The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

and lukewarm. I guess he figured it was his duty.

He hurriedly checked the swaying folds of the curtains, to make sure no prying eye could look in. “Gut,” he said, satisfied.

Then he pulled down his shorts.

The prompter in my head, that precise, intrusive internal voice, never let go of my hand. I knew exactly what to do, even though I’d never slept with anyone under these circumstances before: it had always started with my consciousness becoming pleasantly, mistily bedewed by someone I liked, so that the pleasurable feelings were always clear and unambiguous. But today I didn’t even know whether I liked Kurt or not – and it made no difference at all. I had always wanted to be warmly intoxicated with perfectly mellowed (though perhaps only transient) desire; I would let myself dissolve into pleasant reverie – and the truckers who caught on were then allowed to come after me. Come into me. Pay a tender, longed-for, intimate visit. Always for a limited time.

But now – now I saw everything with perfect and loathsome sobriety. Without ardor. Without desire. I examined the shameful lighting in our little cab without shame: everything had perfectly clear, absolutely sharp outlines; gone was that undulating, dewy translucence I needed so badly during my Nights of Distances, my Nights of Instants. I was stone sober and wide awake: I was an actor on the stage of my own private theater, and the role was translated by my lips and movements with perfect precision. It became the way I could seductively (like a typical easy woman) slip out of even that clay-caked T-shirt. It became the bowing of the head I used to inconspicuously avoid direct eye contact; the precise and realistic movements of body, hands, lips. I knew exactly what to do, although I had never behaved this way before. And he didn’t get it. How could he have guessed I had a prompter directing me from inside my defenseless-looking head? He surrendered himself to my hands and lips without the least sign of surprise. I did exactly what he anticipated. I did exactly what he expected and wanted, and if anything especially turned him on, it was that he didn’t have to ask for anything. He was not so experienced that I couldn’t surprise him. I was functioning. I didn’t try to assess him, to figure out whether I liked him at all. I paid attention only to myself – concertedly, critically. I did everything I could think of doing – and although I’d never studied what was most pleasing to (average) men, my intuition helped me. I kissed him deeply, a kiss no less clinging than the one he had given me before – and I let him sigh blissfully. Or semi-blissfully. It was an experienced and wet kiss, well calculated – but still just a sort of half-kiss. Everything was halves and semis… Our semi-rapport. Our semi-commercial exchange. The half-light. Semi-desire. And we were half-human. We were marionettes, waving our hands, moving, living according to the puppet master’s nimble fingers… And when that large, actually very large, and hard piece of flesh (Fleisch, it occurred to me, Fleisch) plunged into me, I realized that even this time I would feel pleasure. Semi- pleasure. I was making my acting debut on the stage of the Southern Road – and the sun had shifted slightly in the sky, so that the shameful lighting colored my rival’s face. (Yes, he was my rival, though not my enemy.) Perhaps all my old sins and loves returned to me and aroused me as I conscientiously, attentively (and no doubt artfully), rode him like a hobbyhorse, rocking and plunging. Men like it when they don’t have to exert themselves too much, reasoned the prompter in my head. And I was willing to provide good service for good money. I rocked and plunged, more vigorously and deeper, to the point where it hurt – and through the filter of perfectly sober thought I felt my eyes becoming moist and saw the same voluptuous moisture in my rival’s eyes and my thighs quivering with the first tendrils of pleasure that were beginning to spread from my crotch, after all… After all…? No, there was no after all about it, this was the approach of a powerful, compact, nearly painful orgasm, its potent, absolutely unfeigned spasms gripping my rival like a velvet vice. I bit his shoulder and neck to stifle the moans and the scream that struggled to leave my throat. We weren’t the only ones parked at that rest area. I gripped him again and again in the velvet vise and looked with my misty but perfectly sober eyes directly into his; I observed how his face twisted, how he cried out and groaned and pulled me toward him, his nails digging into my buttocks, one hand on each, spreading them. He pulled me toward him and his face twisted with the animal grimace of genuine ecstasy: the quivering spread to my thighs and groin and down my legs… I knew the convulsion would come soon – and it would be a painful one – but payment had been made. I held on, and when I felt the hot liquid streaming into me like a firehose into a burning house, I calmly realized how perfectly my prompter had everything planned: these were my safest days of the month… Soon the convulsions stopped in my thighs, replaced only by a trembling exhaustion, and my rival, or sexual partner, was still quivering too. He was overcome. And lying next to him afterward, tired, trembling, my prompter did not forget to speak up and show me precisely how to place my hand on his heaving shaggy chest so that it would seem intimate without applying too much pressure – though, of course, this meant nothing at all. I was still trying to catch my breath in the sultry atmosphere of the shamefully lit cab. That was good, solid lovemaking, it occurred to me.

A good fuck.

ROSES by Evelyn Lau

THE PSYCHIATRIST CAME into my life one month after my eighteenth birthday. He came into my life wearing a silk tie, his dark eyes half-obscured by lines and wrinkles. He brought with him a pronounced upper-class accent, a futile sense of humor, books to educate me. Lolita. The Story of O. His lips were thin, but when I took them between my own they plumped out and filled my mouth with sweet foreign tastes.

He worshipped me at first because he could not touch me. And then he worshipped me because he could only touch me if he paid to do so. I understood that without the autumn leaves, the browns of the hundreds and the fiery scarlets of the fifties, the marble pedestal beneath me would begin to erode.

The first two weeks were tender. He said he adored my childlike body, my unpainted face, my long straight hair. He promised to take care of me, love me unconditionally. He would be my father, friend, lover – and if one was ever absent, the other two were large enough on their own to fill up the space that was left behind.

He brought into my doorway the slippery clean smell of rain, and he possessed the necessary implements – samples of pills tiny as seeds, a gold shovel. My body yielded to the scrapings of his hands.

He gave me drugs because, he said, he loved me. He brought the tablets from his office, rattling in plastic bottles stuffed to the brim with cotton. I placed them under my tongue and sucked up their saccharine sweetness, learning that only the strong ones tasted like candy, the rest were chalky or bitter. He loved me beyond morality.

The plants that he brought each time he came to visit – baby’s breath, dieffenbachia, jade – began to die as soon as they crossed the threshold of my home. After twenty-four hours the leaves would crinkle into tight dark snarls stooping towards the soil. They could not be pried open, though I watered his plants, exposed them to sunlight, trimmed them. It was as if by contact with him or with my environment, they had been poisoned. Watching them die, I was reminded of how he told me that when he first came to Canada he worked for two years in one of our worst mental institutions. I walked by the building once at night, creeping as far as I dared up the grassy slopes and between the evergreens. It was a sturdy beige structure, it didn’t look so bad from the outside. In my mind, though, I saw it as something else. In my mind it was a series of black-and-white film stills; a face staring out from behind a barred window. The face belonged to a woman with tangled hair, wearing a nightgown. I covered my ears from her screams. When he told me about this place I imagined him in the film, the woman clawing at him where the corridors were gray, and there was the clanking sound of tin and metal. I used to lie awake as a child on the nights my father visited my bed and imagine scenes in which he was terrorized, in pain, made helpless. This was the same. I could smell the bloodstains the janitors had not yet scrubbed from the floors. I could smell the human discharges and see the hands that groped at him as he walked past each cell, each room. The hands flapped disembodied in the air, white and supplicating and at the same time evil.

He told me that when he was married to his first wife, she had gone shopping one day and he had had to take their baby with him on his hospital rounds, “I didn’t know where to put him when I arrived,” he said. “So I put him in the wastepaper basket.” When he returned the child had upended the basket and crawled out, crying, glaring at his father. “I had no other choice,” he said, and he reached into his trenchcoat and gave me a bottle of pills. “I love you,” he said, “that’s why I’m doing this.”

I believed that only someone with a limitless love would put his baby in a trash can, its face squinched and its mouth pursing open in a squawk of dismay. Only someone like that could leave it swaddled in crumpled scraps of paper so he could go and take care of his patients. I could not imagine the breadth of the love that lay behind his