ill Gotten Gains
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People are sensitive about extra-marital affairs but not me. I’ve always been able to relate to women in a manner that other men envied. It first showed itself as a teenager, when being seduced myself by a mature woman. She took great care to show me how to pleasure a woman, telling me that it all starts with the mind. Make love to a woman’s mind and she’ll give you all, my seductress told me. Naturally it helps to be handsome, though if a man can awaken a woman from a dead union, inspire her to be alive, he need not be so.
I’m an adorer of the bearer of breasts. It’s not a crime. I like to think myself more like a male nurse than seducer; injecting charm and mystery into the veins of women living without desire and adoration and create for them the russet shadows of secrecy and infidelity.
I live for the impetuous softness of touch, the tears of summer nights, the shudders of forbidden excitement, if there is such a thing.
Katherine, the woman standing over there, in the green polka-dot dress, looking at the artwork, needed something; someone to change her dull world. That would be me.
Look it’s ugly, I get that. But honestly, why blame me if the light in her heart has been turned off, the spark she once had for life, faded, almost to darkness.
Last week she accompanied me on weekend trip to Paris, played being the woman on the man’s arm. A man who was adoring her. When the day’s romantic activities ended, when her romantic thoughts and desires had been sparked to life, after the laughter, the touching, teasing, I adored her in bed. It’s a lifestyle, that’s all.
What I’m telling you might seem repugnant but is it any more repugnant than a man beating up on his wife, or abusing her? I bring a little light relief into the lives of the women who are looking for something to change their world, maybe not forever, perhaps to get over a sad patch in their lives. When women choose me over their husbands they do so, in my opinion, with good reason. I’m the man other men hate. I have passion. I give passion.
For two days I told her stories, lit her heart to a furnace, tasted her breasts, let her enjoy the impossible perfection of romance. I’m simply the man who came to save her from a tedious and uneventful life; the enigmatic stranger who fills several pages of her innermost secret diary.
She’s good in bed, of course, articulate and athletic. I’m her living Rodin, working within the arch of her back, bumping my fingers over the splendour of each vertebra, kissing the purity of her taught and tenuous skin.
So yes, I move under peculiar moons, a man alone, with sparkling eyes, gifted in the art of loving, stimulating her erotic senses, gazing on her body while she lay on her stomach, waiting for my next pleasure making move.
There’s no easy way to achieve my expertise. It demands the sacred study of women, knowing when to absorb and satisfy their August obsessions, awaken their ideas of fulfilment, create for them warped worlds and legitimate passions. I watch carefully, find them, study them, and wait to remove them from the territorial kinship groups, from their native community, removing each of them from a life of servile obligations.
The quality of my work is obvious, I’m a self-made man. I might begin my search anywhere, but am drawn to the church; where better to find disillusionment and hopelessness? Katherine was just such a woman, sitting between the pews of mahogany, two rows in front, dressed in cotton print, brown eyed with no idea she would be redeemed.
She turned momentarily to catch my eye, and I knew, you just must trust me on this, I knew. Her warm breath, the breath of her dull life, being breathed before the chancel, dripping with gold and satin. I knew what she really wanted and with a calmness and assuredness I spent the next four weeks attending the service. I was going to make my move below the priest’s pedestal. The following week she took her place among a congregation of believers. Her locks of blond hair fell about her shoulders like wild flowers and her perfume mingled with the scent of candles and piety. I studied her, the frock, another cotton favourite, and the wedding ring on her finger, a straw hat held in her hands — enough to tell me so much about her life. A life, you can be sure, of natural fragrances, quaint and precious things. I could be wrong but unlikely. The dolphin on the gold chain hanging from her creamy smooth neck gives her away. Next week I’ll sow my seed of interest. Yes, there is work to be done but I’m driven on in my quest for a romance by the view of her neat posterior, visible to me through the lightness of cotton fabric while she stands to adore her maker.
Within two weeks I was biting her arse.
Among the foliage and shadows of neighbourhood trees she shone her own vivacious summer as she walked to church. She crossed the park, stopping momentarily to feed the ducks, where it was easy for me to observe the unheated emptiness of her heart. The colossally huge space bringing crystal to her cheeks, salt still fresh on her lips. She is lonely by every other name.
I watched her husband from my car as he left the house, dog pulling on a leash. Stopping frequently, the animal sniffed and licked and pushed his nose into other people’s pathways with an air of innocent rudeness. I watched a man seemingly completed by routine procedure. Over a period of two weeks he was observed leaving the house to walk the dog at 6.30 a.m. and returning at 6.45 a.m. Fifteen minutes after this he climbs into his Rolls Royce and leaves for the city, where he works as CEO for a large merchant bank. The information neatly supplied on his parking permit. He returns to his home at 8.30 p.m. This happened six days a week. Sunday, he played golf.
One can understand how the years of excuses had long floundered upon her indifference toward him. She now lived a virtual solitary life, neat and perfect, with everything of value wrapped up in lacy dreams and memories of what might have been. She had friends, mostly distant, or those closely involved in charity work. Babbling women wearing smocks raising money for the local children’s orphanage and holding a garden tea party to sell the fruits of their kitchen labour for a worthy cause. Occasionally she would even join a door to door collection for the church, walking up and down rows of privet hedges, while curtains moved, and vases shifted in windows.
I was sitting on the bench where she stops to feed the ducks the next week. She will half remember catching my eye in the church, and I will casually remark on the pleasantness of the morning. It will be my gypsy heart that captures her interest, leaving her with a smiling warmth as she moves on toward the church. Between now and when that happens there will be an unfathomable space in her heart.
The following week I was there again. She sat beside me. From a poetry book in my hand, I read her Conrad Aiken’s poem, Chance Meeting. In those brief moments I herded my words together to create the desired effect of innocent foolishness. The last of several sequential apologies was accompanied by my name. She responded graciously and offered hers.
We agreed to walk to the church together.
That’s all there was to it. The chance meeting of a distant face and a thousand dreams coming together on a Sunday morning, to be devoured and appreciated and swallowed. It was indeed early, but I could sense all too soon we’d be building hopes and piling them in corners, waiting for an opportunity to spend them on each other. The choir boys yawned and sang and yawned their way through the service. I sat at her side, appropriately distant, and allowed the serenity of her presence to soak away the knowledge of my tedious work. It would all be so natural now. I would occasionally glance sideways, and my gaze would be met with hers and a smile shared. It is the deep and fantastic first feeling; the arrow of desire meeting the light of realisation. She liked me.
The meetings in the park were a joy. Surroundings faded into obscurity as we learned about each other. We talked about forests, shores, suns and savannahs. Spanish children, orchards, and butterflies darting down canyons. Memories, and I remember when. The stink of tar and the fragrance of flowers. Passions and despairs and sombre days. The thirst for calm and nature all around, the nourishment of open spaces and cooling breezes. We talked about loneliness and dreams that cracked and dried and crumbled to dust. I knew she was thinking about thigh bones, shoulders, and feet that had not felt a caress in too long. Organs that had not been stirred from long sleep.
There was no talk of people. An unspoken agreement. Not until the seventh hour together in five days. It was a simple admission, one that explained how my friendship made everything else in her life bearable. She placed her hand on mine. Her perfume was filling my nostrils and she was drawing me in with her eyes, deeply in and uncontrollably and inexorably toward our first kiss. For a fleeting moment I attempted to resist. Such innocence hardly fails. It allowed her to consider the implications, the consequences, and then it was done. I may have stammered some explanation for accepting her kiss but really, there was nothing left to be said.
We left church the next Sunday, separately, and met at noon. She asked me to drive and as we deepened the distance between reality and our dreams we spoke about everything and anything while we ate each other with greedy eyes. It was the physical and rapturous joy of being alive and in love that burnt on the air around us.
Under the willow we lay in each other’s arms. Hearts aflame, desires burning with anticipation. There’s no thought for wreckage, or the inferno that waits. Two people on the golden earth, holding and touching and caressing. Mouths entwined, hands roaming on sacred skin, trembling passions and heated breath. I surreptitiously unbuttoned her frock, letting it fall open. My hand passed lightly over her stomach and up to the clasp on her bra, which, too, fell side to side, and like spiders, my kisses crept over her skin. I rested my head on her buttocks and gently, lovingly, bit her arse. We lay in a nest of lies and deceit comforted by need. The bubbling need to be adored, to be loved, to be wanted, and those feelings overwhelmed fairness and respect and righteousness.
She wasn’t in church the following Sunday. I was expecting her absence after the phone call. When the man approaches I recognise him immediately. He sits on the bench. He is calm. He is extraordinarily calm. He explains to me that he loves his wife, always has. He finds this situation intolerable. His wife, a respected member of the society in which they live, being enticed away by a scallywag and no more than that. There is always a sense of satisfaction when another man recognises my needs and can discuss them in a gentlemanly like way. So many do not.
His job and the respect of his fellow directors has been hard earned. A divorce at this time would not only shock his partner’s but ruin his credibility. There had to be a solution and we accepted our roles in finding what it would be. Two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-pounds might seem a lot of money and there is no question it would carry me for some time. Some discussions need not take long. A point is made, accepted, and a deal is done.
The man walks away, leaving the briefcase with me.
Love, lust, and romance is all very fine, but it isn’t financially viable, it doesn’t pay the bills, it won’t add to the equity in a home.
