Acts of Love (9 page)

Ben was touched by her consideration. He switched the heater on low. ‘And music?’

He could feel her smile in the dark. It was warming, friendly. Ben switched on the radio before she could answer. It was already tuned into the classical wave-length – the Brahms violin concerto. He fussed with the tone and the volume until he had it perfect. The exquisite sound enveloped them, music that propelled them back into the past, each into their own private thoughts as the car pierced the night.

His were of his wife, Clarissa Carr.

‘Your mother is very American,’ Clarissa had told Ben. He did not miss the edge in her voice. It was always there when she was setting them up for a fight. How many times had he promised himself he would walk away before she provoked him into willing participation in one of their pitched battles, but never did? That was their life now, what their marriage had come to. That and violent, unloving sex: what she demanded and he had
been driven to. That and abject apologies, false declarations of love. They were trapped by her fragility, her neurosis, her eye-catching beauty: looks that could chase a Jerry Hall or any other top mannequin off the fashion-show runways and magazine covers of the world.

‘
You’re
very American. You can’t get more American than North Dakota, Clarissa. I’m very American – well, half of me is, anyway. So what?’

‘I hate the way she looks at me. So puritanical. So superior. “Not nearly good enough for my son” looks that she jabs at me like daggers.’

‘None of that’s true. And you know it. If anything, she is in awe of you. How many times have I told you how she whispers to me whenever we are with her that you are the most beautiful woman she has ever seen, and how lucky I am to have you for a wife?’

‘And you? Do you feel lucky to have me for a wife? No, don’t bother to answer that. We both know the answer. Your cheating heart, the other women you fuck … I smell them on you. I always know when you have had another woman.’

Ben walked towards the dressing-table in the bathroom of their Paris
pied-à-terre
on the Avénue Montaigne. He pulled her up from the chair where she had been sitting looking into the mirror, addressing his reflection. He spun her around to face him. She looked incredibly beautiful with her long, blonde highlighted hair, the perfect face that needed only a trace of make-up to enhance it, setting her among the top beauties of the world. She was standing in a white satin, all-in-one chemise trimmed in écru lace with three tiny mother of pearl buttons across the crotch – one of those splendid pieces of lingerie the French conjure so surely into being. That and bone-coloured stockings held in place with frilly white garters high up on her thighs. Her stunning good looks could tame his growing anger. Nearly in a whisper he told her, ‘You know that’s not true. That I have never had another woman since I married you.’

She began to laugh, and wrenched her arm from his grip. ‘Liar. My God, what a bad liar you are.’

‘If that’s what you think, then divorce me, name me as an adulterer. Give up pretending to the world that you are happier
married to me than posing in front of the cameras.’ He hadn’t meant to say so much, but the words simply slipped out uncontrolled. His anger at Clarissa for provoking yet another scene had made him careless. The last thing he had wanted to be.

The look in her eyes was wild with rage and frustration: rage because she knew he meant it and she had no intention of divorcing Ben Johnson; frustration because no matter how much he showed her he loved her, nor how many protestations of love he made her, she could not believe him.

She lunged for him. Quick enough to avoid being fended off, she grabbed his hand and bit into it as hard as she could. The pain took him by surprise. He was too strong for her. He tore himself free and raised his hand. The slap hung in the air. She was so wild and beautiful, inhibitingly sexy. He hesitated, because he knew that was what she wanted: for him to lose control and beat her. Violence was a sexual turn-on for Clarissa.

‘That’s what you’d like. Me to divorce you. Set you free to whore around. Hit me, that’s what you want to do. To give me some of the pain I cause you.’ She lunged at him again, this time with her hand upheld to slap him hard across the face. Ben caught her by the wrist before her blow landed. He twisted it hard and her knees buckled from the pain. She tried kicking him, but he swept her off her feet by an arm around her waist. She wriggled in his arms, and he applied more pressure to her wrist, until she begged him to stop. He bore her struggling to the bed. Roughly he threw her down and pinned her there with one arm across her shoulders. Then he slapped her across her face several times. He tore open the satin confection that scantily covered her body right down to the tiny pearl buttons. The slim straps that held the chemise on her shoulders snapped. He fought her roughly to spread her legs wide, then knelt between them.

Slapping Clarissa around was unbearable to Ben, out of character, but it did shock her out of her violent attack on him. It was the beginning of the end of her rage against him. She had possession of Ben. That was what all her scenes were about: taking possession of her husband, having power over him, creating in him a sexual lust more exciting than he could have with any other woman. She could see in his face that she had won. She had him where she wanted him, wanting her more than she
wanted him. She was excited by the conquest. The sequel was to torture him with her frigidity. And this was truly how she held Ben captive. She pitted her frigidity and beauty against the lust and love he felt for her – those things he prayed she would one day feel for him.

‘Why do you do this to us, Clarissa? None of it is necessary. For better or worse, we love each other and you know that as well as I do.’ They were lies, he knew that, and so did she. But when she drove them both into a pitched sexual frenzy as now, those were the words she wanted to hear and he wished were true.

‘Liar. Prove it to me. I love you totally and you give crumbs of love. All I get are your sexual leftovers.’

How could he tell her that believing her when she told him she loved him had been his great mistake, the wrecking of their two lives? What did she know of love, for herself, for him, for anyone? He had tried to tell her, by god, how he had tried. Trying to help Clarissa to be happy with herself, and in their marriage, to truly love, had become a full-time job. But Clarissa was a woman of the kind that only hears what she wants to hear, sees what she wants to see. So he gave up trying to teach love to the emotionally deaf and blind Clarissa. Now they just used each other and tried to postpone the inevitable. ‘Stop trying to destroy us, Clarissa, or I
will
walk out on you. That’s a promise.’

He had, once again, said too much. But he had had enough, and it was getting ever more difficult to tolerate her tantrums. The sexual games she played were of late getting too violent. He sensed danger. She seemed to him to be presenting greater emotional problems than they could deal with.

He was handling it badly. That had been a wrong thing he had said to Clarissa. She had nothing but her looks and him to keep her, if not happy, at least centred. They were her life. To take them away would be more dangerous than to remain and make the best of a bad marriage. That had been the verdict of two psychiatrists, who believed that, in time and with Ben, Clarissa could work through her emotional instability. Then he could leave her.

The hatred Clarissa felt at that moment gazed out at him from her eyes. He felt sick at his words. He was too quick for her this time. Before she could strike at him, he tied her hands together at the wrists with the remnants of her silk chemise, and
knotted one end of it to the bedpost.

‘I hate you,’ she hissed.

‘I know. But I wonder if you truly know how much you do hate me, and all the men who have made love to you, taken you sexually.’

She struggled against the bonds that held her tight. Ben scrambled off the bed and began undressing, never taking his eyes from the magnificent body lying on the midnight blue quilted bed-cover. No wonder all men and many women craved her, wanted to be where he was now. Once naked, he sat on the bed next to her. She tried to kick him. He grabbed her ankle and held her leg high while he removed the garter and slowly, seductively rolled her stocking down and dropped it on the floor. He kissed her foot, licked the instep with pointed tongue, his gaze fixed on her face.

‘Stop looking at me like that,’ she demanded.

‘Like what?’

‘Like you want to devour me.’

‘But I do. And I will,’ he told her. She trembled at the lust she heard in his voice, and because she knew he would make a meal of her sexually.

‘Please, Ben. I don’t want to come. You can come. I’ll take you in my mouth. Use my hands. Anything you want, but please don’t do it, don’t make me come.’

It was all part of the game. All a way for her to defrost, to allow herself to have orgasms. That was what the entire tantrum was about. She wanted sex, but could not accept that she was hungry for it. Nor that it was Ben and only Ben who was able to bring her to orgasm. Nor that after several orgasms with him she was insatiable, and no sexual act was too refined or too depraved for her to participate in.

Ben reached out and removed a strand of hair from her face. He lay down next to her and stroked her hair. Then he took her chin in his hand and tilted it towards the light. Her beauty was an aphrodisiac for him. His love for her shone in his eyes. His passion to give her sexual pleasure was boundless. Unable to deny her her game, he carried on playing it. He climbed on top of her and straddled her shoulders, taunted her with his plentiful, erect penis by stroking her eyelids with it, the bridge of her nose,
her cheeks, grazing her lips with it. He throbbed with lust for her. And that drew a shiver of pleasure from her. She parted her lips, wanting to take him in her mouth, to feel him tight in her throat, only to have him remove it from her lips to caress the underpart of her chin, her neck with it. She felt cheated. He wasn’t listening. She wanted him that way and no other way. She tried again to control their sex.

‘Do you love me?’ she asked.

‘You know I do.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘I love you, Clarissa.’

‘Then come in my mouth. And let’s be done with
your
lust.’

‘
Our
lust. I’m not alone here, Clarissa.’

‘I thought you said you loved me.’

‘I do.’

‘More than life itself?’

His answer was to place his lips upon hers, to kiss her with passion, to nibble her lips open and then to kiss her deeply. She lay there as if made of ice. He didn’t care; he knew that would change soon enough. He placed a kiss on her shoulder and when he removed his lips she shrugged as if she were trying to dislodge it. But her erect nipples, the occasional squirm of her body, the way she tugged at the bonds that strapped her to the bedpost, contradicted her determination to remain icy cool under his sensuous kissing. They were signals that the game was very much on. They excited his desire for her, made him more determined that she should have the orgasms she secretly yearned for and enjoy sex with him. He could make Clarissa come, again and again, and together with him. Nothing in their disturbed relationship was more thrilling for him than when she lay in an erotic exhaustion in his arms, near to fainting, telling him how she didn’t want to live without his love-making, that he was indeed her world, her very life, and she loved him. His lust for his wife was rising and he was about to tell her, ‘Clarissa, love me, just love me.’ But it was Clarissa who spoke.

‘You say you love me, then give me what I want.’

‘I intend to.’

‘Untie my hands,’ she ordered.

He ignored her. Instead, he moved down her body with his
lips. Cupping a breast in his hands, he caressed it, sucked deeply on her nipple. She writhed under the sensation. He knew how responsive her breasts were, that it was an erogenous zone that drove her into an erotic frenzy. She began to fight against her desire for more. More heightened passion, more of his love-making.

He nibbled at her flesh. To her his searching tongue was like a whip. She reached fever pitch and began to lose herself. Her body arched and she came in a long, convulsive orgasm. ‘I hate you for this. Despise you for possessing me, for reducing me to just a cunt.’ She ground the words through gritted teeth, avoiding his eyes.

He ignored her protestations. His lust left no time for them. Ben loved women, adored making love to them in or out of bed. He was a romantic man who believed in romance and sex, and that they went together. Clarissa’s words meant one thing, but the intense orgasms she achieved with him, her sighs of pleasure when he was moving with long, leisurely strokes in and out of her, the way her cunt gorged on his penis meant something quite other.

It was true, he did force her to submit, again and again. Not to his lust alone but to her own as well. And he took great pleasure in doing it. He did to her what she most feared, reducing her to little more than a hungry cunt, making her dissolve in their come, until little was left of Clarissa Carr, magazine icon of the eighties. From there she rose and took another form, that of an erotic beauty claiming in full his sexual attention. He gave it willingly. His reward was how happy and fulfilled she was to be in that place she so feared.

The morning started off well enough. Ben woke Clarissa with tender kisses. She responded with passion in hers. He stroked her hair, covered her face with yet more kisses and told her how beautiful she was, how much he loved her. When he slid on top of her and between her long, shapely legs which he had kissed and placed high on his shoulders, and then entered her, it was to a woman playing the role of the dutiful wife tolerating a morning fuck. She had reverted to character, the role player. The real Clarissa Carr, the woman he loved, was not there. He felt sick
with despair when she wrapped her arms around him and told him, ‘Faster, deeper. Faster, come now, I am.’

She was faking sex. After the night of real lust and erotic fantasies played out to excite them further, until they had been both lost in sexual oblivion, this was unbearable. He knew at that moment that he was finished with Clarissa. If he needed further proof, it appeared when he lay down next to her and saw a faint bruise on her cheek where he had slapped her about the night before. She was turning him into a monster. It was in fact she who had taken possession of him; he who was losing his real identity to give her one. That was all over, right then and there. No words, no actions. Just over. He needed time and a plan to get away from her without causing her too much grief. He left for Lyons after breakfast.