Fools for Lust (11 page)

The two men walk in. In the flesh, so to speak, they appear so much larger, and number 9 looks very young. But she likes the gentle curls of hair on his chest. It was difficult to arrive at a choice. So she has settled for one with dark hair and a foreskin that wrinkles down and, even when half-erect, obscures the bulbous, mushroom-like cap of his glans. The other is cut, his cock all pink and shiny.

They approach her and the dark-haired man politely asks in a European accent, ‘Would madam like us to undress her?'

‘Yes, that would be nice, very nice. Yes,' Zelda answers, setting her handbag down. Next time, she thinks as their hands begin searching for her buttons, she will go with the black man. Something she often guiltily dreamed of in Minnesota days of old, when she was still Miss Sayre.

Seen That Tight-Lipped Grin – New York, 1934
Whole days now went by without them even speaking to each other, beyond the bare formalities of ‘Good Morning,' ‘Please,' or ‘Goodnight.' Sex, which he knew she had once enjoyed so much, was now perfunctory on the rare occasions that he managed to stay hard long enough without recourse to her mouth.

Scott had often wondered how it must feel for a woman, for Zelda, to take a man's cock in her mouth and pleasure it without choking. How this most intimate of violations could provide her with even a modicum of pleasure. The thought had troubled him for years. The fact that she was already familiar with this particular sexual perversion when he had met her brought a sliver of bile into his throat. He was disgusted by the idea of the other men she might have practised on, done it with, before or since him.

The young man sitting at the bar was still looking at him.

Scott had to admit he was quite pretty, a tad feminine despite his short hair and the floppy fringe that fell across his pale forehead.

He smiled back at the stranger.

Who soon joined him at his table.

‘You know I'm not that way inclined,' Scott said furtively, looking around the bar to check there was no one around whom he knew. ‘Just interested in knowing what it would be like. Curiosity, call it. An experiment. Not that I wish to go all the way, just, you know ...'

‘Sure,' the young man said.

‘And I don't want it to be something sordid. In some public convenience, with trousers down to my ankles. Have to do it properly, in a civilised way. Be comfortable with each other ...' Scott added.

‘I understand,' the young man said. ‘Do you have a place where we might go, then?'

They had undressed, with their backs to each other. Scott was conscious his body was no longer as athletic as it had been. As he failed to turn around, he felt the young man's hand on his shoulder.

‘Do you want me to suck you first?' his pickup asked. ‘It will put you at ease. You can do me afterward. No rush.'

He lowered himself to his knees and took Scott's flaccid cock in his hand and rolled the foreskin down before enveloping it with his lips.

Scott closed his eyes. The tongue moved slowly around his stem. He imagined it was Zelda and St Paul, Minnesota, again, and paradise and youthful days. Felt a bit the same. Pleasant. The shivers began as usual in the deep pit of his stomach before travelling down toward his now aroused genitals.

Later, he adopted the same kneeling position and closed his own mouth on the thick cock of the young man. At first, the feel was quite unexpected. The penis felt strangely greasy under his tongue, pulsing with the beat of a distant heart. He licked it methodically, his lips gripping its surprising warmth while his tongue circled its expanding circumference. With his free hand he cupped the young man's balls and felt them yield. He pushed his lips further forward, curious to see how far he could take the cock in without choking. Surprisingly far. The young man, towering now above him, began to moan gently and rustled Scott's hair as he sucked away. Scott had lost all notion of time, his whole mind concentrating on his task.

Finally, the young man shuddered and said, ‘I'm about to come. It would be best if you let it out now, unless you want it inside your mouth.'

Scott pulled away just as the cock began spurting its white, floury ejaculate.

As the come spiralled down toward the wooden floor of the borrowed apartment, he was already thinking back on the experience. It had been interesting. He couldn't really say he had taken much pleasure sucking another man's cock, but on the other hand there had been nothing unpleasant either. Yes, “interesting” was truly the right word in the circumstances. So this is what Zelda would feel as she did it. Maybe now he would understand her better?

The young man was dressing quickly.

‘I'll make my own way out,' he said. ‘It would be better if we didn't exchange names.'

‘Yes,' Scott said.

She's Waltzin' Out the Door – Princeton, 1936
The team had lost the Varsity Challenge, and the overall mood was despondent. The woman was waiting for them to arrive back at the dressing room, holding a bottle of champagne and a couple of glasses in her hand. She was visibly drunk already.

‘There's nothing to celebrate, lady,' McKenna said.

‘I know,' she said. ‘So I thought I'd bring you Princeton boys some consolation. So you'll be luckier next time.'

Tim, who had been kept on the sidelines for most of the game and was still bitter at the coach's decision, walked up to the woman, took the bottle and one glass and poured.

‘And why not?' he said. ‘There's nothing else to lose. And most of us won't be here next year anyway.'

He passed the bottle on to the other players. The woman took a small metal flask out of her bag and took a deep swig from it.

‘Atta boy, that's the way to go!'

The players had soon emptied the bottle of champagne and began trooping past her.

‘Why are you off so fast? We can still celebrate,' the woman said, brandishing the small flask. ‘It's good bourbon!'

‘We're all filthy and sweaty. We have to take a bath, lady.'

She hiccupped and followed the last one of them into the building as they made their way toward the giant communal bathtub.

‘I'll join you,' she exclaimed.

‘You must be joking,' McKenna replied.

‘Not at all,' the woman said, and raised her cotton skirt to reveal that shockingly she had no underwear on. ‘See, I'm already dressed for the occasion, boys.'

The young men looked at each other. Some blushed, others shrugged their shoulders. One of them began to strip openly in front of this strange woman. ‘Why not,' he said.

She stripped with them.

‘So which one is the captain of the team?' she asked, as she jumped into the hot water and joined the burly, muddy young men.

‘I am, and today was the last time,' Chris Callaghan said.

‘In that case,' she said, wading toward him through the steaming water, her small breasts bobbing along, ‘you get the first blowjob.'

The whole team fell silent.

She serviced almost half of them, but the water was growing cold and she suggested they adjourn to the dressing room. They carried her out of the bathtub triumphantly over their broad shoulders, like a trophy.

By now, most of the young players, even those who had already come in the woman's mouth, were hard and excited, and any veneer of civilisation had long worn away.

They all had her in a variety of positions, using every available orifice offered. She sometimes laughed, often moaned, occasionally cried, and eventually passed out. Which didn't stop some of the guys from continuing to fuck her until they ran dry.

Later, once the young men had all hurriedly dressed again in their perfect Princeton gentlemen's suits, and, shamefaced, trooped away from the scene of their lustful crimes, Tim and McKenna revived the woman with some smelling salts from the first-aid cabinet and helped her dress in silence.

They watched her move away unsteadily across the now darkening playing fields, feeling damn guilty about what had happened, but after all, hadn't she been the one who had suggested the orgy and all its excesses?

Finally, she faded into the darkness, her soiled white skirt just a minute, starlike point of white on the horizon where night and earth blended.

‘Damn it,' Tim said. ‘That was crazy. She was crazy. Who was she?'

‘I don't know,' McKenna said. ‘Earlier, on the floor, while Stewart was arsing her and she was sucking on me and White in turn, between mouthfuls she kept saying “I'm Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of the famous writer,” over and over again.' He sighed. ‘Forget it, man, she was just some madwoman with a bad itch in her pants. What we all did was mad too. Better forget all about it.'

‘Fitzgerald? Never even heard of the name,' Tim said.

‘Probably some delusion of hers, anyway,' the other one said, straightening his tie, thinking already of tomorrow's ball, with all the Vassar belles in attendance.

Zelda, Highland, 1948
Scott has now been dead for over seven years, and Zelda lingers in the mental institution where she is being kept for her own good.

Most of the time she is quite lucid, and has much too much time to reflect on the golden past and its mistakes. How lives can be wasted so damn easily on the altar of lust, ambition, petty jealousy, and money worries. How time eats away at the wall of love. How nothing lasts even with the best intentions in the world. How we allow things, people, to go because we are too proud, shy, or helpless to do otherwise. How all those things gnaw at the mind during the unending hours of the night when all you can do is wonder “what if this” and “what if that” and “what if she” and “what if he”, until the sheer torture is too much and you retreat into that deep well where the ghosts can no longer reach you and there are no longer any feelings.

She is being given insulin treatments and has been moved to the top floor of the main Highland building.

In early March, she writes to her mother that the jasmine is in full bloom and crocuses are dotted across the lawn.

On 9 March, she writes to her daughter, Scottie, that she thinks winter is now over. She is already four months into this new stay in Highland, and Scottie's second child, a daughter, has been born.

She writes of the promise of spring in the air and the fact she sees an aura of sunshine over the nearby mountains and longs to see the new baby and its growing brother.

The following night, at midnight, a fire breaks out in the establishment's kitchen. The flames shoot up a small dumbwaiter shaft to the roof and leap out onto each of the floors.

The building has neither a fire-alarm system nor a sprinkler system.

Very quickly the fire grows completely out of control, and smoke races through the rooms of the old stone-and-frame building. The fire escapes are made of wood and soon catch fire.

Zelda sleeps. After hours of tossing and turning, peace has returned at last, and she is again on the backseat of that brand-new automobile that Scott had purchased with his first novel's advance, and she is unbuttoning his trousers and giggling madly at the bemused look on his face as she extricates his small cock from the heavy garments. She's nervous also; she's never done this before, just heard about it from the other girls at the finishing college, who tell her it's the best way to a man's heart. And, yes, she loves Scott so. After all the courting, the tantrums, and the breakups, yes, she has decided, hesitantly moving her lips toward the warm penis, feeling its awkwardly spongy texture between her moist lips. Yes, I will be Mrs Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

She smiles in her sleep.

The fire keeps on gaining ground.

Nine women are killed that night, six of them on the top floor.

Her body is only later identified by a charred slipper lying beneath it.

She is taken to Maryland and, on a warm and sunny day, buried next to Scott. They are together again. For ever.

I'd killed her. Or so I thought. Then her ghost began to haunt me.

Or, then again, maybe it was just me going mad. Slowly, surely, finally. Ah, the ravages of love!

It began at night. It always begins at night. I woke in the heart of darkness, my mind racing like an old vinyl record somehow accelerating abnormally from 33 rpm to 78 rpm. One part of me sought with terrible desperation to erase all memories of her. My once and past, beautiful, touching, vulnerable Kay. But, alongside in abominable coexistence, another rebel section of my mind did its best to cultivate that fruitful field which could summon back the smell of her body, the sound of her voice, the heart-wrenching sway of her hips, the gait of her walk down a busy London road or wherever, all the hundred things that were her, the essence of her being, of her death. My heart would tighten, my cock would grow hard, my breath no doubt began to smell and the bitter fragrance of my sweat would metamorphose into a bile-like stench in all likelihood designer devised to attract all the minor demons and torturers of the lowest level of hell. My tormentors.

Was it guilt? I couldn't even be sure. After all these years – nearly ten – I could no longer be sure I had actually committed the dreadful act of erasing her from my life in such a definitive way. Time is such a convenient cleanser.

‘If I can't have you, then no one will.'

A childish, petulant attitude and murderous consequences. So, I took a vacation. The Caribbean. A harbour of heat and indolence. Where my eyes could feast on the shapes of a thousand other women in meagre attire, compare curves, opulence, posture, the million variations in the shape of breasts both in reposed and in motion. We'd never been anywhere hot when we had still been together, so the only colour I'd seen her skin host was the pale demeanour of porcelain, an alabaster white that had no equal for me, just a wondrous shade that captivated my attention even more than the varying shades of green and blue of the becalmed sea before the wind took flight over the coast, usually around 11 each morning and I had to wear a baseball cap to prevent my hair flying awkwardly in all directions, defying gravity and elegance. At least I still had a full head of hair, however recalcitrant it was. I assumed that by now Kay's erstwhile husband was approaching the terminal stages of baldness.

I sat daytime on the beach reading my book per day, roasting in the sun, allowing the constant breeze to soothe the sweat pearling down my front. The palm trees swayed. The German girls ran topless across the sand of the cove we had adopted for the duration. The heavy hips of the Dominican women swayed lazily as they walked slowly across the sand, a shawl of adorable kids with ribbons in their hair in their wake. The British teenagers ambled down the beach and the hotel's stone and wood promenade overlooking the ocean with their navel piercings on display and their nascent cellulite squeezing out in folds from their bikini bottoms. I was not alone, of course. My wife was there with me. As ever. But by the fifth day I also came to the sad realisation that we had barely spoken to each other so far, beyond the excruciating banalities of food appreciation and respective greetings for the time of day. I had somehow given up communicating altogether. Maybe she had even noticed? It made no difference. I had never been that much of a conversationalist. Economic, you could call me. Or worse. I just had run out of things to say.

We ate early in the dining room that overlooked the ocean and traditionally watched the sun set around 7 p.m. between the mountains to the west, or were they volcanoes? I'd never bothered to find out. We took drinks from the bar and walked back to our air-conditioned ersatz wilderness hut. We were asleep within an hour at most. Sometimes a desultory fuck, more often not even that, just a friendly peck on the cheek and an affectionate ‘goodnight', just as the sounds of disco music filtered feebly towards our room from the hotel's main entertainment plaza where the festivities for the evening were only just beginning. Not our style, though.

Sometimes on the beach when my eyes strayed from the written page or the eternal movements of the waves and the sea ahead of me, I would follow an arse and approximate its shape to that of Kay's but, more and more, the memory of her, her texture so to speak was fading fast with every passing week. Soon, I knew, all I would recall of her would be her face from that photograph they had featured in the newspaper, and would no longer be capable of evoking at will the sadness of her eyes, the texture of her pale skin, the hundred variations of her cunt. It was enough to make me cry inside.

Invariably I'd wake in the heart of the night. I'd discreetly move to the terrace and close the door to the bedroom. The sky was always pitch black and there would be no stars. I could hear the chirrup of ever-present insects, the sound of the palm trees waltzing gently in the night wind and, just a hundred yards away, the monotonous ebb and flow of the sea on the sandy beach. And I felt alone like never before. So, so lonely. Like in the song.

I sat in the reclining deckchair I'd dragged over from the beach on our first day here and waited for day to break, expecting the slow metamorphosis of the sky from pitch black to navy blue and then all paler shades of blue until the moon disappeared altogether and, over the impossible horizon of the ocean, the sun would make an early appearance behind a curtain of thin clouds.

Which is when she whispered to me.

In the darkness.

In the silence.

‘You always promised to take me to a tropical beach, didn't you, Conrad?'

I had. I was in love with her then. A love she ultimately rejected.

‘It's not you,' I replied quietly. ‘You're not here. You're dead.' Refusing point blank to turn my head even an inch and face her voice, her improbable face.

‘Go figure,' she said.

‘It's me,' I remarked, subdued, resigned to the impossible, ‘I've just read too many books, seen too many films, or maybe it's just a case of bad digestion. Those tortillas at the grill tonight did have a strange taste, didn't they?'

‘I wouldn't know,' Kay said. ‘The one good thing about being dead is that food no longer becomes much of a concern.'

‘I'd hate to be dead,' I answered, the faint trace of a smile no doubt colouring my thin lips. ‘Food is good, food is nice. Probably why since you I've put on so much weight.'

‘You don't look any different,' she replied.

It was then I turned to face her at last.

It was her, unchanged, eternal, the same she always was in my dreams before her image had begun to slowly fade as the years had taken their toll on my ageing grey cells.

‘Neither have you changed.'

She advanced a finger towards my face and touched my cheek. The breath of her contact was ice cold.

‘You're warm,' Kay said. Or was it actually the ghost of Kay?

‘That was always the case,' I said. ‘Remember?' I'd been more than just a lover. I'd also been able to warm her in bed.

Her hand retreated and fell to her side. She sighed. Her eyes were still as deep and sad. And alive.

‘You killed me,' she stated. Again.

‘I know.'

‘You killed me I think a dozen times. At least.'

I made no comment.

She continued. ‘And as if killing me was not enough, you insisted on killing me over and over again in your stories, your books. I was just a slab of meat, a body, a thing you played with at your leisure, into which you twisted the knife. How could you be so cruel, Conrad?'

‘Try to understand me,' I pleaded. ‘It was a way of keeping you alive. And fuck the paradox. Surely you of all people would understand that.'

‘No. You were bitter and mean and cruel and insensitive ...'

‘So be it,' I interrupted her. ‘Is now really the time to argue again as we did so often over the telephone after you broke free and returned to your husband?'

‘No,' she agreed. I was surprised.

The sounds of the nearby sea died on the deserted beach and had now faded into the backdrop of our futile conversation.

‘So, why have you returned?' I asked her. ‘To haunt me?'

She just stood there in the heart of the night's silence. I could just about guess the vertical shapes of the trees behind her, anchoring the beach like dozy, thin giants. Her gawky shape obscuring the ivory darkness of the sky.

‘There is no need to haunt me, Kay,' I continued. ‘No need to manifest yourself for that. You've haunted me ever since you rejected me. Every bloody night, every bloody day and there hasn't been a minute when at least a share of my mind hasn't been preoccupied by your absence, by the depth of your missingness.'

Again she failed to answer. A sphinx.

I was still sitting where I'd been all along, in the blue recliner on the room's terrace, just wearing a pair of washed-out green shorts.

‘Talk to me, Kay.'

‘Yes?'

‘So why have you come? Today, tonight of all times?'

She appeared lost now.

‘I don't know,' was all she could say.

‘You've had almost ten years, you know. Actually it will soon be our anniversary. August, remember.'

She lowered her eyes. The night breeze ruffled her hair.

‘That hotel,' I continued, ‘that Tuesday in August. How I picked you up in Camden Town, opposite that cinema that's no longer there. How you told me you were both hoping I'd not come so you could be supremely angry at me but also that I would so we could officially become lovers in the illicit sacraments of the flesh. I still remember that first time. How could I ever, ever forget …'

My turn to sigh and feel the weight of the passing years on my shoulders, descending in overdrive towards my heart. It was flooding back. All of it, every embrace, every word, every shard of inconceivable pain. I held back my tears.

‘So why the hell are you here?' I asked her, raising my voice, oblivious to the possibility it might wake my wife up, beyond the closed terrace windows or the whole damn resort.

‘I just had to,' she finally said.

‘A sad case of haunting,' I remarked.

‘Yes,' she agreed. ‘I'm not very good at it, am I?'

‘No,' I replied. Then: ‘Maybe it requires training?'

‘But you were responsible for my death, time and time again, Conrad, and how can I forgive you that? How can I?' she protested. ‘I am here because of you.'

‘I know,' I agreed with a heavy heart.

And I knew that however prosaic her ghostly appearance was right now, that the haunting was only just beginning this very minute in time and her apparition this particular night would inevitably open the floodgates of my life again, allowing the pain to live and prosper in strength and intensity and keep me awake every single night for the next years to come. If I lived that long.

‘So,' I said, ‘what now, then?'

She furrowed her brow. Her cold hand touched my shoulder. I shivered uncontrollably.

‘A last fuck?' she said.

‘A mercy fuck,' I answered.

‘You could call it that,' she agreed.

‘The one you were going to allow me that night,' I said. ‘But I went and betrayed you first, so I was not even granted that.'

‘Maybe,' Kay's ghost said.

I was overwhelmed by sadness. And exquisite tenderness.

Her hand took mine.

‘Come,' she said and led me towards the beach.

So there I am; it's four or so in the morning, on a beach in the Caribbean, following a woman who doesn't exist any longer. I know I'm not dreaming. No way. But then don't the insane always argue that
they
are the sane ones as a clinical proof of their insanity? It's not Kay and it is Kay. My mind balances between denial and a crazy kind of acceptance.

‘Lie down,' she asks me once we are just a few yards from the ebb and flow of the night waves sliding feebly against the shore. Just like
From Here to Eternity
, only everything is dark. But the moon is full and illuminates her face, like a spotlight on an eerie stage that only has me as an audience. She, of course, is the star. The ghost of honour.

I kneel down. The sand is powdery, still warm from the day's unending sunlight. Her hands swiftly pull down my shorts and Kay, in turn, gets down on her knees and takes me into her mouth. My cock is surrounded by ice. But still manages to react. Weakly but soon I accustom myself to the chilly embrace of her tongue, recognise the frozen softness of her lips as she teases my cock so well. She has not lost her touch, I see. Her hair brushes like silk against my stomach and I slide my errant fingers through her myriad curls, counting, caressing every twist and turn of her blondness. It's like she was before, I note. Her soft perm, unlike the photograph in the newspaper (a feature about young women who had to balance career and children, where she expressed her regrets about reaching her mid-30s and being childless and having lost all those years to a job she had now given up) where her hair was now straight. Do ghosts still go to the hairdresser?

I close my eyes and will my erection to fullness. To do so, despite the coldness that now seeps through my cock, I cheat on her mentally. I think of the other Kay, who she was when she was still alive, and the way her tongue used to coat my cock with her saliva as she sucked me in all those hotel rooms. Trust House Forte at Heathrow, Cumberland near Marble Arch, the Old Ship in Brighton, a room on the top floor of the Groucho Club in Dean Street.

My cock grows and now almost reaches her throat. Her teeth nibble my glans with danger and tenderness as she enjoys my texture, feels my girth invading her mouth with every lick, every movement. Her hands, glacial, knead my balls, a finger trailing south to tease my perineum as she allows me one long, agonising thrust that almost has her gagging.

She knows what I am thinking of. The hotel rooms of our shared past.