Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  I look around for the tray of jewelry. The salesgirls are busy dressing a customer hidden from me by a three-way mirror. One salesgirl is fat and gypsyish with a face warmly colored as an apricot. The other is spiky and has a crest of white hair surrounded by black hair, like a skunk. They are shrieking with pleasure as they bring hats and beads for the customer to try. Finally everybody is satisfied and a beautiful young lady, who is not a young lady at all but a pretty boy dressed up as a lady, emerges from the shelter of the mirror. He is wearing a black velvet dress with long sleeves and a black lace yoke; black pumps and gloves; a little black hat with a dotted veil. He is daintily and discreetly made up; he has a fringe of brown curls; he is the prettiest and most ladylike person I have seen all day. His smiling face is tense and tremulous. I remember how when I was ten or eleven years old I used to dress up as a bride in old curtains, or as a lady in rouge and a feathered hat. After all the effort and contriving and my own enchantment with the finished product there was a considerable letdown. What are you supposed to do now? Parade up and down on the sidewalk? There is a great fear and daring and disappointment in this kind of display.

  He has a boyish, cracking voice. He is brash and timid.

  “How do I look, momma?”

  “You look very nice.”

  10

  I am at a low point. I can recognize it. That must mean I will get past it.

  I am at a low point, certainly. I cannot deal with all that assails me unless I get help and there is only one person I want help from and that is X. I can’t continue to move my body along the streets unless I exist in his mind and in his eyes. People have this problem frequently, and we know it is their own fault and they have to change their way of thinking, that’s all. It is not an honorable problem. Love is not serious though it may be fatal. I read that somewhere and I believe it. Thank God I don’t know where he is. I can’t telephone him, write letters to him, waylay him on the street.

  A man I had broken with used to follow me. Finally he persuaded me to go into a café and have a cup of tea with him.

  “I know what a spectacle I am,” he said. “I know if you did have any love left for me this would destroy it.”

  I said nothing.

  He beat the spoon against the sugar bowl.

  “What do you think of, when you’re with me?”

  I meant to say, “I don’t know,” but instead I said, “I think of how much I want to get away.”

  He reared up trembling and dropped the spoon on the floor.

  “You’re free of me,” he said in a choking voice.

  This is the scene both comic and horrible, stagy and real. He was in desperate need, as I am now, and I didn’t pity him, and I’m not sorry I didn’t.

  11

  I have had a pleasant dream that seems far away from my waking state. X and I and some other people I didn’t know or can’t remember were wearing innocent athletic underwear outfits, which changed at some point into gauzy bright white clothes, and these turned out to be not just clothes but our substances, our flesh and bones and in a sense our souls. Embraces took place which started out with the usual urgency but were transformed, by the lightness and sweetness of our substance, into a rare state of content. I can’t describe it very well, it sounds like a movie-dream of heaven, all banality and innocence. So I suppose it was. I can’t apologize for the banality of my dreams.

  12

  I go along the street to Rooneem’s Bakery and sit at one of their little tables with a cup of coffee. Rooneem’s is an Estonian bakery where you can usually find a Mediterranean housewife in a black dress, a child looking at the cakes, and a man talking to himself.

  I sit where I can watch the street. I have a feeling X is somewhere in the vicinity. Within a thousand miles, say, within a hundred miles, within this city. He doesn’t know my address but he knows I am in Toronto. It would not be so difficult to find me.

  At the same time I’m thinking that I have to let go. What you have to decide, really, is whether to be crazy or not, and I haven’t the stamina, the pure, seething will, for prolonged craziness.

  There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can’t know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you’ve reached it. I believe this.

  When you start really letting go this is what it’s like. A lick of pain, furtive, darting up where you don’t expect it. Then a lightness. The lightness is something to think about. It isn’t just relief. There’s a queer kind of pleasure in it, not a self-wounding or malicious pleasure, nothing personal at all. It’s an uncalled-for pleasure in seeing how the design wouldn’t fit and the structure wouldn’t stand, a pleasure in taking into account, all over again, everything that is contradictory and persistent and unaccommodating about life. I think so. I think there’s something in us wanting to be reassured about all that, right alongside – and at war with – whatever there is that wants permanent vistas and a lot of fine talk.

  I think about my white dream and how it seemed misplaced. It strikes me that misplacement is the clue, in love, the heart of the problem, but like somebody drunk or high I can’t quite get a grasp on what I see.

  What I need is a rest. A deliberate sort of rest, with new definitions of luck. Not the sort of luck Dennis was talking about. You’re lucky to be sitting in Rooneem’s drinking coffee, with people coming and going, eating and drinking, buying cakes, speaking Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and other languages that you can try to identify.

  13

  Kay is back from the country. She too has a new outfit, a dark-green schoolgirl’s tunic worn without a blouse or brassiere. She has dark-green knee socks and saddle oxfords.

  “Does it look kinky?”

  “Yes it does.”

  “Does it make my arms look dusky? Remember in some old poem a woman had dusky arms?”

  Her arms do look soft and brown.

  “I meant to get down on Sunday but Roy came over with a friend and we all had a corn roast. It was lovely. You should come out there. You should.”

  “Some day I will.”

  “The kids ran around like beautiful demons and we drank up the mead. Roy knows how to make fertility dolls. Roy’s friend is Alex Walther, the anthropologist. I felt I should have known about him but I didn’t. He didn’t mind. He’s a nice man. Do you know what he did? After dark when we were sitting around the fire he came over to me and just sighed, and laid his head on my lap. I thought it was such a nice simple thing to do. Like a St. Bernard. I’ve never had anybody do that before.”

  SERENA

  Luke Jennings

  Luke Jennings is an author and the dance critic of the Observer. As a journalist, he has written for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Time, as well as numerous British titles. He was shortlisted for the 2010 Samuel Johnson and William Hill prizes for his memoir, Blood Knots, and was nominated for the Booker Prize for his novel Atlantic. With Deborah Bull, he wrote The Faber Guide to Ballet, and with his daughter Laura, the Stars stage-school novels. He is also the author of the Villanelle thriller series.

  I became the familiar of Serena Vance shortly after the death from radon gas inhalation of my previous mistress, Philippa Lapsley. For all her sluttish ways, I had been fond of Philippa, and had been sorry to wake that Saturday afternoon and find her flesh grown cold beneath me. Such a waste, they’d whispered at her funeral. Such a waste.

  It was with no great excitement, in consequence, that I waited for Miss Vance to clear customs and join me in the pearl-grey Lexus that the company had sent to meet her at Heathrow Airport. I knew nothing about her beyond the fact that she was forty years old and a native of Chicago, where she had something of a reputation in the field of arbitrage. Her transfer to the London office had apparently been arranged at short notice.

  I was dozing against the warm upholstery of the back seat (invisible to the driver, of course, who was not one of ours) w
hen a blast of cold air brought me abruptly to my senses. With it came a travel-bruised vestige of Chanel’s “Allure”, a day-old memory of expensive hairdressing, and an exhausted yawn. Serena, I noted approvingly, was rather beautiful. Pale, with fine-drawn features, a clearly incised mouth and eyes that – well, let’s just say that the eyes were less of a surprise. They were the colour of wet slate in February and they had the depthless stare by which we of the craft know each other. I wanted her immediately.

  “So,” she said, a smile touching her lips. With great care, she lifted me in the palm of her hand. Her fingers were long and slender, and she held me in her grey gaze with an almost nervous delicacy. I burned for her. Did I please her, I wondered? I was wearing an urban camouflage T-shirt and combat pants that Philippa had bought for me at Hamleys (at eight inches in height I’m pretty much a standard size), and at my side was the rapier that had transfixed my former mistress’s martini olive on the occasion of her first visit to the Savoy.

  “I’ve never had a familiar in... human form,” said Serena, raising her phone to her mouth so that the driver would not think that she was talking to herself. “What did you have in Chicago?” I asked her, and she wrinkled her nose and blew the hair from her eyes. “A kind of lizard thing,” she murmured. “It manifested itself once during a meeting with senior officers of Madison Semiconductors. And another time at a polo game outside of Lexington. Both of which were kind of hard to explain.” She yawned, absently covering her mouth with the phone, and I prickled with the anticipation of exploring her. “It’s rush hour,” I said, indicating the backed-up traffic. “And it’s still three in the morning Chicago time. Why don’t you get some sleep?”

  Later, in the South Audley Street flat, she took a bath. This was my idea – when in London, I told her, do as the Londoners do – and as she lay with her eyes half closed and the steaming, stephanotis-scented water lapping at her chin, she admitted that it was a good one. “Hey, you’ve got little fold-away wings,” she murmured dreamily, as I pulled off my T-shirt and combat pants and dropped quietly into the water from the soap dish. “How cute!”

  In reply I swam lazily over to her shoulder and bit her ear beneath the sapphire stud – not hard, but sharply enough to make her gasp and turn her head. Grasping a dark tendril of wet hair, I trod water for a moment before easing myself into the temperate bay of her collarbone. From here I considered her body. Her skin was so pale that only her neat cinnamon-brown nipples and the vaguer triangle of her pubic hair prevented her from vanishing altogether in the milky opacity of the water. An affecting sight, I thought.

  As if in reaction, Serena adjusted herself, raising the freckled slopes of her breasts from the water. Face first, I slid down the warm spillway between them like an otter, my groin bumping pleasingly on the gentle ridges of her sternum. In the water I swam around her right breast and reached for her nipple, which I was just able to span with the fingers of both hands. Pulling myself against her, I applied my long rasping cat’s-tongue to the soft brown boss of flesh until it grew to a quivering tautness, and then, shaking the water briskly from my wings, flew to her other side.

  At which point the phone rang. The ensuing conversation, as I recall, concerned the laying of a fibre-optic cable across the Gulf of Tonkin. Serena, ever the professional, gave the matter her full attention – “No rest for the wicked!” was one of her favourite expressions, I would discover – and I climbed in a state of sulky tumescence to her shoulder. For the rest of the day and the night that followed, I deferred my pleasure.

  When the company chauffeur came for her the next morning, Serena was wearing something grey and tailored and carrying a thin black briefcase, and I was wearing an Action Man helicopter pilot jumpsuit, my rapier, as ever, swinging at my side. I rode into the city on my mistress’s shoulder, nibbling affectionately – and not without a certain anticipation, for her neat little Illinois quim was still terra incognita – at her ear lobe. In the twenty-four short hours of our acquaintance I had grown remarkably fond of Serena Vance, with her smoky eyes and voice and her slender, pampered body. Aroused by the smell of her peony-root shampoo I stuck my proud member out of the jumpsuit and waved my rapier at the Fenchurch Street traffic. The chauffeur, a long-time initiate, winked at me in the mirror.

  Serena, I discovered, was not the only newcomer to the company, although she was the most senior. A young Anglo-Chinese man named Ganymede Ho had been recruited to the broking team, and had been assigned a female familiar whose pleasure it was to run knickerless along the ranks of terminals with her Barbie mini-kilt lifted to her waist, spraying the coffee cups and soft drink cans of non-initiates with piss. Between these bouts of micturition, the wilful little sprite would lie on her master’s keyboard with her legs spread and order the chairman’s weasel to lick her.

  This was a spectacular exercise – jewelled collar or no jewelled collar, the beast had long teeth and a short temper – and an enthusiastic crowd invariably gathered to watch. To begin with, at least, Serena was a little shocked by these larks; in the United States familiars were expected to maintain a rather more discreet profile in work situations. She soon learned to see and not see, however; a reputation for staring open-mouthed at her colleagues’ workstations would not greatly have improved her professional standing.

  So, as in all things, she played it cool. And so, for once, did I. Unzipping my jumpsuit I stretched out on her mouse-mat and bathed in the refracted sunshine that angled through the building’s plate-glass wall. When a ruttish little pixie attached to one of the other arbitrageurs fluttered over in a Sindy nurse outfit and placed my hand between her legs, I courteously withdrew it. When there was a move afoot to gang rape a pigeon that had strayed into one of the boardrooms I demurred, preferring to be an adoring spectator of my mistress’s assault on the epitaxial wafer market. I stayed close to Serena for all of that day, and I sensed that my attentions were appreciated. In the car on the way home, I guessed from her manner that our relationship was shortly to be consummated. “You’re a sinister, profligate little imp,” she whispered to me, “but you’re my sinister profligate little imp.”

  Back in the flat she fixed herself a drink and put on a CD. It was an old recording of Hawaiian music, all swoops and slide guitars. In the bedroom she drew the curtains and undressed, hanging the grey suit in the wardrobe and laying her underwear out on a chair. Then with her drink still in her hand she lay down on the bed, drew her knees up to her sides, and, as I patiently beat my wings above, laid a long finger down the gathered parting of her flesh. The end of the finger disappeared, and then, shining, was drawn back, and I watched a manicured nail circle the opal gleam of her clitoris. Around it, the humid crest of her pubic hair slowly reasserted itself after a day’s constriction under silk. The steel guitars rose and fell. She smelt equatorial, a jungle after rain. Finally her fingers withdrew, leaving a brief trail across her navel, and I heard her place her glass on the side table. “Down you go,” she whispered, and I dropped between her thighs, shook out my wings, and began to gorge.

  THE DISAPPEARING ISLAND

  Henri Breton

  Henri Breton is a painter and writer of Anglo-French parentage, has written several short stories and articles for the Erotic Review. In his youth, for reasons never fully explained, he took passage on a tramp steamer from Liverpool to Valparaiso, where he remained for some years, earning a living from journalism until his return to Europe. His main love is the Mediterranean and the countries that surround it. He currently divides his time between London and Barcelona.

  “I want to introduce you to my friend Nicky,” said the Sea Captain. We shook hands with the tall, fair-haired man who had joined our table. He had a broad open face, full of good humour and intelligence with that attractive Dalmatian mix of Slav and North Italian.

  “Oh... qu’il est beau!” murmured one of the girls, a little too loudly, for the Sea Captain turned to her and said, “Actually, I think we’re distantly related. Anyway, we come from the s
ame part of the world. But, unlike me, he comes from one of Dalmatia’s thousand islands. I grew up on the mainland and always envied his romantic existence, quite surrounded by the friendly sea and practically living in a boat. But it has to be said, it is a very small island.” And he looked at Nicky and they laughed.

  Later, as the evening progressed, we listened to Nicky’s story.

  One afternoon, I went with some other boys of my age to a favourite place on the island where we could escape from the grownups and just generally laze around and shoot the breeze. It was a superb coign of vantage at the top of a little gorge that led to my father’s quarry. Unless the quarry was being worked, it was always deserted, so we were amazed to hear the sound of voices immediately below us. When we looked down we saw a man and a woman whose faces were unfamiliar, which meant that they were mainlanders. Even more unusually, the strangers were both naked, and they were lying on top of each other on a garish beach towel that cushioned them from the heat of the smooth rock enough to be able to do what they were doing without discomfort. We watched silent, engrossed, enrapt, as teenagers usually are when they see something strange and fascinating – and so obviously taboo.

  They were “making love”. Well that is how Ivo, the wisest of our little group, described it to us. So that was how babies got made, we thought. Somehow, to a bunch of boys, peeping through a little thicket of pungent wild thyme and rosemary, and seeing a white bottom pumping rhythmically between a pair of splayed thighs ten metres below them, the whole thing appeared to be far from the sublime action we had always dreamed it to be. Comic or acrobatic, perhaps. It was difficult not to snigger. But the man suddenly jumped up between the woman’s legs and we saw, for the first time, the adult genitals in action: the gaping maw of the woman’s cunt that sat so livid in her black, unruly bush, and the man’s jerking (seemingly enormous) cock, spraying her brown belly and her contrastingly pallid, pink-tipped tits with white come. Now – that was something. We were instantly more impressed. Here was some information about the human body that our peers certainly didn’t possess: it was an important piece of knowledge, the sort that could be traded.