It was Mr. Pope who initially encouraged his wife to use it as a kind of private listening room. At this very moment he is thinking about her sitting alone, her head tilted to one side, watching him. The thought of her watching him increases his tumescence. He is a performer by nature, some might say it was imprinted on his DNA. He only becomes sexually excited when he knows he is being watched. Too many easy conquests have left him jaded and satiated, an affliction that has intensified with middle age. Each new seduction is the only way he can reach out, touch the persona they are selling to the public. Not his private self, he left that on a train fleeing Romania somewhere in the mid-fifties. To know himself he needs to be told about himself, preferably from the lips of young girls. Otherwise after each concert tour his sense of identity spirals down into a void without meaning.
Mr. Pope raises his baton and the cellist begins the second movement. Mrs. Pope pushes the young man away from her. She gestures for him to keep quiet. Slowly, from within her briefcase, she pulls out a black net corset and two highly polished Italian patent-leather pumps. She bends over, and the man begins rolling her skirt above her hips. She stands and pushes her skirt back down. He moves across the darkened room and leans into the window. Just then the conductor raises his arms and with a wild flailing sweeps the orchestra into the second movement. She slips on the corset under her dress, a quarter-cup black number. The cups cut under her breasts, as if a man is holding them up and squeezing them.
She begins rolling down her fishnet tights. They catch slightly on her toenails. She turns to the young man.
His head is nodding in time with the music. He leans against the wide shelf of the window, beyond which she can see her husband vacillate with the music. At that instance she can see through the young man’s eyes. She knows what stirs him beneath his trousers. It is the proximity of the audience just outside the window. The smell of the collective animal, the French perfume, the sweat, the secret undersmells that whisper. It fills the room. They are her captive audience, blind to her presence yet so close that if she wanted to she could throw her lingerie and it would fall, perhaps dangle, across their faces.
On stage, the fourth violinist studies a twist of blond hair. It curls teasingly on the neck of the cellist sitting in front of him. The fourth violinist, barely nineteen and still a virgin, wonders what the hair would taste like. He imagines salty. He imagines running his fingers up the smooth nape then plunging his fingers into the soft mass of hair. Taking a handful he would push her head down, push her soft pliant mouth down to his cock and…the third violinist nudges him hard in the ribs. He is late with his note by twenty seconds.
He follows the conductor’s baton as it spirals slowly up into the air. His eye is caught by something set into the wall.
WHAT THE FOURTH VIOLINIST SEES
He sees the pale face of a beautiful man, not much older than himself, who sits watching in the window of the listening room. There is something odd about the slightly disjointed way the beautiful man nods his head to the music.
Two white breasts seem to float toward the young man. A woman, older, her hair loose, torso poured into a corset, pushes her breasts toward his face. He takes one fully into his mouth. The fourth violinist sees the long nipple disappearing into the young man’s full lips. In and out. In and out. Again the fourth violinist misses his cue.
WHAT MRS. POPE FEELS
Teeth around the nipple teasing slightly, biting, circling with his tongue as the nipple hardens, then slowly sucking. Quicker, quicker. He takes the other breast, pulling harder, rolling the nipple between his two fingers. He plays my body, he plays my breasts. He is a sex child. I am a mother with a cunt. Red threads run from my nipple to my navel, a lattice of pleasure. I want him to touch my sex. I move forward but he holds me at a distance. He knows what he’s doing and he’s in no hurry.
WHAT THE SILENT YOUNG MAN FEELS
Skin. Skin you can press your fingers into, sinking, sinking. Skin like sweet warm milk. The blue veins run like water just below the surface. Breasts that run in a perfect semicircle below the nipple, large, unmistakable. Her raised areola tastes like plums. Bruised plums with a slight tang of sea salt. I want her to take me like a young siren, Medusa lashed to the deck. And all around the churning sea.
WHAT THE HUSBAND IS THINKING
Why do you want to know? It doesn’t matter what I think. I am just a bit player, a construct of Katherine’s. That’s her name, Katherine Pope née Handsworth. I stand here and I am not entirely conscious. Musical instinct drives me. I hear the notes before they are played. I am orchestrating the moment before it manifests. This makes me the dictator. The puppet master with a hundred invisible strings attached to the lips and instruments of the orchestra in front of me. This power is tremendously exciting. The responsibility involved is also terrifying. I can feel the audience breathing at the back of my neck. They inhale as one. Their breath travels in languid rivulets that accelerate with the music. As the master I feel as if I am choreographing one enormous collective orgasm…or perhaps a series of little climaxes that lead to a kind of death. The kind of death that sears the top of the brain as the whole orchestra concludes in a concoction of violent color, leaving you floating somewhere near the chandeliers.
The kind of death that occurs in the silence between the last note and rapturous applause. The last heartbeat.
Notation: Climax. Beat. Silence. Beat. Applause.
I like to think I specifically cater for the women in the audience. For the older blue-rinse set, the gentler, slower ascent is kinder on bodies familiar with touch.
For the younger frisky members (and God knows the numbers are dwindling) I direct the triumphant heroics of the brass section. For the men I leave the space between the notes, they can draw their own conclusions.
You tell me my wife is in the audience. I know that already, I feel it. There is a symbiosis between even warring couples. Comprenez-vous? Not that I don’t love my wife. It’s just that she is so different. For her life is still dramatic. The pathos she generates throws everything up into a sharper focus. That’s why I love her, she wakes me up. And there’s only two things that wake me up. Fellatio and Mozart.
WHAT THE FOURTH VIOLINIST SEES
He lifts her up and pulls her onto his lap. The fourth violinist falters for a moment as the woman clutches at the man’s cock. Even in the shadows he can see the length and thickness clearly, a thick conquering phallus that makes a frail silhouette of the rest of the body. The man’s profile is Bacchus, Priapus, Jack of the Beanstalk. She drops to her knees. Her breasts pour over his glans, he plunges into the cleavage.
The fourth violinist’s bow drops to the floor; the bassist covers for him. As he reaches down he notices the slim ankles of the cellist. He imagines soft ridges of blond hair running inside thighs to a golden bush. As he sits there he glances across to the listening room again. The woman is taking the man into her mouth.
The fourth violinist imagines the feel of her mouth, the way her tongue would play under the ridge like a wind instrument. He wonders about the flautist.
The woman’s head bobs up and down as she takes all of it deep into her throat, the man flings back his head, his mouth open in ecstacy. As they reach the conclusion of the third movement he pulls her away, holding himself tightly at the base of his shaft, saving himself. The fourth violinist glances at the third violinist, instrument poised in mid-air, his face flushed. He too stares in the direction of the listening room.
WHAT MRS. POPE FEELS
The taste of him is youth, slightly pungent, the aroma of almonds and hot testicles. Velvet, heavy in the palm, pushing against my belly. The blind beast that splits the peach. What could I do? I dropped to my knees and tasted him.
He seeps a droplet of the ocean, and I suck. I swallow him. Feeling him quivering under the tongue, this makes me master. As I suck I see my husband, racing with the music. Waves of red and white spirals interlace with the music and press against my eyes.
WHAT THE SILENT YOUNG MAN FEELS
All I know is her flesh, the tone of her voice and her scent, her fingers wiser than mine. They don’t hesitate. Her cunt is a tight veil. I draw it across my face, my lips, over the skin of my body until she is welded to my belly. I want to fill every hole, her ass, her cunt, her ear, her mouth. To fuck you and the strangeness inside you. Her breasts fill my hands, they are flesh at the end of a tight wet canal. We are riding the waves, and the ceiling drips song.
When I fuck you I am fucking your husband. I shut my eyes and it is his hands grasping the baton. The jerking stick, my cock, your music. Your moaning under our breath. This is what I feel.
WHAT THE HUSBAND IS THINKING
Something’s missing in the string section. Come in, come in, you bastards. The third and fourth. They’re not even looking at their scores. I’ll tap the music stand. What are they staring at? Ahh at last, a note. Thank you, gentlemen…slowly, slowly, gently, gently, think about a tiny silver sea lapping between your toes, drawing up over the ankles, not too fast…washing up like waves of electricity over the knees.
HER
He’s lifting me up onto the broad windowsill, the hot air of the auditorium warms my buttocks. He parts my lips and buries his mouth, finding my clit, playing me with his tongue. I moan. My body trembles under his fingers. Just the tip, just the tip, then as I grow he takes all of me and sucks…It is as if he is inside all of me, as if my pleasure is his.
THE SILENT YOUNG MAN
The smell of her, the taste of her…the flesh quivers, a tiny penis, she is close to coming. I am pulling her to her feet, I’m wrapping her legs around my hips. I press her against the wall and cut into her like a hot knife through butter.
THE HUSBAND
Up over the waist, bring in drums, that’s it! That’s it! Nail the rhythm into the guts, into the very core of being! Faster! Faster! Faster! And cut! Now the death, now the silence rushing in.
HER
Ahhhhhh!
THE SILENT YOUNG MAN
Ahhhhhh!
THE HUSBAND
Screams pierce the silence between crescendo and applause. I swing around, furious. A couple lie satiated, half naked, hanging out of the window of the listening room.
It is an image from my worst nightmare. It is not real. Her long red hair cascading down the wall. The older members of the orchestra start to cough, to avert their eyes. The younger members grin openly. It is a phantasm. The young man pulls himself out of my wife and smiles slowly. He takes a bow.
The whole auditorium is shaking with laughter.
There is no applause.
LOOKING FOR STRANGE
THE LOVER
All that is visible is the radio alarm clock sitting on a table by the side of the bed. Its faint glow also illuminates the bed’s white quilted spread, which I have drawn up as far as my nose. It smells of her. And me. I lie there, feeling the tension ooze out of my feet, the muscles at the back of my neck, my stomach. We finished making love only ten minutes ago. But I like to lie here, alone in her flat after she’s gone to work. It gives me time to explore.
I swing my legs out of the bed. A thick rug of some foreign material lies in the middle of cool polished floorboards. When I sink my toes into it, the carpet releases an exotic fragrance. She once told me that nomads used to play chess on it. And here it is, marooned in a Tasmanian suburb.
There is a dresser against the wall, a heavy antique piece with brass claws for feet, clutching, alive. The dresser is strewn with tiny pots of cosmetics, necklaces glittering dimly in the dark, an abandoned velvet sash, a hairbrush that smells of old hair spray, perfume and the darker scent of olive skin and thick black hair. I hover for a moment, but it is not makeup that I want: I want to see through her skin, just for a moment.
I move to the dresses swinging off a metal clothes rack—some scarlet, some beaded for the evening, some still wrapped in plastic and smelling acidic from the dry cleaners, others slightly sweaty, telling of some clandestine night in a dance club and their eventual fate, thrown to the floor of some strange bedroom.
I choose a summer frock. I draw it over my head. My penis, still damp from her, sticks slightly against the silk as I pull the fabric down over my body. The dress is tight around the shoulders and only just covers my nakedness. I don’t want to look in the mirror. I’m not a cross-dresser. I just want this moment—of being her, of feeling vulnerable in that pliant body. My hands trail up to the empty pockets where her breasts would sit.
Outside the traffic is a distant roar, outside it’s a Saturday night. People mill on the pavements in search of escape, a meal, an encounter that takes them out of their skin, out of their marriages, out of their lives. I lie down and fall asleep.
THE BOYFRIEND
Dee. That’s what he calls himself. Dee. I like it, it conjures up a certain masculinity I find irresistible. Nothing queeny about this guy—that’s what first attracted me to him. He appeared straight, as if his sexuality was a secondary issue in his life. As if he was comfortable with it, and didn’t have to flaunt it all over the clubs. He’s tall, with a really good body. One of those smooth chests you can just rub your chin down, and a wash-board stomach. Not a gym bunny, oh no, this body was built for heavy manual labor. A body that has purpose, that always turns me on. Real muscles, not like those pumped up fluffy numbers. And his cock—you know, a heavy circumcised number with a decent-sized knob at the end. And low-slung balls; I like holding the weight of them in my hand.
It wasn’t love. I’d given up on that one! No, it was definitely lust. Uncomplicated, animal and entirely satisfying. Love was the last thing I needed, especially after the previous debacle. Put me in a room and I’m bound to zoom in on the nearest psychopath. I’m in love with trouble. Shrink tells me it’s my comfort zone. But Dee wasn’t trouble. He was just lovely. Some people are, you know, uncomplicated.
THE LOVER
I met him at La Cage. I go there occasionally. It’s just part of my personality. I don’t question it. I reckon there’s a lot of heartache out there from people living through their head and not their hearts. Me, I just live.
I noticed him straightaway—I guess it was his longish ginger hair. Not many men have good hair like that; it made him stand out. He looked a little less fashion-conscious than the rest. I liked that—a bit frayed around the edges, a little vulnerable. I walked up and stood next to him, and ordered a drink. I could feel him checking me out. His eyes running around the edge of my shirt and burrowing in between my legs. I’ve always liked this moment best. There’s never any doubt in my mind that they won’t want me. Some people just embody sex, and I’m one of them. I cultivate it. I’m not being arrogant or anything. It’s just plain fact. One that’s never failed me.
So he turns around, and finally I see his face. Late twenties, aquiline nose, good skin, a full mouth and green eyes, with a heap of irony glittering in there. My kind of boy.
“Simon,” he tells me. “Simon. But don’t tell me yours. Let’s stay strangers for a while at least.” And I know I have to have him.
LOOKING FOR STRANGE
They break into a commission flat, an ugly place just behind the club. Dee’s heart is thumping, despite a pretense of indifference. He doesn’t know this man, but he wants him, and the danger of the si
tuation thrills him as much as it thrills Simon. It is Simon’s idea to come here. He does it regularly, he tells Dee casually. You just break in and fuck in the bed. It’s wild, and totally alien—plus there’s the added thrill of the possibility of being caught. He wets his bottom lip with the tip of his tongue. The gesture is deliberate but slight enough to seem natural. It gives Dee an immediate erection.
Small rooms, damp walls, small town poverty. Simon takes Dee’s hand and quickly leads him to the bedroom.
A single futon on the floor, an old cot pushed up against the wall, the wooden bars broken in places.
Simon throws a teddy bear off the bed, and suddenly drops to his knee in front of Dee. Biting the skin around his waist, he unzips the tight jeans. Dee’s cock springs out, proud and rudely pink under the naked lightbulb. He looks down and weaves his fingers through a mass of ginger hair, as Simon takes his cock into his mouth, tasting the ridge, then greedily taking it deep into his throat. Dee tilts his head back, luxuriating in the sensation of being sucked, Simon’s hands reaching so confidently around his waist and gripping his ass.
There is a poster pinned to the ceiling, an old one of Tom Cruise. I’m going to come staring at Tom Cruise, Dee finds himself thinking, and wrenches himself away. He pulls Simon down onto the bed, tugging off his T-shirt. Tracing the fine down of golden hair around his nipples, he buries his face into Simon’s armpit, filling his nostrils with the pungent smell of male sweat: stronger, sweeter—younger than his own. He reaches down and roughly pulls off Simon’s beaten leather pants. Simon’s cock, smaller than his, rubs against the shaft of his own thick member. A valley of white freckled skin, the testicles covered in sparse golden hair. Dee holds Simon’s cock and rubs it gently across his lips and eyelids. It never ceases to amaze him, this similarity of flesh. The same, but different. The knob is slightly wet. He teases him by using it to trace the outline of his lips, his stubble. Simon gasps, and pulls Dee up to his face.
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