Mora giggled and clapped a hand over her mouth. She put her left hand on Charles’s knee and her right hand on my thigh and stroked us both. Her face was red, even through her tan.
I don’t know how to explain it, but I was as shocked as if Charles had stroked my nipples. Those weren’t his breasts, they were mine. Mine. But I could tell by the way Mora was breathing that she didn’t agree that marriage had made me a man of property.
We passed dunes tufted with islands of waving sword grass, rows of beach cottages, the potato fields of July, and then I saw the windmill in East Hampton. We drove through the town’s sparkling centre. In the late afternoon light it was still, unreal, a postcard.
“An extraordinary afternoon,” I said in the silence. There was more I wanted to say, but I couldn’t find the words. Mora’s fingers were having the desired effect on me.
I was confused by the male complicity I felt with Charles. When he touched Mora, she became a strange woman we’d picked up together. From then on, two plus one equalled more than three.
FOUR
However shocking or perhaps just plain perverse it may seem, when I saw Mora naked with Charles and Vy it wasn’t jealousy that I felt. It was lust that grew in my belly, like a sapling putting down roots. I knew the voyeur’s stunned delight in achieving erotic perspective. Our nakedness created the illusion that we had entered another dimension, a counter world of the id, where our apprehensions were removed with our clothes and past and future ceased to exist.
Vy’s bedroom was white, but by no means chaste. White walls, white sheepskin rugs on the parquet floor, huge antique mirrors, white vases filled with daisies, and a platform bed on which the three of them sat as if on a tongue sticking out of fluffy clouds, for the silk spread was white, but the sheets underneath were crimson. Satin.
I sauntered around the room, determined to be casual, sipping my brandy and looking at things, conscious of the cool night air on my bare skin. I studied four large framed photographs of Vy on one gleaming white wall, two of them by young fashion photographers I knew. In the portraits, she was elegant and stylish, with formidable cheekbones and a frosty gaze; I didn’t see in them the woman I’d watched kneeling before Charles on the beach.
When I walked over to the bed, Mora and Vy were lying on each side of Charles like houris, watching him stroke himself. His tongue moistened his dry lips, and his strong hands moved slowly from his knees up his firm thighs to his rounded belly. His breath came in shallow gasps. His chest swelled and his nipples pointed. I shivered. We would play a game, a sexual Simon says.
We drew matches and Charles won. He asked that Vy and Mora stretch out between his thighs and handed me the Polaroid. I was happy to hide behind it because I felt flushed and my ears were ringing.
It was the first time I’d seen Mora hesitant about lovemaking; her touch was tentative at first and she followed Vy’s lead. Charles’s swollen flesh glowed wetly in the soft light of a bedside candle. From my new perspective as voyeur, I saw that what was exciting about oral sex was not the mechanics of one person satisfying another, but the selfless art of it, the submission of ego to pleasure. The women’s tongues and fingers worked gently and assiduously; Charles groaned. The phrases that broke from his lips were the mutterings of gratified desire. I waited until they had forgotten the camera before I snapped a picture.
They all blinked and looked around dazedly when the flash went off. Once again; and then it was time to draw matches. Mora’s turn. I was surprised when she moved towards Vy instead of Charles, but when she touched Vy’s breasts, Vy turned her long body to the side.
“Not yet,” she said huskily. “Let me warm up, first.”
Mora smiled as if she’d expected the rebuff, and crawled to Charles, climbing atop him, swivelling her hips to claim his hardness. The two of them flowed into each other.
For a moment then, it hurt like hell. I remembered every time Mora and I had made love, the heat and wetness, our nerves rushing to release, our ragged romantic promises, the closeness of sex during times when we couldn’t even speak to each other. I was drawn to her; I handed Vy the camera and kneeled beside them, kissing Mora and stroking her taut breasts, placing my fingertips on her pubic mound to feel the movement of Charles’s flesh inside her, beneath the soft maidenhair.
The room melted, contracting so that only the bed existed. My hands moved over their bodies, urging them together, teaching Charles about Mora’s responses, sculpting them. When the flashbulb went off, we blinked like animals in the dark.
It was Vy’s turn. “Whoo, boy,” she exclaimed. “This is most extraordinary. Hot, hot, hot.”
“Tell us what you want, before things get out of hand.”
“I want to take Richard into the next room.”
“No pictures?”
“Just the two of us, no silly cameras.”
I was more than a little frightened of Vy. Shyness, I suppose, and the fact that I was attracted to her. The room she took me to was obviously a guest room. Rattan furniture in the shadows, a colourful hand-sewn quilt on a large brass bed, moonlight making patterns on a faded Chinese rug.
We didn’t make it to the bed. I reached for her but she slipped away, onto her knees, and took my flesh into her warm mouth. I thought my knees would fold, and my hands went to her shoulders for support while fire raced up and down my spine. It was over before I could take a deep breath, while my fingers were still caressing her silky hair and finding the secret places of her delicate skull.
I was shaking all over. “Whew!” I breathed after a moment spent looking for my head, which had shot like a rocket to the ceiling. “That was too fast.”
She chuckled, licking her lips like a cat over a saucer of milk. She rose gracefully and shrugged her square shoulders into her caftan. “That calls for a drink,” she said, going into the next room for the brandy.
I was aware of a steady, rhythmic thumping through the wall and wondered for a minute if she’d return. I lighted a hurricane lamp next to the bed and waited. She reappeared with the bottle and two glasses, looking younger and more vulnerable in the flickering light.
“So the doors of marriage creak open,” she said.
“I think you oiled the hinges with that one.”
“Well, I’m good at what I do. I enjoy the power of doing that. It wasn’t until I saw men from that perspective – on my knees, in absolute control of them – that I realized they weren’t omnipotent.”
She was too glib; it had bothered me since our first conversation. She sensed my scepticism. Not about what she’d said, but about her sophistication in regard to swinging.
“I was born this way. No illusions. I look at things in black and white. It’s like not having eyelids.”
I wanted to hold her, to press my body against hers, to feel the length of her thighs on mine, but she sat away from me, smoking one of her cigarettes. Her sharp profile cut through the aromatic blue haze.
“I wish I didn’t love Charles so much, that I could turn it on and off.”
I lifted my glass. “Here’s to marriage.”
She sniffled. She was squinting and her eyes were wet, but that might have been the smoke.
“Marriage? That’s for victims. I don’t intend to be a victim ever again. That’s why I stay with Maurice, even though I know it drives Charles crazy.”
“What have you got against marriage?”
She pouted mock-dramatically.
“His name is James Lee Tait. My used-to-be. Three years of holy wedlock made a sorrowful woman of me. He promised everything – he had the gift of promise, you know? – but in the end it was the same old song and dance.”
“So you divorced him.”
“Not without a lot of turmoil. A woman gets attached to you creatures, and a divorce is like losing . . . your past, maybe your future.”
I wanted to understand. “Do you hate him?”
“No, not really. Let’s just say I envy his get-up-and-gall. I suffered over that. He�
��s a singer, and I waited in the wings of his career and let mine slide; I had my own ambitions.”
“You make marriage sound like a minefield.”
“It’s no picnic. It’s the most dangerous relationship you can have. A contract made in hell.”
“And Charles? How does he fit in?”
“He doesn’t believe in marriage, and he lets me do what I want to do. We have a pact: no apologies. Jimmy was the kind of man who was always saying ‘I’m sorry’ while he was stepping on my feet – but I could have twisted his balls into a daisy chain. Charles, on the other hand, makes no bones about being exactly who he is, and he never apologizes. I don’t expect anything from him, so I’m never disappointed.”
I stretched out in the bed, thinking about marriage, and Mora and Charles in the next room.
“Sorry. I’m rattling on, and I know you’re thinking about Mora. She’s so restless.”
I told her about my first wife, wishing that the scars were visible so I could show her. I tried to explain about Mora. “Sometimes I feel like she’s only mine on loan, that nothing will ever satisfy her.”
“She’s vibrating like a spinning top. Nothing will slow her down; she’s like a natural force. Take it from another woman.”
“I love her. You love Charles. We’re crazy.”
“Charles says two plus two equals twelve.”
“Charles is crazy.”
“I know.”
“But you’d rather be with him right now, wouldn’t you?”
“Well? Wouldn’t you rather be with Mora?”
“That’s not what’s happening.”
“You’re evading the question. I mean, what if Charles fucks her better than you ever did? He’s very good.”
Check. I couldn’t bear any more conversation. I wanted to make love to Vy. It was the only answer I had.
“I can’t,” she protested when I touched her. I put my hand through the opening in her caftan onto her cool stomach. “I absolutely cannot, I’m sorry.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Charles and I made love while you were off looking for Mora before dinner. He’s big, and I’m sore. It’s my background,” she sighed theatrically. “Fair-skinned mothers. Delicate skin. Look here, I’ll show you.”
She opened the caftan and spread her white thighs. “You see the blood?”
The lips of her vulva were irritated and swollen, and there was a tiny drop of blood on her clitoris. Imagine the centre of a rose with a drop of blood on a petal . . .
I found cotton and peroxide in a bathroom medicine cabinet and brought them back without looking in on Charles and Mora. I heard them talking through the closed door and I wanted to eavesdrop, but I wanted to make love to Vy more.
“Your hands are so gentle,” she told me when I wiped away the drop of blood and covered her soreness with Vaseline. The glistening petals of her sex opened beneath my fingers.
“I’ll stop. I promise you. If it hurts, I’ll stop.”
She squirmed evasively when I penetrated her. I stopped, moving again only when she opened to receive me. She whispered hotly in my ear while she licked it with the point of her tongue. “I trust you. No reason, but I do. I know you’ll stop – but please don’t stop now.”
I cupped the plump weight of her buttocks in my palms and let myself be swallowed by her. We got lost in the dialogue of bodies, questioning and answering, alone on a gently rolling sea in the blackest night.
She pulled a yellow popper out of the darkness and crushed it between her fingers, holding the amyl nitrate to my nose and then to her own. We both inhaled deeply and felt our hearts rush to where our genitals were, riding on the cloudy, pungent chemical high like surfers on a wave.
“Oooo!” she cried out, as if in a dream. I heard someone wailing, without realizing it was me. Each wave that took us was bigger than the last, and we were no longer rocking gently but struggling together to stay afloat.
I heard tapping on the floor and looked down to see my fingers doing a fast dance on the wide boards. I was half off the bed and sweat was pouring from me. Vy’s body was arched, a dying swan. There was a roaring in my ears like the ocean at the same time I heard knocking on the door, and then I hit the last, biggest wave and was dragged head over heels into shore. Vy’s whole body clenched and she followed me, digging her nails into the backs of my arms. A high thin noise came from her throat.
When I opened my eyes, Charles was standing over us, naked, grinning, scratching his chest. “Birds would give up a winter’s feed to hit that note,” he said, while Vy shuddered and I navigated the re-entry to consciousness.
“What time is it?”
“Half past four. You two make a lot of noise.”
Mora moved from the shadows to stand beside him, her hand on his shoulder. Her hair was matted and wet and she was ragged around the edges. They looked like weasels who’d been in the chicken coop. There should have been feathers hanging from their swollen satisfied mouths.
“I won’t be able to explain this away tomorrow morning,” Charles said. “I won’t believe it. It was so incredibly high at times. So intense.”
“I guess we did it after all.” Mora smiled tiredly, shaking her head in happy disbelief.
“I don’t know what could be bad about this,” I said.
Vy sat up and stretched, pulling Charles’s hand to her breast. “It was divine, and I love you all, and I don’t know what to say, except that we’ve been very wicked.”
Charles yawned and rubbed his eyes sleepily. Mora came to sit next to me on the rumpled bed that smelled of sex and poppers and cigarettes. We kissed Charles and Vy goodnight with the gentle exhaustion of sated lovers, and Mora and I curled up spoon-fashion on the bed. She was mine again, for a few hours.
Part Two
New York City, 1977
FIVE
In the pictures I developed of the four of us on the beach, our faces are aglow with anticipation and pleasure. Our shyness is not fear of each other, but of the unknown. There are no shadows under our eyes, no tightness around our mouths; no hint of desperation clouds our sunny expressions. Our discovery of adultery was almost painless – and the timing was right.
“I thought I had it figured out,” Mora said when we looked at the wet proofs in my darkroom. “Love and sex and relationship. Marriage – the idea that if you want this, you can’t have that – that was what was wrong with us. Then what happens? We go and break all the rules. We find out that marriage has got corners and angles we didn’t know existed.”
Turn around. We were friends again. The bad habits we had fallen into disappeared overnight, as quickly as rubbing condensation from a window. We were able to treat each other lovingly again. Trust reappeared. Freedom was exhilarating.
Predictably, the few friends – married couples – we told about Charles and Vy thought we’d gone off the deep end. A relationship with one other person was difficult enough, they scoffed. Three was arrogance, asking for it on the chin. None of them raised moral objections and they didn’t ask how we felt: and since we knew their marriages and their reasons for being cynical, we paid no attention to them.
Months after returning from East Hampton, we received a note from Vy. She was in London.
Richard and Mora loves –
Still don’t know what magic you worked.
Let’s get together when I get back
so we can find out. Kisses, Vy Cameron
Curious, Mora called Charles – not without some trepidation, but the phone was her instrument, not mine. I got on the extension.
“Maurice took her over to meet some of his friends,” Charles explained. He sounded lonely by himself in Maurice’s big house, and resentful that Vy had gone off without him. “I guess there’s a party circuit for septuagenarians in the countryside around London. Discreet scenes in the stately homes of England.”
“That lady gets around. I wish I had her style.”
“Come out and see me. We’ll go for
walks on the beach, and spend a lot of time in bed. Just us chickens.”
“It’s the middle of the week, Charles. Richard can’t get away; he has shootings lined up.”
“I didn’t invite Richard.”
She paused and looked at me. “We’re a team, you know that. I wouldn’t go anywhere without him.”
I threw her a kiss, my hand over the receiver.
“Look, the words ‘wedlock’ and ‘hammerlock’ are not synonymous. They don’t add up to virtue. Besides, you’re not just a ‘twosome’, you’re half of a ‘foursome’ – silly words, it sounds like we’re talking about golf . . .”
“I’m sorry—”
“Maybe if you did some homework, since I’m not around to keep things stirred up.”
“What? What kind of homework?”
“Now I’ve got your interest piqued. I’ll mail you your next lesson.” I heard a dry chuckle on the other end.
I broke in. “Come and see us.”
“Oh. There you are, Richard. You should breathe more heavily when you’re spying on people.”
“Mora knew I was on the extension. I trust her, but not you. Why don’t you come visit us?”
“No, I don’t think so. I’m going to hole up out here and try to get some work done. Fasting and abstinence and hard work, that’s the prescription. I’ll be a different man, the next time you see me.”
“Like?”
“Lean and hungry, I suppose, and head over heels in love.”
“You mean because absence makes the heart grow fonder?”
He chuckled again. “Love is what I feel when I want to get laid. Abstinence, that’s what makes the heart grow fonder.”
He wasn’t kidding about our homework. The clipping arrived in the mail two days later. He had cut it from the classified section of a sex tabloid.
The advertisement was for a private club called Plato’s Retreat that had recently opened on lower Fifth Avenue.
The Mammoth Book of the Best New Erotica Page 24