The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker

by Suzanne Portnoy

  My bra fell away from my body and on to the floor and he looked at my breasts. ‘You are so beautiful,’ he said.

  I hadn’t heard a compliment from a man for years. Then, not ten minutes after meeting me, Frank did something my husband had never done in the ten years we’d been together. He went down on me.

  He lifted up my denim skirt, then paused before pulling down my silk knickers, taking in the sight intently. As Frank began licking my pussy, I thought about blood. My period had come that day and I was worried he might be put off by it. As every woman knows, it isn’t every man’s cup of tea; it makes some men uncomfortable, is messy and can be a turn-off.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ve got my period,’ I said, stating the obvious.

  ‘Doesn’t bother me,’ he said from below. He stayed down there for twenty minutes, until I reminded him we had a dinner reservation at Lotus.

  We looked at each other, half-embarrassed, half-excited. Frank had blood on his face and hands. The white sheets were spotted with red handprints. We had been together for half an hour and already the room looked like a crime scene.

  ‘Your pussy tastes delicious,’ said Frank. ‘We’ll resume this later.’

  Here was a man who lived to eat pussy, I happily realised. It was his thing. He preferred it to all other forms of sex, he said as we talked in the shower before leaving for dinner. Lucky me. He found oral sex relaxing, meditative, an almost spiritual act, he said. After a decade of oral abstinence, I was plenty ready for his religion.

  Over dinner, Frank confessed his own fears about our meeting. ‘My anxiety grew with each step,’ he explained. ‘Across town, to the hotel, through the lobby, up the elevator, down the corridor. Each step, Suzanne.’ He said he had stood outside my door before knocking, listening to the sounds on the other side.

  Lotus was half-empty – it was still early evening – so our waiter left us alone. Frank’s hand travelled up my leg and fingered the edge of my knickers. We looked intensely into each other’s eyes, like two teenagers on their first date. I felt embarrassed but also excited by the attention. As we sat in the restaurant, barely able to keep our hands off each other, I stroked his hard cock through his trousers and he fingered my pussy under my dress. ‘If this room were empty, these fingers would make you come right here, Suzanne.’

  I’d never met an exhibitionist before. Frank was French kissing me between courses, and, when he wasn’t fingering me, he was nibbling on my ear and threatening to pull off my knickers. I could see from the smile on his face he was getting off on the glances we were attracting from the other diners. We skipped dessert and went back to the W for a three-hour pudding.

  I spent the next three days on my back, punctuated by brief rest periods for eating and a little sleeping. After three years of total celibacy, I was insatiable. We fucked for breakfast, then wandered the streets of New York before coming back to our room for an afternoon round. Frank would work for a few hours while I caught up on my sleep. Then we fucked again before dinner. When we weren’t fucking, we were kissing, touching, groping each other. I couldn’t believe my luck, and Frank seemed to feel the same. He was constantly hard and I was constantly wet. I thought we were a perfect match.

  Yet nothing is ever truly perfect. Frank wouldn’t come, or couldn’t, even though, only halfway through the weekend, he had given me five orgasms. I began to wonder if something was wrong, but said nothing at first. On our last day, while lying in bed after yet another marathon session, I said, ‘You haven’t come all weekend. Don’t you want to?’

  He didn’t seem that bothered by it. ‘I don’t have to come. I just love seeing you come.’

  I’d never heard of a man who didn’t want or need to come. I felt like I’d failed in some way. ‘Well, if you wanted to come, what would I need to do?’

  ‘I need you to tell me you hate me,’ he said.

  ‘But I don’t hate you,’ I said, confused. ‘That would be lying.’

  ‘Tell me you hate me,’ he repeated. ‘I need you to tell me you hate me.’

  ‘I don’t think I can do that, Frank.’

  I did not understand what he was asking me to do, or why. I had flown three thousand miles to meet someone with whom I had become more intimate than I was with my own husband. How could he think I could tell him such a thing? Why would he have wanted to meet me so badly, and been so loving towards me, if he wanted me to hate him?

  ‘Tell me you hate me,’ he pleaded.

  This was not my idea of a proper relationship, of love, of sex even – accommodating someone who wanted to be abused. I wanted to make him come, but not this way.

  Frank could see I was uncomfortable and, seeking to avoid further discomfort, he said, ‘Don’t worry. I won’t ask you again.’ He didn’t sound disappointed, just defeated.

  We had sex three more times that weekend. I always came; he never did.

  ‘You know,’ I told him as I was leaving, ‘I may never see you again.’ It had taken a huge lie to bring us together this one time, and I didn’t know if I wanted to do it again, especially for a masochist.

  When I returned to London, there was an email from Frank. ‘Sorry about that psychosexual favour I asked you,’ he wrote. ‘I’m sorry it made you uncomfortable. I always have to make things hard. But that’s the way it’s always been for me.’ He said that in only two days I had clued into an aspect of him that had taken his wife fifteen years to work out: he wasn’t the thoroughbred of any woman’s dreams.

  Perhaps Frank wasn’t quite a dream man after all, but he did make me feel attractive and desired and special. The more I thought about him and the longer we continued our long-distance relationship, the more determined I became to return to New York and find a way to make him come.

  I resolved to stay married, keep my family life and fly to New York every three months, each time concocting a new lie to justify my exit. On my second visit I learnt how to make Frank come.

  We were having sex – Frank on top, my legs wrapped around his back. ‘Tell me about the men you’ve fucked,’ he said. ‘What were they like? What did they do to you? I know you’ve fucked loads of guys.’

  It had been a decade since I’d fucked anyone besides my husband, but I’d had plenty of lovers before David. I thought back to my early twenties and told Frank about an assistant director named Tim whom I met in a West End pub.

  ‘He used to ring me up in the middle of the night when he was drunk,’ I said. ‘He’d ask what I was doing, and I’d tell him I’d been asleep. "Why don’t you come over and fuck me and my mate?" he’d say. I didn’t like his friend, so I’d just fuck Tim and let his friend watch. Sometimes I’d suck his cock and let his friend watch that, too. There wasn’t enough room on the double mattress for all of us, so I’d usually call a cab after the sex.’

  Frank started to pump me harder. He arched his back and pushed into me. It felt brilliant.

  ‘Did he have a big cock?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. That’s why I went over there.’

  Frank didn’t have a big cock, and it was not very thick, but feeling him get harder and seeing him get more excited as I told my stories made me wet and turned me on.

  ‘Tell me about someone else,’ he pleaded.

  So I told him about a guy from university whom I used to see riding his expensive racing bike around campus, in skintight biking gear. I fucked him because he looked arrogant and I thought it would be satisfying to demolish his ego. ‘One day I left a note on his bike saying I’d seen him around and wanted to fuck him. I wrote down my dorm-room number and said I’d be in at seven that night. And, like an obedient puppy, he showed up, on the dot. I sat on his cock until I came, then pulled him out and jerked him off. After he came, I said, "OK, you have to go now. I’m really busy."’

  ‘You’re such a slut,’ Frank said, pumping harder. ‘I knew you were a slut. You’re just using me.’

  My stories had the desired effect. I may not have been able to say ‘I hate you’, but there were oth
er things I could do to make him feel used, like a human dildo. After two more stories about guys I’d fucked, he climaxed.

  It wasn’t easy at first. It didn’t come naturally to share my sexual history while making love. It felt sordid and wrong, like I was a cheap hooker there to get a trick off before moving on to the next guy. But, if that was what would make Frank come, then that was what I wanted to do.

  By the end of my second visit, I’d grown used to it, and it even began to turn me on to see the effect my words had on him. I may have fucked a hundred men before I got married, at twenty-nine, but it was now ten years on and the details of those early encounters were sketchy. So soon I was making up stories about guys with enormous cocks who made me suck them off until I was gagging, who fucked me hard, who shot their spunk all over my body.

  When we weren’t in bed, Frank liked to show me off. He acted like a man who’d won first prize at the state fair and wanted to display his trophy. He kissed me on the street, touched my breasts in stores, fingered me under the table at restaurants. One hot afternoon Frank and I were walking around Greenwich Village. I was wearing a thin white Fruit of the Loom men’s vest with a pair of cut-off jeans slashed to the top of my thighs. We stopped to make out on the steps of a townhouse. I felt Frank’s hands move beneath my vest and begin removing my bra. He reached around to feel my hard nipples before unclasping the bra and sliding it off under my shirt. I reached down and felt his crotch. He was hard. ‘Let’s go back to the hotel,’ I said. Exhibitionist, masochist, piece of work. But what a lay!

  ‘Your shirt’s pretty see-through,’ Frank said, not moving from the townhouse steps. He got off on the idea that passers-by could see my nipples and his hard-on. I was relieved I was on the other side of the ocean from home, but he never seemed concerned he might run into someone he knew, someone who knew he was married.

  On my third visit to New York, Frank took public display to the next level. He suggested we find a swinging club. ‘It’s something I’ve always wanted to try out,’ he explained, ‘but I’ve never met anyone who’d do it with me.’

  It was not something I’d ever considered. I told him the closest I’d come to an orgy occurred back in university, at a house party in the arty seaside town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. A guy I met – cute but off his tits on coke – suggested group sex. ‘Let’s see if we can round up some people,’ he said. ‘See you back here in a half-hour.’

  I walked around the house in search of willing participants. There were no takers, it being Puritan New England, so the two of us got on with it anyway and fucked in the coat room for three hours, interrupted now and then by people asking us to move so they could retrieve their coats, which we’d been using as a mattress.

  ‘I’d love to watch you fuck another guy,’ Frank said. ‘It would really turn me on – watching you suck another man’s cock while I fuck you from behind.’

  ‘Would you really like to see me fuck another guy?’ I asked. ‘Wouldn’t you get jealous?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘If so, we could always leave.’ He said he had heard of a couple of sex clubs in the city and promised to check them out on the web.

  The next night he took me to a place of dubious legality and no name, the one that, at $60 per couple, was the cheapest of several options. I wore a tight, very short leopard-print PVC dress with slits up the thighs. My best girlfriend, Bernadette, gave it to me for my birthday before I left London. She and I had talked about Frank a lot. She said I needed something uber-sexy for the next time I saw my man. A pair of black six-inch stiletto shoes completed the porn-star look.

  Our taxi dropped us outside a rented venue in TriBeCa that was nondescript on the outside and disappointingly nonsexual on the inside. I didn’t know what to expect, but assumed I’d see beds or love swings or bondage equipment. And people. Instead, there were empty bar stools and an empty dance floor. Fifteen minutes after our arrival, a couple came in. We watched them walk through a back door and down stairs I had assumed led to the bar’s basement. When a second couple arrived and did the same, we realised where the action was.

  We followed them downstairs and entered what looked like a storage room, just a collection of chairs and a few old sofas and square café tables against the walls. Still no beds in sight, but the anxious-looking bouncer we passed at the bottom of the stairs made it clear we were in the right place. My sense was that he was on the lookout to make sure the club didn’t get busted. It made me wonder if at any minute the police might bust in and arrest people for – what, indecent exposure? Still, that didn’t dissuade us.

  There were five other couples there, already well into each other. On one side of the room, a half-decent-looking white guy, about forty years old, with short dark hair, wearing an unbuttoned shirt and black trousers pulled down to his knees, was being sucked off by a naked woman with shoulder-length blonde hair. His fingers were exploring the pussy of another woman, who was seated beside him. She looked to be in her late thirties and was wearing a purple blouse and a matching skirt hitched up her thighs. Nearby a mixed-race couple was fucking on one of the sofas.

  The room was quiet except for the heavy breathing and sexual sighing coming from the other side of the room. There was no music. We took a seat on a large sofa next to a man and a woman who were taking in the show. It was a turn-on watching other people having sex. Another couple was sitting a good twenty feet away, just far enough that one couldn’t quite work out what they were doing. Were his fingers in her pussy or playing with her clit? How big was his cock? And what was the relationship of the dark-haired guy and his two women? Were they together?

  I wanted to be part of it all but didn’t know where to begin. We didn’t know the rules and didn’t know if it was appropriate to speak or engage with the others. ‘We are virgins,’ I said to Frank. ‘Here, at least.’

  ‘What a novelty,’ he said. ‘Let’s lose our virginity, baby.’

  Frank put two tables together and told me to lie down on them and dangle my legs over one side. He positioned himself in a chair, lifted my dress, and started licking my pussy. I closed my eyes, not to tune out the scene in the room but to concentrate on my own physical sensations.

  Although aroused, after thirty minutes I still couldn’t come. No one had approached us, which would have enlivened things, and I found the noises in the room a distraction.

  ‘Your turn,’ I said. I told Frank to sit on the sofa. I leant down in front of him, took a pillow off the sofa and put it under my knees to soften the hard floor. I unzipped his trousers, pulled out his cock and took it in my mouth. The couple nearby looked over, as though seeing us for the first time.

  In retrospect, my first exposure to swinging was quite pedestrian. I played only with Frank and he only with me. We didn’t swap partners. We didn’t make contact with anyone else. The only difference was that we had sex in a room where there were other people, so in that sense it wasn’t all that different from my failed orgy in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even so, it felt daring and new and liberating – and very different from my daily life in London.

  About a month after I returned from my third weekend with Frank, my husband discovered my secret Nerve account. He had been mining our email system for a friend’s address, and instead found an alert Nerve had sent me. ‘A message is waiting for you,’ said the subject header. It should have said, ‘You wanted to get fucked. Well, now you are fucked.’

  He confronted me in the kitchen when he came home from work. ‘Why would you need another account?’ he asked. ‘What’s Nerve.com?’

  I could feel my stomach clench. My hands started to shake. My cover was blown. I’d always been a terrible liar, and keeping my affair secret had been incredibly difficult.

  ‘There’s a few personal matters I’m dealing with,’ I said lamely. ‘I didn’t want to use my work email.’

  ‘What kind of personal issues? What have you got to hide?’ he asked.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I to
ld him the truth. ‘I’m seeing someone else.’

  ‘Really?’ said David. He looked genuinely surprised. ‘Who?’

  I had expected shouting or anger or disappointment. Instead, he looked puzzled. He hadn’t had sex with me for so long, I wondered if he found incomprehensible the idea of anyone else having sex with me. He looked almost calm.

  ‘A guy in New York,’ I explained. ‘We met over the web. That’s who I’ve been visiting on my trips there.’

  ‘Wow. That was very conniving of you.’ He sounded almost approving. He asked my lover’s name and what he did for a living. I said his name was Frank, that he was a lawyer, was married, had two kids, lived in Queens.

  ‘Wow.’

  I expected more than a wow. Still, I was relieved. I hadn’t been chucked out of the house on my ass. And I no longer had to keep a secret. As for David, he seemed almost relieved himself. Maybe, like me, he preferred honesty to all else. There was a man between us, but at least no more lies. He walked out of the kitchen without saying another word.

  A couple of days later, I asked my parents if they would babysit so David and I could go out for dinner. Then I burst out crying. They asked what the problem was, and I told them about Frank and admitted I’d been unhappy in my marriage. My father asked if David and I had sex any more. I told him it had been years.

  ‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘If you don’t have sex, you don’t have a relationship. It’s finished.’

  David and I went to a Lebanese place off the Edgware Road. It was still early and the restaurant was empty. We sat opposite each other. He seemed remarkably calm. Anyone passing our table would have thought we were an average married couple on an average night out.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked. ‘You’re not pissed off. What’s happening?’ I ran through various scenarios. Was he relieved? Had he fallen out of love with me, as I had with him? Did he even care? I looked over and saw David squirming in his seat, a guilty expression on his face. ‘You’re not actually turned on, are you?’