Sex in the City - New York

by Maxim Jakubowski

  ‘Hi, Marc.’

  She’d come up behind me while I was waiting to cross Eighty-sixth.

  ‘Milly!’ I gave her a quick fraternal hug, with a showbiz-style peck on the cheek for good measure.

  ‘You’re supposed to call me “Marcus” now, remember?’ I’d switched to the two-syllable form around the time I traded in my guitar for a vintage organ.

  ‘Well, you’re supposed to call me “Millicent”.’ She stuck her tongue out.

  I laughed. She was great, by any name. ‘It’s a deal, Millicent.’ I made a mock-formal bow.

  ‘At your service, Marcus.’ She bestowed an archaic flourish with her hand, the type of move you might see at Shakespeare in the Park. Then she cracked up like a little kid.

  The fact that she still lived in this neighbourhood was definitely a plus; though we crossed paths in the Village more often than here. Her mother had remarried and moved in with Milly’s new father-in-law, leaving Millicent the sole occupant of one very serviceable, rent-controlled apartment. I liked that because it made her happy, but also for my own selfish reasons. She was curating a piece of my life.

  There were numerous tasks I’d intended to accomplish in the next hour – somewhat unrealistically. All of a sudden, I felt impulsive. ‘You haven’t been to my new place, have you?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Millicent. ‘Is it a place one simply must see?’

  ‘I don’t know about that … but it’s the best place to go if you want a shot at sampling this ice cream.’ I drew her attention to the paper bag I was holding.

  ‘I hear your apartment is lovely this time of year,’ she said, not missing a beat. ‘What with the ice cream in bloom.’

  The light changed, and we segued from our face-to-face to the walking-in-stride mode, old pals on a mission – though I wasn’t completely sure yet what the mission was.

  As was her habit, Millicent reminded me to look at the tops of the buildings, where one could be surprised and delighted by interesting ornamental embellishments from decades gone by. I wondered how many building tops I’d missed since the last time I’d walked with Milly. Then I wondered what, if anything, she had missed by not spending more time with me. I wondered …

  A passing bus caught my eye, its entire flank occupied by an ad for a video station.

  I wondered which clubs I should drop in on that night. I wondered who was going to be around, what opportunities might be in the air.

  Millicent’s adorable ass enlivened the lone barstool at my kitchenette counter. I stood proudly at hand, watching her attack the similarly round and cute cappuccino-coconut scoop I’d served up. I ate slowly, for my part, letting small spoonfuls melt on my tongue. Millicent teased me about wandering the Upper East Side with a pint of ice cream, hoping to pick up women.

  How and why had I forgotten that I was in love with her? Watching her smile and laugh in my kitchen seemed to make the complexities and ambivalence melt away like the ice cream, to put me in touch once more with uncomplicated lust and straightforward emotions. Again I let impulse guide me.

  ‘You owe me, Millicent. I’ve been back for two years, and you haven’t jumped my sexy bones.’

  She gaped, her spoon frozen in action. ‘You remember I said that?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ For a year or two in Pittsburgh, I’d used that memory as a sail.

  ‘I wonder what else you remember.’

  I helped myself to the flirty curl at the bottom of her retro hairdo. ‘I remember that this is your natural hair colour – and how delicious it looked on you, even when one had to delve deep to find it.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I remember that you thanked me for a night of passion. No other woman has said that to me, in so many words.’

  ‘Ha! I don’t doubt it. ‘And the award for Sappiest Girl He’s Ever Slept With goes to …’’

  I put a finger over her lips. ‘Shh. It was beautiful. In fact, I think I’ll call my next album Thank You for a Night of Passion.’

  ‘You’re hilarious, Marcus. And I think I’ll call my next album round-up “Do You Want to Fuck Me, or Just Write Songs about Me?”’

  ‘Brat.’

  ‘For the record, though …’ She paused to bring another spoon of cappuccino coconut to her lips. ‘I don’t feel they have to be mutually exclusive.’ She swallowed. ‘The fucking and the songwriting.’

  I set my spoon down, decisively. ‘Are you game, Milly?’

  ‘No, “Milly” is not game. Millicent, however …’ She stood. ‘Do you mind ice-cream-flavoured kisses?’

  I walked around to her side of the counter. ‘We’ll soon know.’

  She tasted like much more than ice cream.

  ‘Here’s something else I remember,’ I said. ‘You liked being on top.’ My cock had started throbbing with the memories that pulsed through it.

  She closed her eyes for half a second, as if my words had flicked at her clit. ‘Some things don’t change,’ she said. She began to pet me.

  ‘I’m glad to hear that. You were a magnificent creature, riding me with such exuberance.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been called a magnificent creature before.’

  ‘You really need to visit me more often.’

  ‘One ice-cream-and-fuck session at a time.’ She licked my ear. Then she sat again, close to the edge of the barstool, and unzipped me.

  Smooth as a glissando, I slid her capris off her ass, then over the lip of the stool – noting that the critical stretch of the panties inside them had already been streaked with cream. My erection pointed the way to the bedroom.

  I had so much larger a basis for comparison this time, but my body and psyche were no less impressed by Millicent’s sexual self than when I’d been poor in experience. There was such an earnest, hungry vigour to the way she kissed my neck and slapped my butt and nibbled up and down my chest; such an uncompromising heartiness in the way she clutched my cock, mouthing cheerfully at its head before descending onto it with her even hungrier vulval mouth.

  She tickled me under the arms while she pumped me, her fingers orchestrating my chuckles with finesse. I’d nearly forgotten that she’d been a fantastic bass player; and though I was being fucked and titillated and my head was spinning with glee, I made a mental note to ask if she ever played now.

  She had described herself as ‘sappy’. But as she rode me like a pogo stick, inching me into the unsustainable tingle of pre-orgasmic delirium, it was I who felt sentimental.

  Though close to coming, I reined myself in long enough to do more for dear Millicent. I exerted my sit-up skills to go from supine to L-shape; and, before she knew what was happening, my left hand was painting her clit in pussy juice, and my right was returning the tickle favour, cajoling her sensitive underarm. When she shrieked in erogenous surprise, I moved that hand to her ass crack. Then I suckled her left nipple … and we both fucking lost it, squirming and squealing and churning and spouting like an implosion of flesh and energy, collapsing into ourselves and dampening my bed with our pent-up libido.

  We both began to dress, seemingly on autopilot.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ I asked her.

  She understood me. ‘I don’t know, Marcus.’

  ‘I don’t know either,’ I said honestly. ‘My head’s just … all over the place these days.’

  ‘I know it is.’

  Life had been simple in 1987, when I’d had one big, distant dream and one incipient love. And yet, I reminded myself, I’d felt compelled to retreat from both of them. The dream had chased me down in Pittsburgh – in the form of a start-up record label who believed that pretty harmonies could be big again – and escorted me back here. And now I was so distracted by dancing with the dream that love was hard-pressed to get a foothold. It wasn’t the hectic schedule; I’d observed, in the lives of my peers, how that o
bstacle was surmountable. No, the issue was psychological.

  ‘Let’s play it by ear, OK?’ said Millicent. ‘Call me when you’re here.’

  ‘Sounds good. I’ll probably be in for an hour or two on Saturday. I have some wardrobe to figure out, then a conference call and …’

  As I spoke, I felt the weight of a half dozen MTA tokens in my pocket, pulling me downtown like gravity.

  Milly took my hand. ‘No, Marcus. I mean when you’re really here.’

  2007

  It’s all about niches nowadays, isn’t it? I said to my greying sideburns in the bathroom mirror.

  With that in mind, it amused me to ponder how at one time my songs had been played on the radio; the radio, not podcasts or user-guided streams or nichey satellite stations. My friends who still had bands didn’t even bother to think about the radio these days, to hope for anything that widely penetrating.

  I’d found that I was comforted by the timelessness of being largely off the map. (Comfort. I really was crossing into middle age, wasn’t I?) I’d grown tired of being trendy, with the concomitant worry of not being trendy the next day. At this stage of the game, I preferred to be entirely irrelevant to that metric, even if it meant my name might never be mentioned in a magazine again, save in a where are they now? feature.

  With the twentieth century safely behind me, I liked being grounded in a genre of music that would never again dominate the popular music charts but which, after seventy-five years, looked like it was never going to disappear, either. One more rendition of Cheek to Cheek in a piano bar had negligible impact on the culture at large, but it made me – and the niche patrons of Du Piano on Third Avenue – happy.

  It was funny that this leather-jacketed kid, who had resided illicitly in the heart of an older generation’s Uptown, was now growing pleasantly grey in Yorkville, playing Tin Pan Alley tunes for a local crowd that was, on average, even younger than his forty-two. Yes, it was funny how content I was here, though the things that had brought me here – twice – didn’t matter much to me any more. But this was New York, a city that could, to put it egocentrically, keep pace with one’s progress. Most of Millicent’s building tops had stayed the same, but Marc Flynn and his landscape had evolved.

  Millicent. I didn’t eat ice cream as often as I had in my thirties; but sometimes when I did, I thought about her. And sometimes when I didn’t, I thought about her.

  Since I’d retired from the thick of the rock-music scene, I rarely saw her. I knew that she was currently a senior editor for an online magazine; an office job that kept her farther from the city’s entertainment happenings. I knew she still lived in her mother’s old apartment, but it seemed I could go years at a stretch without running across her. Of course, this was in part because I didn’t go out as much as I used to. My condo had the equipment I needed to compose and produce the jingles, TV scores, and incidental music I sold to my clients; the kitchen where I enjoyed cooking for myself; and the Internet hook-up that brought me everything in the world except the heat, chill, winds, aromas, and other tangibles of the city.

  Du Piano, where I shared the bill Thursday through Sunday, was a good place for tangibles: enormous Cabernet glasses that entrusted you with their nurturing heft … velvet banquettes that fondled your ass … milky sconces that spoke intimacy. And comfort. And, from time to time, this venue had been a place where I’d encountered that most exquisite tangible; the human tangible. The soft hair, hot breath, and responsive flesh of some pianophilic soul, someone whose gaze flickered with intelligence and lust when I made eye contact following my set.

  I’d learned that the newfangled communal washing-up area outside the bathrooms was an even better spot for a pick-up than the bar itself. Hand an amenable stranger a flirty little towel, and suddenly it was as if you were sharing a hotel room.

  Yes, I loved New York.

  It was a night when I’d finished, but I was lingering; as I frequently did, enjoying the atmosphere and the modest euphoria of unwinding after a minor performance. I usually preferred to stand, or pace, by the bar immediately after playing, letting the residual nervous energy dissipate. This gave me a clear view of the door, and thus I was aware of Millicent’s entrance even before the bartender.

  ‘Why, hello,’ I said, hugging her solidly. ‘What are you drinking?’

  She looked around. ‘Damn. Did I miss your set? I’ve been meaning to come here for, what, two weeks now. Don’t tell me I blew it.’

  I shrugged diplomatically. I’d spotted Milly on the second story of the mega-bookstore on Eighty-sixth a couple of weeks back. We’d chatted for a minute: I listened to her account of a foray into Off-Off-Broadway theatre (‘tiny role, but I got to see peeps in their underwear backstage’), and she expressed interest in my regular gig at Du Piano. She lit up when I said that I’d found my niche. Still, I hadn’t expected her to turn out.

  ‘I was an idiot to think I’d get out of the office on time tonight. Oh –’ She had noticed the bartender waiting patiently for her order. ‘Is that a Malbec up there? That will be good.’

  I slapped my plastic on the bar, to reinforce my signalled intention to play host here.

  ‘Thank you.’

  I appreciated the fact that she’d accepted without the obligatory fuss.

  As I’d noted in the bookstore, Millicent had let her hair grow a little longer. Its fluffy adornment of her deep-burgundy dress augmented the luxury of the room around us. She caught me admiring her hair-kissed shoulders, which reminded me of ornamented building tops.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just that you’re beautiful.’

  She blushed a degree, but grinned ten degrees.

  The glass of wine was deposited in front of her.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about you.’ She took a sip. ‘Mm. Nice. I love these Malbecs.’

  ‘Hey, enough with the cliff-hanger,’ I kidded. ‘You’ve been thinking about me.’

  ‘Yeah. Do you recall something you said to me, back when we … back in the ’80s? How I was grown up, in a way you weren’t?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘So, I was thinking about that … and I have a confession to make: I’m not grown up.’

  I smiled. ‘Well, not in the dreary, stuffy, boring sense of the word. Isn’t it cool that some of us manage to escape that fate, these days?’

  She patted my knee. ‘I don’t just mean that. I mean … Are you seeing anyone right now?’

  The non sequitur tripped me up only momentarily. ‘No. You?’

  ‘No.’ She seemed to breathe more easily. With her next sip of wine she appeared to allow herself more relish, more engagement with the grape.

  ‘Remember when you phoned me last summer?’

  I wagged a finger at her. ‘You have evidently come here not to hear me play piano, but to test my memory once again. And, once again, I pass with flying colours. I phoned you last summer: check.’

  ‘I don’t know what you really had in mind … maybe all you were thinking about was buddying up for that music festival, having a few laughs, no big deal.’ No, that wasn’t all I’d been thinking about.

  ‘But for months afterward, I kept dwelling on what a drag it was that I’d had a conflict. And then I would think that I should follow up with you, that maybe we could do … something.’

  ‘You should have.’

  ‘Yes, Marcus. I should have. That’s the whole fucking point. That’s why I’m saying I’m not grown up.’ She gestured at the room, at the whole city. ‘You’ve identified what you want. You’ve pursued it.’

  ‘Some of it, yes. But so have you. Right?’

  ‘Some of it.’ She took another sip. ‘Do you remember having me over for ice cream?’

  ‘Millicent: the answer to every one of these is yes. I remember everything we’ve ever done.’

  Her face shimmered, and her fingers graz
ed the lapel of my sport jacket. ‘OK, then I’ll cut to the chase. Can I come over for ice cream?’

  ‘I don’t know if I have any ice cream,’ I said truthfully.

  ‘The ice cream part is optional.’

  I signed for our drinks, then took her hand; it was half handshake, half a pull toward the adventure she’d sketched out for us.

  She held the door for me as we left. It was a busy Friday night on Third Avenue. Over Millicent’s shoulder, a stream of taxis – apparently perpetual while the green lights reigned – evoked the infinite scope of the city.

  She followed my gaze. ‘Have you ever imagined that as soon as they disappear beyond the horizon, they dip under the island and loop back around? It could be the same fifty taxis, over and over.’

  ‘I’ve been lazy, Millicent, too lazy,’ I confessed as we navigated past the crowd in front of the movie theatre on Eighty-sixth. It was a strange thing to shout over ambient noise on a sidewalk, but I didn’t want to compound the laziness by deferring the thought.

  ‘I’m going to test your memory again,’ she said when I’d flicked the lights on.

  Reversing the host relationship, she motioned me to one of my own living-room chairs. Then she straddled me, both of us still clothed, as she had that night in 1987. But this time she scrunched into me even more tightly, pressing her bosom to my chest and gripping my shoulder bones. I recalled that old quip: if you were any closer, you’d be behind me.

  With the cooperation of her dress, she had the heat of her panties flush with my crotch, cooking me hard. And as her wetness seeped, I almost believed it would melt the metal of my zipper, springing me into the open air without the intervention of fumbling fingers.

  But when she did unveil me, her legendarily dexterous fingers didn’t fumble at all. Nor did mine, when I drew aside the taut curtain of her gusset to reward her generous lips with my touch and, sweet fuck, plunge my cock upward into her heaven.

  ‘Did you find your niche, Marcus?’ she crooned.

  I wanted to be this close to her, always. Writhing into Millicent, my body absorbed by her … my mind yearning to envision what she was feeling as she bounced and whooped. My libido arched toward climax via the ultimate turn-on, the idea of Milly’s ecstasy; of her being glued to me by pleasure while I inhabited her.