Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels

“Look, the words wedlock and hammerlock are not synonymous. They don’t add up to virtue. Besides, you’re not just a ‘twosome’, you’re half of a ‘foursome’ – silly words, it sounds like we’re talking about golf…”

“I’m sorry -”

“Maybe if you did some homework, since I’m not around to keep things stirred up.”

“What? What kind of homework?”

“ Now I’ve got your interest piqued. I’ll mail you your next lesson.” I heard a dry chuckle on the other end.

I broke in. “Come and see us.”

“Oh. There you are, Richard. You should breathe more heavily when you’re spying on people.”

“Mora knew I was on the extension. I trust her, but not you. Why don’t you come visit us?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’m going to hole up out here and try to get some work done. Fasting and abstinence and hard work, that’s the prescription. I’ll be a different man, the next time you see me.”

“Like?”

“Lean and hungry, I suppose, and head over heels in love.”

“You mean because absence makes the heart grow fonder?”

He chuckled again. “Love is what I feel when I want to get laid. Abstinence, that’s what makes the heart grow fonder.”

He wasn’t kidding about our homework. The clipping arrived in the mail two days later. He had cut it from the classified section of a sex tabloid.

The advertisement was for a private club called Plato’s Retreat that had recently opened on lower Fifth Avenue.

“The first on-premise club which meets in Manhattan – which means the party’s right there…” It mentioned facilities like whirlpool baths, disco floor, swing rooms, and free bar and buffet.

It made me think of restaurant ads for Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s – a meal, some hats, streamers and horns. I imagined people as lonely as forgotten uncles and single people with nowhere else to go buying some holiday companionship for a package price.

We looked at each other.

“We could go and just see what’s going on,” Mora said, barely concealing the excitement in her voice.

“Somehow I don’t think swinging is a spectator sport, love.”

“Please, Richard: let’s go take a look. I’m really curious.”

“I don’t know if I can handle it.”

“We’ll stick together, I promise. Besides, there’ll be a woman for every man there. What if you meet someone?”

“I don’t know. What if I do?”

“Well, you won’t turn her down, will you?”

When we called the number in the ad for information, a woman told us that Plato’s Retreat was open from ten until five in the morning, and directed us to an older loft building below Madison Square Park. We stood on the broad, empty avenue opposite the building, sharing a joint and getting our nerve up. It was Saturday night, after eleven. People were arriving in taxis and entering the building. A limousine hugged the curb.

Stoned, we took a small, rattling elevator to the fifth floor and stepped off into a spartan reception area crowded with a desk and three pretty, businesslike young women wearing black Plato’s Retreat T-shirts. I handed over twenty-five dollars to the one who winked at me, and we received orange membership cards with the club name on one side and a list of rules on the other.

1. Only couples or unescorted females allowed in the club.

2. No single male will be admitted without an escort.

3. If female of couple leaves the club, the male escort must accompany her.

4. No drugs or drug abuse on the premises.

5. Neither part of the couple is prostituting themselves.

Stepping through black curtains sewn with sequins, we found ourselves at the head of a long, dark corridor where shadowy half-dressed figures stood about passing joints, plastic glasses in their hands. They gave us slow, appraising looks as we brushed past them, and past the voyeurs who crowded the doorways of the swing rooms. By peering over shoulders, I could see a few people rolling about athletically on mattresses. I was surprised by how passionless both participants and onlookers seemed.

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.