Body and Soul (6 page)

Ben Gage had been a rebound from her loss of Marshall. As Eden sponged almond-scented water over her shoulders she realised that she had never really forgiven the men in her life who loved and finally walked away from her. How much of that had been her fault? Except for Marshall they had, every one of them, returned to claim her on her terms. Why then had she not been able to take them back? Timing. It had all been a matter of timing. They had shown their colours and were not there for her when she had most needed them. Their sin had been that they could not lay down their lives for her as she had done for them. It had been a matter of unconditional love. Would she have turned Marshall away as she had the others? Well, she would never know now.

Eden was dazzlingly young and beautiful with a talent so rare as to make her virtually unique when she met Ben Gage while on the rebound from her first love Marshall. The two men could not have been more different.

Ben Gage was fifty years old when she met him and they fell in love, a friend of her mother and father. He managed their investments along with several other friends of the Sidds. He was not particularly handsome nor did he have a great physique, but he had a marvellous New England conservative charm about him, was kindness itself and had a sweet smile. He was irresistible to women. They adored his dependability and a certain sexiness in him that was evident no matter how subtle he was about it. He had always been well dressed, smooth around women and kind, a good pal to his men friends. He was that rare thing, a businessman with heart and compassion and a genuine love for art. Ben was happily married to an intelligent sweet woman who ran a rather slapdash house of considerable size for him and their family. They lived on the outskirts of Boston and were socially prominent among the people he had grown up with. They frequented the music and art worlds and collected modern paintings, Rothkos and de Koonings, Marini sculptures and Henry Moores, when hardly a soul they knew was buying them.

Ben Gage adored his three sons, seemed outwardly content with his calm, peaceful existence and his attentions to his wife
were envied by every woman in their circle of friends. But there was at the same time in him something quite secretive, a nurturing of secret desires he kept strictly to himself.

He had watched Eden grow up and both he and his wife Nora took her under their wing once she had lost Marshall. They and their children loved and admired Eden and were pleased when she gravitated towards them. Reviewing her time with him, Eden could hardly remember when she’d first realised she was deeply in love with Benjamin Gage, that she yearned to have an intimate life with him, that anything else was impossible to contemplate. What she loved most about Ben was the stable life he made for his family. Once she had become a part of his life and that family neither of them wanted to live without the other. Every time she went away on tour she fantasised that she could leave them, that she would be strong and give Ben up rather than demand a more intimate relationship. But passion, sexual desire, built up in her to such a pitch that on one occasion when Ben was driving her to the airport, she broke down and confessed her love and frustration at not having a sex life with him.

That first sexual encounter at the Copely Plaza was thrilling. The fear she had that they might be discovered added to the excitement of at last having sex with him. His passion for her, to feel him for the first time taking possession of her, remained still one of the highlights of her life. The control he showed in satisfying her sexual demands was frightening in itself. With exquisite care he devoured her body and soul. He wrung one orgasm after another out of her until she cried with the pain of pleasure on such a grand scale. Ben was an imaginative lover who introduced her to new sexual delights that she was able to enjoy because she trusted him implicitly.

That first night established a sex life for them that neither could live without. They added to each other’s lives and, deceitful as it was, Eden made up her mind she would never allow their affair to infringe on Ben’s life with Nora and the boys. She had never been happier. She had his family, his heart, a thrilling sex life with him. There came a time when he could not bear to be apart from her and so often she travelled with them on exotic
holidays and always they found stolen moments to be alone together and have sex. They viewed the art galleries and collected paintings, dined in fabulous restaurants, the Gages attended her concerts, often flew to wherever she was playing merely for the evening. Ben and Eden’s life was a series of sexual escapades and phone calls filled with erotic innuendo, conversations that left her warm and wet with lust for him.

Their sex life was conducted on the floor of his office, across his desk, over the back of an easy chair while his wife prepared dinner, in his car, hers, in a compartment on a train. They never could say no to each other and the fear of discovery only added to the excitement. It became obsessive for them, and then impossible for them to stop. They had been intimate for more than two years when one afternoon, after reducing each other to sexual oblivion in the bed Ben shared with his wife, Eden realised they could no longer go on. Their longing for a life together was too great. The deceit was beginning to grind into her soul. Eden was not yet twenty-one years old and debasing herself at every opportunity to have sex with Ben. It was not enough. She wanted more of him than she knew he could give her. She could deceive Nora no longer and knew she could never break up Ben’s marriage, his home, lose him his place in staid New England society. That very night she told him, in floods of tears, that it had to be over for everyone’s sake. She was leaving him to save herself and her dearest hope was that they could remain friends. He told her then that that was impossible for him, and so she lost the man she loved and his family.

Ten years passed. She tried to make contact with him several times but he would never take her calls. Then one day without warning he was announced by the doorman of her building in New York. Ben asked to see her. She refused but gave him her telephone number. He called and asked her to meet him for dinner in what had once been one of their favourite restaurants, El Parador. She agreed but arrived there with her current lover. As they all walked home together, Ben took her aside and told her, ‘You are lovelier than ever. I still want you. Meet me tomorrow for lunch then we’ll go shopping – Bergdorf, Saks, anywhere you
want. I want to buy you something lovely. I told Nora about my love for you, that I was coming to get you. We can take it on from there.’

Jamie Worthing, her companion at the time, invited them in for after-dinner drinks. Ben never touched his, merely turned to Eden and said, ‘You won’t meet me tomorrow, will you? Come with me right now then and we’ll forget the years that separated us.’

‘It’s too late,’ was her only comment.

‘Ten years too late, is that what you’re saying?’

‘I suffered too much during those years without a word from you,’ Eden answered, a sadness in her voice that she remembered to this very day.

‘I’m leaving,’ he told her.

‘I’ll see you out,’ offered Jamie from across the room.

‘No, Jamie, I’ll see Ben out,’ Eden had replied.

At the door she asked him, ‘Can we be friends?’

‘No,’ he had replied.

Six months later he was dead.

Chapter 6

The bath water was cold and that snapped Eden back into the present. She climbed out of the water, into a cream-coloured terry cloth robe, and went directly to bed. When she awakened it was dark outside and the telephone was ringing.

‘You’re settled in then?’ were Max’s first words.

‘Yes, and delighted to be here.’

‘There’s an edge of happiness in your voice. An enthusiasm I’ve not heard for a very long time,’ he told her.

‘It’s my attitude, dear Max. I have changed my way of thinking about myself and my life.’

‘You no longer feel invisible?’ he asked with genuine concern in his voice.

Eden laughed and proceeded to tell him, ‘More a case of I’m through making myself invisible for others to ignore.’

‘You’ve come a long way in a few days. It’s grand to hear you speak of yourself this way.’

‘Even now as we talk, I’m finding it impossible to believe that I allowed myself to slide into being someone I never really was, only pretended to be. Max, you should have warned me that I was losing myself. Why didn’t you?’

‘Because I love you too much and accept you however you want to be.’ His voice was soft with feeling.

They remained silent for several minutes. That same thing passed between them that had been lingering there for all the years they had been together. Whatever it was, neither of them seemed capable of labelling it ‘love’ or indeed felt strong enough to confront it as such.

Eventually it was Max who broke the silence. ‘You’ve met someone!’

‘A sometime lover, not a love affair, just someone who finds me erotically exciting and enjoys sex with me. Someone I never credited with being as wise as he is about me. Sebastian borders on indifference while at the same time enjoying me. It’s as simple as that and just what I need to bring myself around to where I want to be. Does that sound like an easy rationalisation of a one-night stand with a promiscuous admirer?’

‘It does rather,’ replied Max with a note of disapproval in his voice.

Never willing to allow coldness between them, Eden asked, ‘Forgive me.’

‘There is nothing to forgive.’

‘Don’t be a hypocrite, dear Max. You always have to forgive me because I can’t love you in the same way you love me. We know that pains us both.’

‘One day our love for one another might change your mind,’ he told her as he had done hundreds of times before.

‘Good night, Max. I kiss you,’ was Eden’s reply before she put the receiver down.

She sat in her darkened room, pressed her hands over her face and took long, deep breaths for several minutes, distancing herself from Max and her inability to love him the way he wanted her to, sexually and unconditionally.

Eden dressed and went down to the port to have her dinner. The Greeks adore living in the streets, detest being alone, and as a result one is never lonely in Greece. On Hydra there was no stigma attached to a foreign woman arriving alone for an evening out. She was merely swept up by any of the groups dining together who were always looking for more company to enjoy an evening with. A night out with friends, acquaintances and strangers was an evening well spent and nothing more. Social contact, fun or boring, never overlapped to the next day. It was a be here now society where all social barriers dissolved and joy in the immediate experience was all that mattered.

Eden was picked up immediately she entered the restaurant by
such a group of Greeks who lived on Hydra and had several people in their party visiting from Athens. They knew who she was and showed their delight in seeing her after such a long absence from the island. Among them was Sebastian with yet another young beauty. He and Eden greeted each other affectionately but with some discretion which Eden was grateful for, although she was certain that the entire island was aware that he had made a recent conquest of her. It was the way several people raised an eyebrow and looked knowingly at each other that was the giveaway.

Always thinking about sex, Sebastian arranged the seating so that Eden was given a chair next to a young Greek man whom she had known merely to greet and no more in the past. Sotiri was handsome and sexy with an aura of erotic hunger about him. He was attractive, a well-known actor in the Greek theatre with enormous charm and a sharp wit. Eden was amused by him and unaware of his reputation as a lover of both men and women, a libertine who played sexual games with Sebastian as his accomplice.

Everyone knew of Sebastian’s sex parties. Tales of them and his outrageous antics were gossiped about openly. It was as much a part of his life and theirs as breathing. Sebastian was discreet about the dark sexual side of his nature but never hid it.

The truth was that that sort of sex excited Eden as it did many women who had had brief sexual encounters with him but she had never been involved in one of Sebastian’s orgies. Love, the desire to be loved and able to love in return on a grand scale, had always been a prerequisite for Eden before she would allow her own sexual wildness to surface from the depths of her being. That was why anything and everything was right sexually with first Marshall and then Ben, then best of all with Garfield.

At the table that night she picked up a sense of overwhelming sexual excitement from both Sebastian and Sotiri that was difficult for her to ignore. She wanted them both and to be made love to by them at the same time. Erotic desire pulsed through her body, her fantasies took hold and the very thought of being dominated by their sexuality left her moist and limp with yearning for their
sex in any form they were prepared to take her.

They went to her house after dinner, Eden escorted by the two men. She was unaware that Sebastian’s young thing had been left behind at the restaurant until the three of them arrived at her gate.

‘I think we’ve lost someone. Where’s Frances?’ asked Eden.

Sebastian took the key from her hand and opened the gate. ‘This night is for you alone. Well, not quite. You and Sotiri and me.’

‘Do I have any say in this?’ she asked.

‘None whatsoever,’ answered Sotiri as he swept her off her feet and into his arms.

‘From the moment you joined the table this night was cast for us,’ Sebastian told her as he plucked her from Sotiri’s arms and carried her into the house while kissing her.

Both men at the same time undressed and fondled her. It was difficult for Eden to tell where one began and the other left off. Once they had her naked two sets of mouths hungry for her licked and sucked on her flesh. She had come several times before they even had their clothes off. The two men exchanged places: one at her breasts sucking hard on her nipples, the other between her legs, taking her vaginal lips in his mouth and licking, devouring them as if they were soft warm candy, his tongue lapping the ecstasy their acts had produced.

The sight of the men now naked and rampant, ready for their desire for sex unbound to take them over, made Eden’s heart beat faster. They had magnificent bodies, this older man and this young Adonis of the theatre. They strutted their masculinity in front of her. Sebastian tied her hands by the wrists to the headboard of her bed and grazed her face with his penis, lowering his bollocks into her mouth. Her mouth thus filled, she rolled them around with her tongue, sucked on them while fondling Sotiri’s hard and erect penis. Delirious with lust, lost to the real world, Eden was out in another dimension where sex and lust ruled. She was taken by her two lovers at the same time and then in turn and wept with that special kind of passion that comes when the self is dissolved in submission to all things erotic and out of the norm.

She had no idea when or how it happened but at some time she was released from her bondage and took over the two men. She drove them to the point of madness with her sexual aggression towards them only because it was fringed with adoration, a kind of love for a man and his body that is without violence or ego. Once in command of Sotiri she sensed that the young man had never had an encounter with anyone who took control of his sexuality as she did. It spurred her on to make demands of the two men she had never made before. To watch them, these two virile men, obeying her sexual commands of what they should do together was a new thrill for Eden. To see the men licking and sucking each other’s hard phalluses quite shocked her and when they obeyed and penetrated each other on her orders her jealousy burst into rage and she stepped in and replaced each of them with herself. Heterosexual sex continued with a more intense lust than any of them had ever known.

In the morning Eden awakened wrapped in the arms of both men. It was not so much that she was shocked by the sexual thrills of the night before as that she found the entire experience so much out of her usual way of living. It was something that must have been lying dormant for years somewhere in her subconscious, this desire to be had by two men at the same time. She gazed at them, so handsome and peaceful in their sleep, left them and bathed in almond-scented water while reliving her night of lust. She had been to bed with two notorious libertines for the thrills that came with letting herself go, setting aside all barriers to convention. At heart she was a conventional woman, one who wanted to be as free as the men sleeping in her bed. But wanting doesn’t make it so. One had to work hard to win such sexual freedom and the truth of the matter was that as much as she was prepared to do that, it simply was not enough for her. She wanted love to be a part of the equation. Another Marshall or a Ben or indeed a Garfield.

Sebastian and Sotiri in her bed had offered her much but with no strings attached. Delicious though she’d found that, it was hardly a replacement to the sort of lust and freedom she imagined with the right man, one who loved her passionately and loyally.
That right man would automatically double her passion and settle her restless need to be loved. Was she looking for the impossible? No! For some strange reason that rebuttal stayed ringing in her head, clearer than any of the thoughts she’d had about love and relationships since the end of her life with Garfield.

It was true she wanted the thrill and the passion of the life she had had with him. She wanted to love as she had loved him, unconditionally, but this time with a good man, one who would love her in the same way. The very idea made her heart skip several beats. Was it too late to begin again in search of passion and love? Was she strong enough to do what she must to recapture the sort of life that satisfied her? These last ten years of retreat, had they been a necessary path to have taken so she might go forward on a last grand quest into life and what it still had to offer her?

Eden was contemplating these weighty questions while drinking a cup of coffee in front of the open fire in the kitchen. She was looking out on to the port and the choppy sea beyond when Sotiri walked into the room and poured himself a cup of the coffee. Neither of them said anything, merely looked at each other for several minutes before the actor spoke.

To Eden he looked more handsome than the night before, younger, even more sexual. A beautiful man in every sense of the word and with a glamorous masculinity about him that one rarely saw in young men these days. He was like a matinee idol of the forties and fifties in his looks and deportment and Eden could understand why he had such a huge following. She was dazzled by his maleness, the manner in which he looked upon her and held his counsel until he was ready to approach her. He understood without even knowing her that he was dealing with a proud and passionate artist, she could sense that in the gaze he directed at her across the table.

‘You’re more beautiful than I thought you to be last night when first we met,’ he told her, speaking over the rim of his coffee cup and then sipping from it.

‘I don’t know what to say to that,’ she answered, truly a bit flustered by the flattering remark.

‘I did, of course, know who you were. When you were with Garfield I was envious of his hold on you. I used to stay in the background and watch you both. Once I even watched him fucking you on the rocks where you liked to swim. I fantasised that you would come to me one day and make love to me as you made love to him then. You never gave me a second glance.

‘Last night was an erotic orgy of sublime sex. You were marvellous to have sex with. I could never have imagined that you would be so lustful, though. You were on fire with base sexuality when you took command of Sebastian and me. Neither of us had ever had each other and it will probably never happen again. We did it for you as well as for the sheer excitement of outrageous sex, for the thrills and moments of ecstasy for ourselves. I knew in my heart as I gave myself in to your demands that you would become jealous and enraged by what you saw. That’s what I wanted because instinct told me I would then have you enslaved to me sexually, able to do anything I wanted with you. And I did. And now we have moved towards each other in a way that has bound us together for life. Neither of us will ever be able to forget last night. You, Sebastian and I went somewhere together that will have branded us forever. Tell me you understand and agree with me?’

‘I don’t know that I do. Last night was sexual madness that took me into a world of sex and lust, a night to remember, yes, but it was a small part of what makes up the whole Eden Sidd. Branded me for life? I think not, but only time will tell.’

‘Last night you cast a spell on me. No woman, and I have had many, has ever submitted to me as you did and I certainly had never submitted to a woman so completely as I did to you. It was your passionate lustful nature that seduced me. I have never known such weakness and strength in one human being. It’s voluptuous as is your creative genius. You have the world of human emotions in your hands and are, I sense, someone who knows how to spin it in your favour. I pray last night was only our beginning. You have captured my heart. Please don’t break it.’

Eden was overwhelmed by Sotiri’s beauty as a man, his erotic being as he confessed his feelings for her. She went to sit on his lap and stroke his hair. To kiss him gently on his cheek then on his
lips. But she was lost for the words she needed to make him understand that she shared a sensuous feeling for him and nothing more. It had been sex on a mad, grand scale, nothing more. How to make him understand that and not hurt him at the same time?