‘No… ’ she protested, but he caught her wrists anyway and pinned her arms to her sides. Bending to kiss her, he bit down on her lower lip, his tongue penetrating her in an instinctive desperation, the need to mark her, possess her as his, and they both sank to the floor, clumsy as they tore each other’s clothes off as fast as possible. He got there first, hoisting her top over her arms and head so that she was trapped, bound up in it, her arms held above her, her face and eyes covered. He then pulled her panties and tights down to her knees and wound them around her legs so that they too were bound together. Then he took her bra off, leaving her entirely naked from her neck to her knees.
‘What are you doing?’ Her voice muffled by her top.
‘Wait and see – you’ll like it.’ Straddling her, he looked down at her body: her pert small breasts with their long erect nipples above the arching ribcage, the curve of her stomach leading down to the triangle of pubic hair. Cut off at the knees and arms, her pale torso resembled that of a classical Grecian marble statue. He pushed his hand between her thighs. She was already wet in anticipation. His index finger found her clitoris and he began to strum her expertly. Susie groaned beneath the binds of her clothes, her body pinned down by his weight, writhing in pleasure.
It was a delicious feeling; the bondage giving her permission to lose control, to be entirely at his mercy, submission she could truly surrender to. Playing her until he sensed she was close to coming, he paused to take his trousers off. With her body stretched out before him, still kneeling over her, he took his cock and rubbed the tip of it across her nipples and then down the centre of her midriff, resting it between her swollen labia. He plunged into her suddenly, making her cry out, then after thrusting a few times he pulled out entirely, leaving her gasping for more.
‘What do you want?’ he demanded.
‘You,’ she groaned.
Her sex swollen and wet against his palm, Susie struggled, but the more she tried to free her limbs, the more entangled she became.
‘What do you want?’
‘You!’ She was now desperate for the feel of him, the shape of him inside her, filling her, pounding into her.
Seeking release, he entered her, excruciatingly slowly at first, then again, after a couple of deep thrusts, he pulled out.
‘Not yet,’ he whispered against the outline of her ear pushed against the fabric of her blouse, her sex throbbing in anticipation, every erotic zone heightened; her lips, her nipples, her swollen clit. He rolled her onto her side, then pushed himself between her thighs and entered her slowly from behind. Lying back on the floor, he pulled her onto him so that her body was lying over him, and continued to play her as he moved slowly inside her. She came almost immediately, while he held back. As she lay over him, catching her breath and slowly gathering her wits, she realised he hadn’t had an orgasm yet.
‘Free me,’ she pleaded.
‘Why? What will you do?’ he asked teasingly, still role-playing.
‘Free me and I’ll show you.’
He untied the tights from her legs and helped her wriggle the rest of the way out of her skirt and top. Once completely naked, she pushed him back down to the floor and made him roll over on his front, then reached for her handbag, which was still sitting on the floor nearby.
She pulled out a small umbrella she always carried. She also pulled out a jar of Vaseline she used to moisturise her lips. With her knee, she forced him to spread his legs, while lubricating the smooth knob of the umbrella handle.
‘Susie, I’m a top not a bottom.’
‘Not for long.’ She cupped both his buttocks; he had a beautiful arse, high and firm, and long muscled legs, now spreadeagled on the marble. Reaching under him, she grasped his erect cock and ran her fingers up and down it, him groaning while, with her other hand, she found his anus and eased her lubricated fingers into it, then slowly pushed the knob of the umbrella handle in. He groaned again, but she was pleased to find he still stayed erect, as she masturbated him with one hand and fucked him with the other, faster and faster until he came spurting against his own stomach and the floor.
Afterwards she climbed off him, and he rolled over, and remained lying on the floor, naked except for his T-shirt, still hard from her, hands now behind his head, grinning up at her. ‘So, was he?’
‘Was he what?’
‘Bigger than me?’
‘Huge, a hundred times bigger,’ she said, grinning back. ‘God, you’re impossible.’
‘I hope so. I hope I am beyond impossible. I hope I am unimaginable, undeniable, indelible like the blackest ink. So when do I get to see the proof sheet?’
She stood up and pulled her skirt back down over her legs, then reached for her bra. ‘You don’t – you know that. We have an agreement. You think a little sex changes that?’
‘I wouldn’t dare.’ He pulled his trousers toward him. ‘But I tell you this much: I’m never going to look at an umbrella in the same way again.’ At which they both started laughing.
*
She couldn’t sleep. It didn’t help that Felix apparently always slept with a nightlight on. And there it was, an orange beacon with its light yawing across the bedroom floor like a lighthouse illuminating the shipwreck of their abandoned clothes and underwear. Susie didn’t want to be there. To her surprise, Felix had persuaded her to spend the night, yet once they were inside his vast emperor-size bed he’d curled up against her, wrapping his arms around her, and had fallen asleep instantly. Which was where he still was, snoring gently, his breath a warm tide against her shoulder. But it was hot under the sheets, and more than that she felt trapped, claustrophobic.
After they’d made love she’d wanted to go, but he’d insisted on cooking and they’d eaten out on the heated terrace, naked except for two hats – a dare he’d made, with which both of them had gleefully complied. Felix had set up his video camera on a stand and had filmed their antics. The footage had charmed her; there was a jarring contrast between the pristine hard-edged glamour of Felix’s modernist furniture and table settings and their own uncontainable, fallible flesh: it had felt like a metaphor for the impossibility of their coupling. Felix wore a bowler hat like Magritte, while she wore a trilby, like some Thirties hooker, her mascara and lipstick smudged from their lovemaking. He entertained her with gossip and scandalous anecdotes about the art world: who had seduced whom, how this painter had managed to get into that gallery; skirting around anything too intimate or personal. Beneath his banter she sensed a curious need for approval. It was as if this extraordinarily erudite and successful gallerist sought not only to impress her but also to achieve an intellectual camaraderie he imagined would legitimise him somehow. After the meal, he’d asked her to spend the night with him.
Bending her head slightly, she gazed down on his sleeping profile. He was less beautiful side-on, and, with his mouth slightly open as the breath entered and left his body, more vulnerable and human. He was a paradox, and Susie knew, to her chagrin, how obsessive she could become when it came to trying to understand paradoxes. She carefully rolled away from him, lifting his arm (the weight of it disturbingly mortal) and resettling it on the pillow so that he wouldn’t notice her departure. He turned, but to her relief, carried on sleeping.
After wrapping herself in his silk dressing gown, abandoned at the foot of the bed, she tiptoed out into the passageway and into the library room she’d glimpsed earlier through a half-open door.
The room was circular and was the centre of the apartment from which all the other rooms radiated out. Panelled in oak, it was entirely lined by bookcases, the ceiling extending to the height of the two floors of the apartment. She scanned the spines of the books, her heart jolting when she spied a whole shelf dedicated to her art set up high.
An exquisite antique set of library steps was placed at one end of the bookcases. As Susie began to push the steps toward the shelf, the wheels started squeaking. Terrified, she paused, listening to see if she had woken Felix.
Nothing but silence came from the corridor outside. Encouraged, she moved the steps the last few feet to the shelf and climbed up, the polished wood cool under her naked feet. The shelf contained catalogues; all her solo shows and all the group shows she’d ever been in, dating from her final graduation show at Goldsmiths to the infamous Sensation group show to the last retrospective she’d had at Tate Modern in London. Leaning across, she arbitrarily selected one of the catalogues and pulled it out. It was for her first solo show in Britain, Desire as Myth, the show Felix had mentioned that he’d loved. Glancing down at the image on the front cover, a rush of memories came upon her; how naively optimistic she was before the show, the intense excitement of filling a space entirely with her own work, her conviction that it would be critically panned and her astonishment at the following notoriety and fame. How she had changed.
As she placed the catalogue back, she noticed that the shelves below were full of old hardback books, seemingly minor or unimportant, forgotten works. Curious as to why Felix might be the collector of first-edition B-grade fiction, she pulled a volume out. As she opened it she noticed that the first page – the blank title page – had been torn out. Why bother collecting first editions if they weren’t in mint condition? she wondered, but then so much of Felix was surprising. Just then somewhere far below in the street outside a car alarm went off. Taking it as a sign to leave, Susie climbed down the steps.
Moments later she was dressed and at the front door. Once outside, breathing in the chilly air, Susie immediately had the sense of a huge weight lifting from her. Was this fear of intimacy, or relief? She didn’t know and in that moment she didn’t care.
*
The bedroom was dark and filled with memories that fluttered against Latisha’s purple drapes like confused insects. Woken by a full bladder, she lay there thinking about the scenario she’d just emerged from. She’d been modelling for Maxine, a lazy hot afternoon; drowsy with the sound of the artist’s voice and the earthy scent of wet clay, she’d fallen asleep in the dream and had woken in her bed. For a second she wasn’t sure which scenario was the real world.
*
Susie sat back in the seat of the cab. Outside it was dawn, the hazy blue light she loved for how it transformed the mundane into the mysterious. The streets populated only by the occasional weary partygoer emerging from a darkened entrance of a club, the homeless drifting like zombies down the abandoned walkways, a street-cleaning van crawling along the tarmac. As the cab turned right into Houston she was sure she caught a glimpse of Maxine, standing on a corner by a yellow water hydrant spouting the rainbow of a broken water main. Her ghost, dressed in the same denim jacket she always wore, was gazing over at her, the long blonde hair dripping water on either side of her face, her eyes wide and pleading. Falling back into shadow, she disappeared.
*
Over in the apartment on Central Park South, Felix woke for a second and then went back to sleep.
*
The painter stood in the centre of the studio, dog-tired, his skin still blistered from the South American sun; the flight had landed at 4am and his nerves were jangled with jet lag. He dropped his rucksack, then walked over to the fridge. The milk was cheese, and there was some stale muesli. He pulled it out and started eating it from the package anyhow. The two paintings he’d been working on before he’d had to leave were still propped up against the wall; the oil paint was still slightly tacky to the touch.
Gabriel Bandini sat down at the Formica table with the muesli package balanced between his knees. Outside the morning light had started to creep over the neglected window box and the straggly weeds that had sprung up in the dusty soil. He’d come back spontaneously, without anyone’s knowledge, bored out of his mind by the relentless sun, finding the insistent chatter of foreign voices bewildering and exhausting. The bright colours that had burnt into his retinas had bleached both his imagination and his dreaming, and the artist had found himself yearning for the tones of New York: the blues, the purples, steel and glass, the clean, flat skies. He found himself craving conversation he could understand; the touchstone of knowing you were still human. He craved the embrace of the man he still considered his lover. He had grown tired of being the outsider.
By coming back he risked his life, he knew it, but, he rationalised in soft muttering thought, by staying away he risked his soul and that was the only thing he had left that belonged to him.
He looked back at the paintings, calculating what areas he might start working on later that day, falling into the wonderful seduction of routine. Normalcy, something he hadn’t experienced in months, began to flood his body like a drug. Just then something on the carpet caught his eye. It was the outline of a footprint; a footprint made by someone who’d had some yellow paint under his or her shoe-sole. Startled, he went over to examine it.
The footprint was large and broad and it definitely hadn’t been made by his own foot. Shocked, he swung around. Now he noticed the tiny changes in the apartment, evidence that someone had been in while he was away. The chair on the other side of the table wasn’t up against the wall like it usually was; a corner of the box he normally kept well hidden under the bed was now poking out from under the bedcover, and someone had left a tea towel by the sink. Grabbing his key, he began to make his way down to the janitor’s office on the ground floor.
*
‘What do you mean, an aunt? I don’t have an aunt. I have a mother, but she’s 70 and lives in Chicago. She hasn’t visited me in years.’
The janitor, dressed in cowboy boots and a short silk robe with the effigy of Bruce Lee embroidered on the back, stood in the doorway of his apartment, smoking nonchalantly.
‘Aunt! Aunt! She told me aunt! What could I do, Mr Bandini? Family is family in my culture.’
‘But I gave you strict instructions! No one was to come into my space while I was away.’
‘It’s not your space. Is landlord’s space and he very unhappy. He want you out.’
‘That’s between me and him. Jesus, Chung, I gave you extra money and everything so this wouldn’t happen.’
‘Why big deal? Just woman, just your aunt, although I did think it funny she black—’
‘Black! She was black and she told you she was my aunt! Chung, do I look mixed-race?’
The janitor peered at the painter critically, then blew smoke in his face. ‘I dunno, Mr Bandini. All Westerners look same to me.’
‘Okay, I give up. So did this woman, this intruder who was allowed into my property illegally, say what she wanted?’
‘No. Maybe money? Everybody else want money from you, why not her?’ the janitor concluded philosophically.
‘And what did she look like?’
‘Big. Like bear, like she could take you out with one swipe. She walked bad with stick. Maybe 60 years old. But her eyes… her eyes like lasers, she see through lies. You be careful. She gonna get you, your aunt,’ Chung concluded with dramatic satisfaction.
*
Back in the apartment Gabriel locked the door behind him and, for good measure, pulled the blinds down, then reached for his mobile phone.
*
Felix was in the middle of a meeting when his mobile phone rang. He glanced at the incoming number and called the meeting to a premature close. After the three junior directors had left the office, he returned the call.
‘I told you not to ring me on this number.’
‘I wouldn’t, but this is an emergency.’
Gabriel’s voice sounded close. Felix thought he could detect the roar of a city in the background.
‘Where are you?’ he asked suspiciously; the kid was meant to be in Panama City.
‘My place, here in New York.’ Gabriel’s voice was tentative, fearful.
‘I told you to stay away for at least three months—’
‘I tried, Felix. I got lonely. It was driving me crazy,’ he whined.
‘Jesus! Do you know what you’ve done? I can’t afford any possible complications with
this current sale. I’ve got the Foundation breathing down my neck, not to mention Felicity’s art broker. It’s a goddamn balancing act and the last thing I need—’
‘Listen! There’s something far more important. I came back early this morning and, Felix, I’ve had an intruder.’
The strand of Maxine’s damp hair sitting on his pillow flashed into Felix’s mind.
‘What do you mean, an intruder?’
‘A woman claiming to be my aunt conned her way into my apartment.’
‘What’s this got to do with me?’
‘Well, the thing is, Felix, it doesn’t appear she’s taken anything – which is totally weird. Like, I would rather the bitch had stolen something, then we’d know she was like a thief or something.’
Listening, Felix’s mind began spinning; there were too many similarities to his own experience. He breathed out to steady his voice before answering.
‘Calm down, you sound paranoid. What did this woman look like? Do you know?’
‘Big, African-American, about 60… scary, according to my janitor, but then he’s five foot and about 54 pounds so everyone’s big to him.’
‘So it’s some crazy who’s maybe seen you around and developed some weird obsession.’
‘How did she know where I lived?’
‘Maybe she followed you home? Besides, you can buy that information if you know the right people to ask.’
‘Felix, I’m not feeling good about this. I need protection.’
‘You need to fucking disappear, I told you that, yet here you are, again.’
‘Don’t threaten me. You forget you need me more than I need you,’ Gabriel snapped, surprising Felix with his aggression. A second later his tone softened: ‘I could buy protection for fifteen Gs.’
‘If you need money, all you have to do is ask.’
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