26 Nights

by 26 Nights (Memoirs of a Contemporary Gentleman) [MF] (retail) (epub)

  “Betty was now lying on her back on the floor, with Edna crouched above her, kissing her way slowly down Betty’s body. Kissing and licking. From her breasts down over her stomach, and on down to that flaming red triangle. And on down. Betty was moaning. She bent her gorgeous legs to give herself leverage to lift her lower body toward Edna’s searching mouth …”

  At any rate, suffice it to say that Steven managed to keep the letter of the wager by … participating directly only with Edna. I have mentally replayed the scene a great many times to satisfy myself completely of that fact, and I find myself quite satisfied of the fact.

  If he had impressed me favorably in more than one way during his headlong plunge through the female population, my chessmate’s next step was a distinct step backward. It surprised me mildly that he accepted an appearance on a television talk show in the first place. I was more, rather than less, surprised, to discover that his reason had to do with the name of the host. Fern Forrester is an attractive woman, in a superficial way, but widely known, even to people like myself, who do nothing to actively pursue such knowledge, to be as shallow, self-involved and uninteresting a person as even the singularly shallow, self-involved and uninteresting business of television gossip has yet produced. Nonetheless, he proceeded with his usual efficiency and quickly achieved his purpose. Further, he reported the incident with no trace of the embarrassment I, for one, would have felt at the thought that the person I had been so intimate with in the afternoon wouldn’t recognize my name if it came up at dinner. In fact, he described their coupling with an unusual degree of detail. I offer only a brief taste:

  “Her hips began to squirm as she gazed at the reflection in front of her … ‘Look,’ she breathed. ‘I’m fucking. I’m fucking you. Ohh … look how beautiful.’

  “It was beautiful, with her sleek body in motion, her breasts quivering, her legs open to show the long stretch of her inner thighs. She watched herself as she fucked harder. I reached around her to put a hand over her breast and rubbed the hard nipple, bringing a moan from her. I slid my other hand down over stomach to her moving pussy. She inhaled sharply when I touched her little button, and then moaned again as I gently brushed my fingers across it.”

  I think that he dwelt on the particulars of this encounter in order to provoke in me feelings of jealousy. An absurd idea. If he wants to waste his energy on a woman who isn’t even fully aware of who he is, in my opinion he should feel free to do so.

  The persistence with which my employer was sticking to business continued to surprise me. Conceit and self-flattery suggested that he was genuinely interested in enjoying intimacy with me, but I refused to accept such famously unreliable counselors. Why then his ardent pursuit? This is, after all, a man who has enjoyed the favors of more women than the kings of England back to William the Conqueror, inclusive. For now I consider this to be an open question.

  My sympathies were much more excited by my employer’s next victim. When he brought me the story he concentrated on the virtue with which he had resisted the easy opportunity presented by one Ginger, a paid entertainer provided by his host at a party. He neglected to explore the propriety of opting instead for the virtue of his host’s spouse. What most drew my attention—and indeed sympathy—was not the alacrity with which he exchanged Ginger for Grace, but Grace’s affecting desire to change her life with Ginger’s. I am certain that if she knew what I do, never mind how, about the sort of life that Ginger is leading, she would quickly forget that particular fantasy so common to the idle rich. I expect also that Steven, on reflection, felt more sympathy for her unhappiness, and less for his own misplaced pride in never having paid for satisfaction. As it was, neither pride nor sympathy seem to have prevented him from achieving his customary result:

  “ ‘Why would you want to do that?’ I asked.

  “The head went up again. ‘For kicks,’ she said. She kissed my cock sweetly. ‘I’m bored.’ She licked at me. ‘Besides, I’m kind of a whore already. I married Russell for his money, you know.’

  “ ‘Not the same thing,’ I said. Her mouth had swallowed me again … I closed my eyes, swaying slightly. ‘Well, you’d certainly make a fortune at it,’ I muttered to myself.”

  It is to his credit, I think, that he reported to me all the details of this particular exchange. He must have had some misgivings about it. If I wanted to press a point I could have suggested that he had forfeited the bet by purchasing her favors. It was and is my opinion, though, that he had pursued the best course that was available to him under the circumstances.

  Having praised my employer’s honesty so thoroughly, I nonetheless fell into doubt when he delivered the name of his next inamorata. He had, after all, been making predatory passes at a woman named Heather, and appeared ready to stoop. There followed several days when he barely appeared in the office, and when he did was gruff and uncommunicative. I surmised from this that Heather had become uncooperative, and my spirits rose. This was, after all, virtually the first time that his mad career seemed to have encountered the sort of obstacle which might prevent his completing the alphabet in the allotted time. Apparently his intended had gotten religion. Rather than changing targets, he mounted an elaborate cloak-and-dagger operation designed to discredit the Reverend Jourdemayne, the spiritual obstetrician who had presided when Heather was born again. Just when I was allowing myself to enjoy the hope that this masculine obstinacy might prove to be his Achilles heel he appeared at my elbow looking fresh and cheerful. The change in mood, he explained, had been brought about by a religious experience. He had spent the night in bed with a young woman who bore the unlikely name of Holy Virgin Mary. Despite my obvious interest, I received only sparse details of the encounter, videlicet:

  “She had indeed been happy to see me, and though we both regretted the circumstances that kept her sister from joining us, Mary proved to be so inexhaustibly eager, inventive and athletic that she made up for it. Perhaps the skills she displayed were the result of her study under the Reverend Jourdemayne but, having seen him in action, I doubted it. More likely it was just natural talent.”

  This left Mr. Walling nearly a third of the way through the alphabet in just six weeks, and left me squirming in my seat with uncomfortable anticipation of what the future might hold.

  Fate, heaven only knows why, has been a staunch ally of Steven Walling. I had concluded that my best hope of winning my wager was that complications unconnected to women and womanizing might slow him down. Perhaps not entirely unconnected. I was therefore optimistic when he began spending extensive time with his friend Phyllis, whose initial was for the moment safely out of range, but whose friendship he wished to maintain against the time when he had won, or God willing, lost the bet, and could resume his old habits. My fool’s paradise was exploded when I discovered that there was a third in their party, Phyllis’s visiting cousin Irene, whose appearance at that very moment placed her at the intersection of Steven Walling’s crosshairs. Sure enough, it was not many days at all before he informed me that the young woman had succumbed, picturesquely enough while sightseeing at the Statue of Liberty:

  “I stepped up close behind her, hastily opening my trousers and dropping them and my shorts around my ankles. It wasn’t particularly elegant, but neither of us cared at that moment. Irene drew in her breath sharply as I found her sweetly moist opening and guided myself slowly inside her.

  “It was slow and sweet all the way. My hands found their way beneath her blouse and bra to hold her stiff-nippled breasts, as her hips moved in soft, sensuous rhythm. The New York skyline had never looked so wonderful to me.”

  If I have given any impression of myself as cold or dispassionate, it is a misimpression. I do, however, believe in keeping business and pleasure separate. It is therefore in the nature of a confession when I state that the above scene caused me, just for a moment, to think that losing my wager with my employer might not be an unmitigated disaster. The moment passed, however, without, I hope, showing on my face, and
my resolve to win redoubled. I can’t quite say that I proposed his next challenge, one which I confidently believed insurmountable and hoped would occupy him fruitlessly for some time. I did, though, repeat the name to him several times at a moment when he seemed receptive, emphasizing the initial. The bait was sufficient, and I stifled my triumph. Just as well that I did, as the sequel will show.

  The consummation I am about to describe made me wonder whether anything could halt this rake’s progress. In this day and age men of much more modest gifts than Steven Walling can and do obtain sexual gratification with ease. I didn’t expect the availability of willing partners to be his undoing, but rather his natural disinclination toward effort along with the six month deadline. When, therefore, he announced his intention of seducing one of the world’s most famous women, a woman who was in large part famous for her reticence, I was, to put it mildly, surprised. Surprised that he would voluntarily make his task so difficult and that he would waste precious time laying a siege which would surely be lengthy and just as surely futile. I compliment myself on having performed a miracle by retaining my composure when he crowed his success to me after their initial meeting. My hands remained steady as he delivered the details, but my heartbeat, I think, became as highly irregular as the event he described:

  “ ‘I want to see them bare,’ I said. ‘Take the hose off.’

  “She shook her head slightly. Then she closed her eyes. She reached up beneath the skirt to her waist and pulled the pantyhose down, hitching herself up off the seat to do so. She pulled them off and dropped them.

  “ ‘Gorgeous,’ I said. And I reached out a hand and put it on her thigh. She jumped, but didn’t protest or make a move to push it away.

  “ ‘Why am I doing this?’ she whispered, again softly.”

  Why indeed? For purposes of the wager, it is only important that she did, so I will draw a curtain across the scene.

  Having completed the first decade of his unholy rosary, one might have expected Steven Walling to take a moment to reassess his progress. That is not his nature. He plunged ahead immediately, and with effect.

  I wouldn’t say, going by Mr. Walling’s usual detailed description of the event, that Katharine had been waiting for him since their first encounter with bated breath. In fact, she was so little impressed by our hero’s willingness to fly to Monte Carlo, in order to have her as his flight attendant and renew his assault on her somewhat questionable virtue, that she offered to end his career as a ladies’ man by removing the appendage essential to his craft. As she had the aforementioned appendage between her lips at the time, the threat was taken seriously. This led to a rather ticklish several minutes, during which he had to use the full measure of the charms God gave him simply to escape with his virility intact. Never one to thank the lord for small favors, he decided not only to escape in one piece but go ahead and complete his conquest.

  As always, in the end the Walling suasion and suavity prevailed, and he enticed her into the casino bathroom. When our wager is over, I must cross-examine him about his fascination with fornication in water closets:

  “We were holding each other as she pressed herself to me, moving harder, and we kissed again to stifle our panting and moaning, though I don’t know how successful we were. Especially when I felt her spasming around my flesh as she went over the top, just as I was wondering how long I could hold out myself. As it turned out, not another second. But if the sounds of our climax were indeed audible outside our stall, at least no one was heard to complain. Very civilized country, Monaco.”

  I dare say.

  Having determined to prepare myself for the possibility of losing this bet, I realized that my knowledge of my employer was in many ways deficient. I turned to his brother Henry to supply the want. It was an unanticipated but welcome fact that my attention to Henry inspired Steven with jealousy. I did nothing to discourage this. Very well, perhaps I not only allowed the misconception but fostered it. The green-eyed monster led him not to the perfectly chaste dinner I shared with his brother (and which at least yielded me the information I had hoped to glean), but to a love-feast of his own with the owner of a Chinese restaurant:

  “The table was small, but fortunately sturdy. Our bodies fit together with no trouble at all, and her fine, shapely legs came up to curl around me. For a long pleasant time I probed deeply into the mysteries of the East—although the words Li Mai cried from time to time were definitely English. Old English.”

  Pangs of sibling rivalry may not have slowed Steven down, but they appealed, I confess, to my vanity.

  It amused me to learn that Steven Walling’s sexual adventures began in failure. Not through any fault of his own, or any unwillingness from his partner, but in the way so many adolescent attempts fall through. Her parents caught them in the act and gave them unshirted hell. Some perverse impulse made him determine that this wrong needed to be set right. Perhaps he was still struggling with my strong suggestion that he ought by rights to be cavorting only with women he had not previously enjoyed. It was only after he succeeded even more easily than is his wont in reaching his goal that he discovered the reason Marcia was so willing. His high school sweetheart had become a prostitute:

  “ ‘Marcia, I love you,’ I panted. I had said that then, in the heat of my need, with one hand on her breast and the other up her skirt, and I said it now.

  “ ‘Oh, I love you too,’ Marcia breathed. ‘Oh, Steven!’ she whispered as my hand found her soft moistness through the silk of her panties. ‘You make me so hot!’ ”

  The pathos of this story, from beginning to end, made me feel closer to Steven Walling than I ever had before. Once more there was the momentary confusion over whether I was quite determined to win. Barely more than two months had elapsed as he passed the peak and began his downhill run through the second half of the alphabet.

  The sexual ethics of the upper class are notoriously lax. It might have been interesting to add a rule at the beginning of our wager limiting my employer to women of this group, but I doubt it would have made his task any harder. Indeed, it is notable that whenever he has approached his more affluent lady friends he has encountered very slight resistance, even from the mysterious J lady. The philanthropical Nancy was no exception. The fact that she was married deterred her not at all. On the contrary, the fashion in which she was faithful required only that her husband be allowed to watch. And in the long run to participate … along with the houseboy:

  “Arnold opened his trousers and took it out. I tried to concentrate on Nancy. The continued stimulation of her moving body kept me in a state of intense arousal, while the annoying distractions she was creating prevented me from getting too close to the edge. It was about the strangest feeling I had ever experienced during an erotic encounter.”

  Apparently Mr. Walling’s experience, while very long, is not unusually wide.

  If my employer is learning something from his wayward journey, and I hope he is, it is unlikely to be any new technique of seduction. He is a past master of that art Perhaps he will discover that the game is not invariably worth the candle, in this case when it involves actual risk of physical harm. His eye having settled on a beauty of African extraction, he began to limber up his toils and cast them her way. The danger in this case came not with failure but with success. Convinced that his only interest in her had to do with her heritage, she nonetheless cooperated in his quest, not out of a sense of fun, but rather to spite another lover. The venom she poured on him before, during and after their coupling was nothing compared to what the old boyfriend offered if he caught them together again. I don’t think he will:

  “Her body was squirming in the chair, her soft thighs clutching my head. I could hardly breathe, but the essence of her was all the oxygen I needed. I nibbled and sucked and licked, and she writhed harder, her buttocks rising off the chair, her legs twitching against my cheeks.

  “ ‘Come on, you white bastard, don’t stop, you paleass motherfucker … oh shit yeah … Now �
�� now … now.’ ”

  Escaping with his life, to say nothing of another feather in a cap that was starting to resemble a war-bonnet, he caught a cab to more familiar precincts and delivered his report to me.

  Phyllis Dilsey may almost be called the cause of this whole mess. I am not a jealous woman, as I think is clear by now, but I don’t like to see Mr. Walling diverting time from business to less worthy objects. I may, therefore, have been easily provoked on the fateful morning that our wager was forged. It had been necessary that morning to pry him from his bed, and the aforementioned Mrs. Dilsey. That explains why I was so easily led into a gambling venture. Add to that that she had been hovering around ever since looking for a repeat performance, and you will understand my vexation when Steven revealed that he planned to grant her wish. There were long pauses in the conversation, as I had no intention of revealing just how angry I was at what I considered a betrayal of the spirit of our agreement. My silence brought him as close as he had come to a failure.

  Not that I have that assurance from his own lips. On his behalf, as on mine, silence spoke volumes. For the only time in our long odyssey he gave me bare assurance that he had accomplished his goal. In my experience (and never you mind what that is) this can only mean one thing. He must have encountered some difficulties in the performance of his wonted acrobatics. I would say that it must have been hard for him, but that might lead to some confusion.

  Although, having accomplished this retrospective, I find myself less apprehensive about the prospect of his victory, it is not in my nature to go down without a fight. If I can throw a cross in his path with no sacrifice of honor I will do so. If, however, it is my fate to lose the wager, I hope to encounter that fate with grace. It would be such an easy thing to sour his victory (should he achieve it—I still have hopes of winning) by letting it appear that it was what I wanted in the first place. But you, dear readers, won’t be fooled, will you?