The Pleasure Quartet (4 page)

Greenwich Village was becoming a world of possibilities. A city symphony of female faces and bodies. Each one as clear and defined in his overworked imagination as a wide screen porno movie. Noah couldn’t recall how long it had been since he had enjoyed such thoughts. He imagined with a strong tinge of self-consciousness that the eyes of every woman he passed and fantasised about in the process was fixed on his unyieldingly hard crotch. He really had to get indoors and relieve himself.

At last, Noah reached home.

The airy, well-lit lounge. The Eames chair he had paid an outrageous price for, despite its age. His cluttered desk, a warren of piles of tape boxes, CDs, papers, folders, elastic bands and paper clips. The laptop booting up, its screen shifting from sky blue to pale grey. Slowly. Too slowly.

It had been ages since he had surfed any sex sites, but the computer’s predictive ability locked on them after just a few strokes of the keyboard.

He unbuttoned his jeans and pulled out his cock. He had gone soft again, waiting for the website to load. He shrugged at the timing.

Had every woman in the world, at one time or another, performed in pornographic acts in the eye of a lens? It felt that way. Racing through clips, sites where the activities in question were carefully categorised: colour of hair, age, body shape, position, settings urban and bucolic and wilder, openings used solo or in unison, nationalities, even scenarios ranging from pretend lost hitchhikers to interception by border guards, casting auditions, medical examinations, school encounters, orgies, weddings, all the life sexual was present and on display and available to him and whoever else was seeking relief right now, and the choice of faces on offer was infinite. He knew he was only seeing the tip of the iceberg, and his mind felt dizzy at the thought of how many women had espoused sex on camera. The clips travelled the ages, from teased sixties hairdos and clothes and bushy genitalia to a maelstrom of smooth, exposed cunts and more modern furniture in the irrelevant backgrounds in front of which they all performed. Rarely did he recognise a woman from clip to clip, film to film. Always a new one, a fresh face. Because it wasn’t the act, the position or the combination of participants that stopped his fingers in their tracks, it was the women’s faces. There was something anonymous about the men, just an incessant parade of steadily performing cocks. Despite their obvious necessity, they were interchangeable and forgettable.

Here, the faint smile of a young girl with a strained air of dramatised innocence at the instant of feigned violation by her supposed teacher that unconscionably gripped his heart, the emotion immediately transferring down to his cock which hardened and pulsed in his hand.

There, the panicked look in a Czech would-be model’s eyes as she auditioned in a hotel room, was asked to strip and examined from every close-up angle by the camera and the interviewer, when the unlikely agent promising her modelling gigs makes it clear she has to suck him on camera to determine her talents.

His cock hardens again towards the end of a lengthy sequence in which another young woman has been used repeatedly in all openings by two tattooed studs, the resigned fall of the shoulders as she is dragged towards a bath tub to be urinated on as a final insult in the story of her degradation.

He felt ashamed at the way some images or situations could arouse him even further as he stroked away, his cock now at full length and hard in his grip, moving up and down across the ridges of his glans, his veins at bursting point, trying to hold the orgasm back just a little longer, until he reached the image, the woman, the act that would make the explosion inevitable and even painful in its intensity.

Noah flew from clip to clip, sometimes just a few seconds here, seeking the ideal face, the right emotion.

Still dissatisfied, he noticed a provenance link for a brief GIF of a faceless girl whose ‘master’ was tracing clumsy letters from the alphabet across her offered rump, with the letter O strategically placed to advertise the availability and popularity of her anal aperture. It was not an uncommon image, but the shape of the woman’s pale arse intrigued him and Noah clicked on the link to a Tumblr page he couldn’t recall encountering before.

The screen went blank for a few seconds and he reckoned the link had expired, the account been closed.

The page opened slowly, the buffering agonisingly halting as the screen filled up. He scrolled downwards to hurry it, but it was no help.

He was edging his cock, tiptoeing on the precipice of his own sought-after eruption, anxious to come, to lift the burden from his mind and body, impatient to reach an image that would form the perfect trigger to his orgasm. Noah held on, waited for a quartet of images to finally come to life on his laptop screen.

The photos were of poor quality. An amateur production. They were sequential.

The first one was just a repeat of the one he had linked onwards from, reposted on a BDSM site about reputedly beautiful slaves. The apple-shaped pale arse, its opening red and distended, the back of the young woman’s thighs, tense, sinews on alert, the fall of her back an exquisite curve expanding to an unknown horizon, a promise of further forbidden delights.

The second image repeated the initial one but was shot from the side so you could trace the sketch of a breast, small, its curve an exquisite geometry, and beyond the bent-over body the legs of a group of men. Onlookers, previous users or users still to come? The blurry background was a white wall. Some form of cellar, a dungeon? He peered closer, seeking out details. A tile caught his attention. A sauna, he decided.

The penultimate photograph appeared to have been taken later, following the inevitable excess and plundering of the victim. It was clear to Noah that what had occurred on the occasion of these photographs was real, not a set-up with professional participants. This had happened in real life, wasn’t a scenario elaborated for a porn clip. The photographs taken had been incidental, and maybe the young woman at the centre of attention had not even been aware they were being taken. Might not have allowed them had she known. Her body was splayed, as if stretched on an invisible cross, drenched in sweat and the assorted men’s cum, as if broken, but there was a pride in her abandon, the looseness of her limbs, attitude. The photograph was cropped so you couldn’t see her face, ending at her neck, a delicate extension to the ravaged body that lay fully exposed, betraying all the indignities she had just suffered.

Noah swallowed hard. His cock hurt. His chest felt tight.

With his free hand he rapidly scrolled down the page to the final image.

It was similar to the previous one but the crop was different. The image was slightly out of focus, a garden of shadows, taken by a cheap device in badly lit circumstances. You could distinguish the woman’s chin and her mouth. It was half-open, a horizon of white teeth profiled beyond the dry lips (how many cocks had she sucked? how many times?), but there appeared to be an ambiguous grin there. No sadness or resignation, or shame, or a reflection of hypothetical tears flowing from her eyes. No. There was something oddly triumphant about the downturn of her lips, as if in her degradation there was some form of victory achieved, that the pleasure she had extracted from the men still surrounding her was her own accomplishment, a measure of her will. A caricature of insubordination. Which added to the sheer obscenity of the series of images, screamed a mighty defiance. Damn, he wanted to see her whole face, her eyes. To witness how the pleasure in her gaze combined with the unavoidable pain.

Noah’s throat felt terribly dry.

He highlighted the final photograph and tried to lighten the image better with the software he stored on his laptop.

Yes.

That was a bit better.

And from the murky depths of the image he finally noticed the young woman’s hair, laid out behind her, a darkness against darkness, untidy, unkempt, wet from her exertions and the ocean of fluids released earlier.

It was red.

Gorgon-like.

Striking. Like a beacon being lit up in his soul.

His heart stopped.

He groaned.

He came.

His cock shuddering out of his control, spilling his seed across the desk and even the keyboard before he could control its terrible and powerful flow.

By the time his orgasm had faded, he was exhausted, his mind running around in circles trying to interpret what had happened and why it had proved so strong. There was much similar porn on the internet, he knew, but this had been different. Not the scenario, to be sure, but an unholy combination of elements: the pallor of the woman’s skin, the allied grace of her curves, some hint of the intensity of her submission, the curl of her lips, and in his imagination, the look he knew he would have witnessed in her eyes had the photograph been more informative.

That red hair, like a stain in the night sky!

It began to haunt his own nights.

‘Is there something wrong?’

‘No. Why?’

‘You were a bit rough last night, Noah. When we were in bed. It’s just not like you. Are you angry at me?’

‘And expressing it physically? Not at all. Surely you know I wouldn’t do that?’

‘I didn’t like it. It felt almost as if you wanted to hurt me. Or like you wanted me to be someone else. Maybe that’s even worse.’ She was buttoning her blouse, and paused as she spoke, pinching a button tightly between her fingers as she stared at him.

‘You’re imagining things, April.’

‘I don’t think so.’ She fastened her top button and turned away from him to straighten her collar in the mirror.

‘What does that mean?’

‘I’m not sure . . .’

‘Maybe things have become a bit routine, and I was subconsciously trying to add a bit of spice. I hadn’t noticed I was doing anything differently. Perhaps it was both of us, trying something new? In bed, together, things come naturally, don’t they?’

‘Not when you scare me. I like familiarity, the Noah I first met and wanted.’

‘Nothing remains the same forever in life . . .’

‘Don’t give me that crap. You’re starting to sound like a self-help book. That’s not you, either.’

‘That’s not what I meant. You know my feelings on pseudo psychology.’

‘What is it, then? Are you happy with me, Noah? With us?’

‘I am.’

‘Are you?’

‘Yes.’

‘When was the last time you said you love me, and meant it?’

‘That’s a trick question.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Quite unfair.’

‘I’m not going to let this drop, Noah. Why don’t we go out later, try that new place in Nolita you mentioned, that the
Village Voice
reviewed last week? We can talk. It’s been ages since we’ve been on a proper date, just the two of us, no music, no movie or anything to do with our jobs.’

‘Sure.’ He was relieved to be granted some form of respite from the conversation, albeit temporary.

She leant up to kiss him.

Her lips were soft, tremulous, her body vibrating slowly in his embrace. Winter was nearing, and she slipped on her faux fur vintage Balmain coat which she had left draped over the sofa. Noah seized his brown leather jacket and they left the apartment together. The cold winds wrapped themselves around the Manhattan avenues and there was a chill in the air. They parted and April made her way down Broadway to catch the subway near Canal Street. Noah continued straight ahead to the record company’s offices. He watched her walk, her slim calves encased in nude stockings, impractically high-heeled shoes on her feet. She looked deep in thought.

After the weekly strategy meeting in the glass-panelled boardroom, Jake took Noah to one side and asked him to stay on. Apart from this vast room, the company’s offices were mostly open plan, everyone working around an enormous oak table, designed accordingly, almost thirty metres in length and five metres wide, with desktops and laptops delineating their individual areas. A few soundproofed booths with curtains and doors had been set up at the back of the central room for individual meetings with visitors and artists when it proved necessary.

Their colleagues filed out.

Jake, although nominally Vice-President of Marketing, was effectively in charge of the label. Wignall, the CEO, had based himself on the West Coast, and mostly overlooked the financials and the dynamic between the record company and its multinational owners.

‘That mix you selected for the Rumble crew was just right,’ Jake said.

The band and its management had been fiercely opposed to Noah’s decision to go with that particular version of the song, but he’d won the day following an exhausting series of meetings and arguments. Now, the track was breaking fast with radio and the downloads were increasing exponentially with every passing day. They had a sure-fire hit on their hands.

‘It was obvious from the start,’ Noah said. ‘The other takes were predictable. Safe. Sometimes you just have to gamble and try something different. We would have done well enough with the version they preferred, but not great. It was an okay song but it needed the right arrangements and sound.’

‘I’m glad you held your ground.’

Noah smiled. ‘I’m pleased it worked.’

Jake gave him a high five. His outmoded version of hip. Noah stifled a laugh.

‘Listen,’ Jake said.

‘Yes?’

‘This is another mighty notch on your bedpost, you know. I was talking to Wignall last night. He’s over the moon. We’d like to make you a proposal.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Some of the best sounds of the past year or so have been coming out of England. But all the best talent seems to be ending up on other labels. Which is a bummer seeing that we have an office in London that’s already costing us a fortune to run.’

Noah remained silent, curious to see where this was leading, although he had a premonition and felt a tinge of excitement run through his fingers. He’d never had much contact with their British offshoot, which was run by a flamboyant entrepreneur with a flair for self-publicising, but a patchy track record in discovering new artists or appointing the right people to do so.