The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (5 page)

In the main room at the end of the corridor, sixty or seventy fully dressed people crowded around a tiny dance area, watching two women wearing white towels move listlessly with the loud disco
music. Others sat on giant inflatable cushions in a mirrored alcove next to a postage stamp-sized bar, where drinks were being dispensed by a moon-faced black woman in a low-cut silver blouse. The
crystal ball revolving slowly above the room threw long shadows across the expectant, anxious faces of the middle class waiting to be set free of their inhibitions.

“My high school dances were livelier,” I told Mora.

“It’s still early. They’ll loosen up, you’ll see.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because it’s my night, and that’s what I want to happen.”

“See anyone you like?”

I pointed out a few couples, but she dismissed the men. I was puzzled. I realized that I didn’t know what attracted her to certain men and not to others.

“How can you know what they’re like if you don’t talk to them?”

“It’s what they do with their eyes. And their hands. Body language.”

The men she was attracted to had to radiate a certain energy, an indefinable electricity that was invisible to me. I went to get drinks for us and when I got back to her she had her eye on a
tall, lean man with curly hair, a bump on his nose and a prominent adam’s apple. He was in the middle of a graceful dance with a heavy-breasted brunette whose blissful, lascivious grin
betrayed no awareness that the towel she wore was slipping off her hips. His eyes were closed and his mouth was set in a severe pout. He looked like Huntz Hall, lantern-jawed Satch from the Bowery
Boys’ movies.

“Him?” I asked doubtfully.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“I’m . . . surprised, that’s all.”

“Look at the way he dances. The man has energy in his back pockets to spare.”

“Uh huh.”

When the music stopped, he stood there wiping the perspiration from his face with a handkerchief. Mora saw her chance. She squeezed my hand, whispered, “Be back in a minute,” and
walked up to him. I watched him lean forward to talk with her over the noise, look in my direction, nod a few times, and then she was back.

“That’s a smirk on your face,” I said.

“He turns me on. He says we should go to the locker room and get undressed.”

“That’s friendly of him. Which one is the woman he came with? The brunette?”

“He works here.”

“Oh.”

“He says once you’ve got your clothes off, you won’t have any trouble picking someone up.”

She didn’t get it.

In the locker room, he was waiting for us, talking with a dumpy woman in a Plato’s T-shirt who was in charge of towels and padlocks. We undressed and he introduced himself, blinking
myopically. His hand was large and wet.

“Richard, my name is Stanley. Mora says this is your first time here.”

“That’s right.”

“I could tell when you walked in.”

“How’s that?”

“You’re not lookin’ at the women like you’re here for the same thing they’re here for, if you know what I mean.”

Mora was standing between us, adjusting her towel to cover her breasts. He took her arm, winked at me, and started to leave.

“How long will you be? I mean, where will we meet?”

“Don’t wait around,” Stanley advised over his shoulder. “Just say hello. Just be friendly.”

I was stunned. The dumpy woman looked at me like she knew what I was thinking and handed me a towel to wrap around my waist. “He’s smooth, isn’t he?” she said. The
son-of-a-bitch.

I made my way slowly through the crowd back to the bar, feeling self-conscious about my nakedness, feet avoiding people with shoes on, my chest brushing against fabric, fingers hooked in the
towel so it wouldn’t come unknotted. I got another drink at the bar and sat down on a nearby couch.

I tried to remember what it was like to pick up a woman, how it was done in the movies and on television. I hadn’t tried to pick up anyone since high school. As I remembered, it was no
fun.

If Vy had walked in the room right then, I would have climbed all over her.

After a while, I found myself staring at a Puerto Rican woman in a clinging black dress who was sitting on the other end of the couch. She had a nice, shy smile and a diamond ring on her finger,
and she was watching her husband – a muscular man with more cleavage showing than most of the women in the room – flirt with a blonde dancing in front of him. The blonde was attracting
an audience of still-clothed men who stood around, whispering their admiration, but she was playing to the Puerto Rican hunk. She wore a black lace camisole and one thin strap kept falling off her
shoulder, baring a small, firm round breast; as she whirled, she flipped up the front of her undergarment, revealing plump boyish buttocks and pale straw pubic hair shaved in the form of a
heart.

Seeing her husband so transfixed, the Puerto Rican woman moved toward me on the couch. I smiled cautiously and looked into eyes as round and bright as new black buttons. Thinking that no one was
looking, that her husband was preoccupied with the blonde, I put my hand on her knee. She looked pleased but nervous.

I was wrong about her husband. The next thing I knew, he was angrily knocking my hand away and hissing at me. Spitting words of warning. I’m sure I blushed. I muttered my apologies and
turned my head back to the dance floor.

Mora had predicted that people would loosen up as it got later, and they did. Those who’d come to gawk were leaving, clothes were disappearing, and towels were slipping provocatively. I
didn’t see Mora anywhere. The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” bounced around the room like a badminton ball on moving jets of water. The smoothness of disco music, its
continuous, creamy beat, its plaintive voices echoing forever the rhythmic invitation to dance, pulled me to my feet.

Mora wasn’t in the swing rooms, so I went to the steamy, wet room where three whirlpool baths churned in semi-darkness. Couples cavorted in the bubbly water. I saw Mora and started to join
her. A man next to me came to life.

“Couples only,” he growled, pointing to a sign above the door that the rising steam had obscured. I noted his thick biceps and stepped back, but a small boy inside me jumped up and
down in protest.

“But I’m half of a couple. The other half is in there, and I want to say hello to her.”

“Maybe she don’t want to see you right now. Wait till she comes out. Be a gentleman.”

I took a deep breath and nodded. There was nothing to do but wait for her at the bar. All that mattered was that one of us was having a good time, I told myself. The booze made the lie somewhat
more palatable.

I tried to strike up conversations with various women at the bar, but they could smell my desperation, the way dogs smell fear. Mora emerged at last, wrapped in a white towel. She glowed. Her
pupils were bright, and her damp skin was red from the heat of the whirlpool. Her small hands were water-wrinkled.

“
Whew!
I am wiped out, Richard.”

She put her arms around my waist and nuzzled her damp forehead into my shoulder like a puppy.

“I saw you in there – you were very busy.”

“I don’t have the words to express it . . . You know how, when you’re a kid, you don’t think you belong anywhere?”

“I do, sure.”

“Richard, I felt like I
belonged
, like there was a secret society of people like me . . .”

I was upset. “Like a stamp club?”

She stepped back. “Oh, shit, Richard. If you don’t understand, I don’t know who will.”

“I’ve been feeling like an outcast from that secret society of yours.”

“I’m really sorry I was gone so long. Why didn’t you join us?”

I told her about the bouncer and she frowned.

“Come on, we’ll go back in. We’ll stay together.”

Our bare feet squished on the wet carpeting of the whirlpool room. I blinked my eyes to adjust to the darkness. She dropped her towel and lowered herself into the swirling water slowly, until
she was covered up to the neck. Hazy amber lights set into the side of the tub made her look silver, like a mermaid shimmering in the warm water. I settled next to her, my genitals floating free.
We were alone, although small groups of people nearby were groaning and splashing about enthusiastically.

She beamed like a kid at Christmas and fondled me, her hand making waves in the water. We kissed long and slowly, and didn’t come up for air until we heard splashing in the water near
us.

“I think we’ve got company,” Mora whispered in my ear, the point of her tongue playing warmly in its whorls.

When I looked up, I saw the blonde from the dance floor sitting between Stanley’s legs. He grinned at me like a benevolent pasha and winked at Mora. I stared at the blonde’s long
slender legs and the heart-shaped pubic hair between them, and she smiled back at me with curiosity in her eyes.

“People are talking about you two,” Stanley said.

“Who?” I was skeptical.

“The regulars. People in the scene.”

“Maybe they’re talking about Mora, but I’ve been batting zero.”

“Shyness turns women on. Tracey noticed you.”

Bullshit she’d noticed me, but I didn’t care – for some reason, Stanley had brought her along, she was sitting not four feet away, and all I had to do was figure out some
clever way of crossing the ocean between us.

She made it easy by speaking first, in a squeaky voice that managed to make Brooklyn sound sexy. “I saw your mustache, and I just adore mustaches, and Stanley said you were probably a
really nice guy, so when he asked me to come in here with him for just a minute I decided to forget that it was two in the morning because I like nice people more than I like going home in a cab by
myself – don’t you think Plato’s is really neat? I feel right at home . . .”

Mora and I looked at each other in disbelief, and then turned to study Tracey from top to bottom. It was true: she was indeed one of the most beautiful women either of us had seen outside of the
pages of
Playboy
. The important details were all in place: her firm breasts and plump buttocks belonged in a centerfold, her skin was smooth and soft, and she was without wrinkles or scars.
She even wrinkled her nose like a cheerleader.

I looked her straight in the eyes, all at once sure where I had hesitated before.

“Tracey,” I said. “You are a goddess. I say that without a doubt in my mind.”

She cooed. “I
knew
you were going to be a sweety! I can always pick them out – and nice equals sexy.”

I felt buoyant. Maybe it was the water, but I think it was relief. I reached for her ankle and she let me hold it while Stanley floated through the water to Mora. Then she took my hand and
placed it on her belly. “I want to feel you in my belly, filling me up.”

I couldn’t believe my luck. Like a kid about to raid the cookie jar, I looked around to see if anyone was watching. Mora was riding Stanley in the water, holding on to his shoulders with
her fingertips and looking into his eyes. I touched Tracey’s breasts and felt electricity course through my palm and wrist and up my arm. I thought I heard her purring when I kissed her inner
thighs, and then she folded herself into me, hands braced against the edge of the tub, and we became deep sea divers, carrying on like estrous dolphins.

It seemed like hours later that we surfaced, only to hear the announcement over the sound system that the club was about to close. Sex had stretched time like a rubber band.

Close? Tracey and I held on to each other like exhausted boxers against the ropes. Mora and Stanley were out of the water, drying themselves off. I hadn’t had enough – I didn’t
care what time it was, I had only just discovered the delights of Plato’s, and I wasn’t ready to go home. Another ten minutes . . .

I was also water-logged; every cell squished. Tracey gave me a huge grin as she climbed out of the whirlpool, and I managed to plant a kiss on her firm left buttock.

“It’s four o’clock in the morning, lover,” she said. “Time to go home.”

I stood up. “Here’s a towel, Richard,” Mora said.

I took it reluctantly, looking around like a man who’s been rudely awakened from a glorious wet dream. I heard Stanley’s laughter in the background.

Mora put her arm around me and whispered in my ear, “You see what it’s like now. You see how you can get lost in it. Can you blame me for doing what I can?”

“Not any more. Not now.” I was sure that I could promise her that understanding.

Out on the street, we blinked at the dawn light like sleepy moles and walked down Fifth Avenue with our arms around each other. The early morning city was like an open bedroom;
we scrutinized the people we passed on the sidewalk as if they were hurrying naked through Plato’s. The world was sexualized.

“I told you that you would meet someone,” Mora said.

“If it hadn’t been for you . . .”

“Stanley gave me his telephone number. He made a big deal of it.”

“Do they live together?”

“I think so. Do you want to do it again?”

“It’s not fair to ask me now,” I told her. “It’s Christmas morning.”

She squeezed me. “You know what? I’m happy. I think we make a good team.”

“Sweet Jesus, take pity on our lust.”

Mora was sitting up to her neck in a tub of hot water and I was scrubbing her back. Her skin was turning red from the water and my fingernails, and the rising steam was curling
the yellow wallpaper. Her slippery soft body was light as cork under my hands, the delicate bones of her arms and legs like wires holding her in the water.

We were talking about Plato’s. She said her mother had always told her that in marriage you can’t eat your cake and have it too. She referred to her mother when she was uncertain; it
helped her make up her mind, usually the other way.

“You can’t have it both ways.”

I wondered. Most of the people at Plato’s were married, and I supposed they lived tolerable lives together, no different from ours except that they shared a recreational interest –
they went to bed with strangers. Sex to them was an end in itself, its own perfect justification.