June 06, 2007
Fiction
Portrait
Robert says he fell in love with her while his eyes were closed. He was sitting in the back row dozing, as a professor emeritus was privileged to do at the annual graduate student conference, when a voice drifted into his dreams—a voice that made the topic of “Nostalgia as Expressed through Verb Endings in The Tale of Genji“ sound as sexy as anything he’d heard in his life. He opened his eyes to see her, a Renoir beauty in low-rise jeans and a turtleneck.
Jenna doesn’t call it love. She can’t put simple labels on her feelings, especially where Robert is concerned. However, she did feel a prescient twinge between her legs when “Ernie”—the grad students called him that for his resemblance to a jovial Hemingway—came up to her at the reception and said, Very impressive talk, Ms. Wallace.
Several chance meetings and a few planned ones later, she got herself invited back to his place, because they both agreed she could hardly show him the tattoo on her butt in the middle of Café Milano. She imagined he’d offer her sherry and try to seduce her. No sherry, he’d been sober for fourteen years, but by evening’s end he did make love to her on his bed with the Indian print spread, surrounded by trophies of his many travels. For days afterward, she smelled him in the crook of her elbow, on the tips of her fingers and the crotch of her panties, her skin fragrant with foreign spices, as if she’d become a stranger to herself.
•
Before they have sex, Robert tells her stories. Teasers, tantalizing menus that prime her for the meal to follow.
It began the first time they were together. His kisses on the sofa made her hot, his beard was softer than it looked, and she was more than ready to follow him, swaying a little, to the bedroom. But when they got into bed she froze up. She was going to fuck Ernest Hemingway? The Old Man and the Sea? It couldn’t possibly be true.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Jenna?” His voice was kind.
She nodded, afraid if she tried to speak, her teeth would chatter.
He lifted her on top of him, pulling her hips down so that her pussy pressed against his surprisingly taut stomach, his hands resting warm on her thighs. “You might be more comfortable if you close your eyes.”
Then he began to talk.
He said her breasts were lovely, more beautiful than he’d imagined. She couldn’t know how hard it was not to touch them, weigh them like fruit, stroke the satin of her skin. Her nipples were such a pretty color—dusty rose, he’d call it. Ah, they were standing up already as if they could hear. Did she want him to flick them lightly with his tongue, then blow on them, or slowly circle in and brush the tips with his thumbs? Were they as exquisitely sensitive as they looked? Could she come, perhaps, if he did nothing but kiss and fondle them for a long, long time?
Listening, eyes closed, Jenna learned that if she rocked back and forth, with small, furtive thrusts, she didn’t feel cold any longer.
When it happened, that very first time, Jenna’s eyes shot open. Where did it come from, that warm gush of wetness? Robert smiled up at her, not surprised at all. Her juices pooled between them so when she pushed into him again their bodies made soft kissing sounds together. Robert waited until she was gliding over him to do the things he told her about.
Each time he adds a twist, a new chapter.
What should he do with his hands today? Slide them down the snowy slope of her ass to the sweet pink crevice? All of her most delicious parts are pink, how clever of her to be color-coded. Should he lick his finger and run it along the groove until he felt the little dimple? Would she push it open for him so he could strum it like a clit and then spank it—very gently—because she was so naughty to like it so much?
At first she was embarrassed by her arousal, the abundance of it, but he tells her he loves the way her thighs engulf him, loves the feel of her lips skating over him like a wet silk mitten. She has such eloquent lips.
Jenna says things during sex, too: Ahhh. Oh, god. Yesss. Please, oh, please, oh, Robert, can I sit on your cock now, please?
She’s a bit of a slut for a smart girl. When she met him she’d had thirteen lovers, twenty if you’re the type who says blowjobs count.
Until Robert, she’d never come with a man inside her.
•
Afterwards, he tells her other stories. He went drinking with Mishima, met Kawabata at a garden reception at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. Back in his Columbia days, he saw Ginsberg read “Howl.” Anne Sexton—that was later—she was absolutely electric on stage. There were sad stories, too, about his wives. The first one withheld sex, and when he was tired of begging he turned to working girls. He did it to save his marriage—hard for her to understand, perhaps—but back then, it made sense. The second divorce was his fault. Booze. And yes, he did have affairs with students, while they were taking his classes, but the ones he chose deserved A’s anyway. Things were different back then. He was a different man.
As she snuggles against him, their juices drying, Jenna feels a tug of envy. He’s had so many lives. She’s not sure she’s had even one yet. She imagines him walking around in the kind of clothes she’s seen in second-hand stores when she shops for sock hops and Seventies Nights, imagines him walking through a Technicolor world, a time of hats and gloves and virgin wedding nights and fallen women. A time when sex actually meant something.
•
Jenna gets bolder as the affair continues. Even a man like Robert becomes more approachable when he’s bellowed “Oh, Jesus, I’m coming” in your ear a half dozen times.
Once she asks, “If every woman you ever slept with came to a party, would you have to rent a small club? Or Fenway Park?”
He laughs and calls her “a delight.” And never does answer.
She tells him, “I know I’m just your latest fresh piece of ass.”
He protests, courtly as always, that he fell in love with her voice, her mind, but yes, he must admit she does have a fresh and undeniably magnificent ass.
She doesn’t tell him she has that old Sinatra song on her iPod and listens to it obsessively and wonders if he really does have a woman for every year, each with a label slapped across her naked belly, each with a cunt as round and open as the lips of a wine bottle. She imagines Robert moving down the chorus line, kneeling to drink deeply from the small town girls, the big city girls, the blue-blooded girls in their limousines. What stories did he tell them to make the wine flow?
•
She buys him a Playboy on eBay, July 1959, the beatnik issue. She feels she owes him for all of those Malaysian curry dinners, those sopping sheets.
“Ah, I remember this one,” he says, kissing her warmly. “What a marvelous present.”
They look at the centerfold together, Yvette Vickers (discovered in a genuine beatnik coffeehouse, the text claims), stretched out on her stomach, straddling the edge of a bright orange Naugahyde sofa, wearing nothing but a man’s shirt. Nearby are two unmatched tumblers of French wine and an overflowing ashtray. Yvette winks at them as she puts an LP on the turntable, as if she wouldn’t be averse to a little threesome in the afternoon.
“She’s got a magnificent ass,” Jenna observes.
Robert murmurs agreement. He is staring at the “beauteous bohemienne.” Jenna frowns, jealous of her own gift.
She says, “Doesn’t it look like she’s masturbating on the edge of the couch?”
He tilts his head, leans closer to the picture.
“I used to do that, you know. I was so clueless, I had no idea I could use my fingers. So I rubbed myself on things, my pillow, the edge of my mattress.” She feels herself blushing, but the words only come faster. “Once when my parents weren’t home, I ravished a poor sofa cushion in broad daylight on the living room floor. Terrible, isn’t it, to molest innocent furniture?”
“Absolutely criminal.”
She has his full attention now.
•
She calls him around midnight. She’s wearing nothing but a shirt, drunk on three juice glasses of cheap red wine.
“I’ve been doing some math,” she says, pulling each word carefully from the tiny corner of sobriety left in the fog of her brain. “You see, if you are really middle-aged, as you like to call yourself, that means you’ll live to be 124 years old.”
He laughs sleepily. “Go to bed, Jenna. Make sure to drink plenty of water first.” And then, “Come over tomorrow. I’ll make something special for dinner.”
She’ll go, of course, she always goes whenever he asks and lets him feed one hungry mouth and then the other.
She accidentally spills most of the water on her shirt and huddles under the comforter, soaked and cold. She pictures a long, narrow stairway snaking up between sooty skyscrapers. At the top, in some faraway place she can’t see, death waits. Is it sleep with no dreams or is there really a white light, a benevolent voice calling, the way all those people who died in hospitals and were brought back to life describe it? Chances are, Robert will know that answer first, the way he always does.
•
After dinner, Jenna sits on the edge of the table and wraps her legs around his waist. She’s still hungry. She whispers, “I want you to fuck me like I’m a whore.”
He draws back and gives her an odd look. “That was a long time ago.”
She tightens her grip, pulls him closer. “But I really want you to.”
“Do you?” He studies her face. Then he says, “All right.”
Does she imagine a new business-like glint in his eyes?
“Are you wearing lingerie?”
She shakes her head.
“Next time you want to play working girl, bring a garter belt and stockings. Tonight we’ll have to make do without.”
He tells her to strip to her bra and panties in the bathroom and knock on the bedroom door when she’s ready.
He’s lying on the bed naked, one hand behind his head, the other languidly pumping his half-erect cock. He gives her a once-over, gestures for her to take off everything, and pats the bed beside him. She lies down.
“So you’re the new girl. Claudia, right? A pretty name for a pretty lady. I’m Paul.”
“Hi Paul.” She is about to extend her hand, but gives a stiff nod instead. He whispers in her ear, as if there is someone else in the room who shouldn’t overhear, “Check the clock. We have an hour.”
He begins to nuzzle her neck and shoulder and seems about to kiss her lips, but veers at the last moment, smiling at some private joke. He gazes at her breasts for a while before he touches them, as if they are strange and fragile things.
She tries to keep her breathing steady and stay in her role. She’s not a whore. She’s a pair of eyes, watching him in one of those past lives.
She watches Robert kiss his way over her belly, inching closer, closer to her pussy lips. Very gently, like a little hello, he touches her clit with the tip of his tongue, then circles it. She sighs, in spite of herself, and rocks her hips forward. That seems to be his cue to feast in earnest: quick back-and-forth flicks—ohhh—lazier horizontal figure eights—yes—-slower up and down glides—ahhh. Only a fool would begrudge him all that practice now.
Her chest is flushed and her thighs are trembling as she stammers, “Am I supposed to come?”
Robert looks up, face and beard glistening. “I assume if you didn’t want to, you would have faked it long ago.”
She smiles. “Did you really make prostitutes come?”
“I tried my best. Believe it or not, I wanted to give them pleasure. I went to brothels for what I was missing in my life at the time—a response. Speaking of which, tonight I was getting quite a nice one.” He lowers his lips to her pussy, but stops. “Now if you’re Claudia, I figure I have about fifteen more minutes. If you’re Jenna, I have all night.”
“Kiss me,” she says. She licks herself from his beard, sucks her juices from his tongue. “Whorish” comes to mind, but she knows that probably isn’t the right word for what she’s doing at all.
•
He gets sentimental as they lie spooned together. He tells her: Don’t be like me. Don’t give your whole heart to a pile of articles and books no one will ever read. You need to find yourself a nice young man. You need to get married and make babies.
He strokes her flat belly. He has no children of his own.
•
She never sleeps well in his bed. She wakes up hungry again. Exactly the way those boys must feel when they nudge, nudge, nudge their morning boners against her ass. In the moonlight she watches Robert, sleeping with his back to her.
She puts on his bathrobe and walks through the dark house. In the study she pauses, tempted by the drawers, full of photographs, perhaps, of those women, their names and vintages scrawled on the back. Or better yet letters, diaries. All the stories he hasn’t told.
But Robert often wakes up by five.
She settles in the reading nook by the bookshelf and snaps on the lamp. The top shelf is lined with all the books he’s written. The next has Kawabata’s complete works in Japanese. On the tall bottom shelf, a row of art books and several volumes of erotic art and photography.
“Ah yes, I was wondering what would get Jenna up at the crack of dawn. Dirty pictures, of course.”
Robert stands before her dressed and grinning, apparently unaware he’s the one who’s brought out the courtesan in her.
He gets his glasses and a blanket to wrap around them against the chilly morning and sits down to look at the book with her.
“These are real people,” she says, fascinated by the variety, couples fat and thin, older and younger, straight and gay. One man who looks just like her high school geometry teacher, Mr. Johnson, is fucking a woman doggie-style, his face contorted in ecstasy.
“This is what real people do,” Robert says. “By the way, I know this photographer. Sidney Beck.”
“Sydney? Is that another one of your women?” Jenna knows that on the nights they’re not together he goes to gallery openings, readings and “events” in the company of friends he doesn’t name.
“Sidney is a gay man,” he says, putting his arm around her and giving her nipple a tweak, “and that notwithstanding, we are nothing more than friends. He did ask me if I’d pose for him, with a partner, but it didn’t happen.”
“Lost your nerve at the last minute, eh?”
“Not I, but under the circumstances, I could hardly insist.”
She recognizes that look. He’s slipping away to a place she can’t follow.
She taps his arm. “Do you still have his number?”
•
Sidney’s studio is a world divided in two. On one side, the clutter of equipment and umbrella lights, filing cabinets and a desk with a computer, on the other, blank simplicity: a white back drop, a Victorian fainting couch draped in creamy satin.
Jenna decides she likes Sidney’s eyes. She can’t name the color—gray or brown or green?—but they’re watchful without judgment or that flicker of lust that always puts her on guard.
Robert undresses right away. He is particularly cheerful when he’s on a new adventure. Jenna stays in her jeans and T-shirt. Sidney tells her she should only do what she feels comfortable doing. But she’s confused. She knows she’s not Playboy. Can she aspire to be Art?
She and Robert sit side by side on the little white couch and kiss.
“Nervous?” Robert asks.
“Hella nervous. I hope you have a good story for me today.”
“I’ve come prepared.”
She glances down at his cock, already twitching and thickening. That’s another first with Robert, watching a dick get hard, the lazy upward climb of a mesmerized, one-eyed cobra. College boys spring a woody if you smile the right way.
Jenna takes him in her hand. Her palm tingles.
“I know this little guy,” she says. “Oh, excuse me, I meant this Enormous Rod of Power and Might.”
Robert laughs.
She hears the click of a shutter and looks up. Sidney is smiling, too.
•
Two rolls into the session, they make history: the photograph that will hang in galleries, adorn the covers of two books, make Sidney a name. It’s not a pose, it’s what they always do, Robert lying back on the couch, Jenna straddling his belly and bending forward to offer him her breast, her face turned away from the camera.
Sidney does ask Robert to move his right hand over a bit to cup Jenna’s buttock. Perfect. Robert takes advantage of his new position to slide a finger in her crack and tickle her asshole, sending jolts of sweet fire through her spine.
She smiles down at him and then—ah, it comes already—the first gush of her desire. Before he even says a word.
She’s the one who says, “We’re good together, aren’t we?”
“As good as it gets,” he says with a smile so sweet it makes her chest ache.
She closes her eyes, and leans over him, and who would ever guess, from that picture, so still and serene, that she’s trying not to cry?
•
Jenna studies the proof of the photo where they are lying together on the draped couch. Sidney has asked them to sign a release form so he can use it in his exhibits and publications in perpetuity.
She likes this picture.
She likes how Sidney has lifted their bodies out of time, how they could be lovers in ancient Greece or in a nineteenth-century French postcard. Any man, every woman.
She likes how they fit together, the rhythm of curves and angles: his flesh dusky, hers stark white but for the dark fall of curls down her back. And yes, she might allow in this case that her ass is magnificent.
She likes Robert’s cock, pointing skyward, at the center of it all. It is average enough in size, no porn-style donkey dick, thick as an arm or a hearty sapling. Yet, that is what makes her catch her breath, that most forbidden sight of all—an ordinary man’s desire.
But the thing that makes her stop and gaze for the longest time is Robert’s face as he suckles her, his hand cupping her breast as if to whisper a secret. She’s never seen this before—how could she with her eyes closed? She couldn’t see how she’s been feeding him, too.
•
Robert says he adores the photographs. He has his copies bound together in leather and keeps them with his art books, because, he says, that’s precisely where they belong.
Jenna keeps one copy of her favorite print with her other photographs, the few she carries with her in her travels. She thinks about framing it and hanging it on her wall, but then she’ll have to explain it and she doesn’t want to tell the story to just anyone.
She’ll tell her husband of course, the man she’ll share her life with. She’ll show him the photograph, and tell him about the session, because she’ll tell him everything important that’s happened to her. Not all the details, perhaps, because he’ll say it makes him jealous, and she’ll like that about him, too. She’ll tell him how crazy she was back then, so full of yearning, so rarely easy in her skin. But that one day was different.
And her husband—the man she doesn’t know yet, although if she closes her eyes she can see his smooth neck and hear his voice—he’ll say: What a great story, Jenna, love. Yes, that’s some story.
• • •
’s erotic fiction has appeared in Clean Sheets, Scarlet Letters, She’s On Top: Stories of Female Dominance and Male Submission, He’s On Top: Stories of Male Dominance and Female Submission, Garden of the Perverse: Fairy Tales for Twisted Adults, Sexiest Soles, Taboo: Forbidden Fantasies for Couples, Best American Erotica 2006, Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 4, 5 and 6, and Best Women’s Erotica 2005, 2006 and 2007. Her novel set in Japan, Amorous Woman, is part of Orion’s Neon erotica series. Read more of her work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
