I can’t pass Gay Street without thinking of Mary McCarthy evaluating the ‘equipment’ of yet another paramour with her wry critic’s eye. Or MacDougal Street without flashing on Diane DiPrima’s fateful encounter in a gay bar with dark and sexy Ivan, her fictional name for the man who fathered her first child. DiPrima claims she wrote her erotic classic, Memoirs of a Beatnik, solely for money, but to me her portrait of the city and her fellow artists resonates with true love.
In fact, I always start my course on literary lady libertines with a discussion of Gotham City itself. The name, I tell them, comes from a proverbial Nottinghamshire village populated by fools. Except the foolishness was really a masquerade to trick King John into building his hunting lodge elsewhere. The ‘imbeciles’ thus avoided economic ruin due to the king’s ravenous demands.
Can foolish behaviour, wisely chosen, actually expand awareness in mind and body? Why is sexual experimentation – which most societies condemn in women – a seemingly necessary path for the creative female artist?
When I ask these questions, I think of my own foolish acts, still hoping to glimpse the canny wisdom hidden there.
Full Circle
I received my second, and last, proposal of marriage in New York City, too.
This time I said yes.
I’d just started grad school, and I brought my new boyfriend to the city during Christmas vacation to sightsee. With my sister at work all day, we ended up making love on her big brass bed for hours instead. I was sitting on top of him, his cock inside me, when my future husband popped the question.
I’d known since our first date that he was the One. Yet I paused to savour the moment. I’d been waiting for it since 1973.
‘Yes,’ I said, falling to embrace him. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’
In one sense, that simple word is the end of my New York tale. I would never seduce a man away from his girlfriend, never watch strangers fuck at a party, never flirt with prostitution again. Yet in other ways my adventures of the flesh only began in earnest that afternoon in Gotham City. Anyone who’s travelled there knows that marriage is an adventure all its own, as full of magic, deep shadows, and surprise as the great city itself.
About the Story
When I first contemplated writing a story about sex and New York City, my initial impulse was to explore the love affairs of famous twentieth-century women writers such as Edna St Vincent Millay, Mary McCarthy, Dorothy Parker and Diane DiPrima. Erotically adventurous in both their lives and their work, I saw these literary ladies as early twentieth-century Bohemian incarnations of Carrie Bradshaw and her friends. As I began my research, I saw that there really was a relationship between sex and New York, as if the very air of Gotham City made the boundaries of propriety seductively soft and yielding. The more I read of the lives of these legends, however, the more I was reminded of my own more humble encounters with sex in the city in the 1970s and 1980s. Eventually I came to realize that while the exploits of literary greats might eclipse the surroundings, the experiences of two ordinary young women could give the city its proper role at centre stage.
Readers always wonder how much of an author’s story comes from real life, and I suspect this curiosity is particularly strong with erotica. I will confess that Gotham Sex is absolutely true – somewhere from 110% to 130% true. By which I mean actual events were much messier and my insights less sure before I smoothed and shaped them with my fiction-crafting hands. The apartment overlooking the Strand bookstore, the Bowery loft and the streetwalkers’ cruising grounds all come straight from vivid memory, but naturally I changed most names and identifying details of the characters to protect the guilty. There is no doubt, however, that these moments of sexual connection touched me profoundly. They are my truth of the city, and I doubt these things could have happened in quite the same way anywhere else in the world.
I grew up in various parts of the east coast of the United States, always in the shadow of New York City. Unlike my older sister, who’s lived in New York for thirty years, I found the home of my heart in northern California where “The City” means San Francisco with its soaring bridges and scent of Asian mystery. However, even today it is the sight of the Manhattan skyline that inevitably makes my heart tighten with longing, as if some dark but illuminating erotic adventure still awaits me in the shadows of its canyons.
A Washington Square Romance
by Maxim Jakubowski
On Broadway, he bought her an I Love You rubber stamp, which would never be used.
At Ground Zero, peering at the monstrous hole in the ground and the early signs of reconstruction, he held her against him and tried not to cry. It wasn’t because of sympathy or compassion with the victims of the tragedy, but because he felt he had never been so close to her than he was now.
Under the arch in Washington Square, he kissed her.
She had reached Barcelona airport early and gone through security and passport control with more than two hours to spare before her flight left for New York, and had spent the time sipping coffees at one of the multitude of shiny bars in the duty free zone, leafing soporifically through some of her Catalan literature text books and daydreaming. When her plane was called, she had been in no rush to make a beeline for the gate, only to realise to her dismay once the back of the queue where she had been standing reached the final control point, that she could not find her passport. Her heart stopped. Where could she have mislaid it? It had been in her hands when she had checked her lone piece of luggage in.
She had run back breathlessly to the duty free zone and the cafe. There was now someone else sitting at the table she had occupied. She felt her heart jump, her stomach convulse with anxiety. She asked the man if there had been anything on the table when he sat down. He looked at her with a puzzled look. She had automatically asked him in Italian, which he visibly couldn’t understand. She switched to English. No, the table had been empty. He suggested she walk over and ask the attendant at the bar.
Which she did.
The young girl on duty had only just begun her shift. She completed the order she was working on and finally moved to a back door to enquire with a colleague. A few minutes later, an older man with grey eyebrows and leonine features walked out with a broad smile on his face. Giulia’s attention was immediately drawn to his right hand. In which he held her passport.
Immense relief swept through her whole body. She felt faint. Held her breath.
‘Thanks, thanks, thanks, so much,’ she said, in Spanish this time.
The man grinned back at her, and silently handed her the lost passport.
She thanked him again a dozen times or more in her joyful haste and began to run back to the final control checkpoint. However, when she reached it, she was informed that the plane’s crew had already locked the aircraft’s doors and that she had missed her flight. Her solitary suitcase had already been unloaded. She pleaded her case, began sobbing uncontrollably, but it was to no avail. An airline attendant escorted her back sympathetically to the luggage area where the bag could be retrieved and then to the American Airlines desk.
There were no more flights to JFK today, but in view of the circumstances and even though they had no obligation to do so, they agreed to put her on the same flight the following day, which fortunately still had some empty seats.
Tears still drying across her hot cheeks, forlornly pulling her bag behind her, Giulia found herself once again in the departure and check in area of Terminal A. She pulled her mobile from her handbag, checked the printouts of the e-mails they had exchanged and rang his hotel in New York. He wasn’t in his room. Why would he be? She left a message for him to call her back.
By the time he did, she was back in her dormitory north of Plaza Catalunya, and she had exhausted all the tears a human being could expend in the space of half a day.
Hiccupping between words, stuttering, crying out of control, she informed him that s
he had missed the flight.
She could almost feel the weight falling like a hammer across his own heart all those thousands of miles away.
But his voice remained calm and soothed her once she had managed to explain that she would still be coming, arriving on the same flight tomorrow.
‘It’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘It’s a just a day, a night less. The main thing is that we can still be together. Just try and get a good night’s sleep and be at the airport nice and early and don’t linger over coffees this time,’ he said, a hint of affection and humour in his deep voice. ‘I’ll be waiting for you.’
‘Yes.’
‘And don’t forget to take a cab from JFK to Washington Square,’ he added. ‘I’ll pay for it. Don’t want to waste any more time, do we?’
‘I want you so much.’
She barely had time to drop her luggage to the floor before he wanted to undress her. He had been waiting in the hotel lobby for her fifty bucks taxi ride from the airport to reach the city, reading a magazine, distracted by every new arrival. As she ignored the doorman and ran towards him, he smiled broadly. She embraced him, squeezed him against her, and all the pain and anguish of yesterday’s disaster faded away in an instant.
They called the lift, and although not alone in it, she felt his hand caressing her arse through the thin white linen skirt she was wearing.
‘I want to see you. All of you,’ he said as he took a step back from her once they entered the fuchsia-coloured room.
She quickly slipped out of the skirt and he pulled the Strangers in Paradise tee-shirt over her head. She was bra-less. Had never really needed one. He sighed as he saw those nipples again whose shade he could never quite capture in words, an ever so subtle variation between pale brown and pink he had never witnessed on any other woman he had seen naked before.
His breath caught in his throat.
She laughed and approached him. Pushed him back onto the bed and straddled him.
Outside, the cold February sun illuminated the recently refurbished arch, like a stone rainbow at the southern extremity of 5th Avenue, towering above Washington Square while dogs ran loose across the park and small children laughed and shrieked on their swings and hardy squirrels scampered over the sparse grass and the chess players in the South East corner of the park pondered and ruminated on and on and all was well with the world.
Pearls of his come like miniscule diamonds scattered across the curly jungle of her pubic hair, her inner lips swollen and a darker shade of bruised pink, catching their breaths, the bed a field of lust and sheets creased in every direction of the zodiac.
‘Is it your first time in New York?’
The familiar smell of her cunt wafting like a upright fountain towards his nose, reviving his senses; joyful, loose, full of the flavour of life itself.
‘No, I came when I was a teenager. My father was talking at a medical conference at Columbia. So he brought the whole family along. I shared a room with Tommaso, my younger brother. He was a pest then. We stayed in a big luxury hotel near Central Park. Did a lot of shopping.’
His hand strayed unconsciously towards her nipples, picked one up between two attentive fingers, caressed the rough tip, kneaded her flesh like soft dough, weighed each orb with abominable tenderness, the feather-like compactness of her slight elevations. He sighed. How could skin be so white?
‘Look,’ he said, almost slurring his words, nodding towards the window where the outside light was fading, ‘dusk approaches. We must absolutely take a walk across the Square before night falls and then we can find somewhere to eat. If we stay in this bed any longer, I’ll want to make love to you again, and right now I’m just too raw ...’
She had been sitting with her neck supported by the bed’s headboard. She slouched down, stretched herself lazily across the rumpled bedcovers, yawned languorously, opened her legs in a wider angle. The wetness at the core of her delta shone. He couldn’t take his eyes away from her cunt. He silently lowered his head towards her core and systematically licked the drops of come still lingering around her opening.
‘You tasted a bit salty, earlier,’ she remarked. ‘Where did you have lunch?’
‘At Live Bait, a Cajun restaurant near the Flatiron Building.’
‘Oysters?’
‘How did you guess?’
‘I had a glass of white wine with my meal on the flight,’ she grinned.
His tongue dipped into her cunt.
‘Oysters and wine,’ he said.
‘I must call my mother, just to let her know I arrived safely,’ Giulia said. They’d shared split pea soup, pierogi and meat stuffed cabbage at the open 24 hours Veselka Ukrainian restaurant on 2nd Avenue. He knew she would like it. She was not allowed spicy food as it badly upset her stomach.
‘Do you want me to leave the room while you speak to her?’ he suggested.
‘No. It’s fine, but stay quiet.’
Her mother knew she had travelled to New York with her mysterious new boyfriend, but her father had been kept in the dark and she was terrified he would find out she was having an affair with an older man. After all, he had insisted that while in Barcelona she stay in student digs supervised by Catholic nuns. But she hadn’t even told her mother about the difference in age that stood between them. Giulia was a talented liar.
Midnight was nearing. She threw off her shoes and walked over to the corner of the hotel room and unzipped her luggage and pulled out a deep blue silk nightie.
‘Look,’ she said.
‘It’s beautiful,’ he touched it. ‘So soft.’
They had always been in the habit sleeping naked.
‘My mother bought it for me, when she learned I was going to spend a few days, a few nights with you,’ Giulia confided in him. ‘She felt I ought to look nice in bed,’ she giggled.
‘A most understanding mother!’
‘She is nice.’
‘Little does she know what her dear daughter is concealing from her, or does she?’
Giulia gave him a look of protest, as if he were pushing his luck, emphasising her duplicity. For a moment he did wonder what her parents would make of him. Likely scream with shock, he guessed.
But her parents were not present in this room by Washington Square. They were.
‘Come here, let me hold you.’
And again the warmth and softness of her body was intoxicating, releasing waves of terrible tenderness through every square inch of his body, his veins, his brain cells, as if he had lived his whole life until this very moment waiting for her, to fulfil him, to make him a better man.
He undressed her.
She slipped the nightie on.
It ended around mid-thigh and, at the top, its elongated V-neck revealed the quiet onset of her slight cleavage.
He delicately raised the hem of the silk garment and ventured a finger into her cunt. She was wet already. He pushed her gently back towards the wall, and entered her with agonising slowness.
He was home.
She never did wear the silk night-gown again that week in New York.
Mid afternoon. February.
They had seen a mediocre thriller at the Union Square multiplex movie house and, sitting in a coffee house on Broadway just a hundred yards away from the intersection with Houston, were debating the merits and virtues and otherwise of Bruce Willis, who had starred in the film.
‘I like it when you tell me stories,’ Giulia had said.
The waitress who had served them had a piercing in her right eyebrow and wore black from head to toe. He vaguely recognised a tune by Bruce Cockburn amidst the background muzak. When they had walked in, it had been to the strains of The Walkabouts playing Neil Young’s On the Beach. They were bathed in coffee fumes and a reassuring warmth. Giulia could spend her life in cafes, it was that Italian upbringing of hers.
&
nbsp; ‘Will you tell other women stories about me when we are over?’ she asked him.
He wanted to be truthful and say no, but already she knew him too well. He was who he was, and aware that the temptation would be too strong not to talk about her, to improvise tales of beauty and fury, of lust and longing, songs of adoration and missing.
He lowered his eyes, nodded.
The punk waitress refilled Giulia’s cup.
She sipped pensively from the hot cup and watched him.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘At any rate, not in the same coffee houses. Let’s go walk.’
Under the Washington Square arch he stopped and took her hand and said, ‘I’m so happy right now. Kiss me.’ Her lips still tasted of coffee and her tongue of sugar and her dark eyes shone in the early evening penumbra and his whole body shivered. A band of assorted buskers played ragtime jazz across from the fountain. On the south side of the park, on the pavement outside the massive University buildings, hawkers were selling rag tag second-hand books on trestle tables and old issues of Penthouse and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Impulsively he bought her a copy of an old Philip Roth novel about an older man who was in love with a younger woman. A few years later, they would film it and it would remind him of her, even though she looked nothing like Penelope Cruz, despite their common Mediterranean roots.
An anorexic sun was setting in the distance, disappearing in the shadows that lurked around the Empire State Building. Traffic roared down Fifth Avenue as if every inhabitant of Manhattan was in a rush to reach home before dark settled. Coloured and Asian nannies were fleeing the Park at the speed of lemmings, frantically pushing cots in front of them as if their life depended on it, returning their charges to their nearby apartments where their working parents were about to return from their offices.
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