The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (2 page)

“OK. What do we do now? Throw in the towel because the honeymoon isn’t working out?”

“I don’t know, Richard. I just think being unhappy is a waste of time.”

“Agreed.”

We stared at each other. Neither of us really
wanted
to be married. Not really. We were romantics, we weren’t interested in snug harbors – when we spoke of love, we meant
passion. Rub us together and you got fire.

From the time I first saw Mora I was under a spell. I know some magic was involved, because I was on the defensive after the break-up of a relationship I’d taken more
seriously than I should have. The home truths I’d learned about my needs were so lacerating, I vowed eternal celibacy.

For six months I’d been living like a monk in a basement sublet in Brooklyn Heights. It had a single bed I used and a kitchen I didn’t, and little else except for a color television
set and a well-equipped darkroom. No pictures on the walls, no plants to be watered, no cats to wrap themselves around my ankles when I came back late from my studio on West 17th Street.

It was a low, unhappy period in my life. I told myself I’d snap out of my funk any day, but the truth was I was drifting, getting by in a low key. I had let being in love become a way of
defining myself. Alone, I didn’t know who I was.

Mora came along just when I was beginning to spend so much time in Village bars that the bartenders knew my name, occupation, and marital status. One of them was an actor I had used as a model.
He knew a woman who needed some pictures.

“She comes in here all the time. Lives just around the block. She’s real intense.”

“You don’t understand. I take pictures of products, not egos. I don’t do portfolio glossies and I don’t want to meet any women.”

It was noisy in the bar, right before dinner. Maybe he didn’t hear me.

“She’s a lot of fun. Just let me tell her you’ll do it.”

A few days later she showed up at my studio. I was fussing with lights around an ornate, old-fashioned bathtub with claw feet. Later in the day, the agency that had had it delivered to me would
come to fill it with towels – I did catalogs, too.

I earn a living with a 35 millimeter camera because when I was a boy I picked up a Brownie for the first time and discovered my third eye. I have a gift for seeing with the camera lens what the
naked eye misses, moments when formlessness becomes form. When Mora walked through the door, it was one of those moments.

I stared. She stared back. She was so small I could have fitted her in a large camera bag. The top of her head came to the middle of my chest. Her curly hair was short but not mannishly cut, a
chestnut brown that smelled like oranges.

Her white skirt showed off her slender legs, and she had thrown a linen jacket over her thin shoulders. She wore a
figa
– a small, fist-shaped Brazilian good luck charm – on a
gold chain around her throat, but no earrings, no bracelets: only a trace of lip gloss. Her tan was so deep, she looked like she’d just stepped off a plane from someplace south.

I looked away first, after seeing the mischief in her calm green eyes. “Ever modeled before?”

She shook her head. “Only for my boyfriend’s Polaroid, but the pictures always came out blurry – you know how those things go. He found it hard to concentrate.” She
suppressed a smirk.

“You don’t say.”

We were grinning at each other. Hers was impish, provocative. “Have you acted before?”

“Never, if you don’t count Gilbert and Sullivan in grade school. But I’ve tried everything else and all my friends are in theater this year, so I thought, why not?”

Her self-confidence was dazzling. It came out in the standard portrait shots I did of her. Her dark features were wonderfully mobile, and she kept that glint in her eye. After the shooting, I
cancelled my appointment with the bath towel people and took Mora to dinner.

And so we met. And we made love. She was just as bold in bed as she was before the camera, very passionate and open; her energy was astonishing. A month later, I left Brooklyn
and moved into her second floor apartment on Cornelia Street. Things happened fast around Mora.

We lived together for a year, more happily than I’d thought possible. Business went so well in the studio, I hired a part-time assistant; Mora didn’t have to work because her father
owned a shopping mall and sent her a monthly allowance. When she decided she had no acting talent, she got into politics for a while, and then she just started spending all her time at home cooking
exotic meals; she told her friends she was too happy to concentrate on anything more.

What happened was that we got cocky. All the traditional signals had gone off at the right times, and we started thinking we were different, that we could nail our feelings to the wall where
they would never change. One thing led to another and, before we knew it, we were standing in City Hall, saying our vows. Afterwards, we threw a party for our friends, and then when the shock wore
off and we realized what we’d done, we stayed drunk for two days and had a terrific fight so we could squeeze the last ounce of passion out of making up.

Why did we do it? Talk to anyone: marriage is like getting a diploma in living as an adult. The license certifies a certain wilful madness for, as we found out, everyone lies about marriage,
especially its kinkier aspects: the manacles of words at each wrist and ankle, the eager vows that become expectations. The endless expectations.

We were on our third round of drinks and Mora was snapping her foot back and forth restlessly and staring off into space. I looked around for a waiter so we could order dinner,
when I saw Charles Venturi sit down at a table near us. He was the last person I expected to see. He’d been off in Europe for years – since the early seventies, when we had served time
together on the same slick magazines. We were never close, but I had sought him out and spent time with him because he fascinated me.

Sitting across from him was a tall blonde woman in her late twenties who had lovely cheekbones, hollow cheeks, and long delicate wrists, the supple carriage of a dancer, the long neck and waist
of a model. She was beautiful in the wiredrawn way that well-bred New England daughters who sing Bach on Sundays can be.

“Look over there,” I said to Mora. “That’s Charles Venturi.”

“They’re a handsome couple,” she admitted. “They look interesting.”

She followed me over to their table.

“Charles! How long have you been back?”

We shook hands and I introduced Mora. The woman with him was Vy Cameron. In the years I’d known Charles, I hadn’t seen him with a woman who looked so capable of keeping up. I liked
the determination I saw in her pale gray-blue eyes, and the demure way she shook my hand, fingers wrapped lightly around fingers. A lady, with an agenda.

The two of us exchanged the usual inane comments that pass for casual conversation in the Hamptons, but we kept our eyes on our mates. Mora and Charles were hitting it off. While he talked, she
was giving him what I think of as the Treatment. The Treatment consists of her undivided attention, of long, smouldering looks, and sudden, surprising smiles that promise a lot more than
understanding. It’s flattering, and nearly always effective.

After a while, I interrupted them. I saw a chance to change the weather between Mora and I, the possibility of sun behind the clouds.

“Let’s get together. Where are you staying?”

“With the man Vy lives with, Maurice.”

I raised my eyebrows, and he looked unexpectedly sheepish for a minute.

“It’s a long story. I’ll save it for later.” He winked.

He suggested that we meet on the beach next day. We talked about time and place – he knew a beach where it was possible to go without bathing suits – and returned to our table.

In bed later, Mora asked me to tell her more about him. I was suspicious of her interest and reluctant at first, but she cuddled up to me and I starting stroking her and talking. In the dark,
her emerald eyes glowed like a cat’s. A cat in heat.

When it comes to women, Charles has a gift. He hears what they’re saying between the lines. They find him inordinately seductive, although there isn’t much about
his appearance other than his provocative black eyes that would suggest such powers of attraction. But he’s solid and dark and intense.

His restless energy is the source of his charisma. His hunger for the varieties of experience. He grew up fast on the Italian Catholic streets of East Harlem, where he learned to see the world
as a stage, and his part in it as an infinitely adaptable player. He was attracted to both the smell of incense and the smell of sex, the sharp aroma of men and the secret fragrance of women. By
the age of forty his resume read like eight lives had been crammed into one. He’d been a translator, a student of Gurdjieffian teachings, a psychotherapist, a librarian, an editor of
men’s magazines – even a novice with shaved head in a Zen monastery. His appetite for biography was prodigious.

All this time, he was writing furiously; when he published the books that established his reputation, his radical ideas about sexuality were treated respectfully by slick national magazines, a
few maverick critics, and even one incautious Nobel Laureate. It didn’t hurt that he was called a pornographer by a few midwestern district attorneys who had no idea what he was talking
about.

He became a cult figure in the sexual underground. When he stepped out of the shadows into the spotlight, he represented the forces of eros to the media. There was applause. He titillated
people. Amused them. Sometimes even succeeded in outraging them. Then, one week, he was on the cover of
Life
magazine wearing eye shadow and mascara and grinning about the confusion of sex
roles he embodied. It seems improbable, but it was the sixties. The pot boiled, and he was there to take his turn stirring it, along with student radicals, Black Panthers, Yippies, Weather People,
and self-destructive rock stars. The seventies were a let-down for him. I think he went off to Europe primarily because he was bored and he wanted to see if he’d been missing anything
there.

When we met him on the beach, next day, the sky was cobalt blue, and the ocean was calm as bathwater. Mora smiled at the sun. She was happy again. We found Charles sitting
cross-legged on an orange beach towel at the foot of a golden dune, brown arms on his knees, gazing out over the rippling water. A lone sail boat patrolled the line of the horizon. I was
disappointed when I didn’t see Vy.

“Thank God for the sun,” I said.

“That’s a big ocean. I’m glad to be on this side of it.”

I unfurled our blue chintz beach spread and Mora helped me to anchor it with our sandals. We took off our jeans and sprawled next to Charles. Mora began rubbing lotion into her legs.

“Where’s Vy?”

“She had to play hostess for a while.”

“For Maurice?”

He nodded. “She won’t be long.”

“You share her with him?”

He shrugged. “That’s how it is.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“He loves her in his own way, I guess.” A faint smile played on his lips as he studied Mora. Her tight smooth flesh overwhelmed the white terrycloth bikini she wore.

“You’re so casual,” she said. “Have you known her long?”

“I met her when I got back from Europe. Some friends threw a welcome home party, and she was there. As soon as I saw her, I knew I was in trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“I was turned on, and I knew we wouldn’t be any good for each other – but I had to have her. I met my match.”

“I want to hear more. All about her,” Mora said. Erotic style fascinated her, and any woman who could live with two men deserved a great deal of study.

“What does she do?”

“She’s a dancer. But she has many talents.”

“You can tell us more than that.”

“Well, you can ask her yourself,” Charles said, pointing to a tall, erect figure walking down the beach toward us. Vy wore a Japanese kimono and clogs, and her blonde hair was piled
on top of her head. We could hear her singing in a high, lilting voice when she got closer, but the words were lost in the muffled slap of the surf on the beach.

Her first words were breathless, almost hoarse. “I’m so fucking dry I’m going to have to do a little deep throat to get my voice in the right register. I’m a tenor in the
heat.” She patted her chest. Her palpitating heart.

Mora and I looked at each other. What heat?

“It’s my coloring,” Vy said. “I’m more susceptible than most people. I don’t like the sun. It causes cancer and it dries up the skin.”

“I worship the sun,” Mora said.

“Well, nothing could have seduced me down to this beach but the thought of you three doing something delicious without me.” She was overwhelming, regal. In supplication I opened the
bottle of cold Retsina we’d brought, filled four paper cups, and handed one to her. Charles lit a joint and passed it around.

She settled herself on our blue spread. Mora watched her with narrowed, admiring eyes. “Now tell me what I’ve missed. Have you been talking about me? I hope so – it would make
me feel so good. All Maurice talks about any more is deals. Buy that, sell this. Sometimes when he refers to me it’s in the same tone of voice, and I feel like a jewel he’s tucked into
his safety deposit box.”

She leaned back on her elbows, her gaze fixed on my face, the slender joint stuck in the corner of her mouth.

“I don’t own a safety deposit box,” Charles said.

“I don’t own a bathing suit,” she purred in a cool, milky voice, removing her kimono with ladylike panache. Her plump, berry-tipped breasts, flat white belly and wide hips were
exquisite. Her skin blushed that faint pinkish hue found in the center of certain roses. In the cool salt breeze, she trembled almost imperceptibly, like a rabbit in a field of shotgun fire. I felt
a sudden stabbing urge to take her in the crook of my arm and press my fingers gently in the wet hollows of her throat, her elbows, her knees; my groin was beating like a second heart.

Mora wasn’t to be upstaged. She untied her bikini top with what was meant to be a casual gesture, but I knew that she was tense. Her normally puffy copper nipples were tight and
hopeful.