Chapter 8: Sensory Deprivation

REAL ESTATE open houses have two purposes. The first is to convince the sellers that the agent is doing something to market their house. The second is to get leads and new clients who are usually sold other houses. Only rarely—less than one percent of the time—does an open house result in the sale of the property being shown.

So, it was logical that on the one weekend I was too self-absorbed to sit at my own opens, a rookie agent with no listings of her own would clinch a deal for the house I listed.

That’s not such a bad thing. It cuts my commission in half, but that’s the half a listing agent normally expects to give to the selling agent. A seven percent commission is split between the selling agent and the buying agent. Of course, that half is split with the broker who holds the agent’s license. Still, one-point-seven-five percent of $750,000 is still over $13,000. Not bad. Especially since it was my second closing in 30 days. I would be banking most of it, just so I’d have something over the off-season in the winter. The chance of making a sale between November 1 and March 1 was less than half of the rest of the year. I knew agents who had separate businesses in Arizona and closed up shop in the North to spend the winter there.

On the other hand, my prospects for winter were looking up. After our soul-baring weekend, Rita had continued to come to me for instruction in the art of love, but as often as not, we simply met as lovers. We had made a deeper emotional connection. We hadn’t had the talk yet—the one about the future and commitment. I’d been shy about committing to any woman since my college freshman girlfriend—who I thought I’d be with forever—left me. Oh, she didn’t leave me during our freshman year. She left me the summer after graduation, exactly two months after our first wedding anniversary. I was shell-shocked at the time and almost missed my first week of graduate school because I hadn’t emerged from my funk. The reason she was leaving me, she said, was that multiple orgasms on demand simply wasn’t enough for her. Apparently, I got an ‘A’ in sex and flunked marriage. For the first time since then, I was allowing myself to become attached; it was a frightening though rather pleasant thought.

And so it was that we found ourselves in the studio one Saturday afternoon with Rita posing as my model.

The pose featured her as a woman clinging to her lover who was turning away. In order to get the setting right, I’d positioned a male mannequin facing three-quarters away from my chaise. I had Rita lie on her back and then twist her upper body to fling her arms around the mannequin. It was a delicious and erotic image when I just stood there to look at it. It didn’t hurt that I’d positioned her with my hands, paying special attention to the exact position of her breasts and pussy. All the time, I’d given her strict instructions to stay perfectly still as I caressed her, just as her mannequin boyfriend did. I’d left her moist and panting as I went to my easel and began laying in the detail work on canvas.

“This would be a lot more fun if Studly here was better equipped,” Rita said as she stroked her left hand up and down the mannequin’s featureless crotch.

“Well, perhaps we can find a substitute for Studly when the posing is over,” I said. This was our fourth sitting for this painting and I was about finished. “That’s enough for today. I think we’re pretty much done with this.”

“Can I see it now?” she asked as she stood up and stretched. I clicked a mental photograph of that position. Her hands were stretched above her head as she went up on tiptoe and arched her body back and forth. I could almost see the scene in front of me.

“Yes, I suppose so.” I hadn’t let her see the development of the piece and wasn’t all that sure I wanted her to see it now. I’d never felt uncomfortable showing my work to a model before. She padded over to me in her bare feet (and bare everything else) and looked at the canvas. I stood aside. Her brow creased. She tilted her head to one side in a reflection of the position she had held over the course of two weekends and four sittings. The expression on her face was not one of rapture.

“Uh ... Doc ... I know I’m not an art critic, but...”

“ ... but you know what you like,” I said finishing the cliché that I’d heard repeatedly over the twenty years of my career.

“No. I know when something really sucks. This is terrible.” The passion of her comment shocked me. After painting the canvas of Allison, I’d decided to do a series I’d mentally captioned Burning Love. I’d laid in a flaming background, repeating the themes from the earlier work with flame dripping from the cock. But Rita was not through with her scathing criticism yet. “Is that how you see me? With your artist’s eye am I truly such a bitch? It’s not just that it doesn’t look like me, it’s that it makes me look so awful! I don’t ever want to sit for you again!”

“Rita. It’s not a portrait of you. It’s a portrait of something in my head. The model is just a reference point. I wanted to make a series out of the canvas I did of Allison. I don’t think of you personally that way. Lots of artists use the same model for all kinds of works. Just think of Picasso. His mistress was his model but no one would suggest that his paintings ‘looked’ like her.”

“You’ve told me about Picasso,” Rita said. She was pulling her clothes on angrily—not just the robe she usually slipped into, but dressing to leave. “Where’s that book?” I assumed she meant my book of Picasso. I retrieved it and she dragged me over to sit and look at the book. My style was nothing like Picasso, but I’d always admired his work. She began turning pages, focusing on the paintings of his famous model, Marie-Thérèse Walter, the mother of one of his children. “Look at these,” Rita said. “They don’t look like her but they look...” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “They look like he loved her.” She looked over at my painting. “Not like that! You showed more love in your painting of Allison.”

She left the book in my lap and stormed out of the house.

I opened my eyes. I’d collapsed in bed after Rita left and just thought about what I’d painted until I was so exhausted from my own confusion, I fell asleep. I could see it. I knew what I’d done. I’d used Rita as a placeholder as I attempted to paint Allison again. And I hadn’t done a particularly good job of it. My original painting had been free and uninhibited. This one was deliberate and controlled—exactly the opposite of what I felt when I painted Allison. It was an inappropriate theme superimposed on an incompatible subject. None of what I’d captured in the first painting was present in the second. Technique overrode passion. It was mechanical. There were flames but the painting was cold. That fleeting grasp of a breakthrough in my art now looked like an unhappy accident I’d never reach again. I would go back to the studio and scrape the paint off the canvas and prep it for another painting.

It was late but I still thought I’d go back to the studio. The room was dark. But something had awakened me from the dream of destroying my latest canvas. At first, I thought it was just an aftershock of Rita’s tearful departure, but something else was nagging at me.

I heard a rustle in the room and reached to turn on my bedside lamp, but my hand was arrested by a soft but firm grasp on my wrist.

“Rita?”

“Shh. Trust me.” It was whispered but I was sure it was Rita. She had a key to my house and often came in at unexpected times. I lay still, only moving slightly to help her remove my clothes. The one time I reached for her soft skin, she firmly returned my hand to my side. I couldn’t figure out what she was up to.

She pushed me over onto my stomach and arranged my arms straight down at my sides and my legs straight out with my feet together. I must have rolled onto a fresh sheet as she tugged a folded edge out from under me and pulled the opposite edge over my back and tucked it in at my side. She rolled me onto my back again. I was effectively strapped in. I started breathing a little rapidly. I was sure I could get out as long as she didn’t tie anything around me. But I didn’t know what she planned. She’d been angry when she left. Was she about to take revenge on me? That simply didn’t fit with her character. I was sure she had a purpose, but I couldn’t still my racing heart. I relaxed slightly as she positioned a comfortable pillow beneath my head in exactly the way I like it when I sleep.

She next placed a sleeping mask over my eyes. It was heavy. A bag filled with some small grain like rice, slightly warm and not uncomfortable but sealing my eyes closed with no chance of a stray flicker of light impinging on my sight. I could see the color bursts behind my eyelids that always accompany pressure on the eyes—mostly reds and oranges with tinges of blue fading into the black at the edges. Gradually, the color subsided and there was no signal sent to my optic nerve at all.

Again, I felt her breath on my face as she leaned near my ear. I could feel the goosebumps rising on my flesh as the gentle breath blew across my neck.

“Trust me?” came the whispered voice in my ear again. This time it was more of a question than a command. A request for confirmation—for permission. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t trust my voice to make the right sounds with my heart beating so rapidly. I merely nodded slightly. “Then relax,” she whispered.

I felt a pair of earphones being placed over my ears. I moved slightly to get them comfortable, expecting to hear pleasant music or maybe a gentle voice through the headset lulling me to sleep. Instead, everything went silent. There was a very slight white noise stimulating my eardrum, but like the colors behind my eyes, I wasn’t sure if it was from an external source or if it was simply my nerves filling in blanks that I normally wasn’t aware of.

If you plug your ears with your fingers, you might effectively block out most of the ambient sound that surrounds us all the time. Sounds of the house, the furnace, the refrigerator, water in the pipes, outside traffic. You find these sounds replaced gradually by an awareness of your own internal sounds. Your breathing, the rustle of fabric against your hair, your own heartbeat. But the silence descending on me was complete. I couldn’t hear my own body. I could hear nothing outside it.

And time was suspended.

I am an artist and, while that is not synonymous with ‘drug addict,’ I have had my occasional brush with mind alteration. There comes a point when smoking a little weed that time slows down. Or perhaps one’s awareness of time is suspended. Everything moves in slow motion and until you emerge from your stupor, you have no concept of time’s passage. You might be surprised when you look at a clock to find that hours have passed or that only a few minutes have crawled by.

As I lay in my bed with no more movement possible than a twitch of my fingers or toes, no sight or sound perceived, the same feeling of time suspension descended upon me. I had no idea how long I lay there. My heart rate and breathing slowed. I could no longer feel the thudding in my chest but assumed I was still alive. After I stilled my racing thoughts and relaxed enough to stop being curious about what she was doing, I discovered I was really quite comfortable. In fact, I drifted back into sleep.

I awoke to featherlike touches on my crotch. I started, suddenly not sure if I was awake or simply lost in a dream of deafness and darkness. My heart started to race again when I realized I couldn’t move. Just before panic set in, I remembered Rita’s whispered words to trust her. I was in sensory deprivation.

I’ve dreamt before of losing my sight and remembered being in a huge cave once when the guide turned out the lights to give everyone an idea of what it was like to be in complete silence and darkness underground. The silence was short-lived as people began to shuffle and titter almost at once. But the darkness was complete and awesome. For a few moments, one’s eyes played tricks and there was the impression of seeing lights, realizing it was nothing more than the retina being repaired and the optic nerve sending signals that originated before the lights went out. But those afterimages fade. The result, surprisingly, is not blackness. The rods and cones in the retinal layer continue to fire somewhat randomly, even in darkness. The result is what I can only describe as texture. I’ve tried repeatedly to capture that randomness on canvas, but something about the canvas itself and the reflectivity of the paint overwhelms the texture of the dark.