The Pleasure Quartet (36 page)

April turned back towards him, an enigmatic smile drawn across her lips. And began to undress.

Noah was taken aback; he had expected, hoped to undress her himself. Slowly, stretching time, baring, revealing her an inch or so at a time, lingering, fingers wandering lazily across her skin,
building his desire in infinite increments, each breath a sigh, teasing, playing with the minutes.

April looked up at him. With a look of reproach, seeing him standing motionless and in no rush to disrobe.

‘Why are you waiting?’ she asked, her hands stretching behind her back to unhook her bra.

She had no sense of ritual, he realised.

For her, sex was just another element of life, one to enjoy and indulge in, like you did a good meal or a pleasant conversation. A condiment like salt and pepper or sweet words of endearment
whispered in one’s ear at the right moment, even if neither partner actually believed in them. An ingredient that would serve to enhance the quiet pleasure of a long term relationship,
smoothing its rough edges, filling the unspoken gaps of intimacy, nothing more.

Noah was beckoned by roughness. Not in bed; April always bristled slightly whenever he deviated from the well-worn path of their embraces. But in life. He found an unexpressed thrill in danger,
magic, which was probably what made him so receptive to music and good at his job in spotting bands and singers who could prove innovative and with whom he could work to mine their
unpredictability, leave the surface of things behind and reach a new level.

April set her bra to the side and revealed her breasts.

She bent over to slip her panties down to her ankles and then imperceptibly shimmied and allowed them to drop to the bedroom floor where she stepped out of them.

Her pubic hair was a darker shade of blond, tightly woven, but so soft to the touch, Noah knew. She had never allowed him to shave it or responded to his suggestions.

Rooted to the spot and unwilling to do anything quite yet, he kept on gazing at her. Fuck, she was beautiful. It was as if every time he saw her nude again was the first time again. A
revelation. Even her minute flaws seemed to serve as a frame for her perfection. An ever so slightly crooked top tooth only visible when she laughed aloud, a thin scar across her right eyebrow, a
slight discoloration of the skin on the inside of her right thigh in the shape of an island on a map of the world, just a nail’s length across. April was terribly self-conscious about the
stain, and Noah had once been in the habit of annoying her when he insisted that the mark was shaped like Sardinia, or it could have been Sicily or Malta or Tuvalu for all he knew. Geographical
accuracy had not been the object of the exercise. And then there was the dark, harmless mole on her back, equidistant from each shoulder.

All these made her real.

And even more attractive to him.

April, now fully nude, walked over to their bed and pulled the cream cover away and dived under it.

Noah finally set to and pulled his grey T-shirt above his head, disturbing the even cushion of his dark curls, and began to unbuckle his jeans, tugging on the worn leather belt.

As he joined April between the covers, her body warm and soft against his, he found that she had placed herself at the centre of the bed, so he had no choice but to position himself above her.
She had already opened her legs wide. Her wetness greeted him. He nestled his lips in the crook of her neck and breathed in the barely fragrant aftersmell of the perfume she had sprayed on before
lunch and their walk through Greenwich Village, L’Eau by Issey Miyake. He knew because she had asked him to buy it for her for last year’s Christmas gift. They rarely surprised each
other.

He slid inside her.

With ease.

Comfortable weekend sex.

Predictable. Pleasant. Silent.

He was hard, but tender and attuned to April’s inner rhythms, riding her with care and energy, expertly surfing across the inner waves of her lust, trying to match his movements to the
currents of their respective desires, equalizing the ebb and flow and intensity of the hidden seas that controlled their sexuality.

Soon, April was beginning to gasp and Noah knew she was close to coming, so he accelerated his thrusts.

‘Jeeezussss . . .’ Her triumphant cry punctured the room’s peace.

Noah closed his eyes, now fixed on releasing his own pleasure. She was one of the few women he had known who came easily. There was no challenge in it.

A thought intruded in his mind as he kept on burying himself inside her pliant softness: the next time they fucked, he wanted to play loud music as an accompaniment. Whoever said that you
shouldn’t mix work with pleasure?

He had met April just a few months after he had arrived in the city. The now ex-girlfriend he had initially followed from London to New York, Bridget, had quickly failed in her
attempt to conquer the Big Apple, and had soon come to the conclusion she didn’t have it in her to navigate the course. Bridget had enjoyed a modicum of success on the university and club
circuit back in England as a folk singer with a dusky voice and clever phrasing, but on Bleecker Street, she was just one of a handful of moderately talented singers and, despite a few gigs at
Kenny’s Castaways and The Bitter End, she did not get enough favourable reviews or repeat bookings.

He’d been freelancing for a handful of music magazines, which was how they’d met. He’d championed Bridget with a positive review in a successful attempt to bed her, and with a
laptop reckoned he could work from anywhere, so following her to Manhattan had not been too much of a dilemma.

When a discouraged Bridget summarily gave up on her dream and decided to return to the UK to complete her law studies, Noah had opted to stay put. He’d always loved the excitement of New
York, and half-American by birth, he didn’t need to worry about obtaining a work visa. Thanks to a book advance he had pocketed to write a no warts and all biography of a popular boy band
with whose manager he had been to university, he had found himself an affordable rental in Brooklyn where the rock scene was burgeoning.

Within half a year, he had been offered an A&R job by a mainstream record company with a brief to nurture further local bands. He had a good ear, a distinctive taste for the original and a
British no bullshit attitude which quickly made him popular with the musicians with whom he had to work and seduce into the corporate fold without any of them feeling they were compromising their
ideals and principles in the process. Unlike other record business types, he would not pretend to be their friend and was careful not to interfere too openly with their music, opting for gentle
hints and subtle production recommendations once he had managed to get the bands into the studios, an attitude they and their often inexperienced and wary managers appreciated.

Noah had found a life he enjoyed. Although not essentially creative himself he was nevertheless involved in the creation of powerful music. It was the best of possible worlds and yet something
was missing. Sex, women.

A string of harmless one night stands around the networks of clubs and venues he now haunted for his job had proved unfulfilling, and then he met April.

A photo session had been set up for one of his groups, a trip hop trio from Philadelphia, whose female singer’s deep, sensual tones always managed to move him inside from the moment she
began to sing, although her everyday non-performing voice was however a bit strident and oh so American. She was part of a long-standing couple with the bass player in the group, but despite that
the temptation to get to know her better had, against Noah’s best judgment, skirted his thoughts more than once. The record company’s art department had signed up a fairly well-known
fashion photographer whose studio was on the Lower East Side and Noah had agreed to meet up with the guys there after the shoot, to pick up some test recordings of a couple of new songs they were
working on.

He was waiting in the studio’s anteroom for the session to end. Leafing through a fashion magazine left open on a low glass table, he was smiling at the incongruous thought he could just
as well have been sitting in a dentist’s parlour when a young woman, a blonde with short hair, walked through, a pile of cellophane-wrapped clothes on hangers looped over her arm.

Their eyes met.

She noticed the ironic smile on his lips.

‘What’s so funny?’ she asked him.

‘Not you, I assure you. Just something that was passing through my mind before you entered.’

‘You’re English.’

‘Indeed.’

She smiled back at him.

By then he’d been in America long enough to recognise her own accent was also not local. He took a guess.

‘You’re Canadian?’

She nodded and laid out her cumbersome bundle of clothes onto a nearby sofa.

‘I’m April,’ she introduced herself.

‘Noah.’

‘Are you waiting for Hutch, or are you one of his assistants?’

‘Neither. He’s finishing a shoot,’ he indicated the door that separated the waiting room from the loft studio where the work was taking place. ‘I’m with the group,
musicians being shot. The band.’

‘Their manager? Minder? You don’t look like the rock type.’

Noah appreciated her attitude. And he wasn’t ashamed to admit it, her looks, too. She had a quality of self-assurance that appealed to him greatly, as if she knew what she wanted and
nothing would change her aim or direction.

‘Is there a typical rock type?’

‘I don’t know. You look normal . . .’ her sentence halted in full flow, as if she thought she had said something wrong, was maybe insulting him. She lowered her eyes.

‘I don’t mind in the slightest being normal,’ Noah countered. ‘Feel no need to conform to popular expectations.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ April said. ‘I expressed myself badly. I do that sometimes.’

‘It’s fine. What about you?’

‘Me?’

‘What brings you here, April? Do you work for a dry cleaner, maybe?’

She laughed. ‘No.’

He laughed along with her.

‘So what’s all the clothes about?’

‘They’re for a fashion shoot tomorrow. I brought them ahead of time. I work for a magazine. She looked down at the one he had dropped back to the glass table. ‘Actually, the
same one you were reading.’

‘How fortuitous.’

‘Wow, big word!’ Her eyes were a pale shade of green and he couldn’t help but stare at them, not that the rest of April didn’t call for much closer attention, but you
could only admire a woman one step at a time, he reckoned. His attention was drawn to a thin, almost invisible line, a scar he realised, that partly bisected one of her eyebrows. A terribly minor
imperfection that made her feel less plastic, he felt. He liked the girl. A lot.

‘No one’s perfect. Even more so with a British university education.

‘So I see.’

‘And what about Canada? Where do you come from?’

‘Vancouver.’

‘Never been,’ Noah said, ‘but got close. I was visiting Seattle a couple of years ago, and was tempted to hire a car and drive up. Never got round to it, though.’

‘You should have. Gastown is a gas.’

‘Would you have been there, or already in New York?’

‘If I’d known you were coming, maybe I would have stayed on there . . .’

He enjoyed the way she could playfully sustain a conversation, spar with him, tease, seduce him already.

Right then, the studio door opened and the band poured out, all in an ebullient mood, still high from the photo shoot.

Noah and April exchanged phone numbers.

She’d arrived in the city at almost the same time he had, they later discovered, leaving a small local publishing house where she’d found a placement following art school studies and
now worked in Manhattan as a production assistant for a mid-level magazine group. She wasn’t actually involved with the fashion department and the errand at Hutch Lea’s, the
photographer’s studio, had been a favour she was doing for a colleague whose child was down with flu. Normally, she wouldn’t ever have set foot there. Her job was assisting the art
department complete their lay-outs in readiness for the printers.

Noah pondered at length where to invite her for a first date and how long to wait until he actually called her and suggested they meet. He had the intuition she wouldn’t be impressed
merely being a ‘plus one’ on a guest list however prestigious the gig was and actually suggested they visit the Metropolitan, where a new exhibition transferred from London’s
Royal Academy was enjoying rave reviews and tickets were at a premium, but available to him against musical favours. He chose right.

They were lovers within a week.

Noah knew his feelings on the subject were profoundly irrational, but soon after April moved in with him, she took the decision to grow her hair longer, and even though all
their individual and common friends loved her new look, he felt cheated, as if in acquiring a new partner he had been given a wrong bill of goods.

Thus were seeds sown.

Outwardly, things were just fine. They seldom argued, the sex was good, if at times predictable, they looked good together and enjoyed each other’s company and New York was vibrant. What
could go wrong?

April was untidy, relished in the chaos of mess, her clothes scattered across their bedroom or further afield if Noah indulged her while he was meticulous and precise, over-organized apart from
the piles of cassettes and CDs that spilled over from his desk into even the kitchen, which he always blamed on the nature of his work and which she never reproached him for or used as an excuse
for her own state of domestic wildness. She even approved of the way he dressed, conservative and unimaginative and somewhat repetitive in combinations of black, blue and grey whereas she
generously mined every colour of the rainbow and, miraculously, wore them equally well, avoiding clashes, gaudiness or fantasies of outmoded psychedelia.

‘Are all Canadian women like you?’

‘Like what?’

‘So easy to live with?’

‘Am I?’

‘Absolutely.’