Yes, New Orleans, his city of sex.
Endless walks through the small streets between hotel room episodes. Invigorating breakfasts of beignets and coffee and ice-cold orange juice at the Café du Monde; oysters and thick, syrupy gumbo at The Pearl off Canal Street; loitering hand in hand in the farmer’s market full of the smell of spices and seafood, chewing on garlic-flavoured pistachio nuts; obscene mounds of boiled crawfish at Lemoyne’s Landing; hunting for vintage paperbacks through the dusty shelves at Beckham’s; po’boys at the Napoleon House; zydeco rhythms at the House of Blues; a routine he could live on for days on end. Until he would tire of the woman, because she bored him once past the mechanics of fornication, never said the right thing or talked too much or simply because she wasn’t the woman he really wanted to be with in New Orleans.
There had been Lisa, the software executive; Clare, a lawyer who looked like Anne Frank had she ever grown up, and liked to be handled roughly; Pamela Jane, the investment banker he had met at the hotel bar who wanted to be a writer and Helene the biology teacher from Montreal. He didn’t feel he was being promiscuous; four women in six years since Kathryn. Some he had found here, others he had brought.
But somehow none had fitted in with this strange city and, even though the sex had been loose and fun, and the company never less than pleasant, there had been something lacking. Even at midnight, buckling under his thrusts on bed or floor or sucking him off under the water streams of the shower, he knew they were creatures of the day, anonymous, predictable; they had no touch of the night, no share of darkness. And darkness was what he sought. In women. In New Orleans. What he knew he had once detected under Kathryn’s fulsome exterior.
He had high hopes for Susi.
She was Austrian, in her late twenties, and worked in a managerial capacity for a travel agency in Vienna, which made it easier (and cheaper) for her to jump on a plane for purposes of pleasure.
They had met in New York some months earlier. It was Spring and the weather was appalling for the season. The rain poured down in buckets and all Manhattan was grid-locked like only New York can manage. He’d been in town promoting a book and negotiating the next contract with his publishers there (he never used an agent) and was booked on an evening flight back to London. He’d been staying, as usual, at a hotel down by the Village, off Washington Square. He had booked a car to JFK and it was already half an hour late. They had checked at reception and found out that the driver was still blocked in traffic near Central Park and Columbus Circle. He had promptly cancelled the car and rushed with his suitcase to the hotel’s front steps to hail a yellow cab. They were few and far between and he wasn’t the only hotel guest heading for the airport. Both he and the tall, slim red-headed woman went for the same cab which declined the airport ride pretexting the conditions. They agreed to share the next cab to come along. She was even later than him, as her flight preceded his by twenty minutes.
“My name is Susanne, but my friends call me Susi with an i,” she had introduced herself as the driver made his slow way towards the Midtown Tunnel.
Despite clever shortcuts through Queens, the journey took well over an hour and a quarter, so they had much opportunity to talk as they inched towards their planes. She had been in town for a week, visiting her parents who both worked as diplomats for one of the big international organisations.
She did miss her flight, while he caught his with a few minutes to spare. E-mail addresses were exchanged and they had remained in touch since.
They had quickly become intimate. He’d sent her one of his books and she had remarked on the sexual nature of many of his stories and confessed to some of her own sexual quirks. She was an exhibitionist. Would sometimes take the subway back in Vienna dressed in a particularly short skirt and without underwear and allow men to spy on her genitals. She was shaven, so they had a full view of her naked mound. She was also in the habit of masturbating in parks, where she could be seen by passers-by, actually encouraged voyeurs to do so and knew that, sometimes, men were jerking off watching her just a few metres away.
She would pretend her name was Lolita. He asked her why.
Because she had little in the way of breasts and her bare pubis evoked a child or a doll, she answered. She was submissive by nature, she told him.
She sent him a series of photographs taken by an ex-boyfriend she had broken up with shortly before the New York trip. He found them wonderfully provocative in a tender sort of way. In the first, her long, skinny frame stood in contrast to the sluttish, traditional black lingerie of embroidered knickers, suspender belt and stockings almost a size too big for her. Yes, she had no breasts, barely a hillock worth of elevation and no cleavage and, he imagined (the photographs were all black and white), pale pink nipples like a gentle stain in the landscape of her flesh. Her hair was a bit longer than when she had been in New York, her eyes dead to the world. In the second photograph – he could guess the sequence they had been taken in, pruriently imagined what the boyfriend in question had made her do, perform, submit to, after the camera had been set aside – she was now squatting only clad in suspender belt and stockings, her cunt in sharp focus, lips ever so ready to open, her head thrown back so you could barely recognise her features. Photograph number three saw her spread-eagled over a Persian carpet and parquet floor, one arm in the air, both legs straight, holding herself up by one arm, like a gymnast, her face in profile, a most elegant and beautiful vision of nudity with no hint of obscenity at all, her body like a fine-tuned machine, a sculpture. In the fourth, she was standing and the photographer had shot away from crotch level and her body was deformed like in a hall of mirrors by the skewed perspective, the focus on her enlarged midriff. The one thing that struck him as he kept on examining the photos on his laptop screen was how her sex-lips didn’t part and how he wished to see inside her. The final photograph she had sent him (were there more? more explicit or extreme? she had answered that others were just out of focus but his imagination as ever played wildly on) was both the sexiest and the most vulgar. She was on all fours, her arse raised towards the camera in a fuck-me pose, long legs bent, rear a bit bony, the line of her cunt-lips straight as a ruler and continued by her arse-crack and darker hole. Every time he looked at this one, he couldn’t help getting hard. And he knew that she enjoyed knowing that.
He told her about the delights of New Orleans and invited her to join him there one day.
To explore possibilities, he said.
Initially, she only said maybe.
But he persisted, courting her with a modicum of elegance and she agreed. It took a couple of months to find a week when both could free themselves from previous commitments (ah, the sheer logistics of lust!) and arrangements were made. Flights to New York were coordinated – her job came in useful – and they both arrived in Newark an hour or so apart. Neither flight was delayed.
Curiously enough, there are no direct flights between New York and New Orleans and their connection went via Raleigh-Durham.
As they emerged from the airport luggage area, Susi smelled the heat that now surrounded them like a blanket and turned towards him, kissed him gently on the cheek and said: “I just know I’m going to like it here . . . Thanks ever so much for bringing me.”
By the time the taxi dropped them off at the small hotel he had booked on Burgundy it was already dark.
It was summer. Moist, no wind from the Gulf, the air heavy with the powers of the night, the remains of the day lingering in patchy clouds, they were both sweating, their bodies not yet acclimatised.
They dropped their bags and he switched the air-conditioning a notch higher and suggested a shower.
He undressed her. Now she was no longer black and white. The nipples were a darker pink, closer to red than he imagined and darkened a shade further when he kissed them. Her pale body was like porcelain.
Long, thin, exquisitely supple. Since Kathryn, none of the other women, here or elsewhere had been anywhere as tall. He escorted Susi to t
he shower cubicle and switched the water on. She looked at his cock, growing slowly at the sheer sight of her nudity. He soaped her with infinite delicacy and tenderness and explored her body under guise of washing, refreshing her from the transatlantic journey and its grime and tiredness. He fell to his knees and wiped the suds away from her crotch. Her gash staring red against the mottled pinkness of her pubic mound. She hadn’t shaved there for a week or so; they had agreed she would let him shave her clean. A delight he had long fantasised about. He parted her thin lips, like opening a rare flower and darted his tongue inside to taste her. Susi shuddered.
The first time was good.
They were shy, affectionate, slow, tentative, testing pleasure points and limits with great delicacy.
She was extremely self-conscious of her lack of opulence breast-wise and he lavished particular care on her there, sucking, licking, nibbling, fingering her with casual precision until he caught the precise pulse of her pleasure behind the gentle swell of her darkening nipples.
They came closely together. Silently.
The later days filled quickly between wet embraces and ever more feverish fucks as they grew used to each other’s quirks and secret desires. She had always wanted to take a riverboat down the Mississippi and they spent a day doing so, passing the civil war mansions and lawns and observing the rare crocodiles still lingering in the musty bayous. Just like tourists. Which they were. Sexual tourists with, so far, no taste for the local fare. Breezing down Magazine Street in mid-afternoon as the antique shops reopened for business.
Taking a streetcar to the Garden District. Lingering, with verbose guides, in the atmospheric cemeteries, with their ornate crypts and walls of bones. Visiting the voodoo Museum, trying to repress their unceremonious giggles. He, covertly fingering signed first editions at the Faulkner House.
Susi never wore a bra – she had no need for one – and neither did she slip knickers on when they would go out walking. Long, flowing, thin skirts revealing the shape of her legs when she faced the sun, only he knowing how unfettered her cunt-lips were beneath the fabric, sometimes even imagining he could smell her inner fragrance as they walked along hand in hand and conjuring up the thoughts of other, lubricious men passing by had they known of her naked vulnerability. It turned him on, this constant availability of hers, this exhibitionistic desire to provoke. Walking along Decatur, passing one of the horse-drawn carriages waiting there for tourists, a dog held in leash by a small black child wagged a tail frantically and brushed against Susi’s leg. He smiled. She asked him why.
“He could smell your cunt,” he said.
“Do you think so?” she remarked, her eyes all wide.
“Yes,” he told her. “You smell of sex. Strongly.”
Her face went all red, approximating the shade of her short bob, and as he watched the flush spread to her chest and beneath the thin silk blouse.
“It turned him on,” he said.
“Oh . . .”
“And me too, knowing how naked you are under those thin, light clothes,” he added.
She smiled.
Later, back in their hotel room, she insisted they keep the curtains open when they made love, knowing any passing maid or room-service staff might see them in the throes of sex as they walked past on the steps outside the window and, as he moved frantically inside her, he saw she kept her eyes open, was actually hoping they would be seen. The idea excited her.
The same night, a few blocks before Bourbon, she suddenly said:
“I have to pee.”
They’d only left the hotel a hundred yards or so ago, so she must have known the need would arise. He offered to go back to the room.
“No,” she said. “The side street there. That will do.”
It was dark, no one around, although the risk of passers-by emerging off Toulouse was likely.
Susi pulled her long skirt upwards and bunched it around her waist, her thin, unending legs bursting into pale view, the plumpness of her cunt in full display under the light from the illuminated wrought iron balcony above them and squatted down. He watched, hypnotised, as the hot stream of urine burst through her labia and splashed onto the New Orleans stone pavement. Her eyes darted towards the main street, almost begging for someone to come by. None did. Her bladder empty, she rose to her feet, the skirt still held above her waist in insolent provocation.
“It’s a bit wet,” she said to him. “Would you dry me?”
He got down on his knees, wiped her cunt-lips clean with the back of his hand then impulsively licked her briefly. Her clit was hard, swollen. Susi was in heat.
“Fuck me here,” she asked him. “I don’t mind if people see us.”
“I can’t,” he said. “We’ve only just got out of bed. I don’t think I could get hard enough again so quickly.”
Susi glanced at him with disapproval.
She dropped the folds of her dress.
They began talking.
“Does it turn you on?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“What is it? A feeling of control over people, men, that they can see you but not touch?”
“I don’t know,” Susi remarked. “My body is nothing special, but I love to show myself. Gives me meaning. It’s a bit confusing.”
“Your body’s great. You shouldn’t underestimate yourself,” he answered. “But you must be careful. On the nude beach outside Vienna, with your girlfriend along, there’s an element of safety, but elsewhere it could be risky, you know.”
“Yes.”
“Some people could read other things into your need to exhibit yourself. You could get yourself raped.”
“I know,” Susi answered, with a slight sigh in her voice. “Sometimes, I even imagine what it would be like. Several men.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Five of them. First they fuck my every hole, then I am made to kneel, still naked, at their feet and they all jerk off and come in my face and hair.”
“A bit extreme . . .”
“I know . . .”
He tried to lighten the mood. Already feeling anxious in premonition as the darkness neared.
“The ultimate facial treatment. Better than soap!”
Susi laughed and led the way back towards Bourbon Street.
He described how Bourbon Street would be when Mardi-Gras came. The noise, the coloured beads, the floats, the beer, the wonderfully hedonistic atmosphere that gripped the whole French Quarter, the fever that rose insidiously as the alcohol loosened inhibitions and the music from the bars of either side of the street grew in loudness, competing rhythms crisscrossing on every corner, clouding minds and bodies.
How the revellers on the balconies would bait the walkers below, sprinkling them with drink, offering beads for the flash of a nipple or a quickly-bared backside to massive roars of approval from the wild crowds.
He could see Susi’s eyes light up. Yes, she would enjoy Carnival here. No longer requiring an excuse to bare her parts to one and all and the more the merrier.
“And what happens behind doors?” she asked him. He shuddered to think. He’d only ever stayed in New Orleans for the first night of Mardi-Gras. Had heard mad rumours of uncontrollable excess, of sex in the streets. He’d once come across a range of video cassettes in a 7th Avenue porn joint in New York documenting the sexual side of Mardi-Gras here year after year. But, like with wine, he was unaware which were the good years or the bad years and had never sampled any of the cassettes in question.
His mind and imagination raced forward. To a clandestine video cassette in a white box and Polaroid cover shot of Susi’s porcelain-white body, face covered with come, labelled “SUSANNE ‘LOLITA’ WIEN, MARDI-GRAS 1999”. A vintage performance, no doubt.
Bourbon Street night deepened as the beer flowed ever more freely, spilling into the gutters from plastic cups being carried up and down the street by the Saturday night-revellers. The music surging from all around grew louder, the lights more aggressive and the crowds sway
ed uncertainly. Young kids tapped away for a few cents or break-danced outside the bars, the neon signs of the strip clubs entered battle, pitting male strippers against female ones, topless joints against bottomless ones. A row of mechanical legs danced a can can from the top of a bar window, advertising further displays of flesh inside.
Susi was curious.
“I’ve never been to a striptease place before. Can we?”
“Why not?” he acquiesced.
They entered the dark bar. A woman down to a shining lamé bikini was dancing around a metal pole at its centre. A few men sat by the stage desultorily sipping from half-empty glasses. They ordered their drinks from a sultry waitress and watched the stripper shed her bra with a brief flourish. The performance was uninspiring and the most exciting thing about the dancer for him was her gold navel ring which gleamed in the fluctuating light. His mind went walkabout as he tried to recognise the rock and roll tune she was, badly, dancing to.
Several shimmies and swirls later, and a liberal shake of silicon-enhanced mammaries exposed, the song (some country and western standard given an electric and gloom Americana twist) came to an end and the stripper quickly bowed, picking up a few stray dollar notes thrown onto the stage by the isolated punters on her way off.
“Is that all?” Susi turned to him, asking.
“I think so,” he said.
“But it’s not even bottomless. She didn’t even show her cunt!”
“Maybe because it’s a bar. I don’t know,” he said, “there must be some local bye-laws or something. Don’t know much about the rules in American strip clubs,” he continued, surprised by Susi’s interest.
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