Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

“Yes, Gräfin. Thank you, Gräfin.”

She said to me, ‘Are you interested in Harry's little business?”

She was inviting me to mock him. I pitied him and tried to be gentle, saying, “Not exactly.”

“Go on, then, Harry. Go and play.” She twitched her veil as though shutting him out.

Alone with her, I did not know what to say. I finished my glass of wine feeling that I was at the center of a great silent void, like a boy in a bubble. She pushed her glass toward me almost contemptuously, as though reluctant to satisfy my gluttony. I finished it, saying nothing, but feeling that it might help to be a bit drunk because I did not know what to do next.

I finally said, “What is it about Harry that you don't like?”

She made just the slightest facial tic, using the tip of her nose and her upper lip, like a handsome animal reacting to a buzzing insect.

“That he's queer?” I said.

“What is queer?”

“That he’s a sodomite.”

She smiled and said, “The one thing I understand.”

“Sure,” I said, and she knew I doubted her.

Leaning forward, her warm champagne breath on my face, she said with a satisfaction like appetite, “I am a sodomite.”

No words were available to me then, and with my mind a blank, I touched her hand, which was hot and eager.

She said — wicked child—“I don't like that jacket. You always wear that jacket. It’s too dark.”

“You bought it for me.” Or rather, Haroun bought it for me, with the Gräfin’s money. Haroun had loved fussing with the tailor in a small street behind the Naumachia, discussing textures of velvet.

“I suppose I’ll have to buy you another.”

“Good idea,” I said, telling myself that I was humoring her and not being insulted.

“Tomorrow we will go to the tailor. I want you to wear a light-colored jacket, one that will look well with my dresses. This one is wrong. It attracts attention.”

A child's demands are often meaningless, pay attention to me their only motive — even then, at twenty-one, I knew that, perhaps better than she.

“I suppose you want my key,” she said.

The thought had not occurred to me. I had to think hard in my drunken slowness to reason what she was talking about. Key? I thought, and smiled, and she smiled back. What key ?

Instead of replying — what was I to say? — I put my hand out. She pouted, putting on a sulky malicious face, and smacked the key into my palm. There were bite marks, hers, on the meat of my palm, the dark roulettes of her teeth.

In her suite that second night I was more confident. I knew what she wanted, I understood her contradictions, I was more polite, kissed her more gently, held her in my arms and delighted in the darkness, loving the feel of her clothes and the skin beneath them, and sometimes slipping my fingers through a placket and not knowing which was silk and which was skin, for both were warm to my touch.

I took my time, to give myself a chance to adjust to seeing in the dark, and when she began to glow slightly — as a darkened room grows warmer and emits a sort of frosty light — I could pick out her shape and soon the texture of her clothes: the loose dress of white loops, the velvet collar and the white shoes with such high heels she was nearly as tall as I was. The Chanel hat with the little veil she had worn at dinner she kept on, and the gloves. All in white tonight — I saw her easily.

“What do you want?”

“How can you ask me that?” Her tone was sharp.

We kissed. My hands roved delicately over her clothes.

“I have everything. How dare you ask me that?”

She pushed me aside, surprising me. I was offended and annoyed, and in a quick reflex I snatched at her wrist and held on, too tight, although it had not been my intention. She did not resist. Before I could let go, she went limp and dropped to her knees, her hat and veil brushing my shirt front and down my trousers, and I was thinking what a stiff skewering hat pin must have held it in place that it could rub me like that without moving.

I had not released her wrist, and the texture of her lace gloves gave me a better grip than if I had held her bare hands. I guided her fingers to the bulge in my trousers and rubbed them against me. Before I realized it — she was that adroit — she had unzipped me with her free hand and in the next moment she had me in her mouth. That heat, that busy tongue, and the fingers of her gloves on the shaft of my cock, the lacy fretwork of her fingertips stroking my hardness, as I held her head, her hat, her veil, my hands tightening on all this brocade. The harder I held her head, the more eagerly she sucked me and stroked me with her gloved hands, chafing me with the white lace. I came, sooner than I wanted, spurting in a succession of involuntary jerks, stabbing at her mouth and face and spattering creamy mucus on her veil and face and lacy fingers.

Seeing what I had done to her pretty gloves and her veil, I began to apologize in the shallow staticky tone of a man who has just had an orgasm. She was not listening, she was licking her gloves and her veil like a little girl licking the last sweet drops of syrup from her fingers.

I had hardly touched her, yet that was enough.

That she was cruel and fickle the following day made me smile at the sight of her play-acting, for now she was predictable. And I even knew the reason: she intended to enrage me so that later, in her room, I would dominate her and treat as my slave. It was role-playing, it was harmless, it was perfect. I was not enraged, I was aroused; if she could pretend to be cruel during the day, I could imitate that cruelty at night — it was easy to make my passion into fury.

The softness of her skin in the dark, far softer-seeming because of the dark, was irresistible. And the aroma of her lily-fragrant perfume, mingled with the cat smell of her steaming cunt, made me salivate and pant like a lion, my nose tormented by damp feline fur and hot blood. Still I could not tell where her soft skin ended and her silk began, and the complexity of her vaginal lips was like another elaborate silken garment she had put on for me to stroke. I adored the gleam of her body in the light from the Taormina street lamps and the blistered moon.

But she preferred darkness to light, the floor to the bed, silence to words, my roughness to my gentleness, clothes to nakedness; preferred serving me to my making love to her. She knelt and worshiped my cock with her mouth and her gloved hands, and she cried out louder than I did when I came, spattering her face as she licked. One of those times when she was done with me I knelt myself and touched her between her legs, and she was so wet with desire my fingers sank into her, and as they slipped between the hot flesh folds into her enlarged hole it was as though they were being swallowed.

After her daytime sulks, her fickleness, her trickery, her cruel remarks and her imperious bearing, her contradictions, her outright insults, turning away from me to show me an uplifted profile of contempt and indifference, she liked nothing better, as darkness fell, than to be led to her suite and commanded to kneel before me; and for me to take my cock out and demand that she suck me off. And often when I was done she still had not had enough, and I watched from above as she went on sucking and gulping.

The strings and muscles in her neck, the pulsing of her throat, the motions of swallowing — I could see it all, as fascinated by her neck and throat as I had been weeks ago when she had turned away and drunk the wine to snub me. I loved to watch her swallowing, and there was no prettier sight than her subtle gulps, the active gullet, like a thirsty cannibal drinking her victim drop by drop.

So we lived on in the Palazzo d’Oro, and we flourished in Taormina, and the summer days went by, seeming to grow hotter as the nights grew cooler, and I kept wondering how far she wanted me to go with her, for I was, even after ten days or so, still learning. The Gräfin was my earliest lesson on the topic that every woman is different.