The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (4 page)

“So the doors of marriage creak open,” she said.

“I think you oiled the hinges with that one.”

“Well, I’m good at what I do. I enjoy the power of doing that. It wasn’t until I saw men from that perspective – on my knees, in absolute control of them – that I
realized they weren’t omnipotent.”

She was too glib; it had bothered me since our first conversation. She sensed my skepticism. Not about what she’d said, but about her sophistication in regard to swinging.

“I was born this way. No illusions. I look at things in black and white. It’s like not having eyelids.”

I wanted to hold her, to press my body against hers, to feel the length of her thighs on mine, but she sat away from me, smoking one of her cigarettes. Her sharp profile cut through the aromatic
blue haze.

“I wish I didn’t love Charles so much, that I could turn it on and off.”

I lifted my glass. “Here’s to marriage.”

She sniffled. She was squinting and her eyes were wet, but that might have been the smoke.

“Marriage? That’s for victims. I don’t intend to be a victim ever again. That’s why I stay with Maurice, even though I know it drives Charles crazy.”

“What have you got against marriage?”

She pouted mock-dramatically.

“His name is James Lee Tait. My used-to-be. Three years of holy wedlock made a sorrowful woman of me. He promised everything – he had the gift of promise, you know? – but in
the end it was the same old song and dance.”

“So you divorced him.”

“Not without a lot of turmoil. A woman gets attached to you creatures, and a divorce is like losing . . . your past, maybe your future.”

I wanted to understand. “Do you hate him?”

“No, not really. Let’s just say I envy his get-up-and-gall. I suffered over that. He’s a singer, and I waited in the wings of his career and let mine slide; I had my own
ambitions.”

“You make marriage sound like a minefield.”

“It’s no picnic. It’s the most dangerous relationship you can have. A contract made in hell.”

“And Charles? How does he fit in?”

“He doesn’t believe in marriage, and he lets me do what I want to do. We have a pact: no apologies. Jimmy was the kind of man who was always saying ‘I’m sorry’
while he was stepping on my feet – but I could have twisted his balls into a daisy chain. Charles, on the other hand, makes no bones about being exactly who he is, and he never apologizes. I
don’t expect anything from him, so I’m never disappointed.”

I stretched out in the bed, thinking about marriage, and Mora and Charles in the next room.

“Sorry. I’m rattling on, and I know you’re thinking about Mora. She’s so restless.”

I told her about my first wife, wishing that the scars were visible so I could show her. I tried to explain about Mora. “Sometimes I feel like she’s only mine on loan, that nothing
will ever satisfy her.”

“She’s vibrating like a spinning top. Nothing will slow her down; she’s like a natural force. Take it from another woman.”

“I love her. You love Charles. We’re crazy.”

“Charles says two plus two equals twelve.”

“Charles is crazy.”

“I know.”

“But you’d rather be with him right now, wouldn’t you?”

“Well? Wouldn’t you rather be with Mora?”

“That’s not what’s happening.”

“You’re evading the question. I mean, what if Charles fucks her better than you ever did? He’s very good.”

Check. I couldn’t bear any more conversation. I wanted to make love to Vy. It was the only answer I had.

“I can’t,” she protested when I touched her. I put my hand through the opening in her caftan onto her cool stomach. “I absolutely cannot, I’m sorry.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Charles and I made love while you were off looking for Mora before dinner. He’s big, and I’m sore. It’s my background,” she sighed theatrically.
“Fair-skinned mothers. Delicate skin. Look here, I’ll show you.”

She opened the caftan and spread her white thighs. “You see the blood?”

The lips of her vulva were irritated and swollen, and there was a tiny drop of blood on her clitoris. Imagine the center of a rose with a drop of blood on a petal . . .

I found cotton and peroxide in a bathroom medicine cabinet and brought them back without looking in on Charles and Mora. I heard them talking through the closed door and I wanted to eavesdrop,
but I wanted to make love to Vy more.

“Your hands are so gentle,” she told me when I wiped away the drop of blood and covered her soreness with vaseline. The glistening petals of her sex opened beneath my fingers.

“I’ll stop. I promise you. If it hurts, I’ll stop.”

She squirmed evasively when I penetrated her. I stopped, moving again only when she opened to receive me. She whispered hotly in my ear while she licked it with the point of her tongue. “I
trust you. No reason, but I do. I know you’ll stop – but
please
don’t stop now.”

I cupped the plump weight of her buttocks in my palms and let myself be swallowed by her. We got lost in the dialogue of bodies, questioning and answering, alone on a gently rolling sea in the
blackest night.

She pulled a yellow popper out of the darkness and crushed it between her fingers, holding the amyl nitrate to my nose and then to her own. We both inhaled deeply and felt our hearts rush to
where our genitals were, riding on the cloudy, pungent chemical high like surfers on a wave.

“
Oooo!
” she cried out, as if in a dream. I heard someone wailing, without realizing it was me. Each wave that took us was bigger than the last, and we were no longer rocking
gently but struggling together to stay afloat.

I heard tapping on the floor and looked down to see my fingers doing a fast dance on the wide boards. I was half off the bed and sweat was pouring from me. Vy’s body was arched, a dying
swan. There was a roaring in my ears like the ocean at the same time I heard knocking on the door, and then I hit the last, biggest wave and was dragged head over heels into shore. Vy’s whole
body clenched and she followed me, digging her nails into the backs of my arms. A high thin noise came from her throat.

When I opened my eyes, Charles was standing over us, naked, grinning, scratching his chest. “Birds would give up a winter’s feed to hit that note,” he said, while Vy shuddered
and I navigated the re-entry to consciousness.

“What time is it?”

“Half past four. You two make a lot of noise.”

Mora moved from the shadows to stand beside him, her hand on his shoulder. Her hair was matted and wet and she was ragged around the edges. They looked like weasels who’d been in the
chicken coop. There should have been feathers hanging from their swollen satisfied mouths.

“I won’t be able to explain this away tomorrow morning,” Charles said. “I won’t believe it. It was so incredibly high at times. So intense.”

“I guess we did it after all.” Mora smiled tiredly, shaking her head in happy disbelief.

“I don’t know what could be bad about this,” I said.

Vy sat up and stretched, pulling Charles’s hand to her breast. “It was divine, and I love you all, and I don’t know what to say, except that we’ve been very
wicked.”

Charles yawned and rubbed his eyes sleepily. Mora came to sit next to me on the rumpled bed that smelled of sex and poppers and cigarettes. We kissed Charles and Vy goodnight with the gentle
exhaustion of sated lovers, and Mora and I curled up spoon-fashion on the bed. She was mine again, for a few hours.

Part Two

New York City, 1977

FIVE

In the pictures I developed of the four of us on the beach, our faces are aglow with anticipation and pleasure. Our shyness is not fear of each other, but of the unknown. There
are no shadows under our eyes, no tightness around our mouths; no hint of desperation clouds our sunny expressions. Our discovery of adultery was almost painless – and the timing was
right.

“I thought I had it figured out,” Mora said when we looked at the wet proofs in my darkroom. “Love and sex and relationship. Marriage – the idea that if you want this,
you can’t have that – that was what was wrong with us. Then what happens? We go and break all the rules. We find out that marriage has got corners and angles we didn’t know
existed.”

Turn around. We were friends again. The bad habits we had fallen into disappeared overnight, as quickly as rubbing condensation from a window. We were able to treat each other lovingly again.
Trust reappeared. Freedom was exhilarating.

Predictably, the few friends – married couples – we told about Charles and Vy thought we’d gone off the deep end. A relationship with one other person was difficult enough,
they scoffed. Three was arrogance, asking for it on the chin. None of them raised moral objections and they didn’t ask how we felt: and since we knew their marriages and their reasons for
being cynical, we paid no attention to them.

Months after returning from East Hampton, we received a note from Vy. She was in London.

Curious, Mora called Charles – not without some trepidation, but the phone was her instrument, not mine. I got on the extension.

“Maurice took her over to meet some of his friends,” Charles explained. He sounded lonely by himself in Maurice’s big house, and resentful that Vy had gone off without him.
“I guess there’s a party circuit for septuagenarians in the countryside around London. Discreet scenes in the stately homes of England.”

“That lady gets around. I wish I had her style.”

“Come out and see me. We’ll go for walks on the beach, and spend a lot of time in bed. Just us chickens.”

“It’s the middle of the week, Charles. Richard can’t get away; he has shootings lined up.”

“I didn’t invite Richard.”

She paused and looked at me. “We’re a team, you know that. I wouldn’t go anywhere without him.”

I threw her a kiss, my hand over the receiver.

“Look, the words wedlock and hammerlock are not synonymous. They don’t add up to virtue. Besides, you’re not just a ‘twosome’, you’re half of a
‘foursome’ – silly words, it sounds like we’re talking about golf . . .”

“I’m sorry –”

“Maybe if you did some homework, since I’m not around to keep things stirred up.”

“What? What kind of homework?”

“
Now
I’ve got your interest piqued. I’ll mail you your next lesson.” I heard a dry chuckle on the other end.

I broke in. “Come and see us.”

“Oh. There you are, Richard. You should breathe more heavily when you’re spying on people.”

“Mora knew I was on the extension. I trust her, but not you. Why don’t
you
come visit us?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’m going to hole up out here and try to get some work done. Fasting and abstinence and hard work, that’s the prescription. I’ll be a
different man, the next time you see me.”

“Like?”

“Lean and hungry, I suppose, and head over heels in love.”

“You mean because absence makes the heart grow fonder?”

He chuckled again. “Love is what I feel when I want to get laid. Abstinence, that’s what makes the heart grow fonder.”

He wasn’t kidding about our homework. The clipping arrived in the mail two days later. He had cut it from the classified section of a sex tabloid.

The advertisement was for a private club called Plato’s Retreat that had recently opened on lower Fifth Avenue.

“The first on-premise club which meets in Manhattan – which means the party’s right there . . .” It mentioned facilities like whirlpool baths, disco floor, swing rooms,
and free bar and buffet.

It made me think of restaurant ads for Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s – a meal, some hats, streamers and horns. I imagined people as lonely as forgotten uncles and single
people with nowhere else to go buying some holiday companionship for a package price.

We looked at each other.

“We could go and just see what’s going on,” Mora said, barely concealing the excitement in her voice.

“Somehow I don’t think swinging is a spectator sport, love.”

“Please, Richard: let’s go take a look. I’m really curious.”

“I don’t know if I can handle it.”

“We’ll stick together, I promise. Besides, there’ll be a woman for every man there. What if
you
meet someone?”

“I don’t know. What if I do?”

“Well, you won’t turn her down, will you?”

When we called the number in the ad for information, a woman told us that Plato’s Retreat was open from ten until five in the morning, and directed us to an older loft
building below Madison Square Park. We stood on the broad, empty avenue opposite the building, sharing a joint and getting our nerve up. It was Saturday night, after eleven. People were arriving in
taxis and entering the building. A limousine hugged the curb.

Stoned, we took a small, rattling elevator to the fifth floor and stepped off into a spartan reception area crowded with a desk and three pretty, businesslike young women wearing black
Plato’s Retreat T-shirts. I handed over twenty-five dollars to the one who winked at me, and we received orange membership cards with the club name on one side and a list of rules on the
other.