THE JULIETTE SOCIETY 1 page

Sasha Grey

The Juliette Society

Sasha Grey

THE JULIETTE SOCIETY

Before we go any further, let’s get this out of the way.

I want you to do three things for me.

One.

Do not be offended by anything you read beyond this point.

Two.

Leave your inhibitions at the door.

Three, and most importantly.

Everything you see and hear from now on must remain between us.

OK. Now let’s get down to the nitty‑gritty.

If I told you that a secret club exists whose members are drawn only from the most powerful people in society: the bankers, the super‑rich, media moguls, CEOs, lawyers, law enforcement, arms dealers, decorated military personnel, politicians, government officials and even distinguished clergy from the Catholic Church – would you believe me?

I’m not talking about the Illuminati. Or the Bilderberg Group, or Bohemian Grove, or any of those corny plot devices used to advance the commercial agendas of disingenuous conspiracy nut jobs.

No. On the face of it, this club is a lot more innocent.

On the face of it.

But not underneath.

This club, it meets up irregularly, at a secret location. Sometimes remote and sometimes hidden in plain sight. But never the same place twice. Usually not even in the same time zone.

And at these meetings, these people… let’s not beat around the bush, let’s call them what they are, the Masters of the Universe. Or the Executive Branch of the Known Solar System. So these people, the Executives, they use these private gatherings as much‑needed down time from the important and stressful business of fucking the world up even more than it is already and dreaming up ever more sadistic and devious ways to torture, enslave and impoverish the population.

And what do they do on their off days, when they want to relax?

It should be obvious.

They fuck.

I can tell you’re not convinced. Let me put it like this. Have you ever met a garage mechanic who doesn’t have a thing for cars? A professional photographer who never takes a shot unless the studio lights are on. A baker who doesn’t eat cakes.

So these people, the Executives, and let’s not mince words again, are professional fuckers.

They will fuck you to get one over on you. They will fuck you over to get to the top. They will fuck you out of your money, your freedom, and your time. And they’ll continue fucking you until you’re six feet deep and in the grave. And then some.

So what do they do when they’re not doing that? Naturally…

The other thing you need to know is this. Powerful people are like celebrities. They like to hang out together. All the time. They’ll tell you till they’re blue in the face that it’s because no one else understands what it’s like to be them other than people like them. The truth is they just don’t want to mingle with the lower echelons, the hoi polloi, the uncouth and unwashed who take particular pleasure in witnessing the downfall of the rich and powerful by the one thing that always, without fail, stops them dead in their tracks: sex.

So these people, the Executives, the professional fuckers, they’ve worked out how to have all the sex they want, and indulge their most wild and debauched sexual fantasies, without the scandal… they do it behind closed doors. And all together. In secret.

Henry Kissinger once said that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. By that time, he’d been creeping around the corridors of power long enough that he probably knew exactly what he was talking about. This place is the proof.

They call it the Juliette Society.

Go ahead. Google it. You won’t find anything about it. Absolutely nothing. It’s that secret. But just so you’re not completely in the dark, a little background and a little history.

The Juliette this society is named for is one of two characters – sisters, the other’s called Justine – conceived (if that’s the right word) by the Marquis de Sade, the 18th‑century French nobleman, libertine, author and revolutionary whose sexual adventures so outraged the noblesse oblige of the French aristocracy that he was locked up in the Bastille for obscenity. Which, in retrospect, was a really bad move because, sitting there in his cell, with nothing better to do than jerk off day and night, the Marquis was stimulated to create even more and greater obscenities. Just to prove a point.

During his incarceration he would write the greatest work of erotic literature the world has ever known. The 120 Days of Sodom . The only book ever written that outdoes the Bible for sexual perversion and violence. And almost as long. It was the Marquis, of course, who shouted out of the window of his cell in the Bastille to the crowds below that they should storm the place and so, inadvertently, started the French Revolution.

But back to Juliette. She’s the lesser‑known of the two sisters. Not because she’s the quiet one. Oh no, far from it. See, Justine is a bit of a drag and a prude, a compulsive attention‑seeker who plays the victim till you’re more than sick of her. She’s like one of those celebrities who harp on about the disease of drug and sex addiction, tirelessly promoting their virtue to the public by appearing on every rehab reality series going.

And Juliette? Juliette is absolutely unrepentant in her lust for sex and murder, and any carnal delight that she hasn’t yet tasted. She fucks and kills and kills and fucks, and sometimes does both at the same time. And always gets away with it and never has to pay a price for her indiscretions or her crimes.

Maybe now you start to get my drift. Maybe now you understand why this secret society, the Juliette Society, might not be as entirely innocent as it seems.

And if I told you that I’d managed to penetrate, pardon my French, the inner circle of this club, would you believe me?

It’s not as if I belong there. I’m a full‑time third‑year college student. I major in film. I’m no one special. I’m a regular girl with all the same regular needs and desires in life as everybody else.

Love. Security. Happiness.

And fun, I love to have fun. I like to dress well and look good but I don’t have an expensive taste in clothes. I drive a small hand‑me‑down Honda hatchback that my parents gave me for my eighteenth birthday and always seems to have random crap lying on the back seat that I never find time to fully clear out. I have friends who I’ve outgrown and find it hard to relate to any more and others who have stayed the course.

And, at this point, I’m not going to come across like such a smart‑ass anymore. Now I’m going to start sounding all homey and humble. Because, in truth, the closest I had ever come to the seat of power was in my head.

I have this recurring sexual fantasy. No, it’s not about fucking an old billionaire in his private jet over Saint‑Tropez at thirty‑five thousand feet. I can’t think of anything that would gross me out more. My fantasy, it’s much more down to earth – more mundane and intimate than that.

A few times a week I’ll go to pick up my boyfriend after work and sometimes, when he’s there late and ends up being the last one to lock up, I fantasize about fooling around a bit with him in his boss’s office – but we’ve never actually done it. Still, a girl can dream, can’t she?

His boss is a senator. Or rather, a successful lawyer and would‑be senator. And Jack, my boyfriend, is a staffer in his campaign office. As well as being an economics major. Which doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for us to get together because, by the time his day is finished, he’s usually so beat that he falls asleep on the couch almost the second he’s kicked off his shoes. Mornings he’s up early again for class and there usually isn’t even time for a quickie. And you know what they say about Jack and work and no play.

So I fantasize about playing my part as the dutiful girlfriend and I have this all planned out. I’ll dress for the occasion. Stockings and heels with my favorite double‑breasted khaki trench coat, just like the one Anna Karina wears in Godard’s Made in U.S.A . And underneath, some lingerie; maybe a sheer black bra and panties and a matching garter belt and suspenders. Or I’ll go topless and wear knee‑high white stockings and these cute little pink polka dot panties I have that seem to drive him wild. Or else just heels and bare legs with nothing else but a slinky cream silk slip or a chiffon babydoll. But always a smear of ruby‑red lipstick. Got to have the red lipstick. A girl’s best friend.

The campaign office is in a storefront downtown. There are windows on all sides and the lights stay on all night to make sure that everybody who goes past sees the line of identical red, white and black posters pasted along the windows with Jack’s boss mugging for the camera under big bold type that reads, VOTE ROBERT DEVILLE.

So the only place we could get a little privacy is the utility closet, the bathroom or the office that Bob – he likes everyone to call him Bob – uses when he’s there, which isn’t very often. It’s tucked right at the back, near the exit to the parking lot, so he can sneak in and out without having to waltz in through the front entrance, on the street, in full view of everybody.

I’m pretty sure there must be at least a few people in that office whose kink is to fuck in the bathroom or the closet during working hours and hope they don’t get caught. But it’s not mine, and certainly not when we have the run of the place to ourselves. And anyway, Jack usually lets me in the back door, which leads directly out into the lot where I park my car and the office is just… right there.

I should just say this again, because I really don’t want you to get the wrong idea: we’ve never actually done this. We’ve never even discussed it, Jack and I. I’m not even sure he’d be into it. But in my fantasy, as soon as we get in that office, and the door’s closed and the lights are off, all the kissing and cuddling is over; I’d take control.

I’d push him backwards into the chair, Bob’s plush leather swivel chair, and we’d do it right there, in the ‘seat of power’. I’d tell him not to get up, not to touch himself, not to move an inch, and do a little strip‑tease, to show myself off for him. First undo the belt of my coat and slip it off my shoulder so he can see some skin. Then quickly throw one side open, keeping the other pressed close against my body, giving him just a glimpse of what’s underneath. I’d turn my back, let the coat drop to the floor, bend over and touch my toes so he knows exactly what he’s going to get if he’s a good boy and does what he’s told.

His cock is hard before I’ve even got his trousers off. And when I do I can see it bulging against the cotton fabric of his boxer briefs.

Then it’s time for some close contact. But he’s still not allowed to touch. I’d position myself in front of the chair, straddle his legs with my back to him, and grip the handles of the seat as I brush and bump and grind my butt, first soft and then hard, into his crotch. Then lower myself down onto it, hold him between the cheeks of my ass and clench, feeling it flex and twitch and grow against the curve of my…

But I’m getting off the point. The point is, I had no business whatsoever being there, at the Juliette Society, among those people. And I didn’t exactly answer an ad on Craigslist or go to a job interview to gain entry to it.

Let’s just say I had a talent, a persuasion, a hunger.

And I was spotted.

We could argue back and forth forever about nature or nurture but this talent, it’s not something I was born with. At least not that I’m aware of. No, this is something I realized. But it has been with me for a long time, hard‑coded, buried like a switch in a sleeper agent, and only recently turned on.

And saying all that, how do I even begin to explain what happened that night? The first night I encountered the Juliette Society.

The first thing we ever learnt in film class is this:

Plot is always subservient to character.

Always, always, always and without fail.

Any creative writing teacher worth his salt will tell you exactly the same thing and make you repeat it over and over and over until it’s as recognizable to you as your own name.

As a general point of principle governing a fictional world, that’s as immutable as Einstein’s theory of relativity. Without it the entire fabric falls apart.

Take any classic movie (or any movie, really), strip it down to the basics, and you’ll see what I mean.

OK, Vertigo , a movie that every film student like me is expected to know inside and out. Jimmy Stewart’s character, Scottie, is a detective whose single‑minded and dogged pursuit of the truth, coupled with a crippling fear of heights and an obsession for a dead blonde that borders on necrophilia, are the very things – his Achilles heel, as it were – that blindside him to the elaborate con to which he falls prey.

Let’s assume instead that Scottie was a cop with a sweet tooth. It would have been more realistic. But it just wouldn’t have worked. He’d be a cop drawn inexorably to the donut stand instead of the femme fatale, and Hitchcock wouldn’t have a movie.

There you have it. Plot subservient to character.

Let’s take another example. Citizen Kane . Film critics love to call it the greatest movie ever made, and for good reason, because it’s all in there. Subtext, art direction, mise en scène, all the things that make a great movie into a work of art and not an extended commercial for Microsoft, Chrysler and Frito‑Lay, the way movies seem to be these days.

So Citizen Kane , the story of a news mogul, Charles Foster Kane, felled by hubris and ambition – the self‑same qualities that fueled his drive to the top, qualities derived from an overwhelming mommy complex that dwarfs his achievements, damns his marriage and, ultimately, destroys his life.

Condemned by this vicious circle that reaches to the very core of his being, poor old Charlie dies alone and unloved, simply because he could never detach from his mommy’s tit.

Or maybe not her tit… because the last word Kane utters with his dying breath, when his grip loosens and he drops that snow globe – or crystal ball, or whatever it was, in which he failed to see his immediate future, that his life was not just fucked but over – that word, Rosebud, was, so legend has it, a sly reference inserted by Orson Welles to the pet name used by William Randolph Hearst (the real Charles Foster Kane) to describe his mistress’ vagina.

Rosebud. The first word heard in the movie and the last one seen, painted on a child’s sled tossed into a furnace, as the flames lick at it and peel the word away to nothing.

Once you know that little tidbit of information, you’ll never watch Citizen Kane again the same way. You hear Rosebud, you see Rosebud. You think ‘vagina’.

You think Orson Welles might have been trying to tell us something? I think he was trying to tell us this: Charles Foster Kane was a real mother fucker. And that, not surprisingly, was the source of all his problems.

Just as an aside, there is one type of movie, and only one, that doesn’t conform. One genre that flagrantly breaks the rule. Not only breaks it but turns it on its head, just because it can, and it doesn’t give a fuck: the porn movie.

But let’s not go there.

Anyhow, this rule, I’ve realized it applies as much to reality as it does to fiction. That it’s not only in the movies that what happens to us is subservient to who we are, how we act and why, but also the stories of our lives, the choices we make and the paths we take.

This path I’m on, you can’t see it. It’s not a yellow brick road, the lost highway or a two‑lane blacktop. And I don’t even know that it’s a road I’ve been traveling along until I reach my destination, look back at how far I’ve come, and realize that all this time the choices I made, the roads I took, were leading me to this place.

So here’s the deal. In order to explain how I ended up at the Juliette Society, I have to start at the beginning.

Not right at the very beginning. We’ll save all the embarrassing baby pictures for another day. And all those apocryphal childhood memories that locate the origins of traumas that have stayed with me ever since. Like the time I pissed my panties at Sunday school while Sister Rosetta was telling us about Noah and his ark.

So, no, not right at the beginning, but close to it.

And I need to tell you something about myself, my character, my Achilles heel. I have to start with Marcus, my teacher, on whom I have a secret crush.

Doesn’t every girl have a secret crush? An insignificant other who they can project their wildest sexual fantasies onto. Mine was Marcus who, unknown to him, became my fetish object the very first time I walked into his class.

Marcus: brilliant, rumpled, handsome, shy – shy to the point of seeming aloof – and intense. Marcus, who fascinated me the moment I first set eyes upon him. Nothing inspires the curiosity of a woman more than a man who’s emotionally distant and hard to read, especially sexually. And I just couldn’t get a peg on Marcus.

In film theory there’s a term, ‘frenzy of the visible’. It’s something to do with pleasure. The intense pleasure we feel at looking, seeing, comprehending, evident truths of the existence of the physical body and its workings, writ large up on the screen.

That’s how Marcus makes me feel. When I’m sitting in the front row of the lecture hall, where I can get the best view of him, projected against the whiteboard, illuminated by fluorescents that seem as bright as an arc light on a movie set. I sit in the same spot every class, in the front row of this huge hall that stretches back maybe forty rows, right in the middle of the row, directly in front of his desk, where he can’t fail to notice me. Yet Marcus rarely ever catches my eye. Or even looks in my direction, but addresses the room – the entire room – except me, and makes me feel like I’m not there, that I don’t even exist.

He’s there, I’m not, and it’s driving me nuts – a frenzy of the visible.

And I wonder if he’s just playing hard to get because I’m making it pretty damn obvious.

On the days that I have class – Monday, Tuesday, Friday – I find myself dressing for him. Today is no different. Today, I picked out figure‑hugging jeans that show off my ass, an underwired balconette bra to lift and separate, a blue and white striped tank top that accentuates my curves and a navy blue cardigan that frames and directs attention towards them.

I want him to catch sight of my breasts and think Brigitte Bardot in Contempt , Kim Novak in Vertigo , Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct .

Is that obvious enough?

I hope so.

So today, as always, I’m sitting in class, pretending to take notes, and undressing Marcus with my eyes. Marcus is talking about Freud, Kinsey and Foucault, about the spectacle of cinema and the feminine gaze, and I’m trying to trace the curve of his cock in brown suit pants that are just a little too tight around the groin not to be revealing.

He’s half‑standing, half‑sitting against his desk with one leg splayed out along the edge, forming an almost perfect right angle with the other, which is firmly anchored on the ground. And I’m chewing on a pencil, counting a span of inches from the seam of his pants along his inside leg, taking guesstimates of girth and width and length.

I jot down the numbers neatly in the top right hand corner of my yellow legal pad, which, twenty minutes into class, contains nothing but scribbles, scrawls and doodles. And when I tot them all up in my head, I’m impressed. Because Marcus clearly has a cock that’s more than a match for the size of his brain.

I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not as if I haven’t done this close to a hundred times before. Every class, the same routine. And, miraculously, the same three numbers come up every time. Like I’ve hit the jackpot over and over and over. And I get that same little thrill shooting through my body every time.

Marcus, as I said, is oblivious. For all he knows, I’m absorbed in his lecture. It’s not that I don’t care about the subject or I’m not listening. I’m following his every single word and being distracted at the same time. I’m multi‑tasking.

Marcus is talking about Kinsey and the conclusion reached in his landmark sex study that women don’t respond to visual stimuli in the same way as men, and sometimes not at all. I beg to differ. And if Marcus only knew what he was doing to me, he would too.

He elides neatly from Kinsey into Freud – another old pervert with strange ideas about female sexuality – and now he’s got all my gears churning.

He writes CASTRATION on the white board. And PENIS ENVY. Then underlines each twice as he repeats them aloud for added effect. And you’d think that’d be one gigantic buzzkill for my scholastic masturbation fantasy, right?

Wrong.

See, Marcus has a voice like brown sugar – soft, dark, rich. Just to hear him say anything makes me all gooey inside. But the words he says that really turn me on are the least sexy of all. Words that sound clipped and cold and technical, but when Marcus says them it sounds like he’s talking dirty – in an intellectual way.

These words especially:

Abjection.

Catharsis.

Semiotics.

Sublimation.

Triangulation.

Rhetoric.

Urtext.

And last, but certainly not least, my absolute favorite, the one word to rule them all:

Hegemony.

When Marcus speaks, it’s with such quiet authority that he has me in his grip and I feel like I would do just about anything he asked.

So when he says, ‘penis envy’, I hear him plead, order and command, ‘Please fuck me’.

And even though he’s not looking at me, I know he’s speaking to me, and only to me.

Only to me.

This has nothing to do with Jack, my infatuation with Marcus. I love Jack and only Jack. This is just an amusement, a little romantic episode I’ve dreamt up to amuse myself in class. A pedagogical daddy fantasy that’s got me hot for teacher and flies from my mind the second the bell goes.

This time it doesn’t even get that far.

I’m looking at Marcus’ sinewy arms and long muscular legs and imagining what it would be like to have them wrapped around my body, my entire body, the way a spider holds a fly in place as it prepares to consume it. I want to be held by Marcus, consumed by Marcus, in that way. And I wonder if Marcus can fuck as expertly as he talks about psychoanalysis and semiotics and the auteur theory.

I let the question hang in the air.

The answer comes unexpectedly from behind, in a conspiratorial whisper.

‘He’s a freak.’

I turn around and look directly into a pair of bright, clear, almost luminous, green eyes and full, sensuous lips arched into a coquettish smile. And that’s how I meet Anna. Leaning over me from the row behind, whispering into my ear, in full view of Marcus.

I know her, of course. She’s in my class. Anna is blonde, petite and voluptuous; the super‑hot girl at school who turns everybody’s head. She’s the girl everyone wants to be friends with; the girl all the guys want to fuck.

I was brought up Catholic and taught that sex was something you weren’t supposed to seek or experience pleasure in. It wasn’t until I started going out with Jack, long after I’d lost my virginity, that I stopped feeling so conflicted and started to enjoy it.

Anna doesn’t seem to have had any of those hang‑ups. She’s flirtatious, free and relaxed, always ready with an easy smile. I look at her and see someone who’s comfortable with her body, her sexuality, and the power it holds. And she intrigues me.

Have you ever met someone and thought, from the second you laid eyes on them, from the moment they first spoke to you, We’re going to be friends.

That’s how I feel about Anna, the instant she says, ‘He’s a freak’. It’s like hearing my own voice, like she knows exactly what I’m thinking. And understands.

That’s how it will be between us from now on. A secret bond.

What I didn’t know is this:

She’d already fucked him, Marcus.

And on those rare occasions when Marcus caught my eye and I wanted to believe he was looking at me?

Well, he wasn’t.

He was looking through me.

At her.

‘Can you see my ass in the mirror?’

This is what I say to Jack in the hope of attracting his attention.

He’s propped up on the bed one evening, shortly after the beginning of the Fall semester, reading some report or other.

I’ve just come out of the shower and I’m lying naked, face down across the bed, with my arms folded in front of me and my head resting on them so I can look up at him. I’m displaying myself for him the way Brigitte Bardot shows herself off for her estranged husband, Michel Piccoli, in Contempt . I’m feeding Jack lines from the movie to see how he responds.

It’s a game I like to play. Not to test his love but to interrogate his desire for me.

He glances up at the mirror, briefly, says ‘Yes’, and goes straight back to his reading material.

But he’s not getting away with it that easily.

Do you like what you see, I say.

‘Why? Shouldn’t I?’ he says, without even averting his gaze from the page.

Does my ass look fat, I say.

‘You’ve got a beautiful ass,’ he says.

But is it fat?

‘You’ve got a beautiful fat ass.’ He looks at me – at me, not at my ass – smiles, and returns to his papers again.

How about my thighs, I say.

I reach back and stroke my thigh just below the ass and, while I’m at it, I pull the cheek apart just a tad so he’ll get a glimpse of my plump little pussy from behind.

‘They’re great,’ he says. This time he doesn’t even look.

That’s all, I say, just ‘great’?

‘What do you want me to say?’ he says.

I might be feeding him questions but I’m not about to give him the answers.

Do they look thick, I say, as thick as tree trunks?

‘They look just fine,’ he says.

Whatever he’s reading, he’s engrossed in it – the way I wish he would be engrossed in me.

I roll over onto my back, arch my shoulders and cup my breasts, pushing them up into two rolling hills, and jiggle them a little.

Which do you prefer, I say, my breasts or my nipples?

My body is still flushed with heat from the shower and the areolae are pink and round. I brush and circle my nipples with my thumbs until I start to feel them swell.

‘Does one come without the other?’ he says, showing not the least bit of interest.

If you could choose, I say.

‘If I could choose between nipples without breasts or breasts without nipples?’ he laughs.

Yeah, I say, if you could have a girl who was totally flat‑chested or one with tits so big the nipples were almost non‑existent.

‘You, or someone else,’ he says. But, perhaps deciding this isn’t a conversation he wants to have anyway, he doesn’t wait for an answer. He says, ‘I like them just the way they are.’

Damn you, Jack, I think, pay attention to me. Look what I have here for you! And you can have it on a plate. For free. No strings attached.

The less attention he gives me, the more childish and petulant I become.

I’m thinking about shaving my pussy, I say, sliding my fingers into my bush and tugging at the tight brown curls of hair.

I say it because I know he won’t like it, because he finds completely hairless girls a real turn‑off.

‘Don’t,’ he says, curtly.

Why not, I say.

Now I’m just trying to be provocative. Anything to get a reaction. And it works.

He stares at me over his knees, annoyed.

But he doesn’t say anything and it doesn’t make any difference because, now I know that I’ve got his attention, I decide to push him further.

I might do it anyway, I say, as casually as I can.

‘Don’t,’ he says again, in a way that says, this is not up for discussion. In a way that says, leave me alone.

I stretch my arms up over my head, then roll onto my side, just to deny him the pleasure of seeing my breasts, my bush. I want him to kiss my ass instead. And I lie there, pretending to ignore him. As if he even cares.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 771