Quiver

It was Mr. Pope who initially encouraged his wife to use it as a kind of private listening room. At this very moment he is thinking about her sitting alone, her head tilted to one side, watching him. The thought of her watching him increases his tumescence. He is a performer by nature, some might say it was imprinted on his DNA. He only becomes sexually excited when he knows he is being watched. Too many easy conquests have left him jaded and satiated, an affliction that has intensified with middle age. Each new seduction is the only way he can reach out, touch the persona they are selling to the public. Not his private self, he left that on a train fleeing Romania somewhere in the mid-fifties. To know himself he needs to be told about himself, preferably from the lips of young girls. Otherwise after each concert tour his sense of identity spirals down into a void without meaning.

Mr. Pope raises his baton and the cellist begins the second movement. Mrs. Pope pushes the young man away from her. She gestures for him to keep quiet. Slowly, from within her briefcase, she pulls out a black net corset and two highly polished Italian patent-leather pumps. She bends over, and the man begins rolling her skirt above her hips. She stands and pushes her skirt back down. He moves across the darkened room and leans into the window. Just then the conductor raises his arms and with a wild flailing sweeps the orchestra into the second movement. She slips on the corset under her dress, a quarter-cup black number. The cups cut under her breasts, as if a man is holding them up and squeezing them.

She begins rolling down her fishnet tights. They catch slightly on her toenails. She turns to the young man.

His head is nodding in time with the music. He leans against the wide shelf of the window, beyond which she can see her husband vacillate with the music. At that instance she can see through the young man’s eyes. She knows what stirs him beneath his trousers. It is the proximity of the audience just outside the window. The smell of the collective animal, the French perfume, the sweat, the secret undersmells that whisper. It fills the room. They are her captive audience, blind to her presence yet so close that if she wanted to she could throw her lingerie and it would fall, perhaps dangle, across their faces.

On stage, the fourth violinist studies a twist of blond hair. It curls teasingly on the neck of the cellist sitting in front of him. The fourth violinist, barely nineteen and still a virgin, wonders what the hair would taste like. He imagines salty. He imagines running his fingers up the smooth nape then plunging his fingers into the soft mass of hair. Taking a handful he would push her head down, push her soft pliant mouth down to his cock and…the third violinist nudges him hard in the ribs. He is late with his note by twenty seconds.

He follows the conductor’s baton as it spirals slowly up into the air. His eye is caught by something set into the wall.

WHAT THE FOURTH VIOLINIST SEES

He sees the pale face of a beautiful man, not much older than himself, who sits watching in the window of the listening room. There is something odd about the slightly disjointed way the beautiful man nods his head to the music.

Two white breasts seem to float toward the young man. A woman, older, her hair loose, torso poured into a corset, pushes her breasts toward his face. He takes one fully into his mouth. The fourth violinist sees the long nipple disappearing into the young man’s full lips. In and out. In and out. Again the fourth violinist misses his cue.

WHAT MRS. POPE FEELS

Teeth around the nipple teasing slightly, biting, circling with his tongue as the nipple hardens, then slowly sucking. Quicker, quicker. He takes the other breast, pulling harder, rolling the nipple between his two fingers. He plays my body, he plays my breasts. He is a sex child. I am a mother with a cunt. Red threads run from my nipple to my navel, a lattice of pleasure. I want him to touch my sex. I move forward but he holds me at a distance. He knows what he’s doing and he’s in no hurry.

WHAT THE SILENT YOUNG MAN FEELS

Skin. Skin you can press your fingers into, sinking, sinking. Skin like sweet warm milk. The blue veins run like water just below the surface. Breasts that run in a perfect semicircle below the nipple, large, unmistakable. Her raised areola tastes like plums. Bruised plums with a slight tang of sea salt. I want her to take me like a young siren, Medusa lashed to the deck. And all around the churning sea.

WHAT THE HUSBAND IS THINKING

Why do you want to know? It doesn’t matter what I think. I am just a bit player, a construct of Katherine’s. That’s her name, Katherine Pope née Handsworth. I stand here and I am not entirely conscious. Musical instinct drives me. I hear the notes before they are played. I am orchestrating the moment before it manifests. This makes me the dictator. The puppet master with a hundred invisible strings attached to the lips and instruments of the orchestra in front of me. This power is tremendously exciting. The responsibility involved is also terrifying. I can feel the audience breathing at the back of my neck. They inhale as one. Their breath travels in languid rivulets that accelerate with the music. As the master I feel as if I am choreographing one enormous collective orgasm…or perhaps a series of little climaxes that lead to a kind of death. The kind of death that sears the top of the brain as the whole orchestra concludes in a concoction of violent color, leaving you floating somewhere near the chandeliers.

The kind of death that occurs in the silence between the last note and rapturous applause. The last heartbeat.

Notation: Climax. Beat. Silence. Beat. Applause.

I like to think I specifically cater for the women in the audience. For the older blue-rinse set, the gentler, slower ascent is kinder on bodies familiar with touch.

For the younger frisky members (and God knows the numbers are dwindling) I direct the triumphant heroics of the brass section. For the men I leave the space between the notes, they can draw their own conclusions.

You tell me my wife is in the audience. I know that already, I feel it. There is a symbiosis between even warring couples. Comprenez-vous? Not that I don’t love my wife. It’s just that she is so different. For her life is still dramatic. The pathos she generates throws everything up into a sharper focus. That’s why I love her, she wakes me up. And there’s only two things that wake me up. Fellatio and Mozart.

WHAT THE FOURTH VIOLINIST SEES

He lifts her up and pulls her onto his lap. The fourth violinist falters for a moment as the woman clutches at the man’s cock. Even in the shadows he can see the length and thickness clearly, a thick conquering phallus that makes a frail silhouette of the rest of the body. The man’s profile is Bacchus, Priapus, Jack of the Beanstalk. She drops to her knees. Her breasts pour over his glans, he plunges into the cleavage.

The fourth violinist’s bow drops to the floor; the bassist covers for him. As he reaches down he notices the slim ankles of the cellist. He imagines soft ridges of blond hair running inside thighs to a golden bush. As he sits there he glances across to the listening room again. The woman is taking the man into her mouth.

The fourth violinist imagines the feel of her mouth, the way her tongue would play under the ridge like a wind instrument. He wonders about the flautist.

The woman’s head bobs up and down as she takes all of it deep into her throat, the man flings back his head, his mouth open in ecstacy. As they reach the conclusion of the third movement he pulls her away, holding himself tightly at the base of his shaft, saving himself. The fourth violinist glances at the third violinist, instrument poised in mid-air, his face flushed. He too stares in the direction of the listening room.

WHAT MRS. POPE FEELS

The taste of him is youth, slightly pungent, the aroma of almonds and hot testicles. Velvet, heavy in the palm, pushing against my belly. The blind beast that splits the peach. What could I do? I dropped to my knees and tasted him.

He seeps a droplet of the ocean, and I suck. I swallow him. Feeling him quivering under the tongue, this makes me master. As I suck I see my husband, racing with the music. Waves of red and white spirals interlace with the music and press against my eyes.

/> He pushes against the back of my throat, his urgency becomes mine. Faster, faster, I press my clit against the back of my heel, rubbing against the soft Italian leather. Faster, faster, louder, the music, the salt, the chorus of male voices, the pulse of his seed, of my wet sex. He pulls away and turns me around. Parting my buttocks, he plunges in, drawing me down onto his lap. Into the sphere of his chest, his smell. Tongue in my ear, one hand holding me apart, the other squeezing my breasts, as if he is trying to feel all flesh at once. And I am big. I am bursting with juice. And he plunges and rises, guiding me over the tip, then slowly down onto the shaft. Fast, faster, faster still. All is wet. The walls of Jericho have tumbled down.

WHAT THE SILENT YOUNG MAN FEELS