“That’s not what’s happening.”
“You’re evading the question. I mean, what if Charles fucks her better than you ever did? He’s very good.”
Check. I couldn’t bear any more conversation. I wanted to make love to Vy. It was the only answer I had.
“I can’t,” she protested when I touched her. I put my hand through the opening in her caftan onto her cool stomach. “I absolutely cannot, I’m sorry.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Charles and I made love while you were off looking for Mora before dinner. He’s big, and I’m sore. It’s my background,” she sighed theatrically. “Fair-skinned mothers. Delicate skin. Look here, I’ll show you.”
She opened the caftan and spread her white thighs. “You see the blood?”
The lips of her vulva were irritated and swollen, and there was a tiny drop of blood on her clitoris. Imagine the center of a rose with a drop of blood on a petal…
I found cotton and peroxide in a bathroom medicine cabinet and brought them back without looking in on Charles and Mora. I heard them talking through the closed door and I wanted to eavesdrop, but I wanted to make love to Vy more.
“Your hands are so gentle,” she told me when I wiped away the drop of blood and covered her soreness with vaseline. The glistening petals of her sex opened beneath my fingers.
“I’ll stop. I promise you. If it hurts, I’ll stop.”
She squirmed evasively when I penetrated her. I stopped, moving again only when she opened to receive me. She whispered hotly in my ear while she licked it with the point of her tongue. “I trust you. No reason, but I do. I know you’ll stop – but please don’t stop now.”
I cupped the plump weight of her buttocks in my palms and let myself be swallowed by her. We got lost in the dialogue of bodies, questioning and answering, alone on a gently rolling sea in the blackest night.
She pulled a yellow popper out of the darkness and crushed it between her fingers, holding the amyl nitrate to my nose and then to her own. We both inhaled deeply and felt our hearts rush to where our genitals were, riding on the cloudy, pungent chemical high like surfers on a wave.
“Oooo!” she cried out, as if in a dream. I heard someone wailing, without realizing it was me. Each wave that took us was bigger than the last, and we were no longer rocking gently but struggling together to stay afloat.
I heard tapping on the floor and looked down to see my fingers doing a fast dance on the wide boards. I was half off the bed and sweat was pouring from me. Vy’s body was arched, a dying swan. There was a roaring in my ears like the ocean at the same time I heard knocking on the door, and then I hit the last, biggest wave and was dragged head over heels into shore. Vy’s whole body clenched and she followed me, digging her nails into the backs of my arms. A high thin noise came from her throat.
When I opened my eyes, Charles was standing over us, naked, grinning, scratching his chest. “Birds would give up a winter’s feed to hit that note,” he said, while Vy shuddered and I navigated the re-entry to consciousness.
“What time is it?”
“Half past four. You two make a lot of noise.”
Mora moved from the shadows to stand beside him, her hand on his shoulder. Her hair was matted and wet and she was ragged around the edges. They looked like weasels who’d been in the chicken coop. There should have been feathers hanging from their swollen satisfied mouths.
“I won’t be able to explain this away tomorrow morning,” Charles said. “I won’t believe it. It was so incredibly high at times. So intense.”
“I guess we did it after all.” Mora smiled tiredly, shaking her head in happy disbelief.
“I don’t know what could be bad about this,” I said.
Vy sat up and stretched, pulling Charles’s hand to her breast. “It was divine, and I love you all, and I don’t know what to say, except that we’ve been very wicked.”
Charles yawned and rubbed his eyes sleepily. Mora came to sit next to me on the rumpled bed that smelled of sex and poppers and cigarettes. We kissed Charles and Vy goodnight with the gentle exhaustion of sated lovers, and Mora and I curled up spoon-fashion on the bed. She was mine again, for a few hours.
Part Two
FIVE
In the pictures I developed of the four of us on the beach, our faces are aglow with anticipation and pleasure. Our shyness is not fear of each other, but of the unknown. There are no shadows under our eyes, no tightness around our mouths; no hint of desperation clouds our sunny expressions. Our discovery of adultery was almost painless – and the timing was right.
“I thought I had it figured out,” Mora said when we looked at the wet proofs in my darkroom. “Love and sex and relationship. Marriage – the idea that if you want this, you can’t have that – that was what was wrong with us. Then what happens? We go and break all the rules. We find out that marriage has got corners and angles we didn’t know existed.”
Turn around. We were friends again. The bad habits we had fallen into disappeared overnight, as quickly as rubbing condensation from a window. We were able to treat each other lovingly again. Trust reappeared. Freedom was exhilarating.
Predictably, the few friends – married couples – we told about Charles and Vy thought we’d gone off the deep end. A relationship with one other person was difficult enough, they scoffed. Three was arrogance, asking for it on the chin. None of them raised moral objections and they didn’t ask how we felt: and since we knew their marriages and their reasons for being cynical, we paid no attention to them.
Months after returning from East Hampton, we received a note from Vy. She was in London.
“Richard and Mora loves -
Still don’t know what magic you worked.
Let’s get together when I get back
so we can find out. Kisses, Vy Cameron”
Curious, Mora called Charles – not without some trepidation, but the phone was her instrument, not mine. I got on the extension.
“Maurice took her over to meet some of his friends,” Charles explained. He sounded lonely by himself in Maurice’s big house, and resentful that Vy had gone off without him. “I guess there’s a party circuit for septuagenarians in the countryside around London. Discreet scenes in the stately homes of England.”
“That lady gets around. I wish I had her style.”
“Come out and see me. We’ll go for walks on the beach, and spend a lot of time in bed. Just us chickens.”
“It’s the middle of the week, Charles. Richard can’t get away; he has shootings lined up.”
“I didn’t invite Richard.”
She paused and looked at me. “We’re a team, you know that. I wouldn’t go anywhere without him.”
I threw her a kiss, my hand over the receiver.
“Look, the words wedlock and hammerlock are not synonymous. They don’t add up to virtue. Besides, you’re not just a ‘twosome’, you’re half of a ‘foursome’ – silly words, it sounds like we’re talking about golf…”
“I’m sorry -”
“Maybe if you did some homework, since I’m not around to keep things stirred up.”
“What? What kind of homework?”
“Now I’ve got your interest piqued. I’ll mail you your next lesson.” I heard a dry chuckle on the other end.
I broke in. “Come and see us.”
“Oh. There you are, Richard. You should breathe more heavily when you’re spying on people.”
“Mora knew I was on the extension. I trust her, but not you. Why don’t you come visit us?”
“No, I don’t think so. I’m going to hole up out here and try to get some work done. Fasting and abstinence and hard work, that’s the prescription. I’ll be a different man, the next time you see me.”