Amy’s stepfather and grandfather had both been shrinks, so she became one too. In psychotherapy school, she’d paid hardly any attention, but had graduated ninth in her class because so many of her professors had hoped she might become their mistress. She accepted a job at a big corporate firm downtown that specialised in pronouncing disgruntled ineligible for insurance payouts, or paid sick leave.

 

The money was terrific and she imagined she might be able to see the bay from her office window. It turned out, though, that all the bay view window offices were occupied by partners. Not a few of them dropped by her windowless office in the first couple of weeks to invite her to be their mistress. Normally, it took even the most venal, ambitious associate four years to attain partnership in the firm. One of its most senior partners offered Amy his patronage not five months after her hiring if she’d agree to let him rent her a penthouse apartment with a 240-degree view of the bay. He’d come over with a minimum three hours’ notice and have sex with her no more than half a dozen times per month. 

 

He must have had the world’s most ferocious acne in history, though, and Amy found it impossible to look at him without recalling how the athletes at her high school had described their favourite whippingboy as looking as though his face had been on fire that someone had put out with a fork. She might have got around his woeful pockmarks by not looking at them, but then there was the smell. He was one of those smokers who grossly overestimates the power of breath mints. Simone found the combination of the sour cigarette stench and the cloying sweetness of the mints unbearable. 

 

Knowing the senior partner’s reputation for vindictiveness, she left the firm to open her own practice, with Simone, a classmate from shrink school who’d graduated fifth in their class, strictly on the strength of her coursework. They dedicated themselves at first to counselling victims of sexual harassment and sex-based under-compensation. As custom dictated, they’d named their little firm after themselves, but right around the time she was admitting to herself that she found victims of sexual harassment tiresome, Amy read an article in Boundaries, the psychotherapy trade magazine, about how that of the so-called BDSM community was the last bilaterally adult, consensual erotic style the enlightened felt free to ridicule or find distasteful. Pervs, as they called themselves (as very distinct from perverts) were apparently subject to dismissal from work for no reason other than their erotic preferences, just as gays and lesbians had been two decades before. 

 

Amy had dabbled in kink herself. In high school, where everyone from the auto shop bad boys to the quarterback of the football team lusted after her, she’d secretly dated her English teacher, Mr. Hinshaw.  Having thrown caution to the wind in seeing her extracurricularly in the first place, he quickly threw even more by asking her to be awful to him. He didn’t want her to touch him, but only to ridicule him for wanting so much to touch her. He gave her a little stack of index cards on which he’d written several little speeches for her to memorise. As he stimulated himself through his trousers, she was, to say, for instance,“When the handsomest stud in school wants me, why on earth would I allow someone as pathetic as you to even touch me, maggot?” She never troubled himself to learn any of the little speeches by hart, but her reading them didn’t seem to attenuate Mr. Hinshaw’s excitement or delight in the slightest. 

 

Eventually, though, he got entirely too weird for a suburban 17-year-old. She pretended it was solely concern for his career that compelled her to stop seeing him away from school, after which e wasn’t seen or heard from for a fortnight. When he returned, he didn’t call on her or even make eye contact with her the last five weeks of the semester, and gave her a C in his 20th Century American Fiction class. It was the only non-A she received in her high school career.

 

As a young adult, she’d found herself thinking a lot about him. It occurred to her he hadn’t chosen that which excited him any more than the boys who felt called upon to express lust at the sight of hers had chosen to find large breasts exciting. if loving being insulted thrilled Mr. Hinshaw, and he were able to find an over-18 partner who enjoyed insulting him, how was it anyone else’s business, any more than what a gay or lesbian couple got up to in private? 

 

She asked Simone how she liked the idea of rebranding the firm under the name Naked, Ashamed, Trembling & Ecstatic, from a little poem Mr. Hinshaw had written for her, describing how she made him feel, though he’d never removed so much as a sock around her. Simone, whose relationship with her lover Lisa she now revealed to be spicier than she’d ever let on, and who turned out to be pretty bored with sex discrimination, went for the idea, but only on the condition that she get to be Trembling. 

 

Their first patient, as luck would have it, was Darren, a male secretary at the firm whose pockmarked partner Amy had spurned. He worked for another partner whom Amy hadn’t actually met, but whom she knew everyone to refer to as Horrorwitz. On a night Darren had worked late with him, Horowitz had been increasingly demanding and censorious. But then he’d told Darren he was sorry for having been so difficult, and deserved to be punished harshly, with the riding crop he extracted from his desk. Darren regarded Horowitz as an asshole, and would have much enjoyed beating hm, but knew too well how capricious Horowitz could be, and was pretty sure he’d be fired for giving him what he begged for. Whereupon Horowitz fired him for his demurral, though he told the firm’s Human Resources department that it was all about Darren’s incompetence. 

 

Darren had since been suffering from low self-esteem. One of Amy’s key takeaways from three years of shrink school was never to provide a simple answer when a much longer one, that could be delivered in bite-size pieces over the course of a succession of expensive therapy sessions, was possible. So instead of telling him it was Horowitz who ought to be plagued with self-doubt, she said the goal of his therapy would be teaching Darren to establish boundaries he mustn’t allow others to cross. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said, “not that again!” He’d apparently been…treated before.

 

Estelle, a senior partner in an international accounting firm’s local office, came to Amy, and spent the first five minutes of their consultation exacting Amy’s promise of confidentiality, phrased in a variety of ways. She admitted in tears that she had come to meet five or half a dozen times a month with a janitor, Javier, she’d met one evening when she stayed late at work. At first, she’d barely acknowledged his presence when he came in to clean, until he told her to get up so he could vacuum under her desk. His daring to do so had thrilled her, and he’d seen it. She’d given him an inch, and his not hesitating to seize the whole yardstick had thrilled her as no man had thrilled her for years. For the first couple of weeks, she was to have removed her panties and placed them neatly atop her computer keyboard in anticipation of his arrival. She worried, though, about being discovered by a fellow burner-of-the-midnight-oil if they continued to conduct their affair in her office, and rented a penthouse studio apartment overlooking the bay in which to meet. 

 

The more domineering with her Javier was, the more she loved it. She was an avid feminist — how could a woman who’d clawed her way up to her position not be? — but revelled in submission to a Oaxaca-born janitor 23 years her junior. She’d taken to asking him not to shower for 48 hours before their…dates, and encouraged him to sound as Latino as possible. He had come, Estelle thought, to suspect she was mocking him, and wondered aloud, in unaccented English, if they should continue…seeing each other.

 

Amy couldn’t tell which upset Estelle more — that she was so turned on by submission to someone so far beneath her socioeconomiclly, or the very real possibility that she was about to lose him. Estelle and her husband, who seemed not to doubt her lies about why she was getting home after eleven so often, hadn’t had sex in nearly two years. 

 

Rob, an orthodontist whose office was down the hall from Amy’s, asked her to lunch. She accepted, and found him pleasant company. At 41, he was a widower, with a 12-year-old son and a seven-year-old daughter to whom he  was endearingly devoted. He was an avid 49ers fan, and loved windsurfing, though he’d not been able to do much since what he referred to as his wife’s passing. He got around 25 percent of Amy’s jokes, more than most people. When she told him about her practice, he was amazed, and maybe a little bit intimidated. She liked his being a little bit intimidated. His being intensely vanilla, as Estelle would have put it, was a breath of fresh air after a day of listening to the laments of pervs.

 

After they’d been seeing each other nearly a month, Rob referred Paul, the prolifically tattooed dad of a boy whose teeth he was straightening. Paul was himself an accountant, and paying for his and his ex-wife’s son’s orthodontia as part of their divorce settlement. The one weekend per month the boy stayed down in Burlingame with Mom, Paul dressed up as the fearsomest motorcycle outlaw anyone seen since the guy in Village People, and terrorised submissives in gay bars. When it emerged that he wasn’t strictly gay, and was open to suggestions, Amy had the idea of introducing him to Estelle, who she thought would love his tattoos. 

 

She was right. At her next consultation, Estelle was positively aglow after her and Paul’s first date. “He’s an absolute brute!” she reported, rapturously. “A grown-up version of the sort of bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks who used to excite me so much in high school, though at the time I had to pretend to prefer the captains of the squash and tennis and debate teams. Every third word out of his mouth is friggin’, which he makes sound more obscene than the real word! He absolutely reeks of cigarettes, and how un-PC is that? He has enough crud under his fingernails for a windowbox!” Amy wondered if, instead of getting a manicure before their date, Paul had immersed his hands in old motor oil. 

 

“He took me for a ride on his motorcycle,” Estelle said. Do you know what he said when I tried to decline because I was wearing a dress? ‘I ain’t asking you, woman, I’m friggin’ telling you. The actual ride was terrifying, and better than all the foreplay I’ve had with all my lovers combined.” In an eager tone so like a middle school girl’s that Amy nearly laughed aloud, Estelle asked to know more about him. Amy enjoyed concocting a little biography for Paul, not a syllable of which was true. All she pretended to know was that he worked at a motorcycle repair shop and was an ex-felon. She’d learned of him from another patient whose bike Paul regularly serviced. “Well,” Estelle cooed, “with those horrible hands of his, he can service me whenever he pleases!” She giggled at her own joke. Amy wondered if there were another shrink in the Bay Area who’d elicited comparable joy from a patient at that moment. 

 

Within a couple of months of introducing Paul and Estelle, Amy’s clientele consisted around 80 percent of patients she’d seen only once. They were no longer coming in to have their boundaries defined or their self-esteem boosted, but in hope of Amy referring them to someone with complementary erotic quirks. Amy wasn’t complaining. Some vanilla patients opened up to her florally over the course of several sessions, and helping them excavate the roots of their misery was challenging and deeply satisfying when it worked. But the majority of her patients were neither very perceptive about themselves, nor very forthcoming, and bored her senseless. She suspected that she was actually making very few of them happier. Recognising the roots of one’s misery so seldom made one less miserable.

 

It occurred to her that a high-end matchmaking Website for the kinky might be a moneymaker. She did her due diligence, and discovered that, while there were a great many sites on line on which the kinky could look for each other, most seemed populated primarily by the subliterate, misshapen, and scary. Her own service, she thought, would be for upscale professionals who could write grammatical sentences in English, went to the gym, and wore designer fragrances. 

 

She looked at several vanilla sites that served the upscale. She emailed the people — two women and a man — who seemed to be the faces of the three sites with the the look-and-feel she wanted for her own. She told them what she had in mind, and asked if they might allow her to take them to lunch to pick their brains. 

 

One of the three ignored her. The second, whose site matched doctors, lawyers, tenured university professors, and “notable persons in the arts”, emailed back to inform Amy that she had “not the slightest interest in being involved with anything as sick as [her] proposed project.” It was her view that “what your proposed client needs isn’t the sort of encouragement your apparently intent on giving them, but intensive psychotherapy.” Amy hadn’t mentioned that she was herself a psychotherapist, and was tempted to write something snide about how, on reflection, she didn’t think she’d profit much from the advice of one who couldn’t differentiate you’re from your, but didn’t. She instead devoted her attention to the charming, heartening response of the sole gentleman she’d contacted, Errol, whose site was strictly for academics, though he helped the non-tenured find love too. He’d found Amy’s email intriguing, and would be delighted to meet her for lunch, but only with the understanding that they go dutch — or, if she preferred, took each other. 

 

He was no less charming in person than digitally, impeccably groomed and dressed. His loafers looked recently polished and his fingernails immaculate. He was originally from Auckland, and his faint accent charmed her. His eyes twinkled. He was sexily avuncular. He showed her photographs of his four-year-old twin granddaughters back in New Zealand. He had a son Amy’s age, a professor of linguistics at the University of Melbourne. When he’d started his Website, consultants had worried it might be too niche, but they’d been mistaken. He was making around $8K per month from it, and suspected that Amy, with a much broader audience, might make much more than that. 

 

She asked what he meant about a broader audience. His eyes twinkled. He said there were a great many more non-vanillans out there than most people imagined. He wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that the woman who’d been so snooty about Amy’s invitation to lunch was herself a dominatrix. He speculated that the repressed kinky were no less inclined to “present” as fiercely antagonistic to others like themselves than repressed gays were to be loudly homophobic. He would be delighted to help Amy with her project.

 

For a price. That price being that a couple of days a week, Amy would allow him to be her manservant. Specifically, he would come to her home in the early evening and either make dinner for her or bring something delicious from a restaurant. Wearing formal attire and white gloves, he would serve it, and then stand silent and motionless, white-gloved hands clasped before him, eyes straight ahead, as she ate it. Had she seen the late 1970s melodrama Mandingo, about life in the American South before the Civil War? There had been a scene in which James Mason, as the heartless plantation owner, had used little slave children as footrests, imagining that doing so might relieve his “rheumatizz”. The scene had thrilled Errol to the marrow. If Amy found it pleasurable to use his face as a footrest while she dined, it would delight him to allow her to do so, particularly if she’d allowed him to bathe and massage her feet before dinner, and to help her put on a pair of new La Perla stockings with Cuban heels, reinforced toes, and seams, provided, of course, by him. Such stockings had thrilled him well before he’d even seen Mandingo. 

 

“Wow,” Amy observed. “So detailed.”

 

“Indeed,” he said, delighted that she hadn’t grabbed her purse and fled. “The devil might not be in the details, but the delight certainly is.” 

 

“Well, then,” Amy said. “I think we’ve got a deal.” 

 

This seemed to reduce Errol’s delight. “But if Madame will permit,” he said, relinquishing eye contact, “Madame’s boy isn’t quite finished.” He correctly interpreted her saying nothing as licence for him to continue. “Perhaps Madame will wish to entertain lovers while her boy stands silently and motionlessly in the background, waiting to attend to her every whim.”

 

That sounded fairly creepy. If she were able to get comfortable with the idea of his presence, would any future lover necessarily follow suit? She bought time to think about it by asking, “Isn’t there a name for that sort of thing? And I don’t mean voyeurism.”

 

“Oh, one wouldn’t be watching,” Errol said, once again clearly relieved she hadn’t bolted. “One would of course be looking straight ahead. And I think the word Madame might have on the tip of her tongue is cuckolding, though it doesn’t strictly apply here. One cuckolds a husband or other equal. One would have illusions about his inferior station.”

 

She’d decided to cross the bridge of Errol’s proposed voyeurism when she was actually dating someone she fancied. “Where does all this come from, this need of yours for humiliation?”

 

He ceased to be the character he’d been playing. With his own twinkling, he looked her once more in the eye. “I’ve asked myself that a million times,” he said, “and never come up with an answer. The fact is I just don’t know why I am who I am erotically, but I do know that I sure have a lot of fun being him.”

 

She said she’d try it, and she did. With Errol’s guidance, the Website became a small gold mine, and she came to look forward to his foot massages. But as word of her being the brains behind Matches for the Kinky got out, she was asked out less and less. Errol told her that massaging her feet, buying her very expensive stockings, and letting her step gently on his face were all well and good, but that none of them compared, in terms of his excitement, to his being a passive observer of her lovemaking, and after 11 weeks, during which he’d been present in her bedroom during not even one lovemaking session, he asked her to accept his resignation. Without his guidance, the Website’s popularity declined, and Amy saw no recourse but to return full-time to psychotherapy.