“She looks pretty happy,” Inigo said, “so the little ruse must have worked. Here's hoping it bears fruit.” He lifted a cup as if in a toast, then said, “I'm being even ruder than normal. I've brought a pot of java. Would you like some?”
“Please.”
Inigo patted the couch next to him and poured me a cup, offering to spike it with brandy, like his, but I declined. As I settled down next to him, taking care to tuck my two dirty books under my skirt, I considered and rejected the notion of telling him what I'd seen in le Boudoir the night before. Mostly I didn't want him to know what a snoop and voyeur I was. And how could I tell him that it looked as if Elic might have switched genders, something a crazy old handyman had told me certain demons did in order to achieve a “transfert de sperme” between a human couple?
Instead, I inanely complimented the coffee, telling him it was the best I'd had since leaving the States. I asked him if he was from New York, because he sounded as if he was.
He said, “Not originally, but I love New York, and I have a house there. Well, we share it, but—”
“We?”
“I live here with some friends—in addition to the Archers, of course, and le seigneur and his son. Elic and Lili travel sometimes, but rarely to New York, so I think of the house as mine. We have another house in Paris, and that's where they usually go when they want to trade the country for the city.”
“Paris is my favorite city in the world,” I said. “I'd give anything to live there.” I told him I knew who Elic was, but I wasn't sure about Lili.
“Long dark hair, very exotic looking. She and Elic are devoted to each other.”
I wasn't sure how to respond to that.
Inigo said, “You're wondering why you've seen them with other people. It's because Elic can't . . . Well, it's complicated, but they can't make love to each other.”
I didn't question that, not wanting to display my naïveté, but I must have looked puzzled, because he said, “When I say, ‘make love,’ I'm talking about actual, you know . . . intercourse. They can do other things. Or rather, he can do things to her, but it doesn't work the other way. I'm saying too much. You're confused, and I can't . . . Archer's always telling me to keep my big . . .” He sighed and shook his head. “Sorry. I get a little too talkative sometimes.”
I've wondered ever since why a man who wasn't impotent should be unable to have sex with just one specific woman. “Must they sleep with other people?” I asked. “Can't they just . . . do without?”
Inigo smiled and shook his head. “I'm afraid that wouldn't be possible.”
I was about to question that when, in a conversational backtrack, he told me that although he kept a house in New York and sounded American, he wasn't. He said people often speculated on his origins, and that he was frequently accused of having gypsy blood, for some reason, but that he was actually born in Santorini. I said I knew all about Santorini. It was the Greek island cluster that Kit Archer had identified in his novel as being the real Atlantis. Inigo told me he'd helped Kit with his research.
Inigo said he'd been born Inignacios, which had been Latinized to Ignatius when he lived in Rome, and then to Inigo when he made his home among the Basques on the border of France and Spain. I asked where his house in New York was, and he said, “Greenwich Village—the East Village.”
“Oh, my word,” I said. “That's where I know you from. I saw you once. It was just in passing, but I know it was you. You were leaving Bertha Chalmers's brownstone just as I was walking up the front steps. You tipped your hat and smiled as you held the door open for me.” That smile had made me weak in the knees (you had to see it to understand) but of course I didn't tell him that.
“You know Bertha?”
“I attend her literary salons. That's where I met Kit. How do you know her?”
“She spent a week or so here a while back when she was traveling through Europe. Ah, Bertha. She had it all—wit, beauty . . .” He looked off with this dreamily carnal smile, shaking his head a little, as if she still held him in her sexual thrall.
“When was this?” I asked. “That she stayed here?” Bertha Chalmers had to be eighty if she was a day.
“Oh. Um . . .” He lifted his cup, took a sip, shrugged. “It was some time ago. We've remained friends.”
“Yes, but . . . I mean, she's—”
“Did you like the books?” he asked, nodding toward the lump under my skirt.
I've never been much of a blusher, but I could feel my cheeks growing warm as I took the books out from under my skirt.
“You know, you really don't have to hide that kind of thing around here.” Pointing to My Secret Life, he said, “What do you think of that one?”
“Not much. I was told it would help me to understand the sexual inclinations of men, but . . .”
“Of men who ought to be locked up, maybe. Who told you that?”
“Lord Hickley.”
“Of course. They're cut from the same mold, he and old Walt. How do you know Hickley, anyway?”
“He's asked me to marry him.”
Inigo winced, no doubt recalling his revelation about Hickley's mistress.
“I'm not going to,” I said.
He turned that smile on. “Oh, I do love brainy women.”
Slumping down, I said, “I'm going to end up a brainy old maid. I'm beginning to wonder if I wouldn't have been better off being dumb and beautiful.”
“But you are beautiful.”
I shook my head. “If I had a figure, perhaps, and paler skin, thicker hair . . .”
“The current vogue is for big, soft, pigeon-breasted females, but it won't last. It never does.” He launched into an amusing but surprisingly learned discourse on the various trends in female beauty in different eras and cultures. It was the first time I'd been introduced to that concept.
I said, “That's all very fascinating, but unfortunately for me, I'm living in the Western world at the turn of the twentieth century, and every man I meet thinks I'm skinny and plain.”
Moving a little closer to me, Inigo said, “I think you're beautiful.”
“You just feel sorry for me.”
“If I felt sorry for you, would I be dying to kiss you?”
“You don't want to kiss me.”
About a second later, I was in his arms, getting the kiss to end all kisses. His mouth was so amazingly warm, and he really knew what he was doing with his lips and tongue (just a little tongue, a soft lick along the inner part of my upper lip, not enough to scare me, just enough to stop my heart). I don't know how long it went on, but before it was over, I heard a pounding in my ears, and I swear to God the room was spinning. I know I ended up lying on the couch with him half on top of me and no recollection as to how we ended up that way.
“Can I touch you?” he asked, a little breathlessly.
“Where?”
That melting smile. “It would take less time to list the places I don't want to touch you.”
I returned the smile. “Where don't you want to touch me?”
“Nowhere.”
I chuckled, biting my lip. Through my sensible skirt and petticoat, I could feel his erection pressing against my thigh. It felt like an oak branch. This was all happening so fast, and I wasn't at all sure I was ready for it.
“I've been thinking about making love to you ever since I first saw you,” he murmured, moving against me in a frankly sexual way as he gathered up my skirt. “In my mind, I've had you standing, sitting, from behind, bent over the—”
“I'm a virgin.”
He stopped moving. “Hmm.”
“You're disappointed.”
“No.” He braced himself on his elbows to look at me. “Yes.”
“Because what you'd hoped would be a nice, quick, friendly fuck”—the first time I ever used that word— “has suddenly gotten all complicated and—”
“I like sex when it's complicated,” he said. “I like it when it's simple. I like it when it's sweet, I li
ke it when it's dirty, I like it fast, I like it slow . . . What I don't like is when the woman I'm making love to weeps with pain, and if your first time was with me . . .” He shook his head.
“Isn't it always painful?”
He flipped open his trouser buttons and withdrew a good eleven or twelve inches of thick, hard cock.
I stared at it. My sexual inexperience notwithstanding, I knew I was in the presence of something exquisitely abnormal. Looking back, even the veins snaking beneath the surface of the shiny, taut skin were unusually fat. The head itself was like a peach, but with a damp little slit at the top. I shrank back from it even as I ached to touch it.
Sitting up to re-button his trousers, he said, “I haven't taken a virginity in . . . Well, let's just say you wouldn't believe how long it's been. I gravitate toward experienced women. I'm less likely to hurt them, and they're generally comfortable enough with the situation to let me know how they're feeling, so I can . . . slow down, or . . .”
I sat up, too, tidying my hair and blouse. “It's just as well. I mean, I didn't really want to. I hardly know you. And I can't think it would have been very good for you. I mean, I know nothing—less than nothing. I didn't realize how uninformed I was before I came here, but now . . . I wouldn't know where to begin.”
“You don't have to remain uninformed if you don't want to,” he said. “There's more to making love than just . . . opening your legs for a man. There are things I can show you, teach you . . .”
“Like sex school?” I stood up, smoothing my rumpled skirt. “That isn't how people are supposed to learn these things.”
Rising off the couch, he said, “There is no right or wrong way to learn these things, Emily. Why not let me—”
“No. Really.” I backed away as he reached out to me. “I feel self-conscious enough already.”
“There's no shame in innocence. But if you do want to learn—”
“I'm sorry, Inigo,” I said as I crossed to the door. “I know you're just trying to help, but I really don't think—” I gasped as I nearly collided with a dark gray cat that was heading into the library as I was heading out of it.
The cat arched its back and hissed at me.
“Relax, Darius,” Inigo told it. “She's not going to touch you.”
The cat darted into the library and onto a leather club chair facing the couch.
“I'll be leaving as soon as the rain stops,” I told Inigo, “so I'll say good-bye now.”
I left and returned to my room, where I sat on the edge of the bed and tried not to cry. I'd never felt so confused and unsure of myself. My gaze lit on my ruined black picture hat, which I'd propped on a bedpost to dry. In my mind, I saw Hickley aping me for the amusement of his friends and mistress—the ridiculous, waterlogged hat, the desolate pout and big, pitiful eyes.
The tiresome, gullible American prig: That was my role in this little drama, the one Hickley had cast me in, and which I'd played to perfection. Of course, I was just a minor secondary character in his world, a stereotype with no need for a character arc. I had arrived on the scene ignorant and overwhelmed, and I would leave the same way. So it had been decreed by Lord Hickley.
But as I well knew from my fiction writing, characters sometimes developed a will of their own, taking the story in a direction its author had never intended. I said, “Go to hell, Randy Randy.” And then I got up and went back downstairs, hoping Inigo was still in the library.
He was. He looked up from his magazine when I came to stand in the doorway, and smiled.
I said, “I, um, I was thinking perhaps I was a bit hasty . . .”
Inigo stood up. So did another man I hadn't seen, because he'd been sitting in the club chair, the one the cat had jumped onto. He was even darker than Inigo, with a hint of a beard.
“Miss Emily Townsend,” Inigo said. “May I present my friend, Darius.”
“I'm pleased to meet you.” I went to shake hands with him, but he bowed instead. I would have thought there was something wrong with his right hand, but he was holding a book with it.
“My pleasure, Miss Townsend.” His voice was very deep, with a vague accent I couldn't quite place.
I said, “Forgive me, but isn't the cat called Darius, too?”
“He is,” Darius said. “I can't decide whether it is he or I who should take offense.”
Inigo took my hand, chafing it slightly in a reassuring way. Gesturing toward the door, he said, “Why don't we take a walk?”
It was a short walk that ended in his suite of rooms in the southwest tower. The Arts and Crafts style furnishings were remarkably modern even by today's standards, and imparted a warm and masculine look to the apartment. The walls were hung with original artwork by the likes of Aubrey Beardsley, Gustav Klimt, and a who's who of Pre-Raphaelites and impressionists.
Inigo offered me some cognac, and when I said yes, not even caring that it wasn't yet noon, he ushered me into his bedroom, where the liquor cabinet was. He poured us each a generous serving in delicate lead crystal snifters that rang when we touched them together.
I tossed mine back, wanting to be as relaxed as possible for whatever lay in store, but when he asked if he could take my clothes off, I felt a surge of panic. He must have seen it on my face, because he smiled and said, “Do you mind if I take mine off?”
He stripped down very efficiently, then lifted his snifter and sipped it casually, as if he weren't standing there stark naked. I tried not to stare.
“You can look,” he said. “That's more or less the point.”
I did look. His penis in its flaccid state was a weighty eight or nine inches long. I wanted to touch it, but I didn't have the nerve, so I was grateful when Inigo took my free hand and cupped it lightly around the shaft. I was surprised by how hot it felt, and how soft—although it didn't stay that way for long. It began to grow heavier in my hand, and longer and thicker as well. I was gripping that snifter so hard, it's a wonder I didn't snap the stem.
I asked him the most inane questions (including, I admit, whether it hurt when he got hard), all of which he answered graciously and with preternatural patience. He showed me how men liked to be touched, and explained about the different kinds of strokes and caresses. It excited me enormously when I felt the tension increase in his body and heard his voice become huskier, and realized how aroused he was becoming. That his erection could rise as high as it did, given its weight, struck me as a miracle of hydraulic engineering. He told me the little drop of clear fluid oozing out of the tip was preejaculate, and that it was meant to ease the passage of the penis into the vagina, but that he usually needed an additional lubricant, like oil.
Eventually he got me on the bed with him and finessed me out of my blouse, skirt, and corset, although I was still more than covered by the absurd array of undergarments we wore back then. Having my breasts caressed was incredible, especially when he unbuttoned my chemise and touched my bare flesh. The things he did to my nipples, first with his hands and then his mouth, stole the breath from my lungs.
When he reached under my petticoats and encountered my drawers, he stripped them off, grumbling that they were pointless for women, and that he “went into mourning when they started to catch on.”
I said, “Women have been wearing them for the better part of a century,” but then he started fondling me, and I lost my train of thought. I came hard, and then he got on top of me with my petticoats pushed up and thrust against me, that huge cock sliding up and down my slit until we were both thrashing and moaning and clutching at each other. He hunched over and let out a long, shuddery groan. I felt hot fluid shoot onto my stomach in a series of pulses, and it propelled me into another spectacular climax.
After that, I let him completely undress me so that we could take a bath together. He read aloud to me from The Autobiography of a Flea, then knelt in the water and let me pull him off so that I could see him ejaculate, because I was so curious about the discharge of semen. I was surprised at how much there was, an
d how far it shot across the tub. It wasn't as creamy as Elic's, though—more like ordinary semen.
We took our time washing each other with a soapy sea sponge. Inigo shampooed my hair, but wouldn't let me return the favor, saying he didn't like to have his scalp touched. I remember that, because it was so unusual for him to ask not to be touched somewhere. Inigo loved being stroked and rubbed and licked and kissed and fucked and stroked some more. I mean, everybody loves it, of course, but Inigo lived for it. Physical pleasure was everything to him. Once he'd broken the ice with me, he was like a cat, always rubbing up against me, begging to be petted. He was horny pretty much twenty-four hours a day. Unlike Elic, he did need some downtime between orgasms, but not much.
He talked me into moving into his apartment for the remainder of my stay (“It's not as if anyone here will look askance”), and by the next morning, I was conversant in the joys of oral lovemaking, both giving and receiving, in every imaginable position.
The next day, Friday, we awoke to a bright, clear, beautiful summer morning. I could have driven back to Lyon, but Inigo insisted I stay until Sunday (the day I'd told Biddie would be the latest I would return) in order to “flesh out” my instruction in the various forms of sexual congress.
We spent most of that day in the bathhouse, a white marble structure that looked rather like a smaller version of our Newport summer house, albeit scoured with age. It was, after all, almost two thousand years old. Inside, it was a classical bathhouse except for the back wall, which was of moss-draped rock with a low opening that led into the “grotte cachée.” Beneath a large skylight was a sunken pool about fifteen feet square and three or four feet deep, rimmed with an underwater marble bench. The water for this pool, which was exceptionally temperate and soothing, came from a stream gurgling out of the cave.
Bound in Moonlight Page 6
