The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels Read online

  The Mammoth Book of

  SHORT EROTIC NOVELS

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  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Robinson Publishing 2000

  Collection copyright © Maxim Jakubowski

  and Michael Hemmingson 2000

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, 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.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library.

  UK ISBN 978-1-84119-078-5

  eISBN 978-1-78033-352-6

  13 15 17 19 20 18 16 14 12

  First published in the United States in 2000 by Carroll & Graf Publishers

  This edition published in 2007 by Running Press Book Publishers

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file

  US ISBN: 978-0-7867-0713-3

  Running Press Book Publishers

  2300 Chestnut Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19103-4371

  Visit us on the web!

  www.runningpress.com

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Maxim Jakubowski & Michael Hemmingson

  NIGHT MOVES

  Michael Perkins

  HOTEL ROOM FUCK

  Maxim Jakubowski

  SPANKING THE MAID

  Robert Coover

  LAIR OF THE RED WITCH

  O’Neil De Noux

  THE BANISHING

  Mark Ramsden

  DE SADE’S LAST STAND

  William T. Vollmann

  SPEAKING PARTS

  M. Christian

  THE COMFORT OF WOMEN

  Michael Hemmingson

  THIEF OF NAMES

  Lucy Taylor

  THE DARKLING BEETLES

  Gene Santagada

  SCRATCH

  Nikki Dillon

  THE EMPEROR OF NIGHT

  Marilyn Jaye-Lewis

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NIGHT MOVES by Michael Perkins, copyright © 2000 by Michael Perkins. Printed by permission of the author.

  HOTEL ROOM FUCK by Maxim Jakubowski, copyright © 2000 by Maxim Jakubowski. Printed by permission of the author.

  SPANKING THE MAID by Robert Coover, copyright © 1982 by Robert Coover. Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic and the author’s agent, George Borchardt, Inc.

  LAIR OF THE RED WITCH by O’Neil De Noux, copyright © 2000 by O’Neil De Noux. Printed by permission of the author.

  DE SADE’S LAST STAND by William T. Vollmann, copyright © 1992 by William T. Vollmann. Reprinted by permission of the author and Grove/Atlantic. Originally appeared in Esquire, an abbreviated version of ‘More Benadryl, Whined the Journalist’ from The Butterfly Stories.

  SPEAKING PARTS by M. Christian, copyright © 2000 by M. Christian. Printed by permission of the author.

  THE COMFORT OF WOMEN by Michael Hemmingson, copyright © 2000 by Michael Hemmingson. Printed by permission of the author.

  THIEF OF NAMES by Lucy Taylor, copyright © 2000 by Lucy Taylor. Printed by permission of the author.

  THE DARKLING BEETLES by Gene Santagada, copyright © 2000 by Gene Santagada. Printed by permission of the author.

  SCRATCH by Nikki Dillon, copyright © 2000 by Nikki Dillon. Printed by permission of the author.

  THE EMPEROR OF NIGHT by Marilyn Jaye-Lewis, copyright © 2000 by Marilyn Jaye-Lewis. Printed by permission of the author.

  INTRODUCTION

  The short novel, the novella, the long story – call it what you will – is a tricky art form, especially for writers who write for publication, rather than self-esteem. While this literary form is considered (especially in mainland Europe) just that – an art form to be mastered – the situation in Britain and America, where commercial considerations dictate much of what is published, is more problematic.

  Not long enough for solo book publication, too long for inclusion in magazines or anthologies: these are some of the obstacles the novella finds in its way.

  However, the short novel is also the perfect form for literary erotica, allowing writers to develop their characters to greater depth beyond the gymnastics or hydraulics of the sexual act in all its myriad varieties. Both the editors of this anthology modestly claim to have, in the past, written some of their best erotic work at such length and this has been recognized by critics. We proudly refer you to MJ’s “The Map of the Pain” or “The State of Montana” or MH’s “The Naughty Yard” or “The Dress”, as satisfying examples (available in previous Mammoth Books of Erotica anthologies or in single volumes).

  The contributions we have had from some of the best writers of e
rotica currently practising the art, which we include in the present volume, prove the point: the reader isn’t faced with a whole book of sensual forays, yet the reader also stays around longer, gets more involved, than they would with just a few pages of titillating prose and a “tableau vivant” in the form of a story.

  We are confident that, once again in this series, you will be aroused, piqued, fascinated – hypnotized, even – by the halls of sexual mirrors our writers have conjured here. Some stories sound disturbingly autobiographical; others are fantastical; some are meditative; others full of action.

  Putting this anthology together, with e-mail messages spanning the globe, was a joy and, at times, a pain, as so few writers could be included without fear of turning this mammoth into an unwieldy and too heavy and expensive volume, and many a good story could not be used. It’s all part of the process. But, at the end of the day, this is a damn good book of erotic literature – there’s definitely some sexy, thoughtful, funny and sad stuff going on in these pages: all the complexities and wonders of human sexuality. So, buy copies for friends, give them out as gifts, slip them mysteriously under the bed or on the bookshelves of those you are feeling rather amorous about . . .

  Maxim Jakubowski & Michael Hemmingson,

  London & San Diego, 1999

  NIGHT MOVES

  Michael Perkins

  “Swing: to shift or fluctuate from one condition, form, position, or object of attention or favor to another.”

  Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary

  Midnight in the Garden

  Bruise on her breast,

  not my fingertips,

  Gloss on her lips,

  not licked from me.

  Hair a tangled halo

  I hadn’t mussed,

  Eyes swollen and wanton,

  not turned my way,

  Her smell of lust

  stronger than

  sharpest memory;

  I could not swallow,

  I could barely see.

  This was what it meant:

  This was being free.

  Part One

  East Hampton, 1976

  ONE

  Mora and I had been in East Hampton for two days waiting for the sun to come out when we ran into Charles and Vy. It was July, the Bicentennial Summer, and we were on our first vacation as man and wife. We’d accepted a friend’s invitation to spend a few days at his beach house, but the afternoon we arrived the rains came, and lasted through the following day. We were grumpy stuck inside. We wanted to lie naked in the sun.

  The next morning, the sun made its appearance, and it was windy when we walked to the beach. We had the ocean to ourselves, but it was too rough to go in. Empty blue sky, empty white beach, empty green ocean. The freckled, lively children further down the beach who were our only neighbors had to be content with building sandcastles. Mora read a novel and wrote in her journal, frowning and chewing her lip. It was her way of arguing with me without saying anything, and also of arguing with herself instead of with me. I shrugged at her silence and went for a long run on the wet hard sand, where high rolling breakers left thick clumps of seaweed, but I couldn’t outrace my frustration.

  By evening, we were speaking only when spoken to and being scrupulously polite with each other. We brooded in marital silence over cold gin at Peaches, a restaurant in Bridgehampton where summer people went that year for a hamburger or a salad before rushing off to the parties that seem to run around the clock, summer weekends on the South Fork. When there was a breeze from the ocean, the leaves of the giant maples on the sidewalk outside scratched softly at the window screens. On each small round table a slender mirrored vase held a single rose. It should have been romantic; couples all around us thought it was.

  I reached for her hand and she put it quickly in her lap.

  “What the hell is wrong with us?”

  She sighed and I knew she was grateful that I’d spoken first. The answer was sitting on her tongue. “It’s marriage. Holy Wedlock.”

  “You want to expand on that?”

  “I don’t have to. We both know it’s that – why it’s that.”

  So we did. Jealousy. Possessiveness. Insecurity. Fights, screaming, threats, feeling trapped. And keeping score – that was the worst. That computerized reference file constantly added to of insult and injury, a never-to-be-erased tape of gritty misery.

  “OK. What do we do now? Throw in the towel because the honeymoon isn’t working out?”

  “I don’t know, Richard. I just think being unhappy is a waste of time.”

  “Agreed.”

  We stared at each other. Neither of us really wanted to be married. Not really. We were romantics, we weren’t interested in snug harbors – when we spoke of love, we meant passion. Rub us together and you got fire.

  From the time I first saw Mora I was under a spell. I know some magic was involved, because I was on the defensive after the break-up of a relationship I’d taken more seriously than I should have. The home truths I’d learned about my needs were so lacerating, I vowed eternal celibacy.

  For six months I’d been living like a monk in a basement sublet in Brooklyn Heights. It had a single bed I used and a kitchen I didn’t, and little else except for a color television set and a well-equipped darkroom. No pictures on the walls, no plants to be watered, no cats to wrap themselves around my ankles when I came back late from my studio on West 17th Street.

  It was a low, unhappy period in my life. I told myself I’d snap out of my funk any day, but the truth was I was drifting, getting by in a low key. I had let being in love become a way of defining myself. Alone, I didn’t know who I was.

  Mora came along just when I was beginning to spend so much time in Village bars that the bartenders knew my name, occupation, and marital status. One of them was an actor I had used as a model. He knew a woman who needed some pictures.

  “She comes in here all the time. Lives just around the block. She’s real intense.”

  “You don’t understand. I take pictures of products, not egos. I don’t do portfolio glossies and I don’t want to meet any women.”

  It was noisy in the bar, right before dinner. Maybe he didn’t hear me.

  “She’s a lot of fun. Just let me tell her you’ll do it.”

  A few days later she showed up at my studio. I was fussing with lights around an ornate, old-fashioned bathtub with claw feet. Later in the day, the agency that had had it delivered to me would come to fill it with towels – I did catalogs, too.

  I earn a living with a 35 millimeter camera because when I was a boy I picked up a Brownie for the first time and discovered my third eye. I have a gift for seeing with the camera lens what the naked eye misses, moments when formlessness becomes form. When Mora walked through the door, it was one of those moments.

  I stared. She stared back. She was so small I could have fitted her in a large camera bag. The top of her head came to the middle of my chest. Her curly hair was short but not mannishly cut, a chestnut brown that smelled like oranges.

  Her white skirt showed off her slender legs, and she had thrown a linen jacket over her thin shoulders. She wore a figa – a small, fist-shaped Brazilian good luck charm – on a gold chain around her throat, but no earrings, no bracelets: only a trace of lip gloss. Her tan was so deep, she looked like she’d just stepped off a plane from someplace south.

  I looked away first, after seeing the mischief in her calm green eyes. “Ever modeled before?”

  She shook her head. “Only for my boyfriend’s Polaroid, but the pictures always came out blurry – you know how those things go. He found it hard to concentrate.” She suppressed a smirk.

  “You don’t say.”

  We were grinning at each other. Hers was impish, provocative. “Have you acted before?”

  “Never, if you don’t count Gilbert and Sullivan in grade school. But I’ve tried everything else and all my friends are in theater this year, so I thought, why not?”

  Her self
-confidence was dazzling. It came out in the standard portrait shots I did of her. Her dark features were wonderfully mobile, and she kept that glint in her eye. After the shooting, I cancelled my appointment with the bath towel people and took Mora to dinner.

  And so we met. And we made love. She was just as bold in bed as she was before the camera, very passionate and open; her energy was astonishing. A month later, I left Brooklyn and moved into her second floor apartment on Cornelia Street. Things happened fast around Mora.

  We lived together for a year, more happily than I’d thought possible. Business went so well in the studio, I hired a part-time assistant; Mora didn’t have to work because her father owned a shopping mall and sent her a monthly allowance. When she decided she had no acting talent, she got into politics for a while, and then she just started spending all her time at home cooking exotic meals; she told her friends she was too happy to concentrate on anything more.

  What happened was that we got cocky. All the traditional signals had gone off at the right times, and we started thinking we were different, that we could nail our feelings to the wall where they would never change. One thing led to another and, before we knew it, we were standing in City Hall, saying our vows. Afterwards, we threw a party for our friends, and then when the shock wore off and we realized what we’d done, we stayed drunk for two days and had a terrific fight so we could squeeze the last ounce of passion out of making up.

  Why did we do it? Talk to anyone: marriage is like getting a diploma in living as an adult. The license certifies a certain wilful madness for, as we found out, everyone lies about marriage, especially its kinkier aspects: the manacles of words at each wrist and ankle, the eager vows that become expectations. The endless expectations.

  We were on our third round of drinks and Mora was snapping her foot back and forth restlessly and staring off into space. I looked around for a waiter so we could order dinner, when I saw Charles Venturi sit down at a table near us. He was the last person I expected to see. He’d been off in Europe for years – since the early seventies, when we had served time together on the same slick magazines. We were never close, but I had sought him out and spent time with him because he fascinated me.