Maxim Jakubowski: The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels

“I don’t know, Richard. I just think being unhappy is a waste of time.”

“Agreed.”

We stared at each other. Neither of us really wanted to be married. Not really. We were romantics, we weren’t interested in snug harbors – when we spoke of love, we meant passion. Rub us together and you got fire.

From the time I first saw Mora I was under a spell. I know some magic was involved, because I was on the defensive after the break-up of a relationship I’d taken more seriously than I should have. The home truths I’d learned about my needs were so lacerating, I vowed eternal celibacy.

For six months I’d been living like a monk in a basement sublet in Brooklyn Heights. It had a single bed I used and a kitchen I didn’t, and little else except for a color television set and a well-equipped darkroom. No pictures on the walls, no plants to be watered, no cats to wrap themselves around my ankles when I came back late from my studio on West 17th Street.

It was a low, unhappy period in my life. I told myself I’d snap out of my funk any day, but the truth was I was drifting, getting by in a low key. I had let being in love become a way of defining myself. Alone, I didn’t know who I was.

Mora came along just when I was beginning to spend so much time in Village bars that the bartenders knew my name, occupation, and marital status. One of them was an actor I had used as a model. He knew a woman who needed some pictures.

“She comes in here all the time. Lives just around the block. She’s real intense.”

“You don’t understand. I take pictures of products, not egos. I don’t do portfolio glossies and I don’t want to meet any women.”

It was noisy in the bar, right before dinner. Maybe he didn’t hear me.

“She’s a lot of fun. Just let me tell her you’ll do it.”

A few days later she showed up at my studio. I was fussing with lights around an ornate, old-fashioned bathtub with claw feet. Later in the day, the agency that had had it delivered to me would come to fill it with towels – I did catalogs, too.

I earn a living with a 35 millimeter camera because when I was a boy I picked up a Brownie for the first time and discovered my third eye. I have a gift for seeing with the camera lens what the naked eye misses, moments when formlessness becomes form. When Mora walked through the door, it was one of those moments.

I stared. She stared back. She was so small I could have fitted her in a large camera bag. The top of her head came to the middle of my chest. Her curly hair was short but not mannishly cut, a chestnut brown that smelled like oranges.

Her white skirt showed off her slender legs, and she had thrown a linen jacket over her thin shoulders. She wore a figa – a small, fist-shaped Brazilian good luck charm – on a gold chain around her throat, but no earrings, no bracelets: only a trace of lip gloss. Her tan was so deep, she looked like she’d just stepped off a plane from someplace south.

I looked away first, after seeing the mischief in her calm green eyes. “Ever modeled before?”

She shook her head. “Only for my boyfriend’s Polaroid, but the pictures always came out blurry – you know how those things go. He found it hard to concentrate.” She suppressed a smirk.

“You don’t say.”

We were grinning at each other. Hers was impish, provocative. “Have you acted before?”

“Never, if you don’t count Gilbert and Sullivan in grade school. But I’ve tried everything else and all my friends are in theater this year, so I thought, why not?”

Her self-confidence was dazzling. It came out in the standard portrait shots I did of her. Her dark features were wonderfully mobile, and she kept that glint in her eye. After the shooting, I cancelled my appointment with the bath towel people and took Mora to dinner.

And so we met. And we made love. She was just as bold in bed as she was before the camera, very passionate and open; her energy was astonishing. A month later, I left Brooklyn and moved into her second floor apartment on Cornelia Street. Things happened fast around Mora.

We lived together for a year, more happily than I’d thought possible. Business went so well in the studio, I hired a part-time assistant; Mora didn’t have to work because her father owned a shopping mall and sent her a monthly allowance. When she decided she had no acting talent, she got into politics for a while, and then she just started spending all her time at home cooking exotic meals; she told her friends she was too happy to concentrate on anything more.

What happened was that we got cocky. All the traditional signals had gone off at the right times, and we started thinking we were different, that we could nail our feelings to the wall where they would never change. One thing led to another and, before we knew it, we were standing in City Hall, saying our vows. Afterwards, we threw a party for our friends, and then when the shock wore off and we realized what we’d done, we stayed drunk for two days and had a terrific fight so we could squeeze the last ounce of passion out of making up.

Why did we do it? Talk to anyone: marriage is like getting a diploma in living as an adult. The license certifies a certain wilful madness for, as we found out, everyone lies about marriage, especially its kinkier aspects: the manacles of words at each wrist and ankle, the eager vows that become expectations. The endless expectations.

We were on our third round of drinks and Mora was snapping her foot back and forth restlessly and staring off into space. I looked around for a waiter so we could order dinner, when I saw Charles Venturi sit down at a table near us. He was the last person I expected to see. He’d been off in Europe for years – since the early seventies, when we had served time together on the same slick magazines. We were never close, but I had sought him out and spent time with him because he fascinated me.

Sitting across from him was a tall blonde woman in her late twenties who had lovely cheekbones, hollow cheeks, and long delicate wrists, the supple carriage of a dancer, the long neck and waist of a model. She was beautiful in the wiredrawn way that well-bred New England daughters who sing Bach on Sundays can be.

“Look over there,” I said to Mora. “That’s Charles Venturi.”

“They’re a handsome couple,” she admitted. “They look interesting.”

She followed me over to their table.

“Charles! How long have you been back?”

We shook hands and I introduced Mora. The woman with him was Vy Cameron. In the years I’d known Charles, I hadn’t seen him with a woman who looked so capable of keeping up. I liked the determination I saw in her pale gray-blue eyes, and the demure way she shook my hand, fingers wrapped lightly around fingers. A lady, with an agenda.

The two of us exchanged the usual inane comments that pass for casual conversation in the Hamptons, but we kept our eyes on our mates. Mora and Charles were hitting it off. While he talked, she was giving him what I think of as the Treatment. The Treatment consists of her undivided attention, of long, smouldering looks, and sudden, surprising smiles that promise a lot more than understanding. It’s flattering, and nearly always effective.

After a while, I interrupted them. I saw a chance to change the weather between Mora and I, the possibility of sun behind the clouds.

“Let’s get together. Where are you staying?”

“With the man Vy lives with, Maurice.”

I raised my eyebrows, and he looked unexpectedly sheepish for a minute.

“It’s a long story. I’ll save it for later.” He winked.

He suggested that we meet on the beach next day. We talked about time and place – he knew a beach where it was possible to go without bathing suits – and returned to our table.