The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 9

by Maxim Jakubowski

  In addition, there are several handfuls of repeat offenders, or should I describe them as the usual suspects; some have now clocked up regular contributions to the Mammoth Erotica series while others made their initial appearance only in the last year or two. It’s great to have them all back.

  Writing about sex, and emotions, is nowhere near as easy as many imagine. Just because it is a human activity that all of us think we know all about means that not only taboos must be broken when it comes to describing it with a modicum of authenticity and honesty, but the author must try to relate to the reader in a particularly naked way. Our sex lives are a secret that only our close ones actually perceive correctly, and when you put pen to paper (or in this day and age, finger to keyboard) you have to find a way that strangers can relate to your story, your complex relationships. If you cannot achieve this connection then the end result can prove either vulgar or clichéd or both. This, for me, is where the frontier lies between erotica and pornography. It’s an eternal debate and will continue to rage forever, I have no doubt. But I strongly believe that the stories we offer you in this volume will both titillate you and make you think, will trigger your imagination, sometimes make you question your own acts or relationships or past experiences, and might also scare and/or amuse you. Or all of the above.

  If they achieve any of these aims then I feel we have achieved the goal of our sensual mission.

  So, enjoy another year in the daring and provocative world of the sexual imagination. Shudder, hold your breath, smile, allow your heart to beat just that touch faster, and give in to all your most secret senses.This is erotica at its best.

  Maxim Jakubowski

  Alert

  Laurence Klavan

  Hands, so many hands of other travelers were hanging beside her own, lined up like winter coats in a closet or fish in a school under the sea – or like trains themselves, waiting to take off, trains stopped in their tracks, that was it – except one hand, his hand, more disobedient than the rest, moving up her thigh, then gently beneath her skirt, the fingers cool and slightly chapped even though it was summer.

  Allie was trembling but so was everyone else: trembling and rocking back and forth and sometimes lurching forward as if pushed from behind. Allie was aware that her reaction to riding the subway was like someone’s in 1904 – the year the system started, an overhead sign informed her – but she was, after all, innocent of the experience, never having done it before.

  And it was twice as terrifying today, she knew, despite the unclean conditions then, the – she could only guess – cholera and diphtheria and the TB, that was the other one, at the turn of the century. It was so much more treacherous today that she never would have agreed to come if not for – and now she thought of nothing other than his hand, because his fingers had found and were touching the little raised flower stitched on her underwear between her legs. His was like a blind man’s hand and so she closed her eyes to be like him and only know what it was like to feel and never see, never in a crucial way to know anything but what you felt. Doing this, only feeling, in the dark, she went into a new tunnel, one that led back to the blackness of her sleep that morning, a tunnel she had exited by opening her eyes.

  Allie had been angry those few hours earlier – she was a punitive girl, punishing, which was surprising, for she was short and blonde and pale and pretty, and others in their shallowness assumed that she was sweet – she’d been angry because she had not wanted to come, had spent eighteen perfectly pleasant years without going down to the city, which was ninety miles south of the town where she was and had been born.Why should she add to her “experience” in such an arbitrary way, like those people who fly private planes without expertise or jump into gorilla cages just for the “rush” and end up in frozen pieces on foggy mountaintops or as bloody stumps in fake zoo streams, their last startled sense being pain, their final feeling regret (or who were so drunk that they were dead already before being blown or torn to bits)? She had no sympathy for these people who asked for what they got – and since she was unlike them, was sensible and not stupid and heedless, she was angriest at herself for agreeing to go. She had been weak – being guilty was a way of being weak – and that especially irked her.

  But Dan Stabler was an old family friend and had offered her a job in his store for the summer, right after she graduated from high school. Loafin’ was the town’s most popular bakery and café, and while Allie hated the store’s stupid name and having to wear the apron with the smiling slice of bread on it – a logo other people liked, apparently, though how many over the age of four, Allie couldn’t imagine – she had accepted. Allie hadn’t gotten into Picard, the local college, and so would have to wait to apply again next year. She didn’t want to go any farther from home – and why should she when there was a perfectly good school within driving distance, she could even keep her old room; it was pretentious and phony to want to “see the world,” wasn’t this the world right here? Of course it was.

  Her parents hadn’t been as happy as she thought they’d be when she said that she’d be staying put, had never really understood her only applying to one place, and had gone behind her back to ask Dan if he had something, anything, for her to do. When he came up with the job, invented it out of thin air, by adding another counterman, woman, or whatever, her parents made it plain there would be no saying no.

  Allie thought they’d be glad to still have her around, but the job seemed like a punishment for what they felt was her bad idea. (Allie’s scolding sensibility was a direct inheritance from them, but she didn’t make the connection, for she always felt totally justified in her harsh and severe judgments of others.) So how could she refuse when Dan asked her to do more, to work the stand in the Farmer’s Market down in the city that day, because someone else had gotten sick?

  That meant getting up at five to take the trip, sitting beside Dan on the lumpy front seat of his bread truck, while he listened to the radio repeat the same exact weather report (sunny and hot, sunny and hot – what did he expect, it was summer?!), depressing news stories from overseas (we’re here, aren’t we? We’re here, we’re not there!) and songs from the seventies, a time when apparently all people had lank and dirty hair, took too many drugs, and sang songs that made absolutely no sense at all (well, why don’t you give your horse a name? – then your horse would have a name!).

  Dan, who still looked like someone from that era, actually remembered the words well enough to repeat them in a flat, horrible voice that sounded like the world’s worst walrus singer. Allie had never had an opinion of Dan – he was like a hundred years old and so hardly even alive to her – but today she disliked how he dwelled on the radio’s news reports about the city, the threats to the city, and actually turned it up to catch every last disgusting detail.

  This was, of course, another reason Allie had not wanted to go and for her to condemn anyone reckless enough to live there. She had no doubt the threats were real and that the government people communicating them were sincere. This was just the sort of thing you’d expect to happen in such a place, and what was wrong with warning people? She herself would want to be warned (which wouldn’t be necessary, because she wouldn’t be living there) and she would heed those warnings. Even now, as Dan changed channels to hear the same information from a different source, she said, “Maybe we should just turn around and go

  The remark unnerved Dan enough to make him snap off the radio altogether. He considered being concerned enough to lose a day’s profit, and it was clear it was a new idea and not one he was at ease with.

  “It’ll be okay,” was the best he could come up with; then, after additional thought, “Why let our enemies win? It’s our country.”

  Stymied, Allie didn’t say anything, just looked out the window at the highway, increasingly crowded and unclean as it approached New York. Roadkill was being replaced by potholes, as if nature itself had ceased to exist and great gaps were now appearing as evidence of a new nightmare world, and
all would soon collapse as a result. She bet Dan thought that worry would protect him, when only turning back (or not even going) was the only action that made sense. But that would take guts, and Dan was too greedy.

  “I had a piece of the walnut loaf this morning,” she said, petulantly, to punish him. “I almost broke a tooth.”

  Dan didn’t answer right away, then said, quietly, “Then you should talk to your parents about orthodontia.”

  Referring to her parents had the desired effect – she felt young and diminished and guilty again about her aimless summer, which she had been sure her mom and dad would want to share with her, and why hadn’t they? – and took the focus off his bread, which truth to tell, wasn’t bad, and she had never even tried the walnut. Dan seemed to be getting sneakier as they hit the bridge that brought them into town, as if he were absorbing a big city character through the automatic traffic pass Velcro-ed to his windshield that let him be billed later. (And that was another modern idea she couldn’t abide: you ought to pay then and there.) Allie pulled over her the sweater her mother had insisted she bring, as if it were a lead apron to prevent her being filled with the same flaws now entering Dan.Then she saw him peel off the pass and place it in the glove compartment, which he locked; he never had to do those things at home.

  Allie looked at the big buildings, the suffocating crowds, the water that surrounded it all – everything made vulnerable to attack because of its decadence, irresponsibility, and excess. She found herself getting angrier and angrier, the way she always did when – and her parents knew this even if she didn’t and she absolutely did not – she was utterly, unbearably, and to her unforgivably afraid.

  The Farmer’s Market was held at Union Square, on what looked to Allie like a big concrete slab that probably used to be a parking lot. It scalded in the morning sun, and not even the stand’s awning provided any relief. Allie started sweating the minute she left the truck, and large dark rings appeared on her white track team T-shirt that looked like those potholes in the road. Now she was marked, damaged, too, by “progress.”

  A never-ending parade of people filed by, some obviously on their way to work, looking self-important yet also stifled and suffering in overpriced suits, others obviously wasting their lives riding rollerblades on the way to nowhere. The people who bought bread from her were stingy young executives who forfeited fifty cents for tiny raisin buns not big enough to feed a baby or demanding yuppie mothers who acted entitled to stop traffic with their strollers and didn’t say “thank you” when Allie handed them their loaves. She felt like a hick serving at the pleasure of sophisticates, and she bet she was better read than any of them. (Who had gotten through the whole “Dune” cycle last summer? Certainly not that young business boy whose hair goop couldn’t hide his hair loss and who bought a tiny bun.)

  Throughout the morning, Dan acted pleasant and didn’t even seem to feel the heat. He told her, “acting surly never sold a scone,” but she pretended not to hear and walked disgustedly back to the truck for more bread.

  Dan had parked in an allotted area behind their stand, right near a rope that cordoned off the lot. She thought it looked like a carny van in a circus convoy she’d seen once in a movie; at day’s end, they’d pull up stakes and go someplace else where people made fun of freaks. She was carrying out a new supply of miche – and leave it to New Yorkers to buy the bread with the phony Frenchiest name – when she was stopped by someone’s voice.

  “Hey.”

  Allie looked up and over the rope that separated the market from the rest of the metropolis, the only thing that lay between her and its awfulness, a protective ring she hadn’t realized was a comfort until she looked up and over. A skinny boy her own age was resting on the rope, oblivious it appeared to cars flying by, hardly making the effort not to hit him.

  His face was dark, darker than any in her own town – he was Spanish or Italian or Jewish, it was all the same to Allie – and his hair wasn’t even brown but so black it seemed to have been colored, but it couldn’t, could it, he was a boy. Still, it was a pleasant face, the face of an orphan in a bombed-out Italian town during World War Two she’d seen in a documentary once in school, and his voice had the innocence of a child when he asked, above the street sounds, “What’s it, bread?”

  Allie, of course, had been taught not to speak to strangers, so she didn’t respond right away. But the question was so open, direct, and benign – and the questioner so seemingly guileless – that after a second she said, with much less hostility than she’d intended, which surprised her, “Well, what does it look like?”

  The boy took the question as he heard it – not as rhetorical or sarcastic but as sincere – and answered, “Bread.”

  Was he kidding, this kid? He didn’t seem to be – and he wasn’t flirting, either, not in the usual way, which is what Allie had figured at first. A weak wind made her belly feel cool and she remembered that her shirt was sweated through, he could clearly see the flower pattern on her bra; but the boy didn’t look there, didn’t direct one guilty glance, engaged her eyes the whole time, which was a first since she was fifteen with men and boys of any age. (Allie wasn’t a virgin but her experience was limited to one encounter with an ex-boyfriend which didn’t even last as long as the commercial break on the TV not muted opposite them. Since then, she spoke in a worldly and dismissive way about men and love-making, unable to admit that hers was a subjective observation based on one unpleasant event and not an objective wisdom that put all others in the shade. In truth, she wished simply to put off doing it again for as long as possible.)

  But that was not an issue here: the boy seemed as innocent as a sprite, like a spirit of the forest that had escaped to the city and gotten lost. Is that why he asked about bread? she wondered.Was he hungry?

  “Here,” she said, keeping her voice down, and then reached over the rope and handed him one and then two of the little raisin buns, let the yuppies buy something bigger.

  Without looking again at him, she turned away with her bag of miche and started back to the stand. Behind her, she heard over car horns, sirens, and boring cell phone conversations, his small voice saying, “thanks,” with a surprise that convinced her he had not been angling for it but had only asked her something to be friendly or maybe to make his own morning less monotonous or maybe even because he thought she looked miserable and wanted to help. All of these possibilities – but especially the last one – made Allie turn around suddenly and less subtly than she’d wished to smile at him or do something, she wasn’t sure what. But the boy was gone, his place taken by the traffic of which he had been so unafraid.

  Allie returned to the stand where Dan was, and where he was impatiently wondering why she’d been gone so long. Apparently, it was the height of over-consumption and time-wasting hour; after nine, they’d merely be selling food to people who were hungry.

  “I got lost,” Allie said, aware she was being slightly too snotty, but it was too late.

  As the day wore on, and she waited on more jaded or entitled people, she thought that seeing and feeding the boy by the truck would be the highlight of the day; everyone else had much uglier motives than he. She found herself checking out the crowd, craning for any sight of him, but soon felt it was silly: he didn’t seem to have the same empty purpose or worthless destination that might make him one of them. His ambling was honorable, like sidling by a stream or sauntering down a dirt road, inviting adventure in its natural state; it was not his fault that he had wandered onto an artificial world.

  It was a world where, for instance, there was no shade. More fat gobs of sweat dripped down her back to her waist, making the other side of her shirt sheer as well. Allie thought she heard a sizzling sound behind her; with a smirk, she supposed that something had been set ablaze by the sun or was merely manifesting the burning hatred she was sending out. Then, slowly, she realized it was static from a transistor radio: Dan had been a few hours without upsetting updates, and that had been too long.


  “Uh-oh,” she heard him say, holding the radio close to his head. “Oh, no.”

  Allie was even more curious than annoyed, so she bent a little backwards to pick up what now worried him.

  “Alert,” was all she heard, because the radio was practically covered by Dan’s hair. “Credible threat” and “subway.”

  For a second, sneering, Allie shook it off. How weird was Dan, cruising through stations until he found something to upset him – which he could then, what, disarm with his anxiety? What a nerd he was. But then she saw him spin the station again and then again, and each time the information was the same.

  “Trusted source . . . Below ground . . . Possible bombs . . .”

  Now the fact that every voice said the same thing seemed more disturbing than tedious; it was a bulletin their obligation to report, a repetition for everyone’s own good. Allie slowly felt the awful heat around her head replaced by a kind of cold, as if someone had rubbed an ice cube on her, the way her mother would in the summer when she was small.

  She missed her mother terribly now, and her father, too. Ninety miles north seemed the space from where she stood to a star in the sky. It would take her a thousand years to get home, and a different species would have evolved there by the time she arrived. She was trapped.

  When Allie looked at the faces flying or trudging past, she couldn’t help but add another element to their expressions: an awareness in their eyes that something awful was around them, a threat that loomed above like a giant bird from a bad horror movie, its massive wings spreading and obscuring the sun. (It was just a coincidence but a convenient one that a cloud – the first of the day – had just passed over.) She refused to feel compassion for them; indeed her contempt grew – or did it drop? – to a new degree. What did you expect, living here? Don’t come crying to me! In other words, she placed her own panic and her hatred of it in herself on them.