by Marie Wilson
As I approach the table, I swirl my cerulean circle skirt high so he can catch a glimpse of pink and green. He licks his lips and I sit to slurp noodles, sip Sling, twirl cocktail umbrella, gaze into eyes, make contact.
White heat. If the vibrations of om can harmonize the world, the vibrations of his cunnilingus growl can harmonize my soul—not to mention make me come.
I have always craved a partner who embodies all-out animal lust as well as human intelligence and caring. Someone to watch over me; someone to make me thrill to his touch; someone to inspire me. I had begun to think these qualities could never coexist. But here he is, warm mountain lion and wild baboon all in one.
Sizzling. We walk along the busy Saturday-night street, crowded with summery coquettes and jump-jive boys. I steer him into an alleyway and push him against a wall of chaotic graffiti. We kiss, and I feel ease in my muscles and bones. There’s a hush now, the hubbub far away.
Fire escape, light falling in slats, mud puddles, men in shadows, drug deals, the smell of chop suey and cappuccino. We kiss, long and hard. A red light glows through an iron grate; trees push up, defying concrete; garbage, exhaust, overwrought city planning. And two people, just passing through and wrapped in love, blossom.
WANDA
Now, look, baby, “Union” is spelled with five letters.
It is not a four-letter word.
—Dorothy Parker
The cab speeds through the winding cobblestone streets before spitting us out in front of Agent Provocateur. Lingerie on birdcage-like forms, all black bars and feminine curves, adorns the warmly lit window. Inside, turquoise-tulle panties and champagne-satin bras decorate the black-and-cream shop, and mannequins sport garter belts of shiny fuchsia silk. There is a vintage vibe, a noir feel, as if all should be hidden under a trench coat. Wyatt and I pluck a few things for me to try on.
“I’m her dresser,” he tells the shopgirl as we sashay to a fitting room. She smiles knowingly and offers flutes of champagne.
The little room is decorated like a boudoir, all hot colours, sensuous fabrics and movie-star lighting. Wyatt sits in a purple, plush velvet chair in the corner, his fedora pulled appropriately low, shadowing his eyes. We toast and sip as I strip down to my heels, drawing the striptease out with my new scarf. His arousal is evident.
He holds a pair of vermillion-tulle panties for me to step into. As he draws the tiny scrap of fabric up my legs, he kisses and caresses my thighs, forcing them apart so he can lick my velvet pussy. His hat falls off and I pull at his salt-and-pepper hair to steady myself as his tongue lingers and plays, making me weak with desire. I feel like I might fall off my heels when he stands and steadies me, then grabs a bra.
“Madame,” he says, proffering it. Then he moves behind me, gazing into the full-length mirror, taking in the merch. He holds the sizzling-hot vermillion push-up bra toward me. While he fastens it, his lips, his teeth, his tongue caress my neck.
“You have the loveliest collarbones ,” he says, looking at my reflection appreciatively.
“I look like . . . a Christmas present,” I say, appraising myself in the looking glass.
“Let me open you.” His hands move around to determine what this wrapping holds. He runs his palms over the smooth, satiny fabric of the bra, feeling the warmth of my tits beneath. His fingers probe to find my erect nipples. His hardness is hot against my ass.
As he nuzzles my ear, his eyes drift up to meet mine in the mirror. I reach around to unzip his jeans and release the magic within. He thrusts against me, his rock-hard, vermillion tool nudging the soft vermillion tulle, pleading to get in as he slips one hand down the front of the panties. He finds my velvet heart and proceeds to drive me wild.
And soon these fresh-off-the-rack panties are christened, with his and my sex juices releasing across their sweet red ribbons.
“We’re definitely getting these,” he says, zipping up.
ROSE
People are more fun than anybody.
—Dorothy Parker
The summer before I met Joe, I auditioned for roles almost every day but couldn’t find work. With two teenagers at home, I had to bring in an income, so I took a job as an extra—or, rather, as a background player.
Now, whether you give the BG a better name or not, they are still considered the lowest of the low on set. In the industry they are commonly referred to as “the meat.” Not only that, they are classified into different cuts of meat. Union extras are round steak and non-union are rump. Sirloin tip extras are relatives and friends of the cast and crew. They are treated with kid gloves.
One sweltering July day, the meat was stewing by six in the morning. The early call was for period makeup, hair and wardrobe. They put me in a vintage brown tweed suit and a wide-brimmed felt hat circa 1939. I’d been cast as a spinster who wears sensible, stifling tweed suits, but beneath those staid garments I wore underwear to die for.
I have a collection of amazing retro underwear, most of it purchased at Divine Decadence, and for this gig I wore a pair of 1930s buff-pink silk knickers, tap-shorts style, trimmed with cream lace. Jean Harlow would have loved them. And since Harlow never wore a bra in her motion pictures, neither am I for this flick.
The men were transformed into farmers, rednecks, shopkeepers and gentlemen-about-town. They all looked pretty charming in their suits and bomber jackets, but there, in the middle of a group of them, stood a very handsome young man dressed in overalls and a newsboy cap. I caught his eye and he smiled a killer smile.
If the young man only knew about my fabulous knickers, I thought. I stole a glance to find him also stealing a few, and he looked as if he did know my little secret. Like the proper lady of the Dirty Thirties that I was, I batted my lashes but sublimated my desire by turning my attention to the BG women who were being turned into church ladies and society mavens, all with gloves, hats and neat little handbags. Eventually, save for the fluorescent lighting and Styrofoam cups, the room looked like a Depression-era soup kitchen.
At 8:00 a.m., fifty or so BG players walked out of the holding area and onto the set of a small town square, where a shiny black Dodge was parked outside a theatre. The marquee read “Gone with the Wind. All Seats 15 Cents.” The BG were to form the lineup waiting to see the Civil War epic for the first time. In real life, I have seen GWTW eleven times.
In 1939, Hattie McDaniel became the first black actor to win an Academy Award. She and the other black actors in the movie were banned from its world premiere in Atlanta, Georgia. Also that year, Billie Holliday sang “Strange Fruit,” that dangerous song about lynching in the South. Thinking on this, it made my skin crawl to see the redneck BG, but I was relieved when I spotted a group of them playing cards with a few black BG. And there, putting down three aces, was that dreamy shy guy, an absolute knockout in his pancake hat and denim overalls. Beads of sweat had formed on his dark skin. He licked his lips, then cast a glance my way.
At about 10:00 a.m. a craft-service woman brought baskets of food for the extras. My dreamboat bit into a huge hot dog, making me hungry in more ways than one. But breakfast had been small, so my desire for food trumped my desire for him. As it turned out, the dogs were for union extras only—round steak, like me—but I couldn’t stand the hungry eyes of an elderly man standing next me, so I gave my dog to him. He insisted that I eat it, but he was a pensioner without enough money to eat right. He had been made up to look like a prosperous old gentleman, but in reality he was nothing but rump.
“Eat it,” I said, and he did so with thanks. I caught Dreamboat watching. He smiled and walked away, then looked back, tilting his head to suggest I follow. How could I have resisted the invitation? This man was a prime cut. He disappeared behind the faux theatre front.
My hunger for food suddenly forgotten, I joined him in a makeshift prop room, where we instantly tore at each other’s period threads, scarcely a thought in our
heads about the movie. Through it all, I was aware that if it really had been 1939, this man would have been strung up if we’d been caught. I couldn’t shake the thought, so I backed off and told him what I was thinking, hoping I might get beyond it. Moments later he took me beyond by dropping to his knees, hoisting up my schoolmarm skirt and eating me through my Harlow knickers.
Impatient, he tugged at the knickers till the buttons popped off. Bypassing silken nostalgia to get to silken cunt, he used his teeth like a velvet buzz saw on my clit.
If we’d been caught, we’d have been fired and banned forever from all sets, blacklisted from the BG and probably the FG, too. We couldn’t have cared less; such is the power of sex. I ached to explode in his mouth.
He lay on the bare floor and pulled me onto his face, and almost instantly I came in waves of cosmic glory. I felt as if I were ascending to heaven, all the while stifling my vocals with my sleeve.
Then he put me on the floor as I grappled with his overall straps, desperate to get at his hardness, but he had quicker means and was suddenly slamming his fantastic rod inside me. My pelvis rose to meet him and he broke, convulsing with orgasmic shivers.
I spent the rest of the shoot with a silly smile on my face, no longer wearing knickers under that sensible tweed.
WANDA
All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.
—Dorothy Parker
His hand moves fast. I hold my breath and stand as still as the angel atop Sacré-Coeur, which I can see over his right shoulder. His intense, dark eyes focus on the furrow between my brows. “You think a lot,” he murmurs, à la Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless. His hand never stops moving.
“Yes. I’m a writer,” I reply.
“But they are also the lines of—how do you say? Sexual excitement . . .”
I blush. He exudes a youthful sexuality as delicious as any sweet found along the Rue Mouffetard.
“How much do you charge?” I ask tentatively.
“A million dollars!” He laughs.
“No, seriously.”
“If you don’t like it, then rien.”
His hand moves ever faster and I know a culmination is imminent. Indeed, moments later, his hand performs a final flourish. He is done.
Quickly, he rolls up the portrait and hands it to Wyatt, who is sitting nearby on a tourist-packed sidewalk patio, sipping Sancerre and watching.
“Come, have a drink with us,” Wyatt says to the artist. Belmondo obliges and takes a chair at the table. I look around for another chair, but there are none.
“Sit here,” Belmondo calls to me, patting his lap. I raise an eyebrow and look at Wyatt, who smiles and nods.
Questions racing through my mind, I perch on the artist’s lap.
“Wanda,” Wyatt says, leaning across the table to take my hand. “Remember what I said the other night?”
“You said a good many things the other night.”
“I like to watch.”
My confusion is soon overruled by arousal as I feel Belmondo’s desire growing hard against my ass. My eyes are firmly fixed on Wyatt’s. He smiles his crooked smile and I think I understand. Yet this is a learning curve I hadn’t expected, one whose trajectory I’m beginning to like.
Suddenly, as if my lover’s smile were the switch, a bolt of electric sexual charge flashes through me. My breath quickens while the rest of me remains oddly paralyzed. I feel that if I were to move, there would be an explosion: stars bursting, rivers flooding, volcanoes erupting.
Belmondo’s hard cock against me, his breathless French muttering and Wyatt’s obvious pleasure are melting me into a pool of pure sexual desire. Wyatt holds my gaze, knowing I am wet with anticipation and reveling in the knowledge. He pours us each a glass of Sancerre.
*
With his teeth Belmondo pulls at the marshmallow-pink ribbons on my new panties, his breath hot against my skin. His dark hands move hungrily over my breasts, his nails, buffed with charcoal, finally touching me, just as I’d wanted them to as I watched them whisk the black stick over paper in Montmartre less than an hour ago.
Wyatt stands beside our hotel bed, his hand fixed around his lovely erection, which, like a divining rod, seeks its treasure. His hand never stops moving.
The small room, with its flowered wallpaper and gabled window, envelops us securely while our rapture is given free rein. I reach out and touch the tip of Wyatt’s spectacular, blood-infused cock. He takes my hand and places it on Belmondo’s ass, which I instantly grasp, pulling him down toward me. I want him so badly. The unbearably gorgeous pressure in my groin is as white-hot as these two cocks, and I want one of them in me now. But Belmondo has other ideas, and moves to put his cock in my mouth.
I suck with one hand firmly grasping his cock and the other feeling for the deeper shaft, the inside one that feels like an extension of his cock. Now my tongue runs the length of him, lingers at the tip, plays, sucks, and then plunges down again.
Belmondo moans with a French accent (I swear), then moves down to hover invitingly over me. Beyond his shoulder I can see Wyatt, his eyes fixed on us, two bright, sky-blue orbs cutting through me with hot passion. I find this as stimulating as Belmondo’s cock teasing my clit, which it now is.
“Fuck me. Now,” I command. The artist enters my wet cunt. My pelvis rises to meet his and we undulate in unison, first enticingly slowly, then faster and still faster until we fall into a furious and delirious rhythm.
“Wanda,” Belmondo mutters, and then all heavenly hell breaks loose. Wyatt steps into full view. As he releases his cum over us, I climax in great, earth-moving throbs. The artist finishes with a flourish and a howl, and the three of us pulse and breathe together in ecstatic carnal union.
ROSE
Women and elephants never forget.
—Dorothy Parker
Dear Joe,
In a dream long ago there was someone. He knew who I was, understood me, saw me from all angles, caressed me in all the right places, saw the beauty in my soul, the light in my heart.
He cared about me. And meant it. His love didn’t stop or turn to hate.
A distant memory of someone. A buried sketch of someone not unearthed till you. A dream of someone who moved through my life long ago, in the brightly lit ghost world of my imagination. Someone who loved me. Gone, not seen all these years. As if never having existed. Like a much-loved doll from childhood. Buried, forgotten, perished with time.
Now this ancient memory stirs. This someone moves from the long-forgotten world of my dreams and materializes before me. Someone who knows me. Someone who cares. Someone who loves me.
Someone. Someone like you.
Love,
Rose
WANDA
Fill up my heart with a secret treasure.
—Dorothy Parker
I’m standing on a footbridge watching the sun sparkle on the Seine. It’s our last day in this enchanted city and I want to drink in every gorgeous detail. We have seen so much, and shared even more.
When I turn to find Wyatt, a dark-haired woman bending to pick something up distracts my eye. Her face lights up like the Eiffel Tower at night as she holds the object up to the sky and offers thanks to the heavens. The sun glints off what appears to be a fabulous piece of jewelry held between slender fingers.
Suddenly, in the midst of her rapture, the woman notices me. Her long flowered skirt flutters in the breeze as she approaches. Speaking in rapid-fire French, too fast for me to understand, she shows me her newfound treasure. Hearing the fuss, Wyatt approaches. In broken English the woman blesses our union, then presses the ring into my hand. She cries and laughs and thanks God again.
Then she asks for money. The request surprises me, but Wyatt takes it in stride and gives her two euros. She pockets the coins and demands more. “Non,” he says.
�
��Oui,” she counters.
He tells me to give the ring back. She refuses it, wants us to cross her palm with silver, not fool’s gold. Ah, but we are fools, fools in love, and she knows it.
Finally we give in. Laughing, we walk away with a shiny, scratched-up 24K “gold” wedding band. Married on a bridge over the Seine by a Parisian gypsy for three euros.
I came away from the land of silver fairy lights and golden gypsy jewelry deeper and stronger, feeling as fearless as I had before my heart was shattered by what’s-his-name. I had questions, to be sure, a whole new set of questions, a whole new reality facing me, but I was unafraid to take it on.
The less fear you have in your soul, Paris whispered to me, the more room there is for l’amour. But what is that? It’s the way van Gogh painted irises, and it’s a kiss in the Parisian rain. It’s a blackbird on a chimney singing sweetly in the morning, and it’s your lover bringing you Rhum Baba from the Rue Mouffetard as you lounge in bed.
And it’s an understanding of life and all its players that reaches the depth of your soul. Suddenly, plunging into those depths, you feel as light as a fairy wing, ancient in understanding, born anew into love, a scarlet scarf blowing in the breeze.
EPILOGUE
Outspoken by whom?
—Dorothy Parker
Despite Rose and Wanda’s insistence that Con and Tyler name their baby Mrs. Parker, they didn’t. The proud parents christened their gorgeous babe Neo, and decided not to reveal the gender. Not yet, anyway—not for as long as they can hold their tongues.