Lights of rudely awakened guests started peppering the front facade of the hotel, while meantime I was desperately trying to turn my key in the lock to get inside and shut Larry up. But he had jammed the keyhole with a toothpick.
As I poked and prodded, a well-dressed guest coming home late from the casino appeared in the hall.
“I’m sorry to trouble you, sir,” I said, “but, my lock seems to have stuck. I wonder, could you help me?”
The poor man looked a little tired, but he did his best to oblige. As he was bending down squinting into the stubborn lock, the door flew open to reveal a furious-faced Larry.
“You’re trying to fuck my wife, too,” he accused the poor passerby. “I’ll fix you all.”
Everybody started coming out into the hall, and it was excruciatingly embarrassing. I had to stop his paranoia at once, so I gave him a terrific shove back into the room, jumped inside, and slammed the door. Then the battle was on. We went for each other hammer and tongs, and I, being the stronger of the two, knocked Larry down onto the floor, grabbed his thick silver hair, and started pounding his head on the marble floor. One, two, three times I whammed it, until I realized that the next strike could kill him.
I let him up on the promise he would calm down and forget about what had happened. I spent the rest of the night trying to placate him, and the next morning we decided to move out of the hotel, taking the seven-A.M. helicopter down to the El San Juan.
The next day Larry took off for New York, and I stayed around. It was Christmas Eve, and all the crowd from the El Conquistador came over to my new hotel for the occasion.
When they saw me, they said, “You’re the girl who cheated on her husband and seduced the young boy.” They laughed and said the story had traveled all around the hotel like a flash fire.
Larry eventually got over the incident and forgave me. He knows that when I am horny I have to find a victim. Besides, those episodes are like ships that pass in the night. It’s the ships that dock for a while that really drive him mad. I occasionally have an affair with a man I might meet on the job that could go on for weeks or months.
Last winter I fell in love with a thirty-three-year-old banker named Skip, who looked like Sean Connery in his younger years. Larry knew about it, but accepted the situation as long as the man paid me. If there was a check from him in the morning when Larry came by, he would feel reassured, but if it was missing he would be angry. Which is hypocritical in a way, because I could still love my banker whether he paid me or not. Although sometimes I love to mix emotions with physical pleasure and business, and Skip used to pay a considerable sum to spend the night with me. He was fabulous-looking, with a fantastic body, and a witty sense of humor.
Skip used to come by around nine P.M., mingle with the group of people in the living room, tease the girls, and drive them out of their mind – since he knew he was a good-looking flirt, being very conceited indeed. At times he would parade around the house in one of Larry’s silk morning gowns, and while chatting on the couch, he would reveal certain parts of his body by letting the gown drop open halfway “accidentally.” All my girls liked him, and if it wasn’t for my house rule, the code of ethics – “Don’t touch Madam Xaviera’s lover” – they sure as hell would have liked to make a pass at him “for free.”
While being with Skip, I didn’t care for anyone else, and it was a divine feeling to really love someone again. During peak hours he would jokingly help me out by serving drinks to my thirsty customers, and walk around with a white towel on his sleeve as if he really were the butler. In between we would make love and have long, sentimental conversations.
Skip’s favorite thirst quencher was beer. I can’t remember how many dozens of cans of beer I got him during those months we saw each other. He would even send my maid out to get it, and give her a generous tip afterward.
However, my “James Bond” was more jealous than Larry even. If Skip was in the house, I was not even allowed to close the bedroom door and discuss, in private, finances with my customers, since he thought I would “make it” with that man. Nor could I “chip in” on a swing or a threesome without Skip immediately threatening to walk out on me. Granted that I might have lost some income by giving up these extra activities, but Skip’s overall generosity, his fine body and mind – not to speak of the many red roses he sent – gave me quite some happiness for several months. Finally a combination of family problems and business pressures reduced our relationship to one of friendship, but we remain good friends, and there is still a warm and tender feeling for each other.
As Skip was sent sailing off, another ship docked, tied up, and looked as though it was here to stay. A Greek boy, Takis, about twenty-nine, came to see me about two girls he wanted me to meet. They were from Montreal, he said, and wanted to become my roommates. The doorbell rang, and here was this gorgeous young man built like an Adonis, dark hair, and green eyes exactly the same color as mine, except that he has got long black eyelashes. He has a baby smile on his sensuous, dramatic face. Only his nose is a bit small, in my. opinion, definitely non-Greek.
Takis and I caught fire from that very first moment we met. We made love almost immediately after his appearance, and he then more or less moved into my life and my apartment. The ship had docked. His tongue was warm and fast, and, I must confess, there has been no feeling nicer than having this Greek boy giving me head. He also knew exactly where to touch my body, blow kisses on my neck, and make love to me. Our rhythm was that of the ever-moving waves of the ocean. Come and go, up and down, back and forward. That’s how his lovemaking affected me.
Takis, a very emotional and sensitive person as it turned out, became one of the sweetest things in my life. He was good, kind, never impolite or rude. He was lazy in a way, since he loved to sleep late in the day, but so did my roommates, the two Canadians he had meanwhile introduced to me. They also had moved in with me, and all of a sudden the house was full of laughter and happy young people. Takis, to my knowledge, had never slept with either of the two Canadians. He had told me that in Montreal he used to be the boyfriend of a rather well-known Madam Carmine. So in other words he was used to the late hours, the many different men who came to patronize the house of Carmine. She had been about ten years in this business and managed to save a good deal of money, with which she was said to be rather generous.
Being Greek, Takis had one of the famous Greek weaknesses, and that was gambling. He would not, like most men might do, cheat on his girl friend, but the few nights that he did come home in the early morning hours he always confessed to me that he had gone to some after-hours gambling joint, where preferably his favorite Armenian game of “barbout,” a game similar to crap shooting, was played. Takis was constantly broke. I used to support him, not in great sums like Carmine allegedly did, but with a ten- or twenty-dollar bill here and there. One night when he left, all he had in his pocket was twelve dollars, but when he came home at ten the next day, he was exhausted but very satisfied – he showed me proudly how he had won with his small sum the big sum of two thousand dollars.
However, the money seemed somehow to burn the proverbial hole in his pocket, and like a masochist he had to go back to the tables and lose it all. Since it was not actually money from my savings or anything like that, I could never really get mad at him. Of course, I wished he would save his winnings or get a steady job, but lazy as he was at that time, he preferred to be the boyfriend, almost gigololike, of Madam Xaviera. Not that he ever purposely took advantage of me – that I can guarantee. It was always my own idea when I decided to be generous with him. And he never asked for a thing. Some days I would take him downtown and buy him some new shirts or some jockey underpants or a nice woolen sweater that revealed his sexy body even more. All this while, we really were tremendously turned on by each other, and used to make love night after night till sunup.