Figures In A Landscape

People and Places

Paul Theroux

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781328592781
• eBook ISBN: 9780544866669
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

"A portrait of an optimist with curiosity and affection for humanity in all its forms."—The New York Times Book Review
 
"Theroux is at the top of his game with his third collection of essays, a magisterial grouping of intimate remembrances, globe-trotting adventures, and incisive literary critiques."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
 
"Theroux's observations are so keen and writerly skills so sharp that he butter-slices narratives with a razor-thin surgeon's scalpel, masterfully serving up both the world's dark underbelly and its gloriously uplifting sustenance of love, longing and wonder-lust." —Forbes

Paul Theroux’s latest collection of essays applies his signature searching curiosity to a life lived as much in reading as on the road. This writerly tour-de-force features a satisfyingly varied selection of topics. Travel essays take us to Ecuador, Zimbabwe, and Hawaii, to name a few. Gems of literary criticism reveal fascinating depth in the work of Henry David Thoreau, Muriel Spark, Joseph Conrad, and Hunter Thompson. And in a series of breathtakingly personal profiles, we take a helicopter ride with Elizabeth Taylor, go diagnosing with Oliver Sacks, eavesdrop on the day-to-day life of a Manhattan dominatrix, and explore New York with Robin Williams.

An extended meditation on the craft of writing binds together this wide-ranging collection, along with Theroux’s constant quest for the authentic in a person or in a place.
 

9

Nurse Wolf, the Hurter

The man she called “the bug cruncher” used to show up at her studio furtively carrying old, cloudy Tupperware containers labeled with strips of masking tape scrawled Lasagna April 97 or Spaghetti Sauce. Never mind the labels; the Tupperware contained insects the man had carefully caught on Long Island, where he was a construction worker. He started with beetles, and then he brought roaches and slugs. As time passed the creatures got bigger. One day he brought a live mouse.

Nurse Wolf said to him, “I draw the line there. I never said I’d do a mouse.”

“Do the mouse,” the man pleaded. “It’s half dead anyway.” It had been in the Tupperware container with no breathing holes.

“I’m like, ‘No way!’” Nurse Wolf told me. But she agreed to do the others. “I had to wear shoes. He was very specific. Open-toed mules with these high heels.”

The man lay on his side, on the floor—“the bug’s-eye view,” in Nurse Wolf’s phrase—tumescent, touching himself.

“Stab it with your heel, slowly.” He wanted Nurse Wolf to tease and torment the creatures. Then he would say suddenly, “Crush it!” and clutch himself.

The bug cruncher’s fetish was unusual even in Nurse Wolf’s wide experience. And it was difficult for her to squash insects by aiming a stiletto heel at them—they often kept slipping, and the slugs were just impossible.

“I liked the freaky side of it,” she said, yet she was soft-hearted toward all creatures. She collected stuffed animals, she loved having pets, she owned a large collection of animal skulls. She had an oryx skull, a giraffe skull, and a stuffed beaver she called Hoover in her studio, which she sometimes called her dungeon.

Her psychotherapist remained thoughtful when Nurse Wolf told her how, as a dominatrix, she sometimes imagined herself a furry creature with sharp little teeth. When Nurse Wolf added, “And with a long tail. I have a major tail fetish. I wish I had a tail. I used to wear a tail,” the therapist said, “That could be penis envy.”

“I have a penis!” Nurse Wolf shouted at her, and began laughing. “I have lots of them! I have a long purple one with glitter on it. I have big ones and small ones. Some are electric. Why should I be envious?”

Some time later, Nurse Wolf said to me, “I love women with tails.”

She also told me, “I love little fat Hispanic boys with breasts. I have an ass fetish. I can’t describe the perfect one, but I know it when I see it. I love old men. I love big fat soft men. A few of the fattest and oldest men are my babies. I put diapers on them. I like the ones that just lie there and love the smell of talc. I love the rotten ones, too, the ones that are naughty and have to be spanked very hard. Other babies need treatment. I say, ‘Mommy wants to take your temperature. This is good for you. This is part of your treatment. I’ll make this as comfortable for you as possible.’ I use a dildo, or I might use my finger. If it’s my finger, I wear gloves, two gloves, one over the other. For fisting I use long-sleeved autopsy gloves that a doctor friend gave me. They’re totally great gloves.”

In the world turned upside down, people in search of pain are nearly as common as people seeking relief from it. This is the other side of treatments. Nurse Wolf was my name for this queen of algolagnia—pleasure from pain. She gave pleasure by inflicting it, she got pleasure from causing it. “Nurse Wolf” because in our talks she described one of her most frequent roles as a nurse in a medical scenario, and it suited her perfectly. I could see the white shoes, the white nurse’s outfit, the brisk gestures, the busy hands. In her early thirties, attractive, the picture of health, still looking more like a Texas cheerleader than an art student—she had been both—it was easy to see her as the efficient and unflappable nurse.

She often referred to skills and actual medical knowledge. In her studio she had a medical room and a lot of implements: tongs and scalpels and electrical devices. I remarked several times on her expertise, the specific operations she mentioned, for it cannot be easy to sew buttons on a man’s skin, or stitch his penis to his thigh, or put in sutures (even given a dominatrix’s skill in tying knots), or use the sharpest scalpels in the manner that people in her line of work call “blood play.” But she rejected my compliments and dismissed such procedures as fairly simple—her modest dismissal was very nurse-like—shaking her head and saying, “It’s only home surgery.

“Typically, I’m an evil nurse,” she explained.

The ritual and theatrical aspects of sexuality were subjects I often pursued with Oliver Sacks. He told me how sadistic attacks on plants were for some men a sexual ritual. He also said, “The universals of costume and uniform become heightened and ritualized in fetishism. Posture is very important. One shows one’s posture in one’s dress.”

In her wardrobe, which included a French maid’s outfit and black leather items of her biker-babe role—and much else—Nurse Wolf also had the white dress, the hat, the shoes. And then she enlarged on the eroticism in finding dramatic uses in her nurse scenario for rectal thermometers, high colonics, and the simple exposures and insertions in the more provocative aspects of prostate-poking—sex as proctology.

“‘This is for your own good,’ I might say. Or it’s an examination. ‘You have to bend over and we have to see if you’re worthy to be my slave.’ With the cross-dressers it’s, ‘Are you a virgin?’ It can be a slave-auction scenario or sheer humiliation. There’s something incredibly humiliating and exciting about someone they’re overpowered by, and being penetrated by.”

“So you’re a wicked nurse?” I asked.

“There’s always that wicked side, but the question is, how pronounced is it? ‘Mommy wants to take your temperature.’ Nurse does that, too. It’s the same kind of line. ‘This is part of your treatment.’ I am more or less in control that way.”

Her authority and assertiveness in the role-playing derived from the discussion beforehand in which all the options were considered. “I say, ‘Paint me an image if you don’t know the words for it,’ and they go, ‘I used to watch this show, and this woman used to wear . . .’ and they describe it. A lot of people love catsuits. They love Catwoman in Batman. And they love that woman Emma Peel from The Avengers.”

If the role-play was nurse-patient, she urged the client to recount his history—had he had an experience of nurses or hospitals, or physical examinations, and what about a childhood illness?

The promise of “authentic medical exam room” is often made in the advertisements for mistresses in the S & M press. Nurse Wolf’s medical room was well fitted out and, with the possible exception of the handcuffs and whips, would not have disgraced a professional gynecologist’s examining room, which it greatly resembled. And there was much more equipment elsewhere in the place. “Dungeon” seemed an apt name for two of the rooms, given the furnishings: a black coffin, a steel cage, flogging posts and flogging stools, a rubber body bag that was winched up so that a man could hang like a bat. I had never seen so many clothes or such equipment.

“You wouldn’t believe my overhead,” Nurse Wolf said.

After many lengthy conversations I seriously wondered whether there was anyone whom Nurse Wolf did not welcome to her place.

Her answer surprised me.

“If someone calls on the phone and says, ‘I’m very attractive. I work out all the time and make a lot of money,’ I have no interest,” Nurse Wolf said. “And younger men are no good. They think they’re so handsome. They don’t show up on time. They’re not respectful—I don’t like the young guys at all. Those you’re-going-to-tie-me-up-and-keep-me-forever guys. What I want to hear is: ‘I haven’t had an extensive amount of real experience, but I want to grow in this area, and I fantasize about X, Y, and Z.’ Maybe they don’t know what it means in their life—that it has a place. I have a lot of great clients.”

“What makes a great client?”

“They have a good sense of humor. They respect your time. They like the same things I do. They trust me and appreciate it. I like grateful and really respectful people. The only downside is that after you beat the hell out of them, they call you twenty times afterward to thank you.”

As with any other treatment center, a person is not accepted as a client without first being screened and interviewed, and there is always the question of money. Nurse Wolf charges $200 an hour for clients of long standing, $250 for newer clients, sometimes more for lengthy sessions. “I love the crazies and the psycho people, but they are so unstable.”

“I imagine flogging someone is pretty exhausting, isn’t it? How many would you do in a day?”

“Not many. But I might do longer sessions.”

“What’s a long session?”

“The longest I like to do is ten hours.”

Which is $2,000, but as Nurse Wolf quickly points out, it requires considerable preparation and a lot of cleaning up afterward. “This business can be profitable. Some people make it very profitable. But I travel so much. Also, I am selective. I don’t see it as a business as much as I should. Another mistress would have other people working for her. Or would not have so much equipment. They would try to keep their overhead lower. I don’t want to do that. I know people who have 900 lines and websites. They offer videos and phone sessions.”

Screening is essential. Walk-ins are out of the question: no drop-ins, no strangers. Even men Nurse Wolf thought she knew well have become stalkers, and there are nonstop phone freaks. She knows that when she is alone with her clients anything can happen. Last summer, a dominatrix on the Upper West Side was found bludgeoned to death in her dungeon.

“I am worried about that,” Nurse Wolf said. “The clients know where you are, and they think they have something over your head.”

One of Nurse Wolf’s objections to working in a house—as she did early in her career—was that the clients were not properly screened. Some men wanted sessions with her but considered her unclean, wanted her to cover herself completely in Saran Wrap, and others implored her to strip, “which was out of the question.” And others did not want to be dominated at all. “One guy stuck my head in a toilet. I had no idea that I was expected to be a slave at times. I had limits. And of course, in a house they want you to do volume.”

So, as Nurse Wolf, and sometimes as Mistress Wolf, or Mommy, she screens everyone beforehand. “I have them write letters. There are a number of things they have to do for me. They have to draw a portrait of themselves on the outside of the envelope, and the envelope also has to contain a picture of their pet, or someone else’s pet. Choosing a pet picture tells me a lot about a person. What they’re like, their sense of humor. A lot.”

After that she talks to the prospective clients on the phone. And when they arrive for their session there is more preparation—discussion, perhaps an hour or more of it, before the session starts.

I asked, “If I said, ‘Would you see my friend?,’ would you?”

“I would want to know a lot—whether it was personal or professional. I’d ask what sort of experience he’s had. ‘Who have you really enjoyed seeing?’ If someone says, ‘No one’—a first-timer—I’m not going to see them, because I’m not sure what I am going to find.”

She is one of the busiest and most successful mistresses in Manhattan. As for the preferences, there are all sorts, but a certain random synchronicity develops day by day.

“It goes in waves. I don’t know how it happens—it’s like being in the subway and everyone’s chosen to wear green. One day will be all sissy-maid-cross-dressers-slut day. And the next day very heavy leather.”

We met, she and I, as travelers, by chance, both of us being cagey about what we really did for a living, like a bishop and an actress thrown together on the Zambezi. She said she was a photographer; I mumbled something about journalism. In fact, I was working on a novel and she was traveling with one of her slaves, whom she buggered every morning and beat every night, though I was never privileged to observe this unusual spectacle (unusual, at least, in the mellow monotony of a jungle setting). She said she traveled extensively, and it had to be true, for she was knowledgeable and confident. But it was only long after, when we came clean about how we were both self-employed (“I have a dungeon,” “I’m a novelist”) that she told me how she travels with some clients, prosperous businessmen, heads of companies, tying them up and whipping them back at the hotel after all the day’s meetings are over. She especially favored traveling in Germany, Holland, and England. She liked all her clients, but she had a special fondness for the English ones.

“They have a cutely developed sense of kink. They love games. They’re also very polite—respectful and formal. And they can be real sluts,” she said, smiling with genuine approval. Her descriptive language interested me, because it did not come out of books—she had read almost nothing, yet she sometimes used the neurological or psychological phrases that Oliver Sacks used. For example, speaking of the English, she said, “What matters more is that it’s all about some structure and ritual.”

I took to her and she to me. “We both have people skills,” I said. She laughed at that. She laughed a lot—I liked her cheery mood. “Hey, I’m busy, I’ve things to do and people to beat,” she said sometimes. Or, “Come on over and let’s see what we can whip up.”

Such lines were the well-honed ripostes of a professional pleaser, but most revealed the good humor a person derives from sheer fulfillment. I saw my fictional doctor, Lauren Slaughter, resident of Half-Moon Street—daytime postgraduate student and nighttime escort—as the embodiment of much of the ambition and self-delusion of the eighties. Nurse Wolf I saw as a Dr. Slaughter for the nineties, not just servicing flagellomaniacs but also having a cultural perspective: she really was a photographer, a record-cover designer, and a maker of videos; she liked the movie Crumb and all sorts of performance art. She had an enthusiastic appreciation of modern art. Talking about Francis Bacon one day, I mentioned that he was a masochist who was whipped every evening by his Cockney lover. (“Ready for yer frashing now, Frawncis?”) She gushed, “I love his paintings. I would love to have whipped Francis Bacon.” Pop music, even if it wasn’t mainstream, was a passion. She knew everything about rock groups like Nashville Pussy or acts such as the Pain-Proof Rubber Girls. There were two Rubber Girls, who contorted together in erotic postures on a bed of nails. They also put cigarettes out on their tongues.

After telling me how people did something shocking like that, Nurse Wolf would say, “Maybe they don’t do it in your world, but they do in mine.” I liked that very much, her referring to my world and her world.

Her world I knew from advertisements in magazines. It has never been hard to figure out the personal ads; indeed, they have become less entertaining as they have grown more specific. “Cute Jewish male, 55, very fit, own business, seeks full-figured Jewish female, 22–35, for travel southern CA coast” is not necessarily about marriage, whereas “Marriage-minded Catholic female, 34, seeks smart, fun, white successful professional NYC male who has never been married” certainly is. The more upbeat such ads sound, the more desperate they seem, but the subtext of loneliness and frustration is obviously part of the attraction.

Alongside such ads is another sort of classification that, until recently, I had found pretty hard to decode. For decades, “massage” and “relaxation therapy” have been euphemisms for masturbation, but the category of “Role-Play” in mainstream weekly magazines I found distinctly peculiar. The wording of a typical ad, “Sultry Diva—Let me train you . . . Now!—Fetish Exploration/Behavior Modification/Nurse Therapy,” just baffled me.

Role-playing was one of Nurse Wolf’s specialties. And in a profession where talk costs money and the meter is always running, Nurse Wolf was easygoing and talkative. Her garrulity appealed to me because she was so candid. And her work was not just a job. She was clearly sexually obsessed. Her role-playing was less a living than a way of life that she had been refining since puberty. She had grown up in a suburb, a middle-class home with a swimming pool, in an indulgent family, and was still in regular touch with her folks. She was educated in private schools; she had gone to a great art college. Almost more than anything, I was fascinated by her prosperous upbringing, her prep school, and her cheerleading. What struck me in her reminiscences were her distinct and detailed memories of her girlhood, her close touch with her sexual memory.

“I have a suspicion that obsessive sexuality goes with a clear, continuous, and conscious memory of childhood sexual desire, fantasies, and even activity, without the latent period that other people have,” Oliver Sacks once said to me.

To a novelist, latency is a nuisance, and access to the past is a kind of magic—all the better when what is reve...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction: Study for Figures in a Landscape
• My Drug Tour: Searching for Ayahuasca
• Thoreau in the Wilderness
• Liz in Neverland
• Greeneland
• Hunter in the Kingdom of Fear
• Conrad at Sea
• Simenon’s World
• Dr. Sacks, the Healer
• Nurse Wolf, the Hurter
• Robin Williams: “Who’s He When He’s at Home?”
• Tea with Muriel Spark
• Mrs. Robinson Revisited
• Talismans for Our Dreams
• The Rock Star’s Burden
• Living with Geese
• Trespassing in Africa
• The Seizures in Zimbabwe
• Stanley: The Ultimate African Explorer
• Paul Bowles: Not a Tourist
• Maugham: Up and Down in Asia
• English Hours: Nothing Personal
• Traveling Beyond Google
• Hawaii: Islands upon Islands
• Mockingbird in Monroeville
• Benton’s America
• My Life as a Reader
• The Real Me: A Memory
• Life and the Magazine
• Dear Old Dad: Memories of My Father
• The Trouble with Autobiography
• Acknowledgments
• Sample Chapter from MOTHER LAND
• Buy the Book
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH