History of a Pleasure Seeker (11 page)

Looking at Jacobina, Piet Barol could only see her on her aunt’s chaise longue, her skirts pushed up to her waist. He was acutely sensitive to her. Every time she spoke or glanced in his direction, his cock throbbed like a risk-addicted being over whom he had no control. As the dessert was cleared he began to fear that he would not be able to rise from the table without embarrassment. He toyed with the
poires Carignon
, wondering desperately what he should do, which only increased his difficulties; and at last it was Virgil who rescued him with the speech Anchises makes to his descendants in the
Aeneid
. He had memorized it as a schoolboy and recited it silently, as a soothing incantation.

Classical poetry succeeded where all other distractions had not. By the time the ladies rose, he was presentable enough to rise with them, but he dared not risk an hour in the drawing room. He excused himself, complaining of a sore throat.

Jacobina was not deceived. The knowledge that a young man as desirable as Piet could not control himself in her presence made her soar with happiness. She said good night to him politely, and in the presence of her daughters told him that he might help her with some correspondence the following afternoon, at four o’clock.

P
iet made his way to the attic floor, stumbling like a drunkard. It was hot and airless beneath the lead roofs. As he reached his bedroom, grateful to be alone, he heard Didier’s voice and remembered it was a Thursday and his weekly evening off. Didier was in the bath. “Come and entertain me!” he called. “Himself’s downstairs, doing the coffee.”

Piet opened his own door, pretending he hadn’t heard. But he did not go through it. He was a young man who had just sent a woman into ecstasy. The urge to boast about his achievement to another young man was invincible. He went into the bathroom, wondering how to do so discreetly, and found Didier stretched languidly in the tub. The windows were open; it was deliciously breezy after the stifling corridor. Piet took off his jacket and went to his place on the radiator.

Didier sank beneath the water and wet his hair. It fell sleek and blond over his eyes. “It’s glorious in here. I’m not getting out for an hour.”

“Selfish.”

“You can get in if you like. There’s plenty of space for two.”

The young men were often undressed in each other’s company and there was no awkwardness in this. They had some of their best conversations while one sat on the radiator, waiting for his turn in the water. But they had never shared the bath before. Tonight it seemed unusually long and full and white; especially inviting. Piet hesitated.

“Don’t be so provincial.”

This was a well-aimed barb. “All right, then. Thanks.” Piet took off his clothes and got into the bath at the opposite end from his friend. He lowered himself in slowly to avoid splashing the floor. The mass of his body brought the water to the brim.

“What’ve you been doing all afternoon?” Didier moved his feet to make space for Piet.

“Pleasing a woman.”

“Not Hilde?”

“Of course not.”

“Who then?”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Certainly.”

“Well—” And Piet told him a story, truthful in its essential elements, about a respectable married woman in her forties whom he had spent the afternoon, and others before it, pleasuring until she begged him to stop. He told Didier how the lady refused to let him undress or touch himself or speak; how she addressed him peremptorily, as one might a servant; and that this heightened his delight as he subdued her with his lips and tongue and fingers, reduced her to a moaning wreck who could barely stand when he was done. He told Didier that they had met in the Vondelpark, that her husband was often away, and that they had the run of her house when he was. By the time he was finished his cock had thrown off the anesthetic of the Virgil and was pulsing in the water.

So was Didier’s. “D’you think she’d like two?” He smiled his crooked smile and watched Piet closely. When he saw his friend was not shocked, he told a story of his own. “My first year as a page at the Amstel, a guest asked me into his suite. His wife had noticed me. She was younger than him, Austrian, randy as hell. We spent the night gamuching her.” He grinned. “Of course we didn’t touch each other, him and me.” As he spoke, his foot was bobbing lightly against Piet’s thigh; he could feel the hair on Piet’s leg against his toes. “It happened a lot after that.”

Like Piet Barol, Didier Loubat was not telling the strict truth. He had, indeed, been invited to guests’ rooms at the Amstel Hotel; it had happened on many occasions. But in each case the occupants of the rooms had been men—and their wives, if they had them, were not present. Now recklessness gripped him. He pulled the plug and let some water out of the bath, as though preparing to leave it; but when the level was sufficiently low to expose them both, he said, “We can’t go in this state. Blok’ll be up any minute. If he catches us …”

Piet’s erection was almost painful. “Well, what then?”

“I won’t look if you don’t.”

Both their cocks were now standing clear of the water. Didier’s was long and thin, like his body. Piet’s was squatter and fatter, rising from a dense clump of black hair. The memory of Blok’s lascivious stares before dinner remained, and was highly unpleasant.

“All right, then,” said Piet. “Eyes closed.”

They leaned back and closed their eyes and began to rub themselves, making the water churn. At his end of the bath, Piet was loosening Jacobina’s stays, pushing her dress roughly to the floor as she ripped the buttons on his shirt. He was proud of his body and longed to show it to her. He imagined her admiring him, sliding his undershorts down, taking his prick in her mouth. His legs spasmed and a foot jerked against Didier’s buttock. In the instant he touched it, his friend’s smooth skin became Jacobina’s and this sent him hurtling towards the conclusion he sought.

Didier was listening carefully. When he judged that Piet was past caring, he opened his eyes. Piet’s head was thrown back, his neck and shoulders magnificent. His right hand was thrashing in the water. For six hours Piet had been subject to the most demanding temptations, which first Jacobina, and later the obligations of dinner with her daughters, had prevented him from satisfying.

Satisfaction, when it came, was bountiful.

Didier found the sight awe inspiring, and the impossibility of matching such profusion made him self-conscious. He stood up and reached for a towel.

“Sorry.” But Piet had no energy for embarrassment.

Didier finished drying and put on his dressing gown. “Do ask your friend if she needs anyone else to lend a hand.”

“Of course.” Piet closed his eyes again. He was no longer feeling loquacious and wanted Didier to leave.

“
Bonne nuit
, then.”

“Good night, my friend.”

D
idier went to his room, pulled the table across the door, hoarding the memory of what he had seen, opened the window and lay on the bed. He understood the merits of delay and did not touch himself for five long minutes while he thought over what had just happened and improved upon it—so that when he began his long, slow frig in the hush of a summer’s night, Piet Barol not only repeated his performance in the bath but put his strong arms around Didier’s shoulders and stroked the back of his neck with his fingers and looked deep into his eyes and kissed him.

Meanwhile Piet refilled the bath—
hot
this time—and washed and went to bed, entertaining the tired protests of his conscience and resolving to be better, without at all intending to honor this promise.

A
fter this, Piet Barol began to omit his daily ritual of feigned regret. It seemed a pity to squander an instant of that glorious summer on self-recrimination, so he sedated his scruples and threw himself into sampling the many pleasures available to him while Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts was in America.

He thought less and less of his life in Leiden and grew bolder in his explorations, sometimes leaving Egbert with a translation for two hours at a stretch while he sketched in the shuttered ballroom the superb Louis XV furniture, or the silver table ornaments reserved for Christmas and baptisms. Every piece Maarten had bought was the product of masterly labor. The delicate butterflies and dancing bears engraved on a glass goblet of the sixteenth century had the power to move Piet to tears. So did the fact that Maarten owned seventy-eight such glasses and kept them in a cabinet, redolent of intrigue and secret treaties, that had once belonged to a doge of Venice.

Piet no longer felt embarrassed to be caught in contemplation of the family’s possessions. At last he was at ease with the girls and immune from the disapproval of the servants thanks to the protection of Jacobina. Nevertheless, because it made him happy to be well liked, he continued to dispense his good nature without regard to rank or influence; and so became rather a favorite with Mrs. de Leeuw, who was not used to university men taking the trouble to inquire after her mother’s health, still less to them remembering her ailments from week to week.

Egbert’s docility in the matter of translation exercises was commendable. When Piet understood that his charge would not attempt to leave the schoolroom once he had reached it, he began to add other pursuits to his sketch making. It pleased him to volunteer his services to Jacobina in front of the other servants and to provoke the frown she always wore when setting the date and time of their next appointment. Though he imagined doing so often, he never undressed in front of her nor pretended to any further intimacy than that of a discreet and unusually obliging body servant. She, however, became a great deal more particular in her requirements, which she continued to articulate in the tone she used when she outlined a menu to Monsieur la Chaume or asked Hilde Wilken to clear the tea things. Permitted such quantities of supervised experimentation, Piet began to see that the way to sensual Nirvana is long, and that even an inch of the journey, properly savored, can give two people more pleasure than many enjoy in a lifetime.

As satisfying to him was the social intimacy he had achieved with Constance and Louisa, who now included him in the tête-à-têtes that took place in the summerhouse at the end of the garden where Louisa kept her mannequins and toiles and gave commands to seamstresses and milliners. She did not make any effort to contribute practically to her creations, and Piet admired the way she took for granted that others should labor to give life to her imaginings. She knew her own mind well and was a severe critic. Twice, while her sister and Piet played trictrac, she reduced to tears a middle-aged embroiderer who had failed to catch a pattern of ivy, clambering over a ruin, that she had designed for a coat inspired by Arthurian legend.

Like her father, Louisa had no patience with incompetents. The third time the embroiderer made a mistake, she never appeared again. Once or twice Piet wondered what had happened to her. Presumably she had a family to feed, but such quotidian pressures were so far from life as it was lived at Herengracht 605 that he never remembered to inquire.

Didier remained hilarious on the subject of the girls’ extravagances and reported numerous instances of petulance. But they were only rude to servants. Now that Piet had graduated to the status of guest, he saw only their most charming sides. He and Didier did not share a bath again or refer in any way to the events of their first one together, but they continued to use each other’s water and exchange gossip from the vantage point of the radiator; and when Didier smiled into Piet’s eyes as he served him coffee, or ice-cold lemonade, Piet smiled back.

O
n July 17th, Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts returned from New York in low spirits. It was the first time he had gone into partnership with Americans and he had not enjoyed the experience. He had never met such uncontainable enthusiasm—for yet another story, another elevator shaft, another eighty thousand dollars spent on frescoes and gilt. More than a thousand crystal chandeliers had already been installed, and apparently a further six hundred were required. The project was likely to finish late and certain to cost much more than he had anticipated.

Maarten had well-established lines of credit, but just at the moment his finances were rather tighter than usual. His hotel on the shores of Lake Como was not doing well. The resort had fallen abruptly out of fashion a few months after it was finished. His establishments in London and Frankfurt had required new lead roofs and been closed for six months, since he could not have patrons in a building filled with banging workmen.

Unlike his wife and daughters, Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts had a keen sense of the value of money. Because he was honest he was prepared to charge his guests the sums he did only for an experience that was, in every way, perfect. He personally supervised the selection of the telephonists. He turned every tap, stayed in every Suite Impériale, tried the butter in every breakfast room to make sure it was soft but solid. He would rather close for a season than offer accommodations that were less than first rate. But to have closed his two most profitable hotels for the same season left him inconveniently short of funds, since the new one in New York, which his partner had decided to call the Plaza, was costing tens of thousands a week.

For some time, Maarten had been wondering whether God was punishing him for the venture’s worldliness. He had sanctioned the architect’s fancies from the other side of the Atlantic and visited to see the demolition of the existing building and the sinking of the new foundation’s cornerstone. But the Americans had built very quickly and on his second visit he had been shocked by the grandiloquence he had financed. To have built a Renaissance French château thousands of miles from the Loire Valley was one thing. To have presumed to improve on the original by inserting nineteen floors beneath its turrets was another and seemed worryingly close to what others had done with the Tower of Babel. That enterprise had brought ruin and discord to its overreaching builders, and it seemed to Maarten that this one might do so, too.