The Juliette Society (3 page)

‘Can you see my ass in the mirror?’

This is what I say to Jack in the hope of attracting his attention.

He’s propped up on the bed one evening, shortly after the beginning of the Fall semester, reading some report or other.

I’ve just come out of the shower and I’m lying naked, face down across the bed, with my arms folded in front of me and my head resting on them so I can look up at him. I’m displaying myself for him the way Brigitte Bardot shows herself off for her estranged husband, Michel Piccoli, in
Contempt
. I’m feeding Jack lines from the movie to see how he responds.

It’s a game I like to play. Not to test his love but to interrogate his desire for me.

He glances up at the mirror, briefly, says ‘Yes’, and goes straight back to his reading material.

But he’s not getting away with it that easily.

Do you like what you see, I say.

‘Why? Shouldn’t I?’ he says, without even averting his gaze from the page.

Does my ass look fat, I say.

‘You’ve got a beautiful ass,’ he says.

But is it fat?

‘You’ve got a beautiful fat ass.’ He looks at me – at me, not at my ass – smiles, and returns to his papers again.

How about my thighs, I say.

I reach back and stroke my thigh just below the ass and, while I’m at it, I pull the cheek apart just a tad so he’ll get a glimpse of my plump little pussy from behind.

‘They’re great,’ he says. This time he doesn’t even look.

That’s all, I say, just ‘great’?

‘What do you want me to say?’ he says.

I might be feeding him questions but I’m not about to give him the answers.

Do they look thick, I say, as thick as tree trunks?

‘They look just fine,’ he says.

Whatever he’s reading, he’s engrossed in it – the way I wish he would be engrossed in me.

I roll over onto my back, arch my shoulders and cup my breasts, pushing them up into two rolling hills, and jiggle them a little.

Which do you prefer, I say, my breasts or my nipples?

My body is still flushed with heat from the shower and the areolae are pink and round. I brush and circle my nipples with my thumbs until I start to feel them swell.

‘Does one come without the other?’ he says, showing not the least bit of interest.

If you could choose, I say.

‘If I could choose between nipples without breasts or breasts without nipples?’ he laughs.

Yeah, I say, if you could have a girl who was totally flat-chested or one with tits so big the nipples were almost non-existent.

‘You, or someone else,’ he says. But, perhaps deciding this isn’t a conversation he wants to have anyway, he doesn’t wait for an answer. He says, ‘I like them just the way they are.’

Damn you, Jack, I think, pay attention to me. Look what I have here for you! And you can have it on a plate. For free. No strings attached.

The less attention he gives me, the more childish and petulant I become.

I’m thinking about shaving my pussy, I say, sliding my fingers into my bush and tugging at the tight brown curls of hair.

I say it because I know he won’t like it, because he finds completely hairless girls a real turn-off.

‘Don’t,’ he says, curtly.

Why not, I say.

Now I’m just trying to be provocative. Anything to get a reaction. And it works.

He stares at me over his knees, annoyed.

But he doesn’t say anything and it doesn’t make any difference because, now I know that I’ve got his attention, I decide to push him further.

I might do it anyway, I say, as casually as I can.

‘Don’t,’ he says again, in a way that says, this is not up for discussion. In a way that says, leave me alone.

I stretch my arms up over my head, then roll onto my side, just to deny him the pleasure of seeing my breasts, my bush. I want him to kiss my ass instead. And I lie there, pretending to ignore him. As if he even cares.

That’s the way it always seems to be with us right now.

No communication. No copulation.

I totally get why. Jack was working hard all through the summer vacation at the campaign office, and now the Fall semester’s started, he’s got even more work to do. Even less time for me. It’s rare that I pick him up from the office any more.

Jack’s playful, up to a point. But try as I might, I can’t rouse his interest in taking it any further. I can’t make him show a whole lot of interest in fucking me. It’s not like we don’t have sex, or that it’s not good when we do. It really is.

Jack is sensitive, caring, thoughtful and kind – everything that makes for a great lover – and before Jack, no man had ever come near to satisfying me in bed. But somehow it still never seems like enough, because I’m wild about him.

I look at Jack and think of Montgomery Clift in
A Place in the Sun
; intensely beautiful, square-jawed, the all-American boy. At least, that’s how he looks to me. But it’s not just about the way he looks. Whenever you see Montgomery Clift on screen, he can be doing little else but staring into the middle distance, lost in contemplation, and you can see his mind churning. That’s Jack. And it really turns me on.

When he’s not around, I masturbate like crazy, fantasizing about Jack. Me fucking Jack. Somewhere mundane, somewhere we’re not meant to. At the office, in the canteen at college, in the library, on the train. Jack fucking me. With passion, vigor and resolve.

He doesn’t have any idea about these fantasies of mine, because I do it when he’s not around and we never discuss them. But it’s getting to the point where my fantasy sex life far outstrips my reality.

We live in a tiny apartment. When things are good, it feels like we’re living in a space capsule, locked together away from the world. Our intimacy seems to make the place seem much larger than it is. When things are bad – not really bad, just the little hiccups that happen between any long-term couple living in close quarters – it can feel stifling and claustrophobic.

On nights like tonight, when Jack comes home from class or working at the campaign office and goes straight in the bedroom to catch up on his reading, and stays there pretty much till he falls asleep, it feels like he’s locking himself away from me on purpose, and I don’t know why. I find myself coming up with reasons to walk around the apartment in my underwear or naked even more often than usual. I make excuses to flaunt myself in front of him, anything to attract his attention, arouse his desire and make him show he wants me.

I’ll decide, on a whim, that I’m going to take a shower before dinner and start peeling my clothes off in front of him. But it doesn’t make any difference because he doesn’t even look up and I think he must be blind – blind to my love for him.

I take the shower as quickly as I can, because I didn’t want or need one anyway, and it wasn’t the purpose of this little exercise. I dry myself off and cream and oil my body so it glistens and shines. And I come out naked, smelling of jasmine. And then the games begin.

When we haven’t had sex for a while, I smell sweet. Like a ripe apple or peach, dripping and ready to be eaten. Ready for someone to get to my core. I know that Jack smells me, but I always wonder if other people can smell me too. And if they can’t, how is that possible? If they just think it’s lotion or perfume. They don’t know that I’m ready and ripe and willing. And left wanting.

4

I’m sitting in class, waiting for Anna to show up. But she’s late.

The one thing Marcus won’t tolerate is tardy students. If ever someone arrives late to class, he goes through this whole elaborate routine intended to intimidate them into never doing it again. He’ll stop talking the second he hears the door to the lecture hall crack open. Not at the end of his sentence, in the middle of a syllable, turn his head, stare at the door, just waiting for someone to step through it.

As they scurry inside and find a seat, Marcus’ stony gaze follows their every step and he’s so pissed you can almost see the steam coming out of his ears. But he still looks cute because he has these dimples – dark hair and dimples – and it always looks like he’s smiling, even when he’s really mad. But even once they’ve found their seat and settled in, with their legal pad in front of them and their pen at the ready, it doesn’t end there. Oh, no.

Marcus will stand there in silence, bent over his desk, with his hands splayed out in front of him, staring down at his notes for a really uncomfortable amount of time. Almost as if he’s willing someone to make a sound, willing someone to give him an excuse to explode. But everyone knows better than that.

We sit in respectful silence and when he feels he’s tortured the class enough, and only then, however long that is, he’ll continue the lecture, starting up again from exactly the same syllable he left off from.

Anna is always late to class. I’ve never known her to miss a class but she’ll never arrive at the same time. It could be just as Marcus has started his lecture, or right in the middle, or sometimes five minutes from the end. But whenever it is, she’ll waltz in without a care in the world. Marcus will look up, see her, and then continue right on as if nothing had happened.

And I always wondered, why does she get special treatment.

So, one day, I ask her.

‘Marcus and I have an arrangement,’ Anna says. ‘I do something for him and he does it for me.’

This is how we bond, Anna and I, over Marcus. Our mutual obsession. My secret. Her lover.

What kind of arrangement, I say.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘let me put it this way. Marcus has special needs… ’

I’m wondering what those special needs could be.

Does Marcus ask Anna to lick his balls while he deconstructs
The 400 Blows
. Or fuck her from behind as he recites quotes from
What is Cinema?
by André Bazin. Does he like Anna to stick her pinky in his stinky as he debates the ins and outs of abjection theory?

I can’t wait for her to tell me. There are so many details I want to square with my fantasies of what turns Marcus on and how he fucks. And I can only think the reality is so much better than I could ever imagine.

So, after class, we grab some coffee and go sit outside on a bench, as students rush back and forth around us trying to get to their next lesson. We sit under a tree, shielded from the mid-morning sun already high in the sky, because Anna’s skin is pale and she prefers it to stay that way. ‘I burn easily,’ she says.

‘OK,’ I say, ‘tell me. I have to know, because it’s been driving me crazy, what is Marcus’ special kink?’

‘He likes to do it in the dark.’

My heart sinks. Marcus sounds so depressingly normal.

‘I thought you said he was a freak. That doesn’t sound very freaky.’

‘Wait, let me finish,’ she says. ‘In a closet. He likes to do it in a closet.’

I’m still not convinced and frown slightly.

‘He’s really shy, you know,’ Anna says, sensing my disappointment. ‘He has this large closet in his apartment and it’s an old worn and wooden antique. There’s nothing of any comfort in his apartment, no couches, no pillows, no throw cushions, no carpet, not even curtains on the windows.’

‘Not even a bed?’ I ask.

‘He sleeps on a mattress on the floor, but we’ve never fucked on it,’ says Anna. ‘And I opened his refrigerator once,’ she continues, ‘and it was almost empty. The only thing inside was tea. Not tea leaves, tea bags. A box of value-pack tea bags. No milk.’

While Marcus’ apartment is lacking furniture and sustenance, Anna tells me, there’s one thing it’s not short of: books and papers.

‘There are books crammed into every inch of these floor-to-ceiling bookcases that line the walls,’ she says. ‘They’re all meticulously arranged by subject: film and sex, art and religion, psychology and medicine. And when he ran out of space on the shelves, he started piling them up on the floor, on tables, chairs, the way a hoarder uses up every available bit of space at his disposal.

‘Plus, where the bookcases aren’t, the walls are covered in art. Erotic art. Nothing very pornographic,’ Anna says, ‘just strange dirty pictures.’

Anna tells me about the blurry photographs of couples fucking that look like paintings by Francis Bacon. Street scenes of prostitutes. Salacious cartoons. Things that don’t even look like erotic art at all – dense, sprawling collages of clippings from newspapers and magazines of faces, places and objects – but which clearly serve some erotic purpose for Marcus. And things that can’t be mistaken for anything else.

Anna says that there are two paintings in particular that have captured her interest more than any of the others. They’re hung side by side in a little alcove off the entrance hallway, right when you come through the front door, and whenever she goes to visit Marcus, she’ll just stand there and stare at them for a while.

One is of two women, the curvature of their prone bodies lying side by side, forming a pair of lips. They both wear suspenders and stockings and have pert orb-like breasts with cherry red nipples.

‘One of the women looks like you,’ Anna tells me. ‘A brunette, with a sweet, sexy smile, who wears a lace bridal veil. But the other one, you can’t see her head. Where the head should be are two arms that emerge from the inky background of the painting like crabs’ legs and hold her nipples like pincers.’