Fools for Lust (16 page)

I was asking her, as you do, about other men.

I already knew about those who had come before she met her present husband. Three in all, a modest figure. I was number five. Or did husbands maybe count double?

But surely I inquired there had been temptations, infatuations, attractions, even if nothing sexual had actually occurred?

‘Well,' she hesitated, lowering her eyes with false modesty, ‘there was a man in Wales. He was a bit like you in looks. Just saw him staring at me in a strange, insistent way from across the room at a reading I attended. It was last year. October.'

‘Really?'

‘The way it goes. A look in someone's eye and you think, it could happen, there could be sparks. Sort of wondering what it would be like to fuck him, be fucked by him ... But we never even spoke.'

‘Oh ...' somehow I was disappointed. ‘Anyone else?'

‘Well ...' Her eyes again avoided me.

‘Come on,' I insisted.

‘The bass player in Grant Lee Buffalo,' she spat out, her tone almost breathless. ‘It was at their gig, just last week at the ICA. I was towards the front of the crowd and he was on stage. Our eyes met. Jesus, he could have had me right there. It was crazy. I felt like a slut. I think Chris must have guessed, or something, because he wanted us to leave at the end of the set and wouldn't stay for the obligatory encores.

I smiled. The next day I looked up the American musician's name (and physiognomy – rough trade with an intellectual bent) in the CD liner notes. But never remembered it later.

‘Was it the music?'

‘No, just him, up there, it was his eyes, they just cut through me, I swear. He was deathly thin, even gaunt, not even my type of man. But I knew, and I think that he also knew that something was in the air that night. I even guess my husband had some second sense of it, because he also behaved unusually at the end of the concert, annoyed, frightened maybe.'

Frankly I couldn't see what she saw in him. Too American, too rock 'n' roll. But there was an element of danger. Forbidden fruit? But then I was still amazed that she was even having an affair with me.

Would I ever understand women?

Even as I slept with them, gazed voyeuristically at their features in repose as they dreamt next to me in the illicit beds of the hotel rooms we inhabited, I felt I could read in their soft breath the seeds of their future absence or betrayal.

This was the summer of Grant Lee Buffalo. After we broke up I discovered Counting Crows and ached with the knowledge I would never play their music to her or whisper into her ears the lyrics of a couple of songs on the CD which just broke me up inside. Much later, I'd come across Matthew Ryan. And others. Singers, groups, musicians. Funny the way rock music punctuated the major events in my life, the women in my life.

This was Kate, of the tousled hair, the porcelain skin, the repressed anger, for whom I would buy a Leonard Cohen CD and prepare an assortment of compilation tapes she would only be able to play on her Walkman on her way to work near Goodge Street.

“Was” being the operative word.

A summer that lasted into early winter as lust made place for love and then desperation, as embraces grew in intensity and the fucking took on an aura of violence as I realised my days with her were numbered. It was already there, in her voice, in her eyes, in the subtle twist of her lips as she shied away from passion, her cold, cold heart shying away from more serious involvement than sweaty copulations on office floors or adulterous hotel rooms rented for duration of the lunch break. Those things you feel inside, don't you? So, you turn the screw on your anger; you tighten your hold on her wrists as you hold her down and thrust inside her and she feebly protests that you are hurting her. You thread out the belt from your black trousers and, one night, tie her hands and render her helpless. She does not protest. Lets you do it. You raise the ante. Order her to close her eyes, and circle her fragile neck with the dark brown leather belt. Just like a slave collar. You install her on hands and knees and forcefully take her from behind, watching in fascination as your thick, darker member breaches her openings and makes its savage way into her wet intimacy, all the while holding on to the belt and pulling firmly, keeping her head in a vertical posture. With every new fuck, you feel her moving mentally further away from you. But in her silence she still submits to those perverted whims of yours.

She comes, again and again, under your ministrations, with a soft moan, a deep sigh and, torturing yourself, you imagine her being taken a similar position by another man, maybe the bass player from Grant Lee Buffalo even. You have used a piece of black silk to cover her eyes and positioned her over the bedcover, spread open, obscenely gaping, then led him to the room and indicated to him she is his for the taking. You watch. Of course he is bigger longer and thicker than you and, as he makes his way past her lips, his cock brushes the folds of her labia away inwards, and every in and out movement that shakes her whole, white body as he pumps into her bruises her engorged skin, marking her for ever. And, God in heaven, does he stay hard so long and never tire. The sweat glistens on her back, her breasts swing gently under the impact of his attack, and the animal sounds that rise from deep inside her are unlike any I have ever heard from her before. Or, at any rate, with me.

Ah, isn't my imagination vile?

Or had I actually shared her with another man, whored her for the sake of my madness, would she not have returned to her husband? Maybe it was something she actually craved?

Two years later, Grant Lee Buffalo, having failed to achieve greater commercial success, broke up and Grant Lee Phillips, the singer and songwriter in the group would launch a solo career. But his music on its own somehow never recaptured the intensity and gut-wrenching impact of that initial year.

I never discovered where the bass player went or what he did. Another minor casualty of the rock and roll wars.

The French Lycee in London's South Kensington was the first school I attended where the sexes were not segregated and my initial few months attending classes there proved highly distracting. I soon lost my fascination for the Tour de France and continental bicycle riders and discovered that new race: girls. Somehow before they had never really meant too much to me. They were just there, another gender, a mere curiosity.

To celebrate the end of the first term, the headmistress organised a small party, where all final-year students, of which I was, were invited to sip soft drinks, mingle socially and even dance, albeit under the watchful eye of some of the staff.

Thinking back on the occasion, I reckon it must have been shortly before the Christmas break, when many of the students from France and overseas would return home for a couple of weeks or so. I was awkward, had no social graces, moving from group to group of students and not-quite-friends, making small talk and stealing furtive glances at Catherine, Rhoona, Elizabeth and the myriad girls who'd caught my attention during the course of the term. Some from my class, some from others in the same year. They were all supremely exotic, unreal in a strange sort of way, emerging from the cocoon of childhood into a chrysalis of womanhood, stirring new, unknown emotions inside me that I was irritated to find I couldn't fully control. Creatures I wished to befriend, but knew not how, or even what to do with after the first insignificant conversation.

The headmistress worked the room, dispensing biscuits and cakes, helping to thaw out our shyness. Sensing failure, she finally signalled it was time for music. This was the year of the Twist. Chubby Checker reigned supreme.

I hadn't truly wanted to go to the school's party but my mother had convinced me a change of atmosphere would do me good. I had fervently argued I couldn't even dance, so she had given me a Twist-made-easy lesson a week before and I had been practising my movements in the bathroom every day since, using a bath towel as the centre of gravity for my graceless movements.

Six months later, the cancer inside her got the better of my mother and she would be dead.

But the Chubby Checker tune was the song I was prepared for that day and when the first strains of its melody sounded, I swiftly moved to the dancefloor and studiously began dancing.

And oh, how I danced, and Catherine even joined me, with a wry smile on her face which just melted me inside. We twisted again like we did that winter and it felt wonderful and at the old age of 16 I entered the world of women in earnest. For ever. Never to leave it again, for good, for bad, for joyful, for heartbreak.

Encouraged, I even invited Catherine out a few weeks later after classes resumed in the New Year. Short Catherine who looked like a bird and made my heart flutter. But that's another story altogether. A sad one, of course but then it wasn't Chubby Checker's fault so, hey ho, let's twist again in a circular motion and close your eyes and imagine you are drying yourself after a shower and your body gyrates against the soft contact of the bath towel against your skin. Oh yeah.

When I returned to Paris I finally drowned in the sea of sex.

It was a mixed soundtrack, blending the studious sounds of jazz my flatmate would play non-stop, making me feel so damn guilty I could find no pleasure, no celebration of the senses, in its arty tones, together with the latest hits I would import from back home, early Beatles songs, the Stones'
It's All Over Now
which would start the adrenaline flowing inside me like few other rock tunes. A feeling I would soon grow accustomed to, opening myself to the sheer emotional power of music and amazed at the fact some melodies could affect me inside so strongly and scar my soul for ever.

It was a time of folly, of foolishness and shattered ideals.

Lois had blonde hair the colour of straw and looked, to my inexpert eyes, like a svelte and beautiful model. Her breasts were slight but full and her skin the colour of porcelain and I would feel like fainting every time I entered her, believing it was all a dream and this was too good to last. Of course, it wouldn't and she quickly tired of me.

When I remember her these days, it's to the sound of the Four Tops'
Reach Out and I'll Be There
, the Tamla Motown hymn that kept on being played at the party at which we met.

Nicole and I never even had sex. We spent hours naked together on my bed but never crossed that Rubicon. Did we have a song, a group? I hate myself now for not remembering the soundtrack of our relationship. She had high cheekbones, short, thick, light brown hair and a compact body. Her nipples hardened under the mere breeze of my breath. She was the first woman ever to say ‘I love you' to me.

And then there was the time I even went out with a singer on the folk circuit. When her career hit a roadblock in England, she decided to move to Nashville from where she would send me occasional demo tapes. She later married the much older owner of a Greenwich Village club and settled down to have kids before we lost touch. I still have her albums, gathering dust with the rest of my vinyl collection up in the attic.

With Natasha, we spent hours together listening to the fey but exotic sounds of the Incredible String Band on my deficient hi-fi and slowly fell in love in a quiet, unassuming way, later setting the seal on our relationship with a bus ride to the Hackney ABC to watch Franco Zeffirelli's
Romeo and Juliet
.

Elaine was a classical buff, dressed most conservatively and sucked me off with the zeal of a common whore.

Tabitha liked Duran Duran and most of the New Romantic bands and liked to have her hands bound when we fucked.

Leonard Cohen's melancholy tunes punctuated the long, on-off affair with Mimi, although she was also partial to Metallica and isolated opera arias, a woman of diverse tastes and moods and sexual cravings.

There is something about Cohen's music, I suppose, that strikes a resonant chord inside my heart and my loins, as I would include many of his songs on the various compilation tapes I would record for her-who-must-not-be-named, alongside music by the Walkabouts, Counting Crows, Springsteen, Peter Gabriel, Oh Susannah, the Handsome Family, Matthew Ryan and, again, Grant Lee Buffalo.

Music, sex and heartbreak or the
Reader's Digest
abridged (and expurgated) story of my life. The people at Sony, Virgin and other record companies must be laughing all the way to the bank at my excuses for keeping them in business.

But when I suddenly wake up at three in the morning in an alien hotel room in some American city or another and the world outside is cold and silent and the emptiness inside me is just too much to bear, random thoughts evoke faces, bodies and tunes from yesterday with uncanny poignancy.

Mimi's so pale blue eyes.

A tune from
Aida
.

Kate's cunt. Her gash like a blooming flower of blood.

‘Truly, truly, truly.'

Nicole's uneven teeth. A smile designed to launch a thousand ships.

Gainsbourg's
Melody Nelson
.

And on and on.

Maybe I'm just a sexual romantic who's seen too many movies and feels that every life, every relationship requires a soundtrack?

Or a disgusting, self-deluded pornographer, who believes that the shocking intimacy of every act of sexual excess can attain sheer beauty with the right musical accompaniment?

I can live with both theories I suppose.

And already my shameless mind is busy speculating on what Claudia's soundtrack will be. Forget the hotel room, the railway station we meet at or the foreign city that will shelter our bodies, the colour of the wallpaper, whether she keeps her eyes open or not when we fuck, what I want to know is how I will remember her when it is all over.

I vainly try to guess what sort of song will go with those breathless phone tones of hers, that unsaid longing, that sadness that is already bringing us together despite all the obstacles.