766: She glanced . . .
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 56
56
SHE GLANCED AT HER WATCH and said, “Each of my several cycles of popularity was characterized by a different set of ambitious lovers.”
“Ambitious lovers?”
“Yes. Greg and all the others. They all wanted something—”
“I thought you said earlier that they all wanted only one thing.”
“Do I seem to contradict myself? Very well, I seem to contradict myself. In fact, though, I don’t. They all did want only one thing—”
She used the pause.
“—but it took many forms.” The impish look, a raised eyebrow.
Laughter.
“Once there was a time when my lovers’ ambitions did not extend much beyond satisfying their lust. I liked that, to tell you the truth. There was a purity and simplicity to it that one does not often see in these complicated times. It was possible, early on, to think that all they wanted was me. Looking back—and I have done some thorough and searching looking-backward in the past ten years—in the cases of a few of them, it is still possible to think that.”
I grinned my lovable-little-boy grin at the crowd to let them know that I considered myself to be in that group—at the head of it, in fact.
“Oh, Peter,” said Ariane, tilting her head to one side, regarding me with indulgent compassion. “I’m talking about lovers.”
“Well—” I said.
“Guys I went to bed with.”
“Oh.”
“There’s a lot of little boy left in you, Peter.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s one of my most endearing qualities.”
“Yes,” she said. “It is.”
She plunked herself down on the sofa suddenly, threw her arms around me, and kissed me, thrusting her tongue into my mouth, and with her right hand squeezing and kneading my testes, and then in a moment pulled away, leaving me breathless. She took my head in her hands, pulled me to her, and whispered in my ear, so that no one in the audience could hear, “You really do want only that one thing, you know. It’s just that with you it takes a highly unusual form.”
She stood up, stepped away from the sofa, from me, drew a breath, smoothed her skirt, and continued, as if there had been no break in her thoughts: “After a while, when I began to acquire a certain fame, or notoriety, I began to attract a different sort of lover, who was after more complicated forms of gratification. Advanced stuff.”
“Whips and chains?” I asked, squirming a little to try to get comfortable again.
“Worse.”
The pause.
“Some wanted me to listen to them. Some wanted to tell me what to do. Some wanted me to tell them what to do. Some wanted me to introduce them to a wider audience—and so on.” A long pause, a sigh, a distant look. “But of all of them, the best, and the worst, was a thin blond boy, younger than I, named Terrence.”
[to be continued]
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