Once I took a girl to the top floor of the Rex Tranh hotel in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. There are topiary animals there: deer, bears, cocks, dogs. It was before Vietnam became a tourist destination, and we had the roofgarden to ourselves. Vietnam was still closed. Only East Germans and Russians visited. There were no street lights, cars or motorbikes. 

I took off the girl’s teeshirt. She pressed into the side of the deer, her nipples seeking the hardened ends of the stubs cut by the topiarist. It was cold. I took off my belt and doubled it. She arched her back and raised her arms, so she would fall, a little, into the stubs and spikes of the bush each time my belt landed. She had small breasts, mouth-sized, with very hard pointed nipples. I whipped her.

She was gasping with lust and hurt by the twentieth stroke.

Then there was a small man with perfect black hair and a dancer’s waist at the top of the roof-garden stairwell. This was a waiter she liked, a young man who worshipped her. He followed her everywhere, and his patience had finally won him a glimpse of her bare back.

And he’d gained some other intimate knowledge about her. The girl had very white skin but she was petite, unlike most Western women the Vietnamese had seen. He thought she was a princess, a goddess, an opera star.

I gave the young man cigarettes and francs, and ordered lobster for our room, in thirty minutes.  

By that time we were in our room and the girl was tied over a beautiful laquered cabinet with dragons and herons, and her buttocks and upper thighs had been belted and welted as blazing red as the soft skin between her shoulderblades. She’d put her tee-shirt back on to get back to our room, but there’d been specks of blood on the front when I lifted it off her again. Her breasts had bled. 

She’d wondered, when the waiter knocked, if I’d leave her naked and exposed when he brought in the trolley with the lobster, plates and the awful Russian champagne. 

At the last second I’d thrown a sheet over her. He could tell she was there, but not see her.  When he’d gone, I stood between her spread tied legs and mounted her. And while we moved together, I fed her lobster with my fingers.