The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 11

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Often, when Lilah phoned our place, X wasn’t home. “She’s out saving the world,” I once said.

  “Well, I got out of that racket,” Lilah said, gleefully.

  These fortuitous calls happened a lot. I kept the conversations casual, and mildly flirtatious. Besides, I sensed Lilah didn’t go there with unavailable men. I sensed a woman who enjoyed her single life, her small studio, her unattached, personal freedom. Still, from the phone calls, she and I graduated to email. Back then you graduated to email from the phone: I was new to email then and very few people I knew had it at home, so it felt like Lilah and I were in our own little world exchanging messages. And our phone conversations had a teenage innocence. They were almost always about pleasure. Simple, simply pleasure. Music. Movies. Even candy. We both liked Butterfingers candy bars. Once, on the phone, we were discussing what ingredients made that chocolate bar so sweet to the tongue and as we were talking, a call from X came through. I apologized to Lilah that I had to take the call. “No worries,” she said, “we’ll solve the mystery of the Butterfingers another time.”

  One winter night, X and I were supposed to meet Lilah in the city to go see a new singer-songwriter at a Manhattan club. X bowed out at the last minute. She had a save-the-world-type speech to write for her Ethnic Studies course. “You go,” X told me, “Go. And tell Lilah I am sorry.”

  So, I went. As agreed, Lilah met me under the clock in the centre of Grand Central Station. She stood out from the crowd – and then some. For one thing, she was in a long black Italian coat, like she’d stepped out of the film of a smoke-filled 1940s movie set. She wasn’t rushing hither and thither like the swarm of middle-class commuters. Instead she seemed part of the Beaux-Arts elegance of Grand Central Station itself, her right hand with red-painted fingernails resting delicately on the marble ledge of the kiosk. Her tiny, square-shaped handbag was slung gracefully off her shoulder, and she had one boot-shod leg coolly crossed over the other. I almost had to slap myself in my face to make me realize that woman is waiting for me. For all my eager admiration, I was overcome by shyness as we greeted each other. But Lilah was so unguarded that it forced me to “man up” and shed the shy sixteen-year-old bullshit. I directed us to the taxi stand outside where snow was starting to fall. The midtown winds were blowing the flakes in topsy-turvy plumes as our cab headed south.

  Lilah smelled of jasmine perfume, a fragrance so strong that the whole cab was filled with it. Both of our hands were pressed into the cab seat, almost touching, while our other hands held onto the straps near the back windows. We made inane comments about the passing shops and streets. Her velvet skirt rode up her left leg and unveiled her luminous skin beneath her black stockings. I caught her looking at my loafers and the piping of my black jacket. For most of the ride, we talked about X – a safe topic – and we agreed it took more discipline than either of us had to stay in on a Saturday night to write a paper. As we discussed the noble charities which the foundation sponsored, my eyes wandered to the diamonds on Lilah’s handbag and for a while it seemed those jewels were the only light in our dark taxi.

  Downtown at the club, the burly bouncers said the show had been cancelled because the singer couldn’t fly in due to the snowstorm.

  “Snowstorm?” we asked.

  “Try blizzard,” the bouncer told us.

  Lilah and I laughed at our failure to watch the weather reports. I suggested we retreat to a bar before I “head back to the ’burbs,” and then I remembered that Lilah didn’t drink. “Feel a sweet tooth?” she asked me. She knew a café nearby where we could get dessert and we found a small candlelit table in a place called Dessert Isle. She helped me parse the menu options, her finger gliding across my menu. I ordered a profiterole and a dessert wine and she had a crème brûlée and mint tea.

  I admitted it had been “a lot of years” since I’d gone out just for dessert. We joked about how we’d fought over the brownie at that Christmas party. She told me about an ex-boyfriend from college – who didn’t eat dessert. “Sugar-free diet,” she said, in a tone that was at once disbelieving and dismissive. She delicately spooned her crème brûlée and held the spoon in her mouth. Then she took it out and dug in for another spoonful. “Hence the ex in ex-boyfriend,” she said and her smile turned me on.

  Under the small table, our feet grazed each other’s and on the tabletop our fingers brushed more than once.

  Instead of announcing that I ought to head back to the train before the storm got worse, I ordered myself a Sambuca.

  The longer we talked, the more it was obvious we were trying to avoid the very thing that was happening: something like a date arranged by some force other than ourselves. We shifted our chairs so that we could face the pane glass window and watch the snow piling up. I put my hand around the back of her chair, careful not to touch her shoulder. The waiter said they were expecting a foot within the next three hours and we stared at the falling snow.

  Lilah insisted on coming back to Grand Central just to be sure my train was running. Ice had formed on the sidewalks so she had to hold onto my arm. Our hips bumped as we battled the wind. The lapels of our coats flapped upwards and wet snow pelted our reddened faces. My heart sank when we saw that the trains were listed as “On Time”. The anxious crowds wandering around others who were squatted on the ground indicated something different. Then, as if the gods had intervened, the station’s PA announced a twenty-minute delay “on all trains into and out of Grand Central”.

  To kill time, Lilah and I wandered around the newsstands where she pointed out her favourite magazine – Vogue’s fat spring issue, some 500 pages thick. “I have skipped on groceries to be able to buy their fashion issue,” she said, as she purchased the copy. I held up a Greenpeace magazine with a photo of an oil-slicked turtle. “As a former world-saving foundation person, shouldn’t you be reading this instead of Vogue?”

  “Don’t go there,” she warned, and as she waved her Vogue at me I wanted to snatch it out of her hands and kiss her.

  In Grand Central, the schedule-boards had changed. Trains were Cancelled. A collective groan rose from the waiting crowds. I was ecstatic; Lilah raised her eyebrows and shrugged and then she smiled. Before the crowd could converge on the pay phones, I called X to tell her what was up. She barely heard me. She had just read some article for her paper and she was going on about an atrocity in some distant country. As she babbled on, I saw from the corner of my eye, Lilah holding a piece of paper. In her neat red handwriting the note said, “You can use my couch!” The operator was asking for another quarter; I made sure to ask X if she was OK with my “borrowing Lilah’s couch”.

  “What’d she say?” Lilah asked.

  “She said fine and went back to ranting about war and orphans.”

  Lilah and I shrugged, our eyes glittering like liberated kids whose parents were so wrapped up with their own activities that they couldn’t be bothered enforcing a curfew.

  At a deli near Lilah’s place we stocked up on Butterfingers candy bars and expensive English tea.

  Her apartment was spacious for a studio, with high ceilings, lofty windows, tall, fancy Japanese screens that set her bed off from the living room, and bookcases and shelves filled with CDs, art books, books on fashion. “My old Vogues,” she said, pointing to rows of magazines on the colourful shelf near the window.

  As we watched boring TV news reports about the blizzard, I admired her high-heeled boots that were still glazed with melting snow. We talked shopping – about buying patiently to get quality versus settling for shit. “If you are a patient shopper you can nab designer clothes on a shoestring budget,” she said. “And still keep a politically correct carbon footprint.” I told her that I admired her nuanced approach to values.

  She asked me would I mind if she thumbed through her copy of Vogue? “As long as you don’t think me less a man if I peruse it with you,” I said. She patted the couch and I sat comfortably next to her as she held the magazine on her black-stocking lap. She fl
ipped patiently through the magazine, occasionally pausing at certain images: a leggy blonde leaping over a puddle in a Burberry’s. Or a supermodel in a micromini slouched in the back seat of a Porsche donning a Tiffany’s bracelet. She was pleasantly surprised that I could tell Chanel from Versace, couture from kitsch. The magazine’s special feature was a lingerie spread filled with models in teddies, in hooded terrycloth robes, in catsuits, in stilettos and hot pants. I told her what X had said to me recently, that lingerie was invented by men to “corset and bind” women.

  “Well I must be pretty oppressed,” she said, “I’ve been obsessively collecting this stuff since I was eighteen.” As Lilah pointed out an Estée Lauder ad, she explained the Egyptian origins of make-up and glamour, and I recalled the stupid argument X and I had had that night, about the fedora. Poles apart, I thought. It felt like a cosmic joke being played on me. Marrying the wrong chick, sucker.

  Lilah tossed Vogue aside with a thump and got up and went behind the screen and rummaged in a closet. She emerged with hangers filled with lacy, frilly items and spread them on the couch with a collector’s contagious self-satisfaction. Pale blues. Ivory whites. Midnight blacks. Blood reds. I felt sure I was in an insanely erotic dream and would wake up with X at my side, but the sharp scent of perfume and the loud crackles of heat from her apartment’s pipes were all too real.

  Together, like factory line workers, we inspected the stitching and fabric and the labels of each item, turning them inside out. I put my hand into a green stocking and made a talking puppet of my hand. “Save the frogs of the rainforest,” I said and we both laughed.

  As she kneeled on the couch, her knee brushed my crotch and I boldly put my hand on her leg to encourage her to keep the pressure there between my legs. As she did, she coyly asked me whether X wears lingerie now and then, “I mean, despite how ‘oppressive’ it is.”

  I explained that she had quite frequently when we first met but that she didn’t any longer, not now that she thought it was “patriarchal and controlling”. Plus, I added, “when you’re saving the world you’re not allowed to have fun.”

  “Who says?” Lilah asked, stretching the fabric of a baby-blue lace bra.

  “Not I,” I said. “Definitely not I.”

  Sometime between slicing up the Butterfingers chocolate bars and carrying tea into her living room, Lilah and I kissed. It was a sloppy but a long kiss sweetened by our hesitancy and guilt. When we let go and stood close enough that our chests were touching, I could feel her rapid breathing. My eyes wandered the run of her pale neck. I smelled that jasmine again. I clenched my jaw and closed my eyes to calm down. Feeling like I had to say something, I wondered whether it was a wise idea for me to stay over. “It sort of feels like we’re lighting a fuse here,” she said.

  We went to the window and inspected the snowfall; she pointed out the cars half buried in snow. “We have no choice,” she said and then we both laughed. On the couch, we snacked on Butterfingers and she read from the wrapper and the litany of weird ingredients pronounced in her cute falsetto was enough to make me hard. “Confectioner’s Corn Flakes . . . Nonfat Milk . . . Salt . . . Lactic Acid Esters, Soy Lecithin . . . Soybean Oil.” Her voice seemed to be singing in a pitch far above the banal list of ingredients.

  I took the wrapper from her and asked her why she was so into lingerie from such an early age. “Did you want to be a designer?”

  She explained how she used to go out a lot with friends but that chasing boys seemed less fun sometimes than staying home listening to music and copying from fashion magazines and drawing plans for cocktail dresses, wedding dresses. She used to dress her little sister in her mother’s costume jewellery. Between summers at college, she got sales jobs at boutiques, but her talent for managing egos and for fundraising led her into charity, non-profit. I’d always disagreed with those so-called experts who say men are more visual than women when it comes to desire because it was obvious women were visual as well – “Just look at who reads Vogue,” I said.

  It was one a.m. and the sugar high and the tea were still coursing through us. She wondered aloud whether our visual tastes were the same as our taste in dessert. We decided to play a game – a dangerous one, but a game nevertheless. She’d model four lingerie ensembles from her vast collection and I’d rate each of them, “like an Olympic judge, on a scale from one to ten”. and then she’d let me know how she ranked each outfit herself and this would show us if we have the same taste. “And as added bonus,” she said, “I’ll take the one that you chose as the best one and sell it at the neighbourhood boutique on consignment and send the profits to a charity.” She winked when she said “charity”, and I hopped onto the couch and steeled myself to be a discriminating – and lucky – judge.

  Her first outfit was a white bustier with a sheer white satin garter belt centred by a pink rose. It was called “Maiden at the Maypole”. She strolled, smiling, “A walk on the blushing bridal side,” she said, adjusting the white stockings at the garter clasp. At first I couldn’t get over how the white lingerie contrasted with her dark eyes and dark hair and how her legs looked especially long in the white hosiery. She had drawn her hair back into a prim bun and she posed near the window holding the curtain over her white legs. She lowered her head and pretended to blush and then she turned around to reveal that the back of the panties sported a pink bow. I scribbled a “7.5” into my notepad. As she got to me on the couch, she picked up my hand and I held her and said, “With this hand, I thee—”

  “You thee what?” she asked, grinning. “You’re spoken for, you rascal!”

  I stood up and held her hips and pressed my lips onto her shoulder and even kissed the satin bra-strap. “This outfit gives the lie to ‘an innocent bride’,” I said.

  She tapped my nose. “And I’ll probably never wear this in its intended context,” she said, giggling. “No offence. But marriage and lingerie seem incompatible.”

  Her second ensemble was a jet-black kimono with white peonies painted on its sleeves. “Peony Kimono”. The liquid effect of the kimono’s fabric made it seem that Lilah was robed in a black water that shone in spots as if from the reflecting sun. As she walked, she held something behind her back. When she got to the centre of the room, she opened the robe with one hand to reveal the silken yellow lining. Then she let the kimono fall to her feet. “I gave up two summers of vacation pay to buy this kimono,” she said.

  She wore those expensive hold-up European stockings – the ones with the five-inch lace tops, tops that extend all the way to the top of the leg – and a matching demi-style black bra that barely covered her breasts. Her neckline was jewelled by a coral red necklace. She’d brushed her long hair so that it draped down to the left of her face, feathering like a painter’s inky brush against her pale breast. Her stockings were semi-opaque. The mules she wore were high-heeled but she moved effortlessly in them.

  From behind her back she pulled an English-style bowler hat. She put the hat on her head and put a leg up on the couch. It was as if she had known about the fedora argument X and I had. Then I thought, no. This is who she is. It’s not about X.

  I stared at Lilah’s leg, as if I were studying the geometry of the stocking’s weave. Really I was gazing through the fabric at her luminous skin. My eyes travelled upwards to her black panties. Red threads were woven into its black lace. Lilah saw me staring at the panties and, as if she knew I was seeing the red threads, she ran her finger on them to guide my eyes. I ran my finger along the border between her skin and the black fabric, then lightly over the soft mound of her sex, tickling the surface as she kept her leg on the couch and closed her eyes. She bit down on her lip as if trying to stifle whatever urge my admiring eyes had stirred. When she lowered her leg from the couch and walked off, disappearing behind the Japanese screens to put on the next outfit, my cock was so hard that I could barely shift in my seat as I scribbled the number “10” in handwriting so sloppy you’d think I was drunk.

  Lilah’s third e
nsemble was a navy-blue body stocking. “This is ‘Russian Catsuit’ “ she said. She wore a dark blue thong and dark blue star-shaped pasties over her nipples. She strode into the living room barefoot, bouncing gingerly with each step, her hair in a bouncy gymnast’s ponytail. “Let me see if I can,” she said before raised her arms over her head in a V and dashing forward, curling into a single somersault. She raised her hands like an Olympian and I applauded. “Zee Amerikan Lilah has vowed dis crowd,” I said, mimicking a Russian accent. I gave the outfit a 7, mainly for its spunkiness.

  “More than spunky,” she said, sidling up to me, showing me the leaf-and-clover filigree stitched into the garment’s navy-blue rayon. I put the pad down and told her she looked so much like a gymnast I wanted to see if I could lift her up.

  “Hey, this is no bridal outfit,” she said as I cradled her, holding her bride-like in my arms. She kicked and swayed her feet and we kissed softly.

  “We’re being very bad,” Lilah said.

  “Yes,” I said, letting her down. “Judges can’t kiss the models.”

  “Right, you must avoid bias,” she said as she tiptoed back behind the screen.

  The final ensemble she called, “Parisian Peek-a-Boo”, crotchless designer pantyhose with a frilly lace blouse that was long enough that it almost hid her sexy black panties. Lilah flipped a white beret onto her head and sashayed through the living room, poised on backless high heels, bending forward teasingly as if to pick something off the floor, the bright white skin of her ass positively glowing against the frilly hem of the blouse.

  When she stood up straight she ran her finger along the scallop-shaped trim of the pantyhose, up her waist and across her tummy and down the inside of her fair-skinned thighs. I wrote a “9.5” on the pad.