Eighty Days Blue

by Vina Jackson

  Nevertheless, Dominik was unable to keep their destination a secret for long once they arrived at the airport. La Guardia was a teeming mass of people dashing in all directions, as the holiday season was in full swing. You would have thought most folk would, by Christmas Day, already be at their destination, instead of wandering around terminals like headless chickens, but this wasn’t the case. Dominik and Summer, opportunistic leisure travellers with no family reunion in prospect, could sense a feeling of panic and desperation in most of their fellow travellers, darting looks at the display boards and grimacing every time an announcement over the tannoy system warned of a delay somewhere on the continent due to bad weather or some other reason.

  She would have preferred not knowing where he was taking her, a magical mystery tour, but once they checked in their luggage, there was no escaping the information: their flight (and hopefully their luggage too) was going to New Orleans.

  It was a city she had read much about in books and almost felt she knew from the myriad movies in which it had been enshrined, a bit like New York. When she’d first landed in New York, she had discovered that Manhattan and the other boroughs were much more than the sum of their parts, and that between the image and the reality there was a subtle element missing: life and its sounds, smells and colours. And people. She expected New Orleans would prove to be a similar revelation.

  Dominik had visited the Crescent City on many previous occasions, but it had been before the destruction Hurricane Katrina had unleashed on New Orleans and he held bittersweet memories of the place. As the cab crawled from intersection to intersection in the French Quarter, attempting to reach their boutique hotel in the pouring rain, the view outside the drawn windows of the vehicle appeared familiar, the lights, the wrought-iron balconies, the terraces hanging with magnolia flowers, the heady blend of music and laughter in the air.

  It was only later when they had showered and changed and gone out to enjoy their first meal of the trip that small differences became apparent. Less people, like a film set cutting down on crowd extras, notices on many of the bar and restaurant windows and doors for new personnel, oyster chuckers, domestic help.

  ‘It just doesn’t feel like America at all,’ Summer remarked, her eyes darting in every direction, trying to find her bearings.

  ‘I know,’ Dominik said. ‘It’s quite unique.’

  ‘I never got the opportunity to visit Europe much – just a long weekend in Paris – but it’s not quite European either, is it?’ she queried.

  She had slipped into a thin white full-length dress with capped sleeves, held in at the waist by a narrow red belt worn with low-heeled sandals. The rain had ceased, and the atmosphere felt close, a touch claustrophobic, pregnant with future storms.

  ‘Just a blend of diverse influences,’ Dominik confirmed. ‘French, Spanish, Creole, colonial English. Many of the early settlers here were Acadians, all the way from Canada, refugees from religious intolerance. It’s a curious historical melting pot.’

  ‘I like it already,’ Summer remarked.

  ‘Pity the weather is so dull today. Not the perfect introduction to the city.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘According to the forecast, we should avoid further rain for the next handful of days,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’ Dominik not having informed her of their destination, Summer was worried she hadn’t brought a proper set of clothes.

  ‘Remember the Oyster Bar under Grand Central?’ he asked her, with a gentle smile spreading across his lips.

  ‘Of course,’ Summer said. ‘You know how much I love oysters.’

  ‘This is the right place for them. And crawfish. Shrimp. Gumbo. We’ll have an ongoing feast.’

  There was a lengthy queue outside the Acme Oyster House on the corner of Iberville and Bourbon, and both of them had skipped breakfast back in New York and turned down the airline food, so spurred on by their appetite, they moved ten minutes down the main road and found a window table at Desire, the oyster bar of the posh Sonesta Hotel.

  The elderly waitress brought them their hot bread and butter while they ordered.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Dominik said, ‘they serve a sauce that is a blend of ketchup and horseradish with the raw oysters. Initially, I was wary of the prospective culinary delights of tomato ketchup, but the combination works wonders. If you want it even stronger, you can add a further dollop of horseradish. It’s fierce but blends beautifully with the taste and consistency of the oyster meat. I also indulge in a squeeze of lemon and a sprinkle of pepper.’ He demonstrated a moment later when the waitress brought a large platter over to their table. He brought the first enormous oyster to his mouth and swallowed it one gulp.

  Having watched him closely, Summer followed his example.

  Soon the platter was a thing of the past, a battlefield of empty shells dotted against a background of crushed ice.

  She’d also added a few drops of powerful Tabasco to her final trio of oysters and her throat felt on fire as she greedily downed her glass of iced water to sooth the burn.

  She looked up at Dominik, saw him wiping the corner of his mouth with his napkin and devouring her with his eyes. She couldn’t help suppressing a smile of her own.

  ‘If I didn’t know better, the way you look at me makes me think you want to eat me too, with the oysters just an hors d’oeuvre. I know they’re supposed to be an aphrodisiac, but, remember, I’m already in your bed – there’s no longer any need to lure me there,’ Summer said in jest.

  ‘And don’t I know that,’ Dominik said.

  The following days were taken up by the obligatory tourist activities: taking the tram up to the Garden District and a visit to Audubon Park, a couple of riverboat cruises down the Mississippi to survey the swamps and the reluctant-to-show-themselves alligators, the pilgrimage to countless cemeteries and the scattered voodoo museums, coffee and beignets at the open-all-hours Café du Monde on Jackson Square in the middle of the night after leisurely hours of lovemaking in their hotel room, their tired limbs and souls in bad need of recharging, hunting down trinkets in the French Market and more food, glorious food, and aimless walks up and down Bourbon Street listening to the duelling sounds of music rushing from open bar to open bar, a crazy patchwork of jazz, rock, folk, zydeco, soul and every variation of melody.

  On the corner of Royal, the shoe-shine kids tap-danced to their hearts’ content, and at the intersection of Magazine and Toulouse, a blind musician played the accordion while a string-like hippie girl with a gallery of tattoos down both her arms accompanied him on the violin. She was not a patch on Summer, in talent or looks, but Summer insisted on leaving her an exaggerated tip, clearing Dominik of all the useless change in his pockets out of solidarity.

  Dominik was visibly restless. He’d been here and done all this before. He could sense his unease growing, as could Summer.

  There was a whole day to go before New Year’s Eve. Dominik had managed to obtain a much-sought-after booking at Tujague’s in the first-floor dining room with access to the balcony, a stone’s throw from Jackson Square and the Jax Brewery, where the traditional glittering ball would rise all the way from street level to the roof at the stroke of midnight to bring in the new year. It was one of the hottest tickets in town, which the restaurant usually restricted to local regulars and Rotary Club eminences.

  Summer walked out of the bathroom, where she had taken a shower, shrouded in a big, white fluffy towel that barely reached the top of her thighs and revealed a teasing glimpse of her cunt. Sitting reading in bed, Dominik’s eyes moved up from his page and fixed on her. Summer looked down and realised how short the towel was. She made an effort to stretch the material but only managed to pull the thick white veil of the towel down and her breasts slipped out. Dominik smiled.

  ‘Shy?’ he remarked.

  ‘A bit late for that, surely,’ she said.

  He kept on staring at her, deep in thought, inscrutably pensive.

  Summer peered out
of the window to check on the weather. The sky was grey, but she knew it would be warm enough to walk around with short sleeves, at least until evening.

  ‘What do you want me to wear today?’ she asked him.

  His eyes lit up with undisguised mischief. ‘Nothing.’

  Summer dropped the towel altogether, allowing it to fall to the floor. ‘Like this?’

  ‘Perfect,’ Dominik said. He pulled the bed covers from his body, revealing his already semi-hard cock, and began stroking himself.

  Summer initiated a movement to approach the bed.

  ‘No!’

  ‘You don’t want me to help,’ she suggested.

  ‘No. Just stand there. As you are.’

  He widened the angle between his legs and kept on caressing his extended penis, the thick trunk gripped in his palm, a stray thumb gliding simultaneously across his purple glans. His balls appeared to grow in size as he played with himself, his eyes locked on her nudity. Summer recalled that first evening at his London house, how he had asked her to masturbate. She shivered.

  His breath quickly grew halting.

  Summer dropped a hand and brought it to her lower lips, but again he ordered her to remain still. He didn’t want her to pleasure herself. She must watch him. In silence.

  There was a moment, frozen in time, when the light from the window slat landed on the tip of his straining cock, like a line of fire bisecting the mushroom-shaped extremity, his balls full to bursting, and then the moment passed and Dominik came.

  He let out a deep sigh.

  ‘Come,’ he said, nodding to Summer.

  She unfroze.

  ‘Lick me clean,’ he said.

  He tasted of oysters and horseradish and every sin under the sun. She was desperately hungry again. Rang the toll for her waistline.

  They left the House of Blues on Decatur just before midnight. The band had been good and Summer had imagined herself on stage with them, improvising around their riffs on her violin. It had been months since she’d played anything of a non-classical nature, something improvised, variations, natural. She missed that freedom now that she was part of an orchestra.

  The crowds had spilled out across the pavement outside the venue. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Dominik in conversation with a bystander, a tall guy with a seersucker jacket and jeans full of strategically placed holes and black leather winkle-pickers. Surely he’s not buying drugs, Summer thought. That wasn’t Dominik’s style.

  The two men parted, but she couldn’t help seeing them shake hands and a few green notes passing between them.

  ‘Who was that?’ she asked as Dominik walked over to join her.

  ‘A local. I needed some information.’

  She recognised that glint in his eyes. She’d witnessed it before.

  They found a cab on Canal Street, and Dominik whispered the destination to the driver. Summer was feeling drowsy after the deceptively strong cocktails she’d sampled at the club while listening to the music. After a few blocks, she briefly closed her eyes, only to open them again and see they had crossed Bourbon Street well beyond the point they had often reached on previous evening strolls and were now entering a zone of relative darkness in comparison to the well-lit thoroughfares she had so far been accustomed to tramping through.

  The cab finally came to a halt in front of an anonymous building with a steel gate. Dominik paid the driver, and as the car began to disappear in the distance, Summer felt the weight of the silence landing on her shoulders. This was all so unlike New Orleans. There was a dimly lit buzzer to the right of the door, which Dominik pressed. The electronic mechanism of the gate clicked and he pushed the door open.

  They were now in a large courtyard, with a perimeter of smaller buildings surrounding it.

  ‘Those were the slave quarters,’ Dominik said, pointing at the outlying units. ‘Many years ago, of course.’ He took hold of Summer’s hand and led her towards the central building, which loomed out of the darkness and was visibly much larger than the others, a three-storey structure with a wooden veranda, a set of white stairs leading to the porch. Slivers of light peered through the sides of some of the downstairs and first-floor windows.

  They walked up the steps and the front door opened. A large, shaven-headed black man wearing an impeccable tuxedo simultaneously greeted them and checked them out. Having passed his scrutiny, they were ushered into the building. On a low-slung table by the stairs that led to the upper levels of the house was a tray with high-stemmed glasses. The imposing greeter poured them champagne and asked them to wait before disappearing through a side door.

  ‘What is this place?’ Summer asked, sipping her glass. It was good champagne. Dominik didn’t partake.

  ‘A strip club, actually, but a rather private one.’

  ‘A strip club?’

  ‘A very exclusive one,’ Dominik added. ‘There was a time when anything went in New Orleans, but over the years, things have become both commercialised and tamer. Strip joints on Bourbon Street used to be bottomless, but these days that’s no longer the case. They only disrobe as far as G-strings and knickers. It’s also become tawdry, exploitative. This place, I’m told, is the right thing.’

  ‘Where anything goes?’ Summer suggested, her flesh tingling with familiar desire.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I’ve attended burlesque shows before,’ Summer said, ‘and enjoyed them. I just hope it’s not too tacky,’ she added.

  ‘I’ve been told it’s not,’ Dominik said.

  A woman approached. She wore a white carnival mask, and her hair was coal-black, falling to her shoulders like a cloak of silk. Her dress clung to her body, a long-sleeved red velvet gown of vintage provenance, which only bared her neck and a strikingly thin pair of ankles over perilous platform shoes.

  ‘I’m your hostess for the evening. This way, please,’ she said, and pointed to the stairs.

  If there was one thing Dominik hated, it was vulgarity. He was hoping tonight would not prove an embarrassment.

  The tables at which the guests had been seated formed a half-circle facing an improvised stage no larger than a boxing ring. There were fifty spectators at most, and Dominik noted that, apart from Summer and him, there were only three other couples in the audience. Each table kept to itself, barely glancing at the others present.

  First, there was darkness, then a white spotlight shining like hellfire on the centre of the improvised stage, then for the space of an eye-blink total darkness again, immediately followed by the light flashing on once more and a young woman standing at the heart of the newly created sun, an apparition from nowhere.

  She was majestically tall, her head a haloed jungle of yellow-blonde Medusa-like curls, her skin like alabaster. All she wore was an impossibly thin cotton robe that was almost transparent in the fierceness of the spotlight shining on her and that highlighted the doll-like fragility of her waist and the endless avenues of her long legs. She was barefoot.

  At first, she was motionless, like a statue, while the spectators caught their breath.

  Then there was a faint buzz as the sound system was switched on, with an indistinct blanket of static sound.

  ‘My name is Luba,’ they heard the whisper. A Russian accent, a bedroom voice. The sound system surrounded them and it felt to everyone present as if the pre-recorded voice was a personal gift, for their ears only. Dominik felt Summer’s hand abandoning her glass and gripping his thigh under the tablecloth. The woman was stunning, as was the sheer theatricality of the event.

  Then the music began.

  Classical. An impressionistic cascade of soft, delicate notes that reminded Dominik of the sea, and the shimmering surface of troubled waters.

  ‘Debussy,’ Summer said quietly.

  Luba came to life. An eye blinked; a shoulder moved imperceptibly; one foot lifted off the floor; a hand shifted, fingers unfurling like flowers blooming.

  Luba danced with the grace of a trained ballerina and the calculated pr
ovocation of a whore, seemingly totally unaware of her audience, as if the art of undressing and teasing was something essentially private that she was doing just for herself, a personal journey to the heart of her pleasure.

  ‘She’s in the zone,’ Summer whispered to Dominik, both of them entranced by the performer.

  Quickly Luba slipped out of the flimsy garment she had been wearing. The fierceness of the spotlight in which she allowed herself to remain captive made her appear whiter than white, the sole touch of colour the delicate pink shade of the nipples of her firm, small breasts and the barely there demarcations of her smooth genitalia, her body pouring like milk through the tremulous melodies of the French composer. Dominik couldn’t help noting the small tattoo she displayed barely an inch from her cunt, a small blue flower, or maybe it was a miniature image of an improbable gun, the image seemed to change with every movement of her body before he could focus fully on it. Why would she sport the tracing of a gun there, etched deep into her skin, where her flesh was at its most secret? he wondered.

  He knew so little of the lives of others.

  But thirsted for it.

  What could Luba’s story be?

  Summer’s fingers grazing against the hard knot now tenting his trousers snapped him back to reality. Even she was turned on by the performance.

  The Russian dancer contorted into impossible positions with the elegance of a dove in flight, impervious to the amount of intimacy she displayed in the process with such liberal abandon, the puckered light brown circle of her arsehole, the nacreous pink of her inside depths when she was in a spread-eagled position or in athletic movement. Her face remained ever impassive, majestic in her detachment, superior.

  Dominik recognised the final chords of the Debussy piece nearing and sighed, regretful this performance could not go on for ever. Summer’s fingers lingered and he could feel the beat of her heart through the heat of her fingertips. He leaned towards her, brought his lips to her ear.

  ‘One day, maybe I’ll ask you to go on a stage and display yourself in such a wanton and beautiful way, Summer. Would you like that?’