The Story of X: An Erotic Tale (24 page)

Leaning across, I take a cup and gulp from it. Deeper and deeply. The taste is dark
and a little bitter, and maybe spicy. Like cold mulled wine. It is not unpleasant.
I lift up the cup, again, and drink the last drop. Marc does the same with his cup,
looking me in the eye as he does so.

“Everyone takes the kykeon.”

And now the music starts. It is a beating, pulsing African chant. I recognize it,
but cannot name it.

“The
Missa Luba,
” says Marc.

Of course, that’s it. The
Missa Luba
: a mass recorded in Belgian Africa decades ago.

It is the perfect music for the moment, because the kykeon is acting with extraordinary
quickness. I am seeing things. I hold on to Marc’s hand. I am actually swaying, really
swaying this time. Perspiring. Somewhat frightened.

“Do not fight the kykeon,” Marc whispers, gently kissing my pale neck. “Think of it
as a gondola,
piccolina,
taking you down a canal in the darkness. The warm and sultry darkness.”

For a second, I stare at his handsome and distant face, and then a moment later I
am turning and looking at a different handsome face that I also know. Who is this:
an actor? Am I dreaming? I am not sure, because I can see more famous faces. A very
well-known politician. Next to him some Internet billionaire. A celebrity model. Then
another politician, from America, with his wife. Global moguls and supermodels.

I am losing my grip. Marc holds my hand, in its silken glove, very hard. This is like
some gilded sex party for the rich and famous, but most of all,
the very powerful
. Unless I really am dreaming; unless the hallucinations are lucid, and the drug extremely
potent. I do not know. I feel faint.

“Can we get some air?”

Marc nods. “Of course.”

Walking to the window, I gulp the fresh warm air off the lagoon. When I turn, I realize
Marc is standing next to a beautiful young woman of about eighteen in a bright red
Regency ball gown. The girl smiles at me and then she steps around me. What is she
doing? I turn to see. The girl is kneeling behind me, slowly slipping her fingers
up my dress. She begins to stroke my clitoris.

“You are wet,” she says.

I look down at her, then I turn back and stare at Marc.

“Yes, I am,” I say.

She strokes my clit some more. We are standing beside a group of people dancing. But
we are standing still as she strokes me, flicking, touching, and thumbing my clit.
And Marc and I gaze at each other.

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
building 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.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-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
.

T
HAT NIGHT
M
ARC
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 says 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?”

A pause. And then, there it is. That wince of pain. A glimpse of that concealed anguish,
a passing symptom of Marc’s inner sadness. But I have diagnosed these symptoms, now
I need to know the cause.

“X . . .”

“I want to
know,
Marc. You keep alluding to her. I know she died. Tell me the truth.”

He drinks, quite deeply, from his Bellini. He sighs, but also nods. And then he tells
me the story.

“Her name was Serena. She was very young and very smart and very damaged and very
beautiful.” He gazes into my eyes. “She was the second loveliest woman I have ever
met.”

The pigeons rise and applaud next to our table, frightened by some child chasing them
into the air. The campanile glitters in the descending sun.

“I should perhaps have been wary,” Marc adds, toying with his Bellini, rather than
drinking it.

“Why?”

“I knew she was from a Camorra family. Serious, serious
Camorristi,
from the Forcella. They’d made a lot of money, but they still had
all
the necessary connections. Her father claimed to be a marble exporter.” Marc laughs,
mirthlessly and bitterly. “You don’t make hundreds of millions from exporting marble.”

“He was a real gangster?”

“Clearly.”

“So . . .”

“But it wasn’t just the father. Serena’s mother was also from a Camorra family. She
had died young, perhaps in some vendetta, and when she died she’d left Serena lots
of money, a legacy of her own.” He looks at me again, then looks down at his drink.
“So that was Serena’s inheritance: crime, death, and money, too much money, and too
much guilt. Taken together, her background—the death of her mother, the villainy of
her father—all of it, some combination of it—I don’t know—that is what made her so
messed up, I imagine.”

“But how, Marc? How exactly was she screwed up? What did she do?”

His shrug is contemptuous and melancholy at the same time. “Oh, the usual,
carissima,
the usual. Sex and drugs. She did quite a lot of heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine, she
liked dangerous sex. She had been inducted into the Mysteries before me, at the age
of seventeen.”

“Too young.”

“Far too young.” A truth dawns. I gaze at Marc.

“She introduced
you
to the Mysteries, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“How old were you?”

He shrugs.

“Twenty at most. Barely more than a boy. She was eighteen, just a girl. I met her
at a party in Posillipo, and immediately we fell in love; she was so sweet and fragile
and cultured and broken. I wanted to protect her and save her. She was lovely, so
lovely. And yes, I did the Mysteries for her, and they were as amazing as she said.
Life-changing.”

He turns from me, staring at the domes and ogees of the Doge’s Palace, the pinkening
sky above, the beauty of doomed and suicidal Venice. “And so we decided to get married—but
almost everyone disapproved, everyone loathed the idea of our match. Serena’s family
were wildly antagonistic. They wanted her to marry into another Camorra clan, not
an Anglo-Italian dynasty from the Chiaia. They also thought that, because the Roscarricks
had no money, we were after
their
money.” Again his blue eyes meet my eyes. Unblinking. “We weren’t. I didn’t want
her money, any of it, I just wanted her. But the drugs and the drink . . .”

“And your family?”

“My mother was dead against it, too, because Serena was—well, because Serena was from
Forcella. Very much the wrong side of the tracks. She wanted her only son—
the son and heir of the Roscarricks
—to marry some blue blood. Preferably someone posh from England or France, or America
even, someone with money not derived from assassination and contraband, and the smuggling
of China white heroin.”

“And your father?”

“Strangely, he was okay with it. He was English, somehow more relaxed, paradoxically.
He saw what I saw in Serena, the sweetness inside, the brokenness, the charm. But
he was a weak man—my mother was much stronger. But anyway . . .”

“You married.”

“Yes, we married, in a furtive and sad little ceremony, and we were still very much
in love. But within months, ah . . .” He tails off, and drinks from his Bellini, then
sets the glass down.

“Within months
what
?”

“Serena went even more off the rails; she thought I was having affairs, she went on
drinking binges, doing heroin and other drugs. She would come home at six in the morning
disheveled, drunk, stoned, in a terrible state, raving about her father the gangster,
the absolutely terrible man, telling everyone, telling the world what her father did
and how murderous he was, all the people he had killed. She got a very bad reputation,
was in the papers, she would not shut up, and then one day I got the call . . .”