Eighty Days Amber (14 page)

The red-haired young woman finally came to rest, her legs parted, her chest heaving, the small rings clipped to her nipples shaking imperceptibly as the memory of her swaying persisted, her clamped labia puffy and swollen as all the blood in her body had moved to her erogenous zones.

She padded to the side as the spotlight was switched off.

Now I was jealous of her.

Because I knew that when she left The Place and returned to whichever hotel room the fascinating couple would retreat to tonight, the man, Dominik, would take her, fuck her, imprint his soul on her in savage fashion and I wanted to be her, wanted it to be me in the arms of a
forceful man, a bad man even, arousing me, punishing me, cruelly playing with me, satisfying me.

The following morning I rose early, and went down to the Mississippi shore, walking from Jackson Square all the way to the big mall, alongside the Aquarium, the Imax Theater and the berths for the large tourist steamboats, the
Creole Queen
and the
Natchez
. The air was full of spices as the long barges lumbered their way down the mighty river like prehistoric monsters. The New Year’s festivities were being cleaned up, although the smell of beer still lingered in the Bourbon Street gutters. The sky was grey and I had to wear a sweatshirt. Gulls hovered over the waters. When I could walk by the banks of the river no more, I turned and retraced my steps to the Café du Monde, outside which a clown was inflating sausage-shaped balloons. I cut into the square and, intersecting Dauphine, made my way to the club. Madame Denoux was also an early riser, and I found her checking the accounts in an old-fashioned double-columned ledger – she had no truck with computers.

‘Isn’t it your day off?’ she queried as she saw me knocking at the open door of her office.

‘It is,’ I confirmed. ‘I wanted to talk.’

‘That sounds ominous.’

‘Not really. Just a chat.’

‘Tell me, child,’ she said, finally putting down the ledger and giving me her full attention.

‘I think I need a change of scene,’ I said.

‘Ah, you Russians, always on the move. Fallen out of love with New Orleans, then?’

‘Not at all, I love this place. It’s so unique. I could spend a lifetime here. It’s . . . me. Somehow the dancing is not
enough. I need more. Not that I really know what,’ I explained.

Madame Denoux smiled.

‘Can I come back with a proposal, Luba?’

‘Of course.’

‘Promise me you won’t be shocked, or offended.’

‘Don’t you know me well enough by now?’ I said.

I was aware Madame Denoux was well-connected. Her frequent absences from New Orleans on business and the shadowy daytime guests we performers saw visiting her while we rehearsed, all tucked away in her office, confirmed that impression.

‘You like men?’ She looked me straight in the eyes and it felt more like a statement than a question.

‘I do,’ I answered. ‘But I will not whore myself. That is totally out of the question,’ I added.

‘Good,’ she noted. ‘Because that’s not what is involved.’

‘Get to the point,’ I demanded, annoyed that she appeared to be skirting around the subject.

‘Yes,’ she continued, ‘there would be sex involved, and in a way it could be construed as sex for money, but in our eyes, yours, mine, it will be sex as beauty, an art. That’s what our clients already pay for, don’t they, when they come to watch you and the other girls dancing. The illusion of sex. Well, the idea is to provide with them with so much more than an illusion, to take matters a stage further, beyond sheer titillation. And there are men who will pay veritable fortunes for this.’

She was appealing to the artist in me. Because even when I danced and became a driven creature of sex and untold desire, I also considered myself above the fray, expressing
myself in the dance without abandon. Others would not recognise it as art, but I did, or at any rate that’s how I justified my involvement in the whole game to myself.

‘You would go with men,’ she said. ‘Like you, they are equally beautiful, their bodies masterful and elegant and made for love. And rich people will pay to watch you together. No artifice, no trickery. Like your dancing, it would take place in the very heart of the spotlight for all to see every movement, every bead of sweat, to listen to every sound you make, to observe every tremor running across the surface of your skin as you fuck, are fucked. I know you, Luba, you would be perfect. They will love you.’

I held my breath, crazy fantasies already racing behind my eyelids as I tried to reconcile myself with the concept.

‘Interesting’ was the only word that, implausibly, came to my lips.

‘There is a network in place and I’m plugged into it. My establishment has, on a few occasions, hosted such entertainment for a small coterie of exclusively invited guests or by invitation only, but the performers were always shipped in. Such a specialist area of expertise.’ She licked her lips as the memory of these events rushed in front of her eyes. ‘Twice I’ve proposed dancers I’d discovered or brought under my wing to the Network. They were both willing but didn’t make the grade.’ She sighed.

‘Is it safe?’ I asked.

‘Absolutely. Every performer is tested regularly, whether male or female. It’s indispensable. The criterions are exacting and not every one is chosen . . .’

She fell silent for a moment, and I saw a well of regret clouding her impeccably made-up features.

‘What is it?’ I asked, sensing her change of mood.

She took a deep breath and confessed. ‘I was once on that circuit. Myself. When I was younger. Just a few years. I have no regrets. I earned enough to acquire this establishment when I retired. I will never forget those years . . .’

Outside her office window a typical New Orleans downpour was descending on the French Quarter, washing the city’s sins away under a curtain of water as thick as a stage curtain.

‘What do I have to do?’ I asked her.

The training school was in Seattle, an old warehouse space that had been renovated and converted into a private dance studio just a short walk from Pike Place Market and the long descending stairs that led to the waterfront.

This was where I learned the rest of my curious trade and met the three men who would be fucking me over the next eighteen months as we all travelled the world separately and met up by public demand to do the deed on an assortment of hastily built stages and places in alternately obscure and often glamorous locations for an audience of few.

I was never told their names, and I never asked. Neither did I meet the other female performers who also formed part of the Network, the Pleasure Network as I amused myself calling it.

I was accommodated in a tall, modern hotel, from the top floor of which I could see some of the distant islands in the Puget Sound. It was just a short walk from the studio where I reported daily at 9 a.m., like an office drone. I was weighed, measured, medically inspected and then photographed from every possible angle and perspective. After a few days, I was allowed to express an opinion as to which photographs of mine should be included in the Network’s
catalogue. My only interlocutors throughout the Seattle sessions were two middle-aged women invariably dressed in severe grey business suits and white blouses buttoned up to the neck. They looked so alike I called them A and B.

The catalogue, once a new version had been printed to include me, also featured six other young women, but none of them were based in Seattle or visited during my stay. It seemed once you had been trained, there were no refresher courses needed. They were all beautiful in their own way, some exotic, others minor pictures of perfection, one Asian girl appeared to be so small you could fit her into an overnight bag. I wasn’t the only blonde, but I was the one with natural breasts and a tattoo of a gun in a strategic place. Only one of the other girls had a visible one. It read ‘A Spy in the House of Love’ in gothic letters across the small of her back. Our names were listed but I guessed most of the others were using stage names. I remained Luba. I didn’t want to be anyone else. The businesswoman in the grey suit who asked me under what name I wished to be listed as just grunted when I told her.

I was not allowed to keep a copy of the catalogue. Its distribution was quite confidential, displaying photos of all of us, clothed and nude, our statistics and other verifiable information, together with a choice of three scenarios.

Only three men were listed at the back of the catalogue. None had names. Once I had been accepted into the Seattle training programme, I was given a day or so to come up with specific scenarios that would culminate with me making love in full public view with each of the individual male performers. My two guardians also came up with a welter of suggestions, just in case I lacked the imagination. Some of their ideas were outrageous, other boring and still
others puzzling in their lack of potential eroticism. But they had years of experience and seemed to know what the rich clientele of the Network wanted or was into.

Accordingly I came up with three acts.

And the man I would perform each act with when called to do so (and the prices listed for each act in the catalogue were out of this world and bordering on madness, I felt), would forever be named after the story we would inhabit.

There was the Tango.

The Inca Priest.

And – how could I waste all those months of training back in Russia? – the Ballet School Instructor.

I also insisted that each scenario begin with me dancing and that I should choose the music. I wanted it to be more than just a live, and terribly expensive, sex show. Give the punters value for money.

Having established these parameters, each of the men who were to fuck me were summoned from wherever they were in the world, and we were given forty-eight hours together to perfect our act. With our two grey-suited ladies watching and making notes and even intervening if they felt we were not up to scratch.

I began with Debussy. The clear notes of the music, so reminiscent of the indolent rhythm of the ocean, always reminded me of Chey. And that memory firmly lodged in my consciousness would be a partition, as impenetrable as any castle, ensuring that the anonymous sex would remain a job and not a study in intimacy. I would give the men my body but my mind would remain my own.

First, I would demonstrate the Tango.

It was one of the only partnered dances that I was at least
somewhat familiar with. By its nature so wild and erotic, the tango had seemed a natural choice.

In St Petersburg we had learned what one of our workbooks called the Russian tango to records by Pyotr Leshchenko. He was still considered a counter-revolutionary by some and the tutor who played his songs and taught us the steps only did so when the other tutors, with their stiff backs and flint-like stares, were busy elsewhere writing up class notes or demonstrating the fifth position to groups of younger students.

To me the voice of Pyotr Leshchenko was a sound full of sadness, a yearning for lost love, and as soon as I became aware that the records were forbidden then of course the movements and the music were immediately branded into my brain. It was a learning fuelled by the fire of rebellion and therefore never forgotten.

According to the catalogue, my partner was versed in a slightly different, Argentinian style and I knew that for the duration of our set I would be required to follow his lead in adherence to the emotional tradition of the dance and also in order to keep up.

But I intended to follow in body alone. He would not, could not, control me. Years of ballet training had given me the impervious posture of a poker and I knew that in this room I could hold my own. I was a slave to the dance and not to the man. He was an accessory. A vision of carnality. A prop, nothing more. Tango was my show, and he was simply here for the ride, one of a dozen men who had been chosen merely on the basis of their physical attributes and suitability for the role.

I held my pride aloft like a mental shield.

Assessors A and B appeared unmoved by my solo
performance. As the sound of the sea faded, the tango began, a rhythm as different from the Debussy piece as night is from day. Moving from one beat to the next was like travelling from the cool waters of Northern Europe to the hot beaches of South America and the change in temperature raised the pulse of my heart in expectation of what would come next.

My partner appeared from the dark recesses of the stage wings like some kind of demonic shadow brought to life. The man who would fuck me. It was the first time I had seen him, having purposefully flipped straight past the photos in the catalogue in order both to preserve the theatricality of our act and to avoid developing any notion of attachment to him. He would just be the Tango.

His expression was fierce, his stance implacable, as he stepped into the glare of the spotlight.

He grasped my hand. Pulled me towards him into an embrace with a grip as strong as iron. Had I wished to push him away, the pressure of my fists would have been as effective as the paws of a kitten against the chest of a bulldog.

Fear swam into my lungs and my heart hammered, but with it came arousal. Studying the catalogue, mentally working through the steps, erecting psychological and emotional barriers and hours of self-talk:
It’s just a job, it’s just a job
, meant nothing when I came face to face with the first stranger that I would fuck in public.

He was young, beautiful, a symphony of tanned skin and muscled limbs. He was the colour of burnt caramel and looked as if he might taste as sweet. He was Chey, ten years younger, but with a much crueller set to his mouth.

All of my carefully thought-out and ever so rational
assertions melted away, tossed aside as quickly as a day-old newspaper when I discovered that I was attracted to him. And with that attraction came release. I entered into the spirit of the music, of the dance, as if I had not been paid to do so.

I knew that I was safe here under the gaze of my two score holders, and within the parameters of the boundary that their presence created I was free to dream of surrender. Of letting go, of being taken. Of the fantasies of my girlhood that inevitably involved pirates or vampires or highwaymen, visions in which I would be overpowered, relinquishing my will to some handsome and frightening stranger and yet I would remain unharmed, waking with my body and mind intact. Just an idea to play with, but a hopelessly seductive one and once my imagination was set alight my body followed.