She had agreed to go with me to the new Getty Museum after our second session. We talk like old friends in the car–effortlessly and fast, as though we know we haven’t enough time to talk about everything we’d like. When I attempt to reconstruct our conversations afterwards, however, I never seem to have enough dialogue to fill the time we talked. It’s as if there are gaps in my memory “tape” of our conversations. That’s puzzling because my memory is good, and most things associated with Marquesa are too hard to erase, not too easy.

She looks to me for business advice, but I’m afraid to answer because I know nothing about her business in the sense I use the term. All I have is my own experience with her to draw on. Ever since first meeting her, I’ve recommended she tone down her site. It makes her seem harder than she is, I thought. When I suggested that in an email, she replied:

“So THAT’S what you think. Well– you’ll never know! <wicked grin>”

For once coyote disagrees with Mistress. She makes a point of letting us know. This time when I mentioned it, she said the hard tone was a screen. At first, I thought she meant that it screened her–made her seem tougher than she was–the kind of tough bitch the subbies want. Now, I think it’s us she’s screening. She left out one quality on her list. She’s a “cruel, sadistic, conniving romantic optimist” all right, but also an honest one. We have to fool ourselves, or at least ignore the warning label. Or want the contents.

She has a sharp eye and reacts with a child’s enthusiasm when something catches her interest, so going to the museum with her was a even more fun than I expected. Driving north on the San Diego Freeway, the Getty looms above Sunset Boulevard like a modern Spanish castle. Its open spaces are cleverly divided and walled in Southern California light and heavily textured stone. Walking among them, you feel like you’re in a castle courtyard. It’s like being in a play or opera set.

The architecture is more impressive than the collection. Two Cezannes, The Eternal Feminine and Still Life with Apples; a couple of haystacks in Monet’s patented pink snow, a couple of Renoir portraits, a large Munch version of Starry Night, a small room full of fabulous Greek pottery, tons of very expensive baroque and rococo furniture and a lot of indifferent Roman sculpture–that’s what I remember of it. Oh, and a Cassatt, and a Pissarro that Marquesa found dull–she was right, I thought–and a Van Gogh Irises. And a couple of Gericaults and a big Turner. And a couple of memorable pastels by Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Back when I used to practice low level bombing, we flew at 400 feet at around 600 feet per second. You make a lot of noise doing that, so the low level routes were over unpopulated areas–mostly in the high plains. The cattle got used to us. But, man, did we spook the calves. When you fly over a big herd with a lot of calves, you can see your sound reach the ground just a little behind you, about 8 o’clock. The cows keep munching, but the calves go tearing off in all directions. You just see this wave of spooked calves go through the herd at 400 mph and realize it’s you–the power of your engines–that’s doing that. Walking through the galleries at the Getty with Marquesa was like that.

First she spooked the guards, then the men, then the women. The museum wasn’t crowded, so the sight lines were good. She wasn’t dressed provocatively. Tight black jeans, yes. And platform heels. But nothing like what keeps me from knowing what planet I’m on when I first open my eyes in her presence. The guards–and the place was crawling with cops–noticed her first. They weren’t so bad–they spent 8 hours a day with the art, so Mistress was a relief to them. Some drama and novelty in the parade they were paid to watch every day. The men looked like oafs. Marquesa was high heat. The bat never left their shoulders. They stared, frozen. The women noticed the men and then Marquesa. My, my, the hatred women blaze at one another when they see their men caught in headlights like that. Standing next to her, I was invisible. I felt I could walk over, take down Cezanne’s plate of apples and walk out with it, as long as Marquesa was next to me.

In the unlikely event the discussion would interest anyone, I’d argue that there have been 4 great artistic periods in history: Fourth Dynasty Egypt; Athens in the 5th Century BC; Italy and Northern Europe in the 15th and 16th Centuries; and Europe and America in the 19th and early 20th. Architecture and sculpture dominated the first two periods, at least based on what has come down to us. Painting was the dominant visual art in the last two. Cezanne finished representational painting in the last era in the same sense that Beethoven finished the sonata form with his Opus 111. There wasn’t much left to be said in those genres after their masterpieces. I think a lot of Cezanne, in case you haven’t guessed. It was plain he knew and painted the fuss The Eternal Feminine creates, but he painted Her like he hated what can reach through our eyeballs and grab our other ones and squeeze. And it wasn’t lack of skill. Cezanne could draw as well as Durer when he chose. If you don’t believe me, see the reproduction of Madame Cezanne (Hortense Fiquet) with Hortensias (hydrangeas) in Cezanne, published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Marquesa was a yard in front of me, a curvaceous black silhouette with that wonderful blond mane, looking at The Eternal Feminine and trying to figure out why coyote, whose taste in women had at least one redeeming bright spot, saw anything in this hideous reclining nude. I began to feel sorry for my hero, Cezanne, and to understand huge chunks of his ouvre. And especially to understand why Madame Cezanne looked so sad in his sublime formal portraits of her. Coyote decided then and there that he would indeed rather serve in hell than rule in heaven and not be able to respond to the eternal feminine.

Marquesa loved the way Cezanne handled the folds of that fabulous blue tablecloth in Apples. She and Picasso. The mysterious Munch starry night seemed to speak to us both.

“Are these copies?” Marquesa asked as we walked into a room full of statues. It was the same tone she used with the waiter when she wanted to know if the tuna was fresh. I almost laughed. Not at her–at the notion of J. Paul with his billions and his experts being conned. Then I realized she was right. In the truest sense, these were copies. Roman copies of Greek originals. 1st Century Rome churning out knockoffs of 5th Century Athens. What a remarkable thing to say. Either she knew instinctively that these underworried marble Romans lacked the vigor of classical Greek sculpture, which would be difficult to explain unless she has a background in art history she has successfully hidden from me, or she knew because she had seen the Greek statutes these were based on. “After eliminating the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is true,” Holmes was fond of saying.

It was as if Marquesa had just walked into a room full of 2,000 year old statues and had a nonlocal moment with them–as if they’d all been together some place before. Coyote had his own little epiphany. He was standing in the Antiquities Room of the J. Paul Getty Museum with someone who would know exactly what to do if she suddenly found herself in Inanna’s Temple in Erech 5,000 years ago. The heirodules, the ritual prostitutes, would acclaim her as Inanna incarnate in no time. Or Lamashtu. She’d be the same in Ishtar’s temple in Babylon 3,000 ago. Or in any man’s bedroom as Lilith last night. When she says goddess, pay attention. We’re not talkin’ good fairy here. If you see life as a line, it begins in pussy and it ends in dirt. It makes a lot of sense to worship the former as opposed to the latter, but they’re both the end of the line. Sex and death, pleasure and pain, creation and destruction, the two great mysteries combined in a single image–that’s the kind of goddess we’re talking about.

The seductive side is understandably popular and well known. The chthonic, the shadow side, less so. This is from an amulet for protection against Lamashtu, the dark side of Lilith, the succubus. It comes from farther back from the Romans than the Romans are from us.

“Dreadful is she, headstrong is she, she is a goddess, terrible is she. She is like a leopard, her feet are those of a bird. Her hands are dirty, her face is that of a powerful lion. She rises out of the reed bed. Her hair is loose, her breasts are bare. Her hands are caked with flesh and blood. She forces an entry through the window, she slides in like a snake. She enters the house, she leaves the house again.”

There are maybe 5 cases of Greek pottery in a room not much bigger than my living room. Maybe 100 pieces of Red and Black-figure vases and plates. Much of it 5th Century stuff–gems, pure gems. Marquesa wanted to know why it fascinated me. There were a few early geometric designs so I could point out the shift away from abstract to natural forms, and how wonderfully lifelike and imbued with feeling the men and women and birds and snakes became. All created with simple lines. The road to Cezanne–where lines have disappeared and only color remains–began here. And Picasso came back here, to all lines again, when he couldn’t see anything beyond Cezanne. And when he tired of that, he continued backwards to the geometric, the abstract. I hoped to find Amazons, to see if any resembled her, but we were disappointed.

We walked outside, out on the South Parapet. It was cool enough that Mistress had me put her jacket with the black fur collar over her shoulders. It was almost sunset and the air was wonderfully clear. The view was spectacular. From downtown to the ocean and south to the Santa Ana Mountains. Two clusters of skyscrapers rising out of the flat basin floor like giant, alien crystals. The city that designs the planet’s dreams, poor planet. She looked down at the cactus garden below the parapet where the moat should be. “Wouldn’t it be fun to take some bad slaves out there?” she said, looking at me, bright-eyed. You could see the spines from up here. “Think what it’d do to their naked bottoms!”

She knew there were two pastels I liked, and when she saw them she looked at them for a while and again wanted to know what I saw in them. The Degas was easy. A couple standing just offstage in evening clothes, watching intently what was happening out on the invisible stage, with the woman marking the place in the program with her hand. We had talked about the classical, how it strove for something eternal, beyond the mere appearance of things. And how Romantic art broke away from that tradition. She saw the difference in the Gericault portrait of the slave (“you look for omens…”)–he was no eternal Hercules, but someone real, who was born and died. With Degas we were even further away from the eternal. Here were real people caught in a specific, identifiable second of their lives. And what they were doing in that frozen second told us things about them that classical or romantic art could not.

The Toulouse-Lautrec was not so easy. When I first saw it, I thought it was a Degas. He was mimicking Degas’s style. It’s a woman in her bath; we’re looking over her left shoulder at the most beautiful breast imaginable. Degas was too cool to have painted it, but the regular at the Moulin Rouge was not so restrained. Later, when she was delighted by the opulence of the furniture, she pressed her breast into my arm. I took it as a very generous thank you. If she was wearing a bra, it was gossamer. She was also making a point–that what Toulouse-Lautrec and I had admired may not, in fact, have been the most beautiful breast imaginable. Her argument was so compelling, I can’t always forget it when I want to.

She loved the baroque furnishings, especially the marquetry. Not surprising, given where it stands in the dictionary. We played with the little puzzle flower in the display showing how it was done. Studying a sconce, she pronounced it too elaborate. For coyote, much more at home with the austere Macintosh, she was drawing a pretty fine line through a lot of cake frosting, but I looked. The sconce was rococo, not baroque. As I said, Mistress has a good eye.

The last thing we looked at before walking out was the Degas photography exhibit. It ended or began, I don’t remember which, with a small self-portrait. I said he looked just like the young Bob Dylan, and she agreed. As we walked out into those great courtyards and the dark, she seemed unusually thoughtful.

“I don’t know how you could paint your own portrait,” she said finally.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head.

I told her why I hadn’t asked for her picture.

We drove down to the Valley for dinner. To get her to go, I had to reassure her that she could kill me if we were murdered there. She’d had her Corvette carjacked out from under her in the Valley, and hadn’t been back since.

She had given me a post-hypnotic suggestion in our last session that she planned to trigger at dinner. She also told me to forget it. I had, at least until we were driving down the canyon when suddenly I remembered it. I panicked that I had forgotten it once and was worried I wouldn’t remember it when I was supposed to. See why they call me Not-so-wily?

She held out her glass to me in the restaurant and I touched it with mine. I had no difficulty remembering. I took her hand.

“You are my goddess,” I said, “and I belong to you forever.”

It was what I had been told to say, but it was exactly what I wanted to say. I knew she wanted me to say it, and that was all that mattered. Compared to what she was doing for me, it was the least I could do. She can focus so completely on you, and sometimes so genuinely wants to turn you on–albeit for motives that are best not looked into, at least while you’re enjoying the attention–that she will make you feel better–more important, sexy, intelligent and funny–than anyone else ever has in your life. It’s the kind of attention that can bring your lips to her toes in public, as any honest omnivorous quadruped will tell you.

Over dinner I made some reference to Jung’s concepts of animus and anima. The other side of our sexual coins. The concepts seemed to strike a chord in her experience. She wanted me to write about them. She thought the ideas could help slaves she cared about that were struggling painfully with their sexual identity. I’m no psychoanalyst. I’ve been comfortable using the concepts here because I’m using them mostly to describe my own feelings. I’m not theorizing, so I can’t get too far astray, even trying to describe such a complex relationship as mine with Marquesa. Outside that context, I know just enough about them to be dangerous. That’s why I’ve limited my discussion accordingly.

The bistro was packed, and Mistress was less at ease than she had been in the nearly deserted hotel restaurant. She said she really likes Biaggio, the new casino in Vegas, because it isn’t noisy and hectic like the other casinos. Marquesa’s animal nature is very strong. Freud said sex was the engine that drove us; his pupil Adler said it was power. Jung said it was more complex; the life force, or libido, for him was our animal nature or instincts. The stronger that life force, or animal nature, the more charismatic the individual. That was a real insight. Mistress Marquesa has more charisma than anyone I’ve ever met. But that strong animal nature doesn’t let her ego filter out much noise around her. In the restaurant she reminded me of a leopard I saw on The Tonight Show. Gorgeous and well behaved, but you could tell she’d rather be focused on stalking a single antelope than parading around in front of all those people.

It was a cool evening, and she waited inside while I got the car. Outside on the sidewalk waiting for the valet service to bring it, I noticed the car at the curb was a tan–all right, “fawn”–Rolls convertible. Then it occurred to me it must belong to the couple right in front of me. He was bald, plump and mustached and wore jewelry; she was better looking than he was in a hard New York way. I was noticing the world around me for the first time since we went into the restaurant. I turned back toward it and could make out Mistress’s form through the door. She was talking to the woman waiting next to her. It dawned on me that I had just spent 2 hours in one of the best restaurants in LA when it was jammed and never looked around the room. Hell, I couldn’t even remember the room.

Back in the car, she relaxed again. When we were settled on the freeway headed south, she took my hand off the gearshift and held it lightly in hers on her leg. It was the most intimate physical contact we’d had. As we talked, I began to realize why it was so easy for me to be nonlocal with her. I’d grown up with a domineering father and relatively weak mother, who continued to take my father back, even though she knew it wasn’t in her own or her children’s best interests. A strong woman would not let that happen. A strong woman would protect me.

“Just relax and let me take you under my wing,” Mistress said once while we were playing. At the time, I laughed. “Mistress, that is not a wing,” I said, referring to whatever phallus or symbol thereof she was wielding at the time. But there was real comfort in her offer of protection. I began to understand why letting her control me wasn’t frightening, why I felt so safe and unselfconscious with her. She was so strong, there was nothing she couldn’t protect me from.

My horoscope said: “this is the beginning of a charmed time when you’ll have the power to overturn curses that were cast on you during your first 12 years of life.”

Those were her games, she said, referring to our play. Next she wanted to play mine. Ever so gently caressing my hand in hers, she said she wanted to know my fantasies. The sexiest woman you have ever met wants you to reveal your fantasies so she can act them out for you. And you know she can, very well. You also know she wants to make you a slave to your own desires. And you know she can, very well. It was the kind of offer the devil would have made on the South Parapet. Fall down and worship me and all this will be yours.

Faust said he wanted to know the secrets of nature. He sold his soul for them, supposedly, but I suspect that what he wanted all along was sex. That’s what the devil ended up getting for him, anyway. The story’s too sentimental for me. The heroine, the girl Faust takes advantage of, picks up the tab for him with Old Nick in the end. Coyote suspected this one would be on him, all the way. But even then, the offer didn’t sound bad. What a primrose way that would be to the everlasting bonfire–Marquesa’s Way.

She wanted to give me a couple of tapes, so I came in. The dog and I had been introduced and got along fine. Mistress was impressed. She said there weren’t many slaves he liked as much as me. But tonight he wasn’t happy. He kept butting me away from her with his rear, and finally he sat on my foot. He weighs about as much as I do. I was delighted———– was telling me our Mistress was using a tone with coyote that he thought only he deserved.

She gave me her cheek to kiss at the door. We parted like old California friends.

On the flight out, I got a seat on the right side and tried to find her house again. I got closer, but the streets and docks are winding, and didn’t find it. The physical symptoms of withdrawal lasted about 10 days.

My subconscious leaves me pretty much alone unless it thinks I’m trying to kill it or something. I don’t think I’ve had a dream I’ve remembered clearly in the couple of years since I quit climbing. Until the other night. This old acquaintance and I were walking through dense woods. I haven’t seen this guy in years. The only thing I remembered about him was you always saw him out with younger, very attractive women. It was warm and sunny in the woods. We came across this weird shape overgrown with vines. The vines were so thick, at first I thought they were covering a derelict spaceship or something. The leaves on the vines were small and heart shaped. They were a bright emerald green in the sunlight, with delicate, lighter green veins. Then I recognized the shape under that immense weight of vines. It was a nice, dependable, Volvo station wagon–the same color as the one coyote drove for years. The back window was out. A bundle of vines a couple of feet thick had climbed through the hole where the rear window had been. The vines attached themselves in whorls to the glass on the inside of the car, filling it almost completely.