He smelled her, listened to her as if trying to fix these memories in his brain once and for all. What he would one day be left with.
Geoff finally succumbed to sleep around seven in the morning.
When he awoke, she had left the apartment.
The morning went by. He tried to read, but couldn’t concentrate on the text, whether a week-old newspaper or an anonymous serial killer thriller.
Emma returned at the beginning of the afternoon. She was wearing that black skirt he had once bought her in Barcelona and which held so many memories. The one with the giant sunflower patch sewn into its flank. And a T-shirt he had once loaned her in the early days of the affair when their lovemaking had proven a tad rough and messy and he had left compromising semen stains across the blouse she had been wearing that day. The T-shirt that advertised “Strangers in Paradise” across the Aubrey Beardsley-like face of a woman.
He was sipping a glass of grapefruit juice at the kitchen table.
He welcomed her.
“Had a good walk?”
“No.”
“Oh . . .”
A shadow passed across the room shielding her eyes from his examination.
“I saw him again,” Emma said.
The pain inside returned.
“Have you fucked him again?”
“No.”
“I see.”
“There is another party tonight. A different palazzo this time, near the Campo San Silvestro. He’s invited me. Wants to introduce me to some of his friends . . .”
“Do you want to go?”
“Yes.”
“Without me?”
“Yes.”
“Why? I still love you, you know.”
“I know. But love is not enough. I need adventures, you see. On my own. I don’t want to be owned . . .”
“I’ve never tried to own you, you know that. You’re too much of a gypsy to be kept in a cage.”
Emma smiled. “You can come, if you wish, I reckon. As long as you’d promise not to interfere and allow whatever happens to happen . . .”
“I don’t think so,” Geoff said. “Don’t much care to repeat the other evening’s foursome. Just didn’t feel right to me somehow.”
“I understand.”
She walked to the bedroom they had been using; she was holding a large Rinascente canvas bag.
“What have you got there? Been shopping?” he asked.
She looked away. “No . . .” She hesitated then came clean. “It’s the outfit he wishes me to wear tonight.”
“Can I—”
Emma interrupted him. “I’d rather you didn’t see it, Geoff.”
That evening, he left the apartment to wander the narrow streets and have several coffees in a row to allow her to dress in privacy.
By the time he returned, she had already left for the Carnevale or had maybe been picked up.
She did not return that night or the following day.
His days and nights were haunted by obscene visions of her with other men, and the abominable images of alien cocks of all shapes, sizes and shades invading her. Her mouth, her cunt, her arse, her hands. Orgasmic flush invading the delicate pallor of her skin. The indelible marks of hands, ropes, whips and paddles across the familiar geography of her body. And the sound of her voice just saying, “Yes”, “Yes” and “Yes” again, like Bloom’s Molly. And the grateful acceptance of her smile, of her eyes.
Finally, she reappeared halfway through Carnevale.
She looked radiant. More beautiful than ever.
“You haven’t shaved,” she remarked. “It’s so grey.”
“Couldn’t be bothered,” he said. “So, you’re back.”
“Not really,” Emma said. “I’ve just returned to pick up my stuff, my clothes and all that.”
“I’m sorry,” Geoff said.
“It’s the way things are,” Emma remarked. “After Carnevale ends, Master has promised me that the adventure will continue. He wants to take me to Mardi Gras in New Orleans and also the carnival in Rio one day . . .”
“How exciting,” he said bitterly in response.
“Don’t be like that, please, Geoff,” she protested. “You should be happy for me. Respect what I am doing, surely.”
“I find that difficult, Emma. I would have given you everything. Surely you realize that.”
“I know, but it would never have been enough. You know that. I’m young. I have a life to live. My life. ”
Her skin shone in the pale light coming through the window, the curls in her hair like the gift of Medusa.
Geoff closed his eyes. Promising himself he would not open them until she had left with her belongings.
He never saw Emma again. He stayed in Venice until the end of Carnevale. At dinner one evening, he met another woman, a legal interpreter from Arizona. They had a few drinks together and he was pleased to see that he could still chat up a woman, be reasonably witty and seductive. But when he took her back to the apartment and undressed her after some willing fumbling and a cascade of mutual kisses, he wasn’t capable of fucking her. Just couldn’t get hard enough, despite her assiduous ministrations. Lack of inspiration or wrong person, he wasn’t sure.
The next day as he sat at a café by the Rialto Bridge, he caught a glimpse of a small water cab racing down the Grand Canal. A woman was standing at its prow. For a brief moment, he thought he recognized Emma. Same skirt and T-shirt, but the embarkation was moving too fast for him to be certain it was actually her. At any rate, she was alone on the small boat, standing erect behind the driver, facing the breeze.
Shortly after, his friends returned from India and he quickly made his way back to London.
He left the two masks they had worn on that fateful evening behind. Not quite the sort of apparel you could wear for the Notting Hill Carnival.
He would never go back to Venice.
The Epicures
Marilyn Jaye Lewis
It was called Petrograd in honour of the opulence of czarist Russia. Its interior brimmed with ostentation and the owners didn’t care; attracting the proletariat was not their aim. The average working stiff could hardly afford the cocktails at Petrograd, let alone anything from its tasting menu. We, however, always ordered from the tasting menu, blind, with our wine flights selected especially for us by Sergei – who was not really Russian, or if he was, it was from so many generations ago as to make any Tartar roots in him undetectable beneath his Brooklyn accent.
In those days, we savoured every moment of our affluence because we recalled too keenly how it had felt to be among the starving class. Our riches were so new to us in fact that poverty, it seemed, still lay in wait for us up the block, wondering when we might return. We weren’t sure. All we knew was that good fortune had alighted on us at last and we planned to wring the most from it – starting with haute cuisine and vintage wines – before good fortune evaporated into the ether and left us poor again.
Every booming market goes bust eventually, and to survive it you have to prepare for the inevitable in advance. Our safety net was our loft apartment in Tribeca; we’d paid cash for it in early 1982. It belonged to us. We were determined not to be homeless again and we turned that cavernous, once-industrial space into a lush cocoon. That was where our hedonism went unleashed for many years, right there in the bosom of our sanctuary.
Paulina moved in with us in March of that particular year (was it ’84, ’85?). We’d met her at Petrograd in early December, when everyone in New York was already tipping extravagantly and bursting with Christmas cheer. She was a coat check girl there, an immigrant. Illegal, for all we knew, but it wasn’t important to us. We liked her enormously. She was saucy with a dry sense of the absurd. Yet when we welcomed her into our home that first frosty evening, we discovered quickly that all her worldly urbanity fell away from her when she was kissed – along her collarbone, say, or on her lips, her neck, across her pale shoulders; she melted under the tenderness.
Paulina’s legs were long and parted so easily, but she was not tall. She gave the impression of being tall, however, because she wore those very high Italian heels that made her legs look even longer.
Her breasts were full, her waist was narrow and her hips wide, and although she was curvy, she was also slender. When not in her coat check uniform, she dressed in the height of fashion. She was fastidious about her appearance. And truth be told, so were we. I guess you could have called us vain and not been far off the mark. Still, at least we could kid ourselves about it. Perhaps it was that unexpected dash of humility that kept us from being too insufferable. Whatever it was, we were always greeted by the staff at Petrograd with welcoming smiles. We were made to feel at home there.
Bertrand, my fiancé, was what one used to call “a salty dog” – an experienced man with a rather wanton libido. Far from satiating his appetites, however, good food and good wine only made his carnal cravings more pronounced. He didn’t have to say a word. When an item from the blind tasting menu was brought to our table and laid before him, I could tell by the merry gleam in his eye of which delicate or yielding, straining or supple quality of a woman’s body he was most reminded. Five years we had been together, and in that brief time, I had come to learn his lascivious thoughts well. I knew he could say the same about me.
As luck would have it, we were both fond of women as sexual playmates; of servicing them, of testing their limits, their capacities, delighting in their raptures. Bertrand’s easy glide between the sights, smells and tastes of food, and the idea of devouring women (metaphorically, of course), was not lost on me. His appetites filled my eager mind with irresistible pictures – a fleshy rear end, a succulent thigh; a hole stretched to accommodate my lover’s unflagging lust. I often drank my wine a little too freely at Petrograd; the atmosphere there crackled with barely concealed promiscuity. The wine going to my head, the heady mix of Bertrand’s pronounced tastes and the spectre of the dinner crowd’s insatiability – set off so flatteringly by candlelight; all of it served to glut that river of longing in me until the waters threatened to overflow all over the seat of my chair.
Paulina would flirt shamelessly with us when we left the restaurant in our inebriated state. I believe I was the one who slid to her our address, scribbled on the inside of a Petrograd matchbook cover. “Do they ever give you a night off around here?” I said.
She half smiled and replied, “Sure. We’re closed on Sundays.”
“Ah,” Bertrand chimed in, content in the afterglow of a Petite Sirah Port. “The Lord’s day. What could be more fortuitous?”
Paulina and I regarded each other quizzically, neither of us entirely sure what Bertrand meant. Still I said, “Well, by all means, join us some Sunday evening. Come for dinner. We’re excellent cooks.”
“We’re modest, too.” Bertrand helped me into my winter coat.
Paulina laughed politely. “No reason to be modest, you know. No one would fault you for crowing a bit. Most of your attributes are readily discernible.”
Bertrand slipped her a handsome tip. “You shovel it all so seamlessly,” he said sweetly.
She winked at him and stuffed the tip in her pocket.
It had been two weeks since we’d last been to Petrograd, so Paulina was not uppermost in our minds when our downstairs buzzer bleated loudly early one Sunday evening just prior to Christmas. The noise startled us from our mindless gazing at the oversized television screen.
Bertrand stretched and said, “Who could that be?”
“Shall we buzz it up and see?”
He said, “Why not?”
We got up from the comfy couch and then buzzed up our visitor.
We couldn’t have been more pleased when we saw Paulina – dressed in her Sunday best – step off the old freight elevator out in the hallway.
“It’s Paulina,” I said happily.
“So it is. Well, come in, Paulina. Make yourself at home.”
She came inside. “You neglected to give me your phone number, so I took it as a sign.”
“Of what?” I asked curiously, helping her out of her lovely coat in our entryway.
“That I was welcome anytime. That calling ahead would have only been a formality.”
Bertrand and I smiled at each other. He said to her, “How right you were, love. You know, you have quite a good grasp on the English language.”
“I know,” she said pertly. “Now, what are we drinking? Are we going to get festive with it being so close to Christmas?”
“Around here,” Bertrand said, “we even get festive on Arbor Day. Why don’t you ladies relax in there by the fire and I’ll whip up something wonderful in the kitchen.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“I’ll think of something. Maybe something frothy or steamy, or creamy – I don’t know. I only know that it will be brimming with possibilities and there will be plenty to go around.”
“And then what about dinner?” I wanted to know. “Should we plan on ordering up?”
“No,” he said. “Let’s cook, the three of us, together. Can you cook, Paulina?”
“Not really,” she said. “But I can follow directions; I’m easily taught. You know, I grasp things well.”
“I’m sure you do,” Bertrand said, eyeing her perfectly manicured fingers. But beneath her high-toned appearance, she was just a little tart, Paulina was, and Bertrand and I enjoyed it thoroughly – the aural bait she was dangling. “We’ll definitely work those pretty fingers of yours to the bone,” he went on. “We’re excellent teachers. I’m sure the three of us will concoct something memorable.”
I took Paulina by the hand and led her into the living area. Our loft had not come with an actual fireplace; we’d had a quasi-one designed for us, though. It was elevated on a brick platform, with a bronze vent above it and encased in bevelled glass. There were logs on a grate and amber flames; it looked impressive. But it was more an elaborate Sterno pit than a source of any real heat.
“How cosy,” Paulina purred. “And for such an enormous room. Not an effect that’s easy to achieve.”
“We had time on our hands,” I assured her.
“And money, I’m guessing.”
“That, too. Shall we sit?” Without a moment’s hesitation, even in her expensive skirt and sweater, Paulina stretched out on the rug by the fire. I sat down beside her. “Where are you from?” I asked her.