The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Erotica

ONE

Mora and I had been in East Hampton for two days waiting for the sun to come out when we ran into Charles and Vy. It was July, the Bicentennial Summer, and we were on our first vacation as man and wife. We’d accepted a friend’s invitation to spend a few days at his beach house, but the afternoon we arrived the rains came, and lasted through the following day. We were grumpy stuck inside. We wanted to lie naked in the sun.

The next morning, the sun made its appearance, and it was windy when we walked to the beach. We had the ocean to ourselves, but it was too rough to go in. Empty blue sky, empty white beach, empty green ocean. The freckled, lively children further down the beach who were our only neighbours had to be content with building sandcastles. Mora read a novel and wrote in her journal, frowning and chewing her lip. It was her way of arguing with me without saying anything, and also of arguing with herself instead of with me. I shrugged at her silence and went for a long run on the wet hard sand, where high rolling breakers left thick clumps of seaweed, but I couldn’t outrace my frustration.

By evening, we were speaking only when spoken to and being scrupulously polite with each other. We brooded in marital silence over cold gin at Peaches, a restaurant in Bridgehampton where summer people went that year for a hamburger or a salad before rushing off to the parties that seemed to run around the clock, summer weekends on the South Fork. When there was a breeze from the ocean, the leaves of the giant maples on the sidewalk outside scratched softly at the window screens. On each small round table a slender mirrored vase held a single rose. It should have been romantic; couples all around us thought it was.

I reached for her hand and she put it quickly in her lap.

“What the hell is wrong with us?”

She sighed and I knew she was grateful that I’d spoken first. The answer was sitting on her tongue. “It’s marriage. Holy wedlock.”

“You want to expand on that?”

“I don’t have to. We both know it’s that – why it’s that.”

So we did. Jealousy. Possessiveness. Insecurity. Fights, screaming, threats, feeling trapped. And keeping score – that was the worst. That computerized reference file constantly added to of insult and injury, a never-to-be-erased tape of gritty misery.

“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 harbours – 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 colour 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 catalogues, too.

I earn a living with a 35 millimetre 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 modelled 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 theatre 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 licence 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 grey-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.

TWO

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 résumé 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 sailboat 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 towards 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 colouring,” 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 centre 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.

Charles grinned happily at the women. “We are fortunate men, Richard.” Then he told us a story that set the mood for what happened later as much as the hot sun or the empty beach.

“I was walking on the beach this morning. I didn’t know where I was going, just walking and thinking and looking for driftwood. There were no people around, so I took off my trunks. It was about ten o’clock when I realized I was walking through a gay beach. I almost stepped on a man who was lying in the surf, masturbating. Something in his face made me stop – whether it was pleasure or invitation, I don’t know. I went down on him, and for five minutes, maybe ten – it seemed like hours – we were as close as any two bodies can get. Such an absolute passion – and it happened with a total stranger! Afterwards we didn’t say anything, but neither of us were looking for romance.”

“I love it,” Mora exclaimed excitedly, clapping her hands. Her cat eyes flashed. “Anonymous sex, no attachments. It’s too bad heterosexuals can’t be so honest. I see so many people I’m turned on to, yet I don’t want to talk to them. I want to take them. Just make love. Between men, it’s better. You both know what you want, without any illusions…” She was breathless.

Vy crossed her arms and cupped her hands over her breasts protectively, as if guarding her heart. She closed her eyes and sat quite straight and still. “All there is is romance. The rest is technique,” she said, without opening her eyes. “I’ve had expert lovers who couldn’t get me wet because they didn’t know any of the magic words.”

She opened her eyes and focused on Charles. He stretched out casually next to her, propped on his elbows, looking out to sea. Something seemed to draw him: he started crawling crablike on his belly out to the water, leaving a broad, wrinkled trail in the tawny sand.

We all stared after him. Mora sighed wistfully. “I should have been a man. You just don’t know how much I fantasize about certain… situations.”

“Well, my dear,” Vy said coldly. “We all have to learn the hard way.”

“I guess it’s something I want to learn,” Mora replied, unwilling to give Vy the last word. “Anyway, Charles says you’re a part of the world I want to learn about.”

The sharks might have envied Vy’s smile. “I keep myself entertained.”

The static between them made me decide to follow Charles into the surf. I crawled for a bit, felt silly, and walked the rest of the way. He was lying on his back, letting the sudsy foam wash over his body, decorating his hirsute chest and legs with green seaweed and fragments of sea shells. Looking at him lying there, I thought of the man in his story.

“Let the two of them work it out,” he said. “We’re just in the way.”

“I’m grateful that Mora’s found someone to talk to. She’s been in a funk.”

“Tell me about her.”

“What you see is Mora. She hides nothing. She’s an all-or-nothing type. Black or white, no greys.”

“Get out of her way when she decides what she wants.”

“Exactly. She wants my soul. She gets jealous if I talk with a bank clerk too long. I try to tell her that I’m not interested in anyone but her, but she sees what she wants to see. Marriage has done us in, I think.”

He shook his head sympathetically. “But before you got married – how were things?”

“God was in his heaven and all was right with the world… You know what it’s like.”

“So why did you do it?”

“Get married? I guess I’d have to plead insanity. I knew better, and I did it anyway.”

He snorted in recognition. “I’m sorry, but I think you’re taking it all too seriously, Richard. Loosen up.”

“How do I do that?”

“Stop arguing. Stop anticipating.”

“Is that what you learned in Europe?”

He laughed this time. His eyes lit up with mirth. There was a patch of wet sand on his cheek. “What do you know about me, Richard?”

“Not much. But I always thought you knew about women.”

“Then let me tell you something: Mora wants more than marriage can offer her right now. She wants to play, it’s as simple as that.”

“Simple?” I couldn’t swallow that.

“Look, you’re on vacation. Try something different.”

He winked amiably, walked into the water to clean the sand off, and sprinted up the beach. I knew what he meant because the idea had been lurking in the back of my mind since we’d met at Peaches; but I knew that I didn’t want anyone but me making love to Mora.

I knew she’d had lovers in the past, but they were shadows framed by shadows. Charles was sharp and immediate. Yet I had to admit to myself that the image of the four of us together on a bed heated my imagination – that perhaps my curiosity was stronger than my apprehension.

I wanted Vy, but I tried to shake my head clear of her as I walked back up the beach to our blue chintz island in the sand. Sleeping with other people when you’re married leads to trouble, I told myself.

I should have listened, but of course I didn’t.

Indelible image: Charles was standing in a half crouch, swimming briefs kicked aside, feet planted heavily in the sand, calves bulging, body glistening, while Vy’s blonde head bobbed vigorously between his thighs. Mora was leaning back, breasts free, snapping pictures with my Pentax. In her hands it was almost a sexual instrument. I threw up my hands in surprise and she swung around to take my picture. Far down the empty beach, a boy was throwing rocks into the surf, but he was a speck in the distance.

Snap. There are glimpses, in a late afternoon sun, of the future. They come unbidden, and they enter the heart and lodge there. The dark fuzz on Charles’s thighs; the shuddering in Vy’s back as she pulled him into her; Mora’s obvious arousal as she clicked the shutter. There was an excitement in the air – of people about to experiment with their lives – that wasn’t to be dissipated by the salt breeze.

“It feels right,” Mora said brightly when she handed me the camera.

“Does it?” I was doubtful. I had fists at the ends of my arms, fingers closed tightly into my palms. My tongue fluttered helplessly, like the tail of an animal I’d got stuck in my throat.

Vy leaned back from Charles, licked her lips delicately, and lighted a black Sobranie cigarette. She winked at me. Charles sat in the sand, looking seductive. I thought I could hear the wheels turning in his head.

“Why don’t we have dinner together? We can whip up something easy at Maurice’s, and let the evening take care of itself.”

THREE

Vy drove off in a blue Mercedes. She blew a kiss through the window and scrunched gravel as she left the beach parking lot. The gesture seemed to enlarge her: fingertips to her lips, the wide unexpected smile, the pressure of her foot on the gas pedal. We followed in Charles’s Clunker Deluxe. “‘The station car’,” he joked. “That’s what they call vintage Detroit iron out here. It’s what I can afford. Maurice watches that Mercedes like a hawk. I think he has the soul of a chauffeur.”

I shrugged. “Shoulders were made for burdens.”

I sat on the outside and Mora was squeezed between us. We dripped sand on the floor of the car and the hot vinyl seats stuck to our thighs. Despite the heat, Mora’s skin was cool and moist.

“You’re a Scorpio sandwich,” Charles said to her, reminding me that we shared our birthdays. Then he touched her.

We were heading down the Montauk Highway and had slowed on the outskirts of Amagansett, where a train had derailed. The road swarmed with police, gawkers, and dazed passengers. Charles lifted his hand from the steering wheel and pressed the back of it against Mora’s breasts. Lightly. It was the simplest, most casual of gestures, so natural I felt like I was stealing something from them because I stared. I looked quickly out the window, feeling embarrassed – and angry at myself for feeling that way.

Mora giggled and clapped a hand over her mouth. She put her left hand on Charles’s knee and her right hand on my thigh and stroked us both. Her face was red, even through her tan.

I don’t know how to explain it, but I was as shocked as if Charles had stroked my nipples. Those weren’t his breasts, they were mine. Mine. But I could tell by the way Mora was breathing that she didn’t agree that marriage had made me a man of property.

We passed dunes tufted with islands of waving sword grass, rows of beach cottages, the potato fields of July, and then I saw the windmill in East Hampton. We drove through the town’s sparkling centre. In the late afternoon light it was still, unreal, a postcard.

“An extraordinary afternoon,” I said in the silence. There was more I wanted to say, but I couldn’t find the words. Mora’s fingers were having the desired effect on me.

I was confused by the male complicity I felt with Charles. When he touched Mora, she became a strange woman we’d picked up together. From then on, two plus one equalled more than three.

FOUR

However shocking or perhaps just plain perverse it may seem, when I saw Mora naked with Charles and Vy it wasn’t jealousy that I felt. It was lust that grew in my belly, like a sapling putting down roots. I knew the voyeur’s stunned delight in achieving erotic perspective. Our nakedness created the illusion that we had entered another dimension, a counter world of the id, where our apprehensions were removed with our clothes and past and future ceased to exist.

Vy’s bedroom was white, but by no means chaste. White walls, white sheepskin rugs on the parquet floor, huge antique mirrors, white vases filled with daisies, and a platform bed on which the three of them sat as if on a tongue sticking out of fluffy clouds, for the silk spread was white, but the sheets underneath were crimson. Satin.

I sauntered around the room, determined to be casual, sipping my brandy and looking at things, conscious of the cool night air on my bare skin. I studied four large framed photographs of Vy on one gleaming white wall, two of them by young fashion photographers I knew. In the portraits, she was elegant and stylish, with formidable cheekbones and a frosty gaze; I didn’t see in them the woman I’d watched kneeling before Charles on the beach.

When I walked over to the bed, Mora and Vy were lying on each side of Charles like houris, watching him stroke himself. His tongue moistened his dry lips, and his strong hands moved slowly from his knees up his firm thighs to his rounded belly. His breath came in shallow gasps. His chest swelled and his nipples pointed. I shivered. We would play a game, a sexual Simon says.

We drew matches and Charles won. He asked that Vy and Mora stretch out between his thighs and handed me the Polaroid. I was happy to hide behind it because I felt flushed and my ears were ringing.

It was the first time I’d seen Mora hesitant about lovemaking; her touch was tentative at first and she followed Vy’s lead. Charles’s swollen flesh glowed wetly in the soft light of a bedside candle. From my new perspective as voyeur, I saw that what was exciting about oral sex was not the mechanics of one person satisfying another, but the selfless art of it, the submission of ego to pleasure. The women’s tongues and fingers worked gently and assiduously; Charles groaned. The phrases that broke from his lips were the mutterings of gratified desire. I waited until they had forgotten the camera before I snapped a picture.

They all blinked and looked around dazedly when the flash went off. Once again; and then it was time to draw matches. Mora’s turn. I was surprised when she moved towards Vy instead of Charles, but when she touched Vy’s breasts, Vy turned her long body to the side.

“Not yet,” she said huskily. “Let me warm up, first.”

Mora smiled as if she’d expected the rebuff, and crawled to Charles, climbing atop him, swivelling her hips to claim his hardness. The two of them flowed into each other.

For a moment then, it hurt like hell. I remembered every time Mora and I had made love, the heat and wetness, our nerves rushing to release, our ragged romantic promises, the closeness of sex during times when we couldn’t even speak to each other. I was drawn to her; I handed Vy the camera and kneeled beside them, kissing Mora and stroking her taut breasts, placing my fingertips on her pubic mound to feel the movement of Charles’s flesh inside her, beneath the soft maidenhair.

The room melted, contracting so that only the bed existed. My hands moved over their bodies, urging them together, teaching Charles about Mora’s responses, sculpting them. When the flashbulb went off, we blinked like animals in the dark.

It was Vy’s turn. “Whoo, boy,” she exclaimed. “This is most extraordinary. Hot, hot, hot.”

“Tell us what you want, before things get out of hand.”

“I want to take Richard into the next room.”

“No pictures?”

“Just the two of us, no silly cameras.”

I was more than a little frightened of Vy. Shyness, I suppose, and the fact that I was attracted to her. The room she took me to was obviously a guest room. Rattan furniture in the shadows, a colourful hand-sewn quilt on a large brass bed, moonlight making patterns on a faded Chinese rug.

We didn’t make it to the bed. I reached for her but she slipped away, onto her knees, and took my flesh into her warm mouth. I thought my knees would fold, and my hands went to her shoulders for support while fire raced up and down my spine. It was over before I could take a deep breath, while my fingers were still caressing her silky hair and finding the secret places of her delicate skull.

I was shaking all over. “Whew!” I breathed after a moment spent looking for my head, which had shot like a rocket to the ceiling. “That was too fast.”

She chuckled, licking her lips like a cat over a saucer of milk. She rose gracefully and shrugged her square shoulders into her caftan. “That calls for a drink,” she said, going into the next room for the brandy.

I was aware of a steady, rhythmic thumping through the wall and wondered for a minute if she’d return. I lighted a hurricane lamp next to the bed and waited. She reappeared with the bottle and two glasses, looking younger and more vulnerable in the flickering light.

“So the doors of marriage creak open,” she said.

“I think you oiled the hinges with that one.”

“Well, I’m good at what I do. I enjoy the power of doing that. It wasn’t until I saw men from that perspective – on my knees, in absolute control of them – that I realized they weren’t omnipotent.”

She was too glib; it had bothered me since our first conversation. She sensed my scepticism. Not about what she’d said, but about her sophistication in regard to swinging.

“I was born this way. No illusions. I look at things in black and white. It’s like not having eyelids.”

I wanted to hold her, to press my body against hers, to feel the length of her thighs on mine, but she sat away from me, smoking one of her cigarettes. Her sharp profile cut through the aromatic blue haze.

“I wish I didn’t love Charles so much, that I could turn it on and off.”

I lifted my glass. “Here’s to marriage.”

She sniffled. She was squinting and her eyes were wet, but that might have been the smoke.

“Marriage? That’s for victims. I don’t intend to be a victim ever again. That’s why I stay with Maurice, even though I know it drives Charles crazy.”

“What have you got against marriage?”

She pouted mock-dramatically.

“His name is James Lee Tait. My used-to-be. Three years of holy wedlock made a sorrowful woman of me. He promised everything – he had the gift of promise, you know? – but in the end it was the same old song and dance.”

“So you divorced him.”

“Not without a lot of turmoil. A woman gets attached to you creatures, and a divorce is like losing… your past, maybe your future.”

I wanted to understand. “Do you hate him?”

“No, not really. Let’s just say I envy his get-up-and-gall. I suffered over that. He’s a singer, and I waited in the wings of his career and let mine slide; I had my own ambitions.”

“You make marriage sound like a minefield.”

“It’s no picnic. It’s the most dangerous relationship you can have. A contract made in hell.”

“And Charles? How does he fit in?”

“He doesn’t believe in marriage, and he lets me do what I want to do. We have a pact: no apologies. Jimmy was the kind of man who was always saying ‘I’m sorry’ while he was stepping on my feet – but I could have twisted his balls into a daisy chain. Charles, on the other hand, makes no bones about being exactly who he is, and he never apologizes. I don’t expect anything from him, so I’m never disappointed.”

I stretched out in the bed, thinking about marriage, and Mora and Charles in the next room.

“Sorry. I’m rattling on, and I know you’re thinking about Mora. She’s so restless.”

I told her about my first wife, wishing that the scars were visible so I could show her. I tried to explain about Mora. “Sometimes I feel like she’s only mine on loan, that nothing will ever satisfy her.”

“She’s vibrating like a spinning top. Nothing will slow her down; she’s like a natural force. Take it from another woman.”

“I love her. You love Charles. We’re crazy.”

“Charles says two plus two equals twelve.”

“Charles is crazy.”

“I know.”

“But you’d rather be with him right now, wouldn’t you?”

“Well? Wouldn’t you rather be with Mora?”

“That’s not what’s happening.”

“You’re evading the question. I mean, what if Charles fucks her better than you ever did? He’s very good.”

Check. I couldn’t bear any more conversation. I wanted to make love to Vy. It was the only answer I had.

“I can’t,” she protested when I touched her. I put my hand through the opening in her caftan onto her cool stomach. “I absolutely cannot, I’m sorry.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Charles and I made love while you were off looking for Mora before dinner. He’s big, and I’m sore. It’s my background,” she sighed theatrically. “Fair-skinned mothers. Delicate skin. Look here, I’ll show you.”

She opened the caftan and spread her white thighs. “You see the blood?”

The lips of her vulva were irritated and swollen, and there was a tiny drop of blood on her clitoris. Imagine the centre of a rose with a drop of blood on a petal…

I found cotton and peroxide in a bathroom medicine cabinet and brought them back without looking in on Charles and Mora. I heard them talking through the closed door and I wanted to eavesdrop, but I wanted to make love to Vy more.

“Your hands are so gentle,” she told me when I wiped away the drop of blood and covered her soreness with Vaseline. The glistening petals of her sex opened beneath my fingers.

“I’ll stop. I promise you. If it hurts, I’ll stop.”

She squirmed evasively when I penetrated her. I stopped, moving again only when she opened to receive me. She whispered hotly in my ear while she licked it with the point of her tongue. “I trust you. No reason, but I do. I know you’ll stop – but please don’t stop now.”

I cupped the plump weight of her buttocks in my palms and let myself be swallowed by her. We got lost in the dialogue of bodies, questioning and answering, alone on a gently rolling sea in the blackest night.

She pulled a yellow popper out of the darkness and crushed it between her fingers, holding the amyl nitrate to my nose and then to her own. We both inhaled deeply and felt our hearts rush to where our genitals were, riding on the cloudy, pungent chemical high like surfers on a wave.

“Oooo!” she cried out, as if in a dream. I heard someone wailing, without realizing it was me. Each wave that took us was bigger than the last, and we were no longer rocking gently but struggling together to stay afloat.

I heard tapping on the floor and looked down to see my fingers doing a fast dance on the wide boards. I was half off the bed and sweat was pouring from me. Vy’s body was arched, a dying swan. There was a roaring in my ears like the ocean at the same time I heard knocking on the door, and then I hit the last, biggest wave and was dragged head over heels into shore. Vy’s whole body clenched and she followed me, digging her nails into the backs of my arms. A high thin noise came from her throat.

When I opened my eyes, Charles was standing over us, naked, grinning, scratching his chest. “Birds would give up a winter’s feed to hit that note,” he said, while Vy shuddered and I navigated the re-entry to consciousness.

“What time is it?”

“Half past four. You two make a lot of noise.”

Mora moved from the shadows to stand beside him, her hand on his shoulder. Her hair was matted and wet and she was ragged around the edges. They looked like weasels who’d been in the chicken coop. There should have been feathers hanging from their swollen satisfied mouths.

“I won’t be able to explain this away tomorrow morning,” Charles said. “I won’t believe it. It was so incredibly high at times. So intense.”

“I guess we did it after all.” Mora smiled tiredly, shaking her head in happy disbelief.

“I don’t know what could be bad about this,” I said.

Vy sat up and stretched, pulling Charles’s hand to her breast. “It was divine, and I love you all, and I don’t know what to say, except that we’ve been very wicked.”

Charles yawned and rubbed his eyes sleepily. Mora came to sit next to me on the rumpled bed that smelled of sex and poppers and cigarettes. We kissed Charles and Vy goodnight with the gentle exhaustion of sated lovers, and Mora and I curled up spoon-fashion on the bed. She was mine again, for a few hours.

FIVE

In the pictures I developed of the four of us on the beach, our faces are aglow with anticipation and pleasure. Our shyness is not fear of each other, but of the unknown. There are no shadows under our eyes, no tightness around our mouths; no hint of desperation clouds our sunny expressions. Our discovery of adultery was almost painless – and the timing was right.

“I thought I had it figured out,” Mora said when we looked at the wet proofs in my darkroom. “Love and sex and relationship. Marriage – the idea that if you want this, you can’t have that – that was what was wrong with us. Then what happens? We go and break all the rules. We find out that marriage has got corners and angles we didn’t know existed.”

Turn around. We were friends again. The bad habits we had fallen into disappeared overnight, as quickly as rubbing condensation from a window. We were able to treat each other lovingly again. Trust reappeared. Freedom was exhilarating.

Predictably, the few friends – married couples – we told about Charles and Vy thought we’d gone off the deep end. A relationship with one other person was difficult enough, they scoffed. Three was arrogance, asking for it on the chin. None of them raised moral objections and they didn’t ask how we felt: and since we knew their marriages and their reasons for being cynical, we paid no attention to them.

Months after returning from East Hampton, we received a note from Vy. She was in London.

Curious, Mora called Charles – not without some trepidation, but the phone was her instrument, not mine. I got on the extension.

“Maurice took her over to meet some of his friends,” Charles explained. He sounded lonely by himself in Maurice’s big house, and resentful that Vy had gone off without him. “I guess there’s a party circuit for septuagenarians in the countryside around London. Discreet scenes in the stately homes of England.”

“That lady gets around. I wish I had her style.”

“Come out and see me. We’ll go for walks on the beach, and spend a lot of time in bed. Just us chickens.”

“It’s the middle of the week, Charles. Richard can’t get away; he has shootings lined up.”

“I didn’t invite Richard.”

She paused and looked at me. “We’re a team, you know that. I wouldn’t go anywhere without him.”

I threw her a kiss, my hand over the receiver.

“Look, the words ‘wedlock’ and ‘hammerlock’ are not synonymous. They don’t add up to virtue. Besides, you’re not just a ‘twosome’, you’re half of a ‘foursome’ – silly words, it sounds like we’re talking about golf…”

“I’m sorry—”

“Maybe if you did some homework, since I’m not around to keep things stirred up.”

“What? What kind of homework?”

“Now I’ve got your interest piqued. I’ll mail you your next lesson.” I heard a dry chuckle on the other end.

I broke in. “Come and see us.”

“Oh. There you are, Richard. You should breathe more heavily when you’re spying on people.”

“Mora knew I was on the extension. I trust her, but not you. Why don’t you come visit us?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’m going to hole up out here and try to get some work done. Fasting and abstinence and hard work, that’s the prescription. I’ll be a different man, the next time you see me.”

“Like?”

“Lean and hungry, I suppose, and head over heels in love.”

“You mean because absence makes the heart grow fonder?”

He chuckled again. “Love is what I feel when I want to get laid. Abstinence, that’s what makes the heart grow fonder.”

He wasn’t kidding about our homework. The clipping arrived in the mail two days later. He had cut it from the classified section of a sex tabloid.

The advertisement was for a private club called Plato’s Retreat that had recently opened on lower Fifth Avenue.

“The first on-premise club which meets in Manhattan – which means the party’s right there…” It mentioned facilities like whirlpool baths, disco floor, swing rooms, and free bar and buffet.

It made me think of restaurant ads for Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s – a meal, some hats, streamers and horns. I imagined people as lonely as forgotten uncles and single people with nowhere else to go buying some holiday companionship for a package price.

We looked at each other.

“We could go and just see what’s going on,” Mora said, barely concealing the excitement in her voice.

“Somehow I don’t think swinging is a spectator sport, love.”

“Please, Richard: let’s go take a look. I’m really curious.”

“I don’t know if I can handle it.”

“We’ll stick together, I promise. Besides, there’ll be a woman for every man there. What if you meet someone?”

“I don’t know. What if I do?”

“Well, you won’t turn her down, will you?”

When we called the number in the ad for information, a woman told us that Plato’s Retreat was open from ten until five in the morning, and directed us to an older loft building below Madison Square Park. We stood on the broad, empty avenue opposite the building, sharing a joint and getting our nerve up. It was Saturday night, after eleven. People were arriving in taxis and entering the building. A limousine hugged the curb.

Stoned, we took a small, rattling elevator to the fifth floor and stepped off into a spartan reception area crowded with a desk and three pretty, businesslike young women wearing black Plato’s Retreat T-shirts. I handed over twenty-five dollars to the one who winked at me, and we received orange membership cards with the club name on one side and a list of rules on the other.

Stepping through black curtains sewn with sequins, we found ourselves at the head of a long, dark corridor where shadowy half-dressed figures stood about passing joints, plastic glasses in their hands. They gave us slow, appraising looks as we brushed past them, and past the voyeurs who crowded the doorways of the swing rooms. By peering over shoulders, I could see a few people rolling about athletically on mattresses. I was surprised by how passionless both participants and onlookers seemed.

In the main room at the end of the corridor, sixty or seventy fully dressed people crowded around a tiny dance area, watching two women wearing white towels move listlessly with the loud disco music. Others sat on giant inflatable cushions in a mirrored alcove next to a postage-stamp-sized bar, where drinks were being dispensed by a moon-faced black woman in a low-cut silver blouse. The crystal ball revolving slowly above the room threw long shadows across the expectant, anxious faces of the middle class waiting to be set free of their inhibitions.

“My high-school dances were livelier,” I told Mora.

“It’s still early. They’ll loosen up, you’ll see.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because it’s my night, and that’s what I want to happen.”

“See anyone you like?”

I pointed out a few couples, but she dismissed the men. I was puzzled. I realized that I didn’t know what attracted her to certain men and not to others.

“How can you know what they’re like if you don’t talk to them?”

“It’s what they do with their eyes. And their hands. Body language.”

The men she was attracted to had to radiate a certain energy, an indefinable electricity that was invisible to me. I went to get drinks for us and when I got back to her she had her eye on a tall, lean man with curly hair, a bump on his nose and a prominent Adam’s apple. He was in the middle of a graceful dance with a heavy-breasted brunette whose blissful, lascivious grin betrayed no awareness that the towel she wore was slipping off her hips. His eyes were closed and his mouth was set in a severe pout. He looked like Huntz Hall, lantern-jawed Satch from the Bowery Boys’ movies.

“Him?” I asked doubtfully.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“I’m… surprised, that’s all.”

“Look at the way he dances. The man has energy in his back pockets to spare.”

“Uh-huh.”

When the music stopped, he stood there wiping the perspiration from his face with a handkerchief. Mora saw her chance. She squeezed my hand, whispered, “Be back in a minute,” and walked up to him. I watched him lean forward to talk with her over the noise, look in my direction, nod a few times, and then she was back.

“That’s a smirk on your face,” I said.

“He turns me on. He says we should go to the locker room and get undressed.”

“That’s friendly of him. Which one is the woman he came with? The brunette?”

“He works here.”

“Oh.”

“He says once you’ve got your clothes off, you won’t have any trouble picking someone up.”

She didn’t get it.

In the locker room, he was waiting for us, talking with a dumpy woman in a Plato’s T-shirt who was in charge of towels and padlocks. We undressed and he introduced himself, blinking myopically. His hand was large and wet.

“Richard, my name is Stanley. Mora says this is your first time here.”

“That’s right.”

“I could tell when you walked in.”

“How’s that?”

“You’re not lookin’ at the women like you’re here for the same thing they’re here for, if you know what I mean.”

Mora was standing between us, adjusting her towel to cover her breasts. He took her arm, winked at me, and started to leave.

“How long will you be? I mean, where will we meet?”

“Don’t wait around,” Stanley advised over his shoulder. “Just say hello. Just be friendly.”

I was stunned. The dumpy woman looked at me like she knew what I was thinking and handed me a towel to wrap around my waist. “He’s smooth, isn’t he?” she said. The son of a bitch.

I made my way slowly through the crowd back to the bar, feeling self-conscious about my nakedness, feet avoiding people with shoes on, my chest brushing against fabric, fingers hooked in the towel so it wouldn’t come unknotted. I got another drink at the bar and sat down on a nearby couch.

I tried to remember what it was like to pick up a woman, how it was done in the movies and on television. I hadn’t tried to pick up anyone since high school. As I remembered, it was no fun.

If Vy had walked in the room right then, I would have climbed all over her.

After a while, I found myself staring at a Puerto Rican woman in a clinging black dress who was sitting on the other end of the couch. She had a nice, shy smile and a diamond ring on her finger, and she was watching her husband – a muscular man with more cleavage showing than most of the women in the room – flirt with a blonde dancing in front of him. The blonde was attracting an audience of still-clothed men who stood around, whispering their admiration, but she was playing to the Puerto Rican hunk. She wore a black lace camisole and one thin strap kept falling off her shoulder, baring a small, firm round breast; as she whirled, she flipped up the front of her undergarment, revealing plump boyish buttocks and pale straw pubic hair shaved in the form of a heart.

Seeing her husband so transfixed, the Puerto Rican woman moved towards me on the couch. I smiled cautiously and looked into eyes as round and bright as new black buttons. Thinking that no one was looking, that her husband was preoccupied with the blonde, I put my hand on her knee. She looked pleased but nervous.

I was wrong about her husband. The next thing I knew, he was angrily knocking my hand away and hissing at me. Spitting words of warning. I’m sure I blushed. I muttered my apologies and turned my head back to the dance floor.

Mora had predicted that people would loosen up as it got later, and they did. Those who’d come to gawk were leaving, clothes were disappearing, and towels were slipping provocatively. I didn’t see Mora anywhere. The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” bounced around the room like a badminton ball on moving jets of water. The smoothness of disco music, its continuous, creamy beat, its plaintive voices echoing forever the rhythmic invitation to dance, pulled me to my feet.

Mora wasn’t in the swing rooms, so I went to the steamy, wet room where three whirlpool baths churned in semi-darkness. Couples cavorted in the bubbly water. I saw Mora and started to join her. A man next to me came to life.

“Couples only,” he growled, pointing to a sign above the door that the rising steam had obscured. I noted his thick biceps and stepped back, but a small boy inside me jumped up and down in protest.

“But I’m half of a couple. The other half is in there, and I want to say hello to her.”

“Maybe she don’t want to see you right now. Wait till she comes out. Be a gentleman.”

I took a deep breath and nodded. There was nothing to do but wait for her at the bar. All that mattered was that one of us was having a good time, I told myself. The booze made the lie somewhat more palatable.

I tried to strike up conversations with various women at the bar, but they could smell my desperation, the way dogs smell fear. Mora emerged at last, wrapped in a white towel. She glowed. Her pupils were bright, and her damp skin was red from the heat of the whirlpool. Her small hands were water-wrinkled.

“Whew! I am wiped out, Richard.”

She put her arms around my waist and nuzzled her damp forehead into my shoulder like a puppy.

“I saw you in there – you were very busy.”

“I don’t have the words to express it… You know how, when you’re a kid, you don’t think you belong anywhere?”

“I do, sure.”

“Richard, I felt like I belonged, like there was a secret society of people like me…”

I was upset. “Like a stamp club?”

She stepped back. “Oh, shit, Richard. If you don’t understand, I don’t know who will.”

“I’ve been feeling like an outcast from that secret society of yours.”

“I’m really sorry I was gone so long. Why didn’t you join us?”

I told her about the bouncer and she frowned.

“Come on, we’ll go back in. We’ll stay together.”

Our bare feet squished on the wet carpeting of the whirlpool room. I blinked my eyes to adjust to the darkness. She dropped her towel and lowered herself into the swirling water slowly, until she was covered up to the neck. Hazy amber lights set into the side of the tub made her look silver, like a mermaid shimmering in the warm water. I settled next to her, my genitals floating free. We were alone, although small groups of people nearby were groaning and splashing about enthusiastically.

She beamed like a kid at Christmas and fondled me, her hand making waves in the water. We kissed long and slowly, and didn’t come up for air until we heard splashing in the water near us.

“I think we’ve got company,” Mora whispered in my ear, the point of her tongue playing warmly in its whorls.

When I looked up, I saw the blonde from the dance floor sitting between Stanley’s legs. He grinned at me like a benevolent pasha and winked at Mora. I stared at the blonde’s long slender legs and the heart-shaped pubic hair between them, and she smiled back at me with curiosity in her eyes.

“People are talking about you two,” Stanley said.

“Who?” I was sceptical.

“The regulars. People in the scene.”

“Maybe they’re talking about Mora, but I’ve been batting zero.”

“Shyness turns women on. Tracey noticed you.”

Bullshit she’d noticed me, but I didn’t care – for some reason, Stanley had brought her along, she was sitting not four feet away, and all I had to do was figure out some clever way of crossing the ocean between us.

She made it easy by speaking first, in a squeaky voice that managed to make Brooklyn sound sexy. “I saw your moustache, and I just adore moustaches, and Stanley said you were probably a really nice guy, so when he asked me to come in here with him for just a minute I decided to forget that it was two in the morning because I like nice people more than I like going home in a cab by myself – don’t you think Plato’s is really neat? I feel right at home…”

Mora and I looked at each other in disbelief, and then turned to study Tracey from top to bottom. It was true: she was indeed one of the most beautiful women either of us had seen outside of the pages of Playboy. The important details were all in place: her firm breasts and plump buttocks belonged in a centrefold, her skin was smooth and soft, and she was without wrinkles or scars. She even wrinkled her nose like a cheerleader.

I looked her straight in the eyes, all at once sure where I had hesitated before.

“Tracey,” I said. “You are a goddess. I say that without a doubt in my mind.”

She cooed. “I knew you were going to be a sweety! I can always pick them out – and nice equals sexy.”

I felt buoyant. Maybe it was the water, but I think it was relief. I reached for her ankle and she let me hold it while Stanley floated through the water to Mora. Then she took my hand and placed it on her belly. “I want to feel you in my belly, filling me up.”

I couldn’t believe my luck. Like a kid about to raid the cookie jar, I looked around to see if anyone was watching. Mora was riding Stanley in the water, holding on to his shoulders with her fingertips and looking into his eyes. I touched Tracey’s breasts and felt electricity course through my palm and wrist and up my arm. I thought I heard her purring when I kissed her inner thighs, and then she folded herself into me, hands braced against the edge of the tub, and we became deep sea divers, carrying on like oestrous dolphins.

It seemed like hours later that we surfaced, only to hear the announcement over the sound system that the club was about to close. Sex had stretched time like a rubber band.

Close? Tracey and I held on to each other like exhausted boxers against the ropes. Mora and Stanley were out of the water, drying themselves off. I hadn’t had enough – I didn’t care what time it was, I had only just discovered the delights of Plato’s, and I wasn’t ready to go home. Another ten minutes…

I was also water-logged; every cell squished. Tracey gave me a huge grin as she climbed out of the whirlpool, and I managed to plant a kiss on her firm left buttock.

“It’s four o’clock in the morning, lover,” she said. “Time to go home.”

I stood up. “Here’s a towel, Richard,” Mora said.

I took it reluctantly, looking around like a man who’s been rudely awakened from a glorious wet dream. I heard Stanley’s laughter in the background.

Mora put her arm around me and whispered in my ear, “You see what it’s like now. You see how you can get lost in it. Can you blame me for doing what I can?”

“Not any more. Not now.” I was sure that I could promise her that understanding.

Out on the street, we blinked at the dawn light like sleepy moles and walked down Fifth Avenue with our arms around each other. The early morning city was like an open bedroom; we scrutinized the people we passed on the sidewalk as if they were hurrying naked through Plato’s. The world was sexualized.

“I told you that you would meet someone,” Mora said.

“If it hadn’t been for you…”

“Stanley gave me his telephone number. He made a big deal of it.”

“Do they live together?”

“I think so. Do you want to do it again?”

“It’s not fair to ask me now,” I told her. “It’s Christmas morning.”

She squeezed me. “You know what? I’m happy. I think we make a good team.”

“Sweet Jesus, take pity on our lust.”

SIX

Mora was sitting up to her neck in a tub of hot water and I was scrubbing her back. Her skin was turning red from the water and my fingernails, and the rising steam was curling the yellow wallpaper. Her slippery soft body was light as cork under my hands, the delicate bones of her arms and legs like wires holding her in the water.

We were talking about Plato’s. She said her mother had always told her that in marriage you can’t have your cake and eat it too. She referred to her mother when she was uncertain; it helped her make up her mind, usually the other way.

“You can’t have it both ways.”

I wondered. Most of the people at Plato’s were married, and I supposed they lived tolerable lives together, no different from ours except that they shared a recreational interest – they went to bed with strangers. Sex to them was an end in itself, its own perfect justification.

“Your mother also said marriage was for ever.”

“Only bachelors, loose women and divorced people fucked around.”

“But swingers don’t have to get divorced – they divorce sex from love. The advantages are obvious.”

She chuckled. “They don’t have to say they’re working late.”

“Or rent motel rooms.”

“And they can still file joint returns.”

I lifted the damp hair from the back of her neck and kissed the hollow there – it always gave her goose pimples. “They don’t have to tell lies, but they must get jealous sometimes, like everyone else,” I whispered.

“That tickles!”

We messed around until everything got slippery. A little later, the phone rang in the bedroom. It was Stanley, inviting us to a private party at his place in New Jersey. Mora was tentative when she talked with him, but I knew she wanted to go. So did I.

Stanley lived in one of those high-rise towers on the bluffs in New Jersey, ten minutes by taxi on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel. It was an evening in late November, and there was a promise of snow in the air. A uniformed doorman checked off our names against a typed guest list. He was businesslike, but his eyes lingered on Mora’s breasts. He knew what we were up to.

Tracey opened the door and squealed happily at the sight of us. Her black silk blouse gaped open and, when she kissed me on the cheek, my hand slipped inside of its own accord.

“Stanley, come see who’s here,” she called over her shoulder. “I’m really happy you decided to come. Stanley wasn’t sure…”

He appeared behind Tracey and moved to kiss Mora. It was the first time I’d seen him dressed – patent leather loafers, loud green slacks, loose patterned shirt open four buttons. He looked better in a towel.

When he kissed Mora’s neck, he looked up at me from under her ear, blowing her hair away, his stiff palms moving down her back to cup the soft weight of her ass.

“My queen for the evening.” He smiled.

Tracey frowned at this and took my hand from her breast, leading me into the apartment.

She showed me where I could hang our coats, playing the hostess. “I bet he says that to all the girls,” I said.

She smiled brightly and excused herself. There were more people at the door, and Stanley and Mora were holding up traffic. “I don’t know where we’re going to put them all. If people don’t start moving into the bedrooms, this is going to turn into a cocktail party – you know what I mean?”

People were sitting on couches and chairs and on the carpeted floor, passing around joints and talking about lawn care, good gas mileage, swingers’ clubs – and relationships.

Relationships. It might have been a party of middle-aged people anywhere in America, except they weren’t talking about business because, for swingers, it’s not status that’s important – what you do – but what you look like, and what turns you on. They were talking about the arrangements men and women make in order to balance desire with duty. The structures of love. Marital balance sheets.

I listened because it was an opportunity to hear how serious swingers – the people who pursued this life week after week, year after year – dealt with the problems Mora and I had encountered since we stepped outside the closed circle of marriage.

As a group, they were no more nor less attractive than the crowd you’d find on a Saturday night in a disco in Fort Lee, New Jersey. No matter what shape their bodies were in, they dressed in tight, light clothing; they wore gold chains and digital watches, and the men tended to show more chest than their women showed cleavage. They smoked a lot of cigarettes but they didn’t drink much.

At first, their faces were hard to distinguish, because the only light in the large living room came from recessed spots set behind greenery that grew on one wall, over a bubbling fountain constructed of plaster made to look like stone. Another wall was decorated with paintings of bull fights and crossed swords on wooden plaques, but the opposite two walls were glass, to take advantage of a magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline at night. I was sitting on the floor, in a line with the Empire State Building, and when I stood up I could see the twinkling lights of the city reflected in the inky blackness of the Hudson. Some people were looking through a telescope set on a tripod in the corner of the room.

You could tell the party hadn’t really got underway by the lack of people in the bedrooms. We strolled in and out of four of them, and saw a few people having serious conversations or simply petting, before I noticed a brunette lying on a bed masturbating. Her skirt was thrown up around her waist and her ankles were locked together. She had both hands between her legs, her back was arched, and the sweat poured from her forehead. Her eyes were shut tight.

A man wearing a white turtleneck and blue blazer – a man in his mid-fifties with a grey toothbrush moustache – was kneeling on the bed next to her, with the intent expression of a man helping his wife give birth by breathing with her. He didn’t notice us.

Both their faces were bright red and she was babbling when he put his hand on her thigh.

Her eyes snapped open and she brought her hands up to hold out to him. He clasped them and kissed her fingers, one by one.

“Can I get you a drink, darling?” he asked solicitously. He had an English accent.

“You’re not getting me drunk tonight.”

“No, of course not. That’s not my intention. But I do want you to have a good time. I want you to mix with people and be gay.”

He treated her like she might explode, like someone who’s just been released from a mental hospital. I was fascinated. She jerked her skirt down when she noticed us standing there in the darkness.

“I wasn’t putting on a show,” she growled.

“Didn’t mean to intrude, but it was getting crowded in the living room,” I explained hastily.

“Oh, hello,” the Englishman said, stepping around the bed and holding out his hand. “Peter’s my name. This is Johanna.”

He and Mora smiled at each other.

Johanna looked coldly at me. “You’re a voyeur,” she accused.

“Look, if you wanted to play with yourself in private, you could have stayed home and drawn the blinds.”

I was glad she hadn’t; she was ravishing, with long dark hair loose about her shoulders and breasts heaving beneath her sweater. She had delicate nostrils and a thin, painted mouth and her eyes burned with frustration.

“Wait a minute, darling,” Peter said. “No reason to get upset. We’ll go get some drinks and give you a chance to get yourself together.” He pushed us out and closed the door.

“The first attractive woman besides you I’ve seen, and she’s crazy,” I whispered to Mora.

“She’s off, tonight,” Peter said. “But Johanna is as changeable as New England weather. You just have to be patient. When she’s good she’s very, very good, but when she’s bad…” He sighed, and shook his head. Then he looked at me and brightened. “But maybe your meeting was fortuitous. I’ve known her to start out an evening hating someone, and then surprise me. She likes the unexpected move.”

“It must be exhausting to deal with her,” Mora said.

“I know she’s much too young for me. She’s on her own trip, as you say here. She says I can accompany her on it, if I want to, but I’m not allowed to complain.”

We refilled our glasses and he went back to collect Johanna. While we’d been gone, the crowd in the living room had thinned out.

Then I heard a familiar voice. Stanley led Vy and Charles into the room, feathers of snow in their hair. They looked glamourous and happy and the talk in the room stopped for a minute to register their presence. Stanley made an attempt to introduce them, but Vy stopped him.

“Surely I haven’t been gone that long, Stanley – that people have forgotten. This is like a family reunion. Hello, Peter. Is that Johanna in the corner, over there?”

“Hello, Vy,” I said.

“I was hoping you’d be here. Baby, it’s so good to see you! Did you know they’d be here, Charles?”

Our reunion was a four-way hug in the middle of the living room; for the moment we were a closed circle, oblivious of everyone around us.

“I hear you liked Plato’s,” Charles said. He smirked.

“You know we did,” Mora told him.

Vy examined us both with a look of mock severity. “So while the cat’s away, the mice played? You let the Devil tempt you – you couldn’t wait for me?”

She exchanged greetings with the other people in the room – apparently she knew them all – and sat down on the rug to pull off her tight velvet trousers. Like a restless hen on a nest, she squirmed provocatively until her long white legs were bare. The dark blonde tuft of hair at the bottom of her belly gleamed like wheat. She reached for her big leather bag and pulled out a long madras skirt to wrap around her waist.

“No more underwear, thank God. For some reason, Maurice insisted on lingerie in London. He said that his friends would be shocked if I didn’t have any, but I think he had a kinkier motive.”

She hadn’t lost her ability to grab the centre of attention. Every eye in the room watched her get into her skirt. What was it that made me think she was changed – or had my perception of her altered? The circles under her eyes were darker, she’d braided her hair, her fingernails were bitten – but it wasn’t the details that made me see her fresh; it was an aura, as if she’d learned something about herself in England and the knowledge was spreading in circles from the centre of her being.

Peter handed her a drink, and Stanley asked her about England. She was gracious, a queen with her court. Maybe that was what I noticed about her: a new authority that enabled her to hold the floor with ease.

“I met more submissives in England than I could shake a stick at,” she chuckled drily. “And more lords this-and-that with beautiful soft eyes and eccentric tastes… They all have old names and large country places with butlers, and their great soft eyes get wickedly moist when you flick a riding crop. Leather is very popular, very chic with Maurice’s friends.” S&M was unexplored territory for us.

Mora and I looked quizzically at each other. We had only the vaguest notion of what she meant, but I could see that everyone else knew what Vy was talking about and that she was a star.

Charles walked into the kitchen to get himself a drink – I think he was probably feeling neglected – and I followed him, hoping that he could enlighten me.

“What is a ‘submissive’?” I asked.

“Stop putting me on, Richard. You’re being ingenuous.”

I held up my hands. “I ask in all innocence. I really don’t know what she’s talking about. She’s changed – hasn’t she?”

He stared at me, his lower lip dropped in thought. “You really have some catching up to do…”

Peter had been pouring himself a straight vodka without ice at the counter next to where we were standing. He broke in. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help overhearing what you said, Richard. About Vy, I mean. I’ve been a fan of hers since we met – I’d call it an encounter, because it was very dramatic, but she may have forgotten – at a party at the UN Plaza last winter. Do you remember how grand she was, Charles? Some of us were in awe.”

“Tell him what a submissive is, Peter.”

“I’d rather talk about Vy. She’s much more fun to talk about than my Johanna. Vy is a queen, but Johanna has become a pumpkin. Vy understands what a terrible responsibility she has. There isn’t enough of her to go around.”

“You lost me,” I admitted. “I thought I knew something about Vy, but I guess I don’t.”

“There’s a lot people don’t know about Vy. She shows everyone a slightly different angle – it’s definitely one of her charms.”

Having said this, he drifted off in search of Johanna.

“I’m still in the dark,” I said to Charles.

“The English don’t know how to get to the point. Vy says sex with them is like a Japanese tea ceremony.”

“I have the feeling that I’m going to have to ask Vy to explain – you’re being just as vague as Peter.”

“And you’re being dense. One trip to Plato’s and you end up in the inner circle of the sex world on the East Coast, and yet you won’t see what’s right in front of your eyes. Vy is a dominatrix – that’s why Maurice took her to England. Do you know what she carries in that big leather bag? Whips. Leather cuffs. Nipple clamps. Dildoes. Rush…”

I shook my head. “You could have told me.”

“For Christ’s sake, Richard. You fell in love with her, didn’t you?”

The living room was almost empty. I wandered down the hall towards the bedrooms, wondering what scenes I’d find Mora and Vy and Charles in the middle of, hoping that Tracey would be sitting somewhere by herself.

The first bedroom I walked into was occupied by people I didn’t know. I stood and watched them for a while, feeling curiously lustless. Mora was in the next room, on a couch with Charles and Stanley and Tracey. It was a four-way connection: Stanley kneeled behind Mora, who had Charles in her mouth while Tracey kneeled above Charles’s lips. Stanley wore a bottle of Rush on a chain around his neck and I watched him lean over Mora’s back to hold the bottle to her nostrils before bringing it back to his own nose. They looked like a team of acrobats, totally absorbed in a difficult manoeuvre they hadn’t rehearsed for.

In the third bedroom, Vy was sitting in an easy chair, next to a queen-sized bed two couples were romping about on. Peter was kneeling before her, caressing and kissing her feet. She was idly untwisting her braids, looking bored.

“I’m glad you’re back,” I said, touching her hair.

“I thought about you over there, Richard. Maybe more than I thought about Charles – isn’t that strange?”

“Charles just told me how naive I am.”

“Naive?”

“About you. And what you carry in your bag.”

She blushed. “I hope he told you good things.”

“You’re a star.”

“I do what turns me on when I’m in the mood. Are you shocked?”

“Why should I be? It was just something I didn’t know about. Now I know.”

“Does it make any difference?”

“I don’t think so.”

She reached for my hand and pressed it to her check and we remained like that for a while, staring and not saying anything.

Peter stood up, realizing that he’d lost Vy’s attention. “Have you seen Johanna, old man?”

“She’s in the living room.”

“Oh, God. I’d better go rescue her. She’ll be getting drunk, and then she’s impossible to deal with.”

“Poor Peter. He can’t handle that woman at any time. He’s an old teddy bear.”

“I want to make love to you.”

“I would like that very much.”

She stood up and I pulled her into my arms, pressing her long body into mine so that I could feel her knees and pelvic bones and breasts. She shuddered, and I felt it go down her body.

“If Charles and Mora saw us right now, I don’t think they’d understand,” she whispered in my ear.

I knew what she meant – that fucking was all right, but a long embrace was a sign that something serious was going on.

“Can’t leave you two alone for a minute,” Charles said, from behind us. Mora was with him and they were both naked. A streak of semen glistened on Mora’s left thigh and her hair was matted. Her eyes looked like she’d been on a long trip.

“Enjoying yourself, lover?” Vy asked, stepping away from me.

“It’s like a geriatrics convention here. Mora and I are ready to play, and everyone is sitting around talking about relationships and the etiquette of a good swing. Can you imagine?”

I kissed Mora and she snuggled into my chest.

“How are you doing?”

“I’m throbbing from my toes up. I could go on all night, but Charles is right – there’s nobody left to party with.”

“We could always go to Plato’s.”

Charles and Vy didn’t like the idea. I wasn’t crazy about it myself, but I wanted more time with Vy. I knew that Charles was getting restless and, if he went home, Vy would go with him.

“If you feel like being adventuresome,” Vy suggested, “there’s a new place called Night Moves we could try. Maurice told me about it.”

“I’m game,” Charles said, “as long as it’s not the same old faces.”

“It’s on-premise, like Plato’s. Very hip, Maurice said.”

“How do we get there?” Mora asked. “It’s too late for a bus.”

“We’ll grab a cab, or maybe we can find a ride,” Vy said.

“Let’s do it,” I agreed.

“Who has a car?”

“I have an idea,” Vy volunteered. “I’ll talk to Peter.”

We all groaned in unison. Not Peter.

“Have faith, children. Don’t forget that I carry special powers in my bag. Let me deal with this.”

Charles and Mora dressed while Vy went off to talk with Peter. Ten minutes later, she came to get the three of us and she had her coat on. Obviously she had conquered.

“Johanna is going to drive us in Peter’s Cadillac. He’ll get a ride with someone.”

“How did you manage that?”

“He wants a private session with me. And Johanna wants to party. She’s weird, and she’s getting drunk, but I approve of her nuttiness.”

“Just a bunch of old farts,” Johanna said when we left, jingling the keys of the Cadillac in her hand. When Peter had tried to kiss her goodbye she’d turned her head so that he was presented with her ear.

Mora and I sat in the front seat with her. We had to hang on to each other when she took the corners, but she was a good driver. She steered the big beast with one hand, swinging wide around taxis and surprised pedestrains. She glided over the dark slick streets, wet with the melting snow, like a skate on ice.

SEVEN

Night Moves was discreetly planted in the middle of a block of factory buildings and warehouses. Noisy with hand carts, trucks and honking traffic during the day, at midnight it was a closed drawer. The only signs of life on the empty street were the coloured lights of the firehouse across from the club. I could see firemen inside polishing a giant red engine.

The light snow had stopped and a thin layer of white slush covered the sidewalks. Vy strode regally in front, head back, heels tapping impatiently.

“Pinch me,” Mora said when we stopped at the glass front of the club to wait for Johanna to park her car. The sign said night moves, but otherwise it looked like the wholesale soda and beer distributor next door, blank and black and anonymous.

I knew what Mora meant, so I kissed her instead.

“Yes, it’s true. We’re doing this again.”

“Just like we know what the hell we’re doing.”

“Well, at least we all share the same fantasy. We have that in common.” I was excited but apprehensive.

The five of us were a crowd in the pocket-sized reception area. There was a cigarette machine, a pay phone, a few hand-lettered posters too small to read in the dark (one announced a wet T-shirt contest), and – standing behind a counter next to the curtained entrance – a thin young black man with tack-sharp smartass eyes. He recognized Vy and made a small fuss over her while he checked our coats.

“And I thought this was going to be a slow night,” he drawled, looking Mora and Johanna over.

Just as Charles and I were digging in our wallets for the twenty-dollar membership fee a sign on the counter asked for, a man who was obviously in charge stepped from behind the curtain and waved us in. Vy introduced him as Bob, the manager. He wore a thick moustache and a three-piece suit.

“I’m president of this lady’s fan club,” he told us proudly, taking her hand and pressing it to his heart.

Inside, we stood around chatting for a while, blinking in the darkness. Clever track lighting and plenty of candles illuminated an intimate stage set. To our right, a gleaming oak bar was tended by female bartenders in T-shirts and satin shorts. Across from it and on a higher level was a carpeted lounge that led to a small mirrored disco floor. A young, lively looking crowd filled the moulded plastic booths.

I saw two Lacoste shirts, I swear it. The men who wore them had long blow-dried blond hair and they glowed with sun and good health. Tourists. Sitting with them were two of the most luscious-looking college girls I’d ever had the pleasure of ogling from afar.

I nudged Charles, to point them out, but he was focused on Johanna. He couldn’t take his eyes off the way she wiggled her behind on the bar stool, alternately flirting and scowling and sipping Scotch. Vy and Mora stood on the other side of her at the end of the bar, foreheads pressed together as they compared notes on the people they saw.

“She’s a heartbreaker,” he sighed.

“She’s drunk, too. But look over there – it’s the flesh God promised us. In our adolescent fantasies.”

He studied them sceptically.

“I grant you that they are flowers of young American womanhood, but they’re also tourists. They’ll sit and watch and look decorative and, after they’ve got excited, they’ll go home with the guys they came with. Mark my words – they won’t even leave a trail of smoke behind them.”

“I’m going to talk to them a little later.”

“God bless. They’ll write in their diaries about you.”

We were in the way of incoming traffic. A dozen attractive couples passed the bar, conscious of being on display. There was a lot of eye contact and body movement, but I didn’t see anybody as good-looking as the college girls. I sipped my drink and thought about them, trying out and discarding various introductory lines in my mind, telling myself to be bold, that I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by approaching one of them.

A man who was probably telling himself the same thing walked up to Vy and Mora and got brushed off, but he didn’t even pause to acknowledge defeat before moving on to Johanna, who practically jumped into his arms. As he led her off towards the back room, she turned and winked at Charles.

“Perfidious bitch,” Charles muttered after her.

“Let’s go talk to Mora and Vy. We’ll all go into the back room.”

But they wanted to dance.

We moved onto the dance floor, and let a Rod Stewart song lead us around the polyurethaned oak floorboards beneath the silk parachute canopy. The floor-to-ceiling mirrors multiplied our images as we shook our bodies and whirled about.

Dancing loosened me up. When the music stopped, I sat on a carpeted step, aware that the college girls were right above me. I wasn’t surprised when Mora danced Charles off the floor and through the curtains into the back room.

Vy joined me on the step, sitting with her elbows on her knees.

“I’m tired. Maybe it’s just jet lag, but I can’t boogie the way I used to.”

“Dancing is a warm-up exercise for the real thing.”

I put my arm around her shoulders and she looked down at my hand for a long moment before covering my fingers with hers.

“And how do you like Night Moves?”

“It’s not a circus, like Plato’s. It’s just the right size.”

“This is the first time I’ve dared to bring Charles here. He’s been funny since I got back, anyway.”

“Funny?”

“Different. He didn’t want me to go to England – almost as if he’s jealous and can’t talk about it. I think he wants to punish me, but he doesn’t know how to go about it.”

I thought about her relationship with Maurice, her reputation as a dominatrix, and said something I immediately regretted.

“You could teach him about punishment, couldn’t you?”

She was stung. “Don’t be a son of a bitch, Richard.”

“I can’t help thinking about that bag of yours. And Maurice.”

She pushed my arm from her shoulder and stood up. Her eyes were cold. “I thought… Well, never mind what I thought. I don’t have to explain myself to anyone. Not even you, Richard.”

Before I could say anything – and if I could have grabbed my words from her ears and crushed them underfoot, I would have – she squared her shoulders and strode across the dance floor, straight into the back room.

I sighed and stood up, just as one of the college girls passed me, trailed by the blandly smiling Lacoste shirts. The three of them started to jiggle and strut and I decided, what the hell, and approached the remaining college girl. I bent over to whisper in her pink, shell-like ear, blowing aside wisps of soft gold hair.

“I like the way you look. You are so special, it takes my breath away. I would love to…”

I have to give her credit for a classy brush-off. Without looking up, she shook her head slightly and said, “It’s not me you’re looking for.”

I was surprised – and relieved – to find Charles back at the bar. His expression was cloudy. Disappointed.

“I didn’t expect to find you here,” I said, ordering another glass of wine.

“I’m surprised myself. Mora’s hard to hold on to.”

“So what happened?” As if I couldn’t guess.

“The manager, Bob. He saw her and came over to collect on the entrance fee. She went off without a whimper.”

“She’s a woman with a strong sense of duty.” We drank to her.

“I ran into Johanna – actually it was more of a tripping motion – and stopped to say hello.”

“Had she changed her mind about you?”

“She hissed at me like a wet cat.”

“Maybe she’s serious.”

“You know I’m persistent, Richard. I can’t help myself for trying, but I go ahead and try. Know what I said to her? ‘You look best on your knees, giving head.’”

“The direct approach. I see.”

He looked around. “I don’t see the college girls.”

“It wasn’t me they were looking for,” I admitted.

“Lord, what makes women so contrary? So… ungrateful for our efforts, so closed of heart.”

We might have sung the Chasing Male Blues right there, in the middle of a sexual game park, but Mora interrupted in time to remind us of our opportunities. She slid in between us.

“Why are you sitting out here?”

“Just taking a break, you know.”

“Well, there are a lot of women in the back.”

“What’s Vy up to?” Charles asked. “It must be like old Home Week.”

“Last time I saw her, she was talking to Johanna.”

Charles did a quick double-take at the news. I watched his mind turning over the possibilities, like a hungry raccoon turning stones over in a creekbed. When his curiosity was tickled, he rumpled his hair from back to front, raising a crest above his forehead. His eyes turned heavenward for a sign.

“I wonder what that’s all about…”

“Well, let’s go find out,” Mora said, taking our arms as if we were brothers out courting the same young maid, and pointing us to the back room.

Stepping into the back room at Night Moves was like walking into the Arabian Nights. The plush sprawling orgy room seemed fur-lined. We walked across mattresses and around huge pillows on which people lay in every position making love, inhaling the mixed odours of warm flesh, marijuana and tobacco smoke, amyl nitrate and perspiration, perfume and incense. Above the low, throbbing music rose the sounds of orgasm and of bodies moving together in the dark; the whispered, urgent imprecations of those close to the edge, and the quick, breath-snatching sobs of those who’d gone over it.

I remembered what Mora had said about a secret society of people who liked to make love as much as she did, and I wasn’t surprised when a black hand reached out to circle her ankle. The kid with the smartass eyes who worked the door showed white teeth. Mora smiled, shrugged helplessly at us – noblesse oblige – and allowed herself to be pulled down into the darkness next to him.

We found Vy at the centre of a circle of naked onlookers. She was kneeling beside Johanna, who lay on her side, also naked, her wrists tied behind her with a black silk scarf. There were beads of perspiration on her upper lip and between her heaving breasts, and her pupils were dilated.

“I’m not going to…” she sputtered, but Vy put her hand over her mouth, and she stopped.

“There you are, dear. And Richard, too. Johanna has been asking for you. I warned her that you might be busy.”

Johanna shot Charles the fierce look of a victim who is determined that the sacrifice will be conducted according to her own fantasies.

“What made her change her mind?”

“She didn’t. You were always the object of her fancy.”

“Of her hostility, you mean.”

“The more of that, the better.”

I saw then that he recognized what Johanna wanted, what Vy meant, and the wicked anticipation in his eyes made me feel sick with fear and disgust for a minute. I didn’t understand; why wasn’t making love enough?

Did the people watching understand? Or were they, too, just curious about a need greater than theirs?

“You don’t like that, do you?” Vy asked me when we moved to a space of our own, between two massive pillows.

“I don’t understand it. Why isn’t fucking enough?”

I waited for an answer, but she was suddenly impatient with my earnest innocence. I saw pity and scorn mix in her eyes, and – just as suddenly as she’d entered it – she left my life. I was stunned. I expected the floor to open and swallow me. I knew her well enough to know it was a definitive exit.

Looking around at the moving shadows, I wondered wearily why I was there among them. I was overcome by a feeling of lostness. Vacancy. Sitting there in the middle of the orgy, I argued with myself: marriage and freedom. Life sexualized. The sweet power of lust. The evils of jealousy.

Let it be over, I thought. I just wanted to escape, to take Mora home and lock the door. I needed her – and she was my wife. My wife.

I found her with her legs over the black guy’s shoulders, split open for him as he drove deep into her, spanking her ass with each powerful thrust. I kneeled beside them and whispered in her ear, “It’s time to go home.”

EIGHT

I hit her, and she sneezed, but I hit her again, and her head bounced against the metal cyclone fence. It was just before dawn on Ninth Avenue. Bleak, so bleak. There was an excavation behind the fence and I wondered if I had the insane strength to pick her up and throw her into it – and if there was enough loose dirt to bury her with. I hated her with the white-hot intensity of a jealousy freed at last from civilized constraints.

“You motherfucker-bastard-son-of-a-bitch!” she screamed, wailing like an outraged child, rubbing her knuckles over her bruised cheek.

“You had to fuck so much, you couldn’t come with me even at five in the morning?” I shouted, hitting her again.

“Just because you couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse doesn’t mean I have to stop!”

She grabbed my jaw in her strong small hands and twisted my head towards her. “Look at me, Richard! Just look at me! My nose is bleeding and there’s snot…”

I pulled out my handkerchief to give to her – like a good husband – and she knocked it to the ground.

“Did you have to yell that I was crazy to the whole club, just because I wanted you to come home with me?” I was so hurt that I thought I would vomit right there at her feet. Self-disgust choked me.

“Fuck you! You bastard, to hit me, fuck you and your feelings! I don’t care how you feel any more!”

She came at me with her fists and feet, pummelling me in the belly and on the chest, kicking my shins.

“All I wanted was for you to come home with me,” I pleaded, holding up both hands to protect myself.

“I was coming, God damn it!”

My eyes filled with hot tears. “But what about us? You love me and I love you, and that should mean something.”

“This is my life, and this is how I want to live it, Richard.”

The morning sun struck her wet face. I couldn’t hit her, and I couldn’t hold her. She wasn’t mine.

“Come home?”

“I can’t stop now. I can’t.”