Her Hungry Heart (20 page)

‘So they would not end up in Moscow? He does sound a bit like you, Poppa.’

‘He says it was his own personal protest. Sort of an academic petrol bomb. His flower pushed down the barrel
of a gun. I knew his father. I wonder if the boy is a womanizer like him?’

‘You mean like you, you old devil,’ she teased.

‘Yes, maybe.’

There was something, a certain look in her father’s eye. Clearly, for him, this ingenious young rebel was somehow different from the others who hounded him for one reason or another.

‘You really do like him. He must be special.’

‘I trust him. And if you ever meet him, so will you. Oh, by the way, his name is Alexander – Alexander Janacek.’

From breakfast with Sophia and her father, Mimi went to the office on Fifty-Seventh Street where she had an appointment with someone to look at several Kurt Schwitters and Paul Klees. From there she went to have a coffee with Betty Parsons at her gallery. At two o’clock she was in the arms of her lover in his studio on Fourteenth Street.

Mimi had lovers. She had not expected to have them and had at first turned down plenty of men who had tried to fill that role. But then came the Sixties, the Beatles and Flower Power, the hippies and the sexual revolution. She was young and fresh and a free spirit. It was like having love all the time, frivolity, fun, peace, dropping out of survival to play. Play-therapy before the Jungians practised it, a decade of movements for peace without power, sex without power. When had there been a time when people marched against the establishment to music, and gathered for love-ins? It was like the childhood Mimi had never had. She fell for it, admired it and liked it. And it liberated her sexually.

In her teens, when her libido stirred, sexual yearnings became part of her life. Boys and sex, new experiences to be dealt with, all handled within the morals of the times, and held respectably in check. She had had her fun and her pleasures, but promiscuity had not been part of them. Love
was the operative word, and sex followed. When Jay Steindler offered those things and marriage, she happily took them on.

Promiscuity was fast becoming a new toy for Mimi, in this new liberated world of the Sixties. It gave her a naughtiness, a frivolity she had missed in her childhood. She was amused by it, enjoying immensely the crazy irresponsibility it claimed brought peace and not war, love and not hate. It triggered the imagination and naughtiness in her, a new kind of sexual gratification that had nothing to do with security and belonging, success and survival of the fittest, those very things that Jay Steindler preserved for her so well.

This new phase of having a lover was one of her best-kept secrets, at least from Jay Steindler. She was not so sure her father didn’t sense what was going on in her life. Had Barbara too guessed Mimi’s first important lover had appeared on the scene?

Rick Walters opened the door and leaned against the jamb, blocking her entrance. ‘Aren’t you going to let me in?’ she asked. A smile appeared on his lips, the happiness showed in his face.

‘You’re staring at me.’

‘Yeah, I know. You look awfully good. Every time I see you, I just think, “Jesus, she’s a good-looking woman.’”

‘Well, are you going to let me in?’

He moved aside. She stepped into the flat, relaxed into his arms for a hug. Reluctantly, she pulled away from him to walk further into the small entrance hall.

‘Hello, Mimi.’ They kissed and she felt instantly the warmth of his body. Then he closed the door behind him and stood with his back against it. She turned around to face him. He walked towards her and placed his arm around her shoulders and kissed her on the cheek.

‘It’s nice you’re here.’

‘It certainly is for me.’

‘Have you had lunch?’

‘No.’

‘Do you want something?’

‘Just you.’

That brought a smile to his face. ‘Say it again.’

‘Just you.’

‘You don’t know how much I like to hear that, Mimi.’

‘And what about me? How do you think I feel? I always think it’s a miracle that you should want me, that we should want each other.’

Mimi felt a sensuous excitement. How she loved the tone of his voice, his youthfulness, that special kind of male beauty that she found difficult to keep her hands off. She put her arms around his neck, drew herself close into his arms and hugged him as hard as she could.

‘About the other day …’ he began.

She loosened her grip on him and he stepped back, just enough to tilt up her chin. Distracted by her beauty he forgot what he meant to say to her, and instead told her, ‘Those violet eyes, they’ve bewitched me. God, you’re beautiful.’ He placed his lips on hers and they kissed. She loved touching him. Her hands roamed freely over his body. She found the buttons on his Levis, her fingers fumbled with them. She felt a pounding in her heart and even greater sexual excitement, wild yearning, real hunger for this handsome young man. He was undoing the black silk, wrap-around dress she was wearing. Mimi bit into his lip. She had a passionate hunger for him, a voracious appetite that she could not control when it came to Rick.

‘Mimi, the other night you were magnificent. You’re always magnificent.’

She put her fingers through his long blond hair and pulled tight on it. ‘You make me crazy. I do things with you I never dreamed of. The other night … I haven’t stopped thinking about it. It was wonderful, you were wonderful. Why wasn’t it obscene, debauched, depraved, for me to
behave in such a manner? I asked myself. Why was it so good, so much fun, so exciting? Was it the dope or the wine? Rick, you make it so easy, the sex. Why does everything seem so natural with you? So uncomplicated.’

‘Because it is. Because we are.’

They were naked now. He picked her up and put her in the deep armchair near the window. He draped her legs over the chair arms, dropping on to his knees between them. She watched him; she adored watching him lick her cunt, suck on its succulent fleshy inner lips. He was incredibly beautiful, the way he enjoyed her. She had never known love-making like Rick’s. Sex for nothing more than its own sake, for nothing more than mutual sexual pleasure. It had nothing to do with possession, belonging, a future. Sexual freedom without violence or preconceived ideas of what it should be like, what was expected, what was acceptable. It was she not he who was really under a spell. Mimi, ten years his senior, was seduced by him, and by promiscuity, free love. She watched the sun playing on his light brown hair, streaked a golden blond from years of surfing on the Californian coast. Even his hair seemed carefree and young. She touched her breasts. Her whole body yearned for his hands, for his tongue and mouth. She began to squirm under his assault and told him in a voice husky with passion, ‘What bliss, how divine.’ She felt rigid tension in her body, a flash of pleasure, then her orgasm. So did he, and sought out that special elixir with his tongue.

Rick pulled on her legs while he was still kissing her cunt and she slid slowly from the chair on to the floor. She came again and again in a succession of orgasms. ‘The pillows.’ She reached out for some black and white pony-skin cushions lying on the floor and placed them under her shoulders, at the back of her neck. The kisses never stopped. He changed position. Moved on top of her, and, straddling her now, his knees pressing into the carpet, once more eased his face between her open legs. Rick’s penis,
rigid with readiness for her, was just above her face. It taunted her, grazing her lips. She opened her mouth and began to suck. With Rick it was never hurried or a necessity. His sex-drive was enormously powerful and exciting, adventurous.

They came together on a wave of orgasm that seemed to go on for ever. Spent, he slid off his knees to lie on top of her. Putting his arms beneath her, grabbing her bottom, he hugged her tight against him, his face still resting between her legs. Mimi licked the luscious salty taste of his sperm from her lips. Sex with Rick was always the beginning of real feelings, of wanting more. She lay there now, every pore of her skin tingling with excitement, ready for more.

Until she met Rick it had never been that way. She had never felt freedom or ease with sexual love. She had never learned to experience a deep abiding fondness for orgasm, for exchanging sexual lust with anyone. With him, she did. Sex was nothing to Rick, and everything. It was easy and fun. It was there to float out on with the mind as well as the body. That he had taught her, and so much more.

Before Rick, she hadn’t known the pleasure of having a man’s penis in her mouth. The need of some men to demand, lovelessly, oral sex had until now seemed a dirty and ugly act of sexual selfishness. She had rejected it, had even been frightened by the very idea of swallowing a man’s come. Unthinkable!

She had been a married woman for ten years, sexually happy with her husband, and had never taken an active role in their sexual life. With Jay, she had always been the submissive partner. That had always been enough for her. Now, having an affair with Rick, she realized what real submission to a man was. The enormous pleasure of giving yourself wholly to a lover, and the delights to be felt as a result. To lie back and have a man use his cock, his mouth, his fingers, imaginatively for her sole pleasure, to teach her the real value of orgasm-bliss.

Rick turned around and crawled up next to her, pulled her on to her side. He was caressing her breasts, mouthing her nipples. He could feel her so pliable in his hands now. Always, when she first arrived in his flat, there was a kind of tension in her, a holding back which he eased her out of. She was malleable, vulnerable. He took advantage of that, but not for himself alone: for her as well. Every sexual act, every orgasm, was heightened for her by the ease and casualness with which he devoured her. He taught her what it was to die that little death in every orgasm. That it was all right to expire in lust and come, and to feel so quickly the return to life. He knew it was delicious, the rebirth of oneself. And now she knew. He taught her to be fearless in sex and, exploring her own desires and fantasies, how to enjoy them, luxuriate in them, yet not to make more of them than they were. He made her understand that they were sexual acts, life-enhancing, but not life in themselves.

It was a very warm spring afternoon and the sun played on their bodies. Mimi felt the warmth of it eating into her skin and flesh, the very marrow of her bones. She felt really happy in herself. He ran his hands over the skin of her arms, her stomach, her thighs. She touched him in return. He reached out to the coffee table. There was a joint already rolled. He fumbled with the matches, found them and lit up. He took several drags of the joint and watched her caressing her body, licking from her fingers the moisture gathered from her cunt. It excited him to watch Mimi love herself. She had come a long way since that first time they had sex together, a very long way.

He passed the joint on to her. She took it between her fingers and put it to her lips, took a deep drag on it. He had even had to teach her that, how to inhale a joint of grass, a little Lebanese Gold.

Rick had a thing about her breasts. He adored them and had been surprised when he had first seen them. They were incredibly beautiful, large, high and full, as if bursting with
mother’s milk. It was the aureole, the bright cloud that, halo-like, ringed her nipples, that intrigued him. They were unusually large and an elegant light peach colour. He loved to caress them, kiss them, excite them into puckering, her nipples becoming erect before he sucked deeply on them, trying to gather all of the aureole as well into his mouth. Sometimes he would rouge them. That changed Mimi’s looks. Then her breasts seemed extraordinarily lewd and provocative. She looked like a whore with an angelically beautiful face. That too excited them. They created fantasies about her, and those fantasies excited their sexual hunger for new experiences. He taught her to play the whore, he the john.

In the beginning, when they had seen each other in the city several times, she had accused him of playing with life, playing with her and with sex. He had disarmed her by telling her: ‘That’s true, I do. Why do you make it sound like a vice? Why shouldn’t we play? Isn’t life hard enough, dreadful enough, unfair enough? That’s what this age of Aquarius is all about. Less of that, and more play, more love and peace in the world.’

And now she had learned his vice, how to play with life, how to play with him and with sex. Only with Rick did the Mimi that she projected to the world disappear and the Mimi inside come to life and show herself. The child, Mimi Alexandra Stefanik, whose father was a count and mother a beautiful countess, who had been made to deny herself, to become a wet-nurse’s daughter, and who had lived her childhood in lies to survive as Mimi Kowalski, showed herself to Rick. She could, because with this young man there were no taboos. They vanished, were absorbed into the kindness of his soul, his own child-like approach to life and death.

‘Let’s do it once more,’ he suggested.

He rammed the stub of the joint in the ashtray, and brought her to her feet and into his arms. He turned her
around. With her back to him he draped his arm over her shoulder across her breasts, holding her tight to him. She felt his erect penis between the cheeks of her bottom, her back against his chest. His other hand he dropped low over her mound of curly blonde hair. Searching fingers found her clitoris. Mimi moved lazily, languorously, up and down against his body, her hands caressing her own breasts. She loved the feel of her body, her skin, especially while in contact with his. This was one of their favourite positions, and in the warmth of the sun they revelled in their embrace. Mimi, experiencing several orgasms, kept repeating, ‘Lovely.’ Short, delectably light, almost tender orgasms grew stronger, became more intense. He was dextrous. Her hunger for passion inspired him, as did her submission to lust. Her clitoral orgasms were in his hands, and he continued, wanting to bring her to a fever pitch where she was no longer in control of them. He inserted his fingers, fondling her inner cunt lips, moist and slippery smooth with her many orgasms. So sensuous to feel those fleshy cunt lips sliding between his fingers. He adored them and her cunt, and making erotic love with her as they now were.