Chef Anthony Wrote the Menu. I Need to Know If I Make the List.

Vance Smith

The Dismissal Hallway

Chef Anthony posted his required dinner menu from inside that amethyst kitchen and I have read it eleven times. Thirty-four thousand dollars for the evening. I am not thinking about the price. I am thinking about the main course. He described it with the precision of a man who has spent thirty years in professional kitchens: tenderloin placed on a slave's back, carved tableside, while Mistress Lynne's fist works the platter-bearer open in full view of everyone seated at the table, violet candles lit, the room absolutely silent except for the sound of men pretending they are fine. Chef Anthony wrote the menu like a professional. He did not write who gets chosen. Someone lies face down on that tablecloth and becomes the surface she works while the room watches her select them, publicly, in a room built from the combined fortunes of every man who checked into this mansion and decided he was different from the last one. I have been prepaying for years to be tied up, suspended, and dismissed in The Dismissal Hallway. Dismissal is supposed to be my architecture. I invented the exit. I perfected the leaving-before-being-left. And now I am lying in this plum velvet corridor reading a dinner menu and the cage is pressing against me and the single thought running through my entire nervous system is: she has to choose someone, and what if she does not choose me.

I have walked out of every situation in my adult life before the situation could walk out on me. Every relationship, every room, every moment that started to matter. I left before I could matter back. I called it discernment. I called it strength. I have a whole internal language for the thing I do, and none of it has the word fear anywhere in it, and all of it is fear. I came to this mansion and I paid my way into the Dismissal Hallway and I thought I understood the dynamic from my side of it. Then the cage went on. Then Mistress Lynne stopped picking me for things and started not picking me for things, and I discovered that being on the receiving end of a deliberate oversight does something to the inside of a man's chest that no amount of money can insulate him from. He said the first course runs one hundred eighty-four thousand dollars per person and requires a tongue and a specific kind of attention. He said dessert uses nine mouths and three bodies and orgasm denial if the tray falls. He said nothing about who goes on the platter at the main course. He said nothing about how she decides. I have been locked for fourteen months. The cage sits on my body the same way it did on the first day except now I feel it the way you feel something that has replaced every other physical sensation you used to have. The one hundred eighty-four thousand dollar number is not the charged number in this post. The charged number is one. One platter. One body. One man she picks out of everyone in this hallway and places face down on her dining table and works open in front of the room while they eat.

Here is the fantasy I have been running in the dark of this hallway, in the indigo silence that fills this corridor at three in the morning when there is nothing to do but feel the cage and think about the one thing it prevents. She calls my name. Not a request. Not a suggestion. She says it the way she says everything at this mansion, which is like the sentence was already finished before she opened her mouth and your preferences are noted and completely irrelevant. I lie down. The tablecloth is lavender silk and it is cool against my chest and the room goes to absolute stillness. She places the tenderloin on my spine. The weight of it is nothing. The weight of the room watching her choose me is everything. She takes her time because she always takes her time and I am locked and I have been locked for fourteen months and I am not going to come from this and I know I am not going to come from this and I would write her a check for two hundred thousand dollars on the spot to make this exact moment last thirty more seconds. That is the thing I have been protecting myself from my entire life. The moment when you have been chosen and you understand what it cost you to be the kind of person who might not have been. I paid my way into The Dismissal Hallway because being dismissed was the one thing I could survive. I just need Mistress Lynne to demonstrate at this dinner table, with the whole room watching, that I was worth selecting. I will spend the rest of the week in the cage being grateful she did and completely unable to do anything about it.