The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro (8 page)

I was reminded of the many times she had exposed herself to me, shown me her breasts, opened her legs casually, held her gloved hands seductively between her legs. The worst for me, the cruelest of her teasing—if it
was
teasing and not indifference that I took for sensuality—was when she sat next to me and leaned over, placing her thin hand straight down on my stiffening penis, first exploring it and then using it like a handle to steady herself, while she said in a lecturing tone, “I am sorry, I hardly know you. I cannot imagine what you want from me. You seem to be a very presumptuous young man. Where did you get these ideas? It is so hard for me to say 'you'. I should be addressing you as
Sie,
not
du
—'you' is just useless...”

She had used the flat of her hand to press down harder, and then I felt her warm palm and active fingers. Lecturing me with her voice but keeping her fascinated hand against my hard-on—that was the worst time. A woman who would do that would do anything. I did not assume because we were licking each other and kissing in the suite that we would become lovers. I was bracing myself for another reversal, more frustration.

That was why, when I said I loved her, I did so with hatred. Even pressed against her parted thighs I felt great hostility. As I spoke into her ear I was possessed by an impulse to bite it, and saying “I love you,” I felt a strong desire to hit her. I spoke the endearments through gritted teeth, trembling, feeling violent, wishing to push her to the floor and shove her legs apart.

I think she knew this. She was trembling, fearful, cowering. She knew how much I resented the way she had treated me, how I disliked her most for making me say this, like the young peasant boy in my folktale woodcut who was forced to endure humiliation to obtain a favor from the Countess. And so the desperate Wanderer kneels and utters the forbidden formula and at that moment he is consumed by a fury of loathing, hating himself, hating the noblewoman who has put him in this position.

The instant I gave in and told the Gräfin finally that I loved her, I wanted to force her to the floor and fondle her until she begged me to stop. I actually still felt a strong sexual desire, but it was sullen and violent and not so much sex as a visceral wish to assault her. I felt the stirrings of what it meant to be a rapist—despising her as I spread her legs, and in my hatred and humiliation, on top at last. Not sex at all but penetrating her roughly, using my prick like a weapon in a vicious attack. Now I could not kiss her without enjoying a resentful fantasy of biting her, tearing at her lips with my teeth.

I tried to calm myself. I was almost fainting with frustration. She was pressed against me and, as I was preparing myself for rejection, I felt myself losing control.

She moved away from me, and though there was no direct light I could see by the glow from the town and the luminosity of the moon and stars that she was pouring champagne into glasses that made the rising wine into music, a note increasing in pitch as the liquid filled the narrow flutes.

In that somber starry light her lips were black, her skin was greenish, her golden hair was blue. She was a specter handing me a wine glass and still she wore her lace gloves. I drank and touched her hand and was surprised by the warmth of the lace, how her flesh had heated her gloves, and when I reached to touch her breasts I was surprised by the way in which her body had heated her silk chemise, her gown, her sleeves.

After all this she was still clothed. That had added to my sense of ambiguity—so strange, all those clothes in the semidarkness of her suite. I wondered if she was serious and sexual, and when I put my hands on her breasts and held their softness, the stems of her nipples hardening against my thumbs, I felt that she was on the point of rejecting me.

So I could not disguise my hostility. I gripped her tighter, and roughly, like snatching the arm of an unruly child, like a furious parent intending the gesture to hurt as well as restrain. I did this almost unconsciously, unaware of how angry I was until my fingers sank into the flesh of her upper arm where I fingered helpless softness, no muscle at all, finding the weak woman beneath the skin. Something in that softness roused me—I had never touched more appealing skin or such yielding flesh. It seemed to me so tender that I could eat it, chew on her edible arm—I felt like biting her, or at the very least holding on as though grasping a piece of delicious meat. I could not stop myself. I was on the verge of gathering her whole slim body tightly in my hand and raising her to my mouth—all my frustration and arousal concentrated in this one gesture, this revealing touch. As I had snatched her arm, I had become a rapist, an animal, a cannibal.

Did she smell this bloodthirstiness on me? She took a step forward and kissed me. I was surprised but not calmed—surprised because she was fiercer than me. She chewed softly on my lips, and still I held on, remembering again how she had rejected me before, saying no and holding my erection. I felt sure this might end that way too, that I would be sent off, sobbing with lust.

I pushed her away, my hand against her face, my palm jammed against her big wet mouth—and she kissed my hand, licked it like a frantic puppy, and as she struggled to clutch at me I tried to keep her back, to give myself space to slap her.

To show her that I was in control, I held her off with one hand and took an insolent sip of champagne with the other.

The struggle was mute: she said nothing, only sighed. I was afraid of startling the hotel staff: I said nothing. But when I relaxed my grip a little she went a bit limp and was less amorous, and so I grasped her more tightly and began to understand that my rough handling of her aroused her.

It was not in my nature to be rough. My experience until then had been with willing and eager girls. But this was a complex woman and she had made me angry. Of course I did not hit her—I couldn't—but I was furiously aroused with a kind of passion that was as urgent and blind as anger. The moonlit room and the shadows and her clothes maddened me more.

I fumbled and found her breasts again, loving the weight of them, loving their softness; they were full and heavy and now her nipples were hard. I lowered my head and licked and sucked them and could not restrain myself from nibbling them, and when I did she took her breasts with her gloved hands and lifted them into my face, sighing with pleasure as she touched herself.

My mind was still set against her—untrusting. At any moment I felt she would reject me. Yes, even as she was pushing her warm breasts against my mouth I suspected she was just perverse enough to stop herself cold and send me away, saying, “That's enough for you! What more do you want!”

And though she didn't, though she was compliant, more than compliant—active and eager—I was using more strength than was necessary, sensing somehow that I needed to overpower her. I thrust her backward, could not reach the bed, got her to the floor, and hiked up her clothes—silks, straps, garters, stockings, ribbons, all the underpinnings of the old-fashioned feminine Europe, a wilderness of lush lingerie and lace. I was surprised and obstructed by her large elaborate panties, and when I found I could not remove them, could not disentangle them from the silken underpinnings, I parted the lacy crotch of these panties, felt with my fingers the wet mouth and lips of her cunt, and drove my purple cock forward. It was then I knew she could not stop me, though I still gripped her arms and pumped, and each time I thrust she moaned like someone being stabbed to death.

I must not let her stop me, I felt, but the feeling was more intense than the words: I had animal hunger and this was the nearest thing to rape that I had ever known, because I still felt that although she would never succeed, she might try to stop me. She moaned but it was not protest; she writhed but it was not resistance. She wanted more.

The darkness was dazzling. I was convinced of her hunger now, for she reached down and gripped me with her gloved hand and squeezed her lacy fingers on my rigid cock. I felt the ribs and stitching on my hot skin, her whole glove encircling the stalk of my erection and tugging it, planting it deeper into her body. When I came, with a scream that tore through my guts, falling across her body, tangled in her clothes, she let out a little disappointed ‘Ach” that died away, scraping into silence.

The first word spoken in the darkness was my whisper: “Sorry.”

She put her face against the side of my head. Her breath was so hot it scorched my ear. She said, “I want more,” and in the darkness and in her hunger she had never sounded more Germanic. I made a picture in my mind: a forest demon demanding blood.

But I had nothing more to give her. She clung to me for a while, saying nothing, and when, sighing, she let go, I knew she was telling me to leave.

 

The next day, golden in the golden sunlight, under the brim of her big Panama hat, she was in charge again, sulky and spiteful, perhaps slightly worse than usual, as though tormenting me in revenge for having surrendered to me.

“That is not what I asked for,” she said when I brought her the Campari and soda she had requested.

Haroun was there and heard this obstinacy. He smiled—he seemed to understand what lay behind her imperiousness.

“I said Punt e Mes. I never drink Campari at this hour.”

A lie.

“And do stop staring at me. You are making me feel there is something wrong. Get the drink and go.”

That hot day, the day in Taormina after we had made love in her room at the Palazzo d'Oro, was the worst, the most miserable, I had so far spent in her company. She was a shrew to me—demanding, insulting, unreasonable, reminiscing about ex-husbands and former lovers, mentioning large sums of money and her extensive travels, treating me as though I was another species—reminding me that I was an American, a mere boy, with no money except what she gave me, who could be sent away at any moment. But she was not a glamorous German countess speaking in this way; she seemed to me like a dreadful child.

I said, “What sort of childhood did you have?”

“How dare you ask me that!”

That was the daylight. In the evening, at dinner, she was calmer, as always studying her face in the dining room mirror, though pretending not to. She wore a small white Chanel (so she told me) hat with a little wisp of a veil and matching gloves of lace.

After dinner, Haroun sipped his coffee and said, “I must go and attend to a little business.”

“Is that your name for it?” the Gräfin said, making an actressy gesture, holding her gloved hand against her cheek, her fingers delicately splayed in support.

Haroun smiled, he smoked, he knew he would be granted permission to go but that he would have to endure some teasing beforehand. He knew—and now I did too—that the Gräfin had to have her way.

“I do not want to think about your little business. Please take your little business somewhere else.”

“Gräfin—of course, Gräfin.”

She said, “Sometimes people speak words in an opera, and they are perfect, and there is a big pause. And the aria begins with those words, the people singing them in an aria. This aria begins, 'Little business'—wonderful.
Kleines Geschäft.
”

“Yes, Gräfin. Thank you, Gräfin.”

She said to me, ‘Are you interested in Harry's little business?”

She was inviting me to mock him. I pitied him and tried to be gentle, saying, “Not exactly.”

“Go on, then, Harry. Go and play.” She twitched her veil as though shutting him out.

Alone with her, I did not know what to say. I finished my glass of wine feeling that I was at the center of a great silent void, like a boy in a bubble. She pushed her glass toward me almost contemptuously, as though reluctant to satisfy my gluttony. I finished it, saying nothing, but feeling that it might help to be a bit drunk because I did not know what to do next.

I finally said, “What is it about Harry that you don't like?”

She made just the slightest facial tic, using the tip of her nose and her upper lip, like a handsome animal reacting to a buzzing insect.

“That he's queer?” I said.

“What is queer?”

“That he's a sodomite.”

She smiled and said, “The one thing I understand.”

“Sure,” I said, and she knew I doubted her.

Leaning forward, her warm champagne breath on my face, she said with a satisfaction like appetite, “I am a sodomite.”

No words were available to me then, and with my mind a blank, I touched her hand, which was hot and eager.

She said—wicked child—“I don't like that jacket. You always wear that jacket. It's too dark.”

“You bought it for me.” Or rather, Haroun bought it for me, with the Gräfin's money. Haroun had loved fussing with the tailor in a small street behind the Naumachia, discussing textures of velvet.

“I suppose I'll have to buy you another.”

“Good idea,” I said, telling myself that I was humoring her and not being insulted.

“Tomorrow we will go to the tailor. I want you to wear a light-colored jacket, one that will look well with my dresses. This one is wrong. It attracts attention.”

A child's demands are often meaningless,
pay attention to me
their only motive—even then, at twenty-one, I knew that, perhaps better than she.

“I suppose you want my key,” she said.

The thought had not occurred to me. I had to think hard in my drunken slowness to reason what she was talking about.
Key?
I thought, and smiled, and she smiled back.
What key
?

Instead of replying—what was I to say?—I put my hand out. She pouted, putting on a sulky malicious face, and smacked the key into my palm. There were bite marks, hers, on the meat of my palm, the dark roulettes of her teeth.

In her suite that second night I was more confident. I knew what she wanted, I understood her contradictions, I was more polite, kissed her more gently, held her in my arms and delighted in the darkness, loving the feel of her clothes and the skin beneath them, and sometimes slipping my fingers through a placket and not knowing which was silk and which was skin, for both were warm to my touch.