Fools for Lust (9 page)

25- Mimi had been mixing with a group of friends attending the science faculty of the local university and, one balmy summer, met up with a group of young Belgian students who'd come to the city for exchange summer classes. Serge was the first man to make her heart leap. They paired off most evenings and she even introduced him to her family and he became a regular guest at their dinner table. She liked his cock, long and thin, somehow devoid of the rough vulgarity of most of the local boy's penises, she felt. One night, she invited him back to her room but somehow couldn't find the courage to go all the way with the Belgian boy, and after fellating him, found herself content with sleeping naked against him in the small bed, feeling his warmth permeate her to the core. Drifting off into the lands of sleep, she swore to herself that this was the first man she would let herself be fucked by.

26- Serge returned to his studies in Belgium when summer ended and they began corresponding in broken English.

27- She took a job in the administrative offices of the chocolate factory and took night classes in English in order to communicate better with her foreign boyfriend. She would still suck other men's cocks on Saturday night after the dance, if they really insisted, but Mimi felt detached from the act now, already planning a nebulous sort of future. Serge wanted them to spend the following summer together after his graduation. He wrote that he was saving his money up for this already. She had agreed.

28- He drifted into his first affair almost by accident. Then further opportunities for unfaithfulness arose. An American tourist one night in Athens with whom he had anal sex (Danielle, albeit willing had been too tight). Someone at the office. Another woman at a trade fair. The satisfaction of illicit sex was transitory, and never lasted very long, but what surprised him most was that he felt no guilt.

29- Mimi goes to London/Thailand and loses her virginity.

30- Guilt/noir/death for him.

31- Emptiness after Thailand. Christmas in Brussels. Meets Dutch guy.

32- He meets married woman.

33- Takes up with Dutch guy. Has baby.

34- Breaks up with married woman. Despair.

35- Falls out of love with Dutch b/f.

36- He goes on the internet.

37- She goes on the internet.

38- She meets Swiss banker.

39- His meets.

40- They meet online.

41- Mimi in Zurich, New forms of sex.

42- Curiosity killed the cat; new forms of sex for him.

43- After Zurich, child, Macel beats her, rapes her, wants another kid.

44- She contacts him again.

45- Amsterdam.

46- Her body.

47- Sex with her.

48- His feelings.

49- Mimi times between him.

50- The English asshole.

51- Their phone conversations.

52- Her cunt.

53- The Dutch boy.

54- Her eyes when she fucks.

55- He takes her to Paris.

56- His feelings, contradictions.

57- His seaside tryst with her.

58- His feelings and wishes (lyrical).

59- You are my special treasure.

60- Goes on holiday home for Christmas ends her money.

61- Mikssesher, Goes online as her.

62- Meets Infinity and Beyond and finds out.

63- Rage.

64- More sub dreams of her.

65- Flies to her place.

66- Watches her dance and be merry.

67- Watches her suck stranger.

68- The man she had been voraciously been sucking off had finally returned inside and Mimi stood on the deck, leaning over the guard rail, watching the sea at night, lost in her thoughts. What, he wondered, was on her mind? Did she feel there was poetry in the landscape of the night? Sadness in the oppressive silence, broken only by the clapping sound of nearby waves? He moved quietly towards her, her silhouette highlighted against the brightness of the pockmarked moon. He gently put a hand on her left shoulder. She turned round to face him. Thinking maybe the other guy had returned for more. She was crying. ‘You?' she gasped.

‘Yes,' he answered, a knot gripping his stomach.

‘What are you doing here?' the faint trace of a smile spreading across her cold lips.

‘I loved you,' he said, didn't you know that, didn't you realise it by now? She lowered her eyes, accepting her fate.

69- He raised his other arm and pushed. Mimi offered no resistance. Her body toppled over the rail and disappeared into the darkness and the sea. He looked at the illuminated face of his Tag Heuer: it was one in the morning. The distant horizon was 200 miles off both the coasts of Denmark and Germany. A time and a place for love and death.

Maxim Jakubowski
This is how it could have happened (anachronisms and all).

Scott – December 1940
Yes, the past is a different country, he thought. Damn right. And these last few months, every single night, he had tossed and turned in the narrow bed, even when Sheilah had visited, as it all came back. Visiting his own lost life again, armed with no more than his mental passport.

To avoid the pain, he had moved into Sheilah's apartment. Hers was on the first floor. His had been on the third. He could feel it all ebb away. One slow day at a time. There was no longer much work at the studio, and he knew the book was at a dead-end. Something told him he would never finish it. Or at any rate, not to his satisfaction.

She was so kind. But it just felt like charity for the poor, the under-emotional, the under-haemorrhoided, the under-cocked. He grinned broadly and filled the glass again. She had set him up with a writing board, and he kept up the pretence that the novel was making good progress. There was pain climbing the stairs, there was pain all the time, but the worst was not the physical deterioration, it was the past flowing back, reluctantly, as he couldn't just close his mind to its cruel assault.

He sipped the whisky. The glass was soon empty. He filled it again. Not much left in the bottle. No worry, he could always phone out for another delivery.

All this booze made him want to pee. He snickered. It just came in and seemed to flow through his body like water and come out the other end so quickly. He avoided his drawn, gaunt face in the bathroom mirror. He now spent most days in his faded blue dressing gown, with a pocket full of pencils and one always balanced over his ear. The great writer at work. And play.

Another glass, then. Yes. At least the whisky kept him warm inside.

Sheilah had arranged a doctor's appointment for 20 December, but he had managed to get it cancelled on the pretext of some problem with his writing. He had no need to be told what was wrong with him. He knew all too well. The slow usage of time. He also knew that it wasn't illness or his body giving up on him that would kill him in the end. Because he just wouldn't allow that. The drink would do it so much faster and more efficiently. And painlessly. Just as it kept him alive right now. And erased all the memories of the past. The so-called golden days. St Paul. New York. The Côte d'Azur. Paris. Hollywood.

He hoped the alcohol wouldn't kill him at least until Scottie graduated from Vassar. He would write to her again tomorrow with advice. And maybe, with a bit more work and attention, he might actually finish the novel by February. It was just that he had lost much time following the heart scare, when he had fainted outside the Schwab drugstore in November. The medics had said it was his heart, but Scott knew. It was the booze clawing away at his insides. But he needed it so much. Couldn't get through the day without it. Ironically, it kept him alive as it killed him.

He looked, and suddenly the whisky bottle was empty. No matter. Tonight they had agreed to attend a movie preview of
This Thing Called Love
at the Pantages Theater. And he would wear his Brooks jacket, the pink shirt and a bow tie. Made him look like a dandy. He smiled.

Stock up on more booze afterward. Yep.

F Scott Fitzgerald, American author, died the next day. He had written the letter to his daughter, Scottie, in the morning, and was lounging in an armchair after lunch, making notes for an article, eating a chocolate bar, when he suddenly stood up, reached for the mantel and collapsed to the floor. A moment later he was dead.

His wife, Zelda, was unable to attend his funeral in Rockville, Maryland, on 27 December, a raw, wintry day, and asked her brother-in-law Newman Smith to attend in her stead. She had not seen Scott for over a year at the time and was living in Montgomery, Alabama, with her mother.

She had recently been released, with a letter that paroled her to her mother, from Highland Hospital – where she was being treated, unsuccessfully, for her precarious mental condition.

It's Always Forever – St Paul, Minnesota, and Princeton, 1920
The novel has sold. She has agreed for them to become engaged. The family wasn't too happy about it, but then Scott knows they never approved of him that much before, even. Irish and from the other side of the tracks and all that.

They are blissfully happy.

He loves the way Zelda kisses him, how her tongue invites his in, twists moistly around his tongue and plays mischievously with it, streams of saliva blending as the kiss lingers on and on and on, and he soon runs out of breath and she releases him and giggles in her customary lovely way.

The feel of her lips against his, the way she sometimes nibbles the lobe of his right ear (which gives him an instant hard-on, which causes him to clumsily shift around on the spot, attempting to conceal from her eyes the unseemly bump in his pants as they linger in each other's arms in the back of his shiny new automobile).

The distinctive smell of her breath, which lingers all around him for hours, nay, days, even after she is back with her family, like a cloud that evokes her flesh, her eyes, her body.

Is this the magic of love?
Scott wonders.

He has longed for this for ages, it seems, and still can't believe it is all coming true after he had given up in despair so many times.

‘What are you doing?' he asks. Zelda is fumbling with his belt.

‘Close your eyes, silly,' she answers.

He does. Obedient.

Jesus Almighty, she is unbuttoning him, and her fingers are delving in his undergarments!

‘I'm reliably informed it's called a blow job,' she says under her breath, lowering her head toward his penis as her nimble fingers roll his foreskin down and his head emerges. To be engulfed by the volcanic crater of her mouth.

Scott keeps his eyes closed.

Zelda! Zelda! He would never have expected this from her. The girl is just fantastic ...

She licks, she sucks, he grows to what he feels might be monstrous proportions, but she is not fazed and continues her tactile inventory of his cock, as that familiar tingle in the pit of his stomach begins, moving fast toward the sac of his balls, and he shudders as his future wife, his dearest Zelda, relentlessly continues her task. Her auburn hair bobs up and down on his lap.

He knows he can't tell her, but this is not the first time a woman has done this to him. No. There was the Belgian whore, the one with the scar on her cheek and the empty breasts hanging too low, back in that brothel in the north of France, during a furlough while he and his battalion mates waited to be assigned to the front. He can't even remember her name now. All he can recall is the way she spat his seed out onto the stone floor after he had come to orgasm, and departed with not even a word to service another American trooper in an adjoining room. They were all too scared of possible diseases in those foreign climes to go the whole hog and actually purchase a full-blown fuck.

Scott grins at the memory. A few days later, the end of the war was declared. He had never been to the front. No glory.

And now Zelda is doing this wonderful thing to him.

Her mouth full, she quietly keeps on sucking him as he feels that unstoppable wave of depraved pleasure course through him. He tries feebly to warn her, to tell her she should pull back, but Zelda will have none of it, and attacks his member with even more relish.

He explodes, feeling the warm surge of his seed burst through and flood Zelda's mouth. The ejaculation seems to go on for ever. And still she will not release him, lapping up the come; he can actually feel her, hear her, swallowing it, and his heart just melts on the spot, waves of mighty emotion swirling inside his head and chest.
God, I love this woman
, he thinks.
I will never love another the way I love Zelda now. And for ever. My intended. My wife. My extraordinary St Paul flapper
.

Soon, it will be time to drive her home to her parents' house.

Scott shivers.

‘I love you so much, Zelda. Words just won't suffice. They can't express even a small part of what I feel for you.'

She looks up at him and smiles quizzically, as if trying to interpret the precise meaning of his words.

She smiles again, as he clumsily stuffs his cock back into his woollen undergarments, slightly ashamed at being openly exposed to her gaze like this, even after what has just happened.

‘It's OK, Scott, darling,' she says. ‘Next week I shall come to Princeton, and stay the night ...'

‘You mean?'

‘I will become your lover. You will undress me and make love to me. Properly.'

Once more his heart just lurches.

Screaming in the Cathedral – New York, 1923
The world is at their feet. The King and Queen of literary New York. Prophets of the Jazz Age. Life has become an endless party. The money goes around. The liquor flows.

There can't be more to life.

Or can there?

They get back to the apartment after a somewhat wild party at the Waldorf for a visiting French soprano. The nanny has already gone to bed. Scottie, whom Zelda insists on calling Pat – they had first named their daughter Patricia, before changing the name to Frances – is sleeping soundly in her nursery overflowing with toys.

‘Darling, I know I've had too many already, but it would be nice if you could make me one final cocktail. Would you?' Scott asks, as they both kick off their shoes in the carpeted lounge of the Park Avenue townhouse they are renting. (The price is exorbitant, but so what?)

‘Make your own.'

She is frowning. Her cheeks are slightly flushed.

‘What's up with you tonight?' he asks, puzzled by her sudden change of mood. Earlier she had been as happy as hell.

She avoids his eyes, looks away.

‘I saw you with her,' she spits out.

Scott is nonplussed.

‘Who? I don't know what you mean, Zelda.'

‘That blonde actress. I saw the way you were talking to her, you know ...'

Scott bursts out with laughter.

‘Jesus, Zelda. I was being sociable. She's the daughter of one of Scribner's biggest shareholders, for heaven's sake!'

‘Her breasts were spilling out of her cleavage, for Christ's sake, she was like an ambulant peep show and you sure enjoyed the landscape of flesh on display, didn't you?'

Breasts are a delicate subject. Since Scottie, hers have somehow shrunk, whereas most women's would have grown a bit after a first child, she had been told.

Scott ignores her comment and walks over to kiss her.

Her breath reeks of gin, but then probably so does his. Wordlessly, he unbuttons her front and ceremoniously unveils her chest. Her nipples harden, lengthen, as he uncovers them. He kisses her there with tenderness, allowing his tongue to linger warmly as he circles the sharp tips of her small breasts. He moves back half a foot and takes them into his hands, cupping them, then looks her in the eye.

‘But yours are the ones I like,' he whispers gently.

And he is not lying. He loves the fact that they are small, that he can hold them both in the hollow of his outstretched hands as if he were weighing them like fruit; he adores the way the nipples lengthen under the warmth of his fingers, or the moistness of his tongue, and their colour reacts by shifting between indescribable shades of pink and light brown.

He enjoys undressing her so, as he does now. One garment at a time until she stands there quite nude in front of him, legs slightly apart for support in her current slightly inebriated state. Her reddish hair, cut short in a mischievous-looking bob according to the day's fashion, the long expanse of white skin, the planes of her flesh and the modest valleys of darker hue between her breasts and in the shadow of her bellybutton. The sturdy Irish legs. The luxuriant growth of hair around her cunt. He closes his eyes a while and smells her, and soon the distinctive odour of her aroused sex reaches him and he feels himself harden.

She lets her hand move down to her cunt and spreads her vagina lips open to his hypnotised gaze. She is wet already.

‘Fuck me, then. Now. Me. Not her,' Zelda demands.

He quickly sheds his evening wear, his movements a tad unsteady.

‘Shall we move to the bedroom?' he asks, as he pulls the shirt above his head and the cufflinks from his left sleeve fall to the wooden floor.

‘No,' she answers, ‘I want to do it here.' She points to the large room and an Afghan carpet spread across the floor between the liquor cabinet and the plush, quilted armchairs.

Scott feels the warmth spread inside him. Ah, my Zelda, always one for the daring and the unexpected ...

He struggles with his belt. When he looks again in her direction, she is kneeling on the russet carpet on all fours, her backside raised in his direction. An obscene position in which he cannot help but see both her apertures almost gaping in readiness.

‘I'll switch the electricity off,' he suggests, as the trousers slide to the floor.

‘No,' Zelda says quickly. ‘I want the light on.'

She is so daring. His cock, quite hard already, gets tangled in the elastic of the underpants as he rushes his movements.

‘Come,' she calls impatiently. ‘I want you to do me this way, like a dog.'

Finally, he is naked, and moving behind her raised rump, falls to his knees. The wooden floor under the carpet feels hard. He can feel her sweating. It's a warm summer evening and the nanny has forgotten to leave any of the apartment windows open before retiring for the night. He realises there's something animal about Zelda's odour tonight.

He looks ahead. Her puckered asshole and its darker concentric rim of flesh looks almost as if it is breathing. He has never before seen her, seen this, so close. He is fascinated by the depravity of the situation.

His eyes move an inch or so down, and as they do so, Zelda's hands thrust backward and spread her cunt lips wide open for him, and Scott sees how wet she is already.