My original sin was to need you who could live without me . . . I resisted as best I could, not knowing that the struggles of the soul are intended to be lost.
I SING THE SACRED. I sing the bodies, I sing the sex, the union between man and woman, the ever so shocking intimacy of bodies moving towards each other, of copulation, of fornication, on beds of starched linen sheets, on floors of unclean carpet squares, on rickety sofas, in bath tubs under the drip of a leaking shower head, in adulterous beds where the smell of deceived partners still lingers on, in public places, in private places. I sing the fucking, the thrusting, the sighs, the pain and the pleasure.
I sing what is no longer. I mourn what we once were and if you say I am betraying you thus, I say you are wrong. It might be a wake, but it is also a celebration. Of the way our naked flesh met and connected and of a joy supreme.
This is what happened.
This is a crime story I wrote and published somewhere. At one stage I thought it might actually become the opening chapter for a novel I was mentally toying with, about violence and desire along the American highways and a desperate race for love and money moving from Florida to Seattle. I read it in public at some festival. She was in the audience. As I hesitantly lingered over the particularly sexual elements, aware that my tale was so much more personal and explicit than the preceding stories by my fellow authors, my eyes suddenly connected with hers. She was sitting in a middle row. For weeks afterwards, I would wrack my brain to try and recall the actual colour of her eyes, with no success. I would find out later, of course. I was sitting with three others on a slightly elevated platform, two microphones shared between the four of us, a carafe of water and glasses, green baize covering the table on which our books were scattered. I wonder what I must have looked like to her. I was wearing a black Wranglers shirt with metallic poppers, open at the collar, and my usual black Farah trousers. That shirt still is a favourite of mine, I enjoy the way the cuffs sport three poppers instead of the traditional lone button most shirts have. I don’t remember what she wore. At the end of the reading, one or two people came over with questions. I lost sight of her as the audience trouped out of the large room.
This is the story I read that day. It was raining outside, pouring down with rage. The woman in the story was a composite of so many I had known and, in fact, was even more a creature of my imagination. When I wrote the tale, I had not yet visited Miami.
“Kill me,” she had asked.
So I had.
It seemed the only thing to do. I can’t pretend I was confused, I wasn’t. I knew exactly what I was doing. I remember the night still: there was a full moon over Miami Beach, the ocean lapped the shore quietly and the cheap motel sported some odd Spanish name that somehow reminded me of a bad Elvis Presley song. It was fast, reasonably painless. The look in her eyes. Then she died.
She was a $100 a night starlet in a $2.5 million B-movie. I’d been hanging round the studios for a week or so. I had an assignment to cover the making of a big project financed by Spielberg’s Amblin’ company for one of his young hot-shot screenwriter-turned-directors. My interviews were in the can, my notepad full of okay anecdotes and I was ready for the road home and a first draft on the laptop. That evening, I’d walked into this small projection room towards the back of the studio lot. Some indie outfit was screening its dailies. The assistant director had shared reviewing chores with me on a now defunct magazine some years back, and hearing I was schmoozing around town had suggested we have a drink together for old time’s sake after the screening.
It was hot and sticky in the projection room. The conditioning had a bad case of terminal cough and it smelled inside there of dry sweat, stale cigarettes and dime store perfume.
On the screen, following disjointed shots that a clever editor would later knit into the semblance of a car chase with explosions and bruised metal galore, came take after take of a nude shower scene and graphic enactment of a rape. Shot with three different cameras, one hand-held, the sequence repeated and repeated punctuated by clapperboards snapping, seen from various angles, at times literally pornographic as the camera lingered on details of the girl’s body, the ambiguous smile on her lips as some Latin American-looking hood first slapped her before throwing her onto the bed, her breast tips stiffening as both naked bodies made contact, a fleeting view of her slightly open pubes as the hand-held camera moved to a better vantage position, a candid shot which would no doubt land on the proverbial cutting-room floor. It was all badly filmed, but these soundless, imperfect images had an unsettling effect on me. In the smokey darkness, I could feel the dryness in my throat and the beginning of an involuntary erection.
For the other spectators in the uncomfortable room, it was nothing new or anything wild, just a strip of unformed celluloid that would fit into a larger visual puzzle once it had been cleaned up, aseptised. Most of them would have been present at the shooting anyway and this was just a bunch of flickering second-hand thrills.
The screen went dark as the projectionist threaded some new footage into the system. A bar scene with different protagonists I’d never seen before. The knot in my throat was beginning to hurt. I just had to get out of this room, hankered for a cold drink.
“I need some fresh air,” I whispered to my pal sitting in the next row. “I’ll see you outside later.”
As I rose from my seat, I noticed a woman in the back row of the small audience also heading for the exit.
Once in the open air, the cold was like a slap in the face following the suffocating atmosphere of the screening room. The woman who had preceded me out was standing with her back against the building’s wall, a long filterless cigarette hanging from her lips.
“Do you have a light?”
It didn’t take me long to recognize her. Clothing was no disguise. It was that ambiguous smile, part come-hither invitation, part crooked rictus, half small girl ingenue and half down-town hooker.
“Sorry, I don’t smoke. But I badly need a drink of some sorts. There’s a bar around the block, you can light up there.”
She appeared so much smaller than on the screen, but this was not unfamiliar. I introduced myself. Even minor film journalists might prove useful to a career girl, she must have initially thought, and followed me across the lot.
The bar was called something like The Mark of God, or some other patently stupid or irrelevant name. It just sticks in my memory somehow. The lighting inside was gentle and soothing. I had my customary cola, no ice; she had a vodka and orange.
“Quite a sequence, hey?”
“Yeah.”
“It must feel odd,” I said, “to see yourself up there so big, so . . . so . . .”
“Nude, you mean, naked?”
“Yes, I suppose that’s what I was trying to say,” I answered.
She smiled gently. I wasn’t blushing, but neither did I feel altogether comfortable. After all, I had already seen so much of her, her exposed flesh, her concealed self.
“How does it feel, to have to do a nude scene for the cameras?” I asked, slipping into journo mode, as she sipped her alcohol in the non-descript, almost empty bar.
“Well, you feel in a way violated, there are all these people around. In a way, it all becomes a bit impersonal, but you know what, it’s also something of a turn-on. Gives you power over all these men. They can took but they sure can’t touch.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah.”
That first night, we returned to my hotel room.
As I undressed her in the full, bright light I finally witnessed the true colours of her body. Seeing her on a cinema screen being touched by another man was one thing, and was quite enough to give me a hard on, but here, smaller, open to nobody but me, she was something else. Her skin felt softer than the skin of any woman I had been with before. For all that, she was hard and firm, her breasts pointing gently upwards, stiffening as my fingers began to skim their tips, her buttocks clenched together as I lowered her onto the bed.
Inside her, it was like fire, all-consuming heat that reached so deep, so far. It wasn’t like love, it was desperation and we merged like strangers, uncomprehending witnesses to the mad urges of our bodies.
On the second night we went to her room in another mediocre beach motel with would-be art nouveau trimmings and a crumbling balcony overlooking the ocean.
This time I undressed her slowly, mentally filming every square inch of her flesh for memory everlasting. The curve of her neck, the almost invisible dimple in her chin, the forgotten trace of a scar on her forehead hidden by a lock of stray hair, the mole at the top of her back, the way her pubic hair curled and curled. We never did say much. We didn’t really have that much to say to each other when we were not in bed. We soon realized we were creatures of lust and little else mattered.
For I think an hour I kissed, caressed, gently bit, made studied foreplay with her until she could stand it no longer and screamed out:
“Enough, I want you inside me now,” as she wrapped her hand around my cock.
Then, “It feels so big, I don’t know how it’s going to fit,” and guided me in.
On the third day, we rented a room for the night in a better class of hotel, up north on Collins Avenue, towards the Aventura Mall. At the other end of the room, facing the bed, was a large circular mirror. She insisted I take her from behind and watched attentively in the mirror, as I laboured in her rear, thrusting for her appreciation and my own pleasure and hers, fascinated by the look on her face as sweat dripped from her forehead over our private cinema screen.
It was simple fucking, it wasn’t love by any means. But I couldn’t escape, all of me just wanted more. I should have returned to the magazine and the city by now, but she was here for a further week, with one final sequence, a death scene to be shot, where the script dictated she meet her fate at the hands of some sordid Mexican pimp (I did say it was a B-movie, didn’t I?).
“I’m so raw.”
“Me too, but it feels good.”
“Look at me down there, I’m all red.”
I kissed her open wound, savouring the strong taste and pungent smell of her insides.
“Your curls are too long,” jokingly.
“So trim me, shave me.”
I did, and later that day when I made love to her for the first time in her utterly nude incarnation, she got so wet and excited that she lost all control and peed all over the sheets.
From that moment onwards, we both knew we were going too far but there was nothing to hold us back. The moments of desire when our energy returned and we could make love again were the only thing we could look forward to.
It was summer and I suppose we weren’t that young any more. You know how sometimes you’re doing something you shouldn’t and you just can’t help it, you’re just a spectator watching yourself at play and wrong. Ah, summer . . . The sun comes out at last and women, girls, now unencumbered of their thick sweaters, long skirts, dresses and their heavy coats, move like a lightweight symphony in the streets outside, the shape of their bodies so sweetly visible like never before, and you want them all.
Summer and you think: this is wonderful, this is terrible. But the fear is there lurking deep inside, telling you it’s the last time something this special is going to happen to me, and I want it to last forever, even if there is pain and heartbreak at the end of the road. Live now, pay later. Seize the bloody fucking day.
Summer and she’s more than a fantasy, a pornographic centerfold dream. You hold her breasts in a vice, twist her nipples counter-clockwise until you think she will complain of pain, but she smiles and says nothing. You make love in the bath, and you slide in and out of her like in an ocean. You fantasize about making love in a public place. You eat in a fancy restaurant and she is deliberately wearing no underwear, and only your eyes, silent accomplices, know.
Summer never lasts forever.
“What’s the matter?”
“It hurts like hell when I go to the bathroom. We’ve been making love too much, my cystitis is playing up.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, a lot of us girls suffer from it, but it’s been a long time, I must say. Don’t worry, I’ve got some pills for it. There is a side-effect, though, you know.”
“What?”
“For a few days, whenever I go to the bathroom, I’ll be pissing all blue . . .”
“What are you doing?”
“Just taking the belt from your pants.”
Afternoon, the sun is setting outside the window, the curtain drapes fluttering in the air, somewhere in the distance, I imagined, the Cuban coast. A tropical fantasy.
She is standing by the bed, threading the belt out of his beige slacks, her lips wet, her short, brownish hair tousled the way he loves it dearly. She is wearing a black bra, cut low, upholding her long, dark nipples. Mental photographs. They’ve already made love once today, both sniffing a capsule of amyl nitrate, their bodies bucking like wild horses when the chemical rush reaches their brain. Afterwards, she had washed her hair, and returned to the room with a white towel wrapped around her head, otherwise nude. He had been lying on the bed, resting, daydreaming, and he had looked at her moving nonchalantly through the room, his gaze fixed on her lower stomach, the lips of her shaven sex, pink and bruised like the petals of some exotic flower.
“Come here,” he had asked. “Take me in your mouth.”
She now holds the belt in one hand, a red silk scarf taken from her bag in the other, picks up two stockings hanging on the door and comes towards him.
“Tie me up,” she asks him.
“Really?”
“Yeah, you’ve never tried that before, have you?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“Well, there always has to be a first time. Tie me hard, tie me firm, both hands and feet.”
She couldn’t move and moaned under the weight of my body as I forced myself into her brusquely without foreplay. Later, she tied me down also. Then she licked every part of my body, starting from my toes, sucking on them in a way I had never experienced before, sending shivers through the whole length of me. In time, not only my cock, but my balls in her mouth.
Tomorrow, they would be shooting her final scene in the movie, where Ramon, the Mexican pimp (played by an elderly French utility actor), catches her red-handed concealing part of the take from the heist and knifes her in the stomach, leaving her to die in a pool of blood, in the back room of the cantina.
Then, she would be returning to California where her agent had managed another good-time girl small cameo in some other movie no doubt bound straight for the video shelves.
“Go to the fridge and get a cube of ice.”
“What for?”
“Squeeze it inside me, I want to feel what it’s like.”
“There?”
“No, behind.”
And later she would do it to me, too.
We were on the road to nowhere, prisoners of our senses. She returned from the studio that day, wearing a thin white cotton tee-shirt through which her sharp nipples were clearly visible.
I felt a pang of jealousy that other men might have seen her breasts thus on the drive back from the shoot.
“Well, that’s it. I’m now officially out of work,” she said.
“How did it go?” I asked.
“Well, he killed me cleanly. We only needed three takes.”
“How does it feel to be killed?” the journalist in me asked her.
“It turned me on. I almost wet myself.”
“You slut,” I said, jokingly.
“Yeah, well, that’s what I am,” she answered, laughing. “But now, listen, I want you to do absolutely everything I tell you to. It’s important, this might be our last time together and I want you to remember it forever.”
“Yes, boss.”
I undressed her, her body was on fire, feverish, burning with emotional incandescence, she bit my lips to the blood as I pulled her head back by her hair. I tied her up, watched her crucified body spread-eagled over the bed. I prepared to undress. My short-sleeve shirt was sticking to my torso like an unwanted skin.
“Cover my eyes,” she begged, as I lowered my body over hers.
And as we made love, it was as if we were buried in a deep well of despair as we both knew all too well this must be the last time. There was nowhere else to go. Nothing more that we could do. We had tried everything, every position and most perversities and still we wanted more, but it just wasn’t there. Is this all there was to love? Togetherness and future domesticity surely could not be the answer, felt rather ridiculous a concept in fact, anything further would only dull the immediacy, the passion, the desire, the lust.
As we came, almost together, I opened my eyes and saw a tear rolling down her cheek. “What is it?” I asked her solicitously.
“You know what it is,” she answered calmly.
Yes, I knew.
It was then she asked:
“Kill me.”
The sweat was drying over our bare bodies. There was a full moon over Miami Beach.
So I did.
The sound of her neck breaking was muted and gentle.
Outside, it’s now raining. In the distance, I can hear the jets hovering over Coral Gables on their way to landing at the International Airport, ferrying passengers to and from South America. It’s been a few days already. I’m feeling hungry. I still haven’t dressed and sometimes I disgust myself as unwanted erections manifest themselves when I gaze at her dead body, laid out like a cross over the grey bedsheets. Her crooked smile is now permanently carved into her face, her pubic hairs are shyly growing back and her fixed eyes keep on watching me.
I wonder what she is thinking now.
Yes, that’s the story that started it all.
I came across her late in the evening at the bar of the hotel where all the delegates to the festival were staying. I’d ventured into town with a bunch of other writers, in a group of twenty or so, and we had ended up in a decent curry place. I’d somehow managed to get myself squeezed in between two local nincompoop librarians, half the length of the table away from a small, flame-haired Murdoch Empire book editor I sort of fancied. Through the spicy meal, I kept on thinking of how our eyes had crossed paths at the reading. It was almost midnight when we all returned to base and the small bar was crowded. There she was, standing in distracted conversation with a couple of reviewers. I realized who she was: a junior editor for some small publishing outfit whose books you never actually saw in shops but who seemed to profitably stay in business mainly stocking library shelves with totally unpromoted novels and churning out badly designed cookery books, new age clap-trap and self-help and how to dress manuals.
She stood out like a beacon. All blonde, curly-haired, wonderfully tall five feet ten of her. I looked at her. My heart skipped a proverbial beat. I walked over.
“Hello.”
“How are you.”
My imagination no sooner ran out of things to say to her in this artificially social context.
“I’d like to talk about things someday,” I clumsily blurted out and made my excuses, as she probably gave me a strange look while I moved away.
The next morning, the final hours of the festival, I spotted her on her own on a seat in the hotel’s reception area reading a paperback crime and mystery novel by one of the previous day’s main speakers. She looked up as I passed by, moving towards the bar where I had some business with an American film director. Half an hour later, I returned, she was still sitting there, a picture of vulnerable beauty, wearing a long loose black dress with small white polka dots. I moved towards her.
“Have you enjoyed the festival?” I asked her.
She looked up at me, smiled, the dress slid slightly down her left side, baring her pale left shoulder and revealing a thin black bra strap.
“How are you getting back to London? I have spare passenger space in my car if you’re interested.” I enquired.
“I have a lift,” she replied.
Then someone called me away, and when I looked back in her direction, she was gone.
I thought of her a lot on the motorway back.
Dear K.C.
You were probably wondering on Sunday morning what the hell I wished to talk to you about. Sorry I left you guessing. I just didn’t know what to say and how to say it, I suppose. The propriety of making a gentle pass at a beautiful woman eludes me when she has witnessed me the day before reading “dirty bits” aloud in public.
At any rate, I must confess I found you wondrously attractive and have thought about you a lot since the weekend.
I’d love to see you again, if only to talk or have a meal. Would you?
Until then I remain,
Lustfully but respectfully yours,
Dear Maxim,
I somehow guessed that you were not really interested in discussing the art of crime fiction with the likes of me.
Your letter made me smile. Yes, I’d love to meet up for a drink. Give me a call.
Yours,
Three weeks elapsed before they finally met. She had been on holiday to Ireland in the meantime. Searching for her roots, she joked over the telephone.
On that first evening, following a drink and a meal, he found out she was married while they sat in the basement of a noisy Soho pub. All the wrong tunes were blaring out from the jukebox.
“So where do we go from here?” he wondered.
But when he drove her to her train station, she gently put her hand on his while they waited in the queue to exit the Central London underground car park.
Everything was unsaid, but they could feel the mutual attraction simmering in the air like electricity. All they had done was partly exchange life stories and publishing gossip, but she said: “We must meet again.”
“Yes,” he concurred.
On the occasion of their second meeting a week later, they quickly agreed after the first round of drinks that all Soho pubs were much too noisy in the evening, and they must find somewhere else to talk. He suggested his office. As a director of the company, he had a set of keys and knew no one else would likely be in at that time of evening. She readily agreed.
As he switched the lights on, she said:
“Don’t, it’s too bright,” and pulled out a metal candle holder with a large candle speared in its centre from a Habitat paper bag, which had been buried in her backpack full of manuscripts. “I thought this might come in useful.”
He found a match. In the flickering of the candle, he looked in awe at her amazon figure. He’d never been with a woman this tall before, he thought. Her tousled hair was a mass of Medusa-like curls. Her eyes, he now saw, were dark brown. He moved towards her and kissed her. She responded.
The thin coat of scarlet lipstick melted under his tongue, tasting slightly sweet. She opened her mouth wider and allowed him to insert his exploratory tongue. A warm stream of air from her lungs raced inside him. She skipped a breath.
That evening, he kissed her deep and passionately, touched her knee, her thigh but no higher. She wore an open neck short sleeve white sweater and after delicately moving his roving fingers repeatedly over her face, her nose, her chin, his hand moved downwards to her soft shoulder. There was a light brown mole at the onset of her cleavage. He caressed it, and moved his hand further and cupped her small left breast. She looked deeply into his eyes, anxious, interrogating, hopeful, but kept on saying nothing. His fingers slipped behind the thin fabric of the shirt, inside her bra and kneaded her nipple, then as she still offered no resistance he delicately pulled the breast away from the flimsy texture of her black bra. Then, the other. A black beauty spot peered at him close to the aureola of the right breast. She stood there, her breasts unceremoniously, wantonly on display, as he drank in this exquisite vision of her. The colour of her nipples was a discreet pink in the overall pallor of her torso.
Later:
“I have to catch the train home,” she said, her upper clothing in disarray, her cheeks flushed, some buttons of his shirt undone.
“Where did you tell him you were?”
“With one of my authors.”
“Stay longer, please. I want to make love with you,” he asked her in the office penumbra.
“Not today, we just haven’t got the time. Next time.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll find it difficult to wait. Every minute until I see you again, I shall doubt you, I will fear that in the cold light of day all tonight’s fumblings will appear foolhardy and wrong to you and you will change your mind.”
“I won’t,” she replied, but once they were walking along the night road to Charing Cross station, she moved faster and faster, in her characteristic manly and slightly gawky way, and she said little, almost as if embarrassed to be with him in public, swimming through the evening crowd.
The next day, he sent a single red rose to her office, bought from a flower stall in Covent Garden.
Two days later, he received a letter telling him he had been right, and that the reality of their circumstances had appeared to her all too clearly as they had been walking towards her train. She just couldn’t, she wrote. She didn’t wish to hurt her husband, she just felt she could not deceive her husband, and how anyway could they conduct an affair without it becoming sordid, cheap hotel assignments, stealing time out of time, deceitful. No, she just couldn’t. He felt right gutted and answered as best he could, with a long letter justifying his feelings, the state his life was in and could not help himself evoking the erotic feelings she stirred inside him, how he already dreamed of their lovemaking, the caress of flesh against flesh, how their skin touching would feel. Please, he implored, change your mind. But he didn’t really think she would and after receiving no answer, all he could do was write again. The hours and the days were heavy and lasted forever those weeks. Then another letter, and another. The tone moved from loving, suggestive, explicit to angry, resigned, desperate.
She phoned.
“Your last letter made me very angry (he could not for the sake of him recall what he had said in it that he he had not written before). But I just keep on thinking of you in spite of myself. We must meet again and talk.”
They settled for the bar of a big hotel.
He explained again, she nodded her understanding; he told her how he did not wish to harm anyone, that this was just between the two of them, that no one else would know, and as long as no one was hurt, why did they not accept what was happening between them and the way they felt?
Sipping her drink, she looked breathtakingly radiant. His heart was just ragged, being with her, detailing every facet of her features, the way her nose turned slightly upwards, her hair hid her ears, how the faint trace of a scar on her right cheek revealed itself in the bar’s muted lighting.
She acquiesced in silence, her eyes piercing through him, her sadness touching him in parts he didn’t know he had, her long dark stockinged leg like an endless object of desire parting her orange slit skirt.
He looked back at her, he hadn’t asked a question.
Their eyes, soundless.
“Yes,” she said, almost inaudibly, under her breath, and looked down at her lap.
“You mean?”
“Yes, I will,” she firmly answered.
He was overcome with naked fear rather than joy. She was saying she would become his lover, did she? Or was he interpreting her wrong?
“But we must agree we must not ever harm others, it’s very important. You said so yourself.”
Immense relief coursed through him. And irrational disbelief. This can’t be happening to me, surely.
“You won’t change your mind again, will you,” he asked her, falling into fourth gear into a pit of newly-found insecurity.
“I promise I won’t,” she assured him.
At last, he allowed himself to smile, to relax. The waiter brought some more peanuts and olives to their table.
“When?” he finally asked, after what he felt was a decent interval, after they had become more talkative and managed to cast the ghost of the coming affair away to laugh a bit about publishing and writers’ gossip. He loved the way she tittered when he said anything a touch witty or mischievous.
“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it, really.”
“I don’t want the first time to be vulgar or sordid,” he said. “Not at the office. I’ll think of some hotel where no one knows us or is likely to recognize either of us. I’ll make the arrangements.”
She nodded.
It would be two weeks. In the meantime, she came once more to his office a few nights later, and she allowed him to undress her when they embraced on the uncomfortable sofa he kept for visitors. But when he wanted to pull her black knickers down over her wide, ample hips, she said “Not now, we must keep something for next time.” She had arranged a day away from her company, under pretext of some imaginary contracts seminar. He agreed, and touched her sex through the dark, thin material, she felt wet and so warm.
Cos I know that you
With your heart beating
And your eyes shining
Will be thinking of me
Lying with you on a Tuesday morning.
The Pogues
They became lovers on a Tuesday morning in August, in the identikit room of a chain hotel in the metaphorical shadow of the Heathrow runways. J.G. Ballard territory almost.
He had brought along a bottle of white wine and strawberries bought earlier that morning from a small greengrocer near Hampstead Pond, before picking her up in front of the tube station. She wore dark glasses during the drive.
“You’re sure you still want to go through with this?”
“Of course I do.”
“I thought you might have changed your mind.”
“I thought you would.”
“Well, I was going to give you a few more minutes and then I was going to leave, thinking how can the bastard be late or not come?”
“I was here on time, but I was looking out for you in front of the cinema on the other side of the road. I almost missed you . . .”
He undressed her first. Item by item. Layer by layer. Her waistcoat. Her long flowing skirt of many colours. Her quaint lace-up boots. Her wedding and engagement rings. Kissed her throat, then her lips, then bit gently on her ear, nonchalantly licked her forehead and her smooth shoulders. Pressed his lips against her throat and held her tight against him. She wore a black bustier, garter belt and stockings.
“How lovely. It’s been ages since I’ve seen stockings, old-fashioned but so nice, watching you like this is enough to turn anyone into a raving fetishist . . .”
“I thought you would like them.”
After rolling the warm silk down her endless legs and briefly tickling her funny-shaped toes, he got up from where he had been kneeling, drank in her sheer splendour and pulled down her final piece of underwear.
Her pubic hair was darker than he expected, all flattened curls against the marble expanse of her lower stomach. He kissed her bush with reverence, like a priest in holy homage.
He pulled back.
She was now nude.
The look in her eyes said a million things.
“I want to know everything about you,” he blurted out.
She turned round, took a few steps towards the window and closed the curtain.
“It’s too bright,” she said.
It was only eleven fifteen in the morning. The sun shone outside. All that could be seen from the hotel room window was a car park.
Her arse was slightly square and also heart-shaped, a tad too large, but he wanted his hands all over her pale cheeks. Venus on a Tuesday, he distractedly thought. The straps of the garter belt had left a small indent at the top of her hips, outlining the majesty of the pelvis where her dark cunt beckoned.
“Aren’t you getting undressed?” she said.
He did, holding his stomach in as he pulled his trousers off.
She looked him up and down.
He took her by the hand and pulled her towards the bed.
Later, when he would recall their first time together, the image of her body next to him with the filtered light that came through the curtains shadowing it delicately, would remind him of a postcard he had in his study of a sand dune, where a dip in the sand evoked a woman’s navel and a rise the gentle slope of her small breast.
After the initial, obligatory nervousness, he surprised himself by managing erection after erection anew and making love repeatedly, entering her three times before the time came to clean up, leave the room rented for half a day and drive back to Charing Cross station for her 6.14 train.
“Oh, God,” he says, entering her, feeling the ridged texture of her cunt walls against the taut skin of his cock.
“Oh, Jeeeeezus,” she says, as he slides, thrusts in and out of her, realizing this is it, she has done it, she has a lover, she is an adulteress, and no longer fighting the pleasure coursing through her body.
“Oh, Christ,” he moans, his body convulsing as he comes inside her, and this is the first time, I want it to last forever, for eternity, and opens his eyes and notices she had kept hers open all along, the first woman he remembers making love to who has done so. What a wonderful quirk, he thinks. It strikes him deep. It touches him intensely.
Both speechless for a long time after the initial orgasm; he finally disengaged from her, pulling his now limp and moist penis from the warmth of her vagina and kissed her lips with all the tenderness he could muster, even as he knew that neither gestures nor words could properly express the epiphany he had just experienced. The cover of the bed is rumpled, they had not even bothered pulling it down to uncover the sheets. He gets up, pours her a glass of wine. His throat is dry.
“Shall we take a bath?” she asks.
Together in the regulation-size Trust House Forte bath tub which barely contains the two of them, he sees the dark bruises on her thighs and legs.
“Oh, it’s nothing, I’m always catching the corner of my desk at the office. I bruise so easily.”
He soaps her, his fingers lingering more than hygiene demands in the gaping crack of her cunt, caresses her breasts with lather until they shine like wet jewels, she rubs his back, remarks on the hairy birth-mark there, he kisses her and their wet bodies entwine in the lukewarm water, he tries to manipulate himself into a position where he can enter her, but the geometry of the bath tub defeats him. He is hard. Dripping over the bathroom tiles and then the bedroom’s grey carpet, they rush to the bed. Here, unbidden she opens her mouth over his prone body and takes his penis into her mouth. He closes his eyes, thinking, Christ, and this is only our first time, and feels her teeth graze against his glans. He watches her tousled hair, the million and one blonde curls bob up and down over his stomach, the regal expanse of her back and her rising anus as she sucks with loving gluttony on his cock. He extends his hand and touches her back, a finger circling the black beauty spot just below her right buttock, the soft invisible golden down in the small of her back that reminds him of sheer silk in its tactile delight. He feels a surge pass through his body and pulls her off his member, lays her out on the white sheets, spreads her legs wide, slips a wet finger into the gaping aperture of her vagina, and guides his cock in to the hilt. He feels harder, thicker and longer than he has ever been. He digs in as deep as he can, scraping, thrusting, aiming at her most intimate innards, she moans, her eyes open, gazing deep into him, her hair falling back from her face, revealing her overlarge forehead, her exquisite innocence, her torn ear from a past accident with an earring that got caught somehow and was wrenched away, he pulls her legs up and places them over his shoulders, to increase the depth of his invasion, his hands move convulsively from her lips, to her shoulders, her breasts and move downwards to her arse. Impulsively, feeling the wetness in the valley separating her arse cheeks, he slips a finger into her anus. She screams with pleasure and comes instantly with a violent shuddering that courses in overdrive through her body from scalp to toes.
“Oh, Jeeeeezus, Jesus.”
They managed to get together again a week later. Initially, they were only going to see a movie. Some American indie effort. Throughout the film, he kept on wanting to touch her everywhere and found it difficult to concentrate on the pyrotechnic action on the screen.
“Me too,” she said to him as the credits rolled.
They rushed to his office, where they quickly stripped. Again she was wearing stockings and suspenders. He wondered, was it only for him? They fell on the hard floor and embraced, his cock straining for her in physical agony, his tongue inside her mouth, coming up for air when the pressure became too much. He kissed her everywhere, between her toes where she was ticklish, he licked her breasts, her stomach, counted every mole and mark on her body, imagining he knew every square inch of her flesh so much better than her husband, he moved his tongue from cheek to cheek on her backside and slid it down the valley of her arse and into her rear hole. She shivered. Later, he slipped his finger in, and then two.
“You’re so sensitive there,” he remarked.
“I know, I know,” she replied.
Later, in the days apart, he would dream of buggery. He knew she did.
He then moved her round onto her back and moved his mouth towards her sex.
“You can’t,” she said. “I have a tampon in. It’s my period.”
Nonetheless, he slipped a finger into her sex and felt the moistness and the unbearable heat.
“Let me pull it out,” he asked her.
“Oh, you wouldn’t,” she said.
And he began to tug gently on the thin string that peered out shyly from the folds of her labia, below the hood of her clitoris.
“I’ll do it myself,” she said and stood up, all 5ft 10 of nude pallor and unforgettable flesh, and walked to the toilet in the corridor of the empty building.
When she returned, he entered her with joy. Later, when his cock slipped out of her, it was baked with blood, and when she moved over, there was a dark red stain on the brown sofa which he cleaned as best he could. To this day, there is a remote trace of it, and his heart stops every time he looks at the damn sofa, to the extent that he feels he should get rid of it as the memories assault him all too painfully.
There were many more encounters in his office over the months that followed. Often crazed coupling punctuated by doubt and guilt and snacks on the floor, sate sticks, prawns from Tesco, sushi pieces. Because both their backs ached every next day after lovemaking on the hard carpeted floor – they never did use the sofa again – he bought a thick orange blanket which they would drape over the floor, their bed of illicit sex, and later, when autumn came, he even acquired a cushion, and a quilted bed cover to keep them warm. He wondered what his secretary thought if she ever came across the blanket, cushion and cover, at the bottom of his personal filing cabinet.
And then came the fateful weekend away in Brighton, after he had begged her repeatedly for a whole day, a whole night at least together for the first time. It had been her birthday the day before. Her husband had bought her a brown leather waistcoat and taken her to Miss Saigon in the evening. She had found the performance dreary and, somehow, nerves about the coming weekend, impatience with him or guilt, they had begun quarrelling and he had ended up sleeping apart from her on their small apartment’s sofa bed.
The hotel was on the sea front. They took a cab from the station. Their alibi was another writers’ conference. In the room, as he had previously promised he would when guessing randomly at her many secret fantasies, he borrowed the lipstick from her handbag, and pressed the soft tube against her breasts and rouged the nipples a dark red, then squeezed her body tight against his own, slashes of colour blending into the hair on his chest. Then he laid her out on the bed, set our her limbs in a semblance of crucifixion, held the fleshy folds of her cunt apart and applied the lipstick to its outer lips. Then, they fucked and he told her that he loved her, and he whispered suggestively to her what they would do throughout the coming night, how he would wake her and enter her in the small hours of morning, how he would remain embedded in her warm cunt while they briefly slept. Fingers, almost his whole hand, then his tongue in her various apertures, bringing her to climax again and again in moist abandon while he waited for his cock to grow hard between the successive bouts of lovemaking. Fish and chips on the promenade for lunch. Back to the room. Sex. Ice-cream at the local Haagen-Dasz parlour. Sex. Tying her hands against the foot of the bed with the belt he thredded out of his trousers, wrapping one of her black stockings around her neck as he took her from behind. A late night meal at a noisy Mexican joint a few yards from the hotel. The room, a small isolated world away from the real world. Washing her in the bath, joining her there, listening to her pee from behind the bathroom door, furtively sniffing her knickers. Shaving in the morning, naked, with his back to her while she relaxed in the tub, it all felt so familiar, so comfortable, so natural.
He had soon realized he was hopelessly in love with her. It wasn’t just the sex, he knew. He just wanted to be with her all the time, holding her in his arms, buying her things, clothes, discovering books, music and movies together and he counted the interminable hours that would elapse between their stolen evenings and their furtive lunch hours in pubs none of their acquaintances frequented. He wanted more of her, all of her, and began pressing her, which made her nervous. Her husband and her had sold their small, claustrophobic flat and had to find a new house to move into soon. Irrationally – even though he would eventually be proven right – he felt this new house would be the cause of the end of their relationship.
“Of course not,” she defended herself. “We have to live somewhere, you know.”
On the Sunday morning, after breakfast, she rang her husband from the hotel lobby as she had agreed to and found out, to increasing panic, through talking to his brother when she could not reach him, that he had been trying to get hold of her the previous evening and had discovered she was neither registered at the conference nor resident at the hotel where the event was taking place. He had to drive up to Oxford unexpectedly and had only wanted to warn her. She burst out in tears when she returned to the room.
He clumsily attempted to comfort her, only for her to turn viciously against him. He was blamed for breaking up her marriage and she insisted they leave for London – immediately. It turned out to be a false alarm, and she lied her way through it, blaming matters on a mix-up between the hotel and the conference organizers. She said her husband was so immersed in his own job that he never even suspected. But the rot had set in. Having almost lost her, he now knew how much she really meant to him and he became absolutely terrified of losing her for good. He could no longer envisage life without her.
In his mind’s eye, he no longer wanted her to be the wave, but the sea.
Autumn deepened.
She had to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair as all dutiful publishers do. He had a book to promote in America. From her bleak German room, she ached for him and wished he was there with her, she said. In his impersonal mid-West motel suite, he pined for her and feared she would no longer wish to see him after their return from foreign climes. She was due to move house a few days after Frankfurt.
They did meet up again a few times, and the sex was as intense as the pain they both felt about the future. Searing, savage, filthy, entering her again and feeling a desire to literally impale her, tear her apart from orifice to orifice. Shades of Bertolucci’s Last Tango, he carried a small amount of butter in a plastic bag in his attache case, meaning to use it with her and penetrate her anally, but he never did, the tenderness of entering her normally sufficing in the gentle heat of the moment.
The fear and the uncertainty were driving him crazy. Should they part or should they stay together, where was it all leading to, did the others suspect, was the pain stronger than the joy the affair gave them? During a pub lunch break, she suggested they might stay apart for at least a month to consider their feelings and the situation. She was now thinking of him too much, she said, in the nights, at the weekends (as if he bloody well didn’t suffer in the same jealous, atrocious manner, too), and her husband was wondering why she was so distant, and after all this new house meant so much to him, and the shopping at IKEA for new furniture and knick-knacks he kept dragging her to in his cheery insouciance, and it all made her feel so guilty, she explained.
If this was it, he said, give me at least one more night. He could see how torn she was, how despite all her best intentions, she couldn’t bear to be the one to say it was possibly over. One night, he thought, and I will make love to her like never before and force a positive decision out of her. Not that he even believed himself. She agreed for the next day. Not tonight, her husband was doing the cooking at home and she was already late and he would be angry at yet another late night, and why was it that recently she had to work late so often, it wasn’t like that before, was it?
The next day, her husband received an anonymous letter at work.
At seven o’clock, just as he was laying out the blanket on the office floor ready for her arrival, and sucking on Polo mints to freshen his breath, she rang. She was in tears, full of rage. It could only be him. What could he say? It all pointed towards him. Things in the damn letter that only he could know. He had once even joked about an envelope with her company’s logo he had kept back, unused, from a note she had once given him at the pub. He wracked his brain in vain; sure, they hadn’t really been taking too many precautions, hadn’t always been discreet, but who? Her husband was an industrial journalist, could he have made enemies? Duplicitous friends who had pieced things together? Colleagues? Staff at his office who had assembled the clues of the puzzle together from his irrational behaviour, the stain on the sofa, the blanket, their regular telephone conversations? At any rate, she was heading home to save her marriage. She now hated him and nothing he could ever do or say would ever make her want to have any further contact with him again. He just stood there, paralysed, as she hurled abuse at him over the telephone line. He protested his innocence, too shaken to probably even sound convincing. The last time he saw her was standing at his building’s door, the look in her eyes so withering, come to reclaim her letters and the two photographs she had once given him of her. He supposed they had been taken by her husband. Their memory remained etched forever in his brain. One with her hair short and uncurled, disturbed by what looked like a cold wind on the Beaubourg Plain in Paris, taken soon after her graduation from Cambridge. The other, just some months before he had met her, in the Northumberland countryside, her tousled hair almost orange, her eyes small and remote, wearing a black jacket, jeans and heavy DM shoes. A few months later, he took his courage in both hands and rang her at home on a day he knew she had taken off to catch up on manuscripts, and confronted her about this certainty she had that he was the sender of the letter. It turned out the letter was too well written and spelt difficult words correctly, as well as giving his private phone number. In her grief, this was now damning and incontrovertible evidence, it appeared. She made him swear to never write, call or try to see her again. Even threatening police action. He felt he couldn’t fight. She was even now accusing him of a series of strange phone calls her husband and her had been getting for some months, conveniently forgetting they had begun long before their affair, as she had told him about them then.
For a few months, his life fell apart.
Living with pain is a boring story.
He masturbated often, thinking of her endlessly and fishing up to the surface of his troubled mind desperate images of her body, stroke up, the look in her eyes, stroke down, the maddening curls of her hair, stroke up, the colour of her lips, stroke down, the moving shades of pink in her cunt when he chewed on her and his eyes immodestly peered deep inside. It didn’t help much, but he managed to come, the white glue of his seed dripping into his fist.
Why does it have to hurt me, bruise me so? he reflected as he gazed at his drawn features in the small mirror in the toilet while he cleaned the mess off his hands. After all, millions have affairs, fall in lust, spiral in love, come apart. But at the back of his mind, an insidious voice also whispered that, somehow, some also did stay together in the end.
Christmas and its desert of longing and loneliness. Then the February torment of Valentine’s Day – would her husband send her a doggerel card, take her out for a meal, buy her flowers?
Came the time of writing stories again.
– You know, I’m very angry at you.
– What have I done?
– You never even took any precautions, used a condom, asked me if I was on the pill.
– You’re married, I’d somehow assumed.
– Well I wasn’t.
– But your husband and you?
– We’ve always used condoms.
– Always?
– Yes.
– How bizarre. I know I have no right to say so, but it’s a strange comment on the state of your marriage.
– Maybe. Anyway, I’ve gone on the pill now.
– And how have you explained such a momentous change to him?
– Well, buying the new house. It’s going to be expensive, the new mortgage. He understands. Couldn’t afford a kid right now. He knows I don’t really want children.
– But does he?
– Yes, he does.
– I was still a virgin when I went to Cambridge. I’d misbehaved quite a bit before, but somehow I never did do it.
– And when was the first time?
– At University, at a party. This guy suggested we go together, and I decided, why not, and we just did. It was nothing special.
– And afterwards?
– I caught up for lost time. You know how it can be when you’re a student, you’re away from home for the first time. Don’t think I was promiscuous, I wasn’t really. There were only three other guys. And some of them didn’t really last long. I met my husband in my second year. He was then going out with a friend of mine, and I was with another guy. But all our friends sort of said we looked good together. So it happened. There, you’re only my fifth lover.
– I’m madly jealous of every man who touched you then, you know.
– I miss you awfully. So, anything interesting at the office today?
– They’ve finally agreed I could make an offer for that novel I was telling you about. I’m really excited. It won’t be much money, but I hope the author accepts it. The book still needs some work done to it, but I think he will be willing to listen to my suggestions. He sounds a bit weird, but the novel is really good.
– I miss you. I thought about you all weekend, tried to imagine what you were cooking, when you were doing your shopping at Sainsbury. I can’t seem to get you out of my mind.
– I know, I know.
– At one stage, I wanted to talk to you so bad, I even phoned.
– You didn’t!
– Yes. He picked up, so I slipped on a Liverpudlian accent, and said ‘Sorry, wrong number, mate’.
– That was you . . . He was fuming. He hates being called ‘mate’.
– It’s unfair. You always undress me first. Why can’t it be the other way around?
– Sure.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
– There you are. This is me. Look at me. I’m so much older than you. I’m a bit overweight. There’s more and more grey in my hair and I can never comb it properly. And this is you, standing there, so beautiful. Shit, what do you see in me?
– I like your hair. The curls on your chest, it’s wonderful.
– Here, put your hand on my cock. See how you make it grow so effortlessly. Just being with you gives me a hard on. I am in awe of you, of your nudity. Yes, squeeze it more. Yes.
– I like it when you give me orders. You can be so authoritative.
– It’s the old managing director in me . . .
– The other night in bed, next to him, I just kept on tossing and turning so much. I had to get up and go to the other room to read. It was an old book I’d already read; I couldn’t really concentrate. Dickens or Jane Austen, I think. My body ached for you so much, even though we had only parted a few hours before. Why is it so strong? I feel I just want to be consumed by you, eaten alive.
– I feel the same. I just hate the idea that ten miles away, some nights, he might be caressing you, making love to you, it almost makes me feel sick. That he invades you where the imprint of my cock still lingers inside you.
– I just can’t make love to him after the time I spend with you. I’m not that wicked. Most times, by the time I get home, he’s already sleeping.
– Jesus, I don’t know how you do it. You’re the best lover I’ve ever had.
– You’re not just saying that, are you, because we’re together right now? It’s ever so dangerous. It’s the sort of thing that’s likely to stay in a man’s mind forever. I’m touched. Deeply.
– No, of course not. You’re also my first circumcised penis.
– Really?
– And you have so much hair on your chest.
– Yes, a proper monkey, that’s me.
— At the conference, you know I was sitting in the lobby on that Sunday morning hoping you would come across and see me. It was something about you. The way you read, the way you looked.
– Premeditation, hey?
– He hates it when I clip my fingernails in the bath. I don’t know why, it’s just so natural. Why should it bother him.
– I agree.
– He’s so involved with his new job. He takes me for granted. He’s a few years younger than me, and some times I feel he just sees me as a convenient substitute for his mother.
– And the sex?
– It’s okay, I suppose. Not like in the early days of when we were together at Cambridge. We lived together for some time before we married. We almost didn’t. We had some terrible rows. I have such a temper. I even throw things. See, you don’t really know me.
– I wouldn’t mind you throwing things at me, if it was a condition of living with you.
– Oh, it was nothing hard, just an old ham and tomato sandwich.
– Beware the mad sandwich hurler!
– We finally went to see The Piano yesterday night. It was good, as you said. There was a difficult moment. He remarked on the fact that we had never been to this particular West End cinema before, and I stupidly blurted out that I had, forgetting briefly it was with you. But he didn’t make anything of it.
– Yeah, London’s a dangerous city. Soon, too many bars, restaurants and places will be part of our own private geography. We have to keep both worlds apart.
– The whites of your eyes are so . . . white when you’re above me, making love to me.
– They’re nothing special, really.
– No, they are so white. Oh, look at the time, I have to go.
– Do you really want to?
– No. Some evenings, I just want to stay here in this office forever, with the candle light flickering over us. But I can’t.
– Stay. I will become hard again and make love to you in every conceivable pornographic position, missionary, rear, sideways, upside down, make you scream, groan, cry. Stay a little bit longer. God, the tenderness is swelling inside of me and I feel I’m like some bomb, ticking away, that I desire and need you so.
– Why does lust make us feel that way?
– Because it was meant to be, I suppose.
– Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, I could let you do absolutely anything to me. I trust you implicitly. It’s crazy.
– Would you let me put my fingers around your neck and squeeze gently until the pain comes? Would you let me distend the rim of your arsehole, making it more pliant so that I might insert myself there and fill you, mark you forever in that forbidden place? Look at my finger, you’re already so wet down there. Lick it. See how I dip my finger in cunt and arse and sip your juices so naturally, so fragrant, my mistress, my lover.
– Yes, my lover.
– Come with me to New York. I want you for a whole week. I want to spend whole nights fucking you, worshipping you in strange hotel rooms. I want to wake up beside you, I want to smell your breath in the morning when you awake, I want to see your tired cheeks without make-up and the wrinkles of our lovemaking carved like a tattoo under the surface of your skin, all over your body.
– You know I can’t. How would I explain it? Anyway, you know I no longer have any holidays left at the office.
– I’m sure those are not love bites. I’m always very careful.
– Let me see in the mirror. No, it’s just orgasmic flush.
– It’s all over your neck and the top of your chest. What’s he going to say when you get home?
– Don’t worry, it will fade away . . .
– I know, I know.
I obsess over you, K. Here I am at my typewriter, unshaven for the last four days, all grey sharp stubble, probably more than ever looking my age, in what has now become my room, surrounded by the paraphernalia of my life, the piles of books, countless magazines, record albums and CDs, the mattress against the back wall, the reality of what is left of me after your passage through my days. Outside the window, a thin layer of frost whitens the green manicured surface of the lawn, and the bare winter branches of the trees. I wonder what you are doing right now. Whether you are wearing your long skirt of many colours which appeared so transparent with the sun in your back that morning I picked you up in Camden Town, outlining the dazzling shape of your legs, rising from small black boots all the way up to the volcano of your crotch. What perfume you are wearing; maybe one from the amusing assortment of small fancy flasks I’d bought in duty-free at Kennedy. When was the last time you even thought of me, of our so few hours together? If you did actually get around to buying that CD of Nanci Griffiths’ or finally got a raise at your job for the New Year. A trade magazine revealed how much your boss was earning; yes, you certainly deserved a better salary, considering. I miss the sound of your voice, the drawn out “Helloooo” when you pick up the phone and I daily resist the temptation to dial your number. The last time we did speak, you almost suggested that I needed psychiatric assistance and why did I have this compulsion to write you sordid letters? I had no pat answer to give you. And that my lines, my sad pleas caused you distress and could I not do the decent thing and just fade away and let you get on with your life? Understand me, I cannot. I have lost you, I know, but you will not in your anger deny me the memories, the tenderness of what we fleetingly possessed before events and your sense of guilt and craving for respectability bid you throw it all away, handed as you were a perfect excuse. You see, I am not a respectable person; I am unbearably selfish. Well, what would you expect of a romantic pornographer, you of all women with your cold heart of glass and your passion for independence, secure in the knowledge of your beauty and your damning pride. But I am a good person, I assure you. You made me that way. Earlier today, I was browsing through a collection of photographs with a nice introduction by Jayne Anne Phillips, The Last Days Of Summer. Full of images of naked teenagers on far beaches, their bodies full of an expression of innocence not lost by knowledge, luxuriating in textures of sand, flesh, cloth, tide pools and gentle waves. So call me a paedophile, then. I remembered how much I would dream during our nights apart of taking you to the sea, not just a sordid dirty weekend in Brighton, but under some blazing tropical sun, where I would see you for the first time in a bathing suit, your fluid limbs sprawled akimbo in the light of the falling sun. Or even a nude beach, where I would admire how natural you would stand in the buff and would feel both proud at how I was exhibiting your charms to the insidious gaze of other men and jealous of the fact they could not be blind and allow me the exclusivity of your voluptuous nudity. Then I fantasized about how I wanted to adorn your exposed flesh, setting a diamond in the jewel-case of your navel, shaving your pubic hair away, setting clamps of gold around your nipples and piercing your labia, to feel the thrill of a ring dangling from the lips of your cunt, twisting it under my tongue when I licked you, sucked you, ate you, my cock rubbing against the metal that would now be part of you every time I moved within. Silk threads carefully wound around your neck, wrists and ankles. Oh, K, I know you would have allowed me. And all the places I wanted to take you. To a bed and breakfast in old San Francisco at Christmas, with antique elevators inside wrought-iron cages, to New Orleans for New Year’s Eve, to stand on the banks of the Mississippi river nearby the Jackson brewery to listen to the hooting funnels of the riverboats at midnight amongst the boisterous crowd and later to cruise, plastic glasses in hand, down Bourbon Street, past the wonderfully shameless topless and bottomless joints and myriad bars with overhanging balconies full of revellers and happy drunkards. I know this lovely hotel in the French Quarter, you see, where all the rooms are distant from the lobby building, old slave houses set in a circle around drooping vegetation, so private that I could allow myself to scream your name to high heavens when I come like a river inside you, and no one can hear the disturbing noise of my excess. Yes. A hotel room in Paris, on the Left Bank, on a top floor, with a vista of wet roofs and latticed metal gratings, where the walls are so thin you can’t help listening to couples in neighbouring rooms making love with all the sounds of indecency. ‘The Algonquin in New York, where the rooms are small but the furniture is delicately antique and breakfast can be taken outside in bagel places close by, where I would introduce you to the Jewish delights of garlic bagel with lox and cream cheese, a meal of kings in its own right. A beach under the fierce Barbados sun, staying in a cabin, licking away the grains of sand that have crept up inside your sex whilst on the beach, washing the crack of your arse clean of all impurities and wading out, both naked, to the water at midnight and admiring the shadow of a yellow moon illuminate your erect wet nipples. Or oysters by Puget Sound in Seattle. The world’s best roast duck at the Water Margin in Golders Green, in North London. The human geography of pleasure unbound. See how I obsess. I take the Northern Line daily to my office, a lump in my throat when I pass Goodge Street and guess you might be alighting there from a train going in the opposite direction. Sometimes, I even get off at my own station and wait on the other platform if a train has stopped there, peering inside as it speeds away for a vision of you and your crazy curls on the way to your own office. When I wash in the morning, my mind wanders and imagines what you might be wearing that day, whether your fool of a husband made love to you the evening before, how in darkest hell he found deep inside himself the generosity to forgive you when he discovered the facts of our affair. And even when I try not to think of you, he then reminds me without fail when he appears on my television screen standing in some factory car park pontificating about the state of the industry on the regional news, or crusading for victims of Stock Exchange swindles in his cheap suit. Of course, I hate him, I move closer to the screen when he appears to peer at the landscape of his pimples – how the hell do they let him appear on the box with all those blemishes, look, there’s a big red one near his eyebrow almost ready to burst! When we were still lovers, I feared him and noticing him for the first time during a live appearance, I even thought him handsome in a bland sort of way. No longer, he looks like a clumsy amateur, a few more years and he will be hopelessly going to fat. But would I be any better for you, I ask myself? The pain of your absence is killing me softly, day by day, hour after lonely hour. Do you still listen to the Grant Lee Buffalo album I turned you onto? I’ve made a few other great rock discoveries since: the Walkabouts, Counting Crows. Somehow all these callow musicians manage to express so many of the things I seem incapable of with only the power of words. If only I had learned how to play an instrument when I was younger. So what more can I say, apart from repeating the boring litany of how I miss you and want you still? Oh yes, I’m no saint, I fuck other women, but I detest myself as I always feel compelled to evoke images of you when I am with these others, to help me stay hard inside them, to furnish me with the rage to plough my furrow of infamy inside their bodies. I feel sweaty, dirty in these hurried embraces and my cock softens, so I close my eyes and think of the lunar expanse of your great arse, the delicate lack of opulence of your breasts, the jutting geometry of your hip bones, the heartbreaking pallor of your body. See how low I stoop. Forgive me. I have written you letters, yes, letters full of hate and anger, letters that made no sense, letters that bled and roared, but none of them were sent and I sit here imagining stories I might write one day. Tales of sound and fury where the red flowers of the mountain will scream Yes to the returning sailor home from the wars, where St Germain des Prés in Paris after WW2 will bear witness to the lovelorn passions of a group of expatriates Yes I might complete that novel about passions out of erotic control against a panoramic landscape of mythical American highways and love on the run taken to its orgasmic conclusion Yes or that crazy tale of lovers who fuck themselves to death to explore what lies on the other side Yes I obsess and the ghost of you is taking over my life Yes my love. And I never saw you dance. So, night falls and a cloak of darkness surrounds me, snow is falling, Boston and New York airports are closed, and the roads out there are treacherous and deadly. I imagine myself in a car, blocked by the snowdrifts, with the temperature falling, my breath visible in the restricted space of this odd cockpit, even with gloves on my fingers are becoming numb and outside there are no lights for miles and miles. What a stupid way it would be to die like this, just because I wanted to get away from you and foolishly thought the road was the answer. So, I return to London and now my life begins again, my mind still engulfed in hopeless passion, buried in the folds of her flesh, the dark brown vulnerability of her sad, married eyes. Today is the first day of the rest of my life (or what is left of it). I wonder what bodies will come my way again, how will they compare? Will they shudder and hold their breath back as she did when I slipped a finger inside the pliable tightness of her anal aperture? I know they won’t.
– Why, when you touch me, do you always seem to do all the right things?
– I don’t know, I suppose it just comes naturally.