The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor (7 page)

“I always wondered what kind of woman Nicky-boy would be shacked up with,” he said. “Some sexed-up little slut with boobs out to here, I figured. I mean, that boy could
fuck
– anyone, any time, any place, any kind of kink you could imagine. But
you
– you’re a little more genteel-looking than what I’d conjured up in my masturbatory fantasies.”

“Looks can be deceiving, Sonny. You think I’m not a match for Nicholas in bed? You think that’s not partly why I came looking for him? I can find a man anywhere. I can find a great fuck, if I’m lucky. But a great fuck who also happens to be the person I love – that only comes along once, Sonny. For a lot of people, it never comes at all.”

“So you’re a match for Nicky-boy in bed, huh? Well, you’re gonna have to convince me of that, honey. Fortunately, I got plenty of time to be convinced.”

He came towards her, and she retreated, bumping into the coffee table, upending it with a crash and a shattering of glass. She picked up a shard to ward off Sonny, but before he could come at her, the phone on top of the TV set bleated, halting them both.

The answering machine clicked on, and a woman’s voice, fluttery and nervous, said, “Sonny, it’s Elise. I need to talk to you. Sonny, will you please pick up? I just saw Nicholas.”

Sonny rushed for the phone, but Beth was a step ahead and got there first. “Who is this?” she shouted. “Where are you?”

“Give me that!” Sonny grabbed the phone out of her hand and pushed her away. So engrossed was he in what the caller was saying that she could have easily escaped, but she couldn’t,
wouldn’t
leave now.

“You stupid bitch, you told him
what
?” roared Sonny and slammed down the phone. He whirled on Beth. “You want to find your husband? Well, I know where he is. More important, I know where
she
is, too.” He reached for her, and she brought the shard of jagged glass down in an arc, narrowly missing his face. He grimaced and jumped back. “You gonna try and carve me up with that or you gonna come with me to find your husband? C’mon, what’ll it be, Beth? You scared of me or what?”

She was shaking, but she wasn’t scared – not yet. The fear came a moment later, when Sonny was buttoning his coat, and she saw the pistol tucked inside the waistband of his pants.

“You’re an unusual man, Nicholas,” said Myriam. “After I cure them, a lot of people never want to see me again. They’re grateful, but the experience they have with me is too frightening, too disturbing, to ever want to undergo again. Some of them decide I’m some kind of witch or demon. I’ve had men claim I stole their souls.”

“Or their names,” said Nicholas.

“For people sufficiently entrenched in ego, it’s the same thing. They’re so caught up in their mortal identity, that even a few moments outside their own ego feels terrifying and annihilating. Some of them go insane.”

“So what does happen, Myriam? How do you cure people?”

“As far as how I cure them, I’m not sure myself – only that when the ego dissolves, even briefly, so dissolves the disease. As for the experience you had, all I can tell you is you aren’t the first to search for it. In the nineteenth century, there was a group of occultists who worshipped what they called the ‘holy wisdom fire’, a fire they believed to be embodied in all women. Certain women had the power to help bring about a soul’s spiritual integration through intercourse and awaken in their partner the highest spiritual powers from deep within. These occultists called themselves the Cult of Myriam, which still exists. I studied with the group and took that name for myself.”

“So what happened? You initiated me into some kind of cosmic consciousness?”

“I didn’t do anything, Nicholas, except offer you a glimpse of what mystics and holy people have been preaching for centuries. You don’t have to be Nicholas, you know. You chose to be that person, but that isn’t the real you and, deep inside, you know that. That’s why you feel compelled to search for that experience again.”

“Not just because I’m a crazy bastard obsessed with fucking you?”

He was joking, of course – more or less – but she didn’t smile. Instead, she took his hand and they sat together on the mattress. Sitting turned into reclining, which melted into embracing. Nicholas felt such a surge of longing and desire that it was all he could do not to rip off Myriam’s clothing and take her then and there, to hell with her consent. “You’re thinking you could rape me if you wanted to,” said Myriam, “and you’re right, but it wouldn’t be the experience you’re looking for. It would leave you much further from your destination than you are now.”

“Then make love with me,” said Nicholas, pulling her against him. “You cured me of my disease: now cure me of my ignorance.”

Her arms wound around his neck. Her legs parted. “I think you have a lot of good in you, Nicholas,” she said. “More good than you realize. I think your soul longs for a kind of wisdom few people ever find, let alone experience.”

“I think you’re wrong,” said Nicholas. “I’m not a good man. Thirty seconds ago, I was debating whether or not to rape you if you didn’t want to have sex. And I’m a lot nicer guy now than I used to be, if that puts it in perspective. I haven’t lived a good life. I’ve been a thief and a drug-dealer and, when I was younger, a prostitute. I don’t long for any holiness or wisdom. The only thing I long for is to slide my cock inside your body and fuck you forever and never, ever leave.”

Her eyes lit up. She laughed gently. “Have you ever considered, Nicholas, that my body might not be the only place you might find what you’re searching for? That if you allowed yourself to love someone,
really
love someone enough to transcend your own self-centeredness, that might make all the difference?”

But before Nicholas could answer, they both heard the footsteps approaching. Then the door that opened onto the stairwell was kicked open with a crash that reverberated throughout the room. Nicholas leaped to his feet, galvanized by an appalling and incongruous vision – Sonny Valdez, his wife, and the gun that Sonny was now pointing at him and Myriam.

Someone screamed. Maybe it was Beth or Myriam or even Nicholas himself – maybe all three of them were screaming at once – but he hurled himself in front of Myriam, who was still on the floor, and the gun went off and suddenly the room was filled with a terrible red rain.

In the instant it took Sonny to recock the trigger, Beth grabbed his wrist and twisted it with all the strength in both her arms. The gun fired again – this time into the ceiling – as Sonny shoved her away and aimed at Myriam again, firing into her as she lay in a spreading pool of blood on the mattress. With a cry, Nicholas charged Sonny, wrestled the gun away from him, and then slammed the grip into the man’s skull, again and again, like a gong striking the side of a bell, and he didn’t stop, but kept on bashing the caved-in head, even when Beth grabbed him and shouted, “It’s all right, Nicholas, it’s all right! He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead!”

After the police got through investigating, when they were convinced Nicholas had been justified in taking Sonny Valdez’s life, after Myriam was cremated and her ashes scattered in the churchyard of St Benedict’s, Nicholas and Beth went back to Detroit and pretended to be making an effort to resume their lives. A grim joke, thought Nicholas, given everything that had taken place. He’d told Beth the truth about his past, about Elise, and about how Myriam had somehow cleansed his infected blood: everything except the experience he’d had while he and Myriam were making love. That he couldn’t put into words and he was afraid she’d misunderstand, think he was describing sexual passion and, while that was a component of what he’d undergone, the experience was really so much more.

Nor could he explain why, week after week, he avoided having sex with Beth – that the encounters he’d had following Myriam had been so frustrating in their departure from what he sought that he didn’t want to risk adding Beth to his list of bitter disappointments or, worse, using her as a momentary distraction from what he perceived as an unutterable and never-ending grief.

“Do you want me to leave?” he asked her when they lay in bed one night.

“Is that what you want to do?”

He thought about that, really let the idea sink into him. If he ever wanted to walk out on his marriage, this was the time. If he had lost Myriam and all she represented, he could still go back to the solace of addictive sex and drugs, immerse himself in the quest for debaucheries that would bring only deeper and darker oblivion.

But what he said was, “No, I don’t want to leave. Unless you’d rather I did.”

She was silent a few moments. Then: “I want you to stay. But at the same time, I love you. And if what you found with that woman Myriam, what you tried to tell me about on the phone that day when I wouldn’t listen, if you need to go and look for that, then I’d be wrong to try to stop you. It would be more than wrong, I think it would be evil.”

A great swelling of relief passed through Nicholas. Relief and gratitude that seemed to thaw his loins and melt some of the ice from his heart. He was free to leave her if he wanted to, to look for what he’d lost. That meant that he was also free to stay. Desire, faint but hopeful, stirred in him.

He wrapped Beth in his arms and pulled her to him. She felt warm and welcoming and her body shaped itself to his in the old familiar ways, yet even with some trepidation, there was nothing timid or hesitant about his lovemaking. He forced her legs apart and mounted her. She arched her hips and guided him inside.

You’re free to go, if that’s what you need to do
.

He loved her more then than he ever had loved anyone. A sense of lightness and freedom washed over him, a lifting of bonds. He thrust into her and she moaned his name. “Nicholas, Nicholas, Nicholas.”

But for the briefest, most ecstatic of instants, he had forgotten who that was.

W
ORD SPREAD QUICKLY
in the tiny, plague-ravaged town – the Flagellants were coming!

Gabrielle, sequestered in the house with her father and her dying mother, heard the news shouted out in the street beneath her window. She felt her blood quicken at the thought of witnessing such a spectacle – a band of penitents whose submission to the Lord was made manifest in deprivation and self-wounding. Despite her fear of mingling with the plague-infested crowds, she felt compelled to see them.

Snatching up her shawl and wrapping it around her thin shoulders, she crept down the wooden stairs, hoping that her father, exhausted by his day and night vigil at her mother’s deathbed, would be dozing. She didn’t want to have to speak to him, or witness the reproach and anguish in his eyes as she hurried past without so much as gazing at her mother.

Her father’s back was turned to her, his head lowered into his big hands. Gabrielle took a breath and tiptoed toward the door.

All I want
, she thought,
is to get out of here. Get away from the death and dying
.

The plague, or the Great Pestilence as some were calling it, had arrived in early summer. Word of a terrible illness sweeping the port cities of Pisa and Genoa had reached the town a year earlier, but here in this secluded Tuscan valley the villagers had felt secure and safe in their relative isolation. With spring, however, the plague had reached Orvieto, where a spiritual revival that added fifty new religious dates to the municipal calendar had failed to spare the city from devastation. Now death was everywhere – evidenced in the rattling of the carts that carried bodies for burial outside the village, the cloying, rotten-flowers scent of sickness that permeated the air, the moaning of the sick, the wailing of the bereaved.

Gabrielle had heard that, according to the priests, who divined such things by studying the book of Revelations, a third of the world had died.

And the plague had not yet run its course.

An idea, borne of terror and desperation, had been nudging its way into the back of her mind. Many people had already fled the town to take refuge in the countryside. No one really knew what caused the sickness, but escaping the “pestilential atmosphere” of more populated areas was thought to help. It was said the air was cleaner in the country, the food less apt to be contaminated.

When she was almost at the door, her father looked up.

“Where are you going?”

“Don’t you hear the drumming? The Flagellants are on their way to the cathedral.”

“Hah,” her father snorted. “The Brethren of the Cross they call themselves. I call them the brethren of lunacy. Why expose yourself to the crowds to see a troop of madmen beat each other bloody?”

Her mother moaned and went into a coughing fit. Blood foamed around her mouth. Gabrielle’s father dampened a cloth in a bowl of water and wiped her face. “There, there, my love,” he whispered. “I’m here with you. I’m here.”

The tiny woman, little more than bone and gristle, reached up and stroked her husband’s face, a gesture rich with the tenderness and caring of devoted lovers after a long and passionate night. Gabrielle felt that she witnessing something private and precious between her parents, something she could never hope to exprience herself.

“She hasn’t long,” her father said. “Can’t you just sit with her?”

She shook her head. “I have to go.”

“What kind of daughter are you? You feel no love for your own mother?”

But how could she? thought Gabrielle. Until the plague struck, until her midwife mother fell ill, neither of her parents had shown the slightest warmth or caring toward one another or, for that matter, toward her. Theirs was a union based on practicality and the running of a household, a way to satisfy the needs for sex, security, and mutual support. Love was a luxury for idle, wealthy ladies and lovestruck troubadours. The poor had no time for such frivolity.

Now Gabrielle observed the change in both her parents, a transformation that appeared wrought by suffering, and found herself both horrified and envious. For never had anyone shown her the kind of tenderness her parents now bestowed upon each other. It was as though, through suffering, they had paid some terrible price required for the giving and receiving of affection.