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

– Always?

  – Yes.

  – How bizarre. I know I have no right to say so, but it’s a strange comment on the state of your marriage.

  – Maybe. Anyway, I’ve gone on the pill now.

  – And how have you explained such a momentous change to him?

  – Well, buying the new house. It’s going to be expensive, the new mortgage. He understands. Couldn’t afford a kid right now. He knows I don’t really want children.

  – But does he?

  – Yes, he does.

  – I was still a virgin when I went to Cambridge. I’d misbehaved quite a bit before, but somehow I never did do it.

  – And when was the first time?

  – At University, at a party. This guy suggested we go together, and I decided, why not, and we just did. It was nothing special.

  – And afterwards?

  – I caught up for lost time. You know how it can be when you’re a student, you’re away from home for the first time. Don’t think I was promiscuous, I wasn’t really. There were only three other guys. And some of them didn’t really last long. I met my husband in my second year. He was then going out with a friend of mine, and I was with another guy. But all our friends sort of said we looked good together. So it happened. There, you’re only my fifth lover.

  – I’m madly jealous of every man who touched you then, you know.

  – I miss you awfully. So, anything interesting at the office today?

  – They’ve finally agreed I could make an offer for that novel I was telling you about. I’m really excited. It won’t be much money, but I hope the author accepts it. The book still needs some work done to it, but I think he will be willing to listen to my suggestions. He sounds a bit weird, but the novel is really good.

  – I miss you. I thought about you all weekend, tried to imagine what you were cooking, when you were doing your shopping at Sainsbury. I can’t seem to get you out of my mind.

  – I know, I know.

  – At one stage, I wanted to talk to you so bad, I even phoned.

  – You didn’t!

  – Yes. He picked up, so I slipped on a Liverpudlian accent, and said ‘Sorry, wrong number, mate’.

  – That was you . . . He was fuming. He hates being called ‘mate’.

  – It’s unfair. You always undress me first. Why can’t it be the other way around?

  – Sure.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  – There you are. This is me. Look at me. I’m so much older than you. I’m a bit overweight. There’s more and more grey in my hair and I can never comb it properly. And this is you, standing there, so beautiful. Shit, what do you see in me?

  – I like your hair. The curls on your chest, it’s wonderful.

  – Here, put your hand on my cock. See how you make it grow so effortlessly. Just being with you gives me a hard on. I am in awe of you, of your nudity. Yes, squeeze it more. Yes.

  – I like it when you give me orders. You can be so authoritative.

  – It’s the old managing director in me . . .

  – The other night in bed, next to him, I just kept on tossing and turning so much. I had to get up and go to the other room to read. It was an old book I’d already read; I couldn’t really concentrate. Dickens or Jane Austen, I think. My body ached for you so much, even though we had only parted a few hours before. Why is it so strong? I feel I just want to be consumed by you, eaten alive.

  – I feel the same. I just hate the idea that ten miles away, some nights, he might be caressing you, making love to you, it almost makes me feel sick. That he invades you where the imprint of my cock still lingers inside you.

  –I just can’t make love to him after the time I spend with you. I’m not that wicked. Most times, by the time I get home, he’s already sleeping.

  – Jesus, I don’t know how you do it. You’re the best lover I’ve ever had.

  – You’re not just saying that, are you, because we’re together right now? It’s ever so dangerous. It’s the sort of thing that’s likely to stay in a man’s mind forever. I’m touched. Deeply.

  – No, of course not. You’re also my first circumcised penis.

  – Really?

  – And you have so much hair on your chest.

  – Yes, a proper monkey, that’s me.

  — At the conference, you know I was sitting in the lobby on that Sunday morning hoping you would come across and see me. It was something about you. The way you read, the way you looked.

  – Premeditation, hey?

  – He hates it when I clip my fingernails in the bath. I don’t know why, it’s just so natural. Why should it bother him.

  – I agree.

  – He’s so involved with his new job. He takes me for granted. He’s a few years younger than me, and some times I feel he just sees me as a convenient substitute for his mother.

  – And the sex?

  – It’s okay, I suppose. Not like in the early days of when we were together at Cambridge. We lived together for some time before we married. We almost didn’t. We had some terrible rows. I have such a temper. I even throw things. See, you don’t really know me.

  – I wouldn’t mind you throwing things at me, if it was a condition of living with you.

  – Oh, it was nothing hard, just an old ham and tomato sandwich.

  – Beware the mad sandwich hurler!

  – We finally went to see The Piano yesterday night. It was good, as you said. There was a difficult moment. He remarked on the fact that we had never been to this particular West End cinema before, and I stupidly blurted out that I had, forgetting briefly it was with you. But he didn’t make anything of it.

  – Yeah, London’s a dangerous city. Soon, too many bars, restaurants and places will be part of our own private geography. We have to keep both worlds apart.

  – The whites of your eyes are so . . . white when you’re above me, making love to me.

  – They’re nothing special, really.

  – No, they are so white. Oh, look at the time, I have to go.

  – Do you really want to?

  – No. Some evenings, I just want to stay here in this office forever, with the candle light flickering over us. But I can’t.

  – Stay. I will become hard again and make love to you in every conceivable pornographic position, missionary, rear, sideways, upside down, make you scream, groan, cry. Stay a little bit longer. God, the tenderness is swelling inside of me and I feel I’m like some bomb, ticking away, that I desire and need you so.

  – Why does lust make us feel that way?

  – Because it was meant to be, I suppose.

  – Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, I could let you do absolutely anything to me. I trust you implicitly. It’s crazy.

  – Would you let me put my fingers around your neck and squeeze gently until the pain comes? Would you let me distend the rim of your arsehole, making it more pliant so that I might insert myself there and fill you, mark you forever in that forbidden place? Look at my finger, you’re already so wet down there. Lick it. See how I dip my finger in cunt and arse and sip your juices so naturally, so fragrant, my mistress, my lover.

  – Yes, my lover.

  – Come with me to New York. I want you for a whole week. I want to spend whole nights fucking you, worshipping you in strange hotel rooms. I want to wake up beside you, I want to smell your breath in the morning when you awake, I want to see your tired cheeks without make-up and the wrinkles of our lovemaking carved like a tattoo under the surface of your skin, all over your body.

  – You know I can’t. How would I explain it? Anyway, you know I no longer have any holidays left at the office.

  – I’m sure those are not love bites. I’m always very careful.

  – Let me see in the mirror. No, it’s just orgasmic flush.

  – It’s all over your neck and the top of your chest. What’s he going to say when you get home?

  – Don’t worry, it will fade away .
. .

  – I know, I know.

  A LONG LETTER TO K.

  (with apologies to Leonard Cohen)

  I obsess over you, K. Here I am at my typewriter, unshaven for the last four days, all grey sharp stubble, probably more than ever looking my age, in what has now become my room, surrounded by the paraphernalia of my life, the piles of books, countless magazines, record albums and CDs, the mattress against the back wall, the reality of what is left of me after your passage through my days. Outside the window, a thin layer of frost whitens the green manicured surface of the lawn, and the bare winter branches of the trees. I wonder what you are doing right now. Whether you are wearing your long skirt of many colours which appeared so transparent with the sun in your back that morning I picked you up in Camden Town, outlining the dazzling shape of your legs, rising from small black boots all the way up to the volcano of your crotch. What perfume you are wearing; maybe one from the amusing assortment of small fancy flasks I’d bought in duty-free at Kennedy. When was the last time you even thought of me, of our so few hours together? If you did actually get around to buying that CD of Nanci Griffiths’ or finally got a raise at your job for the New Year. A trade magazine revealed how much your boss was earning; yes, you certainly deserved a better salary, considering. I miss the sound of your voice, the drawn out “Helloooo” when you pick up the phone and I daily resist the temptation to dial your number. The last time we did speak, you almost suggested that I needed psychiatric assistance and why did I have this compulsion to write you sordid letters? I had no pat answer to give you. And that my lines, my sad pleas caused you distress and could I not do the decent thing and just fade away and let you get on with your life? Understand me, I cannot. I have lost you, I know, but you will not in your anger deny me the memories, the tenderness of what we fleetingly possessed before events and your sense of guilt and craving for respectability bid you throw it all away, handed as you were a perfect excuse. You see, I am not a respectable person; I am unbearably selfish. Well, what would you expect of a romantic pornographer, you of all women with your cold heart of glass and your passion for independence, secure in the knowledge of your beauty and your damning pride. But I am a good person, I assure you. You made me that way. Earlier today, I was browsing through a collection of photographs with a nice introduction by Jayne Anne Phillips, The Last Days Of Summer. Full of images of naked teenagers on far beaches, their bodies full of an expression of innocence not lost by knowledge, luxuriating in textures of sand, flesh, cloth, tide pools and gentle waves. So call me a paedophile, then. I remembered how much I would dream during our nights apart of taking you to the sea, not just a sordid dirty weekend in Brighton, but under some blazing tropical sun, where I would see you for the first time in a bathing suit, your fluid limbs sprawled akimbo in the light of the falling sun. Or even a nude beach, where I would admire how natural you would stand in the buff and would feel both proud at how I was exhibiting your charms to the insidious gaze of other men and jealous of the fact they could not be blind and allow me the exclusivity of your voluptuous nudity. Then I fantasized about how I wanted to adorn your exposed flesh, setting a diamond in the jewel-case of your navel, shaving your pubic hair away, setting clamps of gold around your nipples and piercing your labia, to feel the thrill of a ring dangling from the lips of your cunt, twisting it under my tongue when I licked you, sucked you, ate you, my cock rubbing against the metal that would now be part of you every time I moved within. Silk threads carefully wound around your neck, wrists and ankles. Oh, K, I know you would have allowed me. And all the places I wanted to take you. To a bed and breakfast in old San Francisco at Christmas, with antique elevators inside wrought-iron cages, to New Orleans for New Year’s Eve, to stand on the banks of the Mississippi river nearby the Jackson brewery to listen to the hooting funnels of the riverboats at midnight amongst the boisterous crowd and later to cruise, plastic glasses in hand, down Bourbon Street, past the wonderfully shameless topless and bottomless joints and myriad bars with overhanging balconies full of revellers and happy drunkards. I know this lovely hotel in the French Quarter, you see, where all the rooms are distant from the lobby building, old slave houses set in a circle around drooping vegetation, so private that I could allow myself to scream your name to high heavens when I come like a river inside you, and no one can hear the disturbing noise of my excess. Yes. A hotel room in Paris, on the Left Bank, on a top floor, with a vista of wet roofs and latticed metal gratings, where the walls are so thin you can’t help listening to couples in neighbouring rooms making love with all the sounds of indecency. ‘The Algonquin in New York, where the rooms are small but the furniture is delicately antique and breakfast can be taken outside in bagel places close by, where I would introduce you to the Jewish delights of garlic bagel with lox and cream cheese, a meal of kings in its own right. A beach under the fierce Barbados sun, staying in a cabin, licking away the grains of sand that have crept up inside your sex whilst on the beach, washing the crack of your arse clean of all impurities and wading out, both naked, to the water at midnight and admiring the shadow of a yellow moon illuminate your erect wet nipples. Or oysters by Puget Sound in Seattle. The world’s best roast duck at the Water Margin in Golders Green, in North London. The human geography of pleasure unbound. See how I obsess. I take the Northern Line daily to my office, a lump in my throat when I pass Goodge Street and guess you might be alighting there from a train going in the opposite direction. Sometimes, I even get off at my own station and wait on the other platform if a train has stopped there, peering inside as it speeds away for a vision of you and your crazy curls on the way to your own office. When I wash in the morning, my mind wanders and imagines what you might be wearing that day, whether your fool of a husband made love to you the evening before, how in darkest hell he found deep inside himself the generosity to forgive you when he discovered the facts of our affair. And even when I try not to think of you, he then reminds me without fail when he appears on my television screen standing in some factory car park pontificating about the state of the industry on the regional news, or crusading for victims of Stock Exchange swindles in his cheap suit. Of course, I hate him, I move closer to the screen when he appears to peer at the landscape of his pimples – how the hell do they let him appear on the box with all those blemishes, look, there’s a big red one near his eyebrow almost ready to burst! When we were still lovers, I feared him and noticing him for the first time during a live appearance, I even thought him handsome in a bland sort of way. No longer, he looks like a clumsy amateur, a few more years and he will be hopelessly going to fat. But would I be any better for you, I ask myself? The pain of your absence is killing me softly, day by day, hour after lonely hour. Do you still listen to the Grant Lee Buffalo album I turned you onto? I’ve made a few other great rock discoveries since: the Walkabouts, Counting Crows. Somehow all these callow musicians manage to express so many of the things I seem incapable of with only the power of words. If only I had learned how to play an instrument when I was younger. So what more can I say, apart from repeating the boring litany of how I miss you and want you still? Oh yes, I’m no saint, I fuck other women, but I detest myself as I always feel compelled to evoke images of you when I am with these others, to help me stay hard inside them, to furnish me with the rage to plough my furrow of infamy inside their bodies. I feel sweaty, dirty in these hurried embraces and my cock softens, so I close my eyes and think of the lunar expanse of your great arse, the delicate lack of opulence of your breasts, the jutting geometry of your hip bones, the heartbreaking pallor of your body. See how low I stoop. Forgive me. I have written you letters, yes, letters full of hate and anger, letters that made no sense, letters that bled and roared, but none of them were sent and I sit here imagining stories I might write one day. Tales of sound and fury where the red flowers of the mountain will scream Yes to the returning sailor home from the wars, where St Germain des Prés in Paris after WW2 will bear witness to the lovelorn passions of a group of expatri
ates Yes I might complete that novel about passions out of erotic control against a panoramic landscape of mythical American highways and love on the run taken to its orgasmic conclusion Yes or that crazy tale of lovers who fuck themselves to death to explore what lies on the other side Yes I obsess and the ghost of you is taking over my life Yes my love. And I never saw you dance. So, night falls and a cloak of darkness surrounds me, snow is falling, Boston and New York airports are closed, and the roads out there are treacherous and deadly. I imagine myself in a car, blocked by the snowdrifts, with the temperature falling, my breath visible in the restricted space of this odd cockpit, even with gloves on my fingers are becoming numb and outside there are no lights for miles and miles. What a stupid way it would be to die like this, just because I wanted to get away from you and foolishly thought the road was the answer. So, I return to London and now my life begins again, my mind still engulfed in hopeless passion, buried in the folds of her flesh, the dark brown vulnerability of her sad, married eyes. Today is the first day of the rest of my life (or what is left of it). I wonder what bodies will come my way again, how will they compare? Will they shudder and hold their breath back as she did when I slipped a finger inside the pliable tightness of her anal aperture? I know they won’t.

  – Why, when you touch me, do you always seem to do all the right things?

  – I don’t know, I suppose it just comes naturally.

  A MAP OF THE PAIN

  Maxim Jakubowski

  IT ALL BEGINS in Blackheath, in South East London. They are in the kitchen, chatting aimlessly while preparing the evening meal. He drones on about the cutbacks at the BBC and his fears for his job. She isn’t really listening to him. Her mind is miles away, in a bed with another man who touches her in all the right places, in all the right ways, another man who has betrayed her so badly.

  He moves over to the fridge. Opens it, searches inside.

  The heat is oppressive. London has not seen the likes of it for years. And he still wears his tie.