The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor (14 page)

At first they alternated talk with lazy sensuality, remaining on a slow plateau of arousal that demanded no release but was pleasure in itself. Majeed filled a pipe with opium and smoked it as he told Val about running away from the home in England, of his days as a prostitute in Hamburg and Munich and Rome. At times Val felt uncomfortable with this confession and would interrupt the narrative with bouts of nuzzling and caressing that led to sex so indolent and languid that their lovemaking was almost tantric in its restraint. At last, with Majeed inside of her, they held each other, and Val told Majeed how she had come to be a wanderer with carnality the focus of her life.

Her introduction to the allure of the perverse, the intrigue of the wicked, had come at an early age. She had grown up in the cheerful, skylit rooms of a renovated twelve-room home on two acres of land outside Tarrant, New York. Her father, a Wall Street executive, made the ninety-minute commute to Manhattan twice a day. He had bought the showpiece home as an investment and as a haven from the tumult of city life, a safe harbor to enclose his wife and daughter while he went forth to do financial battle.

Unfortunately, his final battle, which took place when Val was five, occurred not on the Floor, but in a seedy walk-up tenement where he’d gone to do some coke with a Latina hooker. The hooker rolled him while her pimp concussed his head in several places with a tire iron. The coroner’s report indicated he spent a full day dying.

Val’s mother Lettie, when she learned the circumstances of the tragedy, said too bad it didn’t take longer.

Apparently Anthony Petrillo had been as clever at investing and amassing money as he was unwise in the choice of his companions. He left a vast amount of money – most of which Val inherited after her mother’s suicide when Val was thirteen – but little else. No memories to speak of (except the bitter ones left to his wife) and, for Val, just the blurry image of a man who left with dawn and returned long after nightfall, harried, jittery, with the look of someone deprived of sleep for so long that exhaustion comes to seem the norm and recreation aberrant in the extreme.

After her husband’s death, Val’s mother became afraid to leave the house. Men followed her, she claimed, when she ventured out. The idle glances and chitchat of passersby became the furtive gaze of psychopaths, the soft babbling of lunatics who stalked her. Terrorized by the demons that nested in her head, she left Val and the house to maids and cultivated a sleazy romance with agoraphobia, preening for hours before the mirror but dressing in housedresses so shabby that the maid, discovering them in a pile next to the dryer, once mistakenly used them for rags with which to polish tabletops. She spent most of her time in her sewing room, sleeping or gazing out the one window or, occasionally, stitching together a dress or blouse for Val, usually in some wildly inappropriate material: crushed velvet, lace and stain, jumpers cut from bolts of sequined silk. And all the while she muttered in no language known to any but the denizens of her own internal world, reverting to normal speech only when necessity demanded that she order groceries from the local market or fuss with local school administrators who, after a year or so, began calling repeatedly to learn why seven-year-old Val wasn’t registered for school.

Almost two years after her husband’s death, Lettie’s weirdness took a sudden shift, one which at first appeared to be for the better. She seemed to remember Val’s presence in the house and spent time with her again. Hours were spent brushing out the child’s hair, caressing her, teaching her to read and write from a book of fairy tales that featured stories about seductive hags that fricasseed their children, and coiled serpents that lurked under mattresses and crawled into the snoring mouths of sleepers.

And, as if her father’s murder hadn’t already taught Val enough about the cruelties and caprices of the world, Lettie decided, with that obsessive single-mindedness peculiar to the insane, that more instruction for her daughter was in order.

If Lettie had been a near recluse, afraid to leave the house, now she found a black new zeal, a morbid sort of daring. She commenced to venturing out for nighttime drives into Manhattan, trolling for dissoluteness and danger like a carrion-eating bird seeking dead flesh, a madwoman and her passenger, a wide-eyed little girl.

Val remembered riding in her mother’s Mercedes through the rain-soaked, late-night streets of Manhattan’s seediest enclaves. Lettie always drove a brand-new car, usually one resembling a black barge, its leather smell still as fresh as when it had left the showroom. Val would sit close against her mother, staring out at the weird night-circus of the city, hoping that what she saw outside could not get in.

She remembered the sheen of stoplights reflected in oily puddles, the barred storefronts with their glut of tawdry merchandise, and the flashing neon, often with a letter or two burned out, so that the names of bars and liquor stores resembled gap-toothed grins. Often when she’d shut her eyes against the overbright display, she could still see the neon dazzle, as if one look had tattooed its garish message permanently on the inside of her eyes.

In some neighborhoods, Val remembered being most afraid when her mother stopped for lights, and the milling, seething faces passed within a few feet of the car. Blacks and whites and Orientals, all combinations in between, and, though their skins were a multitude of hues, their expressions generally were less diverse: they looked bored and angry and angry and bored, and often they looked afraid.

Sometimes Val would imagine leaping from the car and running from her mother, disappearing into the crowd’s dark and perilous ranks, and throwing herself upon the mercy of their world, but she was too afraid – not only of what was inside the car with her, but of what lay outside as well.

“Lock your door,” Lettie would order, but she never believed Val’s confirmation that it was already securely locked. She always had to reach over and touch the lock button itself to make sure it was depressed. And all the while, her eyes would gleam, her fear and her enthralment with that other world casting a sheen of bewitchment across her face.

“Look! Look at those two women there,” Lettie would cry, pointing out two
café-au-lait
madonnas in leather skirts the size of postage stamps and wildly bouffant hair. “No, don’t look yet! You don’t want them to see you stare. Now, turn around now. Look!”

It was a ritual that, by the age of eight, Val already knew too well. Her mother had a name for it – “going for a ride.” Presumably it was a form of education, in the wiles and sins and venalities of life, a graphic way of teaching a young child of life’s rife and lurking dangers, and for a few months, Val had accepted it as such.

Only later, after she had grown too old to be trusted to remain locked inside the car on such excursions, did Val recognize the strange nocturnal forays were her mother’s longing made tangible, titillation masked as moral guidance.

“See that man across the street, the one in the built-up shoes! That’s a pimp, the lowest form of life. He lives off women, sells them for sex. And look there, there’s his woman! That’s the kind of woman that killed your father.”

The hours spent cruising the tenderloin along Eighth Avenue, then over to the docks where the chickenhawks prowled like lean barracuda, and finally up into Harlem, provided a seedy circus of vicariously experienced trauma. There’d been the time a wild-eyed man, a tattooed troll with shocks of matted, grayish hair protruding at all angles from his skull, lurched up beside the car and tried to force the door open. He screamed that he was being pursued, that someone meant to kill him. Val’s mother ran the light, sped off. They were halfway up the block when Val heard shots fired and saw the troll, who’d run across the street and was badgering another driver, flop facedown in a mound of dirty snow, which promptly started turning red.

At other times, men with dark faces and Halloween smiles approached the car, thinking Lettie was a well-to-do suburban matron out to score some coke. (Or better business arrangement yet, to peddle her child’s ass.) They cursed her when she sped away. One time a green convertible followed them through Harlem all the way to the Triborough Bridge, its occupants an Oriental with gold stars in his teeth and a woman whose head kept disappearing and reappearing next to him like some kind of dashboard toy.

“It’s so you’ll see the world for what it is,” Val’s mother would tell her as they returned from their nocturnal jaunts. “So you’ll understand how dangerous and vile men are, how careful you have to be just to survive in this world.”

The source of her mother’s obsession with sin and sex was never fully clear to Val, but as time went on, her mother’s madness twisted inward, plunging deeper into insanity’s labyrinthine maze. The late-night cruising tapered off, and here Val let her story end. She didn’t tell Majeed about the night, when she was nine, that she still remembered as the night of locks and chains, the night she tried to run away and came to be a prisoner in the Sewing Room. It was the night her mother realized her beloved needles and thread were handy implements of torture and that a young girl’s vagina was as dangerous as her freedom, the latter to be stolen from her, the former to be stitched shut.

To Majeed, she only said, “After Lettie stopped taking me for rides, things got much worse.”

“Worse?” For a second, she thought Majeed was going to laugh and she regretted having told him anything. But he didn’t laugh. He held her close. “What happened then?”

“I don’t remember everything.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“I can remember if I want to, but it’s like snipping off a piece of skin to see what shade of red the blood is. It hurts. It isn’t worth it. Let’s go to sleep now.”

She had trained her mind to stop at this point. She knew what lay beyond and chose to go no farther. Some memories were too full of fear and grief to ever chance rekindling. Some memories required the deepest kind of burial, could only be obliterated – and then but temporarily – by pleasures of the flesh.

“Wake me, if you change your mind,” Majeed said.

“No. I’ll start to cry.”

Majeed reached for his opium pipe and took a lazy puff. He offered it to Val. She shook her head.

“What can I do to make it better?”

Keep holding me, don’t let me go
, was what Val might have said.

But she needed to escape her memories, put miles and lovers between her and the past and so she said, “Just fuck me. Then take me to the City.”

The trip overland to North Africa, which could have been accomplished by a few hours in the air, took Majeed and Val the better part of two weeks. Majeed suffered terribly from motion sickness. Three hours of train travel and he was invariably doubled over in the lavatory, his body sick and flowing at both ends.

Thus burdened with Majeed’s unexpectedly frail stomach, they traveled in short intervals: Munich to Geneva, then south to Marseilles and Andorra, and across Spain, stopping in Granada and Seville.

In Gibraltar, they took a hydrofoil across the channel, arriving in Morocco at Tangier, then took the train south to Fez, where Majeed refused Val’s offer of a few nights to relax from their journey in a luxurious hotel and booked them instead into an inexpensive hostel on the periphery of Fez, the city’s once-thriving Jewish
mellah
, or neighborhood.

Val had observed that, with their arrival in North Africa, Majeed became more taciturn and moody. His consumption of opium increased dramatically, but any inquiries on Val’s part as to the reason for his pique was always brushed aside; Majeed claimed he was merely fatigued or motion sick or a trick had proved disappointing.

The first night in Fez, in keeping with what was by now their pattern, they dined together, then went their separate ways, Majeed to satisfy, undoubtedly, his own proclivities, Val to explore the myriad mazelike streets of the Old City, glorying in the exotic squalor of the quarter’s sights and sounds and odors. What Majeed did with his evenings was not discussed, but Val assumed he considered a night in which a few carnal transactions weren’t carried out to be an evening wasted.

Rounding a corner in the Old City, Val was startled to see Majeed deep in conversation with a young Berber girl who couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. Her black hair was braided intricately, her hands hennaed with jinn-spells in the custom of her tribe. The child did all the talking. Majeed listened with uncharacteristic somberness. Although she couldn’t know for sure the nature of the transaction, Val’s immediate assumption was less than charitable. She hadn’t known Majeed cared for children; the idea that he did repulsed her. She ducked behind a passing donkey cart so that he wouldn’t see her.

Usually Majeed was later coming back to whatever hotel or hostel they were lodged in, but tonight his return preceded Val’s. When she entered the cramped hotel room, scarcely bigger than a walk-in closet, with its damask curtains and faded silken spread, Majeed was reclining on the bed, incense burning, the room redolent of spices and hashish. His eyes were closed, his wondrous genitalia covered with a corner of the rumpled spread. A halo of smoke drifted up from the pipe between his lips. In the dim light, his pale hair framed paler features, cascades of snow on snow.

When Val slid the chain lock into place, his eyelids lifted to pantherish slits, and he turned on her a strange, unfocused gaze.

“You’re late.”

“I didn’t know I had a curfew.”

“Don’t bitch at me. I’ve had a shitty night. Some faggot Frenchman paid me to let him give me a blowjob in the men’s room of the Hotel Palais Jamai. Then he insisted on groping me and when he found my pussy, he thought I had an extra asshole, that some disease had rotted out a hole in me.” He sighed theatrically and dragged on the pipe. “He didn’t get his money back, though. Fucking faggot woman-hater.”

“That’s quite a tale.”

“Could I interest you in another one?” Majeed asked, slapping his sleek rump.

Val plopped down on the bed. “I think I’d rather hear your stories about the City. I’ve been patient long enough, I think.”