Objects of Desire

by Roberta Latow

  ‘As a friend.’

  ‘She has no women friends.’

  ‘Neither have I.’

  ‘I find that very sad. Then you too must have a secret buried very deep, one you want no one to know about. I have always found that people who don’t want friends and can barely tolerate acquaintances are usually maintaining distance so as not to be discovered.’

  ‘You may be wrong.’

  ‘I’m sorry Page wouldn’t join us. Are you?’ Again the sexual connotations, the sensual look in his eye.

  ‘In truth?’ Anoushka teased.

  ‘In truth,’ he answered her, taking her hand in his, raising it to his mouth and licking the centre of her palm delicately with pointed tongue.

  Anoushka closed her eyes, savouring the kiss, the feel of his lips against her skin. How hungry she was for him to make love to her. All thoughts of Page vanished. Orgasm and that moment of sexual ecstasy that could be so true and pure, only that was on her mind now.

  ‘No. I want you all to myself. For you to take me and no other woman this afternoon. A libertine you call yourself?’

  He rose from his chair and, still holding her hand, pulled Anoushka from hers. They stood looking at each other for several seconds. A flower lady passed by them and held out a small bunch of violets. Hervé let go of Anoushka’s hand long enough to select several bunches for her. He was leading her through the maze of tables and people, and when they stepped on to the pavement in front of the café, turned to her and said, ‘Nothing will be the same for you after today.’

  He needn’t have said anything. Anoushka knew that already.

  Page had two things to do that afternoon. One was to place an ad in the International Herald Tribune and the other was to say goodbye to François. Page had been saying goodbye to François for five years now, and though he didn’t believe it, this time was to be the final farewell.

  He had picked Page up at a party at the Eden Roc in Cap d’Antibes. He had actually tried to snatch her away from a friend of his, but Page would never give up Jean-Paul, nor any other man she fancied, to live exclusively with François. French high society was appalled that he should be besotted by a mere florist, someone in trade. A man of his breeding, taste and intelligence! He was a cultivated man of great inherited wealth, and patron of the arts, with a beautiful wife, children, mistresses, and a reputation as a lover of beautiful, intelligent women. Neither François nor Page cared to make their on-again, off-again sexual trysts particularly public; privacy suited them both. She floated in and out of his life as and when she chose. There was gossip, but discreet gossip, about their sexual preferences, but the French care little about sexual scandal, it has no real meaning for them. A man’s preference is a man’s private affair. Whereas across the Channel in England, sexual indiscretion discovered means scandal and disgrace.

  Page had had many lovers from all walks of life. A biker or millionaire, plumber or solicitor, judge or doctor – they were all fitting objects of her desire. She was a self-made woman who had crawled her way out of poverty by dint of her good looks and ambition. The Page Cooper of today could not have grown wealthy and worldly, sophisticated and a success story, without the business tips she gathered from the men she had become involved with. She used her men the way most men use women: for sexual pleasure, to pave an easier passage through life, to wear them on her arm as a badge of success. Page’s life: a rewarding business success story, lovers she could not love, a crippled personal life because she could not have the one man she wanted.

  Loveless promiscuity had been her personal life, ten years of it, a long run, before she realised that it was no longer enough for her. An endless stream of attractive men and great sex had given her snatches of pleasure but did nothing to quiet the emptiness and despair that haunted her soul. She had never buried the past, the past had buried her. At last she had to admit a need to create a new and better life for herself was upon her. And she had every intention of doing just that, even if it did mean she had to drop the torch she had carried for Oscar. Give up the dream that one day the one and only love of her life would return.

  François had a magnificent eighteenth-century house and gardens near the British Embassy, almost next-door to the Rothschilds, and a house in the Place de Vosges. He called it his play house. The Place de Vosges house was where Page was headed. People whispered about François’s play house, how he kept it as his very private hideaway. Powerful and wealthy people have a way of ensuring their own privacy. François was a master of the art. People said about him that after he survived his heart operation, he changed. His near-death experience gave him an even greater appreciation of life than he already had. He was even more kind and generous to his friends and family, but now lived in a world of his own as well. One where he denied himself nothing, lived for the thrill of the moment as if there were no tomorrow. All of which was true.

  The butler let Page in, and she was shown to the first-floor drawing room. There she found François, Jean-Paul, and another admirer of hers, a man twenty years younger than his host and host’s friend.

  ‘The founding members of the Broken Heart Club,’ François quipped.

  ‘Take pity on us, Page, we hate to lose you,’ said Jean-Paul.

  ‘So you’ve banded together?’

  ‘Only to give you a farewell party,’ said the young man, Timothy, who went directly to her to place an arm round her and kiss her sexily on the lips.

  The four had had a party before, several times. Page was aware that this one had been arranged by François because of the three he was the only one who believed that if she did walk away from them it would be forever. A parting party he had suggested to her. All three men knew how much she enjoyed being held in the arms of one man who caressed her, while another sucked on her breasts and a third took possession of her with his penis. Nothing was more exciting for Page sexually than to have men such as these who adored her, loved and respected her, make love to her, take her sexually one after the other, changing places so smoothly that she hardly knew where one man began and another left off. A night of one long fuck, such as few women ever have.

  Each of them in their own right was a virile lover with endless stamina for sex and orgasm. Page could expect sexual oblivion, and long and exquisite orgasms to match theirs, but it would be she who would have to beg them to stop, she who would be worn out by an afternoon and night of coming. They would feed her, care for her to keep her from fainting with exhaustion from her own many orgasms. There would come a time during their orgy when she would at last lose herself in sex, become no more than an object of sexual desire, when all thought was gone and animal instinct drove her libido.

  These men understood her, loved her for her passion for all things sexual, her appetite for men’s seed and desire to taste it, to be filled by it, till it flowed from every orifice of her body. The excitement of having three men at a time, their thrusting penises, the several orgasms each would issue, was thrilling for her as it was for them. Four people who worked in sex as one. Her obvious pleasure ruined them for sex with other women who loved it less, who played games of: ‘Oh, no. Oh, yes. Well, maybe I do like sex.’

  Page held her men enthralled because no matter how much she gave sexually with men, as a friend, as a lover, as a whore in bed, she held something back. There was always something more to be had from her that she kept, they believed saved, for some mystery man in her life. It was what each of them wanted from her though they knew it would never be theirs. It was impossible to hate Page. Had it not been these two Frenchmen and the young American would have, for being unable to capture her heart. Instead they loved her and feared the loss of her, every time she walked away from them.

  Because Page had made it quite clear that she wanted nothing but what she had sexually with François, Timothy and Jean-Paul, they had each been generous with gifts to her, but cautious in their generosity for fear she might feel compromised and drop them. The three men were aware that there was no future fo
r them with Page, either together as libertines or individually as lovers, in anything like a permanent relationship. They suffered her promiscuity, more so because each of them sensed, to their sadness, that one day there would be a single man who would capture Page’s heart. Or already had.

  They began their afternoon party with champagne and ended it with breakfast in the yellow dining room overlooking the Place de Vosges. Page was dressed in a cream-coloured diaphanous dressing gown of the finest silk, spun as sheer as a spider’s web and trimmed in heavy cream-coloured lace – a gift from François that she kept with several other gowns in his house. It showed off her body seductively. The full breasts so high and firm, the narrow waist and flat tummy, the rounded bottom and just the right amount of flesh on the hips, the long shapely legs and comely thighs. Her skin, so taut and smooth as satin, was the colour of thick Devonshire cream. She was woman made perfect from her graceful hands to her long slender feet. A luscious woman physically, with the personality of a femme fatal. Not the least and possibly the most beautiful and seductive thing about Page was her face, how she used it to give people pleasure: a smile to enchant, a twinkle in the eye to bring light to people’s lives, lips that were sensual but sweet, so very kissable. A face of sugar and fire. Men and women alike were intrigued by the way Page moved: with grace and sensuality. It was in her walk, the manner in which she sat, crossed her legs, used her arms and hands. Even her shoulders. François had often told her she spoke with her shoulders.

  The four were silent over breakfast. As they consumed strawberries and crème fraîche, eggs scrambled in black butter and garnished with truffles, brioche, and paper-thin slices of ham, puff pastries spread with peach preserve, the occasional word or smile seemed sufficient. Everything they had had to say or express to each other had been accomplished during their many hours lost in sexual abandon. These were people bound together in lust. What need for mere words?

  Page rose from her chair and walked to stand behind the still seated François. She placed a hand on his shoulder. He took it in his and brought it round to kiss it, then placed it delicately back where it had been. She bent her head and kissed the top of his. Next she moved over to stand behind Jean-Paul. She grazed his cheek with the back of her hand and then turned his head round to kiss him sweetly on the lips. Timothy scraped back his chair and turned to look at her. She sat down on his lap and raised his hand, opened it and kissed the palm. Then she rose and told her swains, ‘I’ll be back,’ and walked from the room.

  François reached for another brioche. Timothy rose from his chair with the coffee pot and walked round the table refilling empty cups.

  ‘And my mistress Mai Choo thinks she is the great courtesan of the 90s,’ was François’s only comment on Page’s exit.

  Timothy placed the silver coffee pot back on the table and went to the window. ‘She’s more than that,’ he said, still with his back to the other two men.

  ‘Of course she’s more than that,’ said Jean-Paul, ‘and that’s what makes her great. She is a most unusual woman, a courtesan without a patron. Page manipulates men magnificently for her own means. All of us in this room and how many other men can testify to that?’ There was admiration, not criticism, in his voice.

  Timothy returned to sit at the table. ‘I love her. I want to marry her but she won’t have me.’

  François laughed.

  ‘Are you laughing at me, François?’

  ‘No, I’m laughing at the situation. You see, Timothy, we too have been where you are now. We love her just as much as you do.’

  He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I’m not going to get upset about this notion of hers to turn her back on us and strike out for a new life. How many times before has she said she was leaving us?’

  The men fell silent again. Jean-Paul concentrated on his food or at least seemed to be. Now it was François who rose from the table to stand by the window looking down into the Place de Vosges. After several minutes he rang for the butler and asked for a chilled bottle of champagne, vintage Louis Roederer Cristal Brut, and a jug of white peach juice. Returning to his seat once more after serving himself with more scrambled egg from a silver chafing dish on the console set against the wall, he looked across the table to his friends and remarked, ‘One of the many things about Page is that she always leaves us hungry for more.’

  The three men had to laugh at themselves; they were not easily besotted by women. Their laughter seemed to change the subject and somehow bring them back from their erotic reverie into the present. They spoke of politics. Timothy, a political journalist based in Paris but writing exclusively for an American news magazine, always had political tidbits to offer for the interest of his two older friends.

  The three had become good friends, bound together in their lust for womanising, and especially because of their partying with Page. They were neither bisexual nor homosexual, yet through their partying with her had learned the excitement of each other’s bodies, gained added pleasure from knowing intimately each other’s sexuality.

  The Place de Vosges, a series of handsome, much sought after Paris town houses where once the kings of France’s courtiers and favourites lived, was quiet. Every street was muffled, registering as an intrusion on this special sunny rectangle in the midst of Paris. The quiet in the house, as in the square, made every sound seem significant.

  François was the first to hear the tap of her heels on the stairs, then passing the dining room, the front door opening and closing. ‘She hasn’t said goodbye. Page said she would be back,’ said Timothy.

  ‘But she never said when.’ That was François.

  Several minutes of silence and then Timothy broke it. ‘I must go.’

  ‘And so must I,’ added Jean-Paul.

  François told his guests, ‘You won’t find her, you know. She will have arranged to have a cab waiting close by.’

  ‘I didn’t expect to,’ said Timothy, and went to his host. François rose from his chair as Timothy extended his hand and offered an invitation. ‘Come to lunch with me? Tomorrow at the Grand Véfours, a thank you for your hospitality, for the best times of my life.’

  François had been correct, Page had called for a taxi from his bedroom phone and as she rode away in it from the Place de Vosges into the morning traffic, she looked at the cars and the people, the beauty of the buildings and the glamour of the shops, the chestnut trees just bursting into bloom, the twisted and tortured plane trees turning green with newborn leaves, and understood how finite all this was for her.

  She felt happy, a new kind of joy surging from the depths of her soul. Not since the days when she and Oscar had been in love had she felt anything like this. She rolled down the windows and took deep draughts of air to fill her lungs. Slowly breathing out, she felt herself letting go.

  A sense of gratitude for everything she had accomplished, for everything she had been in her life, was there – the good and the bad. Like some invisible shawl, who and what she was wrapped itself around her, embraced her, and she knew that whatever paths she had taken to get where she was with herself, right or wrong, she had done the best that she could and had no regrets. Of the many men who had come and gone in her life, François, Jean-Paul and Timothy, even Hervé, were the men who understood her best, accepted and loved her for what she was, and what she would never be. Never had she felt as deep an affection for them as she did riding away from them and the erotic world they had created for her. Perverse? Maybe so. But that was how she felt.

  The sexual party, orgy if you will, such as she had experienced with them the evening before, was still very exciting to her, as fresh and new as it had been the very first time. Sex without guilt, without strings attached or having to pretend. Sex with no past to consider or future to be concerned about. Adoring men and a constant flow of sexual oblivion experienced almost to death could still thrill. But there was more for Page: sex as good as she had had last night but with one man whom she could love – that was still missing from her l
ife. She had tasted it once and that had spoiled her forever. What was this extraordinary life she had carved out for herself if she could not love again?

  From her handbag, Page took her mobile telephone and punched in Hervé’s telephone. His assistant Sylvie answered.

  ‘Sylvie, this is Page Cooper, I must speak to Hervé.’

  ‘He’s setting up for a shoot, you know how he is. No calls when he’s working.’

  ‘Tell him he must take my call.’

  Seconds later Hervé was on the telephone. ‘This had better be good, Page.’

  ‘I need a favour, Hervé.’

  The tone of annoyance vanished immediately. ‘Of course.’

  Page smiled to herself. That was Hervé. No questions asked. A real friend, a great lover. ‘You’ve always wanted to photograph me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now. Now, Hervé, please. I’m leaving Paris this afternoon. I will need three prints, and I want to look wonderful. I need them. They’re farewell gifts, thank you notes, mementoes of me … call them what you will. I want to give them to three special friends.’

  ‘I’m photographing a princess who for security reasons shall remain nameless. A Vogue cover shoot. It’s supposed to happen in an hour’s time but she’ll be late, her plane has only just taken off from London. So get over here now, Page, and I mean now, and we’ll have a great time doing it.’

  ‘Hervé, we’re just heading for the Pont Neuf. I want the real thing, the grand Hervé portrait – hairdressers, make-up men, dressers, the lot.’

  He laughed. ‘So I am at last going to catch you, make you mine forever. Your timing is perfect. The hairdressers are here, and the make-up man, and a rackful of clothes. The dressers are waiting round drinking coffee and doing nothing. After all these years of my begging to snap you, and your distaste for being photographed, what’s suddenly changed your mind?’