But once in Paris, she strayed into an arcade and saw people watching penny movies with such delight and interest that she waited her turn and slipped a penny in a slot. A little movie scene appeared, awkward and jerky like the movies of the 1920s. A family sat at dinner, father (with a mustache), mother in a ruffled dress, and three children. The young and pretty maid was serving the soup. She was dressed in black. Her dress was very short. It revealed a white lace-edged petticoat, and she wore a butterfly of white lace on her hair. She spilled the soup on the father's lap. The father rose in a fury and left the table to go and change his clothes. The maid had not only to help him change his clothes, but to atone for the accident.

Lillian was about to leave, unmoved, amused, when the machine clicked and a new film began. The scene this time took place in a classroom. The students were little girls of six or seven (Lillian's age when she was receiving the spankings). They were dressed in old-fashioned frilly and bouffant dresses. The teacher was angered by their mockeries and laughter, and asked them to come up, one by one, to be spanked (just as Lillian and her sisters and brothers were lined up and made to march up the stairs). At this scene Lillian's heart began to beat wildly. She thought she was about to relive the pain and humiliation caused by their father.

But when the teacher lifted up the little girl, stretched her across his knees, turned up her skirt, pulled down her panties, and began to spank her, what Lillian experienced after twenty years was not pain, but a flooding joy of sensual excitement. As if the spankings, while hurting her, had been at the same time the only caress she had known from her father. Pain had become inextricably mixed with joy at his presence, the distorted closeness had alchemized into pleasure. The rite, intended as a punishment, had become the only intimacy she had known, the only contact, a substitution of anger and tears in place of tenderness.

She wanted to be in the little girl's place!

She hurried away from the arcade, trembling with joy, as if she were returning from an erotic adventure.

Thus the real dictator, the organizer and director of her life, had been this quest for a chemical compound—so many ounces of pain mixed with so many ounces of pleasure in a formula known only to the unconscious. The failure lay in the enormous difference between the relationship she had needed, and the one she had, on a deeper level, more deeply wanted. The need was created out of an aggregate of negativities and deformations. When Lillian thought that in her relationship to Jay she was only in bondage to a passion, she was also in bondage to a need. When she thought her stays in Paris were directed entirely by a desire for Jay, they were in fact predetermined on those days in Mexico when she was six or seven years old.