Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker

by Portnoy, Suzanne

‘I don’t find you sexually attractive any more,’ he said.

  I was stunned. I wasn’t expecting that exit line. ‘I don’t get it. You were all over me like a rash just a few weeks ago,’ I said. ‘Now you’re completely turned off? I haven’t changed. I haven’t done anything different from usual.’

  He didn’t answer. I was puzzled. I’d always been told I was sexy. Now I was being told I wasn’t sexy enough. I’d dumped my swinging partners, ignored Jahnet’s homework of finding three tantric partners and settled on one, all for a few nice treats and some good but unfulfilling sex. Maybe he just didn’t want to say what we both knew: we didn’t fit.

  I was rebound girl, just as Pat had predicted. Jack had broken up with his previous girlfriend only six weeks before we met. Now the warning signs I’d so happily ignored flashed into my brain, and I pictured the night we lay in bed after fucking, my head on his chest, when I’d asked Jack when he’d last had a relationship.

  ‘It ended six weeks ago, when she punched me after I said something she didn’t like,’ he said.

  Bitch, I thought – as opposed to what in retrospect would have been the more-reasonable response: Danger! Fresh wound!

  ‘She cracked one of my ribs,’ he continued, ‘and I told her to go. And that was the end of that.’

  ‘Wow, she must have been really pissed off,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, she was. But it wasn’t going to work anyway. She wanted kids and I don’t want any more.’ Jack was very convincing, and I believed he had convinced himself. ‘She loves getting drunk and I don’t drink. Even when I looked at pictures of the two of us together, I just thought, "We so don’t fit".’

  ‘Mmmn,’ I said. ‘Six weeks? That’s not a very long time. Are you sure I’m not rebound girl?’ I laughed, lightening the mood and hopping right over the obvious bump in our road.

  ‘Rebound girl?’ he said. ‘Oh, don’t be silly, honey. I love you.’

  The night he broke up with me, Jack said my desire to have sex all the time while we were on holiday showed him how needy I was. He didn’t do needy, he said. This, too, came as a surprise. Stuck in our sandpit oblivion that grim week, my only need was for a diversion. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to eat. Nothing to do but fuck. Even though we had got along, had made the best of things, and even laughed at the ridiculousness of our situation, something had turned off in Jack’s brain and I hadn’t noticed.

  I had thought we were OK. Indeed, on the plane back to London Jack had taken my hand and, under the aeroplane blanket, put my hand on his lap, inviting a hand-job through his trousers. As I felt his cock get hard I looked across the aisle at our kids, all asleep. Everything’s OK, I thought. If we could endure seven days together in a Gulf hell, we could endure anything.

  ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out, dear,’ my mother said when I called with the news. ‘Maybe the next time you get involved with someone, you should get a reference from two ex-girlfriends.’

  If Jack didn’t do needy, I didn’t do break-ups. I tend to recompartmentalise. I liked the guy. Hell, he was one of the few men in my life who was a self-made success story and who had a car and a house of his own. He was a grown-up. And, despite his ‘new man’ ramblings, he was fun to be around. Plus, I didn’t know any other straight men who wanted to watch Nip/Tuck with me. We remained friends. Within two weeks he was back with Stephanie, and within two days I was back at Rio’s, in the red room, with a tall black man with a big black cock.

  13. HOMEWORK

  Fucking a black guy with a big black cock wasn’t the magic salve I’d hoped it would be. Being rejected hurt, and an afternoon at Rio’s, though fun, wasn’t a cure-all for being dumped.

  The next day I rang up Jahnet. I told her about Jack and how he’d given me my walking papers. I told her how sad I felt, how disappointed.

  She wasn’t particularly sympathetic. ‘I want you to come over here and see me. Now!’ Her tone reminded me of the way I spoke with my boys when they’d misbehaved.

  Within a half-hour I was sitting naked on a futon in her apartment.

  ‘I explained your homework,’ she said. ‘No boyfriends. Three tantric partners. You’re not ready for a relationship, Suzanne.’

  I had thought I was. But I knew now she was right. As were my many friends who had warned me not to jump in so fast. I should have stuck to my homework.

  ‘Let out the loudest scream you can,’ Jahnet instructed. ‘I want you to scream as if your life depended on it and, as you do, I want you to think about getting that man out of your system.’

  I screamed so loudly I thought someone might call the cops.

  ‘Now,’ said my tantric-sex teacher, satisfied, ‘I want you to start on your homework. Again.’

  I went back to my PC and signed onto SwingingHeaven. The ad I’d placed just before leaving for Vietnam and meeting Jack had attracted another twenty-five responses. Unfortunately, just like with the previous sixty, the men in my inbox fancied marathon sex sessions and expressed no interest in the spiritual side. I didn’t like the look of any of them either. So I put an ad on JDate, a website for Jews wanting to meet other Jews. Maybe a nice Jewish boy, for a change, I thought. I hadn’t been on a date with one of my own since I’d met David, and even that had been a fluke.

  ‘So,’ I said to David as we lay in bed one morning a few days after we first had sex, ‘what’s your religion?’

  ‘You’re kidding me, right?’

  ‘No,’ I said. I hadn’t a clue. ‘You look Italian or Spanish, maybe.’ I always ended up with naughty Catholic boys, so assumed he was one, too.

  ‘I’m Jewish,’ he said. ‘Mother’s Jewish, father’s Jewish. I’m one hundred per cent Jew.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’ I said. ‘You’re Jewish?’

  ‘Is that so weird?’ he said, starting to look annoyed.

  ‘I never meet Jews,’ I said. ‘Like, never.’ My mother is going to love you, I thought.

  Even though the marriage didn’t work out, the Jewish connection did. I can’t quite say what makes a Jew different from anyone else. All I know is that, when I meet a fellow Jew, I know it – David being the one exception of a lifetime. Maybe it’s the humour, the way of looking at the world, the work ethic or the fact that, deep down, we bond, knowing we’re not the world’s favourite people. Whatever the cause, after finding out that David was Jewish too, I felt a connection to him that had been absent with other men.

  As I filled in the blanks on my JDate profile, I wrote nothing about my quest for a tantric partner. That, I figured, I could reveal later and, given that JDate was a ‘straight’ site and not a swinging one, I didn’t want anyone thinking I was soliciting. A year earlier, while filling out my profile on TotallyGorgeous.com, I’d put ‘big cocks’ next to the question ‘What do you like?’ A month later I was barred. ‘Dear Suzanne,’ said my reject letter. ‘We have terminated your membership, as we’ve noticed you’re using it inappropriately. Our site promotes relationships, not sex.’ Funny, I’d thought at the time, as why else would someone go on a dating site? ‘I hadn’t realised modern relationships no longer involved sex,’ I wrote back.

  Nonetheless, I’d learnt my lesson: no mention of big cocks and no mention of tantric partners either.

  Julius sounded like the best prospect of the lot. The rest were a bunch of desperate-looking Jewish men, most of whom seemed to have been recently divorced. I refused to play the rebound girl again.

  We had a brief chat on the phone. He told me he was an entrepreneur who had run a music-booking agency and then started a music magazine. After selling the magazine he didn’t have to work very hard any more, so now he ‘dabbled’, he said, in internet businesses. I found that meant he owned a couple of dating sites, plus a shopping site, and a few other operations besides. Then he got down to business.

  ‘Are you a dominatrix?’ he asked out of the blue. ‘How do you feel about caning?’

  ‘Me or you?’ I asked.

  He told me he thought it
would be saucy if I whacked his butt a few strokes.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it would be something new.’

  He sounded nice enough, for a masochist. And he said he looked like Andy Garcia. He hadn’t posted a picture to prove it, but I took his word for it and arranged to meet him at an Italian restaurant not far from his home in Maida Vale. I’ve always had a thing for Andy Garcia, who for a number of years had popped up in my dreams with such disturbing regularity it felt like I was cheating on my husband.

  When I got to the restaurant, I spotted Julius standing by the bar. He was smoking – a bad sign, though after Daniel I’d tried to relax my view on that and had reached a kind of compromise, I’d fuck a man who smoked but I wouldn’t go out with him. As I walked towards Julius, I started calculating his chances. He may have fancied himself an Andy Garcia type, but the only resemblance I could make out was that both were Mediterranean looking. I had always assumed Andy Garcia, like all movie stars, was, if not larger than life, at least tall. Julius didn’t top 5’8". Average height, average weight, above-average nose, above-average hair loss. He was about fifty and, though not unattractive, he was no movie star.

  We had a nice meal together. With business contacts in common, we found enough to talk about without lapsing into embarrassing pauses over our rocket salads and pizza. Julius wasn’t dull, but I suspected he wasn’t exciting enough to spend an entire weekend with either. After a couple of glasses of wine, I started feeling tipsy and a little horny too. I looked over at my dinner companion and wondered what he would be like in bed.

  Thinking about Jahnet’s homework, I realised it would be a tremendous challenge to find any man I could be intimate with for an entire weekend. Aside from Jack, Daniel and Frank, I hadn’t spent a full weekend with anyone since being married, and even my married years barely counted. Most weekends, David went to the office while I took the kids to the playground or out shopping. Tantric or no tantric, I thought, it’s going to have to be one special man who I can stand for forty-eight hours.

  ‘Should we have a nightcap back at my place?’ Julius said, as the waitress cleared our plates. ‘It’s just around the corner.’

  What the hell, I thought. ‘Sure,’ I said.

  Walking into Julius’s one-bedroom flat near the Regent’s Canal, I noticed two things: one, he had a hell of a lot of locks on his door; two, the place was unbelievably tidy. His books were arranged in size order. He had white sofas that were still white. There was no paper in sight. I’ve always been wary of superclean guys, having put in my time married to one. I know the likelihood they spend their holidays vacuuming is, like, 500:1. As for the locks on the door, they freaked me out. I didn’t see anything particularly priceless as I looked around the flat. Maybe there’s something buried under the floorboards, I thought. Or someone. I stuck around anyway.

  ‘Should we get started?’ I suggested. ‘I must warn you, I’ve never used a cane before.’

  That didn’t seem to bother Julius. He took a tie out of his wardrobe and asked me to bind him to the wardrobe handles, a foot above my head. ‘Please,’ he begged.

  I graciously complied, wrapping his wrists together and then suspending him as requested. He remained fully clothed, tied to the wardrobe with his chest against the doors. I assumed he hadn’t wanted to take his clothes off because he was worried I might hurt him too much. But then I thought. Surely that’s the point?

  The bedroom was small, giving me only a couple of feet between the bottom of the double bed and the wardrobe. ‘The cane is in the bottom drawer of the side cabinet by the bed,’ he said. ‘Can you get it out? Please?’

  I grabbed the cane. It looked just like the ones headmasters use on naughty boys in movies about boarding schools. At last, my Hollywood moment, I thought. Get ready, Andy Garcia.

  I said, ‘I think this would be a lot better if you dropped your trousers, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, probably a good idea.’

  I unzipped his jeans and pulled them down, along with his black Calvin Klein underwear. His ass was round and hairy. I struck him with the cane. It was surprisingly easy to use and, after a few whacks, Julius’s ass was a pleasant shade of pink and he had an erection.

  ‘This is fun,’ I said. ‘I haven’t whipped anyone since a girl passed me her cat-o’-nine-tails at Rudegirls, an all-girl club I go to from time to time. She pulled down her leopard-print skirt to reveal the most perfect black ass and I whipped her while she bent over a table. That was horny.’ I cracked the cane twice more across his ass.

  ‘Sounds it,’ he said, more interested in his own pain than in hearing about someone else’s. ‘Would you hit me a few more times? Please?’

  ‘I don’t know if I should,’ I teased. ‘I might want you to fuck me first. Or maybe I should just leave you tied up there for a while.’

  ‘Please. Hit me.’

  ‘I’m enjoying this, Julius. Making you wait.’ I did rather dig the role-playing. Perhaps I could be a dominatrix after all, I thought.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ I said. Crack. Crack. Crack.

  ‘That’s enough. Thank you.’

  I was tempted to give him another crack, just to show him who was boss. ‘No problem,’ I said instead. I untied Julius’s hands. ‘Now would you like to fuck me? You look ready.’

  He was ready.

  ‘Do you have any condoms?’ I asked.

  ‘Condoms?’ He sounded surprised. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘What, no condoms? Don’t you ever have sex?’

  ‘To be honest, I haven’t had sex in ages,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I guess I should have been more prepared.’

  I was. I ran out to my car and got my kitbag.

  Back at the flat, Julius had turned off the lights and lit a couple of candles. I wasn’t feeling particularly romantic after the caning. I was feeling powerful, though. I really wanted to use this guy now. It seemed inappropriate to turn submissive after having just caned his ass. If I were going to be his fantasy, he could be mine. I wanted to remain the one in control.

  I sucked his cock to make him hard again, put a condom on him and straddled him, grinding down on his cock. ‘Do you like being fucked like this? Did you enjoy being whipped?’

  ‘Yes,’ he whimpered. ‘I enjoyed it – very, very much indeed.’

  ‘Would you like me to stick a butt plug up my ass while you fuck me?’

  ‘Do you like that?’ He looked shocked. I thought that pretty funny, coming from someone who’d just begged to be caned.

  ‘Of course I like it,’ I said, and grabbed the four-inch ribbed butt plug from my bag. I greased the plug with some lube, also from my bag, and then glided it up my ass.

  ‘Why don’t you fuck me from behind,’ I suggested. ‘It’s a better view.’

  ‘You’re the wildest woman I’ve ever met!’ he said. ‘I’m going to come!’ And he did.

  I didn’t.

  ‘I better get home,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to pick my kids up early tomorrow.’

  I put on my clothes while Julius unlocked the many locks on his door. I was home in ten minutes. I walked straight upstairs to my computer, logged on to JDate and suspended my account. That’s enough of Jewish men for a while, I thought.

  The next morning I checked my email and found a message alert in the inbox. Someone from Tantra.com had responded to my ad. I signed on, for the hell of it, though all the responses I’d had to date had come from men living in the US. After Frank, I’d steered clear of even corresponding with anyone living on the other side of the pond. Sure enough: an American, this one a guy living in the Catskills. Not another New Yorker, I thought, disappointed, and as I moved my cursor towards Delete a picture loaded in the corner of the screen. An arty shot, in sepia tone, showing a very slim man with wavy shoulder-length hair and a huge smile. He was wearing a pair of large sunglasses and no shirt, just a towel wrapped around his shoulders. He was holding a canoe paddle. ‘Musician and healer,’ said his profile. A se
xy hippy, seemed to me.

  Hi there, tantric student. Hmmm. Yes, I can ride the wave for hours – it is such delight, eh? I live in a beautiful home in the mountains north of NYC and am also looking for tantric partners. Do you ever come to the USA? Much peace to you!

  It did seem somewhat idiotic to respond but, then, he was cute. And I did go to New York from time to time. And he did practise tantric. I could probably arrange to meet him a couple of times a year, I figured. Jahnet never said my partner had to live in the UK.

  So I wrote back. I discovered we had a great deal in common, so much so that it was odd our paths had not crossed before. Scott was friends with a musician who’d played in a famous 60s band my uncle was in. And he’d later played bass for a notorious 80s group whose lead singer was now in another band being produced by one of my clients. His only London friend – like Scott, a massage therapist – was a man who had known Jahnet for twenty-three years.

  Goodie! I thought. Another tantric connection. All we needed was to find ourselves on the same continent sometime. Why is it that all the good ones always seem to live on the other side of the world?

  Meanwhile, I scheduled a few more dates with local guys, for homework. With the tantric not really panning out, I put another ad on SwingingHeaven, omitting all tantric references and, in a nod to my original ad, stipulating Radio 4 listeners only, and for once my timing was spot on. Trawling through the hundred-plus emails I received back, I located a handful of professional good-looking guys. Suddenly, I seemed to be on a roll. I was hopeful of finding someone who’d be hip to being an occasional tantric partner.

  Omar was one. He said he worked at a film-production company, played tennis regularly and liked going to art galleries, the theatre and concerts. And he listened to Radio 4 regularly. ‘To me, going out on a Sunday afternoon for an excellent meal and a glass of the old Chablis on the Embankment is my idea of bliss,’ he wrote. ‘Sharing the bottle with you would be very decent indeed.’

  He sounded lovely. But it was the pictures he enclosed that really caught my eye. He sent three: the first, of his face, wasn’t bad: short hair, full lips, large brown eyes, high cheekbones. Then a shot of his cock, soft. Impressive. The third also featured his cock, this time hard, and next to a twelve-inch ruler. The cock was longer.