Chapter 2

Paula was speaking. "Attention, Cal. Not just your penis, thank you. Listen, please. This is a hard day for Aunt Paula, a day she's been dreading for a long time."

"But why, auntie? You've been teaching me beautiful, true things today."

"I know that, darling. But words are not enough... "

"That's good, Aunt Paula. I'm glad they're not. I want to show you... I don't know... what a good learner I am... , and how much I love you, auntie."

"But do you understand what I've been saing, Cal? Do you understand what you must do now... nowyou're big... " Paula gestured toward her nephew's genitals. His erection, she reflected, had not flagged in many minutes. "... What you must now do to show your love."

"I do understand, auntie. You don't think so, my darling auntie, but I understand better than you think."

Cal's ardor surprised Paula. She felt that he must understand, and that he must be eager too. "You see, then, darling, that stripping naked and kneeling and running errands and all - these are wonderful proofs of love and humility in a young boy? But... it's like Alice, Cal, remember? Keep running if you want to stay in place. Now that you're bigger, you have to do more just to demonstrate that you are as enslaved as ever."

"I'll do it, auntie. I want to."

Paula's voice caught. "But, you see, darling... Oh, help me, God. Why did you have to be born a boy, Cal?... Don't you see that Aunt Paula is talking about... forgive me, Cal... I don't make the rules... Aunt Paula is talking about... having to... to hurt you, you know."

"I knew you meant that, auntie," Cal said in a small voice. "But the things you've been saying... You're so beautiful, auntie... Don't be mad at me for speaking to you like that... I know I'm just a boy... "

"A big boy, Cal. Of course I'm not mad. Aunt Paula wanted to make herself as beautiful as possible today... to make it easier for you, darling... The things I've been saying... tell me."

"I think I do understand them, auntie. About beauty and the ache it makes me feel... your beauty does, auntie... other ladies' too, but yours especially... and all I want is to be allowed to look at you, and then I'm not afraid." Cal was trembling in fact, afraid of the hurt he was welcoming, and full of desire for it.

"Oh, my sweet little boy, you're trembling. You are my sweet, wonderful, trembling, frightened angel, and I love you deeply. I wish I could just cradle you like a child again, Cal. I can't. You could say I'm not allowed. But we are going to go through it together. I promise, I swear, to explain everything to you as we go. And, no matter what it feels like, don't let yourself forget that every single thing I do to you will come from love, not anger. I won't lose control, I won't be carried away. I'll be slow with you and careful."

"Will I cry, auntie? Will it be okay if I do?"

"Yes, my darling, it will be okay. Of course it will. And - oh, it makes me so sorry, so sorry I have to do this - if only you weren't a boy, Cal, if only I were teaching a girl how fragile boys are instead of having to teach that lesson to you - and, yes, I won't lie to you, you may cry. And maybe Aunt Paula will cry with you."

"Why, auntie? Why would you cry?"

"Because you will be showing me such love, my darling. And because the nephew I adore will be in pain."

"But I will have to be, won't I, auntie?"

"Yes, Cal, but it will make me sad all the same."

"But you're a lady, Aunt Paula, and ladies shouldn't have sympathy with men." Cal felt braver, calling himself a man.

"Shouldn't, sweet boy, and can't. Not if sympathy means knowing what's in your heart as I... as I... do the things I must to you. But pity's a different thing. It's my sorrow, Cal, that we can't sympathize, that we must be what we are, a woman, a boy. It's what I return to you for your humility, what every woman returns to every man. Oh, Cal, my pity for you IS my love."

"It's so strange, auntie."

"Love is unfathomable. Do you understand that word? It means, too deep to measure, too deep to know. Come closer, Cal. I want to give you something and then, when I do, I want you to tell me what you think of my gift." Cal nodded, puzzled. He felt suddenly shy. He became aware of his erection and wondered how long it had been there. All at once Paula, moving her arm in a wide arc, gave his penis a single stupefying slap. "Auntie!" The boy cried out his pained surprise. Then he recognized the crazy fact: this blow that made his eyes water and his penis smart, this was Aunt Paula's "gift."

He knew what to say. Not merely to please the woman, but because it was the truth in his heart. "Thank you, auntie. It was a beautiful gift." Cal believed that his confirmed erection would prove his sincerity. Paula had certainly caused him pain, but it was a kind of pain that stirred rather than dampened his ardor. A kind of pain? No, sensation itself didn't decide it. Meaning did. It was the kind of pain a woman dispenses in order to enable a man to make an offering of his love. The throbbing in Cal's penis - what was it but the glowing ache of a woman's beauty ignited for its bearer's sake into gallantry and courage? It was a gift indeed.

"Show Aunt Paula your testicles now," the most beautiful of women said.

"Yes, darling, that's the way. Press your penis up against your belly. Oh, sweetheart, Aunt Paula's gone and made it red." She gave her hand a reproachful look. Cal studied it too, but there was sweet admiration in his eyes. Such lovely long fingers, tapering to slender tips and the most exquisite, shapely nails. Could a thing so fine and elegant and feminine really have caused this lingering pain in the headquarters of his maleness? Yet she had only struck a womanly blow: a slap, a swipe of her open hand, a caress with a dose of fury in it. No burly fist, no cutting chop, no man-like brutality. A thing of beauty, rather, a woman's palm, her fingers, deepening a male's ache.

"Now, darling, with your other hand I'd like you to press your scrotum forward." Cal placed his fingers behind his testicles and pushed them, away from his thighs. The sack tightened at its owner's touch. "No, darling, don't let your balls recede. Imagine that you're giving them as a gift to Aunt Paula. You want her to own them now, and you want to show her all their nice features. Try."

Cal maneuvered the underside of his scrotum, trying to loosen it by jostling its tangled contents. The skin thinned out, stretching against constricted testes. Cal pressed the fragile apparatus away from his body and toward his aunt. Paula leaned forward in her chair, seemed to accept his offering. She gently ran a finger-tip over the surface of his scrotum and, gliding to it underside, stroked Cal's own fingers, still dutifully offering his testes. Her touch brought a cry of surprise from the boy. Cal had been naked before his aunt innumerable times. At lessons he had often handled his own organs as she instructed. But Paula had not herself touched Cal's penis or testicles since the days she bathed him as a small boy. Other females, yes: a small army of girls and adolescents had freely satisfied their curiosity with Cal, and of course there was Doctor Barbara, who would always make a joke when he got erect at check-ups: "Well, I'm glad to see you've forgiven me, Cal."

The sensation Aunt Paula was causing by this precedented scrutiny of her nephew's balls ravished the boy. Paula the woman was putting Paula the aunt into total eclipse. Luckily Cal had the obligation of pinning his penis hard against his stomach, and in this way his hand was able to create a subtle rhythm. Paula's finger exerted a slight, focused pressure. Though it was she, Cal's new-found enchantress, the irresistible goddess who used to be Aunt Paula, her touch was not seductive but clinical. She was merely gauging her boy - he sensed this but didn't care; her objectivity added to the thrill - becoming acquainted for the first time, really, with some of his less visible attributes.

For Cal's part, acts of obedience and service had always increased his impression of intimacy with his aunt, though also with all the other women and girls whose bidding he did. But Paula regarded her relation with Cal as sexual only in the most generic sense. It stood to reason for her that intimacy should be a one-way street: intimacy was only honesty, only the shedding pretensions and defenses. Of course a boy would feel the civilizing process - for to Paula male submission was no more than that - as a deepening intimacy with his teacher, at any rate if she were diligent. Humility, nakedness, service: what were these but extensions of common courtesy, more forthright, and ultimately more useful, realizations of those gestures expected of men in society and still sometimes called chivalry? Holding the door, relinquishing the seat, wielding the luggage.

Paula loved Cal dearly. She made no seet of that. (And so she could be sure that Cal's enslavement was mostly the result of the self-knowledge she had helped him to, and not of the fear of losing a guardian's measured warmth.) But this was a love that preceded sex, or transcended it, or somehow wound around it - a love, in any case, that would have moved Paula to put Cal's needs before her own even if she'd had such needs as a mere boy could satisfy. She hadn't though. Paula was a charming woman, and, as we know, beautiful: reverent gentlemen aplenty were votaries of her cult.

"Did you know, darling," Aunt Paula said, "your scrotum looks a lot like a basil-leaf? Feels like one too." Her finger traced one of Cal's scrotal folds, descended firmly between his testes, lingered there a moment and then slid lightly down to the soft and baggy underside below Cal's own rigid fingers. These strokes not intended to be strokes worked their unwitting magic on the boy. He closed his eyes. He wobbled a bit. Slavery to a womanly woman in a short black dress and heels, this was the only thing that counted on earth. Submissiveness engulfed him like a whirlpool. All the same, he stood, because that was true submission the woman's wish, clearly expressed a little while ago through the soft redness of her lips. But his heart, his life, was at her feet.

A spasm as precise as the clap of a bell went through him. A ping at first, a little sickly, the snap of a slender finger against a testicle, and another, and one more to the other nut, all while he was lost in her and unprepared, then colic and recoil, and the need to crouch, denied. (Paula stood up and thrust her slender arm around Cal's waist. Wouldn't she prefer to watch him crumble, defeated by what for her had involved so little? Instead she braced him with her woman's arm, a thing stronger than his legs, stronger that the griping pain within.) The penis, so durably hard this day, now wilted. Then muffled tears.

"My darling," Aunt Paula said, "I think I understand. I think I do. But do you know what the very best thing you could do now would be? Shall I tell you? But, Cal my sweetheart, I only want you to do it if you think you can. Aunt Paula isn't requiring it? She's just offering some advice to her brave boy. Do you understand? Only if you feel you're able. And if you do, then I think it would make you feel much better, much stronger."

"Tell me, auntie, please." Cal's voice was reedy.

"Only if you feel you can do it, yes?" The boy offered a weak nod. His mind was elsewhere - on his lingering cramp, and on the stunning and still incomprehensible revelation of a woman's power to hurt. This Paula, this woman, this aunt - he could never doubt her love. How, after all these years of tender care, could he dream of doing so? Even now, having treated him to this appalling pain, she was all pity and solicitude. She had good advice for him, if he could only bring his mind around to her words and take it in. Her arm was still steadying him and the fabric of her dress was once more riling his skin, but Cal now studied Paula through a long glass. She was worlds away, her female nature a terrible capacity sown at the farthest reach of interstellar dark. A stranger of consummate beauty and insoluble mystery. And this male, this Cal - might he not have been as awful a stranger to her, but that his mystery had been torn from him and hitched etween his legs, a perpetual offering to travelers from her star? "Please, auntie, tell me," he said.

"Then, Cal, the very best thing you could do right now is to ask Aunt Paula for another. If you feel brave enough, and grateful enough... grateful, yes, Cal... because ladies get no pleasure from being cruel. None whatsoever, I swear. Only the knowledge that a man's love is shallow unless it is accompanied by unstinting sacrifice... only that gives us the strength to hurt. It's not the pain we want to see, but your courage in facing it, and the tears of love it draws. Look how I'm sweating, my darling. Look at Aunt Paula's watery eyes. We ladies need courage too."

Cal looked. But the signs of her emotion troubled him more in a way than the vision of her terrible remoteness. Paula mustn't weaken. Cal understood that somehow. Whatever exactly the lesson of this hard day, it must be thoroughly delivered before his teacher relented toward either her pupil or herself. Her power chilled him, but he wanted it absolute: he'd pledged as much, and even now, shocked to discover what he'd consented to, he wished despite his trepidation to be broken. Until now in his submissive life, he realized, he'd been no more than toyed with - teased, reduced, enslaved, as much by the menace of something kept back as by humiliations freely granted. Even the dreadful circumcision which was Cal's introduction to women's rule was only an intimation, real, of their devastating force of will. Yet in loving and serving women and girls throughout his boyhood, wasn't Cal fundamentally in love with this half-hidden cruelty of theirs, this thing they'd flash his way but weren't ready yet to flourish? Now, today, Aunt Paula would at last bring this long-suspected, long-feared power out of the shadows. Pity him though she might, as mother, as sweet lady, the pure female stranger in her would show him the other side of pity: an implacable demand for his pain. At last the ache of beauty would be nourished, and inflamed.

"Thank you, ma'am," Cal said, with ardor again. "May I have another?" In expectation he once more pressed his testes forward.

"My brave man," Aunt Paula said. "You may. But let Aunt Paula do all the work. Well, almost all. You just hold your penis out of the way. Good, yes, I think it gets hard just hearing me mention it." It felt good to laugh a little, she thought. To steel her mind she rehearsed the thoughts that had led her to this moment: she might have spared herself the anguish of performing these acts herself by sending Cal to an expert; well, Paula was an expert, but that was different - that was with grown men, worshippers who knew what they were in for; she could think of many women who understood exactly how to impress a boy with their strength and his own fragility, who could make him feel the pain of total defeat - make him cry his eyes out - and view it all impassively, knowing they had done his body no permanent harm and his soul lifelong good; she knew, too, that if she'd given Cal the choice - though how could he understand its meaning, pain being no easier to foresee than to remember? - then he certainly would have wished his beloved aunt to be his torturer.

"Now stand still, darling. I want this to be just right for my brave boy." Paula inserted two of her fingers in back of Cal's scrotum and pressed. "Spread your legs, dear. Wide as you can, please." Her fingers went higher, almost to the perineum, then dug in, forward and up, lifting the boy's testes while exerting pressure on them from above. With his legs spread wide and his aunt's fingers steadying his balls, Cal might have believed that these "essential" male glands hung where they did by sheer accident. Some harried small-time angel who didn't think it at important - "It's just a boy, for Chrissakes," she'd explain later, "what's the bleep-bleep fuss?" - had slapped them into place with a gob of glue. ("Yeah, doll, mucilage. They fall off in a month? Hey... We're not talking titties here.") Uncomfortable though they were, Paula's fingers felt proper in this place. How stupid testicles feel just hanging there. When your legs are apart and you've nothing on, you know for certain that you're made to be messed with. You're a person, as it happens, with a nervous system and a pulse, but first of all - just look at your stuck-on balls, look at your flapping dick - you're a dime-a-dozen, not-worth-fixing toy. If a girl or woman grows attached to you, just be grateful for feminine caprice.

Paula was taking her time. "Cal, let's see how hard you are. The harder your penis, the easier this will be. Just let it go for a minute." Cal lifted away his hand and his penis sprung out, hard again. There was something to Paula's theory that it stiffened when she mentioned it. For that matter, Cal could never hear a female person allude to the organ, his or any male's, without feeling forcibly exposed and aroused.

Aunt Paula held her free hand up to Cal's view. The nail of her index finger sprocketed against her thumb. Cal stared at the tense little circle: as a gesture it meant "bullseye." But here it was a weapon, and Cal's fragile bulbs its unmissable target. "See, Cal, this is all it is. Just my finger flicking against your scrotum. A little 'ping, ' and it's over. No damage done, no danger. Okay, lift away your penis. Try to stand still. Really, try not to flinch. Deep breath. I'll take one too... and then it's just, you know, a flick, darling, like this... "

Cal cried out. Was it a second before or a second after Paula's finger snapped against a testicle with the shattering curtness of a ball-peen tapping glass? Paula hurriedly reminded Cal not to move. The pain of her little blow flared quickly, a suffocating cramp opening into his abdomen and back like a fault-line. Cal wanted to fold up. It was his only need. He fought it by stiffening his limbs. This increased his blossoming spasms. He dropped his penis, let his arms fall, but otherwise stayed rigid. He squeezed his eyes shut. Nonetheless he wept. He tried, at least, to do so noiselessly. There too he failed. Through his weeping he thought he heard Aunt Paula say something, whisper it rather. He kept trying to make out her words, but failed. As her finger snapped once more against a testicle, he succeeded. "Cal, I have to," she had said.

"Please hold me up, auntie, can you?"

"Oh, yes, sweet darling. Let me just... " Without lessening their pressure, Paula slowly drew her fingers away from Cal's scrotum and along his perineum to the cleft of his arse. She pushed her forefinger firmly against his sphincter. His body, already rigid, tightened against her.

"Cal, let me, please... I can hold you up, you see... " Cal was sobbing and sure to buckle. Paula's finger would not relent. "Cal, it would be better. Cal, it would."

"I can't," the boy cried. "Auntie, help me."

Stretching her free arm wide, Paula delivered a second stinging slap, this one to her nephew's cheek. "No, auntie... , " he shrieked. And at once his anus gave.

Paula inched her finger toward Cal's prostate. She maintained the pressure, holding her nephew upright by an act of impalement. Cal was crying openly now, abject but relaxed. Paula was bearing much of his weight as if on her finger-tip. Her presence in his rectum increased his colic, but also turned it into something victorious and satisfying. All Cal had to do was yield: capitulate with frank, full tears to the pain and invasion, recoil at the slaps, double over with the colic, flower with the fullness in your bowel.

Paula stretched her thumb back across Cal's crotch, sinking it nail-first between his balls. The boy was incapable now of stiffening his limbs. His weight felt spread across the narrow arc between Aunt Paula's forefinger, snug against his prostate, and the sharp crescent of her thumb-nail. His cramp was permanent now, filling his groin and belly, choking his solar plexus. The woman's finger was cracking steadily against Cal's testicles now and this quick staccato battery was getting to feel like an uninterrupted current. Breathless with tears, the boy could only gasp an importunate word: "Auntie... " But could he have said just what he was begging for?

Each convulsion as Cal sobbed refreshed the radiant pain. But it also deepened his conviction of being helpless and possessed beyond any boyish dream of submission. He'd been invaded - not simply entered, but invaded - and now Aunt Paula's finger was rousing his penis through some strange remote-control hidden inside him. She knew morabout it than he. And her thumb was digging into his testicles, pinioning them so that with the finger of her other hand she could repeatedly set off those little explosions that shot an agony no woman could imagine down the whole length of his being. "Auntie... " Had he been able to form a sentence then, what would Cal have begged for - that Paula release him from these torments or worsen them? Like an old paradox, the question undoes itself. Cal yearned for both and neither: only if his torments were unbearable would it signify slavery and love to bear them; yet only if he shrunk from them would he prove them worthy after all.

Paula expected Cal to break. She had seen it in older males countless times. Why shouldn't it happen to a boy? She had only to persist, to keep her pity in check. She owed him the happiness of it. Of making him incapable ever after of denying the pathos of his sex. For a man, she knew, a little arousal goes a long way. It's a rich essence of which the merest hint in a confusion of feelings is enough to impart its quality of pleasure to the whole. Pain may be terrible, but tinge it ever so lightly with sex and it will become ecstasy for a man. "Pathos" was the word that came to mind.

Aunt Paula deftly syncopated Cal's confusion: spikes of exaltation through his prostate to his penis, spikes of anguish through the stretched skin of his scrotum to his balls - a rushing stream of merged sensations and disordered emotions. Wasn't everything upside-down? The jolts to his testicles causing his elation, the push-button erection laying him low? Were these sensations, these emotions, even distinguishable? Were they not a single, simultaneous up-and-down? Cal was now facing, at a moment when even boyish words were bound to fail him, the full truth of the religion of woman, something his training until now had only reflected indirectly: when you are hers absolutely, height and depth are one. When you shed your personhood, that tenuous final garment that wraps your manhood in the ambiguous fabric of humanity, you forsake your very will. You and the woman no longer share a common ground. All the ground is hers. You're the interloper, the vagabond, maybe for a time the guest. In any case, she has all the rights.

So Cal broke. Beneath the deluge of pleasure-pain, he sagged. Aunt Paula's hand was there to wield him. He was her puppet. Her thumb roamed his testicles, turning or stabbing them as she chose. If she liked, she'd brush his penis, knock it a bit to make it quiver. She drove her other finger deeper into his rectum. Cal did what he could to make his depths reachable. He was an armature, nothing more, from which the cunning tools of female domination hung. He might cry his eyes out. This was ecstasy all the same. The real, true thing. Cal stood outside himself, far more an extension of Paula's nerves and muscles than his own boy. He was less the boy of tears than the woman who found them beautiful. He was Aunt Paula's desire - fulfilled. He had alertness enough to see himself afloat on the high water of a woman's sorcery, but he had nothing beyond alertness: he lacked all greed now, all intention, all will except that things be as they are.

When your will is gone, your sense of time deserts you too. A woman's accessory, incapable of intent, you forget the very dimension it's projected into. For Cal, the remainder of the afternoon passed without sequence, everything the cause, everything the effect, of every other thing, a single unending yet undivided moment of tearful erection and ball-breaking joy. Now Aunt Paula's finger slipped out of his anus, and her thumb released his testicles. A thin black-leather belt was trussing them now, lifting them forward and high; now Aunt Paula was closing the buckle at the small of his back. He was reclining against a wall now. Aunt Paula was taking care to position him: only his head touching the hard wall now, Aunt Paula's tabouret wedged behind his buttocks, he bent backwards therefore, his abdomen and belly in strenuous offering to the woman.

Now Aunt Paula was forcing his legs apart, saying, "Wider, Cal, wider, my love." A steel canister, very fat, planted now between his thighs, near his crotch, behind and just below his testicles, enforcing a wide, sweet, painful split. Aunt Paula saying now, "On your toes, please, Cal," and Cal already on them. Now she was showing him a pair of long bamboo cooking chop-sticks, tapered, tied together at their wide ends with a thread. With his gaze forced upward by his posture, he was straining now to look. But now the looking was over: she wished his eyes closed and so they were. She was spraying him with cold water from head to toe, front and back, and it was dripping off his face and down his torso now. Little streams of it along his ribcage, down the creases of his groin, down his crack and onto his thighs. Now a harsh swat to his wet penis. Now to his face with its eyes squeezed shut, its jaw jutting upward. He heard his own yelps, his gasps, his sobs of grateful surprise, and in them the satisfaction of the woman's desire.

The pointed sticks were jabbing randomly now, his abdomen, his legs, his trussed, uplifted balls. When the last, he shrieked, tried to proclaim his servitude, his breathless need to give Aunt Paula everything. He spoke, but it didn't sound like words. A gruff, misshapen croaking was all. Aunt Paula understood that he was offering his life.

But her voice was music. "I'm going to rub a special oil over your penis and testicles now." Aunt Paula wearing latex gloves now. "It will burn you, Cal..."

"Glad... , " the gaping mouth intoned.

Now it was burning as she promised. And something - a hairbrush - was dancing in the flames, fanning them, becoming them, singeing the crown of his penis, consuming his glans. "Auntie," he wailed, a single long and ragged syllable. His penis had never been so thick, so heavy. What was he made for but sacrifice? Strange new paroxysms of surrender were carrying him away and he was going to die now for certain. For Aunt Paula, who was a woman and had the right. Now a wild, lashing rope of sperm shot for her sake from his burning organ. It was his first.

"I love you, auntie," he only thought he said.

Cal lay quietly in Paula's arms, his tears slowly receding. He had dropped to the floor in one innocent tumble, and Paula had joined him there.

"My sweet boy actually swooned for me," she said.

Cal rested a careless hand where her breast began to swell. Paula gently deflected it. It found a home on the sharp turn of her hip; the crepe of Paula's dress did little to soften the feminine hardness of that place. Cal thought the other hardness on a woman must be more wonderful still. He wished he might kiss Aunt Paula there, on her beautiful dark triangle of hair. He knew this could never be.

As she held her depleted nephew, Paula's thoughts drifted to Dana, her sister, Cal's mother. She remembered how, soon after Cal was born, Dana confided that giving birth to a boy had left her a bit confused. "I mean, don't you think it's bizarre," she said, "that women have no penises but are capable of growing them inside?" "So what do you think it means?" Paula asked. "It means SOMETHING," Dana said.

Paula also remembered another conversation with her sister. Dana was home from college and newly in love. Paula was a scornful adolescent. She felt only contempt for males. Love left her cynical.

Dana disapproved of cynicism just then, and she very much approved of love. "Believe me, Paula, it's the only good thing in the world," she said.

Cal was wrestling with a difficult dream. He was in Doctor Barbara's waiting-room. The other patients were all women and girls, of course; some of the women were pregnant. Cal was naked, except for his penis, which was wrapped in a sleeve woven of pliable wicker. It was one of those toys they called The Ancient Babylonian Finger Torture. You fitted it onto your finger only to discover that whenever you attempted to remove it, it tightened in place and refused to budge: the more you pulled, the tighter it bound. Now Cal had one of these around his penis and it angered the other patients that he should be trying to conceal his organ from them, especially in the office of Doctor Barbara, the woman who had made him "extra naked" to begin with. They didn't understand that Cal himself desperately wanted to remove the thing. It hurt his feelings that the women and girls should think otherwise. "But, but... , " he kept saying. He'd tug at the evil device and it would close painfully around his organ, elongating it as it constricted, the tough fibers cutting into his flesh. "Don't you see?" he would plead. He looked everywhere for Aunt Paula, but he was on his own.