The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Volume 3

I

What made me leave my husband Boris? Tomatoes. There is no other explanation.

When I think of those days just before I took flight my teeth begin to hurt. My husband Boris had for six years done little more than squeeze my hand and get a melancholy look whenever I asked him to make love to me.

I persevered. I invited him to drink wine from my navel. I lost weight. I gained weight. I invested in latex and paraphernalia. Nothing. I still loved him in some ways, like one might love a puppy or a tree. I suggested counselling and he yawned.

In Year Six I resolved to try adultery. You may wonder what took so long. Well, I am an extremely hopeful person. I hoped one day I’d come home to find Boris, bottom bared, waiting for me to spank him. Something would happen. How could it not? Also we lived in Manhattan, where making personal connections is not easy.

Woman proposes – the universe complies.

I was in the laundry room, there in the basement of our co-op building, musing about who to approach with my delicate need for more sex. I considered options. They all seemed very complicated. As I was leaning against the washing machine, feeling how good the spin cycle felt against my centre, I noticed the video camera in the corner of the room. Ah. Dan the Doorman. Who had nothing to do except sit quietly all day watching various black-and-white television screens for signs of unusual behaviour. Of course. So I began to behave unusually, at least for me. I rubbed my breasts through my clothes and looked into that camera lens. A few minutes later Dan himself stood at the door of the laundry room. It was that simple.

I thought sex with Dan would free me from Boris. But the simple pleasure of getting banged against a washing machine every afternoon wasn’t, after all, what got me to leave. It was Marge, a woman who lived in our building’s garden apartment. She was old, in her eighties at least. Maybe she felt guilty about being the only tenant with a yard, because she brought us fresh vegetables from her garden all summer long. One Sunday morning she came bearing tomatoes the size of my fist. Boris was out. I asked her in. I put the tomatoes on the sill over the kitchen sink. Before I could thank her she seized my hands in hers.

“Oh, no, you better eat those right up, honey,” she said. Her grip was amazingly strong. “Nothing gets better with age!”

So the two of us sat right down at my table and ate those tomatoes. I let the juice drip down my chin. She licked her fingers. A few weeks later Marge died of a heart attack, wearing her gardening gloves. Three weeks after that I was watching Boris sit in his favourite leather armchair, his jaw set, his temple pulsing, drinking a bottle of Evian and watching Sixty Minutes. My neighbour was dead. I thought of her poor fragile life. I thought of how old Mike Wallace looked. Boris drank his water. I thought of leaving him. I thought of killing him.

It is at such times that all things become possible.

II

My mother always told me that I was begotten on Haight Street during the Summer of Love, in a room full of mattresses just four doors down from where Jerry Garcia hung out with his pals. She says my father was either Jack Nicholson or a dead ringer for Jack Nicholson. She is hazy on the details.

I have no proof that any of her stories are true. And despite these infrequent hints of bacchanalia in her past, Mom grew more subdued over the years, until I can hardly imagine her other than as a pearl-wearing Republican. By the time I remember, she and I were living in White Plains, and she was married to Bob, a real estate broker.

In those days there was no talk of sex. There was no sex. I buried my own urges by learning how to play tennis. Thwack, thwack, thwack. Lots of grunting. Not until I was 14 did I finally become cock-sure. It was because of the tennis. There was a local tennis player, Dick Hawkes, who was ranked in the state in mixed doubles. His partner broke her ankle and he read about me in the local sports pages so he called my parents to see if I would play tournaments with him.

“A great opportunity, honey,” my stepfather said in his heartiest voice.

Never mind that Dick Hawkes was twice my age. The alarm that would usually have gone off in my stepfather’s head was strangely silent. This was sport, damn it. Mr Hawkes wanted to coach me. There could even be a four-year scholarship at the end of it. So Bob and Dick shook hands, right there in our living room. A few minutes later Mr Hawkes and I were off for our first practice session together.

“Call me Hawkso,” he said just after we pulled out of the drive. A wave of pity overtook me. We actually did play some tennis that day. By the third game he’d taken his shirt off and draped it on a bench. He had a little belly, some sparse hairs on his chest. He did not look particularly good. But the way he touched me when we changed sides – shoulder, elbow, breast, for God’s sake, this was broad daylight, people were on the court next to us – was getting to me. I double-faulted many times. He won the set. “Good play,” he said, and shook my hand across the net, sweat dripping from his temples.

On the way home we climbed into the back seat of his Porsche where we made love over a prescient crate of beefsteak tomatoes. What were those tomatoes doing there? Making a mess, I tell you. By the time we were done no amount of bleach would take out the stain on those tennis whites. But I firmly believe those tomatoes had a purpose. Tomatoes are my totem.

For the next four years Hawkso and I played tournaments together across the state. On the way home we would scramble into his tiny back seat where he would rip my frilly tennis bloomers off and rub them over his face while he ploughed me. Then he would swoop down between my legs and suck and drink and hum on me until I came myself senseless. Or he would nestle his cock between my breasts, which even back then were absurdly huge for my frame, and rock back and forth until he sprayed all over my chin and lips with his come.

I did not win a tennis scholarship. I have lost track of Hawkso since. But Richard, if you are perchance reading these words, thank you for those happy juicy times.

III

“Goodbye, Boris,” I said.

“You’re on a quest to find your father,” my mother shrieked, when I called her from the Newark airport and told her I had left my husband and was about to board a 14 hour flight to Caracas. My mother has always approved of Boris. She calls him “a keeper”. But she is wrong. Oh, I was on a quest, maybe. But not to find my father. I wanted Truth. Enlightenment. Perfect Joy. I wanted it over and over again. Is it too much to ask?

When I was younger I used to have great faith in my life working out the way it was supposed to. Whenever I was at a crossroads, something would appear out of the mist to guide me. While I was with Boris I’d forgotten. Now suddenly the world was once more filled with giddy scents and possibilities, signs of what was to come. I found myself having a difficult time refraining from touching everyone in the airport, they all looked so good to me.

At the gate I found myself in line with a group of Japanese businessmen. One gestured grandly to my chest, his hands held before him as if he were supplicating himself before two cantaloupes. I found myself wondering how I might sit next to him on the plane. Alas, I was seated instead next to a ruddy-faced woman in her fifties wearing a navy business suit, on her way to South America to buy antiques. Never mind. We talked. She seemed a safe enough audience, nodding and mm-hmming at just the right intervals. Just as we crossed the border I even let spill a little about Dan, my laundry-room man.

“Oh, honey, you’re doing it all wrong!” she said, and looked at me, horrified, over the rims of her demi-glasses. “You just can’t have sex like that! The diseases! The consequences!”

At that moment our dinner arrived, complete with precision-wedge tomatoes atop a salad wrapped tightly in yards of plastic wrap.

Ah, I thought. Now I understand. My triptych message was complete. My quest was doomed. But these signs must work in mysterious ways, I argued with myself. Anyway, was I going to let a measly tomato wedge tell me what to think? So I took control right then. I unwrapped that salad. I put a wedge in my mouth and chewed and chewed until it finally spit back its measly juice on my tongue. I tried to hope.

Nevertheless, by the time we landed I was sure I was either dying or pregnant. I must have looked stricken with fear and guilt, because as my companion said goodbye she leaned toward me and kissed me, the slightest edge of her tongue raking over my lips. Then she disappeared into the crowd, trailed by the wheels of her carry-on luggage. But her taste remains, warm, a little salty, as I stand here waiting for my bags. At times like these I understand the natural, beefy roundness of things and I want to weep from the joy of it. But I’m in a foreign country, where the customs are unknown to me, so I’ll refrain.