The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker

by Suzanne Portnoy

  I got a little drunk and was feeling loose and horny. I looked over at Aidan’s friend and said, ‘So, what do you do, Nigel?’

  ‘I’m resting at the moment.’

  ‘Resting?’

  ‘Not working. I decided to take a rest for a while.’

  He didn’t elaborate and didn’t seem particularly interested in carrying on the conversation either, so I waited until he went to the toilet before getting the goods.

  ‘How can a man who doesn’t look forty afford to "rest" for a living, Aidan?’

  Aidan told me Nigel had once managed a famous band and, when things turned sour, sued them in a dispute over management fees and walked away with £10 million. Suddenly, the heat turned up on Nigel. When I’d met my husband, he was on the dole. Although he was now a successful marketing executive, he didn’t have £10 million in the bank. I’d never been out with a rich man in my life.

  ‘He did all right,’ Aidan continued. ‘Then he skipped the country to avoid paying tax – left his wife and kids for a year and went travelling. He said one day he looked up at the departures board and realised there was no place else he wanted to see. So he got on a plane and came home.’

  ‘And now he’s at Groucho’s, the shit,’ I said.

  Although he barely said a word, I found Nigel more and more intriguing with each glass of Meursault I drank over dinner. I hated myself for wondering if it was only because he was the richest man I’d ever met. I’d never even considered having an affair since meeting David, but, as I looked at Nigel across the table, I began imagining all the things we could do together with so much cash: have a shopping spree at Harvey Nichols, spend a weekend in Paris at the George V, buy a pied-à-terre in New York.

  So illusive, so unwilling to give away anything about himself, Nigel sparked fantasies he might be hiding more than just a £10-million stash. Like a big cock. He paid no more attention to me than to anyone else at the table. But that didn’t stop me from wondering if behind that silent exterior lay someone who’d make me scream in bed. It was the first time in years I’d thought about another man or found another man desirable. That night, Nigel, or my fantasy of Nigel, made me feel something I had not felt in nearly a decade: arousal.

  When I got home, it was three a.m. But, instead of going to bed, I turned on the computer.

  I typed ‘free porn’ into the MSN search engine, hoping a preview clip on some dodgy Triple-X website would pop up – pictures of big black cocks, gang bangs, deep-throat blowjobs or, my personal favourite, glory holes. After five minutes of visuals, my fingers stroking my clit, I’d be off to bed and able to sleep. The computer had replaced my sex life ever since I’d stopped fucking my husband three years earlier; self-induced orgasms had become my sleeping pill.

  Secretly, in the middle of the night, I used to lie in bed masturbating, silently and slowly replaying fantasy scenes I’d seen on the web. I’d always found porn kind of sexy – equal parts sleazy and sexy, forbidden and mundane. When sex between David and I began to wane, I’d told him that if he wanted to see me really turned on, all he had to do was find some hardcore pornography.

  ‘That’s really sick,’ he said, and that was the end of that option.

  Microsoft, the bland corporate entity that it is, isn’t much more adventurous. On the night of 14 May, when I typed the words ‘free porn’, what came up at the top of the list was a stylish erotic online magazine called Nerve. It wasn’t what I was looking for: no glory holes, no big black cocks – indeed, no porn. It was just poetry and other people’s fictional stories, plus a few arty black-and-white photographs, mainly of attractive women with nice boobs – lovely to look at, but not my thing at all, at least not since the age of twenty-two, when I’d finished groping my way through a bi phase.

  I trawled the site, hoping to find at least one photo of a cute guy with a hard-on. Instead I found a personals section. I hadn’t known such a thing existed online and decided to have a look, curious to see what kind of people posted themselves on the web.

  The personals were laid out like a questionnaire. Each person had to answer the same ten questions. ‘What’s the sexiest scene in the movies?’ was one. ‘Name some music that really turns you on’ was another. The questions were more insipid than erotic, but they got me thinking it might be fun to have a pen pal, just like I’d had when I was ten years old. So I posted a personal. I typed ‘Friendship L’Amour’ in the heading, oblivious in my late-night stupor to the English-French disconnect – friendship and love? – and counting on the sexless word ‘friendship’ to keep away the pervs. Before uploading my personal I had to enter a postcode. There were options only for people living in the States, however, so I entered random numbers with no idea where they would place me on the map. Location was irrelevant; I was only looking for a pen pal, not to meet someone, and the fact that all the men on Nerve lived in the US seemed a bonus. It made everything feel safe and free of complications.

  Aside from my husband, who worked long hours and rarely spoke about anything outside of work, I had no close male friends. I hadn’t had a proper two-way conversation with a man since getting married nine years earlier. I naïvely thought there might be a man out there in a similar situation who also wanted an email buddy. I uploaded my personal, forgot about big black cocks and glory holes, and went to sleep.

  3. MY LIBERATOR

  The day after I posted my personal on Nerve, I had to do some errands and couldn’t wait to get home so I could check my inbox. There were five messages. It was gratifying knowing even one person wanted to write to me, particularly as I’d stressed friendship, not a relationship. I was as excited as I’d been at the age of ten, when I’d received my first newsletter after joining the Jackson 5 Fan Club.

  One guy said he was a fifty-seven-year-old biker who ran a Harley shop in Los Angeles. Another claimed to be an investment banker in Chicago. A third told me he was a graphic designer from Seattle. A fourth was a New York City lawyer. I never did find out what the fifth guy did; he just sent a picture of his big cock – something I wished I’d seen the night before – and asked what I was into. I looked at the cock shot for a minute, then hit Delete.

  Soon enough, as my pen pals realised I’d truly joined Nerve to chat, not have cybersex, the four dropped down to one. His name was Frank, the lawyer. He had an office in Times Square and a wife he’d been married to for twenty years. Like me, he had two kids about the age of my own and wasn’t looking for a relationship.

  We had many things in common. Frank lived in a neighbourhood not far from where my grandmother had lived – in Queens, a borough across the East River from Manhattan full of anonymous high-rise apartment blocks. Frank’s wife had been brought up in a small blue-collar town on Long Island just five miles from where I lived until moving to England at thirteen. At one point, our fathers even worked for the same company.

  I imagined a pudgy middle-aged man, with thinning grey hair. I pictured him sitting in a sack suit, in a large office, behind a large walnut desk, the chaos of Times Square erupting just outside his window. Like me, Frank had not posted a photo on his profile, and I didn’t care. I wasn’t planning on meeting him, so it didn’t matter what he looked like. We were just two people getting to know one another through words.

  Frank seemed to want to know everything about me and was interested in hearing what I had to say. Day after day I would come home from work and go straight to the computer to check my inbox. I found myself looking forward to going home. My husband had never been particularly curious about my background, so I suppose it was natural I enjoyed sharing my life story with someone who was genuinely interested.

  I told Frank about a dream I had one night that puzzled me. Just when I thought my sexual feelings had ceased to exist, I dreamt about working as a bank teller in an old-fashioned bank where everyone sat behind protective glass. In the dream, a cute younger man in his early twenties worked next to me. We were attracted to each other but were separated by the glass. We couldn�
��t kiss in the bank, so we ran outside and found ourselves in a field. We kissed passionately for a very long time. I remember being on the verge of waking and not wanting the dream to end, but then waking and thinking how real the dream had felt. I was convinced my mouth and tongue had moved while I slept.

  The dream puzzled me because it reminded me of similar kissing dreams I experienced first as a teenager and that never really went away. I told Frank I attributed it to a lifelong desire to relive the nourishing promise of a passionate first kiss with an attractive stranger. After I stopped sleeping with my husband, I told Frank, I’d think about those old dreams and wonder if I would ever feel such passion again.

  ‘I really like being your pen pal,’ he wrote one day. ‘I wonder what you look like, smell like, sound like.’

  I wondered what he looked like and smelt like and sounded like, too. But, because I still did not know what he looked like, I was free to use my imagination. I did not picture the image of a full-arm tattoo, however – the work-in-progress Frank admitted to in an email one day. ‘Hurt like a bitch,’ he admitted. ‘But I’m not averse to a little pain.’

  His comment barely registered, but the idea of a full-arm tattoo did. I’m not keen on tattoos, but the way Frank described his quest – seeking out an internationally recognised tattoo artist, Vyvyn Lazonga; planning the design, a dragon wrapped around his arm; researching the origins and mythology of the art – impressed me. Certainly it was not the standard girlfriend’s-name-in-a-heart motif. My perception of Frank changed dramatically. Now I really wanted to know what he looked like.

  ‘I think of you often. You’re becoming a narcotic to me,’ he wrote a month into our correspondence. ‘But it’s frustrating that I only know parts of you.’

  I felt the same way.

  The next day in my inbox was a brief note from Frank. ‘Here’s a picture. I hope you can open it.’

  My heart quickened as I double-clicked on the attachment. Until that moment I had not understood the power of the internet, the way it creates a false intimacy. Suddenly there was a real person at the other end of the email.

  I watched his picture download little by little on my slow dial-up connection. The image staring back at me showed a slim attractive man with short dark hair, thin lips and an intense gaze. He had sad eyes, but, knowing Frank’s wasn’t the happiest marriage, I wondered if I were reading too much into the visuals. He was not as handsome as my husband, but I saw similarities in their faces and bodies. Both had a runner’s physique, dark hair, high cheekbones. Same type, but a different man altogether. Now I really was hooked. But first I needed to know what my fantasy man sounded like.

  A man’s voice has always been a powerful aphrodisiac for me. Once, while at university, I broke up with the best-looking guy on campus simply because I couldn’t stand listening to the sound of his voice. Ironically, we met in a voice-and-diction class – we were both communications majors – when he sat next to me on the first day. What a hunk! I thought – until he turned to me before class began and asked in a whiny high-pitched voice made worse by a thick Brooklyn accent, ‘Do you think they can help me change my voice?’

  ‘Well, they don’t work miracles,’ I replied dryly.

  He forgave my lack of diplomacy. We had sex in my dorm room that afternoon after class. I had been wearing a pair of leopard-print Spandex spray-on pants, a ripped purple T-shirt and pink pointy 1960s flats. He had on an Italian-cut suit, tassled loafers and a pale-blue button-down Brooks Brothers shirt. We were the style king and queen of the class, albeit on opposite ends of the spectrum, and recognised in each other our mutual vanity. I found out he not only looked good, he also had a pretty big cock and knew what to do with it. Unfortunately, I never got over the voice and cut things off within three months. Lesson learnt: if they keep their mouths shut and their pants down, they’re fine. Since then, I’ve made a point of never dating a man whose voice I don’t like.

  ‘I want to hear your voice,’ I wrote to Frank. ‘Send me your number. Please.’

  ‘Not a good idea, Suzanne. We’re both married. Let’s keep things the way they are.’

  I continued to ask for his number and, after eight weeks of emailing each other, Frank finally relented. The daily two-page emails turned into one- or two-hour phone calls. I’d come home from work, start to prepare dinner and ring Frank. With the time difference, it would be his lunch hour.

  He had a strong New York accent, more Jimmy Stewart nasal than Al Pacino grunt. I had had a different voice in mind – deeper, smoother, more seductive, like an American DJ or the voiceovers for American movie trailers. Still, it worked for me and, two weeks after our first phone call, Frank gave me his home number. I could call any time over the next month, he said, because his wife and kids would be in Texas visiting her parents.

  ‘Wow, a whole month on your own,’ I said. ‘Want company?’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  I assured him I was, and in my head began concocting a scheme to get out of town. Then I did something I had not done in ten years: I lied to David. I told him I had to go to New York to visit Martha, who had just had a baby. The fact that I had not spoken to my old college friend in three years didn’t strike him as unusual, nor did my desire to see Martha’s new baby, even though several friends in London had popped out offspring in recent years that somehow I’d never managed to see. Whether a testament to his trust in me or proof of how little he really understood me, David bought my lie. And why wouldn’t he? I had never lied before, except to defend the occasional hideous haircut or to shave a few pounds off the price of some Sergio Rossi shoes I’d bought.

  Once I booked the flight, I was like a cat in heat. I’d hang up after a conversation with Frank and find my knickers dripping wet. I began to go back to the office after putting the kids to bed, having told David I had work to do – more lies tarnishing my wifely record – and ring Frank at his office and have phone sex. Frank would lock his office door and we’d masturbate together, three thousand miles apart.

  As the departure date grew closer, I ached with desire, truly ached – my pussy throbbed. It was physically painful. I thought only of being filled by him.

  I trimmed my hair from a mid-shoulder cut to a short, layered bob. I went to Selfridges and Agent Provocateur and Fuk.com and picked up tasty outfits, one size too small as an incentive. And I went on a starvation diet, eating just two meals a day, skipping the highest calories of dinnertime. My nutrition was mental, anyway – I lived on sexual fantasies. In the evening I’d jump on my treadmill and run for forty-five minutes, to ensure my elevated metabolism burnt extra calories while I slept. I wanted to lose a stone before I got to New York in four weeks. I wanted Frank to think I was hot and want to fuck me as soon as he saw me.

  Almost three months to the day we began our correspondence, and hundreds of calls and emails later, I was hailing a taxi at Kennedy Airport, heading for the W Hotel in Times Square. It was central, and on the Net it looked hip and romantic. The room was about as big as the king-sized bed in it, with perhaps two feet free on either side. That was fine with me. I took a shower, washed my hair, lotioned and potioned all over, then put on my new pink Frank T-shirt vest, a denim skirt and blue sandals.

  ‘What kind of clothes turn you on?’ Frank had asked before I left London to meet him for the first time. Most men look good in black, so I specified black jeans, a black T-shirt and cowboy boots – a Midnight Cowboy fantasy. It was a fail-safe uniform for a tall guy with a slim body, plus it reminded me of so many guys I’d seen in the clubs when I was in my twenties. It seemed fitting, somehow, in this newly sexual life of mine, to dress this man like the ones I’d undressed in my earlier sexual days. Even though I hoped he’d be taking off his clothes as soon as he saw me, I didn’t want to risk Frank showing up in naff clothes, such as a checked shirt or cheap jeans or his work suit. I had already constructed the fantasy in my head of what would happen, and I wanted to make sure that, near as damn it, it would turn out
that way.

  At six p.m., two hours after my arrival, I heard a knock. I opened the door to a man wearing black jeans, a black T-shirt and cowboy boots. Frank did not look like his photo or the picture that had developed in my mind. He was not in the same league as my husband, but then not many men are. He had heavy eyelids and skin so pale it suggested a person who spent far too long in front of a PC. He was actually somewhat geeky looking, but then Frank was a geek; he’d been a maths major in college and one of his hobbies was playing computer chess, a fact I suddenly remembered as I stared at the man at the door. There was a brief moment when I said to myself, ‘You can say no.’ But then I thought, You’ve come three thousand miles to see this guy, Suzanne – don’t turn him away.

  He smiled at me awkwardly and said, ‘Hello, Suzanne.’

  For once in your life, I thought, look beyond the surface.

  Frank came into the room and we hugged awkwardly. Then I moved my lips towards his. Our tongues met. His breath was warm, his mouth soft and wet. He pulled back, but I leant into him. I wanted a second taste. I had never had a kiss like that before, one that made me feel lightheaded. I actually felt dizzy. Pheromones? Endorphins? It was a chemical reaction, pure animal attraction.

  Instinctively, we both moved to the bed and continued kissing. Frank slipped his hand underneath my skirt and felt between my legs, where it was already moist. We didn’t speak at all.

  I pulled my top over my head.

  ‘Stop. Slow down,’ said Frank. ‘Let’s take it slow. I want to savour every moment.’

  Slowly he removed the left strap off my shoulder, then the right, until just my breasts were holding up my bra. His hands lingered on my arm for a moment before reaching behind to undo the clasp. Every gesture, every moment had voyeuristic implications for Frank. He was his own cameraman, as if recording the actions in his head for playback at a later date.