Sex in the City - New York

by Maxim Jakubowski

  He stood at least six feet tall. Lean and mean, but tender too, you could tell. As she swivelled across the floor to him, the keypad that was her chest flashed softly, and she could feel her microchips purring.

  It’s you. I was afraid I’d lost you.

  We come together, we part. Then we come together again. Life is like that.

  She knew he was right. As she reached to him and touched him, she felt a tugging, this time not a small one in her hand, but a large one, lifting her by the abdomen, gripping her whole body, lifting her. She was dangling above her beloved. He gave her a loving look.

  Go forth. We’ll always be here. You know how to find your way back.

  Then the glamorous room vanished beneath her and all was darkness and the most monumental clutter, tubes and soft crumples of paper and containers full of candies the size of basketballs. She was squished between a huge expanse of leather and an enormous plastic covered condom.

  Just as she started to settle into a deep safe corner, she felt herself raised up through the mess, cradled in a gigantic beanbag of a hand.

  ‘There you are,’ a female voice said, out of her head, or so she was nearly certain. ‘God, I’ve really got to clean this purse out from time to time.’

  She felt a firm pressure on her chest, then a series of light punches to the abdomen. She giggled and vibrated happily as she was raised and felt a curtain of hair of one side, the warm ridges of an immense ear on the other.

  Was that really a mouth opening up, tongue at the ready, breathing directly into her very being?

  ‘Hello, darling,’ the giantess said right into her. ‘Guess who?’ The voice, with its yearning and heat, made her silly with pleasure. ‘That’s right, it’s Terri. And we have things to talk about.’

  About the Story

  I’ve always believed cities have distinct sexual identities. The erotic tone of a metropolis is made up by the people who inhabit it.

  I’ve lived in New York City for twenty years, so I’ve seen many changes in the sex vibe here. None has struck me as much as the way in which cell phones have altered the erotic nature of sidewalk life. I became fascinated by the new relationship people had with these phones. I saw people engaging more with these digital companions than they did with the people around them. And I saw a new kind of behaviour emerging, one that revealed deeply private desires, yet was played out in public.

  The main character of Cell Mates is a woman I now constantly see on the streets of New York City. She has a bottle of water in one hand, and her iPhone or her Blackberry in the other. She gazes constantly at her phone, expertly massaging messages from it.

  And where does she always seem to be hurrying to? She looks as though her cell phone is guiding her through the city, towards the most fabulous place where she will be the centre of attention. It’s as though she feels her cell phone will make New York City take notice; of her beauty, her talent, and her charms. Thanks to her cell phone, she’s not just one more young woman on these streets. She’s uniquely alluring. And her cell phone will make sure she’s infinitely desired and adored.

  But what this woman doesn’t realize is that cities also have their own sexual agendas, their own erotic souls. They play with the desires and dreams of the people who live in them. And Manhattan will always be a highly charged alpha-seducer. It’s only out to break your heart, but you get taken in anyway by how it teases you with glamour, fame and power.

  This woman may feel protected by her cell phone from Manhattan’s advances. Yet in writing Cell Mates, I wanted to show that her phone and the city might, in fact, be mischievous erotic cohorts, as sexually conniving as the aristocratic couple in Dangerous Liaisons.

  And I liked playing with the idea that her cell phone might deliver her to the city in the end. But along the way she’ll feel special; not completely anonymous, and definitely not just one in a long line of New York City’s glittering seductions.

  The Same Fifty Taxis

  by Jeremy Edwards

  1987

  Unwritten rule: If you were in a rock band in New York, you looked like a Ramone. Leather jacket and black hair. This applied to the women as well; all of us, the guys and the gals, were gritty parcels of leather and denim, no matter what was going on underneath anatomically. I remember the thrill of a bra strap, spied through a hole in Milly’s T-shirt, emphasizing – as if any emphasis were needed – that this punk was a girl.

  The Upper East Side belonged to another generation. I was an outsider, if a grateful one, paying my deflated, token rent to basically house-sit for a year in a co-op owned by Jay’s grandparents. It was against the building association rules – the way I thought of it, I was against the rules – and every doorman on the staff knew it. They didn’t hassle me on the technicality, and I was grateful for that too. But their stiffness reminded me, whenever I crossed the threshold, that I was a scruffy kid of twenty-two living there on borrowed time and space.

  Once I tried to tip the senior doorman, who had just helped me wrestle an amp into the elevator. He looked at me indulgently, shaking his head, as though I were a five-year-old trying to offer him my last lollipop.

  I felt especially incongruous when I masturbated in the grandparental bed; not because it was a sexual act, but because of the specific flavour of the sexuality. There I was, feverishly jerking away my boyish sexual tension while visualizing Milly’s presumably smooth ass, miraculously unwrapped from its cloak of strained denim. But I was doing it in a bedroom whose decor suggested perfumed sex with a woman who visited a hairdresser; maybe with opera music coming over the radio.

  If I ever fucked Milly, it wouldn’t be here.

  Her band and mine rehearsed on the same night: Wednesdays from 10:00 to 11:00, in neighbouring practice rooms in a rent-by-the-hour facility. And from the first time I saw her freckled nose and tight jeans, I wished I could take her to a different sort of rent-by-the-hour facility.

  She lived with her mother in a walk-up on East Eighty-third, and we usually rode the subway back uptown together. Because the singer in my band was friends with the drummer in hers, we had officially met, and so we didn’t have to share the commute as strangers. It was, in other words, acceptable under the rigid terms of 1980s New York etiquette for me to speak to her.

  Milly was a bass player – a very dexterous one, with a complementary gift for writing lyrics – while I was what my father the musicologist would have called ‘second guitar’. Fifth wheel was more like it. I’d been invited in – into the band and into New York – by Jay, at a time when his group thought they could use a separate rhythm guitarist to free Jay up for the flashy stuff. As it turned out, this worked well for about one song in ten, leaving me superfluous the rest of the time. I was always being asked to turn my volume down.

  She was a sympathetic listener each Wednesday, when I rambled on about my insecurities within the group. But this wasn’t what I wanted to be talking to her about. I wanted to get to know her, with all that this implied; but I was trapped by my own repetitive, self-pitying repertoire. The potent sexuality I read in her eyes deserved better than the wimpy, tedious soundtrack I heard coming from my voice box.

  The intersection where we parted every week, a few blocks after exiting the subway, became a crossroads of hope and unfulfilment on my mental landscape.

  One Wednesday, after we’d climbed up to street level at Seventy-seventh, she asked me if I wanted to have a beer, then led me over to a bar on Second Avenue when I accepted. We sat by the window, and fluorescence from a nearby street lamp made her dyed black hair shine.

  ‘Did you have a girlfriend in Pittsburgh?’ Milly gazed attentively at me as she took her first sip from a bottle of Molson Golden. In the background, I heard cases of beer being ripped open, a confident proclamation that people would be having fun here when the weekend arrived.

  ‘Sort of. I guess you could say that Lori and I date
d by default. Everyone else in our little dorm group was paired up.’

  ‘Dating by default,’ she repeated, with an ironic air of authority. ‘Ah yes, I know it well. It’s right up there with sex by default.’

  A tremor of promise, coated with fear, ran through me. I took a snapshot of the situation in my mind: I was alone with Milly, and she was steering the conversation toward sex. ‘Yeah. We did a little of that, too,’ I said into my beer.

  She kindly shifted the burden away from me, talking of her own relationships. Within a few minutes, she had all but finished her drink.

  ‘You know, I don’t think much of sex by default, Marc. But there are other kinds of sex I like.’

  ‘Me too,’ I managed, as if in a dream.

  ‘Should we go to my place and discuss that?’

  ‘My mother’s with her sister in Boston this week.’

  I swallowed hard as we floated past a skimpy Yorkville supermarket, contemplating how Milly had intentionally invited me out for a beer on the Wednesday she had the place to herself. My wish that I could be like that – smooth and self-actualized – was overshadowed by my appreciation for the fact that she was like that, that she was taking me exactly where I wanted to go.

  Almost as soon as I was seated in her living room, she straddled me – right there on the couch, which I found out later was also her bed. The only clothing she’d tossed aside was her leather jacket, and I still had mine on. There was an urgency to her, like she was afraid I might chicken out if she didn’t come on strong and physically pounce. I felt freed by her assertiveness, by the security of not having to decide what to do or not to do, apart from responding naturally as she went wild on me.

  Her bottom was tight and restless on my thighs, and her quick kisses were clearly meant as stepping-stones to something more. I could smell the salty girliness of her arousal; and as she bounced and rocked on my lap, sweetly attacking me with her darting lips, I felt my cock aching to break through all the layers of fabric and ascend into her.

  She manipulated our centre of gravity so as to tumble completely on top of me. She ran a hand up inside my Clash T-shirt, and rubbed the carpet of fuzz that belied my immaturity. Her thighs never let go of me.

  I’d never been taken by a girl in this way; I’d never had this all-consuming sense of being thoroughly desired, of being pawed into coition by a woman saturated with horniness.

  ‘So how do you like makin’ out with me?’ She had paused in her action, letting her warm, T-shirted spheres hover proudly above me. Her smile was magic.

  ‘Milly,’ I said – just that word. But my tone expressed both hunger and thankfulness, and the answer satisfied her. I was all hers.

  She groped my jeans zestfully, while I pursued my longing to squeeze her breasts. As she was unzipping my fly and I was wrangling her shirt up, I thought to myself, Yeah, we’re all jeans and T-shirts … but, oh fuck, the signpost of panties, the creaminess of female flesh. I unfastened her bra and grabbed round helpings of her femaleness.

  ‘Oh,’ said Milly suddenly. ‘I’d better pee.’ She hopped off me. ‘Come on.’

  I wondered if this was standard practice for experienced lovers. I realized, in any event, that it thrilled me – even if it might only represent her way of making sure I wouldn’t vanish while she was tinkling.

  She yanked her Levi’s and her baby-blue panties down to reveal herself. I was entranced by the gentle furriness of her mound. My sense of time went giddy as I watched, as if in slow motion, an auburn-haired female crotch descending onto a toilet seat in a brightly lit bathroom. My breath caught as I savoured this ultimate crack in our unisex shell.

  Her hips looked so naked on the toilet seat. Still sitting there, a wipe and a flush behind her, she now finished what she’d begun as far as undoing my pants. Soon she had my jeans at my ankles and my dick sticking up from an elastic-throated clench of jockey shorts. She kissed it.

  Though she didn’t take me all the way via oral, her foreplay went beyond everything I’d experienced with the complete version, in terms of both sensation and erotic intensity. It felt as if she’d taught each saliva molecule how to caress male skin, so that she was coating me not just with warmth and wetness, but with an active layer of pleasure. Her blazing eyes hypnotized me, my cock basked, and I was insanely happy.

  Then I stood there, penis glistening, while she shuffled out of her pants and slammed down the plush-covered lid of the toilet. I knew how she wanted me, so I got my jockeys out of the way, got cozy with the plush, and awaited the embrace of her cunt.

  She lowered herself onto me with an alto moan, capped with a soprano squeak, and I couldn’t believe how many brands of euphoria shocked through my groin and my brain. It wasn’t only how she felt around me: it was the lusty personality in her pistoning, and the friendly tenderness in her gyrations. I was so primed, so excited … and, not surprisingly, I started to come sooner than I wished.

  Milly burbled a tolerant, sexy laugh. ‘Nice, huh?’ she said smokily, watching my face glow with ecstasy. She waited till I’d finished before directing my hand to her clit. With token help from me, she danced herself into a slow-cresting climax that brought tears to her eyes.

  She greeted me with an instant coffee when I walked into the kitchen in the morning. My physiology was reverberating with echoes of joy, but my mind had been going nonstop since awakening on her convertible couch fifteen minutes earlier. I’d been thinking about everything in my world.

  She sat across from me at the table. ‘I have to apologize,’ she said. ‘This is a very busy year for me.’ She was in an MA program for journalism, and writing for a weekly paper. Then of course there was the band. ‘But there’s always room in my life for romance, Marc Flynn.’ She put her hand on mine. ‘Otherwise, what’s the point?’

  She had said the opposite of what I’d thought she was about to say.

  I spoke with as much clarity as my confused brain could offer. ‘I think I’m too young for you, Milly.’

  She burst out laughing. ‘Thanks a lot! I’m, like, two years older than you.’

  I wanted to laugh with her, but I had to persist. ‘But you’re, y’know, grown up, in a way I’m not. You have a career going. You have a handle on things. Fuck, you’re even more accomplished than I am at music – even though for you it’s just a hobby, and for me it’s this … stupid dream.’

  ‘Marc!’ It seemed to hurt her that I was down on myself. ‘None of that matters.’

  ‘I’m kind of in love with you, Milly.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘But I’m not ready for this. I’m not ready for any of it.’ I gestured at the room, at the whole city. ‘I’m thinking of quitting the band. I’m sure that’s what Jay wants, though he’ll never say it. I don’t think I ever told you this … but when I joined, I hoped they might do my songs. But my songs are old-fashioned. I’m into pretty harmonies. It doesn’t fit in. I realize that now. And I have this other friend back in Pittsburgh – he writes lyrics, and he’s been bugging me to come back and start a band. He digs my music. He doesn’t care whether it’s passé.

  ‘I admire your self-awareness.’ She looked down at her coffee. ‘I think I’d be wrong to try to talk you out of all this.’ Then her eyes met mine. ‘And I also think you’ll return to New York someday – when you’re ready.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘And when you do,’ she said with an even tone and a determined smirk, ‘I’m gonna jump your sexy bones, my friend.’

  It was a vow that would stay with me for years, like an unused ticket in some cranny of my wallet – long after I’d come to assume that it would never actually be redeemed.

  She walked me downstairs.

  ‘Come here,’ she said just outside the front door. She kissed me. ‘Thank you for a night of passion.’

  ‘That’s really nice, Milly, but, well, it was the greatest night ever, but you get all the credit.
I don’t feel like I –’

  ‘No!’ she insisted. ‘Stop. I said thank you, Marc. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  1997

  It was hard for me to relax up in Yorkville. Paradoxically, the relative calm of the neighbourhood made me antsy; made me worry that there were things happening downtown that I was missing. I was high with the buzz of feeling myself an important part of something; and after a decade of getting there, a scant twelve hours away from that scene was enough to have me climbing the walls of the high-rise condo that my first two albums had secured me.

  In this district, I was merely another nouveau riche bohemian. But below Fourteenth Street, I was indie-rock royalty – for the moment. Every cup of self-conscious gourmet coffee made me feel the promise of another new chapter in my ego-gratifying adventure.

  When I stopped to think – which I didn’t often, since returning to New York – it struck me how extensively the cultural battle lines had blurred. For example, Millicent’s employer was ‘corporate’; theoretically the antithesis of indie. But the entertainment magazine she wrote for had developed a symbiotic relationship with the underground music and film and theatre worlds. Thus, Millicent was a professional ally; as well as an old friend, of course.

  Ah, Milly. She was cuter than ever, with her daring eyes behind neo-retro glasses, and her shape scrumptious in articles such as pastel capris. We didn’t hang out very frequently – who had time? – but she was indisputably one of my most cherished buddies. Sometimes I caught myself having flashes of … desire? Infatuation? Nostalgia? Sometimes to the point where I had to ask myself why I had never made an effort to re-establish what we’d shared.

  The answer, I supposed, was that although the idea of Millicent could still shake up my heart and rev up my dick, I had reservations I couldn’t quite sort out – about myself, I admitted, not her – and it was all too complicated for me to unravel at present.