Tremble: Erotic Tales of the Mystical and Sinister

“Vhat do you vant?” she asked in a heavy Russian accent. In lieu of a reply I held out the shopping bag full of Robert’s hair. She peered in, sniffed, then sneezed.

“Your man? Or maybe he belong to somevon else?” she muttered as she led me into the crowded lounge room.

Next to a garishly ornate three-piece suite covered in embroidered brocade stood a spinning wheel. It looked as if it had been teleported from another time. A state-of-the-art home movie unit with a seven-foot screen filled one wall. Perched on top of the screen were a dozen or so statuettes of various deities, from Bu

ddha to Jesus to a lurid papiermâché rendering of the goddess Kali.

“I am Madame Blonski, I am spinner. Vhat is your design?” Madame Blonski clutched at my arm.

Inwardly cursing myself for being such a gullible idiot, I reached into my handbag. The woman was obviously a fraud and the sight of a crystal ball sitting on top of the microwave beside a samovar did not increase my confidence.

“It’s Ralph Lauren, you know, the Polo label. I think there’s enough hair there,” I ventured, tentatively holding out the photo of a woollen shirt I’d torn out of a GQ magazine.

Madame Blonski glanced at it then peered dubiously at the hair. I waited nervously. Suddenly it seemed incredibly important that she confirmed there was enough there to knit the shirt to destroy the house that Robert built. With the nursery rhyme jangling around my head the three minutes she took to decide stretched into an eternity in which Robert left me, my publicity campaign failed entirely, and I was without lover and job by the end of the month. Finally she put me out of my misery.

“Okay. I can make this. For you, fifty dollar.”

I nodded my head, incredulous at the instant relief that flooded my body. The old woman took the bag of hair and stuffed it unceremoniously under the couch; there were about a dozen other bags already shoved under there. Grabbing my arm she marched me back to the front door. She was so fragile she made me feel like a giantess, awkward in my suddenly massive ugh boots.

“Come back in a veek, Madeleine. Oh and I only take cash,” she announced.

She slammed the front door and left me standing on the doorstep wondering whether I’d imagined it all. It was only when I was in the elevator that I realized she’d used my name without me telling her what it was.

I was halfway through my boxing session, my gloved fists pounding into the leather-clad palms of my long-suffering trainer, when I realized in an epiphany of guilt whose face was dancing in front of my eyes. Madeleine. That smug look that glinted in her eyes as she said, “Market forces.” Whack! “The noughties generation.” Thud! “Retro-Seventies.” Smack! How dare she? Who the fuck does she think she is challenging my judgment in front of my whole staff? We might be lovers but that doesn’t mean we’re equals!

Does she realize she’s undermined my authority; worse still, made me look like some old fart in front of kids I’m old enough to have fathered, kids whose opinions actually matter, opinions that can seep through the walls of Pear and infiltrate the industry like a fatal rising damp? Does she know how many people want to see me fail? For fuck’s sake, Play 360 are limited, they’re this season’s fourteen-year-old suburban chick’s band, tomorrow’s history. That’s their market: short but truly profitable if milked in the right way—which is not to a bunch of inner-city, pot-smoking, neo-grunge male hippies who collectively amount to about a hundred sales and about two hundred illegally burned CDs. Hare-Gives-Lip. Fuck that. Hasn’t she taken in anything I’ve taught her?

I slam away until my T-shirt is soaked, the internal soliloquy stops drumming against my temples, and my knuckles begin to bruise under my leather gloves. It’s only walking back from the gym enveloped in that delicious vacant sensation one gets from strenuous exercise, watching bats engrave their way across the dusk, that I realize why I was so bloody furious. This is the first time she’s ever disagreed with me. My Madeleine. After all, I created her, shaped her in the way I like, the perfect partner: amicable, mellow, a pillowy body of adoration I can sink my battle-weary cock into. A highly crafted counterbalance to the constant barrage of criticism I go home to every night. And now my invention, my Eve, is rebelling. It’s enough to make a man weep. The best I can hope for is that it’s a temporary aberration—you know, one of those incomprehensible hormonal mists women often disappear into—and that my Madeleine will reemerge like a freshly scrubbed car, glistening with unconditional admiration. She’d better fucking do.

I reach my beautiful house, with my beautiful wife framed by my beautiful pristine Federation shutters, and a wave of claustrophobia, the sense that this is my defined future forever and ever, sweeps over me and almost knocks me to the dog-turd pavement. Because, as I’m sure a few of you habitually unfaithful husbands will understand, marriage is a delicate business. Like an intricate piece of machinery, it requires a sensitive balancing system. Real time with wife equals downtime with mistress, the mathematical equation of which is something like four hours with the wife can be eradicated by half an hour with the mistress. I read that somewhere—was it Einstein? Like I said, marriage is a fragile equilibrium not to be recommended for the fainthearted. And so, with that balance totally thrown, I pick myself up off the pavement and enter the house with unresolved fury buzzing around me like a swarm of irritated bush flies.

Women can be scary at the best of times, but they’re most frightening when through some unfathomable alchemy they’ve somehow managed to work out what’s going on. Personally I subscribe to the theory of alien abduction, only I think it was alien abandonment and women were introduced onto the planet as an extraterrestrial colonizing species whose sole quest is to infect us all.

So there’s my wife at the door, looking sexier than I’ve seen her in a long time, and my first thought is, shit, what anniversary have I forgotten? While I’m busy panicking she leads me to the dining room where she’s actually laid the table and very nicely, thank you very much. Our best silverware, cloth napkins, even candles. Then she serves me my favorite—duck à l’orange with steamed snow peas and wild rice. Still suspicious I begin to eat, steeling myself for the moment she’s going to ask me for something, like a holiday or some ridiculous new gadget we need like a hole in the head, but instead she says, “Darling, how was work? Is everything okay?”

It’s the sweetest voice I’ve heard out of her since we last had sex, which has got to be at least four months ago and, by coincidence, occurred on the night she asked me for a Mercedes SUV. So, gagging with suspicion and the parson’s nose, I think, fuck it, I’ll try the Play 360 dilemma on her, leaving the names out of course. And guess what? She agrees with me. She actually says she thinks my strategy, although short-term, is good. I swear I harden up just hearing her say the words, “Darling, your commerical nose is always right. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

Pathetic, I know, but you’ve got to understand—this is beyond the Bay of Pigs, beyond Tehran, beyond East Timor. Our marriage is one of those entrenched guerrilla wars that drags on with each surprise attack from the undergrowth. This is Vietnam, and, guys, she’s the Viet Cong. So I’m still waiting for the innocent-looking veiled woman sitting in the corner to blow up when, smiling mysteriously, Georgina takes my hand and leads me upstairs.

I’m sitting beside the bed fully clothed, thinking what is wrong with this picture, when my wife drops to her knees and reaches for my fly.

Sometimes, when you’ve been with the one person for a very long time, you stop seeing them altogether. They blend in with the furniture, become an inanimate object that is entirely recognizable, entirely predictable. It becomes unimportant to hear them or see them clearly because you already know what they are going to say, where they are going to move to next. And you realize that a profound ennui has infiltrated every centimeter of your being and it will take a completely unexpected act to jolt yourself and your loved one out of such a predicament. I suspect that’s how Surrealism was created—which happens to be the subject of the lecture I attended today and is a direct, or perhaps I should say lateral cause of why I am now kneeling in front of my husband in my very good Yves Saint Laurent suit about to take his penis into my mouth.

I blame Magritte, or should it be Dali? Whichever, there is definitely something surreal about the sight of my husband’s erect member against the dark wool of the Paul Smith suit I made him buy that inspires me.

As you can tell by the objectivity of the thoughts running through my head, I’m not exactly emotionally engaged in the act of fellatio. Until, that is, the sound of Robert murmuring my name floats down in a loving, surprised, and—I’m rather embarrassed to admit—thankful tone. Encouraged, I quicken my pace, tightening my grip as Robert groans and moans my name over and over. His fingers are winding through my hair, but not in that I have control, I will push your head down way, but tenderly, as if his amazement has made even his fingertips shy. As if all his normal defenses have been breached by the audacity of my act.

And I love him then for his excitement. I love him for his vulnerability, for his cry as he buckles at the knees and shoots deep into my throat. I swallow with the panache of a whore and, in that same moment, find myself trying to banish the thought that yes, I can do it as well, maybe better, than her—the other woman, the young blond, the invisible third party who is always between us.

But then as I stand I see that Robert, this great bear of a man, has turned scarlet with awkwardness as he stutters an apology. He kisses me with the hunger of youth, with the greed of old love that flares up in gratitude. And to my own amazement I believe him. I believe that he loves me. But before I can say anything he has me down on the bed, my panties yanked off, as if he is seeing me for the first time, as if we are a couple of clumsy virgin teenagers racing against our own inexperience. And he parts me to look at me. To study me.

“Beautiful,” he whispers as I fight to stop the bubble of tears that is rising like a disastrous hiccup from somewhere below my heart-line. And his mouth is on me, his tongue tracing a quivering path across the inside of my thighs. Unbearably tantalizing, he teases me, circling around and around, his thumbs so gentle over my lips, over the tip of my clit, which feels as if it is unfurling and craning its little head up to reach him like the tendril of a plant, screaming touch me, touch me. His mouth is moving

slowly to the center of my pleasure; parting my lips he blows for a second before flickering across the top of me, his tongue a hot probing rod now as he takes all of me between his lips, sucking, licking, pulling open my pleasure like a great secret shame until, clutching at his hair, I come screaming like never before.

And afterward, his cheek a burning weight against my thigh, I can feel both of us wondering…what now?

It’s exactly like the magazine illustration, only gray. Gray with a silver shimmer. Almost two-tone if you hold it up to the light. It has long sleeves and a collar open to the chest with three small pearl buttons to fasten it. The hair, now spun into a light wool, has the texture of cashmere but a little coarser. As I stroke it I imagine what people will think, what animal they might guess the wool came from—an Angora goat? Some obscure Tibetan sheep? A sheepdog? But they’ll never think of human. I bury my nose in the soft folds and breathe deeply. Robert’s scent has been almost eradicated, replaced by the faint scent of cheap soap. I imagine the tiny Russian woman at the sink, standing on a box to reach it, kneading all that hair with her minute hands. She’s done a great job. At last I have something tangible, something actually made from his body.