Eighty Days Blue (7 page)

Socially, I was at a bit of a loose end, but musically at least, my efforts did not go unnoticed.

Simón, the Venezuelan guest conductor the ensemble had been working with for the past season, had won a post with the orchestra permanently, and he seemed to have taken a shine to me, subtly praising my performance with the odd wink or lingering stare in my direction over the rostrum. I had only begun to notice his attentions once we began rehearsing for the series of Thanksgiving concerts, perhaps because I felt an affinity with the American style; it was influenced by the sound of faraway places, coloured by the infinite variation in cultural backgrounds of composers who emigrated to America to pursue a new life, filled with optimism and collecting the rhythms of new cities along the way, jazz and folk sounds blending with old European traditions.

I had not been sorry to see the old conductor go. He'd
had
an academic approach that I felt lacked nuance. Under his control, the string section had been a little wooden. Simón was younger, and his methods were a radical departure from what we had been used to. Orchestral gossip discussed little else.

He had a bit of a bohemian look about him, and at least in rehearsals, he could have passed as the lead guitarist in a rock band, dressing in jeans and loose T-shirts. He was vibrant all the way from his shoes, which varied from comfortable Converse to pointed snakeskin ankle boots, shined to gleaming, up to his hair, which sprouted from his head in a mass of thick, dark curls and bounced with a flourish with his more manic movements. He led the orchestra as if possessed by music, beating time with his hands snapping like the jaws of a crocodile. Every adjustment of his facial muscles responded to internal cues seemingly without thought: a lift of the eyebrow or pursing of the lips signalled an infinitesimal change of mood or tempo.

I hoped that under his direction the string section might be encouraged to display more passion. If our last few concerts were anything to go by, his influence was just what we needed.

Baldo and Marija, my Croatian flatmates, who played trumpet and flute respectively, were ambivalent about the change. They had recently got engaged, and the happiness that they found in each other reflected onto every aspect of their lives so that it would have taken a bolt from the sky of portentous doom to bring down their mood.

Following the success of her own romance, Marija had become intent on setting me up, and she interrogated me regularly about the status of my relationship with Dominik with the rigour and cunning of a private eye.

That morning, I had told her about the whole affair, if for no other reason than to explain why I had been so short-tempered at home.

‘You know that the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else,' she said prosaically, as we met in the kitchen over a late breakfast, before assembling our instruments and heading off for the concert.

She'd just had a fringe cut into her dead-straight dark hair and the severe line across her forehead lent an authoritative tone to her words.

‘But I don't need to get over him. We're still seeing each other.'

‘You're not really, though, are you, with you stuck here and him all the way over there?'

‘It's not exactly a relationship. We're friends. With benefits.'

‘But you're not getting any benefits.'

I had left out the details of our sexual exploits, but had told Marija that we had agreed, considering our natures and the distance between us, that we were both free to explore casual relationships with other people.

‘Of course,' she'd said in response to that information, ‘if he's not around, that's his problem. A girl has needs.'

She invited me to join her and Baldo that night for a drink at 230 Fifth, the sort of stereotypical pick-up joint that was filled to bursting at weekends with young Manhattanites on the prowl. I really wasn't in the mood for it, but agreed anyway. I couldn't spend all of my evenings locked in my bedroom and strapped up in Dominik's corset, even if I found the company of the two lovebirds bearable only in small doses, and the bar was exactly the kind of pretentious place that I went out of my way to avoid.

When I arrived, I discovered that they'd invited another member of the brass section along, a trombone player called Alex, who had joined the Gramercy Symphonia a year earlier after quitting his job as a divorce lawyer in Wisconsin to move to New York and pursue his dream of making a living from music. Marija had set me up on a double date, and I wasn't thrilled about it.

Alex was pleasant enough, but dull, and he wore a purple shirt that might have suited another, taller, less plump man, but on him, tucked up as he was against one of the bar's mauve suede sofas, just made me think of blueberry pie.

I left them all together on the couches, Marija with her long legs entwined like pipe cleaners round Baldo's shorter pair and Alex glancing up at me wistfully on occasion, and took my drink out to the rooftop garden bar.

The cocktail was average, and the music wasn't my style, but the view of Midtown was magnificent, the Empire State Building looming so close I felt as though I could almost reach out and touch it, leap onto the side and climb up into the sky like King Kong, or a modern-day Jack on his beanstalk.

‘Beautiful, isn't it?' said a voice to my left, with a Southern twang to it.

The voice belonged to a blond man in a navy pinstriped suit and a thin tie, with a short glass in one hand and a fat cigar in the other. He had pulled one of the tables up to the side of the bar and was standing up on it, leaning all of his weight against the railing and looking out into the night with the confidence of a person who believes either that he is impervious to the occasional freak accident that results in people plunging off the sides of verandas to their death, or that gravity didn't apply to him.

‘Yes, it is,' I replied, inhaling the slight waft of cigar smoke that surrounded him.

He jumped down from his vantage point with surprising grace and stood alongside me.

‘Where are you from?' he asked.

‘New Zealand originally, London after that, Australia in between the two.'

‘You get around, huh?'

‘I guess you could say that.'

I watched his eyes flicker at my response, and I leaned a little closer to him, just in case the flirtation in my words wasn't signal enough.

‘Can I get you another drink?'

I looked down at the remains of my sub-par mojito.

‘Maybe someplace else. Wanna get out of here?'

He didn't need asking twice. Forty-five minutes later, we were back at his apartment on the Upper East Side, the sort of chic, minimally furnished place that I had thought Dominik might favour before I got to know him better and realised that wealth doesn't necessarily equal sophistication, although I still wasn't really sure whether Dominik had money or not. Maybe he'd spent his life savings on buying me the Bailly and lived the rest of his existence on the ordinary wage of a university professor.

The man whom I had pulled introduced himself as Derek, a native New Yorker with a job in insurance. I told him that my name was Helen and that I was a legal secretary. Experience had taught me that most men respond well to secretaries and nurses, and it saved me worrying that they might track down my musical connections and turn up at a concert.

Derek really was called Derek, I noted, glancing at a pile of mail resting on his countertop.

His apartment screamed of money but smelled of recently fried salmon mixed with nicotine. I noticed that most of the windows didn't open. He probably smoked indoors, to save himself the trouble of going out onto the balcony.

‘How do you like it?' he asked.

At first, I thought he was offering me a drink, but then realised, as he had made no move to turn on a kettle or get any bottles out of the fridge, that he was referring to how I liked to have sex. The bluntness of the question caught me off guard.

‘Er . . .'

He moved forward and broke the ice with a kiss. He wasn't at all a bad kisser, but I couldn't banish the smell of his recent fish dinner.

I considered calling it off, but ever the optimist, hoped things would improve once we got down to it. Besides, I was trying to cut down on taxis to save money, hoping to spend some time travelling later in the year, and if I stayed over, I'd be able to get the subway, or walk home, in the morning.

I barely suppressed a wince as Derek probed my mouth with his tongue, using the sort of deeply exploratory manoeuvres that might be better placed further down.

These thoughts reminded me of Dominik, who did have quite a knack for it, and I wondered if his skill had been dormant since he left New York or if he was having a tête-à-tête of his own back in London. The thought of Dominik with another woman spurred me on. I pushed Derek out of the kitchen and into the living room, where the air was fresher.

‘Ooh,' he said, ‘a woman who wants to take charge. I like that.'

This was not turning out at all how I hoped.

Derek cautiously slipped the spaghetti straps of my dress over my shoulders and ran his fingertips over my skin as if he were stroking a kitten. Every touch was soft, delicate. Probably the result of reading myriad books about how women prefer liberal doses of foreplay before sex, ideally dipped in chocolate and followed by a warm bath, the sort of nonsense perpetuated in media of all sorts, as ridiculous as assuming that all men want porn, blowjobs and a hot dinner.

I had hoped that Derek might rip the dress off me, push me up against the glass and take me from behind, in Hollywood-movie billionaire style, but the reality was far less exciting. After some wrestling, I managed to unbuckle his belt and his trousers pooled round his ankles inelegantly. I should have taken his shoes off first, as his legs were now locked together, rendering him virtually immobile from the knees down.

We shuffled backwards into his bedroom, and he eased me tenderly down onto the bed and kissed his way softly from my neck down to my navel, looking up and grinning before he buried his head between my legs, oral sex likely his party piece, the trick that he saved for women he wanted to impress. He was eager but gentle. I tried to muster a vision of Dominik in my mind engaged in the same act, but along with his tongue, he'd have four fingers inside me exploring roughly, occasionally probing my sphincter and promising in an ironically polite tone that soon his cock would follow. Dominik and I hadn't yet had anal sex, and I wondered why he didn't just do it, not that I was averse to
the
anticipation. He seemed to think that it was one of the kinkiest items on the bedroom menu, whereas I thought of anal sex as the type of thing to save for a second date. I took his view on the subject to be sweetly old-fashioned and was looking forward to the moment when he decided the time was right.

My mind wandered back to Derek and I made an effort to concentrate on him, out of politeness. He had finished his oral ministrations and I pushed myself up, moving forward to go down on him, but he stopped me and pushed me down onto the bed.

‘No, babe, this is all about you,' he said.

I sighed, an expression that he took to be pleasure.

His cock was big and hard at least, and his torso pleasantly firm against my chest, though I wished that instead of his endless light caresses, he would use his fingers to pull my nipples or lightly constrict my breathing. Perhaps he just needed a hint to push him in the right direction.

I picked up his hand and moved it towards my throat.

‘Whoa. You're not one of those girls, are you? I'm not into that kinky shit.'

I could feel his cock softening inside me.

I pulled him down into a kiss, the sexual equivalent of changing the subject, but the moment was gone. He pulled out of me and disappeared into the bathroom. I heard the sounds of the shower running, and later, he returned with two hot chocolates.

‘It's late,' he said, handing me a steaming mug. ‘You're welcome to stay over.'

He was kind, at least, and versed in the etiquette of casual sex, even if not my type.

I lay awkwardly alongside him until morning and then
set
about making my escape early, though I doubted that Derek would ask me for my telephone number.

The street vendors were out in full force around Central Park, heckling tourists who took a millisecond too long to choose between ketchup or tomato sauce. I picked up a bagel and a coffee on the corner of 78th Street and Fifth, and took advantage of a morning off to drop into the Met while I was nearby.

My mind was in too much of a whirl to appreciate art, and in the end I gave up trying to decide which of the vast array of exhibitions to visit and spent an hour in the Asian section, staring at a fifty-century Afghan head of Buddha, hoping to soak up some of the serenity visible on the features of the stone face with its long, loose ears and wide-set sleepy eyes. I took in the symmetrical brows meeting an angular nose and, below that, a plump, sensual mouth with soft lips, which gave the godlike creature a hint of humanity.

I thought about the night I'd just spent with Derek, the last weekend I'd had with Dominik, the weeks before that, with Victor, and the time that I'd gone to the fetish club in London on my own and enjoyed being spanked by a stranger. I reflected on how all of those things, the things that I was certain at least half the world would think of as abnormal, turned me on so enormously, yet a night with someone like Derek, a nice guy, a good catch in the social sense of the word, did nothing for me at all.

Is that what it had come to? Did I need to be restrained or surprised or pushed around to enjoy sex? Did I really want Dominik for the person that he was, or did I just like the way that he made me feel in bed?

Opting for the long walk home instead of the humid
grime
of the subway, the sights and sounds of the city that had only yesterday seemed grand and exciting, today reminded me that I was cloistered, hemmed in, trapped among regimented straight avenues and square blocks. I was surrounded by monolithic glass and concrete structures that soared into the sky overhead like so many sentinels, the slice of blue sky in between building tops just a faraway glint, menacing as a guillotine edge floating above me.