Just as Charles and I were digging in our wallets for the twenty-dollar membership fee a sign on the counter asked for, a man who was obviously in charge stepped from behind the curtain and waved us in. Vy introduced him as Bob, the manager. He wore a thick moustache and a three-piece suit.
“I’m president of this lady’s fan club,” he told us proudly, taking her hand and pressing it to his heart.
Inside, we stood around chatting for a while, blinking in the darkness. Clever track lighting and plenty of candles illuminated an intimate stage set. To our right, a gleaming oak bar was tended by female bartenders in T-shirts and satin shorts. Across from it and on a higher level was a carpeted lounge that led to a small mirrored disco floor. A young, lively looking crowd filled the moulded plastic booths.
I saw two Lacoste shirts, I swear it. The men who wore them had long blow-dried blond hair and they glowed with sun and good health. Tourists. Sitting with them were two of the most luscious-looking college girls I’d ever had the pleasure of ogling from afar.
I nudged Charles, to point them out, but he was focused on Johanna. He couldn’t take his eyes off the way she wiggled her behind on the bar stool, alternately flirting and scowling and sipping Scotch. Vy and Mora stood on the other side of her at the end of the bar, foreheads pressed together as they compared notes on the people they saw.
“She’s a heartbreaker,” he sighed.
“She’s drunk, too. But look over there – it’s the flesh God promised us. In our adolescent fantasies.”
He studied them sceptically.
“I grant you that they are flowers of young American womanhood, but they’re also tourists. They’ll sit and watch and look decorative and, after they’ve got excited, they’ll go home with the guys they came with. Mark my words – they won’t even leave a trail of smoke behind them.”
“I’m going to talk to them a little later.”
“God bless. They’ll write in their diaries about you.”
We were in the way of incoming traffic. A dozen attractive couples passed the bar, conscious of being on display. There was a lot of eye contact and body movement, but I didn’t see anybody as good-looking as the college girls. I sipped my drink and thought about them, trying out and discarding various introductory lines in my mind, telling myself to be bold, that I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by approaching one of them.
A man who was probably telling himself the same thing walked up to Vy and Mora and got brushed off, but he didn’t even pause to acknowledge defeat before moving on to Johanna, who practically jumped into his arms. As he led her off towards the back room, she turned and winked at Charles.
“Perfidious bitch,” Charles muttered after her.
“Let’s go talk to Mora and Vy. We’ll all go into the back room.”
But they wanted to dance.
We moved onto the dance floor, and let a Rod Stewart song lead us around the polyurethaned oak floorboards beneath the silk parachute canopy. The floor-to-ceiling mirrors multiplied our images as we shook our bodies and whirled about.
Dancing loosened me up. When the music stopped, I sat on a carpeted step, aware that the college girls were right above me. I wasn’t surprised when Mora danced Charles off the floor and through the curtains into the back room.
Vy joined me on the step, sitting with her elbows on her knees.
“I’m tired. Maybe it’s just jet lag, but I can’t boogie the way I used to.”
“Dancing is a warm-up exercise for the real thing.”
I put my arm around her shoulders and she looked down at my hand for a long moment before covering my fingers with hers.
“And how do you like Night Moves?”
“It’s not a circus, like Plato’s. It’s just the right size.”
“This is the first time I’ve dared to bring Charles here. He’s been funny since I got back, anyway.”
“Funny?”
“Different. He didn’t want me to go to England – almost as if he’s jealous and can’t talk about it. I think he wants to punish me, but he doesn’t know how to go about it.”
I thought about her relationship with Maurice, her reputation as a dominatrix, and said something I immediately regretted.
“You could teach him about punishment, couldn’t you?”
She was stung. “Don’t be a son of a bitch, Richard.”
“I can’t help thinking about that bag of yours. And Maurice.”
She pushed my arm from her shoulder and stood up. Her eyes were cold. “I thought . . . Well, never mind what I thought. I don’t have to explain myself to anyone. Not even you, Richard.”
Before I could say anything – and if I could have grabbed my words from her ears and crushed them underfoot, I would have – she squared her shoulders and strode across the dance floor, straight into the back room.
I sighed and stood up, just as one of the college girls passed me, trailed by the blandly smiling Lacoste shirts. The three of them started to jiggle and strut and I decided, what the hell, and approached the remaining college girl. I bent over to whisper in her pink, shell-like ear, blowing aside wisps of soft gold hair.
“I like the way you look. You are so special, it takes my breath away. I would love to . . .”
I have to give her credit for a classy brush-off. Without looking up, she shook her head slightly and said, “It’s not me you’re looking for.”
I was surprised – and relieved – to find Charles back at the bar. His expression was cloudy. Disappointed.
“I didn’t expect to find you here,” I said, ordering another glass of wine.
“I’m surprised myself. Mora’s hard to hold on to.”
“So what happened?” As if I couldn’t guess.
“The manager, Bob. He saw her and came over to collect on the entrance fee. She went off without a whimper.”
“She’s a woman with a strong sense of duty.” We drank to her.
“I ran into Johanna – actually it was more of a tripping motion – and stopped to say hello.”
“Had she changed her mind about you?”
“She hissed at me like a wet cat.”
“Maybe she’s serious.”
“You know I’m persistent, Richard. I can’t help myself for trying, but I go ahead and try. Know what I said to her? ‘You look best on your knees, giving head.’ ”
“The direct approach. I see.”
He looked around. “I don’t see the college girls.”
“It wasn’t me they were looking for,” I admitted.
“Lord, what makes women so contrary? So . . . ungrateful for our efforts, so closed of heart.”
We might have sung the Chasing Male Blues right there, in the middle of a sexual game park, but Mora interrupted in time to remind us of our opportunities. She slid in between us.
“Why are you sitting out here?”
“Just taking a break, you know.”
“Well, there are a lot of women in the back.”
“What’s Vy up to?” Charles asked. “It must be like old Home Week.”
“Last time I saw her, she was talking to Johanna.”
Charles did a quick double-take at the news. I watched his mind turning over the possibilities, like a hungry raccoon turning stones over in a creekbed. When his curiosity was tickled, he rumpled his hair from back to front, raising a crest above his forehead. His eyes turned heavenward for a sign.
“I wonder what that’s all about . . .”
“Well, let’s go find out,” Mora said, taking our arms as if we were brothers out courting the same young maid, and pointing us to the back room.
Stepping into the back room at Night Moves was like walking into the Arabian Nights. The plush sprawling orgy room seemed fur-lined. We walked across mattresses and around huge pillows on which people lay in every position making love, inhaling the mixed odours of warm flesh, marijuana and tobacco smoke, amyl nitrate and perspiration, perfume and incense. Above the low, throbbing music rose the
sounds of orgasm and of bodies moving together in the dark; the whispered, urgent imprecations of those close to the edge, and the quick, breath-snatching sobs of those who’d gone over it.
I remembered what Mora had said about a secret society of people who liked to make love as much as she did, and I wasn’t surprised when a black hand reached out to circle her ankle. The kid with the smartass eyes who worked the door showed white teeth. Mora smiled, shrugged helplessly at us – noblesse oblige – and allowed herself to be pulled down into the darkness next to him.
We found Vy at the centre of a circle of naked onlookers. She was kneeling beside Johanna, who lay on her side, also naked, her wrists tied behind her with a black silk scarf. There were beads of perspiration on her upper lip and between her heaving breasts, and her pupils were dilated.
“I’m not going to . . .” she sputtered, but Vy put her hand over her mouth, and she stopped.
“There you are, dear. And Richard, too. Johanna has been asking for you. I warned her that you might be busy.”
Johanna shot Charles the fierce look of a victim who is determined that the sacrifice will be conducted according to her own fantasies.
“What made her change her mind?”
“She didn’t. You were always the object of her fancy.”
“Of her hostility, you mean.”
“The more of that, the better.”
I saw then that he recognized what Johanna wanted, what Vy meant, and the wicked anticipation in his eyes made me feel sick with fear and disgust for a minute. I didn’t understand; why wasn’t making love enough?
Did the people watching understand? Or were they, too, just curious about a need greater than theirs?
“You don’t like that, do you?” Vy asked me when we moved to a space of our own, between two massive pillows.
“I don’t understand it. Why isn’t fucking enough?”
I waited for an answer, but she was suddenly impatient with my earnest innocence. I saw pity and scorn mix in her eyes, and – just as suddenly as she’d entered it – she left my life. I was stunned. I expected the floor to open and swallow me. I knew her well enough to know it was a definitive exit.
Looking around at the moving shadows, I wondered wearily why I was there among them. I was overcome by a feeling of lostness. Vacancy. Sitting there in the middle of the orgy, I argued with myself: marriage and freedom. Life sexualized. The sweet power of lust. The evils of jealousy.
Let it be over, I thought. I just wanted to escape, to take Mora home and lock the door. I needed her – and she was my wife. My wife.
I found her with her legs over the black guy’s shoulders, split open for him as he drove deep into her, spanking her ass with each powerful thrust. I kneeled beside them and whispered in her ear, “It’s time to go home.”
EIGHT
I hit her, and she sneezed, but I hit her again, and her head bounced against the metal cyclone fence. It was just before dawn on Ninth Avenue. Bleak, so bleak. There was an excavation behind the fence and I wondered if I had the insane strength to pick her up and throw her into it – and if there was enough loose dirt to bury her with. I hated her with the white-hot intensity of a jealousy freed at last from civilized constraints.
“You motherfucker-bastard-son-of-a-bitch!” she screamed, wailing like an outraged child, rubbing her knuckles over her bruised cheek.
“You had to fuck so much, you couldn’t come with me even at five in the morning?” I shouted, hitting her again.
“Just because you couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse doesn’t mean I have to stop!”
She grabbed my jaw in her strong small hands and twisted my head towards her. “Look at me, Richard! Just look at me! My nose is bleeding and there’s snot . . .”
I pulled out my handkerchief to give to her – like a good husband – and she knocked it to the ground.
“Did you have to yell that I was crazy to the whole club, just because I wanted you to come home with me?” I was so hurt that I thought I would vomit right there at her feet. Self-disgust choked me.
“Fuck you! You bastard, to hit me, fuck you and your feelings! I don’t care how you feel any more!”
She came at me with her fists and feet, pummelling me in the belly and on the chest, kicking my shins.
“All I wanted was for you to come home with me,” I pleaded, holding up both hands to protect myself.
“I was coming, God damn it!”
My eyes filled with hot tears. “But what about us? You love me and I love you, and that should mean something.”
“This is my life, and this is how I want to live it, Richard.”
The morning sun struck her wet face. I couldn’t hit her, and I couldn’t hold her. She wasn’t mine.
“Come home?”
“I can’t stop now. I can’t.”
Movements
Michael Hemmingson
I. Suite for an End to a Marriage
The first time I saw my wife fucking another man, she was by our jacuzzi the night of The Party. I was fairly convinced it would be the last party we’d throw as husband and wife.
Actually, she was with two men. One was a fellow I didn’t know and he was fucking her from behind – his large, hairy hands tightly grasping her hips in an attempt to control the backward thrust of her pelvis as if she were a wild animal. The other one (my best friend) had his dick in her mouth. She was taking this dick down her throat pretty deep, and he was no bigger than myself. She never did that for me. Maybe she never liked my dick; and this is something I could believe, given the recent sour circumstances of our marriage.
“I don’t think I’m in love with you any more,” she told me three months before. I was trying to have sex with her. Her pussy was dry like a dry cunt. Finally she pushed my hand away and said she didn’t want to. We hadn’t made love in quite a while.
“What do you mean?”
“Is it hard to understand?” she said. “How can I illustrate it any better? I don’t think I’m in love with you any more.”
“I see,” I said.
“No,” she said, “you don’t.”
We tried the marriage counsellor routine, and that only proved to drive us further apart, snickering at all the flowery, New Age suggestions the counsellor was trying to sell us.
“What a fucking waste of money,” my wife said.
Her name is Beryl, by the way.
I stood there, looking out the kitchen window, and watched Beryl fuck. The one who was my best friend, his name is Art.
I wasn’t surprised. The night seemed to be heading for this. Beryl was on the warpath to have sex with someone – other than me.
“I’m feeling frisky tonight,” she said when she pulled me aside during The Party.
She was drunk. I told her so.
“So I’m drunk,” she said, “and I’m feeling good.”
I wasn’t feeling good. “Thanks for the information.”
“I just want you to know,” she said, “that I might do something wild, I might do something sexy, and I don’t want you to get in the way.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“I don’t want you to get in the way of my being happy.”
“I won’t,” I said.
It started, I suppose, with her dance – or striptease. She put on some electronic music, the kind that gives me a headache. I don’t know where she got this music. She began to dance, and had an audience of men cheering as she lifted her skirt and flashed her panties; then she opened her blouse and exposed her tits. She had small, pointed, brown breasts. She was a tall, slender woman with long legs and tanned skin and straight blonde hair, a very appealing woman to many men.
“That’s some wife of yours!” someone said to me, slapping me on the back.
“Yeah,” I said.
Beryl had stripped down to her thong. Drunken hands groped for her. One pair of hands belonged to Art. Beryl giggled and ran out back and jumped into the jacuzzi.
Watching her fuck,
I knew it was the hottest sight I’d ever viewed. It was better than watching a porno: this was real.
I wasn’t the only person watching, either. Several men, some I knew, some I didn’t, moved towards the threesome. I moved with them. We were all like mesmerized cattle.
Two months ago I was sitting in a bar with Art. We were on our fourth or fifth drinks.
“I think Beryl and I are getting a divorce,” I said.
“You think?” Art said.
“Probably,” I said. “She doesn’t love me any more.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“She said this.”
“Do you still love her?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I think I do.”
“What went wrong? You two used to be the happy fun couple.”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I think she might be having an affair.”
“You think?”
“I wouldn’t put it past her.”
When Beryl was done with Art and the man I didn’t know, she started having sex with two other men. The Party was becoming something else. Other people departed – old friends giving me strange looks. Someone said, “You didn’t say this was going to turn into an orgy.” It was past one in the morning anyway, the time for most parties to start winding down.
Art, with his clothes back on, passed me.
I grabbed his arm.
“Hey,” he said softly.
I just looked at him.
“We should talk,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
The Party was over, people were gone. Four a.m. I lay in bed, listening to my wife taking a bath. The door was unlocked. I went in. She stared at me. She was sitting in the tub, water and soap all around her. She started to say something, I held up a finger to stop her. I unzipped my pants and showed her my hard prick.
“Do you plan to do something with that?” she said.
“I have some ideas,” I said.
“You look all worked up.”
“I am that,” I said.
“I haven’t seen your dick that bulging and red since . . . since we first met.”
I approached her, my body shaking. “Did you like fucking those men tonight?”
The Mammoth Book of the Best New Erotica Page 27