The Story of X: An Erotic Tale Read online

  My senses meld. I give in to the pleasure and the visions. Oh. Oh, yes. The girl is very pretty; I have no idea who she is. I moan a little, I can’t help it. She continues to stroke me. I don’t want her to stop. This is good, this is good. But she smiles and suddenly removes her hand. Then I hear her skip away, disappearing into the milling crowd, leaving me panting. Close. So close. Where am I?

  “Marc, who was that?”

  He shakes his head.

  I whisper, “A mystery. Yes, I know. A mystery. Marc, I feel strange.”

  He takes my hand again. And I lean on his shoulder and I feel a surge of sexuality. Of real and powerful abandon. I want to have sex with Marc, here, in front of these people. Rip away that cravat, that starched white shirt; unbutton those Byronic breeches. It is very difficult for me not to do this. The long leather boots are quite ravishing.

  The music is so loud, it is verging on painful. I have no idea what time it is, or how much time has passed.

  Marc murmurs, his wine-scented words warm in my ear.

  “Do you want to lie down? The kykeon is even more effective if you lie down.”

  I’m not sure I could handle the kykeon being any more effective. But he is right: I have to lie down. Colors riot in my mind; the frescoes seem to be moving. Cherubim are toppling off clouds.

  I stumble through the people, as Marc leads me by the hand. I see men in military uniforms and women in white gauze dresses, and those little Regency jackets—Spencer jackets?—framed by more wide-open windows. The cemetery island is dark and visible on the black Venetian horizon. There are large wooden stairs to my left, which sway in my vision. Marc points, but I am already heading that way, holding his hand.

  I need to go up those stairs.

  At the top Marc pauses: a gilt-rose corridor stretches away. I spy a wide bed in a large gold-and-purple room. Letting go of Marc’s hand, I walk in at once and lie down, kicking off my satin dancing pumps. Is this the third floor? Now I see there are people in this room. I rise to leave, confused, but then Marc is at my side. Murmuring, murmuring.

  “Lie back . . .”

  I do as I am told. Because I really do want to lie back. I want Marc to lie on top of me. But instead a young woman comes over to the bedside and gently hoists up my muslin dress above my waist, exposing me, and then she removes my dress completely, pulling it over my arms, and taking off my bracelet. The girl is about nineteen or twenty, dressed in silk and muslin, with her hair beautifully pinned high above her head.

  I am lying on my back on the bed, naked apart from my white silk stockings and gloves, and another young woman is on the bed with me. The girl is dressed for a period production of Pride and Prejudice, and yet she is also holding a long glass dildo.

  Marc is still there. Standing by the bedside.

  “Marc?”

  “Accept, Alexandra, accept.”

  I accept, I accept, I accept. I presume the second girl is going to put the dildo inside me, but instead she moves to my side and slips off my gloves; then she takes my right wrist and abruptly snaps it in a handcuff. My wrist is then cuffed to the metal post of the bed frame behind me.

  I gaze at the male and female faces looking down at me as my second wrist is also shackled. Then my ankles get the same treatment. Padded cuffs are snapped around my ankles, which are manacled to the bedposts. Now I am completely vulnerable. And the idea that I am handcuffed to the bed, and that the only thing I am wearing is my white silk stockings, and that everyone can see this, and that all these people are looking down at me, admiring me, is unfeasibly arousing and disturbing all at once.

  I gaze at Marc for reassurance.

  He nods.

  I lie back.

  Now the girl leans in and licks between my legs for a few moments, then she opens my thighs and pushes the dildo deep inside: she is pushing it in and out of my sex.

  I sit up.

  “No, Marc, I—”

  The girl speaks: “X, per favore.”

  How does she even know my name? How? I do not know. But she is very pretty and her voice is soothing. Marc is standing next to some other men about the same age as him, calmly surveying me. What is this? I am on a bed with people I do not know and this girl is pushing a thick crystal dildo into my vulva, deep inside, deep, deep inside. I kick my shackled heels at the silk sheets beneath me, struck with the pleasurability of this, the troubling, deep, hard pleasure.

  The crystal dildo seems to be warm: how do they do that?

  “Alexandra . . .”

  This pretty girl says my name again, then she pulls out the dildo and her little tongue is licking my clitoris; she is talented. My mind swirls as I look into Marc’s eyes, his loving and distant blue eyes. The music, the music. Are there two tongues? Like little cats’ tongues, hard and soft, licking my clit. There are three girls now. The third girl stoops and bites, playfully, kittenishly, at my nipples.

  Three girls, one of them naked. And Marc. Standing in his long leather boots and that high white collar; he has removed the dandyish top hat and his hair is tousled and I want to run my fingers through his uncombed coils of black hair. But he just looks at me. It is maybe a loving glance, but there is lust there, too. Glittering and powerful lust. He is enjoying looking at me; he is enjoying watching me do this.

  So that makes me enjoy it more. I begin to moan as one girl fills me with warm thrusting strokes of the dildo, even as she whispers and licks at my clit, speaking sweet Italian to my clitoris. The second girl is very quietly biting my nipples, tweaking them; her perfume is delicious. I stretch and kiss her young, soft breasts. The third is putting something inside me, another warm, vibrating way of filling me, anally, beautifully, I never knew, I never knew. And the music is still throbbing and chanting, louder and stirring.

  “You look beautiful,” says Marc, staring down. “So very beautiful.”

  The windows are open. I can see the stars up there, and down here. Stars and stars. The music drums. The girl thrusts the warm crystal dildo in and out. I am sprawled and open and naked on this bed, with people all around me. I wish I could be more naked. More filled. More. More.

  “Sanctus . . .”

  In and out and in and out. Clitoris. Dildo. Anally. Kissing. My sex is licked and teased and licked and I am shivering now, shivering with pleasure, trembling, drowning, the drowning palazzo, the soaking furs and cinnamons.

  Hosanna.

  Deep inside me. Deep inside me. I see the stars. So many stars. Marc is the stars. I begin to come.

  Dominus.

  The orgasm is coming. The dildo thrusts. The girl licks my clit. The girl bites my nipples. The orgasm is coming, is coming, is coming.

  “Marc!”

  I feel his hand in my hand. I am still shackled.

  “Tesorina.”

  The orgasm is tremblingly close . . .

  The three girls thrust and bite, lick and drum, and then at last I come, with an outright spasm, unleashed energy. I am panting, and yelling, I am writhing, and the girls are holding me down. Because I am shaking, trembling, and possessed, the liquid ejects from my sex in a glorious arc, and I lie back in a kind of delirious and picturesque agony, crucified by this pleasuring, ravening climax. Then, even as the colors whirl, I know that all I want is Marc. I want Marc. Marc on top of me. Marc, Marc, Marc, Marc.

  “Marc.”

  “Alexandra, cara mia.”

  I open my tear-wettened eyes.

  It is him. The girls are unlocking the cuffs and shackles and he is lifting me up off the bed. I am naked in his arms, half fainted, like a woman being rescued from a fire, and Marc is lifting and carrying me out of the bedroom.

  I whisper my tears of bewilderment and gladness into his chest and he carries me, naked, downstairs, right through the crowds, right out of the door and out of the bu
ilding into the warm night air. He carries me naked down the path to the jetty. And lifts me naked into the boat.

  And now I am naked in a gondola. Lying back on the cushions, legs sleepy and open, white-stockinged thighs trembling still, just a little. I am utterly ashamed and yet half of me doesn’t care who sees. Who looks. Who sees my fur and my skin. I am a naked woman, in nothing but white silk stockings, in a black boat, on the black, black waters of the Cannaregio Canal, in the velvet black city of dreams and decay. I blush and I feel the cold breeze on my bare skin, yet something in me resists clothes.

  The gondola rocks, weaves and sails, and then stops. In a little side canal. A small, ancient church looms above us, ghostly in the moonlight. The gondolier disappears. Marc is half standing in the boat above me. He is unbuttoning himself.

  I open my trembling legs. I reach hungrily for his desire. He is unbelievably hard.

  I lean to suck him but he pushes me down. He pushes me hard and forces me back. Then he opens my thighs with his hands and he is inside me, filling me.

  “You were so beautiful.” He kisses me. “So fucking beautiful.”

  He fucks me, making the gondola rock on the waves of ancient Venice. And my stockinged feet are in the air. And people can see. I am sure they can see. Everyone can see Marc as he fucks me. Again. And again. And once more. Ah.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  I DON’T HAVE time to comprehend what has happened to me at the Fourth. Because the following morning, almost as soon as I stir in the big bedroom with its views of the Grand Canal, I am told Jessica and Giuseppe are here. So Marc and I go to breakfast with them, and then Marc takes me on a whirling weeklong tour of Venice: a delicious confection of art and music and Venetian-Gothic architecture and excellent cocktails at Harry’s Bar.

  Jessica and Giuseppe join us for some of these jaunts, but mostly we go exploring on our own. Marc knows Venice well: he tells me he used to stay here as a very young man, taking weeklong trips from South Tyrol during his long vacations from Cambridge University.

  But of course I expected Marc to know Venice very well, because he knows everywhere very well. He could probably do a decent guided tour of the moon. Ending at a discreet but fabulous trattoria.

  First, we go to the Frari—Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari—in the San Polo district of the city, quite near the Rialto. I have no idea where the San Polo district is, or what it means, but Marc reassures me it is important.

  “It doesn’t look like much,” I say, gazing at the drab, squat, redbrick exterior.

  But inside: ah.

  Inside there is an awe-inspiring Assumption, by Titian, a painting, Marc tells me, that moved Richard Wagner to immediately write Die Meistersingers. Then a harrowing statue of a geriatric St. Jerome by Alessandro Vittoria, which Marc says was modeled on an aged Titian. I stare at the old man, at the presaging of death. I know death has something to do with the Mysteries: every one of them is a little death, as the French call an orgasm. La petite mort.

  Why did I enjoy the Fourth Mystery so much? What was in the kykeon? Why did I like Marc looking at me as I was pleasured by women? I know I am not lesbian, but my sexuality is so much more complex and intricate, and rich, and various, and multiform, than I ever comprehended.

  So the Mysteries are teaching me about sex and my sexuality; but they are now teaching me something else. It is something to do with love or God or death. It is there. In my mind. In my senses. Like a delicious and haunting scent I can remember but not name. Not quite yet.

  I recall that Pindar quote: Blessed is he who, having seen these rites, undertakes the way beneath the Earth. He knows the end of life, as well as its divinely granted beginning.

  Marc interrupts my thoughts by steering me, gently, to the other end of the church.

  “And this is the Pesaro Altarpiece.” He kisses my neck, once, then twice. “Henry James said: ‘Nothing in Venice is more perfect than this.’ Of course, he hadn’t encountered you, right now, standing in the shadows of the Frari.”

  Now he lifts my hand and kisses my folded fingers. I gaze at him for a moment. His dark hair, my white fingers. And then I reach out and pull his handsome face toward mine. And we are kissing each other. Really quite hard.

  And so it goes. The next place is the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, with its Tintorettos, then a swift gondola-hop takes us to Ca’ D’Oro, the Golden Palace, where we see the famous view of the Grand Canal, and after that Mantegna’s St. Sebastian, where Marc points me to the haunting inscription: Nothing but God endures, the rest is smoke.

  But most of all I am taken by a small, anonymous sculpture of A Centaur and Achilles on the ground floor, although it is seemingly ignored by everyone who is rushing to view the Grand Canal. I look for a long while at the sculpture. It reminds me of Marc and me: Marc carrying me from the Casino degli Spiriti. Naked and vulnerable, Alex of the Fourth. I was the small boy, he was the Centaur.

  The dreamy days go by. The Doge’s Palace. The Titians and Tintorettos of Santa Maria della Salute. Giorgione’s The Tempest. Walls of Veronese.

  Then we visit the beautiful Brancusis and Pollocks of the Guggenheim, a white marble canal-side villa so close to our palazzo we can go back to the Palazzo Dario for hungry sex before lunch, which is precisely what we do.

  Running across the little bridges of Dorsoduro, we skip through our private palazzo garden with the citronella trees, and hasten up the sixteenth-century stairs. Then we strip each other naked and fall with laughing abandon onto our large Napoleonic bed with the windows open to the Grand Canal. Rising above me, Marc throws me on my back, he is glorious above me, and then he takes me. He possesses me; he owns me; he encompasses me; then he imperiously turns me over and he is hard and then harder inside me, taking me from behind, roughly, pulling my hair back, pulling it savagely so it hurts. But it hurts so very sweetly it makes me cry out; it makes me yell and shudder, and then I come, again, and again, and again, convulsive, and panting, and consumed, and slumping onto the pillows, sheened with postcoital sweat, dazzled by the orgasm, listening to the endless drumbeat of my own heart, listening to the vaporetti steaming up and down the Grand Canal.

  One final, hot Venetian day, Marc directs our sleek wooden water taxi out of Venice, right across the torpid gray lagoon, to the island of Torcello. This green and lonely island was where, Marc says, the first Venetians settled at the beginning of the Dark Ages.

  There isn’t much to see: a lot of half-hearted rubble, a lonely brace of churches and one or two costly restaurants. Why has he brought me here? I am rather hot and a tiny bit irritable at being bitten by enormous mosquitoes. But then we step into the cool and sacred interior of Torcello’s ancient cathedral, and he shows me the startling mosaics, especially the tenth-century Madonna Teotoca—the Madonna God-bearer—on the opposite wall.

  One large silvery tear slides forever down the Madonna’s infinitely sorrowful face. It is unbearably affecting. The weeping woman. It reminds me of the Mysteries. Everything reminds me of the Mysteries. The truth, the dark, frightening truth, is approaching. I can sense it. The katabasis. The final revelation. I am scared and I am compelled. I cannot go on, but I must, and I will.

  There isn’t much else to do on this little islet of Torcello. We wander among the scattered ruins of the deserted city; I look at the old stone chair—the Throne of Attila—parked in the piazza. We drink a desultory and overpriced martini in one of the little cafe-restaurants. Then we just sit on the grass and drink chilled prosecco, bought by the bottle from the bar. Sipping from our fluted glasses, we watch the stately white yachts pass down the thousand-year-old Torcello canal, and we fall asleep in the afternoon shade from the lemon trees, lying in one another’s arms. Perfetto.

  THAT NIGHT MARC and I are having drinks at a table outside Florian’s. It is very touristy, but Marc assures me that everyone in Venice is a tourist, even the Venetians: he s
ays everyone who lives in Venice or visits Venice is perpetually self-conscious of being in Venice. So it’s all okay.

  Therefore we act the part of rich tourists in Venice: we sit in Florian’s as the warm evening descends over the most beautiful drawing room in Europe; the expanses of St. Mark’s Square with its pigeons and campanile and the glorious palace of the doges, and the horses rearing above the cathedral.

  Marc drinks his drink and looks at me. We are talking about the Fifth Mystery. He is not sure he wants me to do it.

  “X, I have never seen the Fifth, not the female Fifth. But I have heard things . . . It is meant to be quite troubling, and difficult. Are you convinced you want to do it?”

  “Not doing the Fifth means losing you. At the end of the summer. In about a month.”

  He nods. Gravely. I shake my head. Almost angrily.

  “Marc, it is absurd. I cannot lose you.”

  “Are you sure? There is no law that says you have to continue.”

  “There may not be a law, but . . .” I look at him, at his effortlessly handsome features framed by the famous view of the Venetian piazza. Should I tell him the truth? That I am now, like Françoise, quite addicted to the Mysteries? That they are changing me, liberating me, freeing me spiritually as well as sexually, in a way I cannot explain, yet cannot resist? That even if there was no threat of losing him, I would probably continue anyway?

  “Marc.” I say, “I’m doing the Fifth. That’s the end of it.”

  He leans back and laughs, very quietly. “You know, if I was vulgar, I could call you a stubborn cow.”

  I look at him.

  “Tua vacca, Celenza.”

  Your cow, Excellency.

  He laughs again, and shakes his head. Then he leans forward, picks up my hand, and kisses it.

  “Alexandra, I consider myself instructed. And I am very, very flattered.”

  We drink some more; we get quite drunk; we talk about art and sex and Venetian life. And then, as I sip my third Bellini, I gaze at Marc and say, because I have to say, because the time has come to say: “Marc . . .” I hesitate. Then press on. “Can you tell me about your wife?”