The Mammoth Book of the Best New Erotica Read online

“The first on-premise club which meets in Manhattan – which means the party’s right there . . .” It mentioned facilities like whirlpool baths, disco floor, swing rooms, and free bar and buffet.

  It made me think of restaurant ads for Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s – a meal, some hats, streamers and horns. I imagined people as lonely as forgotten uncles and single people with nowhere else to go buying some holiday companionship for a package price.

  We looked at each other.

  “We could go and just see what’s going on,” Mora said, barely concealing the excitement in her voice.

  “Somehow I don’t think swinging is a spectator sport, love.”

  “Please, Richard: let’s go take a look. I’m really curious.”

  “I don’t know if I can handle it.”

  “We’ll stick together, I promise. Besides, there’ll be a woman for every man there. What if you meet someone?”

  “I don’t know. What if I do?”

  “Well, you won’t turn her down, will you?”

  When we called the number in the ad for information, a woman told us that Plato’s Retreat was open from ten until five in the morning, and directed us to an older loft building below Madison Square Park. We stood on the broad, empty avenue opposite the building, sharing a joint and getting our nerve up. It was Saturday night, after eleven. People were arriving in taxis and entering the building. A limousine hugged the curb.

  Stoned, we took a small, rattling elevator to the fifth floor and stepped off into a spartan reception area crowded with a desk and three pretty, businesslike young women wearing black Plato’s Retreat T-shirts. I handed over twenty-five dollars to the one who winked at me, and we received orange membership cards with the club name on one side and a list of rules on the other.

  1. Only couples or unescorted females allowed in the club.

  2. No single male will be admitted without an escort.

  3. If female of couple leaves the club, the male escort must accompany her.

  4. No drugs or drug abuse on the premises.

  5. Neither part of the couple is prostituting themselves.

  Stepping through black curtains sewn with sequins, we found ourselves at the head of a long, dark corridor where shadowy half-dressed figures stood about passing joints, plastic glasses in their hands. They gave us slow, appraising looks as we brushed past them, and past the voyeurs who crowded the doorways of the swing rooms. By peering over shoulders, I could see a few people rolling about athletically on mattresses. I was surprised by how passionless both participants and onlookers seemed.

  In the main room at the end of the corridor, sixty or seventy fully dressed people crowded around a tiny dance area, watching two women wearing white towels move listlessly with the loud disco music. Others sat on giant inflatable cushions in a mirrored alcove next to a postage-stamp-sized bar, where drinks were being dispensed by a moon-faced black woman in a low-cut silver blouse. The crystal ball revolving slowly above the room threw long shadows across the expectant, anxious faces of the middle class waiting to be set free of their inhibitions.

  “My high-school dances were livelier,” I told Mora.

  “It’s still early. They’ll loosen up, you’ll see.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because it’s my night, and that’s what I want to happen.”

  “See anyone you like?”

  I pointed out a few couples, but she dismissed the men. I was puzzled. I realized that I didn’t know what attracted her to certain men and not to others.

  “How can you know what they’re like if you don’t talk to them?”

  “It’s what they do with their eyes. And their hands. Body language.”

  The men she was attracted to had to radiate a certain energy, an indefinable electricity that was invisible to me. I went to get drinks for us and when I got back to her she had her eye on a tall, lean man with curly hair, a bump on his nose and a prominent Adam’s apple. He was in the middle of a graceful dance with a heavy-breasted brunette whose blissful, lascivious grin betrayed no awareness that the towel she wore was slipping off her hips. His eyes were closed and his mouth was set in a severe pout. He looked like Huntz Hall, lantern-jawed Satch from the Bowery Boys’ movies.

  “Him?” I asked doubtfully.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I’m . . . surprised, that’s all.”

  “Look at the way he dances. The man has energy in his back pockets to spare.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  When the music stopped, he stood there wiping the perspiration from his face with a handkerchief. Mora saw her chance. She squeezed my hand, whispered, “Be back in a minute,” and walked up to him. I watched him lean forward to talk with her over the noise, look in my direction, nod a few times, and then she was back.

  “That’s a smirk on your face,” I said.

  “He turns me on. He says we should go to the locker room and get undressed.”

  “That’s friendly of him. Which one is the woman he came with? The brunette?”

  “He works here.”

  “Oh.”

  “He says once you’ve got your clothes off, you won’t have any trouble picking someone up.”

  She didn’t get it.

  In the locker room, he was waiting for us, talking with a dumpy woman in a Plato’s T-shirt who was in charge of towels and padlocks. We undressed and he introduced himself, blinking myopically. His hand was large and wet.

  “Richard, my name is Stanley. Mora says this is your first time here.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I could tell when you walked in.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re not lookin’ at the women like you’re here for the same thing they’re here for, if you know what I mean.”

  Mora was standing between us, adjusting her towel to cover her breasts. He took her arm, winked at me, and started to leave.

  “How long will you be? I mean, where will we meet?”

  “Don’t wait around,” Stanley advised over his shoulder. “Just say hello. Just be friendly.”

  I was stunned. The dumpy woman looked at me like she knew what I was thinking and handed me a towel to wrap around my waist. “He’s smooth, isn’t he?” she said. The son of a bitch.

  I made my way slowly through the crowd back to the bar, feeling self-conscious about my nakedness, feet avoiding people with shoes on, my chest brushing against fabric, fingers hooked in the towel so it wouldn’t come unknotted. I got another drink at the bar and sat down on a nearby couch.

  I tried to remember what it was like to pick up a woman, how it was done in the movies and on television. I hadn’t tried to pick up anyone since high school. As I remembered, it was no fun.

  If Vy had walked in the room right then, I would have climbed all over her.

  After a while, I found myself staring at a Puerto Rican woman in a clinging black dress who was sitting on the other end of the couch. She had a nice, shy smile and a diamond ring on her finger, and she was watching her husband – a muscular man with more cleavage showing than most of the women in the room – flirt with a blonde dancing in front of him. The blonde was attracting an audience of still-clothed men who stood around, whispering their admiration, but she was playing to the Puerto Rican hunk. She wore a black lace camisole and one thin strap kept falling off her shoulder, baring a small, firm round breast; as she whirled, she flipped up the front of her undergarment, revealing plump boyish buttocks and pale straw pubic hair shaved in the form of a heart.

  Seeing her husband so transfixed, the Puerto Rican woman moved towards me on the couch. I smiled cautiously and looked into eyes as round and bright as new black buttons. Thinking that no one was looking, that her husband was preoccupied with the blonde, I put my hand on her knee. She looked pleased but nervous.

  I was wrong about her husband. The next thing I knew, he was angrily knocking my hand away and hissing at me. Spitting words of warning. I’m sure
I blushed. I muttered my apologies and turned my head back to the dance floor.

  Mora had predicted that people would loosen up as it got later, and they did. Those who’d come to gawk were leaving, clothes were disappearing, and towels were slipping provocatively. I didn’t see Mora anywhere. The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” bounced around the room like a badminton ball on moving jets of water. The smoothness of disco music, its continuous, creamy beat, its plaintive voices echoing forever the rhythmic invitation to dance, pulled me to my feet.

  Mora wasn’t in the swing rooms, so I went to the steamy, wet room where three whirlpool baths churned in semi-darkness. Couples cavorted in the bubbly water. I saw Mora and started to join her. A man next to me came to life.

  “Couples only,” he growled, pointing to a sign above the door that the rising steam had obscured. I noted his thick biceps and stepped back, but a small boy inside me jumped up and down in protest.

  “But I’m half of a couple. The other half is in there, and I want to say hello to her.”

  “Maybe she don’t want to see you right now. Wait till she comes out. Be a gentleman.”

  I took a deep breath and nodded. There was nothing to do but wait for her at the bar. All that mattered was that one of us was having a good time, I told myself. The booze made the lie somewhat more palatable.

  I tried to strike up conversations with various women at the bar, but they could smell my desperation, the way dogs smell fear. Mora emerged at last, wrapped in a white towel. She glowed. Her pupils were bright, and her damp skin was red from the heat of the whirlpool. Her small hands were water-wrinkled.

  “Whew! I am wiped out, Richard.”

  She put her arms around my waist and nuzzled her damp forehead into my shoulder like a puppy.

  “I saw you in there – you were very busy.”

  “I don’t have the words to express it . . . You know how, when you’re a kid, you don’t think you belong anywhere?”

  “I do, sure.”

  “Richard, I felt like I belonged, like there was a secret society of people like me . . .”

  I was upset. “Like a stamp club?”

  She stepped back. “Oh, shit, Richard. If you don’t understand, I don’t know who will.”

  “I’ve been feeling like an outcast from that secret society of yours.”

  “I’m really sorry I was gone so long. Why didn’t you join us?”

  I told her about the bouncer and she frowned.

  “Come on, we’ll go back in. We’ll stay together.”

  Our bare feet squished on the wet carpeting of the whirlpool room. I blinked my eyes to adjust to the darkness. She dropped her towel and lowered herself into the swirling water slowly, until she was covered up to the neck. Hazy amber lights set into the side of the tub made her look silver, like a mermaid shimmering in the warm water. I settled next to her, my genitals floating free. We were alone, although small groups of people nearby were groaning and splashing about enthusiastically.

  She beamed like a kid at Christmas and fondled me, her hand making waves in the water. We kissed long and slowly, and didn’t come up for air until we heard splashing in the water near us.

  “I think we’ve got company,” Mora whispered in my ear, the point of her tongue playing warmly in its whorls.

  When I looked up, I saw the blonde from the dance floor sitting between Stanley’s legs. He grinned at me like a benevolent pasha and winked at Mora. I stared at the blonde’s long slender legs and the heart-shaped pubic hair between them, and she smiled back at me with curiosity in her eyes.

  “People are talking about you two,” Stanley said.

  “Who?” I was sceptical.

  “The regulars. People in the scene.”

  “Maybe they’re talking about Mora, but I’ve been batting zero.”

  “Shyness turns women on. Tracey noticed you.”

  Bullshit she’d noticed me, but I didn’t care – for some reason, Stanley had brought her along, she was sitting not four feet away, and all I had to do was figure out some clever way of crossing the ocean between us.

  She made it easy by speaking first, in a squeaky voice that managed to make Brooklyn sound sexy. “I saw your moustache, and I just adore moustaches, and Stanley said you were probably a really nice guy, so when he asked me to come in here with him for just a minute I decided to forget that it was two in the morning because I like nice people more than I like going home in a cab by myself – don’t you think Plato’s is really neat? I feel right at home . . .”

  Mora and I looked at each other in disbelief, and then turned to study Tracey from top to bottom. It was true: she was indeed one of the most beautiful women either of us had seen outside of the pages of Playboy. The important details were all in place: her firm breasts and plump buttocks belonged in a centrefold, her skin was smooth and soft, and she was without wrinkles or scars. She even wrinkled her nose like a cheerleader.

  I looked her straight in the eyes, all at once sure where I had hesitated before.

  “Tracey,” I said. “You are a goddess. I say that without a doubt in my mind.”

  She cooed. “I knew you were going to be a sweety! I can always pick them out – and nice equals sexy.”

  I felt buoyant. Maybe it was the water, but I think it was relief. I reached for her ankle and she let me hold it while Stanley floated through the water to Mora. Then she took my hand and placed it on her belly. “I want to feel you in my belly, filling me up.”

  I couldn’t believe my luck. Like a kid about to raid the cookie jar, I looked around to see if anyone was watching. Mora was riding Stanley in the water, holding on to his shoulders with her fingertips and looking into his eyes. I touched Tracey’s breasts and felt electricity course through my palm and wrist and up my arm. I thought I heard her purring when I kissed her inner thighs, and then she folded herself into me, hands braced against the edge of the tub, and we became deep sea divers, carrying on like oestrous dolphins.

  It seemed like hours later that we surfaced, only to hear the announcement over the sound system that the club was about to close. Sex had stretched time like a rubber band.

  Close? Tracey and I held on to each other like exhausted boxers against the ropes. Mora and Stanley were out of the water, drying themselves off. I hadn’t had enough – I didn’t care what time it was, I had only just discovered the delights of Plato’s, and I wasn’t ready to go home. Another ten minutes . . .

  I was also water-logged; every cell squished. Tracey gave me a huge grin as she climbed out of the whirlpool, and I managed to plant a kiss on her firm left buttock.

  “It’s four o’clock in the morning, lover,” she said. “Time to go home.”

  I stood up. “Here’s a towel, Richard,” Mora said.

  I took it reluctantly, looking around like a man who’s been rudely awakened from a glorious wet dream. I heard Stanley’s laughter in the background.

  Mora put her arm around me and whispered in my ear, “You see what it’s like now. You see how you can get lost in it. Can you blame me for doing what I can?”

  “Not any more. Not now.” I was sure that I could promise her that understanding.

  Out on the street, we blinked at the dawn light like sleepy moles and walked down Fifth Avenue with our arms around each other. The early morning city was like an open bedroom; we scrutinized the people we passed on the sidewalk as if they were hurrying naked through Plato’s. The world was sexualized.

  “I told you that you would meet someone,” Mora said.

  “If it hadn’t been for you . . .”

  “Stanley gave me his telephone number. He made a big deal of it.”

  “Do they live together?”

  “I think so. Do you want to do it again?”

  “It’s not fair to ask me now,” I told her. “It’s Christmas morning.”

  She squeezed me. “You know what? I’m happy. I think we make a good team.”

  “Sweet Jesus, take pity on our lust.”
<
br />   SIX

  Mora was sitting up to her neck in a tub of hot water and I was scrubbing her back. Her skin was turning red from the water and my fingernails, and the rising steam was curling the yellow wallpaper. Her slippery soft body was light as cork under my hands, the delicate bones of her arms and legs like wires holding her in the water.

  We were talking about Plato’s. She said her mother had always told her that in marriage you can’t have your cake and eat it too. She referred to her mother when she was uncertain; it helped her make up her mind, usually the other way.

  “You can’t have it both ways.”

  I wondered. Most of the people at Plato’s were married, and I supposed they lived tolerable lives together, no different from ours except that they shared a recreational interest – they went to bed with strangers. Sex to them was an end in itself, its own perfect justification.

  “Your mother also said marriage was for ever.”

  “Only bachelors, loose women and divorced people fucked around.”

  “But swingers don’t have to get divorced – they divorce sex from love. The advantages are obvious.”

  She chuckled. “They don’t have to say they’re working late.”

  “Or rent motel rooms.”

  “And they can still file joint returns.”

  I lifted the damp hair from the back of her neck and kissed the hollow there – it always gave her goose pimples. “They don’t have to tell lies, but they must get jealous sometimes, like everyone else,” I whispered.

  “That tickles!”

  We messed around until everything got slippery. A little later, the phone rang in the bedroom. It was Stanley, inviting us to a private party at his place in New Jersey. Mora was tentative when she talked with him, but I knew she wanted to go. So did I.

  Stanley lived in one of those high-rise towers on the bluffs in New Jersey, ten minutes by taxi on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel. It was an evening in late November, and there was a promise of snow in the air. A uniformed doorman checked off our names against a typed guest list. He was businesslike, but his eyes lingered on Mora’s breasts. He knew what we were up to.

  Tracey opened the door and squealed happily at the sight of us. Her black silk blouse gaped open and, when she kissed me on the cheek, my hand slipped inside of its own accord.