The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (6 page)

“Your mother also said marriage was forever.”

“Only bachelors, loose women and divorced people fucked around.”

“But swingers don’t have to get divorced – they divorce sex from love. The advantages are obvious.”

She chuckled. “They don’t have to say they’re working late.”

“Or rent motel rooms.”

“And they can still file joint returns.”

I lifted the damp hair from the back of her neck and kissed the hollow there – it always gave her goose pimples. “They don’t have to tell lies, but they must get jealous
sometimes, like everyone else,” I whispered.

“That tickles!”

We messed around until everything got slippery. A little later, the phone rang in the bedroom. It was Stanley, inviting us to a private party at his place in New Jersey. Mora was tentative when
she talked with him, but I knew she wanted to go. So did I.

Stanley lived in one of those high rise towers on the bluffs in New Jersey, ten minutes by taxi on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel. It was an evening in late November, and
there was a promise of snow in the air. A uniformed doorman checked off our names against a typed guest list. He was businesslike, but his eyes lingered on Mora’s breasts.
He
knew what
we were up to.

Tracey opened the door and squealed happily at the sight of us. Her black silk blouse gaped open and, when she kissed me on the cheek, my hand slipped inside of its own accord.

“Stanley, come see who’s here,” she called over her shoulder. “I’m really happy you decided to come. Stanley wasn’t sure . . .”

He appeared behind Tracey and moved to kiss Mora. It was the first time I’d seen him dressed – patent leather loafers, loud green slacks, loose patterned shirt open four buttons. He
looked better in a towel.

When he kissed Mora’s neck, he looked up at me from under her ear, blowing her hair away, his stiff palms moving down her back to cup the soft weight of her ass.

“My queen for the evening,” he smiled.

Tracey frowned at this and took my hand from her breast, leading me into the apartment.

She showed me where I could hang our coats, playing the hostess. “I bet he says that to all the girls,” I said.

She smiled brightly and excused herself. There were more people at the door, and Stanley and Mora were holding up traffic. “I don’t know where we’re going to put them all. If
people don’t start moving into the bedrooms, this is going to turn into a cocktail party – you know what I mean?”

People were sitting on couches and chairs and on the carpeted floor, passing around joints and talking about lawn care, good gas mileage, swingers’ clubs – and relationships.

Relationships. It might have been a party of middle-aged people anywhere in America – except they weren’t talking about business because, for swingers, it’s not status
that’s important – what you
do
– but what you look like, and what turns you on. They were talking about the arrangements men and women make in order to balance desire with
duty. The structures of love. Marital balance sheets.

I listened because it was an opportunity to hear how serious swingers – the people who pursued this life week after week, year after year – dealt with the problems Mora and I had
encountered since we stepped outside the closed circle of marriage.

As a group, they were no more nor less attractive than the crowd you’d find on a Saturday night in a disco in Fort Lee, New Jersey. No matter what shape their bodies were in, they dressed
in tight, light clothing; they wore gold chains and digital watches, and the men tended to show more chest than their women showed cleavage. They smoked a lot of cigarettes but they didn’t
drink much.

At first, their faces were hard to distinguish, because the only light in the large living room came from recessed spots set behind greenery that grew on one wall, over a bubbling fountain
constructed of plaster made to look like stone. Another wall was decorated with paintings of bull fights and crossed swords on wooden plaques, but the opposite two walls were glass, to take
advantage of a magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline at night. I was sitting on the floor, in a line with the Empire State Building, and when I stood up I could see the twinkling lights of the
city reflected in the inky blackness of the Hudson. Some people were looking through a telescope set on a tripod in the corner of the room.

You could tell the party hadn’t really gotten underway by the lack of people in the bedrooms. We strolled in and out of four of them, and saw a few people having serious conversations or
simply petting, before I noticed a brunette lying on a bed masturbating. Her skirt was thrown up around her waist and her ankles were locked together. She had both hands between her legs, her back
was arched, and the sweat poured from her forehead. Her eyes were shut tight.

A man wearing a white turtleneck and blue blazer – a man in his mid-fifties with a gray toothbrush mustache – was kneeling on the bed next to her, with the intent expression of a man
helping his wife give birth by breathing with her. He didn’t notice us.

Both their faces were bright red and she was babbling when he put his hand on her thigh.

Her eyes snapped open and she brought her hands up to hold out to him. He clasped them and kissed her fingers, one by one.

“Can I get you a drink, darling?” he asked solicitously. He had an English accent.

“You’re not getting me drunk tonight.”

“No, of course not. That’s not my intention. But I do want you to have a good time. I want you to mix with people and be gay.”

He treated her like she might explode, like someone who’s just been released from a mental hospital. I was fascinated. She jerked her skirt down when she noticed us standing there in the
darkness.

“I wasn’t putting on a show,” she growled.

“Didn’t mean to intrude, but it was getting crowded in the living room,” I explained hastily.

“Oh, hello,” the Englishman said, stepping around the bed and holding out his hand. “Peter’s my name. This is Johanna.”

He and Mora smiled at each other.

Johanna looked coldly at me. “You’re a voyeur,” she accused.

“Look, if you wanted to play with yourself in private, you could have stayed home and drawn the blinds.”

I was glad she hadn’t; she was ravishing, with long dark hair loose about her shoulders and breasts heaving beneath her sweater. She had delicate nostrils and a thin, painted mouth and her
eyes burned with frustration.

“Wait a minute, darling,” Peter said. “No reason to get upset. We’ll go get some drinks and give you a chance to get yourself together.” He pushed us out and closed
the door.

“The first attractive woman besides you I’ve seen, and she’s crazy,” I whispered to Mora.

“She’s off, tonight,” Peter said. “But Johanna is as changeable as New England weather. You just have to be patient. When she’s good she’s very, very good,
but when she’s bad . . .” He sighed, and shook his head. Then he looked at me and brightened. “But maybe your meeting was fortuitous. I’ve known her to start out an evening
hating someone, and then surprise me. She likes the unexpected move.”

“It must be exhausting to deal with her,” Mora said.

“I know she’s much too young for me. She’s on her own trip, as you say here. She says I can accompany her on it, if I want to, but I’m not allowed to complain.”

We refilled our glasses and he went back to collect Johanna. While we’d been gone, the crowd in the living room had thinned out.

Then I heard a familiar voice. Stanley led Vy and Charles into the room, feathers of snow in their hair. They looked glamorous and happy and the talk in the room stopped for a minute to register
their presence. Stanley made an attempt to introduce them, but Vy stopped him.

“Surely I haven’t been gone that long, Stanley – that people have forgotten. This is like a family reunion. Hello, Peter. Is that Johanna in the corner, over there?”

“Hello, Vy,” I said.

“I was hoping you’d be here. Baby, it’s
so
good to see you! Did you know they’d be here, Charles?”

Our reunion was a four-way hug in the middle of the living room; for the moment we were a closed circle, oblivious of everyone around us.

“I hear you liked Plato’s,” Charles said. He smirked.

“You know we did,” Mora told him.

Vy examined us both with a look of mock severity. “So while the cat’s away, the mice played? You let the Devil tempt you – you couldn’t wait for me?”

She exchanged greetings with the other people in the room – apparently she knew them all – and sat down on the rug to pull off her tight velvet trousers. Like a restless hen on a
nest, she squirmed provocatively until her long white legs were bare. The dark blonde tuft of hair at the bottom of her belly gleamed like wheat. She reached for her big leather bag and pulled out
a long madras skirt to wrap around her waist.

“No more underwear, thank God. For some reason, Maurice insisted on lingerie in London. He said that his friends would be shocked if I didn’t have any, but I think he had a kinkier
motive.”

She hadn’t lost her ability to grab the center of attention. Every eye in the room watched her get into her skirt. What was it that made me think she was changed – or had my
perception of her altered? The circles under her eyes were darker, she’d braided her hair, her fingernails were bitten – but it wasn’t the details that made me see her fresh; it
was an aura, as if she’d learned something about herself in England and the knowledge was spreading in circles from the center of her being.

Peter handed her a drink, and Stanley asked her about England. She was gracious, a queen with her court. Maybe that was what I noticed about her: a new authority that enabled her to hold the
floor with ease.

“I met more submissives in England than I could shake a stick at,” she chuckled drily. “And more lords this-and-that with beautiful soft eyes and eccentric tastes . . . They
all have old names and large country places with butlers, and their great soft eyes get wickedly moist when you flick a riding crop. Leather is very popular, very chic with Maurice’s
friends.” S&M was unexplored territory for us.

Mora and I looked quizzically at each other. We had only the vaguest notion of what she meant, but I could see that everyone else knew what Vy was talking about and that she was a star.

Charles walked into the kitchen to get himself a drink – I think he was probably feeling neglected – and I followed him, hoping that he could enlighten me.

“What is a ‘submissive’?” I asked.

“Stop putting me on, Richard. You’re being ingenuous.”

I held up my hands. “I ask in all innocence. I really don’t know what she’s talking about. She’s changed – hasn’t she?”

He stared at me, his lower lip dropped in thought. “You really have some catching up to do . . .”

Peter had been pouring himself a straight vodka without ice at the counter next to where we were standing. He broke in. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help overhearing what you said,
Richard. About Vy, I mean. I’ve been a fan of hers since we met – I’d call it an encounter, because it was very dramatic, but she may have forgotten – at a party at the UN
Plaza last winter. Do you remember how grand she was, Charles? Some of us were in awe.”

“Tell him what a submissive is, Peter.”

“I’d rather talk about Vy. She’s much more fun to talk about than my Johanna. Vy is a queen, but Johanna has become a pumpkin. Vy understands what a terrible responsibility she
has. There isn’t enough of her to go around.”

“You lost me,” I admitted. “I thought I knew something about Vy, but I guess I don’t.”

“There’s a lot people don’t know about Vy. She shows everyone a slightly different angle – it’s definitely one of her charms.”

Having said this, he drifted off in search of Johanna.

“I’m still in the dark,” I said to Charles.

“The English don’t know how to get to the point. Vy says sex with them is like a Japanese Tea Ceremony.”

“I have the feeling that I’m going to have to ask Vy to explain – you’re being just as vague as Peter.”

“And you’re being dense. One trip to Plato’s and you end up in the inner circle of the sex world on the East Coast, and yet you won’t see what’s right in front of
your eyes. Vy is a dominatrix – that’s why Maurice took her to England. Do you know what she carries in that big leather bag? Whips. Leather cuffs. Nipple clamps. Dildoes. Rush . .
.”

I shook my head. “You could have told me.”

“For Christ’s sake, Richard. You fell in love with her, didn’t you?”

The living room was almost empty. I wandered down the hall toward the bedrooms, wondering what scenes I’d find Mora and Vy and Charles in the middle of, hoping that
Tracey would be sitting somewhere by herself.

The first bedroom I walked into was occupied by people I didn’t know. I stood and watched them for a while, feeling curiously lust-less. Mora was in the next room, on a couch with Charles
and Stanley and Tracey. It was a four-way connection: Stanley knelt behind Mora, who had Charles in her mouth while Tracey knelt above Charles’s lips. Stanley wore a bottle of Rush on a chain
around his neck and I watched him lean over Mora’s back to hold the bottle to her nostrils before bringing it back to his own nose. They looked like a team of acrobats, totally absorbed in a
difficult maneuver they hadn’t rehearsed for.

In the third bedroom, Vy was sitting in an easy chair, next to a queen-sized bed two couples were romping about on. Peter was kneeling before her, caressing and kissing her feet. She was idly
untwisting her braids, looking bored.

“I’m glad you’re back,” I said, touching her hair.

“I thought about you over there, Richard. Maybe more than I thought about Charles – isn’t that strange?”

“Charles just told me how naive I am.”

“Naive?”

“About you. And what you carry in your bag.”

She blushed. “I hope he told you good things.”

“You’re a star.”

“I do what turns me on when I’m in the mood. Are you shocked?”

“Why should I be? It was just something I didn’t know about. Now I know.”