from and what she had done before entering Stanford’s Fine Art program.

It was standard small talk.

After a while, Howard gave Catherine a little salute and wandered away to find his wife.

She would have returned his salute but her arms were stuck inside the box.

The room was filling up.

Howard wandered into another room and nibbled on a few hors d’oeuvres from a buffet table, then noticed a lot of people standing in another room toward the back of the house. He let his feet carry him in that direction.

The back room was large and devoid of furniture. There were a dozen big flat screen televisions hanging on the walls, all showing pictures of a woman in a business suit. The whole woman could not be seen in any single screen; each showed only one part of her. One screen showed her dark blue skirt and stocking-clad thighs; another showed her midsection from the side; another the skirt covering her buttocks; another her torso from the back, clad in a pale pink blouse; and so forth. Every part of her body was shown in one screen or another from different angles. Every part except her head.

The images were live transmissions. She wasn’t doing anything in particular. Her hands moved aimlessly and she shifted position every couple of minutes, resting more weight on one foot or the other.

Howard happened to be looking at the screen showing her upper thighs when she began hiking her skirt upward, bunching it in her hands as she raised the hem almost to her crotch. She was wearing stay-up stockings. When the skirt was hiked high enough, a strip of creamy white thigh was revealed. The color and resolution of the monitors was excellent. Howard could see every thread in the lacy tops of the stockings. Then her hands released the skirt and reached down to smooth the fabric out down to her knees.

The people around him seemed not to notice the display. They continued to chat with each other, making the same small talk that could be heard at any other party in Silicon Valley.

He looked through the door to the room with the buffet and saw his wife putting a piece of brie on a cracker while she chatted with her boss. He went out to join them.

“The invitation said that there was going to be a display of performance art here,” Marcie was saying. “Is the art that the woman in the box out there?”

“It is,” Marty replied. “She’s the artist that we hired.”

“What’s she going to do? Just be in a box?”

“I don’t know. I hope that she’s going to do more than that. Jeff’s paying enough that it ought to be something good.”

The talk turned to business and Howard soon got bored. He drifted back to the room where the artist’s head was sticking out of the box.

He watched her talking to people for a few minutes. He could see her head move as she shifted her weight and moved her hands but he had no idea what she was doing inside the box.

As before, she was smiling and talking. She had an animated face and people seemed to enjoy her conversation. She was telling people about growing up in a small town in Wyoming. Her father was a dentist and his clientele mostly seemed to consist of cowboys with bad dental hygiene and a hankering for perfect smiles. To her father’s exasperation, his patients invariably failed to see the relationship between the two.

She must have been exaggerating some of her stories but the people listening to her didn’t seem to care.

There was a buzz rising in the back room.

Howard walked back through the buffet room to see what was happening.

Everyone in the television room was turned to look at one of the monitors. The woman’s blouse was unbuttoned to her navel and she was using her hands to spread the front open and caress the white lacy bra that covered her breasts. As he watched, she unbuttoned the next button, allowing the blouse to gape further open.

The resolution was good enough that he could see the glimpses of her rich pink aureoles through the holes in the lace.

Her hands moved continuously, but slowly. It took several more minutes for her to finally pull the hem of her blouse from her waistband, unbutton the last button, and brush the blouse off her shoulders.

She had lovely shoulders.

There were a lot of women in off-the-shoulder dresses at the party but, somehow, the image of the artist’s shoulders on the screen was more desirable than the bare shoulders of the real women standing beside him.

The woman on the television screens let her blouse hang over her lower back, draped from her elbows, while she slowly unbuttoned each cuff. It was a couple more minutes before she let the blouse slip completely off and fall to the ground.

This was an excruciatingly slow strip tease with no dancing and no music.

Howard wanted to go back into the other room and see if the woman in the box was still talking about her childhood but he was afraid that he’d miss something if he left the television screens. She kept playing with the lace edges of her bra cups and he thought that she might be about to take it off.

After another few minutes, he looked around and saw that there were many more men than women in this room. He could see more women than men clustered around the buffet table outside.

He wondered if more men or women were talking to the artist’s head in the front room.

Then the woman on the screen reached behind to unhook the back of her bra. A picture of her hands and the white strap dominated the screen on one wall. The gesture pushed her breasts forward to strain against the cups. Lovely creamy curves overflowed the cups on a screen on the other side of the room. Men swiveled back and forth between two screens to track the changes to the back and front of the woman’s torso.

Howard wished that he could see the expression on the woman’s face when she released the tension in the strap and felt her breasts fall forward, loose and natural inside the cups. But he couldn’t have everything. And he wasn’t about to leave the television screens to see her live face in the other room.

The hands on the screen hefted the breasts, still loose inside the cups, one at a time, but did not pull the lace aside to bare them yet. That would wait for a few more minutes.

Howard’s wife, Marcie, brushed her hand against his arm. “Do you want to try a piece of the beef vindaloo on nan?” she said. It’s delicious.”

“No thanks.” He barely looked at her.

“Come on,” she urged. “There’s a great spread out here.”

“I’m all right. I’m not hungry.” But there was hunger in his face as he looked at the gigantic breasts loosely encased in white lace on the screen.

“Suit yourself,” she said. Her voice had the brittle tones of cracking ice. He would be returning to a cold night in their bedroom after the party.

Marcie had to push between Marty and another man to get out the door. Their attention was focussed on the television screens. They barely noticed her.

Marcie continued into the front room. There was only one other woman talking to the artist’s head. All the other women in the room were sitting on couches or standing and talking to each other.

“Is that your body on the television sets in the back room?” she asked, breaking into the conversation between the woman who and the artist.

“Does it matter?” the artist said. “What difference does it make if it’s a live feed of me or pre-recorded program? What difference does it make if it’s my body or some other woman’s?”

“It matters to me,” Marcia said.

“Why?” The artist looked curious, like she really wanted to know.

“Because, whoever body it is, it’s not mine. My husband is staring at some other woman’s half naked body and that matters to me.”

“I can understand that,” the artist replied, “but he doesn’t have the option of looking at your body right now. If you were naked in front of him, then he’d probably choose to look at you instead of me.”

“He could be talking to me right now instead of looking at you,” Marcie countered.

“Yes. And he could be talking to me instead of looking at me, too. But he didn’t choose to do either. None of the men want to be out here talking to me.” It wasn’t strictly true. There were a handful of men in this room. But the point was clear. Most of the men preferred watching videos of half-naked female body parts to talking to a real woman.

“Are you surprised by that?” Marcie asked.

“Not really,” the artist answered.

Marcie could see her head bobbing a little as she spoke and wondered what clothing she was stripping off now.

“But this isn’t all that flattering to me, either,” the artist continued. “I’d rather not be images of parts on television screens.”

There was a low cheer from the other room.

Marcie wondered if the woman had removed her entire bra yet or only bared one breast.

But the artist kept speaking without pause. “I had hoped that at least a few of the men would have wanted to be in here to enjoy my quick wit and sparkling personality.”

“Your wit isn’t all that quick and your personality isn’t all that sparkling,” Marcia snapped.

“No, but my body’s not all that beautiful, either,” the artist opined. “My calves are heavy and my hips are too wide. There’s an awful lot of beautiful women being ignored in this room. And, if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re one of them. I really like what that dress does to you. Is it Dior?”

“Macy’s. Off the rack.”

‘Then it must be the way you wear it that makes it look so good.”

Another woman joined them.

“I’m Catherine,” the artist said.

“I’m Marcie,” Marcie replied.

The other woman didn’t volunteer her name.

“Don’t you think that Marcie’s dress is flattering to her?” Catherine asked the third woman. “The lavender is just the right shade for her delicate complexion.”

“What do you think you’re doing?” the new woman asked.

Catherine raised an eyebrow. “I’m chatting about Marcie’s dress,” she replied. “I think it looks lovely. Don’t you?”

“You’re stripping for the men in the other room.”

“That’s just television in there. In here, in the real world, I’m talking to you and Marcie.”

“Someone said that you call this art.”

“I am an artist,” Catherine replied.

“Well, I call this pornography,” the other woman said. “It’s just a cheap sex show. Jeff should be ashamed of himself for inviting us here to see this smut.”

There was another cheer from the other room.

Marcie did not know if that meant that the artist’s bra was now on the floor along with her blouse or if it was her skirt that had been stripped off this time. She was surprised to find that she was curious.

“I guess one person’s art is another person’s sex show,” the artist said. “But I have to correct you on one point. It’s not cheap. Jeff paid quite a bit to commission this performance.”

“Then he should have saved his money and hired a stripper instead.”

“That would have saved him a lot of money,” the artist said with a smile. “But then it wouldn’t have been art. It would have been a different thing altogether.”

“I don’t see what point you think you’re making,” the woman said.

“I do,” Marcie said. “The point is that when men have a choice between seeing a woman as body parts on a television screen and interacting with her as a real woman, they choose the body parts. Right?”

“That’s one interpretation of this piece,” the artist replied. “Not necessarily the only one.”

“What else, then,” Marcie asked.

Despite herself, the other woman couldn’t resist showing that she had some insight, too. “There’s a more general comment here. Society gives people this choice all the time, not just tonight. Women are dehumanized by television every hour of every day.”

“My piece admits a feminist interpretation, for sure,” the artist said.

“Are you implying that there’s some other interpretation?” Marcia asked.

A fourth voice joined the conversation from behind the other two women. “Men aren’t the only people at this party.” The two women turned around to see an older man standing behind them. “There are women here, too, and they also have to make a choice. A surprising number of them choose to eat and pretend that nothing is happening. There’s a pretty ordinary buffet in the other room but the women in there are raving over it like it’s the best food they’ve ever seen. I think that their avoidance of both rooms is the most interesting choice of all.”

“Meaning what?” the unidentified woman said. “Meaning that women avoid the hard choices?”

“Or that the choice between the body and the personality isn’t so interesting to them,” the man replied.

“Women are interested in other women,” the unidentified woman said. “They’re not interested in sluts.”

“Ouch,” the man said. “That’s kind of a harsh judgment, isn’t it?”

“I say it like I see it,” she replied.

“Do you think that every woman crowded around the buffet has made the same judgment about our artist here?”

“They aren’t in here talking to her, are they?” the woman said.

“What is the state of your undress now?” the man asked the artist.

“I can’t say,” she replied. “You’d have to go in the other room and see for yourself.”

The man smiled at her and then left the room. The three women watched him saunter past the buffet without pause. He had the air of one who was more curious than excited. But it was a driven curiosity.

“You can rationalize it all you want,” the unidentified woman said, “but your actions show that you’re nothing but an exhibitionist at heart.”

“I don’t think so,” the artist replied. “Not in my heart. I’ve never been naked in public before and I don’t like doing it now. If I had a choice, I’d be happy to keep my clothes on.”

“You have a choice?”

“A Hobson’s choice. If I don’t complete my performance then I’ve stopped being an artist. I can’t do that.”

“Didn’t you design this so-called performance?”

“I did.”

“Then you had a choice. You chose to create a performance that required that you strip. You could have designed some other performance.”

“I didn’t begin with the idea of stripping my clothes off in public. I began with the idea of separating the body from the person and looked at a variety of different ways to do it. I couldn’t find a better way than this. It was hard to convince myself go to through with this rather than choosing a different topic but I couldn’t find any alternative. It’s art. It can’t be compromised. But I find this evening as uncomfortable as you do. Maybe more so.”

“That’s what every whore says” the woman replied. “That she doesn’t have any choice but to fuck other women’s husbands for money. It’s her parents’ fault. It’s her pimp’s fault. It’s society’s fault. Her choices are never her fault.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to make love to anyone’s husband tonight.”

The other woman shook her head and walked away without responding to that.

Marcie looked around. “There are a few men in here,” she observed. “Not all of them are glued to the television screens in the other room.”

“I’ll bet there are a few women in the television room, too,” the artist said. “It’s a pity that I can’t go in there and see for myself.”

The artists couldn’t satisfy her curiosity but Marcia could. She walked through the buffet room into the television room.

She was surprised to see that there were more women in this room than men in the other room. They couldn’t all be lesbians.

She looked at the screens. The artist had shucked her skirt. She was wearing nothing but her shoes, stockings, and panties. There was nothing particularly erotic about the panties. They were simple white lace panties that matched the now-removed bra.

Marcie realized that the underwear was not intended to be especially erotic. The only reason that the artist had worn stockings instead of pantyhose was so that she could remove them one at a time and stretch out her tediously slow strip tease that much longer.

There was a degree of sensuality in the way that the artist touched her body, constantly caressing herself, but it wasn’t explicitly sexual. Yet. Marcie wondered what she would do after she took her panties off. Would she caress herself between her legs? While Marcie watched, she stroked her lace-covered buttocks and ran her fingers over her thighs but didn’t get near her crotch.

Her husband, Howard, was still here, watching avidly. Maybe the artist was right. Maybe it was better that he stayed in here and watched this piecemeal show of anatomical bits instead of going out to the other room and trying to chat the artist’s phone number out of her.

She was more than annoyed that her husband had been given the option.

Marcie looked at the other women in the room. She was not surprised to see that most of them were paying more attention to their husbands than to the partial nudity on the screens. Smart ladies. The ones hanging out in the buffet were the ones who were taking the bigger risk.

This was no time to let a husband think that he was being ignored.

Then Marcie realized something else. No one had left. The women hanging around the buffet might think that this whole show was in bad taste – offensive, even pornographic – but no woman had tried to drag her husband away. Probably for fear that her husband would refuse to leave, make a scene, and she would lose a battle with him in public.

The artist was right. There were layers to this piece that bore examination. That didn’t mean that Marcie liked it. It only meant that she would remember it.

She stayed and waited with her husband while the artist spent the next quarter hour stripping off her shoes and stockings, one item at a time.

Other women kept drifting in to stand vigil by their husbands. There was a low cheer from the men every time a piece of clothing was discarded, but the cheers became more subdued as the proportion of women in the room increased.

That said something, too.

When the artist finally shed her panties, Marcie saw that she had not bothered to get waxed or shaved. Her bush was full and proud.

The woman on the screen held her hands apart from her body for a minute, ensuring that everyone had time to see her fully nude from every angle. Then the television screens all went dark.

Marcie and Howard wandered past the buffet into the front room. The box was still there, but the artist’s head was gone.

Only after they left, did Howard realize that he had not seen their host anywhere at the party.

His attention had been on other matters.

* * *

The Second Performance:

The invitation list for the second party was essentially the same as the first but more people came this time. The first time, almost twenty-percent of the RSVPs had been answered with regrets. This time, the regret rate was less than five percent.

Word had circulated that Jeff’s “artistic performances” were a lot more interesting than people had expected.

Nothing draws men like the prospect of seeing a nude young woman. And, if their husbands are going, the wives are wise to come along and chaperone them.

There was a good reason for having the guests wear their golden invitations while they were at the party. People would want to crash this one.

Again, there was a black box against one wall of the room. This time, instead of being neck high, the box was taller than a person. There was no head or any other body part to be seen.

There were half a dozen six-inch wide holes scattered over the sides of the box. They were blocked by black fabric, looking like places where small speakers could be mounted. Howard put his head close to one but could hear no sound.

Maybe later.

He grabbed a beer for himself and a glass of white wine for Marcie and wandered passed the buffet into the far room.

Again, there were television screens mounted on the walls. This time, though, they all showed the same image – the artist’s face. She was smiling and talking. “Hello. I hope everyone is having a good time today.”

There were a dozen people, men and women, in the room. They looked at each other, wondering if she was speaking to one of them, and if they should answer her.

“This is Jeff’s second art party,” the artist continued without waiting for anyone to answer. “I’m the artist. Most of you saw me two months ago at my first installation. I expect that a lot of you saw a lot of me.” She smiled wryly. “Today will be similar, except that this time I’m in this room and my body’s in the other one. I’m talking to you on television. I can’t see or hear you, so you shouldn’t bother trying to talk to me. I’m going to keep talking, so, just like television, you can keep listening or you can ignore me. Whatever you want. On this program, I’m going to tell you all about myself.

“I was born in Wyoming in the city of Cheyenne twenty-seven years ago last January. My father was a dentist and my mother worked for a bookkeeper. I was fifteen before I realized that my father cheated on my mother with one dental assistant after another throughout their marriage. I don’t think that he slept with every woman who worked for him, but I’m sure that he always had at least one mistress in the office. He hired women with that purpose in mind. I feel sorry for his patients because I don’t think that many of his hygienists were much good at cleaning teeth.

“When I was younger, I thought that my mother was nasty to me because she hated me. When I got older, I realized that it wasn’t about me. She was nasty because she hated my father. A lot of things that I didn’t understand when I was young, add up to a clear story now. Her boss was a jerk and she didn’t like him but I suspect that she was sleeping with him just to get revenge on my father.”

Catherine kept talking continuously, telling the most horrible stories about her childhood, beginning with her parents, telling how they belittled her and destroyed her self-esteem, and then telling about how she mistreated her siblings in retaliation.

Howard was bored. He tugged on Marcie’s hand. “Let’s get something to eat,” he said.

“Not right now,” she replied, never taking her eyes off the screen.

“You aren’t listening to these fairy tales, are you?” he asked.

She looked at him. “It’s not a fairy tale. Can’t you see? She’s telling the truth about herself. That’s the point. This is the room where she strips. Last time it was her body. This time, it’s her psyche. She’s baring her soul like no one you’ve ever heard before.”

Howard glanced about the room. Men were shuffling their feet and looking bored. Their wives were staring at the screens, barely blinking, rapt.

“I’ll see you later,” he told Marcie.

She didn’t reply, just stared at the screens.

Howard munched a bit of baked brie as he passed the buffet but he didn’t stop.

In the front room, he looked at the black box. The artist had said that her body was out here. She must be in the box but he didn’t see what difference that made. Last time you could see her head and talk to her in person. This time, she was completely hidden.

He looked again at the fabric-covered holes. They didn’t look much like speaker covers. The fabric was too dense. He put his ear close to one and could hear the artist’s faint voice but it was too muffled to make out the words. And the sound wasn’t coming from the holes; it was coming from the top where her head should be.

He touched one of the holes tentatively. The fabric moved easily to his touch. He pushed a little more, being careful not to damage anything.

His hand was slipping into a black fabric tunnel six inches across.  It felt like he was slipping his arm into a sleeve. A few inches inside, he came to a hard ring but the sleeve continued through it. When his arm was inserted past the elbow, he felt his hand slide through another stiff ring and then emerge from the sleeve, deep inside the box.

He pushed his bare hand a little further and his fingers brushed against something soft and smooth and warm. Real warm. Body temperature warm. He was touching the artist’s body.

He slid his hand upward over the skin and felt bumps. Ribs. Then he touched the swell of a naked breast. Another couple of inches and he could feel an erect nipple under his palm.

Hot damn. He was copping a feel from the artist.

He could feel her chest heaving. She had to breathe heavily to keep talking continuously.

He caressed her gently and wondered what she was saying to the camera. Was she saying that someone was feeling her up or was she droning on about her miserable childhood, confessing some new, petty little sin that carried a great, heavy weight on her conscience?

He began to squeeze the tit, not hard but firmly. Suddenly a hand covered his and gently pulled his fingers straight, then withdrew. He understood. Caressing was okay, grabbing was over the line.

He moved down over her abdomen and it twitched. Somewhere slightly below her bikini line, he hit a wall. He felt around and understood. Her crotch was covered with a shield that felt like a piece of wood. He reached around as far as he could and caressed her ass cheeks. He found a narrow wooden shield taht kept him from reaching into her butt crack.

He was allowed to caress her body to his heart’s content but not her genitals or anus.

He didn’t have to feel above her shoulders to know that there would be a wall around her neck as well. Her face had to be off limits because it had a television camera pointed at it.

When he withdrew his hand, the wooden rings attached to the sleeves kept them from inverting and coming outside the box. He could not pull them out and peer down them. Today, her body was for feeling only.

The other men in the room were watching him.

“What’s in there?” one of the men asked.

“The artist.” Howard didn’t want to share his discovery but he didn’t have any choice. Now that they had seen him put his hand inside the sleeve, they would try it too. “You can feel her in the box if you want.”

“Feel her?”

“Yes. Feel her body.”

“Is she naked?”

“She’s wearing some kind of wooden chastity belt but nothing else. Feel for yourself.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” The man began sliding his arm into one of the other sleeves.

“By the way. She doesn’t want to be grabbed. Touching is okay. Grabbing is out.”

“I can live with that.” Suddenly the other man’s eyes grew wide. “Is that what I think it is?”

Howard could tell by the angle of the man’s arm that he was feeling the woman’s chest. “It sure is.”

The other man said no more. His full attention was diverted to his hand.

Howard stepped back and looked at the box again. The half dozen holes were conveniently placed so that a person could feel every part of the woman from her feet to her neck on all sides.

Another man put a hand into a sleeve on the side of the box and began feeling her back.

The first man warned him not to grab, just rub gently.

Howard felt left out of his discovery. He knelt and put his hand in a lower hole to caress her calves. They felt strong and firm. He could feel her muscles flexing as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

Suddenly a woman’s voice asked, “What are you guys doing?”

The men looked at each other with guilty eyes. One of them, the one with the least guilty look, said, “Just touching someone’s arm.”

“Whose arm?”

“We can’t really be sure of that, can we? I mean, there’s no way to look inside the box.”

It occurred to Howard that this might not be the artist. It was certainly a woman but it could be some other woman. He doubted that. Why would she substitute another woman? To prove that all cats felt the same in the dark?

He shrugged to himself. So what did it matter? If she wanted the men to believe that it was her body and the men did believe it, then, for all practical purposes, it was her body. It wasn’t exactly Schrodinger’s Cat in the box, but it seemed to be related. In the absence of any contradictory observation, the shared belief that these men were feeling the artist’s body made that reality true for them.

Lines were forming behind the men who had their arms stuck in the holes.

Howard withdrew his arm to let someone else take his place.

His hand was still tingling with a haptic memory as he turned to walk away.

There were a handful of women in the room. They were glaring at the men as though they believed them possessed by the devil. Howard supposed that they were, even though their hands were far from idle. These men had never had busier hands.

Some of the women were standing beside their husbands in line. He heard, “That’s disgusting,” and “You touch that slut and I’ll be seeing a lawyer in the morning.”

Those men reluctantly stepped out of line; their fear of being deposed by a divorce lawyer was stronger than their desire to feel a little forbidden pulchritude.

If the artist had not been wearing her wooden chastity belt, the balance might have tipped in the other direction. And the wives would have had a lot stronger reason to hate their husbands.

What was the real harm in caressing another woman’s breast for a few seconds? It wasn’t like the artist was offering to fuck anyone’s husband.

Then Howard remembered hearing that this was the second performance out of three. What could the artist do to top this one? Maybe she would get fucked in the end.

He hoped with all his heart that he and Marcie would be invited to the third performance.

He had to go back to the television room and see what was happening to the woman’s face when every part of her body was being caressed by strange men.

The face on the screen was breathing hard but that might have been an emotional reaction to the confession that she was relating now. She had seduced her best friend’s boyfriend in high school. She hadn’t liked the boy at all. She had done it just to prove that she could. She blamed her mother for subliminally sexualizing her childhood home by having an long-term affair with her boss.

Marcie was still locked in thrall. Howard thought of a child watching his first horror movie – frightened half out of his wits but unable to turn away even for a second.

Almost every other woman here had the same expression on her face. Or worse. A number of the women were crying. Presumably they were the ones who had lived through similar situations as the artist was describing.

These women had been here from the beginning. None of them had a clue what their husbands were doing in the front room. They didn’t care. Yet.

Howard wondered if anyone would tattle to Marcie about him being the first man to feel up the artist. Later she might ask him, in an arch tone, about what he had done at the party. If she did, he wondered if it would be smart to deny having put his hand in the cookie jar.

Suddenly he saw a parallel between the guilt that the artist was feeling as she confessed to the sins of her past and the guilt that he felt now about his sin of the present.

He had no doubt that the women in this room would forgive the artist’s terrible childhood sins more easily than the lesser one that she was committing in the other room right now. Allowing their husbands to get to second base while she was distracting their wives was personal.

He spent the next hour traipsing back and forth between the front and back rooms. He couldn’t be bothered listening to the artist’s tawdry confessions nor could he be bothered standing in line to feel her up again. Been there, done that.

He was in the front room when he heard a soft clunk, followed by a man groaning in disappointment. Then another clunk and groan. And another. As men were withdrawing their arms from the sleeves, doors were falling down over the holes from the inside, blocking the next man in line from inserting his arm.

The last couple of men were reluctant to withdraw their arms, realizing what was happening, but it did no good. Howard could tell by the way that their bodies were twitching that they were thrashing around in the box and feeling nothing. The artist had simply stepped back out of their reach.

When women began streaming through the door, the last two men pulled their hands out of the sleeves and snapped to attention.

Howard heard women asking their husbands, boyfriends, and escorts what had been happening in here.

The men universally replied that nothing much had been going on. There was just a box in here. Nothing to see.

That half-truth was a base lie that would not stand scrutiny for long. Some women had come in here and seen what was happening. But those women and their husbands had almost all left early. It would take days for the truth to circulate among the rest of women.

But circulate it would. This was too juicy not to pass on.

Then Howard realized something else. He, like most of the other men in this room, would need to have sex with his wife as soon as they got home. For the older wives, at least, it would be the most passionate sex that they had experienced in some time.

When they found out why they were being asked to accept their husbands’ sudden torrid passion, they would have a new reason to hate the artist.

Once again, the guests left without seeing Jeff, their host, anywhere at his own party.

Rather rude of the man to play Gatsby with his guests.

* * *

The Third Performance:

The artist was wearing a simple white robe. Her feet were bare. She looked like a New Testament martyr.

A sexy New Testament martyr. The robe did little to hide her curves.

She was confined in a cage. Not only confined by the cage, her arms were held loosely over her head by rough iron shackles that were chained to the wall.

She wasn’t going anywhere until someone released her.

Ominously, a multi-tailed scourge was hanging on the wall next to her.

A small didactic plate attached to the bars read, “The artist is awaiting her fate. Should she be flogged, fucked, or freed? It will be your decision.”

This time, six television screens were hanging on the walls in the front room. Unlike the previous performances, the guests could see both the artist and the television screens at the same time.

Each screen showed a different picture.

When Howard and Marcie entered, he led her to the artist first. She looked beautiful. He would have liked to reach out and touch her but the cage was too big; the woman chained to the back wall was too far away for anyone to reach her. That wouldn’t have mattered because no man would dared not do that with his wife standing beside him.

Howard thought that she looked frightened. “How are you doing?” he asked.

“I’ll admit that I’m afraid.” Her voice was quivering. He couldn’t tell if it was an act or not. He looked at the whip. It looked like serious business. If she was risking being flogged with it, she had good reason to be afraid. “Please tell them to let me go. An artist needs her freedom.”

“Who should I tell?” he asked.

“You’ll have a chance to make your choice later. In about an hour.”

“Okay.”

“Thanks.” Then she added, “Please don’t change your mind.” She sounded like she was pleading with him.

“Why would I change my mind?”

“Just remember that it’s only art.”

“The flogging is only art?”

“No. Whatever my fate, flogging, fucking, or freedom, it’ll be real. Everything else is art.”

Marcie had nothing to say to the artist.

Howard didn’t know if his wife was aware that he had touched the artist when she was naked. She hadn’t said anything to him about it during the last two months.

And he wasn’t about to ask.

They drifted away to look at the television screens.

Marcie gasped. Howard was shocked.

Howard’s face was on one of the screens. Like all the other screens, the picture was split. His wide-eyed face was on one side; a picture of the artist’s breasts was on the other. The naked breasts were from the video that had been shown in the television room during the first performance. The juxtaposition made him look like he was leering at the naked breasts.

He probably had been.

He looked at the other screens hanging on the walls. One showed a woman in a red dress with an expression of hatred next to a video of the artist’s pubic triangle.

Another screen showed a man with his eyes closed in ecstasy as a hand caressed a naked breast.

Another screen showed a woman with her face contorted in anger as she confronted the artist. There was sound emanating from each screen. Howard knew that if he were close to that screen, he’d hear the woman berating the artist for being a cheap exhibitionist.

He kept watching until he saw Marcie’s face. She looked transfixed – a voyeur peeping at the other half of the screen where the artist was telling about the last time that she had given a man a blowjob. He had been her professor and, afterward, had given her a glowing letter of recommendation to Stanford.

He kept watching. In another context, these video portraits would not have looked so unflattering but when they were juxtaposed with the images of the artist on display, visually, physically, and psychologically, the faces looked lascivious, envious, angry, and hateful. Or worse.

He realized why the artist had begged him not to change his mind about freeing her. Seeing his own face again, this time next to his hand rubbing the artist’s naked ass, he wanted to maker her to pay for his embarrassment. Her pleas were forgotten. He had already changed his mind about freeing her.

Like every guest in the room, she had tricked him, set him up to be humiliated in these videos.

She deserved some punishment but did he really want to see her flogged? Or fucked by some other man?

He didn’t know what that was all about. Flogging was obvious – the whip was right there – but what about fucking? Was she going to let herself get fucked by every man in the room? That didn’t seem likely. There must be at least fifty men here.

He glanced over at the woman in the cage. She was pleading piteously for mercy from the handful of guests who were watching her instead of the screens.

The faces of the people who were looking at her now were expressing more hatred than any image on the screens. She could see that. She was in for it and she knew it.

He felt a twinge of sympathy. Maybe he would ask for her freedom like he had promised after all.

Then his face appeared on a screen for the third time. This time he looked to be in a state of rapture. His hand was caressing a naked breast. And it wasn’t Marcie’s.

He glanced at his wife. Her face was white as she stared at the same screen.

How long was it going to take for him to repair his marriage? How much recrimination would he suffer?

Artistic freedom be damned. There was no way in hell that he was going to free her until after he had taken some kind of revenge.

For an hour, the level of sound in the room was rising in pitch and volume with every new image on the screens. The purpose of the cage wasn’t to keep the artist inside; it was to keep the mob from getting to her and tearing her asunder.

She was the Christian in the Coliseum and the guests were the lions, ready to devour her.

The television screens went black. The lights in the room dimmed. The roar of the crowd abated as spotlights illuminated their host, present at last. Jeff was standing on a low dais opposite the caged artist.

“Friends, guests, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation in these artistic performances.” He was miked; his voice was amplified and routed through the speakers by the television screens. “I appreciate–”

A voice interrupted him. “I’m going to sue you. You had no right to invade our privacy and secretly videotape us. And then showing those tapes in public like this? We’re going to bankrupt you.”

The crowd roared its agreement with the man’s sentiment.

Jeff raised his hands and waited for silence. When he could speak again, he said, “I understand what you’re saying, but you are wrong on several counts.”

The crowd roared again and again he had to wait for the noise to subside.

“First, this is not a private venue. Everything that you see on these screens was something that happened in public. In fact, you, the people who are looking at the screens right now are the very people who saw exactly the same things in person in these same rooms two and four months ago.”

The crowd fell silent.

“Second, you’ve all agreed to this, each and every one of you.”

The crowd roared again.

“It’s right there on the badges that you are wearing about your necks. Every invitation says in plain English that these are interactive artistic performances and that the performances would be recorded in audio and video media. Furthermore, your badges say that you agree to the recording by attending and wearing those badges.”

A woman yelled out, “That meant the artist would be recorded, not the audience.”

The crowd added a chorus of agreement.

“The badges clearly say that it’s an interactive performance. Interactive means that your interactions with the artist are part of the performance.”

“Legal mumbo jumbo,” some man shouted.

“My lawyers certainly agree with the legal part. You can be sure that I had them look at the language on those badges with big magnifying glasses to make sure that it would stand up in court.”

“But you hid the cameras,” someone else cried out.

“No. They’re right there in the frames of the television screens,” Jeff said. “They make cameras small these days, but not invisible.”

Howard looked around at the screens. It took him a moment to realize that the extensions that he had taken for extra control knobs were little lenses. They were sitting in plain sight, but they didn’t look like cameras. At lest not the kind of cameras that he would have expected.

He wondered for a moment how the artist managed to co-ordinate the images on the screens. She would have had to recognize a hundred faces on the videos. Then the obvious answer occurred to him. The badges contained radio frequency ID chips that were recognized whenever they were near a television screen and the image was indexed in a computer somewhere.

The crowd muttered their angry disbelief.

Jeff had to wait for the crowd to subside before he could speak again. “Let me assure you of one thing. These recordings will not be made public, will not be broadcast or shown to anyone that you know or are likely to meet, and will not be used for any commercial purpose. You will not be embarrassed outside this room.”

“What’s going to happen to the recordings?” a woman asked.

“First, they will be shown in their entirety to the artist’s thesis committee. She will be granted a master’s degree in fine arts if her performances have sufficient artistic merit. After her committee has had a chance to judge their artistic merit, they will be re-edited to remove your faces. Catherine assures me that she can keep a documentary record of her performance without including any recognizable images of any of you. It won’t have the full impact of the actual performance, but will serve to demonstrate the concept of these performances.

“Second, I will not keep any copies of the full performance. She has convinced me that the art is the actual live performance, not in the video of it. I will be satisfied with a copy of the documentary record that she is going to create for herself. Like I said, your faces will not be part of the documentary record.

“Third, if any of you want to have a copy of the videos that have your own faces in them, she has agreed to give them to you. Of course, they will be edited so that only your own face is in your video and there are no other audience members’ faces visible. Personally, I don’t recommend it. As you can see, the videos are not flattering and the only way that you can be certain that they will not be seen if they do not exist in the first place.”

“I’m still going to sue you,” the first man shouted again.

“Ask your lawyer to get in touch with my lawyers. They’ve already prepared an outline of our legal position. After your lawyers have read it, I seriously doubt that they will advise you to proceed with the suit. Especially if it means that we have to show every bit of these videos in open court as part of our defense.

“In any event, let us save the bickering until another day and get on with condemning our artist, Catherine, to her fate. I’m sure that she’s anxious to know what is going to happen to her.

“Before I explain the procedure, please allow me to make a brief defense on her behalf. You all know that it feels painful to be exposed in public. Please do not forget that Catherine has exposed herself far more extensively and profoundly than you. I’ve come to know her over these past few months. She may be a performer but she’s not an exhibitionist. If you listened to what she told you about herself in her last performance, you heard her tell you how shy and uncertain she feels about her body. She has never been nude in public before and got no joy from having to expose her every physical fault to your view. And when she told you every shameful detail about herself and her family, she was telling you the honest truth. No one has ever told their therapist as much about themselves in the confines of his office as she revealed to you. She knew that she would be embarrassing many of you but she also knew that she would be subjecting herself to a hundred times more public humiliation.

“Please show her some mercy. She deserves it more than you think.”

The crowd was muttering. Howard could hear unmollified anger in their tone. He looked at the woman in the cage. She heard the same anger and was already hanging her head in defeat.

Jeff spoke again. “Catherine faces one of three possible fates. You will go into the back room and vote by dropping your badge into one of three slots. If you think that the artist must suffer for her art, you will slip your badge into the slot marked with the image of the whip. If you think that the artist is no more than a whore, pandering to your base instincts, you will slip your badge into the slot marked with the image of the phallus. If you think that she deserves artistic freedom, you will slip your badge into the slot marked with the key.

“If the majority of the votes are cast for flogging, then one of you who voted for it will be chosen to administer it. We will draw a badge at random. If the owner of the badge declines to flog her then we will draw another badge, and keep drawing them until we have a volunteer. If all of you decline, then I will administer the flogging myself.

“She will receive, on her bare back, ten strokes of the cat o’ nine tails that you see hanging beside her. I can assure you that each lash will cause severe pain. She has assured me that the whip is soft enough that it will not break her skin or cause permanent scarring so there is no need to hold back when you flog her, even if you are a strong man.”

The crowd was silent. Everyone could hear the woman in the cage whimper at these last words.

“If the majority of the votes are cast for fucking, then the same procedure will be used to select a man to have sex with her. Only men are eligible for this duty; she is not bisexual. We will continue to draw men’s badges until some man agrees to have sex with her. If no one agrees, and I certainly understand if the married men in the room prefer to remain faithful to their wives, then Marty has agreed to do it with her. He is single and willing. The sex will take place in private in the guest bedroom. There will be no need to force Catherine; she has agreed to cooperate fully with whichever man wins her favors. She will only agree to normal sex and the condom that will be provided must be used.” He smiled and added, “Even by you, Marty, if you’re the lucky winner by default.

“Finally, if the preference of the majority is for her to go free, then she will be released immediately and escorted directly home.

“Dear guests, you may vote in the back room at your convenience. There’s no need to rush to a decision, we will not close the voting or tally the votes for another hour.

“If anyone wishes to discuss his or her decision with Catherine before voting, she is eager to plead her case.”

Howard looked at Marcie. She looked resolute.

“Want to talk to her?” he asked.

“No need,” she replied grimly. “There’s nothing that she can say that I want to hear.”

Marcie began chatting to a woman beside her.

Howard joined the crowd to listen to what the artist had to say for herself.

“Would you rather be flogged or fucked?” a man asked.

“I’d rather be freed,” she replied. She glanced at the flogger hanging next to her.

“What makes you think that you deserve to be freed without being punished for what you did to us?”

She looked at the woman who spoke. “I promised Jeff that I would give his guests a significant life experience. I tried to design experiences that you have never had before and will never have anywhere else. I wasn’t trying to give you bad experiences, just honest ones. If you found the experience bad, then you have to ask yourself if it was you or me who made it like that. You always had more freedom in these rooms than I did.”

“You designed this, didn’t you?” another woman said, practically snarling. “You could have done anything but you chose to distract us in the back room while you encouraged our husbands to feel you up in here. You’re going to pay for that.”

“I encouraged nothing. I forced no one to do anything. I gave you free choices. You chose to listen to my confessions while your husbands chose to caress a bit of skin. You could have chosen to take your husbands home and talk to them while they caressed you. How many of you have let your husbands look at you and caress you like that, even once, in the last two months? Even after you saw what they wanted. Now you blame me because not one of you did as much for your own husbands as I did?”

Howard walked away. The artist was doomed if she thought that these women would take responsibility for their own choices. They were going to make her suffer for their failings. It was an old story, often told.

But maybe that was the artist’s final lesson.

For the first time, he noticed a guest walking by without a badge. Then, a couple minutes later, another and then another. People were giving up their badges, sliding them into slots in the back room to vote on the artist’s fate.

Is that what people always do? Give up their individual identities when they cast a vote or make a group decision?

He didn’t see Marcie in the front room so he walked to the back room. When he passed the buffet, he noticed that it was barely touched. The party guests had something more interesting than food to hold their attention tonight.

“Vote for sex,” a man said as he entered the room. “One lucky sap will get to do her but only if enough of us vote for it.”

The man had a point. Howard had been fantasizing about the artist’s body more than he cared to admit. Seeing her nude image on the television screens four months ago had been fine but that was nothing compared to actually feeling her skin under his fingers two months ago. If every man at the party voted for fucking and the women were split between flogging and freedom, then he’d have a two percent chance of being the lucky guy tonight. In less than an hour he could be in bed with a beautiful, willing, twenty-seven year old blonde.

And, in less than a week, he’d be receiving divorce papers from Marcie.

Beautiful as the artist was, he wouldn’t trade Marcie for her, not even if the artist agreed to marry him and have his babies. He did love his wife.

It occurred to him that he could ask Marcie for permission. This was an once-in-a-lifetime chance that was never going to happen again. He might convince her to give him this as a treasured gift. Especially since he would be forever grateful and there was a ninety-eight percent chance that he wouldn’t win the lottery anyway.

He would never dare ask Marcie for such a thing, but other men here might. And some wives who were more generous and open-minded than Marcie might give their husbands their indulgences.

The fucking option might be a lot more popular than he first imagined.

He smiled at the horny man and said, “I’ll think about it.” And he did think about it. Even if he won the chance to fuck her and declined, his vote would have contributed to making some other man happy, in the default case, his wife’s boss. And he would help save the artist from a scourging with that evil-looking whip. That was worth something, too.

Another man caught his eye. “You know what I heard?” the man said. “I heard that if a married man wins the chance to fuck her and can’t do it because his wife is here, the artist is going to get his name and arrange meet him in a hotel room in secret next week. Jeff couldn’t tell everyone that in front of our wives, but that’s what the real deal is. Jeff will even pay for the room. You can ask him yourself if you don’t believe me. He’s around here somewhere.”

Howard heard the same story from several other men before he got to the voting table. It made sense that there had to be some way for the sex option to be attractive to all the men, not just the few single guys who were here.

He wondered if the artist would find fucking a stranger or two more palatable than getting flogged. Probably. A lot of women didn’t mind a bit of casual, no-strings-attached sex. And the men here were basically good guys. Jeff didn’t invite any losers to his parties.

If Howard had a one-time, no-strings-attached, purely physical bit of fun, would it really hurt Marcie if she never knew?

Howard fingered his badge. He had a hard decision to make.

The voting process was only semi-private. There was a small table on a platform. The table had a foot-high shield on three sides to keep anyone from seeing the badge being slipped into one of the three slots.

No one could see the vote, but everyone could see the voter’s face as he made his decision.

Howard mounted the platform and faced the crowd with his badge in his hand. He looked down at the three slots. As promised, there was a picture of the multi-tailed whip above the first, a picture of a dildo above the next, and a picture of an antique key above the last. Just to ensure that there would be no misunderstanding, the words, “Flog Her”, “Fuck Her”, and “Free Her” were printed below the three slots.

Howard fingered his badge for a long time, still trying to decide. Sex or violence? Each had its merits. Either would be entertaining.

After he finally made his decision, he went off in search of Marcie. She was in the front room keeping company with two other women. All were looking at the artist chained in her cage but no one was talking to her.

Howard had never before seen anyone look so defeated.

He stood at the bars and looked toward the crowd. No one in the room was wearing a badge any longer.

The artist’s fate was decided. There was nothing that she or anyone else could do but wait for the decision to be revealed.

Then the lights dimmed again. Spotlights illuminated the dais as Jeff mounted it. There were three burly men standing beside him. One of them carried an opaque plastic container in his hands.

“Catherine,” he said, “we have counted the votes. Your audience has decided your fate.”

Another spotlight snapped on to illuminate the artist in her chains. This single light was harsh and cast the white-robed figure in sharp, uncompromising light and shadow, a living chiaroscuro.

All of the screens in the room came to life, each showing a live close-up of the artist’s face from a slightly different angle.

She raised her head to look across the audience at Jeff and waited.

“I’m sorry to inform you that only eighteen people voted to free you. Less than one-fifth of the people in this room believe in artistic freedom.”

Catherine moaned and hung her head again.

“One third of the voters, thirty-three votes, wanted to see you fucked.” He paused, and then said, “That leaves forty-eight votes for flogging.” His voice was as grave as an undertaker’s. “Almost half of your audience wants to see you suffer for your art. Your fate is to be punished with ten lashes of the cat o’ nine tails.”

Howard turned to look at Catherine directly. Her lip was trembling and tears were welling in her eyes. He wondered if she were reacting more to the prospect of imminent suffering or to the betrayal by the people that she had tried to serve with her art.

What other outcome could she have expected? She had given her body over for the enjoyment of the men in this room. Those were the husbands of women who were older and less attractive than her. She had set herself in competition with the women who were deciding her fate. Of course they were going to want to see her punished.

He thought about the vote count. That number could have been reached by the women’s votes alone, but he doubted that. Some of the women here must have wanted to free her, if just to get her out of sight and mind as quickly as possible.

To get forty-eight votes, some of the men must have wanted to see her flogged as well. He wondered if any woman had voted to see her fucked.

Then her realized that the voters’ faces were publicly visible when their badges were slid into the slots. They were fair game when tonight’s performance would be included in the documentary video. The artist would know who voted for which fate when she viewed the videos from tonight. And anyone else who saw the final video would see the expressions on peoples’ faces when they made their decision.

“The next item of business is to choose who will do the whipping.” Jeff took the plastic container from the man beside him and held it aloft. “The badges of all the people who voted for flogging are in this bucket.” He reached his hand into the container and stirred it around for a minute, keeping his eyes averted. “I need a volunteer to choose a badge.” He looked at the people standing nearest to him. “Holly, if you would be so kind?” He held the bucket above the eye level of one of those women.

She reached over and picked out the first badge she felt.

“Marcie,” he read from the badge. “Where’s Marcie?”

The room lights were turned on again.

Howard saw his wife raise her hand.

“Will you flog Catherine for us?”

“Gladly,” she shouted.

Howard was shocked by his wife’s gleeful enthusiasm. Was this the woman that had shared his life, home, and bed for seven years? Who was she?

“We have our volunteer.” Jeff gestured to the man who had held the bucket. “Morris, will you please assist Marcie.”

The crowd watched silently as Morris approached Marcie and said, “Please come with me, ma’am.” He led her to the side of the cage where he unlocked the door with a key from his pocket. He stepped in only far enough to remove the multi-tailed whip from its hook on the wall next to the chained woman.

Catherine, her hands still chained loosely over her head, watched the proceedings with a horror in her eyes. “Please have mercy on me,” she whispered, her soft voice carrying clearly across the heads of the silent multitude.

Morris ignored her and said to Marcie, “This way, ma’am.”

He led Howard’s wife out of the room.

“Morris will instruct Marcie in the effective use of the flogger,” Jeff said. “She will learn how to cause the most intense pain possible with the instrument.”

All eyes swiveled back to look at him.

“Jack and Bill, will you please prepare Catherine to receive her punishment.”

The other two assistants who were standing beside Jeff walked to the open cage. The crowd parted for them as they had for Morris and Marcie.

“People,” Jeff said, “please step away from the cage. Step all the way back to the walls. When Marcie returns, she will need a lot of space to swing her whip.”

The crowd began shuffling backwards but their eyes remained glued on the stricken woman in the cage.

One of the men unlocked the padlock that was fastening Catherine’s shackles to the wall. Each iron wristband was attached to a separate piece of chain so that, when she lowered her arms, one of the men could hold one chain attached to one wrist and the other man hold the other.

They led her from the cage, pulling her arms before her.

She followed silently with her head bowed, appearing too fearful to resist. But when the trio reached to front of the cage, she raised her head to the audience and said, “I never thought that so many of you would want to treat me so cruelly. Never.”

The two men turned her away from the audience and raised the chains to lock her wrists to the railing that connected the tops of the bars.

With her bare feet flat on the floor, her arms were stretched akimbo, pulled wide, slightly above her head. She looked as though she were being crucified.

One of the men untied a bow at each shoulder of her robe and a large panel dropped open, leaving bare the entire width of the upper part of her back from her shoulders to her waist. Then he pulled her shoulder-length blonde hair into a ponytail and doubled it over with an elastic band so that it was held out of the way.

She rested her forehead against the bars and waited. With her arms stretched wide, she looked uncomfortable.

The crowd shuffled impatiently for a few minutes. Finally, Marcie and Morris returned. Marcie looked at ease holding the whip casually as she walked across the floor. Morris positioned her beside Catherine, an arm’s length away.

“Step back, please, people,” Jeff said again. “We don’t want anyone to feel the sting of the whip but Catherine. Give Marcie plenty of room.”

Howard noticed that the various television monitors now showed Catherine’s face, her back, and Marcie’s face and upper body.

“Administer the first stroke whenever you are ready, Marcie,” Jeff said.

Catherine’s back tensed in anticipation of the lash. Her hands grabbed the chains above the iron wristbands to balance herself against the force of the coming blow.

Howard marveled at the intricate interplay of muscles in her back. He had never before paid much attention to a woman’s back. He had thought of it as nothing but a flat, blank space of skin. Now he studied it, seeing a complex erotic landscape. That single spotlight casting stark shadows across the structure of shoulder blades, ribs, and vertebrae that were overlaid with an intricate ramification of large and small muscles that twitched and quivered in tension.

Two months ago, in this same room, Howard had run his hand across that beautiful expanse. His palm tingled anew with the sensual memory of those precious moments.

Then the perfect beauty of Catherine’s form was blasted by an explosion of nine leather thongs that thrashed her flesh.

Marcie, his beloved Marcie, had laid a powerful, vicious, perfect stroke of the cat onto the poor woman. Following her recent instruction, she laid all nine tails full and flat across the back from one side to the other. As she had swung her arm, she had twisted her body, making certain that she was throwing her full weight behind the stroke. And she had followed through, moving past the point of impact to ensure that the whip was still accelerating when it struck tender flesh.

Jeff had promised that Marcie would be taught how to ensure that the scourge delivered the maximum degree of pain. He had kept his promise.

The impact of leather against skin echoed in the room like a single mighty handclap.

As the agony radiated through Catherine’s body, her arms and calves convulsed, pulling her heels clear of the floor for a long moment.

Then the wave of pain roared up her spinal column and flooded her consciousness with a tsunami of agony. The moment of absolute silence following the impact was broken by a wail as loud and pure as a siren.

Television screens magnified the artist’s face, contorted by shock and horror, from three angles. Her mouth was open wide; her lips drawn back to expose white teeth and her eyes screwed shut.

Another screen showed her back, now striped in white and red – white stripes where the force of the lash had driven the blood from the capillaries and red stripes on either side where that blood had been driven. As Howard watched, the white lines began to turn pink and then darker red as the blood flowed back into the network of tiny vessels, now damaged under the skin.

Her back heaved and rolled as the woman drew a great gasp of air into her lungs and wailed again.

Another screen showed Marcie’s face, aglow with satisfaction, grinning, her eyes greedily searching out every nuance of suffering expressed by the woman chained in front of her.

The whole scene repulsed Howard but he was powerless to leave. His horror chained him to the spot as effectively as the iron chains that held Catherine. Everywhere he looked, on every wall, he was bombarded by images of the effects of the first lash.

The first lash.

There were nine lashes left.

When Jeff had said that Catherine was to receive ten strokes of the cat ‘o nine tails, Howard had judged that to be not so many. Only ten. Not a dozen or twenty or a hundred. Only ten.

Now he thought that ten was nine strokes too many. One stroke alone was a terrible enough punishment. No one should have to suffer more than one stroke of a cat o’ nine tails.

Catherine’s wails subsided into gasps and sobs. Her red-striped back relaxed and her hands released the chains.

“One,” Jeff intoned from his dais.

Catherine grabbed her chains again and her body tensed until her back was rigid.

Marcie raised her cat back and wide of her body, then swung again, twisting her body and bringing her arm through in a second heavy stroke.

Leather slapped into flesh already bruised and tender from the first lash.

Catherine howled again as her back blossomed with a new lattice of white stripes of agony.

Again, Jeff waited patiently, giving Catherine ample time to feel the effects of the lashes as fully as possible. Only when her howls had again subsided to sobs and her body slumped in its iron bonds, did he say, “Two.”

His count gave Marcie permission to administer the third blow, delivered with all the strength that she could muster.

It took longer for Catherine’s shrieks to subside into pathetic mewling this time. Three strokes of nine tails meant that she was already suffering under the cumulative impact of twenty-seven individual lashes. And there were still seven strokes, sixty-three lashes to be laid on that poor, tortured patch of flesh.

Catherine was in hell and Marcie was grinning like the devil herself.

“That’s three,” Jeff announced.

Howard quailed at the report of the fourth lash and the horrible scream that it elicited.

He told himself that it was better that Marcie be delivering these blows than some man who had twice her upper body strength. Then he looked at his wife’s face, grinning in triumph after every stroke and thought again. A man would show some mercy. His will to inflict pain would be eroded by the woman’s piteous screams and he would have been pulling his blows after the second stroke.

Catherine’s howls only encouraged Marcie to strike harder because they confirmed that she was hitting the mark precisely and effectively. Marcie had always taken pride in doing everything as well as she could.

“Four.”

Marcie’s fifth blow landed in the same place as the first four, on that broad patch of skin and shallow muscle that must, by now, be bruised to the bones below.

Catherine’s scream was ragged, her voice growing hoarse as her vocal cords were suffering such abuse that they were weakening under the strain.

The delicate hands that gripped the chains above the iron shackles were studded with bone white knuckles under the tightly-stretched skin. She was not gripping only to take the weight from the iron wristbands, she was trying to squeeze her agony into the heavy metal.

She was half way to the end of her punishment but Howard feared that the second five would be worse than the first five. The damage to her back was cumulative, every stroke added more pain on top of the earlier pain.

Catherine was babbling now, pleading for mercy, asking that her torture be stopped, begging for release.

“Five,” Jeff said and Marcie raised the cat for her sixth blow.

Howard could close his eyes but he could not shut his ears to the terrible thud.

Catherine no longer howled but gibbered in her agony. She would have been begging for mercy if she could form the words, but her mind was so consumed by her pain that she could utter only disorganized syllables. The only recognizable word was the single syllable, “No!” embedded over and over in her stream of babble.

“Six.”

Surely by now, Marcie’s arm must be tiring but her seventh stroke gave no evidence of flagging.

Catherine’s gibbering was now reduced to ragged gasps for breath, her back heaving spasmodically.

This was more than any could have imagined when they were making their decision at the voting table.

Howard looked at the faces around him. Many of the men and a few of the women showed the same look of sick repulsion that he felt. But so many of the women had a feral look of joy – something that you would expect to see on a hyena as it tore into the corpse of a freshly-killed gazelle.

The worst, though, was the lust on the faces of a few of the men. Howard could understand the erotic power of a woman was submitting to a man, offering to give him any satisfaction that he desired. He could even appreciate that that submission could be obtained with the threat or reality of pain. But for a man to love the torture itself, to revel at the sight and sound of suffering, to wish to see the pain increased beyond human endurance without the possibility of any subsequent sexual act? That he could not fathom.

He wondered how many sociopaths walked past him on the street and in the office every day – men and women who were incapable of sharing in the suffering of another human being, but only knew pain if they felt it directly on their own flesh.

“That’s seven.”

He watched Marcia’s face as she delivered her eighth stroke with all the might that she could muster and wondered if she was one of those sociopaths.

As the beaten woman wept in agony, he studied his wife’s face hoping to see some flicker of humanity, however slight and brief, soften her features.

He saw only a grin so fierce that it was barely distinguishable from a snarl.

“Eight.”

Her ninth blow was delivered with as much vigor as any of the previous eight.

Catherine’s back should have been torn to shreds by the nine times nine individual lashes that it had endured.

Howard expected to see red blood cast across the audience and white bone showing where the flesh had been flayed away.

There was none.

The bruising would be terrible, but the woman’s delicate skin was intact. Not a drop of blood could be seen seeping from any break in that ravaged, burgundy fleshscape.

As he listened to the tortured woman beg for mercy, her soft, rapid words barely coherent, he envied the sociopaths in the room who felt nothing, shared none of her pain.

“Nine. Last stroke,” Jeff announced.

“Please,” Catherine whimpered in a tear-soaked voice.

A miracle.

Marcie flicked the lash casually against Catherine’s back in a dismissive gesture that barely brushed the tails against her skin. “There’s your mercy,” she said. “That’s more mercy than you showed any of us.” She dropped the scourge to the floor.

“Thank-you,” Catherine sobbed, softly.

“You won’t be throwing yourself on your back to service our husbands for a while,” Marcie sneered. “They don’t make a mattress soft enough.”

Catherine had neither will nor strength to answer; she slumped weakly against the bars of her former cage and let her hands dangle in their shackles.

Her job successfully completed, Marcie turned away from her handiwork, scanning the room for her husband.

Howard felt huge relief, not only because the torture was over, but because his dear, dear wife had shown a measure of humanity in the end. He could love her for that gesture.

“Ten,” Jeff announced.

The crowd applauded spontaneously. For Marcie? For Catherine? In thanks for the entertainment? Who could know why? It simply seemed appropriate to applaud at the end of the show.

During the applause, the two men, Jack and Bill if that were their real names, unlocked Catherine’s wrists from their shackles and led her toward the exit door. They had to hold her up by her arms and guide her steps after her ordeal.

She sobbed piteously. Her face was slick with tears.

She wasn’t taking any curtain calls after this performance.

Everyone began gathering their things and streaming out of the house as soon as the artist had left the room. The party was over.

Howard was subdued as he escorted Marcie back to the car.

“I voted to flog her,” Marcie said.

Howard shrugged. As soon as Marcie’s name had been drawn from the container, everyone at the party had known how she had voted.

“How did you vote?” she asked.

He fingered the badge that was in his pocket. “I couldn’t decide. I abstained.”

Howard suspected that he was the only person at the party who had not put his badge into one of the slots.

“Coward,” Marcie said and poked him playfully in the arm. “I knew that you wouldn’t vote to fuck her so I expected you to vote to free her.”

Howard wished that he had. It wouldn’t have made a difference to the outcome but it would have meant something to him.

* * *

After the Ordeal:

“What happened?” Jeff asked as Catherine took the seat across the table from him.

“The committee passed me,” she said with a grin. “With distinction. The external examiner said that it was the most fascinating glimpse into the human soul that he had ever seen. I think that he was particularly impressed with the montage of people’s faces as they voted on my fate and then witnessed my flogging. It’s a pity that the audience couldn’t have had a chance to see themselves voting. It was the most illuminating sequence of all. Such a combination of lust and anger followed by some genuine remorse.”

“I’ll have to see it some time.”

“I’ll show it to you.”

He looked at her with a twinkle in his eye. “You’re not going to erase any of those videos like you promised, are you?”

“It’s art. And it cost me a lot. But I’ll never show the recordings to anyone so it will be the same as if they were erased.”

“If they’re never observed then they don’t exist?”

“Something like that. The originals need to be archived. The artist has a duty to preserve her art. You’d be amazed by the amount of new media artwork that is lost to changes in technology every year. Almost all the art done with emerging technologies in the eighties will never be seen again.”

“Whatever. We need to celebrate your success. You’ve earned your Masters in Fine Art. That deserves champagne.” Jeff waved to a passing waiter.

Catherine laughed brightly. “You think that everything deserves champagne.”

“I think that you and I deserve champagne whenever we want.”

“I think that I deserve it for taking that flogging. God. If I’d known how bad that was going to hurt, I never would have done it. I’m no masochist. The only reason that I put it there was that I thought that the audience would shy away from anything so cruel. I expected most of them vote to let me go. The flogging option was supposed to be a dramatic gesture not a torture that would be administered on my poor back.”

“Surely you didn’t think that anyone would just let you walk away after you’d embarrassed them in front of their friends.”

“I guess I was naive. I didn’t think that they’d feel that humiliated. I was just showing them what everyone had already seen when they looked at each other. It was supposed to be honest, not cruel.”

“I was afraid that that woman was going to strip all the flesh off you. She really laid into you.”

“She really did, didn’t she?” Catherine looked rueful. “You can thank Morris for protecting me from disfigurement. He’s known in the local S and M community as an expert with whips. The flogger was soft and light with broad round lashes that wouldn’t cut easily. The nine tails distributed the force so that no single lash hit too hard. Morris warned me that all those tails would decrease the damage but increase the pain. More important, though, he showed that woman how to use the flogger to hurt as much as possible but not cut. If she’d flicked the tips against me, she would have broken the skin but, by laying the lash flat across my whole back, she distributed the force. Morris had her practice on a punching bag until she got it right. He told her that it would hurt more that way. He was telling the truth about that. It was as agonizing as it looked. I thought I was going to die from the pain alone. He also told her that he would stop the flogging at the first sign of blood. That gave her a big incentive to do it the way he said.”

“The crowd would have felt cheated if he’d stopped the flogging after you’d only taken a couple of lashes.”

“No. Morris would have taken the flogger away and administered the remaining strokes himself. That would have been a mercy. When I researched this piece, I went to a club with Morris and watched him work. He can make it look like he’s beating someone half to death but be inflicting a lot less pain than that woman was doing. By her third stroke, I was praying that she would break the skin so that Morris would take over. You saw my back. It was a mass of bruises for weeks afterwards. I had to learn to sleep on my stomach.”

“I guess you would have preferred to be fucked by one of the men than to be flogged.”

“That I’d rather get loved than beaten? Surely that doesn’t surprise you.”

“Not a bit,” he grinned. “I know how much you like fucking with men.”

“I like fucking with you,” she said as she reached across the table to stroke his face.

He patted her hand. “We’ve got one other bit of business that I want to get out of the way this weekend.”

“What’s that?”

“I want you to help me find a painting for my living room.” He grinned. “I’ve come to appreciate your taste in art.”