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The Mistress Contract opens with a document that a woman sent to her wealthy lover for his signature sometime in the 1980s. The contract establishes an exchange that she thinks fair: If he will provide adequate accommodations for her and cover her expenses, she will provide to him the following “mistress services” — all housekeeping duties and all sexual acts as requested, with suspension of historical, emotional, psychological disclaimers. For the duration of the Agreement, she will become his sexual property. Upon receipt of the document, he phoned her immediately to accept. For 20 years afterward, this extraordinary and unconventional couple recorded their conversations about their relationship, conversations that took place while traveling, over dinner, and even in bed.
This book is the transcript of those tapes and a record of all they had to say about the arrangement, its power relations, its sexual politics.
Scene: HE and SHE in bed with tape recorder.
Time: A night in April, in California in the 1980s.
She: Sometime we're going to have to talk on tape about this agreement we've signed.
He: The content of these tapes should appear in a book, and if the content is as outrageous as the contract, it's going to outrage some people. We will need to hire someone to transcribe and edit the tapes.
She: It has to be someone we trust absolutely because the first thing they will need to do is to remove anything that could identify us and make sure that it never sees the light of day.
He: Ok, ok, one thing I find fascinating, and which makes me fall in love with you every time I think of it, is ... where did you get the audacity (I wouldn't call it courage) to try something like that? The sheer genius? When I go back over all of our arguments, all the times when we were thrashing about on the issue of your bending your will to another, other figures loomed up, shadows from the past. If we did something together, all the other men you'd done it with interposed themselves....
Thoughts On Dialogue
She: We began our recording of conversations on Saturday after buying a Sony tape recorder that could fit in my purse. I felt strengthened by the device. We tried it first in Hilary's for coffee, and it sucked up our words in spite of a speaker on the wall nearby, and we continued later at the same place for dinner—many guests, yet the words fairly clear. Over dinner, our words gradually became slurred with wine, and often our mouths were full.
I have transcribed one tape. What emerges:
1. He is fluent, pedantic, complex-compound, archaically eloquent, long-winded, and occasionally—when he switches to simple diction—comicaL He dominates the conversation by his flow, but it is apparent that the subject interests him, that he has many thoughts on male-female boundaries and wishes to understand. He listens.
2. I am much less skilled at speaking and confine myself to that which I feel or know, or think I know. Several times I confess to feeling confused about where we are going and say so. We get back on target.
Telephone
She: I find it fascinating. Hair-raising. The airy reaches of abstraction and the hawk plummet down to what we're doing in bed. It's exciting.
He: Yes, it is. When we're in bed.
She: Not talking about it?
He: Yes, it's very titillating. I've got an erection right now.
She: I spent a long time at the bookstore today. I can't cover the literature. There's no way I'm going to read all that stuff. Just in that one little tiny mall bookstore, there were three my-height shelves filled with books on relationships between the sexes.
This one probably won't make a dime. We'll do it anyway.
He: There's nothing like this. Psychologists, relationships, and therapists. Psychologists are so tedious.
She: Also I read last night a good bit of the Comfort book. I can't read that stuff too closely. But I had the terrible feeling reading it that you have been underprivileged and that I must do something about it.
He: I don't read that stuff, so I wouldn't know whether I'm underprivileged or not.
She: The woman is supposed to be a lecher and a temptress. I've tried to puzzle out why I never have been.
He: You've never had to be.
She: We should pretend.
He: Fine.
She: So that you'll get your due.
He: How come you haven't ever read that stuff before?
She: I don't enjoy it. It's not literature. I'm feeling like an investigative reporter. I'm going to hound you. I'm going to dig right into it and get you to discuss at every point. I feel that I have a new sense attached, my little machine. The restaurant tape is funny. Our speech begins to get fuzzy, and sometimes our mouths are full. It's gross.
He: Yes, indeed, you've got a wonderful little machine. Love you, sweetheart.
She: Bye-bye, dear.
Hilary's Restaurant
She: You will be asking the lead questions because you are trying to understand how your view of women has changed in recent ...
He: ... just two weeks ago ... damn right ...
She: You have the feeling that change has taken place with great rapidity?
He: That's true. This all began when I began to puzzle about your reticence in telling me about yourself. You never minded telling me about your moods. I got quite enough of your moods. You would tell me about your ideas, but you never told me about your body—how it reacted or got upset, its likes and dislikes. You would only convey that by indirection. You would indicate displeasure when something occurred that you didn't like, and sometimes you would indicate pleasure when something occurred that you did like, but because of the basic perversity of your nature, one could never learn from that. One had only to repeat something in bed to find that it caused you displeasure. And you simply took no responsibility. You thought, I presume, all men were clods, and, that being the case, how could you possibly convey anything to them? Certainly you never took any responsibility in helping me, or any male, change his behavior.
She: There is a male mystique. I assume men are fragile. They need to believe that their techniques are sufficient, and if the woman doesn't swoon, she's not swoon material, is frigid. I've heard many men state flatly that this or that woman "is not good in bed." Remember that phrase? You'd best not tamper with what he presents to you, or he may fall apart or become angry or walk away. Anything could happen.
He: I don't really understand that at all.
She: There's a reluctance to talk about those things which should be mysterious, unspoken.
He: Why? We sometimes talk about ideas, a mystery wrapped in enigma, the concept of the Trinity as a mystery wrapped in enigma....
She: It certainly is.
He: It is indeed mysterious that it took me fifty-five years of being conscious of females and wanting to know all about them to find out some of the most basic things about their anatomy.
She: You possibly weren't curious. You knew what you wanted. What basic things.
He: Such as the physiology of the orgasm, that even though an organ might be sensitive at Time A, isn't sensitive at Time B and vv. The fact that the clitoris might be sensitive at one time, oversensitive at another, and not sensitive at all other times.
She: You must have been monstrously inattentive. Certainly from trial and error, experimentation, you knew some of that before Kinsey told you.
He: I'm sorry, but I disagree with you. I'm sure some very sensitive females ... women who were willing to observe their own responses ... could have solved those problems for me very readily. If there's any mystique, it's the female's mystique of maleness and the female's unwillingness to be candid, or to say, "No, that doesn't feel good."
She: I'm sure that if you had touched a clitoris attached to a female and it had been unpleasant, she'd have let you know, somehow. It can be extremely unpleasant.
He: I realize that, but it would take a male an incredible amount of time to discover when it is and when it isn't. The defense of saying "Well, I don't like to be directive or attack the male ego" is an excuse for undergoing pain. Talk about double messages ... quintuple, octuple, sextuple! The messages are so confusing that it would take a very astute male, one willing to expend an enormous amount of energy, to learn the female anatomy. And that brings up a philosophical problem. No one can get into another person's mind even if you're the best hermeneutics expert in the world. That is impossible. I cannot feel your pain. I cannot feel your pleasure. The only thing another person can do is observe physical states of being, and if you fail to connect those states of being to precise behavior on the part of another human being, obviously that shows. You'll get thirty years of failure to communicate.
She: The woman may also, by not pointing out to him what hurts and what's boring, what's irritating, get herself a husband ... someone who will help her get along in life. In 1950 (I can't speak for the other women), I would not have said, "What you're doing hurts."
He: But even now, you can tell me what hurts, but it's very difficult, in fact impossible, for you to tell me what pleases you....
She: But if I tell you what pleases me, you might do it a second or third time, the next night, maybe. I've known men like that....
He: Well, you could say, "I don't feel like that.... I want to do something else."
She: But then I have taken over the direction, and I don't want that.
He: Well, neither do I.
She: Neither of us does. So what do we do about that?
He: You say to me, in effect, "Well, you have such a simpleminded anatomy, it doesn't make any difference. I know there are always fifteen things I can do that will please you, and if it's the same thing every night for fifteen years, you'd be satisfied.
She: I never said or thought that.
He: It's the way you behave.
She: In other words, you don't like what I've been doing. You wish I'd do something else....
He: No—what I'm saying is that you've considered me and all other males easily satisfied. They aren't complex, so you take really very little interest in their anatomy or what pleases them or doesn't please them because they seem so aggressive, so 'linear,' as you would say.
She: Anything that takes about five hours a day is not easy. If their satisfaction takes five hours out of every twenty-four, it must not be very simple.
He: I don't understand ... male satisfaction? Five hours? Most males, you said, come to orgasm in thirty seconds.
She: Not the ones I've known. The men in the books—the statistical, so-called average males—are speedy. He: Now, that's not the case with me any longer. There's only one male that you've spent that much time in bed with, day after day after day....
She: Well, you would have, at the same age as he....
He: The point is, I didn't know you then.
She: The point is, they're not easily satisfied.
He: Satiated.
She: Or satiated.
He: But they can repeat the same act endlessly, and it's pretty acceptable....
She: Apparently. But not for me.
He: That's right. But I'm telling you that's your view of males. They aren't complicated. They aren't complex. They're gross, unseemly....
She: No, merely focused, as I am not.
He: Well, let me put it this way. They're simple mechanisms compared with the complexity of females. Now, that's something you really believe.
She: Having most of the equipment on the outside, rather than the inside, having most of the locus of pleasure in one place rather than spread throughout the body, makes it simpler.
He: It does.
She: You agree?
He: Well, simpler, as one would say, in this day and age, on one level. It may seem simpler, but beneath that rough exterior lies a sensitive heart.
She: I had a hell of a time getting rid of C. And other men have stuck around.
He: Yes, they tend to stick around.
She: So ... I must be doing something that they like.
He: Yes, but you have very attractive equipment.
She: O, come, now!
He: One vagina is not like another. One body doesn't smell like another. One pair of hands doesn't move like another. There are all sorts of things you do that arouse men. You don't even know you do them.
She: (Laughter) So you think I should bring all this to a conscious level? What were we talking about? We were going to bring you into ...
He: ... into the modern world, learning to deal with feminism, the new consciousness. It all began when I was puzzled that we've been together, so to speak, forever, and you've never told me anything about your feelings, the indifference of your vagina, unless ... (you've a new term) and unless you've been aroused to the plateau.
She: That's not a new term. I knew that in 1947? I read books in 1947. It was in van de Velde ... called Ideal Marriage ... in plain print.
He: I didn't read van de Velde. I don't read sex books or marriage manuals.
She: But I would have known it even if I hadn't read van de Velde. And reading at least one manual might have given you some knowledge which you claim you've lacked.
He: You have not instructed me at all. For all these years, you have been absolutely irresponsible. You've looked at me as a source of pleasure, and when I didn't give it to you, you put me down as a clod, insensitive....
She: I haven't!
He: Yes, you have. Obviously I didn't understand you, and you have dissembled, you have feigned orgasms, feigned pleasure....
She: No!
He: Yes, and you've done things to me that you didn't like to do, and you didn't indicate that this was not pleasing to you.
She: But you present yourself to a female as if sure you know all, and if you don't, just going in and out will at least provide you with pleasant sensations.
He: I haven't behaved that way since I was in my forties, when we first constituted this ... relationship.
She: All right, but at that age you brought to my bed not just yourself and your body but a whole reputation and myth, a hands-off myth.
He: I don't mind your believing in a Jamesian apperceptive mass, but what really annoys me is that you won't allow anyone to escape from one's past.
She: It would have taken a great deal of courage at our age then for me to receive a man who has been playing women, controlling women, moving them and moving on, and not letting them know what he was about, and not letting them see what hurt him or upset him ... to take a man like that and say, "What you just did is unpleasant for me," or "Why don't you make love another way? It would please me more." It would have been impossible for me to have said that to you. You would have gone out the garage door (that room where we began).
He: I would not.
She: I thought you would have.
He: I am a learner. I love to learn.
She: Anyway, it was all completely pleasing to me at that time.
He: I see. As you changed, though, you didn't clue me in.
She: Until quite recently, I was never with you long enough. If you'll remember, during the years when we were concerned with getting custody of my children, etc., our times together were not long enough ...
He: ... or placid enough ...
She: ... to concern ourselves with lovemaking.
He: So these conversations are a real luxury, a psychic luxury.
She: Yes, they come after we've ceased to be an active mother and father.
He: So young people couldn't do this. This is a contribution to understanding what our mature years can make.
She: I don't agree. I think young people are now doing this. It's a different generation.
He: Has it been recorded anywhere?
She: The men are now different.
He: They are? They are not like me. Is that right?
She: They speak very directly to each other, particularly the women to the men. And then if speaking and practicing doesn't help, they talk of the spark which is not there, and they give it up. And go off in different directions.
He: I see. Well, that's very wise of them.
She: We need to ask the questions which come from the question behind all others: What do we know, now, about women and men? Anything?
He: I told you that when I was at the beach in the rain today, when I thought about it, it was mainly a rush of emotion, and I could not articulate that emotion. Rather, I just stumbled along the beach wondering what I was feeling. Our conversation this noon drove questions out of my mind. The only thing I thought of was the fact that, thinking of our children, it might be the case that a dialogue between young couples run in this manner could be just as valuable as between ourselves.
She: By doing this, recording it and publishing it, we might be giving a novel method to other people. Perhaps one of the routes through the current Sturm und Drang of the feminist movement is for couples to discuss in a very methodical manner all of the issues which presumably we'll raise in the course of these conversations.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Mistress Contract Copyright © 2011 by Unbridled Books. Excerpted by permission of UNBRIDLED BOOKS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Overview
The Mistress Contract opens with a document that a woman sent to her wealthy lover for his signature sometime in the 1980s. The contract establishes an exchange that she thinks fair: If he will provide adequate accommodations for her and cover her expenses, she will provide to him the following “mistress services” — all housekeeping duties and all sexual acts as requested, with suspension of historical, emotional, psychological disclaimers. For the duration of the Agreement, she will become his sexual property. Upon receipt of the document, he phoned her immediately to accept. For 20 years afterward, this extraordinary and unconventional couple recorded their conversations about their ...