The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Maxim Jakubowski Read online

  Maxim Jakubowski is a London-based novelist and editor. He was born in the UK and educated in France. Following a career in book publishing, he opened the world-famous Murder One bookshop in London. He now writes full time. He has edited over twenty bestselling erotic anthologies and books on erotic photography, as well as many acclaimed crime collections. His novels include It’s You That I Want to Kiss, Because She Thought She Loved Me and On Tenderness Express, all three recently collected and reprinted in the USA as Skin in Darkness. Other books include Life in the World of Women, The State of Montana, Kiss Me Sadly, Confessions of a Romantic Pornographer, I Was Waiting For You and, recently, Ekaterina and the Night. In 2006 he published American Casanova, a major erotic novel which he edited and on which fifteen of the top erotic writers in the world have collaborated, and his collected erotic short stories as Fools For Lust. He compiles two annual acclaimed series for the Mammoth list: Best New Erotica and Best British Crime. He is a winner of the Anthony and the Karel Awards, a frequent TV and radio broadcaster, a past crime columnist for the Guardian newspaper and Literary Director of London’s Crime Scene Festival.

  Mammoth Books present

  Hotel Room Fuck

  The Best of Maxim Jakubowski: Six Erotic Stories

  Edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012

  Copyright © Maxim Jakubowski, 2012

  The right of Maxim Jakubowski to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  EISBN: 978-1-47210-054-2

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  The K. C. Suite

  A Map of the Pain

  Hotel Room Fuck

  Bottomless on Bourbon

  Edward Hopper Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

  The Rise and Fall of the Burlesque Empire

  Acknowledgements

  “The K. C. Suite” © Maxim Jakubowski, 1990 and 1994. (“Rite of Seduction” first published in a different form in New Crimes 2). First published in The Mammoth Book of Erotica, edited by Maxim Jakubowski (Robinson, 1994). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Map of the Pain” © Maxim Jakubowski, 1996. First published in Life in the World of Women. Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of International Erotica, edited by Maxim Jakubowski (Robinson, 1996), by permission of the author.

  “Hotel Room Fuck” © Maxim Jakubowski, 2000. First published in The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels, edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Michael Hemmingson (Robinson, 2000). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Bottomless on Bourbon” © Maxim Jakubowski, 2000. First published in Desires, edited by Adrienne Benedicks and Shivaji Sengupta. Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, edited by Maxim Jakubowski (Robinson, 2001) and The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Erotica, edited by Maxim Jakubowski (Robinson, 2012), by permission of the author.

  “Edward Hopper Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” © Maxim Jakubowski, 2005. First published in Fools for Lust. Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 6, edited by Maxim Jakubowski (Robinson, 2007), by permission of the author.

  “The Rise and Fall of the Burlesque Empire” © Maxim Jakubowski, 2008. First published in Ultimate Burlesque, edited by Emily Dubberley and Alyson Fixter. Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 9, edited by Maxim Jakubowski (Robinson, 2010), by permission of the author.

  THE K.C. SUITE

  Maxim Jakubowski

  My original sin was to need you who could live without me . . . I resisted as best I could, not knowing that the struggles of the soul are intended to be lost.

  Marie-Victoire Rouillier

  I SING THE SACRED. I sing the bodies, I sing the sex, the union between man and woman, the ever so shocking intimacy of bodies moving towards each other, of copulation, of fornication, on beds of starched linen sheets, on floors of unclean carpet squares, on rickety sofas, in bath tubs under the drip of a leaking shower head, in adulterous beds where the smell of deceived partners still lingers on, in public places, in private places. I sing the fucking, the thrusting, the sighs, the pain and the pleasure.

  I sing what is no longer. I mourn what we once were and if you say I am betraying you thus, I say you are wrong. It might be a wake, but it is also a celebration. Of the way our naked flesh met and connected and of a joy supreme.

  This is what happened.

  This is a crime story I wrote and published somewhere. At one stage I thought it might actually become the opening chapter for a novel I was mentally toying with, about violence and desire along the American highways and a desperate race for love and money moving from Florida to Seattle. I read it in public at some festival. She was in the audience. As I hesitantly lingered over the particularly sexual elements, aware that my tale was so much more personal and explicit than the preceding stories by my fellow authors, my eyes suddenly connected with hers. She was sitting in a middle row. For weeks afterwards, I would wrack my brain to try and recall the actual colour of her eyes, with no success. I would find out later, of course. I was sitting with three others on a slightly elevated platform, two microphones shared between the four of us, a carafe of water and glasses, green baize covering the table on which our books were scattered. I wonder what I must have looked like to her. I was wearing a black Wranglers shirt with metallic poppers, open at the collar, and my usual black Farah trousers. That shirt still is a favourite of mine, I enjoy the way the cuffs sport three poppers instead of the traditional lone button most shirts have. I don’t remember what she wore. At the end of the reading, one or two people came over with questions. I lost sight of her as the audience trouped out of the large room.

  This is the story I read that day. It was raining outside, pouring down with rage. The woman in the story was a composite of so many I had known and, in fact, was even more a creature of my imagination. When I wrote the tale, I had not yet visited Miami.

  Rite of Seduction

  “Kill me,” she had asked.

  So I had.

  It seemed the only thing to do. I can’t pretend I was confused, I wasn’t. I knew exactly what I was doing. I remember the night still: there was a full moon over Miami Beach, the ocean lapped the shore quietly and the cheap motel sported some odd Spanish name that somehow reminded me of a bad Elvis Presley song. It was fast, reasonably painless. The look in her eyes. Then she died.

  She was a $100 a night starlet in a $2.5 million B-movie. I’d been hanging round the studios for a week or so. I had an assignment to cover the making of a big project financed by Spielberg’s Amblin’ company for one of his young hot-shot screenwriter-turned-directors. My int
erviews were in the can, my notepad full of okay anecdotes and I was ready for the road home and a first draft on the laptop. That evening, I’d walked into this small projection room towards the back of the studio lot. Some indie outfit was screening its dailies. The assistant director had shared reviewing chores with me on a now defunct magazine some years back, and hearing I was schmoozing around town had suggested we have a drink together for old time’s sake after the screening.

  It was hot and sticky in the projection room. The conditioning had a bad case of terminal cough and it smelled inside there of dry sweat, stale cigarettes and dime store perfume.

  On the screen, following disjointed shots that a clever editor would later knit into the semblance of a car chase with explosions and bruised metal galore, came take after take of a nude shower scene and graphic enactment of a rape. Shot with three different cameras, one hand-held, the sequence repeated and repeated punctuated by clapperboards snapping, seen from various angles, at times literally pornographic as the camera lingered on details of the girl’s body, the ambiguous smile on her lips as some Latin American-looking hood first slapped her before throwing her onto the bed, her breast tips stiffening as both naked bodies made contact, a fleeting view of her slightly open pubes as the hand-held camera moved to a better vantage position, a candid shot which would no doubt land on the proverbial cutting-room floor. It was all badly filmed, but these soundless, imperfect images had an unsettling effect on me. In the smokey darkness, I could feel the dryness in my throat and the beginning of an involuntary erection.

  For the other spectators in the uncomfortable room, it was nothing new or anything wild, just a strip of unformed celluloid that would fit into a larger visual puzzle once it had been cleaned up, aseptised. Most of them would have been present at the shooting anyway and this was just a bunch of flickering secondhand thrills.

  The screen went dark as the projectionist threaded some new footage into the system. A bar scene with different protagonists I’d never seen before. The knot in my throat was beginning to hurt. I just had to get out of this room, hankered for a cold drink.

  “I need some fresh air,” I whispered to my pal sitting in the next row. “I’ll see you outside later.”

  As I rose from my seat, I noticed a woman in the back row of the small audience also heading for the exit.

  Once in the open air, the cold was like a slap in the face following the suffocating atmosphere of the screening room. The woman who had preceded me out was standing with her back against the building’s wall, a long filterless cigarette hanging from her lips.

  “Do you have a light?”

  It didn’t take me long to recognize her. Clothing was no disguise. It was that ambiguous smile, part come-hither invitation, part crooked rictus, half small girl ingenue and half downtown hooker.

  “Sorry, I don’t smoke. But I badly need a drink of some sorts. There’s a bar around the block, you can light up there.”

  She appeared so much smaller than on the screen, but this was not unfamiliar. I introduced myself. Even minor film journalists might prove useful to a career girl, she must have initially thought, and followed me across the lot.

  The bar was called something like The Mark of God, or some other patently stupid or irrelevant name. It just sticks in my memory somehow. The lighting inside was gentle and soothing. I had my customary cola, no ice; she had a vodka and orange.

  “Quite a sequence, hey?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It must feel odd,” I said, “to see yourself up there so big, so . . . so . . .”

  “Nude, you mean, naked?”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s what I was trying to say,” I answered.

  She smiled gently. I wasn’t blushing, but neither did I feel altogether comfortable. After all, I had already seen so much of her, her exposed flesh, her concealed self.

  “How does it feel, to have to do a nude scene for the cameras?” I asked, slipping into journo mode, as she sipped her alcohol in the non-descript, almost empty bar.

  “Well, you feel in a way violated, there are all these people around. In a way, it all becomes a bit impersonal, but you know what, it’s also something of a turn-on. Gives you power over all these men. They can look but they sure can’t touch.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  That first night, we returned to my hotel room.

  As I undressed her in the full, bright light I finally witnessed the true colours of her body. Seeing her on a cinema screen being touched by another man was one thing, and was quite enough to give me a hard on, but here, smaller, open to nobody but me, she was something else. Her skin felt softer than the skin of any woman I had been with before. For all that, she was hard and firm, her breasts pointing gently upwards, stiffening as my fingers began to skim their tips, her buttocks clenched together as I lowered her onto the bed.

  Inside her, it was like fire, all-consuming heat that reached so deep, so far. It wasn’t like love, it was desperation and we merged like strangers, uncomprehending witnesses to the mad urges of our bodies.

  On the second night we went to her room in another mediocre beach motel with would-be art nouveau trimmings and a crumbling balcony overlooking the ocean.

  This time I undressed her slowly, mentally filming every square inch of her flesh for memory everlasting. The curve of her neck, the almost invisible dimple in her chin, the forgotten trace of a scar on her forehead hidden by a lock of stray hair, the mole at the top of her back, the way her pubic hair curled and curled. We never did say much. We didn’t really have that much to say to each other when we were not in bed. We soon realized we were creatures of lust and little else mattered.

  For I think an hour I kissed, caressed, gently bit, made studied foreplay with her until she could stand it no longer and screamed out:

  “Enough, I want you inside me now,” as she wrapped her hand around my cock.

  Then, “It feels so big, I don’t know how it’s going to fit,” and guided me in.

  On the third day, we rented a room for the night in a better class of hotel, up north on Collins Avenue, towards the Aventura Mall. At the other end of the room, facing the bed, was a large circular mirror. She insisted I take her from behind and watched attentively in the mirror, as I laboured in her rear, thrusting for her appreciation and my own pleasure and hers, fascinated by the look on her face as sweat dripped from her forehead over our private cinema screen.

  It was simple fucking, it wasn’t love by any means. But I couldn’t escape, all of me just wanted more. I should have returned to the magazine and the city by now, but she was here for a further week, with one final sequence, a death scene to be shot, where the script dictated she meet her fate at the hands of some sordid Mexican pimp (I did say it was a B-movie, didn’t I?).

  “I’m so raw.”

  “Me too, but it feels good.”

  “Look at me down there, I’m all red.”

  I kissed her open wound, savouring the strong taste and pungent smell of her insides.

  “Your curls are too long,” jokingly.

  “So trim me, shave me.”

  I did, and later that day when I made love to her for the first time in her utterly nude incarnation, she got so wet and excited that she lost all control and peed all over the sheets.

  From that moment onwards, we both knew we were going too far but there was nothing to hold us back. The moments of desire when our energy returned and we could make love again were the only thing we could look forward to.

  It was summer and I suppose we weren’t that young any more. You know how sometimes you’re doing something you shouldn’t and you just can’t help it, you’re just a spectator watching yourself at play and wrong. Ah, summer . . . The sun comes out at last and women, girls, now unencumbered of their thick sweaters, long skirts, dresses and their heavy coats, move like a lightweight symphony in the streets outside, the shape of their bodies so sweetly visible like never before, and you want them all.
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  Summer and you think: this is wonderful, this is terrible. But the fear is there lurking deep inside, telling you it’s the last time something this special is going to happen to me, and I want it to last forever, even if there is pain and heartbreak at the end of the road. Live now, pay later. Seize the bloody fucking day.

  Summer and she’s more than a fantasy, a pornographic centerfold dream. You hold her breasts in a vice, twist her nipples counter-clockwise until you think she will complain of pain, but she smiles and says nothing. You make love in the bath, and you slide in and out of her like in an ocean. You fantasize about making love in a public place. You eat in a fancy restaurant and she is deliberately wearing no underwear, and only your eyes, silent accomplices, know.

  Summer never lasts forever.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It hurts like hell when I go to the bathroom. We’ve been making love too much, my cystitis is playing up.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Yeah, a lot of us girls suffer from it, but it’s been a long time, I must say. Don’t worry, I’ve got some pills for it. There is a side-effect, though, you know.”

  “What?”

  “For a few days, whenever I go to the bathroom, I’ll be pissing all blue . . .”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just taking the belt from your pants.”

  Afternoon, the sun is setting outside the window, the curtain drapes fluttering in the air, somewhere in the distance, I imagined, the Cuban coast. A tropical fantasy.

  She is standing by the bed, threading the belt out of his beige slacks, her lips wet, her short, brownish hair tousled the way he loves it dearly. She is wearing a black bra, cut low, upholding her long, dark nipples. Mental photographs. They’ve already made love once today, both sniffing a capsule of amyl nitrate, their bodies bucking like wild horses when the chemical rush reaches their brain. Afterwards, she had washed her hair, and returned to the room with a white towel wrapped around her head, otherwise nude. He had been lying on the bed, resting, daydreaming, and he had looked at her moving nonchalantly through the room, his gaze fixed on her lower stomach, the lips of her shaven sex, pink and bruised like the petals of some exotic flower.