Janna was married and we saw each other secretly. We met at a party and then by chance at a gallery and again in a department store. I was bewitched. She wasn't and I knew it. It needed all my ingenuity to persuade her to meet me occasionally. Even when she came, and sometimes she stood me up, she was a reluctant companion until I could cajole her a little and not always then. I knew I should stop, for my sake. But I didn't because I couldn't ; I was obsessed by her indifference. She didn't stop on her side because she came to enjoy her ability to control me and eventually to humiliate me at will. On one occasion after I had been seeing her for a couple of months, usually once a week, she was so difficult and finally so unpleasant that I started to cry. She watched me expressionlessly until I got control of myself, sniffling like some girl, and I thought it was the cruellest thing anyone had ever done to me. She didn't let me see her for three weeks afterwards by which time I was frantic. She never talked about her husband and made it plain that we would never have a sexual relationship. Yet sex was pervasively present when we were together. Sometimes she touched my arm or my back and it was like an electric shock to me. I'm certain she knew this, although she never betrayed any sign, and that the touching was deliberate, a taunt of what was unattainable and a proof that like a faithful dog I would always lick her feet metaphorically in pardon. Which I did because even being mistreated and manipulated was preferable to any alternative she might countenance. You'll have gathered by now that I'm kinda weird. She said the word wimp was invented for me. She also said I should have been gay. I knew what she would look like naked – one always does – but I forbade myself to think of her body. She asked if I had girlfriends – not « other girfriends note » - and I admitted I did not. One day, after asking this question, she asked what I did for sex – did I masturbate ? When, not wishing to lie to her, I blushingly admitted that I did, she raised her eyebrows in what I took to be disapproval. Not for you, I hastened to assure her. I hope not, was her tart response and the subject was dropped. Of course, she brought it up again, always when she had cornered me in some other way so that I felt vulnerable. Did I still masturbate, she would ask ? I would reply sulkily that it was not the sort of thing that one suddenly stopped doing. How often ? What sort of pornography did I look at ? Did I fantasise about men as well as women. Through persistence, she forced me to admit that I sometimes fantasised abut masturbating with other men. And always, once the admission had been elicited, the eyebrows would go up and she would go silent whilst I felt dirtied. In the park one day, she told me I masturbated too much. Eager to please, I agreed to stop for a month. She put me on my honour and I kept my promise. When the month was up – and it was a difficult abstinence – she gave me permission to masturbate once before stopping again for another month. Still I did not cheat and in this way, she took control of my masturbation. In desperation during one of these abstinences, I humbly asked her for permission to do wank myself. We were walking by the river at the time and there was a shelter close by. She graciously told me I could go behind it and give myself relief. I did and afterwards was absurdly, pathetically grateful to her. And then, without warning, she disappeared. She answered neither calls nor letters. When at last I dared go near her apartment, I learned that she and her husband had moved. I had no idea why she stopped. Perhaps she had simply tired of toying with me. Perhaps my obedience and my weakness deprived the game of any further challenge. I was bereft for weeks until coming to accept that I would never see her again and did not have so much as a photograph to remember her by. I also realised that her disappearance saved me from going mad with frustration and self-loathing. But, and this is the strange thing, I discovered I had no regrets either. I had been in total, you might say abject, thrall for eight months to a woman who despised me and the memory of her tyranny is still so sexually thrilling to me that I have preferred to keep it intact in my own little self-contained world than seek the company of any other woman or man.

I wrote this with a photograph of the actress Janna Lyng in front of me after seeing her in the movie Uncle John in which her boyfriend talks to her about his masturbation. I loved her cool self-possession and her Asiatic eyes.