The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Have I been drinking, smoking?

  Complicit.

  I swivel over, find my own rhythm again, lose my soul, close my eyes.

  He holds me tight.

  Assault, tenderness, scandal.

  To be doing “this” at the opera.

  Like Melisande, I am lost.

  Do not touch me or I will throw myself into the water.

  He looks at me.

  “Who hurt you?”

  Does he think he is Golaud?

  “I can’t say.”

  And do I believe I’m Melisande?

  I let myself go, I want to listen to the orchestra serenading me; I want to abandon myself to the seductive voices, the sound of the violins. I want to implode.

  Obsessed, he turns my lips to fire, discards the scarf concealing my face, dislocates me, pulls me to his right and then his left, rises and places his foot on my breast.

  His eyes are blue, ever so blue.

  Half naked on the cold floor, I slip and he catches me.

  There are shadows on the walls,

  Maybe I could float if only I could hear him clearly, if I could gift myself to him fully, my hair falling wildly across my face.

  I pull my knees together in an attempt to get my breath back.

  “I like the way you move, I like your breasts.”

  I am confused, I am on display.

  He draws back.

  “Get up on your feet.”

  “Naked in front of the mirrors?”

  Naked a thousand times, reflected, reshaped, wrong.

  He approaches, touches me, feels me, takes my hand, lowers it to his cock.

  It’s a part, I’m an actress, the camera is rolling, I am obeying the film director.

  “Caress me.”

  I stroke him.

  Scandal.

  I love “this”.

  Bodies in lust.

  Pleasure at its peak, sharp and true.

  I am without reason, torn, asunder.

  My pearl is dripping onto the wooden floor, I am gasping.

  A gust of wind.

  “Don’t fret.”

  I’m trying not to rush, not to interrupt the flow.

  “Stop.”

  Like flowers . . .

  CUCKOO

  Brian Fawcett

  FERRIS CAN’T QUITE decide why the first sight of the ferry dock makes him shiver. Is it fear or expectation, or is it simply the bracing spring air? With one hand, he grips the bouquet of yellow tulips he’s carrying a little tighter, pulls his jacket closer to his neck with the other, and the shivers pass.

  He doesn’t expect the island to be the same after ten years. Islands change, people change, nothing remains the same. If it has taught him nothing else, travelling across four continents has driven home the ubiquitousness of change, although too often the specific message received is twisted between “Yankee Go Home” and “Everything changes – into a mall”.

  Yet from a distance, the island is at least similar, and it isn’t until the ferry closes in on the dock that the changes become visible. Vince is waiting for him at the terminal, as expected. But he’s standing beside a nearly new Volkswagen Jetta, not slouched down comfortably in the seat of a battered GMC panel. From this distance, Vince could be mistaken for an ordinary middle-aged man, his face obscured by a beard that is more grey than black. To Ferris, he’s dead easy to recognize, and anything but ordinary. Vince is Ferris’s secret life – together with Ava.

  Looking at him, Ferris shivers once again. That’s the most familiar feeling of all, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the weather conditions. Ferris has seen him waiting like this fifty, a hundred times, in every conceivable kind of weather, and the shiver has always been part of it. There is uneasiness and curiosity in it, and a tingling, what now? expectancy. But ten years have changed the shiver, too. The intensities have shifted. This morning, curiosity leads.

  The ferry taps the dock, recoils a little, and the ramp mechanisms drop the heavy steel plates onto the decks. Ferris hangs back as the other passengers tramp across the plates and onto the wooden dock, an anonymous surge of eager human flesh that has debarked here the same way, in the same colourful chaos ten times a day since he was last here. How many crowds is that? Ferris tries to do the calculation in his head and settles at somewhere near forty thousand.

  He leans against the ferry rail and makes an inventory. The mossy cedars and firs of the bay are more sparse than he remembers, and there are fewer of them. He glimpses several plush new buildings half-hidden among them, expensive homes defined by the unmistakable ostentation of wealthy people who want solitude, comfort, and convenience at the same time. The road leading down to the ferry slip looks more congested with cars and passengers than it used to be, but the sewery-salt odour of the marina is the same, and when he peers down through its murky iridescence, he can see neither improvement nor the bottom.

  Ferris knows that the changes here, whatever they turn out to be, probably won’t be for the better. Everything gets uglier and more vulgar. This island and its contents more than most places, probably. Less nature, more people, more toxins and shit. The crabs and shellfish all up the coast, he recalls, were declared unfit for eating several years ago, a combination of pulp mill dioxins and too much sewage washing through to the beaches from the new developments.

  He steps onto the ramp, continuing his gloomy inventory. In the marina behind the ferry slip, the boats are bigger than they once were, more of them Fiberglas. And there are houseboats. He wonders how that happened. The islanders had once been willing to form their own navy to keep them out. Somebody has paid a lot of money for the privilege of having their living room roll around like a toy boat in a bathtub every ninety minutes when the ferries come in.

  Vince catches sight of him as he reaches the end of the ramp and booms out a greeting. “Hey, hey! Cuckoo! Over here!”

  Ferris almost flinches. He hasn’t heard that nickname in a long time, not since the last time Vince used it. Trust him to bring it up before anything. He looks over and sees that Vince has a wide grin on his face – and that he’s waiting for Ferris to come to him. Some things don’t change.

  They shake hands and then embrace, awkwardly. Vince glances at the tulips, but doesn’t acknowledge them. “You don’t change much,” he says.

  Ferris shrugs. “I’ve got a few creaks.”

  “No,” Vince says, as if reading his thoughts. “You look young. Your face. And this,” he pokes at Ferris’s gut, “pretty good.”

  “Well, it isn’t like I’ve had to work at it,” Ferris answers. “Good genetics, I guess.”

  Vince’s face hardens momentarily. “Oh, yeah, sure. But you haven’t led a hard life. All you do is travel to glamorous places and sit on your ass. Hop in.” He gestures toward the passenger side of the Jetta.

  Ferris leans through the open window and looks inside. The car is immaculate. “Nice car,” he says. “What happened to your junk heap?”

  At one time Vince had four mid-fifties GMC pickup trucks in his backyard to rob for parts to keep the panel he drove running. It wasn’t that he liked working on cars, or that he was saving money. It was a gesture to his father, a master mechanic who could make or repair anything.

  Vince doesn’t answer for a moment, as if he can’t quite remember. “Oh, shit,” he says, finally, “that was a long time ago. Someone hauled them all to the dump when we sold the house.”

  Ferris opens the car door, tosses the bouquet into the back seat, and climbs in. When he closes the car door, it comes to with a satisfyingly soft thump. Vince clambers in, reads Ferris’s mind once again.

  “The old man’s dead, you know.”

  Ferris doesn’t know, but he isn’t surprised. Vince’s father had been in poor health for years, and he didn’t much like doctors or hospitals.

  Ferris had been fond of Vince’s father and had got along better with him than Vince did. Ferris would have loved the old man, but that wasn’t permitted. Af
ter Ferris’s parents died, the old man had taken Ferris under his wing and offered him everything that familial love confers. He was about the only male role model Ferris ever accepted. He’d given Ferris his nickname – Cuckoo – joking that Ferris was trying to push Vince out of the nest.

  “When’d he go?” Ferris asks, breaking his reverie. “How long?”

  “A couple of years ago,” Vince answers after a pause. “His heart blew up on him while he was pulling the transmission on a truck. Never knew what hit him.”

  “I liked your old man a lot,” Ferris says, then revises. “I loved him. I’m sorry he’s gone.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Vince answers, as if it were the least important thing on his mind. “I miss him sometimes. And,” he pauses again, “sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I’m glad he’s gone. He could be a miserable old bastard when he wanted to.”

  “We should have grown up to be men like him,” Ferris says.

  “We didn’t.” Vince stares through the windshield for a moment, as if considering what kind of men he and Ferris had become. “That’s for sure.”

  He starts the car, and they drive off the ferry slip past the line of cars waiting to load.

  “How’s Ava doing?” Ferris asks.

  “You know how it goes,” Vince answers, noncommittally. “Up and down. You’ll see.”

  Ferris wants to ask him if Ava is still beautiful, but it occurs to him that Vince might not understand what he’s asking. There had always been a strange lack of interiority in the way Vince viewed Ava. He seemed to know that she was an attractive woman, and he admired her sexual athletics and her unpredictability – but Ferris didn’t think he ever thought of her in terms of beauty. Not the way he did. And does.

  They reach the turnoff to the northerly part of the island. Vince yanks hard on the steering wheel – too hard – and the Jetta sloughs around the corner. Ferris can’t think of anything to say, so he looks out the window. The island has, to use the misleading euphemism of real estate agents, developed. New homes sear the roadside, replacing the dense thickets of alder and fir that had been there since the glaciation.

  The changes are so many that Ferris doesn’t recognize Vince and Ava’s old house when they pass it. Vince has to point it out. An addition has been built on, the yard backfilled, fresh paint. It looks like most of the other houses around it – an upmarket bungalow. When Vince and Ava lived there, it looked like what it was: a prefab starter home in a swampy yard filled with wrecked pickup trucks.

  “When did you sell it?” Ferris asks.

  “Four years ago, when Bobby moved out. I built the addition, and then we didn’t need it . . .” Vince trails off into silence.

  That sounds about right to Ferris. Vince was always good at starting projects, not so great at figuring out the correct scale, and lousy at finishing them. Twelve years ago, Ferris helped him put in a fancy new septic system, an experimental one that didn’t work as advertised. Whenever it rained, the already swampy backyard turned into a private sewage lagoon, replete with floating turds and streamers of toilet paper. At least part of the cause was that Vince decided to route the eavestroughs into it, for reasons Vince couldn’t quite explain and which Ferris never got his mind around.

  They talk briefly about what they’ve been doing in the last few years – or rather, Ferris questions Vince about what he’s been doing – teaching retarded teenagers – now challenged pre-adults – for some government program. Vince asks no questions and seems to have no curiosity about Ferris’s doings. Several miles pass. The density of development drops off and the island begins again to resemble the island Ferris knew.

  “What’s the new place like?” he asks.

  “Very different. You’ll see in a minute. Here’s the turnoff.”

  Vince makes a right turn off the main road and bumps down a steep gravel hill toward the water. They’ve moved closer to the ocean, at least, Ferris thinks. For a moment it looks as if they’re right on the beach, but at the last minute Vince turns left into a deep draw sheltered by huge fir trees. It’s like a park, protected from both the main road above and the ocean winds. Vince pulls into a tiny driveway that backs onto a shed-like structure, cuts the ignition.

  “Here we are,” he announces.

  Ferris can’t see any house, and Ava isn’t to be seen either. Ferris retrieves the flowers from the rear seat and follows Vince along a treed path around the shed. Down a short but steep incline he can see a tiny cottage. It’s covered in varnished shiplap, with deep eaves, and a roof of shingled cedar. Smoke drifts up from the chimneys at each end. Beyond it is another building, unfinished, but about the same size.

  “This is a change,” Ferris says, still wondering why Ava hasn’t appeared. In the old days, she always came out to greet him, a habit he attributed to her Yugoslav ethnic background – it was not then necessary to know if that meant Serbian, Slovenian, Croatian, or Muslim. It was, as far as he could see, her only ethnic tic. Otherwise she was as disenculturated as any WASP.

  Vince waves his arm forward in reply, and Ferris skids down the mossy slope after him, and in his wake, tramps his way to the cottagey wooden back door. There is a small bell over it, on a string, and Vince tugs the string before entering. Ferris isn’t sure whether to expect Ava, or Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Vince pushes the door open.

  Over his shoulder Ferris can see a sign that says “NO SHOES”. Vince bends over to remove his, and there is Ava. Her dark hair is peppered with grey, but God, she’s still beautiful. Ferris drinks her in, transfixed by a sense of relief. Without being conscious of it, he’s been imagining all kinds of horrible transformations – weight gain, accident scars, the coarsening of the features that women sometimes get under extended stress. For ten years he’s seen and heard nothing of or from her except a single telephone call he made five years ago. It wasn’t a long call. Ava cut him off in the middle of the opening pleasantries, saying that she and Vince were having problems; no, there was nothing Ferris could do, please stay clear.

  “Ferris,” she says. “You’re here. It’s been a long time.”

  Before Ferris can hand her the bouquet, Vince straightens up, completely blocking his view with his bulk. “Take off your shoes, Cuckoo,” he orders, curtly. “Things have changed.”

  The last time Ferris saw Ava, he had anal intercourse with her while Vince had vaginal intercourse with her. As Ferris waits for Vince to move out of the doorway so he can remove his shoes and continue the conversation with Ava, he recognizes that something about that night was disturbing enough that he’s completely blocked it out. He can’t, for instance, remember the physical configuration of it. And that in itself is strange. In the past few days, a thousand other details of those years have flooded his memory, but not that one. It has vanished, including any memory of pleasure.

  When he first met Ava, more than twenty-some years ago, he thought she was the prettiest – no, the most beautiful – woman he’d ever seen. And movie-star beautiful rather than modelbeautiful. She was tall, dark-haired, and darker eyed, with full breasts and hips, statuesque. Her breasts were too large for modelling, and she carried and cared for herself indifferently – without any sense of glamour. She rarely wore make-up and Ferris couldn’t recall seeing her in high heels. Here, he can’t even remember seeing her dressed up except the day she and Vince got married. That was the day Ferris met her.

  It took a while, but when he got to know Ava, he liked her. She seemed bright enough even though she didn’t talk much. Ferris put that down to the fact that no one talked much around Vince. He dominated most conversations, and when he talked, you listened.

  He never asked them when they got into group screwing, which of them initiated it, or exactly why they were doing it, but it had started before he entered their orbit. A few years after they got married, Vince began to talk about it – proudly, as if it were a badge of their openness and modernity. At first Ferris thought he was bullshitting. Talk is cheap, and Vince was a talker. And even if
he was telling the truth, well, so what? It was the aftermath of the 1960s, when everybody thought they had the duty – and maybe even a basic right – to grope anyone they found attractive in whatever configuration appealed to them at the moment. The more bizarre the better.

  Oh, Ferris had his fantasies about such things, but in strictly democratic terms, as a foursome, in which he and whatever partner he was with would sleep with others. Like most men (and maybe women) in those days, he was as interested as the next person in sleeping with new partners, but giving up bodily possession of his own in the deal was just too threatening. He’d occasionally entertained fantasies of a threesome involving two women, but not with much enthusiasm. He assumed that such a configuration would be centred on the male, and he had enough doubts about his stamina and gifts as a lover that he didn’t indulge the fantasies very far. Two men and a woman hadn’t occurred to him.

  The first time Vince asked Ferris to join them, he said no. Thankfully, Vince didn’t persist beyond calling him a reactionary. Ferris didn’t say so, but he was quite willing to be reactionary. It was easier just to screw around, thanks. He preferred to have his adventures one-on-one, where the social politics were a little easier to sort out.

  Ferris dutifully removes his shoes and tries to evaluate what he’s seen so far – Vince’s relative silence on the drive over, the look on Ava’s face as she greeted him. He’s asked for the visit, so he can’t fault them if they don’t want to be hospitable. It occurs to him that he’d asked Vince, and that Vince has never denied him anything. Judging from Ava, she has misgivings about him being there.

  Well, what should I expect, Ferris muses as he parks his shoes beside Vince’s larger ones and picks up the bouquet. He’s already frustrated by the palpable barrier between them, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. Lord only knows why it’s really there – it’s been ten years, they’ve had a rough time domestically, and he still knows nothing definite about why.

  He has a theory, if you can call it that, based on what Vince told him on the phone. Eight years ago they adopted a foster child about a year younger than Bobby, an eleven-year-old girl with learning disabilities. It was Vince’s way of bringing his work home, and Ferris’s guess is that it went badly. How or why, he doesn’t have a clue. It occurs to him now that the one time he talked to Ava, also on the phone, they were probably in the midst of that mess.