They sat by the dog’s enclosure.
New York.
February.
Early evening.
‘I’ll write a story about a couple, call them Conrad and Julie maybe, who love each other terribly, obscenely. But they cannot stay together. Too many things separate them. The weight of years, the presence of others, frontiers, past and future adventures, the weight of the world and expectations, different ambitions, a life almost lived and a life that still requires mad adventures ...’ he said gently, as she buried her head across his shoulder. ‘So they part, as it must be and will be. Years later, his life has fallen apart in bad ways and he is sitting in a bar in Paris in the Latin Quarter, a place he never took her to, when a man, a stranger enters the joint and tells him he needs his help to find his missing daughter. And passes a photograph of the missing girl to him across the plastic-topped table. And it’s Julie. He tries to tell her father he is no detective. But the man won’t listen to him, and pleads for him to accept the case. So Conrad reluctantly takes on job and begins his quest for ...’
He paused for breath, his imagination running ahead of him into all sorts of tangents and plots and illogical directions.
Looked up at her. There was a tear falling down Giulia’s right cheek.
‘Or maybe,’ he changed his tack, ‘it will be the tale of a man and a woman on a train that takes ages to reach China and she falls asleep with her head on his shoulder, just as they are nearing the border and ...’
‘I prefer that story,’ Giulia said. ‘But you must never give your female characters my name. That would be disrespectful to me. I won’t like it.’
He interrupted himself. ‘Please don’t make me promise that,’ he thought, knowing all too well it was a promise he could never keep. But she said no more.
‘I could write a thousand stories,’ he said. ‘I will write a thousand stories. But, right now, we are together and there is no reason to even think of the future. This is a moment out of time, Giulia. Our moment.’
She wiped the thin teardrop away.
‘Let’s go back to our room,’ she asked. ‘I want to be with you between the white sheets.’
He is watching her shower, her black curls unfurled all the way down to the small of her back, steam rising through the narrow hotel room bathroom, white plastic divider pulled to the side, water splashing against the tiles.
‘One day I will go to live in San Francisco,’ she says, above the muted roar of the jets of water streaming across her skin through the plastic shower head.
The spectacle of her nudity is too much too bear. He pulls off his grey tee-shirt and steps out of his trousers and steps into the bathtub and joins her. The fit is tight. Silently she hands him the soap bar and he lathers the foam across her back and spreads the thin bubbles across her, lingering tenderly over her arse. He soaps her crack, his fingers maliciously slipping and sliding down her wet valley, cleaning her, scrubbing her with all the care and attention of a slave attendant. He cups his hand under the shower head, fills his outstretched palms with water and finally washes the soap’s foam away from her skin. Unsteadily, trying to retain her equilibrium in the reduced manoeuvring space left by the bulk of their two bodies in the bathtub, she swivels on her axis and turns around. She faces him. Her nipples eerily shine, a combination of dampness and the light from the inlaid electric bulb in the ceiling. He lathers up the soap he was still holding in his left hand and begins to scrub her front.
‘I’ve already cleaned there,’ she says.
He ignores her and continues. Painting an invisible fresco across her small, velvet breasts, spreading the softness all over her slight hillocks and the imperceptible valley separating her chest into two parallel and identical landscapes. Giulia moans quietly. His hands move downwards bypassing the mini-crevice of her belly button and its familiar mole and making an assured beeline for her cunt. He kneels down in the bathtub, his face now facing her opening. One pair of fingers part her, while his other hand places the soap bar on the side of the tub and invades the thicket of her pubic hair, travelling through the obstinate curls, treading her jungle, spreading the wetness, massaging the ground below like an alchemist in search of a magical formula. Her dark lower lips open up like a flower to a deep and moist cavern of redness. Her inner lips are still beautifully swollen from the incessant lovemaking of the past two days. He wipes the last remaining bubbles of soap away and his tongue nears her vortex.
‘In San Francisco, I will find myself a black ambassador and I will marry him,’ she says.
He never quite knows when she is joking, or trying to provoke him. He says nothing and begins to lick her. Wetness against wetness. He closes his eyes. A blind man now, worshipping from memory, on automatic pilot, homing in like a bird of prey towards the fountain of life, the taste of Giulia coursing through the bridge that his lapping tongue has now become toward the very centre of him, dragging pleasure and bittersweet tastes alongside, an essence he would never truly be able to explain. In the darkness of his genuflection, his hands wander upwards. Her nipples have the gentle hardness of pizza crust, the beating sound of her heart reverberates through her chest, boom, boom, boom. He is out of breath and realises that for several minutes now, his tongue planted deep inside her, his nose buried beneath the hard shield of her curls and stomach, he had actually forgotten to breathe. He gets up from his uncomfortable squat. Turns her round. Under the warm waterfall that splashes relentlessly over the both of them, he pulls her arms away from her body and positions her so that they are now both now leaning for support against the wall above the taps. Without being asked, she spreads her legs open. He takes his cock in one hand and guides it towards her and enters her.
‘You know,’ she says. ‘When I was in Ibiza, Pedro, one evening when we were chilling, smoking pot, touched me on the arm, and I knew he wanted to fuck me. And I wanted him to fuck me too. I needed it. That’s why I’d let him see me naked on the beach that afternoon. But his hand on my skin just felt wrong, you see, not like yours. So I brushed him away and took another puff on the joint. It was a crazy evening.’
Hearing the name of another, he felt a wave of anger and bitterness sweep through him and thrust into her as hard as he could, and entwined as they were, they almost slipped. Fucking in showers looked easier in movies, to be sure.
He withdraws from her.
‘This is too awkward,’ he points out. ‘One of us is going to slip and we’ll injure ourselves. Let’s go to bed.’
They retreat to the room, swathed in white towels. He hurries to the bed and slides in between the sheets.
‘I have to dry my hair first,’ she said. And stands in the bedroom facing the mirror massaging the soft material into the jungle of her hair. The other large bathroom towel tightened around her body slips to the ground.
He watches, his heart beating wildly, his breath taken away yet again by the sheer innocence of her nudity. Walks out of bed and embraces her as he is overtaken by tenderness. Her hair is now less damp and she throws the towel she had been using aside. Both facing the mirror, his face peering across her naked shoulders. An image he would treasure for ever, indelibly printed into the back screen of his brain.
On their final evening in New York, she wanted to go out. Properly.
She insisted he shave his chin and cheek stubble, wear his black suit, and a clean shirt which she selected from his pack. She foraged inside her untidy suitcase and pulled out a backless evening dress, and shoes with heels. This was the first occasion in all the time he had known her she had ever worn heels. At an open all-night Korean convenience store on the corner of 3rd and Sullivan Street, he bought a red rose she planted amongst the thicket of her curls.
They walked down to the restaurant on Bleecker Street they had chosen earlier and Giulia floated on air and heels like a royal gypsy queen proudly taking ownership of the cold night. The lights of Greenwich Villa
ge flickered. Pride swelled in his heart. Combined with a sense of impending loss because it was to be their final night here. And he never knew on each trip together whether it would be their last.
‘I feel sad,’ he said to her, picking at his pine nut and asparagus risotto.
‘You musn’t.’
‘I know,’ he replied.
The restaurant was almost empty and the food disappointing.
The evening before he had brought takeaway sushi from a downmarket Japanese on the corner of 6th and Greenwich Avenue and fed her individual morsels by hand while they both sat upright in bed, drops of soya sauce pearling down across the Antarctica of her small breasts, which he then obediently licked clean, savouring the taste of food and the musky, natural smell of her own skin.
‘Yesterday was better,’ he pointed out.
‘Yes,’ Giulia said, with a hint of a satisfied smile.
‘Oh well ...’
They walked back to their room taking a detour by Washington Square, a crescent moon laced the shadows falling across the facades of the massive apartment blocks on the southernmost side of 5th Avenue. Under the arch they kissed briefly, but the temperature was falling fast and she had no coat to shelter her naked back from the growing cold. He draped his jacket around her shoulders.
The night porter watched them impassively as they trooped across the lobby towards the main elevator.
They stripped quickly and sought warmth between the cold sheets. The silence that divided them now was deafening. Their hands fumbled in the darkness, seeking each other, their bodies suddenly uncomfortable and self-conscious. His hand grazed one breast. Her fingers grasped his cock and felt it grow under her contact.
On Waverly Place, they made love and wept.
Her limousine arrived a quarter of an hour early the next day to take her to the airport, where her flight back to Barcelona was waiting. They didn’t have much time to talk.
He just stood in the lobby watching her walk to the swinging doors of the hotel, dragging her metal case alongside on its small wheels. He was searching for the right words to say, but they just wouldn’t come. They never did, did they?
Out in Queens, past Jamaica Boulevard, travelling down Van Wyck Expressway, separated from the Arab driver by the glass partition, Giulia pulled her notebook from her bag, and began drafting him a letter. She would continue writing it in the airport’s departure lounge where she had a couple of hours to spare until they boarded the flight. She’d had no wish to have a coffee this time around or spend time in the duty free shops. The letter spread over 9 pages, her handwriting all over the place, sometimes shaken by the tears rolling down her cheeks or that terrible feeling of despair that so often lurked in the pit of her stomach. She used both sides of the paper. During the long flight back to Europe, she made changes, crossing out lines, adding words, erasing others.
It was a love letter. Thanking him for the wonderful time they had spent together by Washington Square. Attempting in bursts of savage hunger to tell him, explain to him how much she loved him, even though the whole essence of their relationship was wrong, could just not sustain itself. She made promises she knew she could not keep. Tried to understand, as she wrote, why love could also contain so much pain.
By the time she landed, she had already decided she would never send him the letter. It remained at the bottom of her bag for the next six months. Accusing her. Chiding her. But wasn’t it him who had one day explained to her that words weren’t enough. That they couldn’t change the course of things?
One day, by accident, he would read the letter but by then it was too late. They had both moved apart, only lust kept them together under its heavy cloak of illusions when they took excursions away together from their real lives in other foreign cities or beaches. Ironically, his discovery of the letter coincided with their very last tryst.
Of course, the letter made him cry. Because he now realised that they had both left their hearts behind in Washington Square.
About the Story
Although I now live in London, I seem to find it easier to pop over to the Big Apple more frequently than I ever travel to Europe. For business, for pleasure, for family reasons, for culinary reasons, to fill my suitcase with books and records (this before the internet changed the face of culture retail, of course), to listen to the wind streaming between the canyons of avenues, see movies a few weeks before they open in London and many other reasons, both public and private.
I love the place although I’m not sure I would want to live there.
When I would travel to New York on publishing business I would often stay at the legendary Algonquin Hotel on 44th Street, and on occasions at the Royalton (long before it was refurbished by Philippe Starck) where I often ended up on first name terms with the cockroaches. When the book business began to migrate out of midtown, I also moved South and my new base became the Washington Square Hotel (after a failed affair with the Gershwin, which I could never quite get to grips with). It made sense, as I was spending most of my free time in Greenwich Village anyway. A passing vote of thanks to my mate Michael Moorcock who suggested I try it.
Characters in my books and stories spend a lot of time in hotels as part of their travel and the sacrifices they make on the altar of wanderlust. It doesn’t mean that every character is me, even if the rooms are the same ones I’ve slept in or otherwise. If I had done everything sexual my hapless anti-heroes have done, I would now be several feet underground or moving about with the assistance of a Zimmer frame or worse. So, setting this bittersweet tale around Washington Square just made sense, you know.
And no, it wasn’t inspired by Henry James.
Cell Mates
by Polly Frost
She was one of those slim young women you see on the streets of New York, hurrying along with a cell phone in one hand and a bottle of water in the other.
Everybody around her was gabbing into their cell phones.
Some were shouting, some were crying, some were laughing.
She alone walked in silence. It was a situation she couldn’t bear. She punched her speed dial, and the phone on the other end was picked up.
‘It’s me, R.B.,’ she cried. ‘You know, me! The girl you’re going with!’
Damn the static! She’d bought her phone only a month ago, but it had already let her down numerous times. The phone screeched, then gave her a ‘no signal’ sign, which it always did next to this high-rise. She scampered to the other side of the street and hit redial. Still nothing, even though the battery symbol indicated at least a little time left before recharging would be needed. ‘Soon you’ll just poop out on me altogether.’
There were days when she thought she and her cell phone should go into couple’s therapy. She dialled again. All clear. ‘It’s still me!’ Heads swivelled around her. She was yelling, yes, she knew that, but she had to in order to be heard above the din of the other street phone conversations. ‘What, R.B.? Did I like what? No, I thought it was really bad! What? You weren’t talking about the play we saw last night? Oh, I see. You were talking about our sex this morning.’
It came back to her in a rush: how she’d attended to his cock, snapping the leather ring around his balls, then sucking him off as she played with his ass and he kept his right hand on the PlayStation control.
She glugged the rest of her Smart Water loudly right into R.B.’s ear. She took out her sexual frustration on her water bottle, squeezing it roughly so the plastic almost broke. Then she tossed it away, and scanned the block for the nearest deli. Her eyes zeroed in on a green canopy shading the requisite display of fruit and tabloids. A hissing sound, this time not electronic, welled up behind R.B.’s voice, and she rolled her eyes.
‘I’m glad you love me,’ she said to her boyfriend. ‘And I love it when you tell me that.’
She’d been doing her best to train him for months. Her method: a
lways precede the correction with a positive.
‘But it would mean more if you’d tell me that when you weren’t taking a leak. I do realize the importance of maximizing one’s time by doing more than one thing at a time. But still ...’
R.B. was proud of describing himself as a “multi-task-aholic”. She, though, sometimes had her doubts about how efficient this really made him, and wondered: was everyone in this city really working twenty-four/seven or were they just saying they were? And what exactly constitutes work? For example, if someone said they were working, but no one was around to see it, did anything actually get done?
Now he was actually lecturing her.
‘Say wha’?’ she responded. ‘I do so possess a work ethic! Well, for example, it’s Saturday, and despite it being a designated weekend day I have a business phone call in exactly an hour with Terri Atkins ... Of course that Terri Atkins!’
Who did he think she meant? Only the hottest editor of lifestyle catalogs in the city!
The phone had another static attack just as R.B. was entering the groaning-and-flushing phase. She gave the phone a grateful pat for covering up the toilet sounds as she turned into the deli.
‘No cell phone! No cell phone!’ muttered the Asian woman behind the counter, pointing to a hand-written sign.
‘This doesn’t qualify since I can’t even hear my boyfriend. Bad reception,’ she enunciated carefully.
‘About tonight, I was thinking ... what?’ she shouted as she paid. ‘You can’t be serious, dude! No, my feelings aren’t hurt, but I can’t believe you’re behaving like this. You don’t just blow your fiancée off with no warning!’ She looked at her watch. ‘And I don’t consider six hours sufficient warning.’
‘No cell phone! No cell phone!’ the Asian woman insisted, again pointing to the hand-written sign.
Sex in the City - New York Page 4