was tugging at the ends of my pussy bow. He realized that it was stitched in place. He unzipped the blouse at the back. My hair got caught in the zip. I lifted my hair up and he told me that the nape of my neck was exquisite. I felt like I would cry—the way he was touching me was so gentle.
“Get off,” I said.
He paused. “All right.” He paced the room. The carpet was salmon pink. “I know you’re young,” he said. “I mean, I know I’m old.”
“You’re not that old.”
He had unzipped his trousers. I could see a swarm of Bart Simpson faces on his boxer shorts.
He knelt down before me and clutched my hands. “You’ve talked about your lost love,” he said. “Now let me talk about mine.”
I yawned. “All right.”
“When Margaret died, I thought I could never love again. I thought I would never see another woman’s face who I would know, just know. That familiarity is.” He closed his eyes. “What I miss the most.” His eyelashes were gray. “I know you were only joking when you said you loved me before, because you can’t love me, because we only just met.” He released my hands. “Why would you love an old man like me?” He stood up and fiddled with the iPod on the wall. He turned the TV off.
The song began: “I’ll Be Your Mirror.”
“Turn it off,” I said. “Please.”
We lay next to each other on the bed for a long time.
“It’s a coincidence that you like pussies,” I said, eventually. I had my back to him. “Because I once rescued some pussies from a refuge.”
“Where are they now?”
“Oh. I don’t know. I had to take them back to the refuge.”
An hour passed.
James heaved himself on top of me. He whispered in my ear: “I was always faithful to Margaret, right to the end. I cared for her for eight years. But she always said to me: ‘After I’ve gone, James, please feel free to impart jouissance to whomsoever you do wish. Otherwise it is a crime against women.’”
“A crime?”
“Yes. And let me tell you, there was crime in her jouissance too. The way she howled when she came. It reminded me of an animal caught in a trap.” He rolled off me. “It was the same sound that she made in the hospital bed during her last moments on earth. She howled like she was coming. She howled because she wanted more of life.”
His tongue slid into my mouth; I pulled away. He sucked on my nipple like an energetic little baby and I let him for as long as I could. Then I sat up and lit a cigarette. Out of the window, I watched the traffic circling around something in the distance.
“This is a nonsmoking room,” he said.
I put my cigarette out on the lid of the truffle box. “Would you say that Margaret was your muse, James?”
“Perhaps. I never thought of it before.”
“Because there was this one time that Sebastian and I were sitting on a bench outside Finsbury Park station and he was like: ‘I never believed in the concept of the muse until I met you.’ We were about eighteen. I had no idea what a muse was. He said a muse was a mythic woman who inspired men to make great literature. The men extracted her feminine essence. She couldn’t create anything herself. Sebastian said he was going to extract my essence. He sounded really mean when he said that. I got up and I was like—I remember that he was smoking a Marlboro Menthol—I’m not your fucking muse. Then I ran off. He caught up with me. He said that being a muse could be really sexy like Betty Blue. We had watched that film recently. I said: ‘But the woman goes crazy. She gouges out her own eye.’ And he said: ‘But the man writes a novel about it, so it’s worth it.’ And I was like: ‘It’s worth her losing an eye?’”
James stuck his finger inside of me.
“Yeah,” I went on. “So like a couple of months later, our teacher entered us both for this writing competition. We both got short-listed. We had to go to the Royal Festival Hall. It was really boring. The man who was a poet or something was going on and on and then he announced the winner of the prose category. Sebastian won it for ‘The Reluctant Muse.’ He went up to the stage like a fighting cock and read a bit of it—something like: ‘“I’m not your fucking muse,” she shouted into the biting North London wind.’” I laughed. “I was shaking because I was so nervous but it turned out I won the poetry category. So it was fine. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to look at him. My poem was called ‘I’m Not Your Fucking Muse,’ and there was a line in it which said: ‘I’ll fuck you up.’”
“That’s charming,” said James.
“On the way home, the teacher was going on about how Sebastian and I were going to be like Ted and Sylvia. ‘But Ted cheated on her,’ I said. ‘And Sylvia killed herself.’ The teacher said: ‘Well, you can be like Ted and Sylvia without the cheating and killing yourself parts,’ and Sebastian was like: ‘Don’t worry, Miss. Ann-Marie and I will be together forever.’” I stopped.
There was a long silence.
Finally James said: “Who’s Ann-Marie? I thought your name was Camille?”
“Oh—yeah. That was before I changed my name. Camille is my stage name. But I changed it legally, so it’s real.”
“So you’re an aspiring actress?”
“Yeah.”
James held my breasts from behind and murmured: “What really turns you on?”
I paused. “Offal.”
“Offal?”
“Yeah. Tripe in cream and onions and . . . hearts. Big, bouncy hearts that crunch like an apple when you bite into them and stuff kind of spews out. And kidneys, smelling of piss.”
“Piss?”
“Yeah,” I said with passion. “Piss.” I jumped off the bed. “Play, boy!”
James looked startled.
“Play!” My voice was imperious. “Why don’t you play?” I went back to my normal voice. “That’s what Miss Havisham says to Pip in Great Expectations.”
“Have you done a lot of community theater?”
“Yes. And professional stuff. RSC stuff. I played Miss Havisham—at Cambridge.”
“I can just imagine you in rotting white lace,” he said, lurching forward and grabbing me with both hands. His face looked full of hate for a moment. Then he pushed me backward on the bed and I couldn’t see his face anymore, but I could feel his mouth latch onto my Venus flytrap and eat it out like a little boy who’s terrified his plate will be snatched away at any moment. He ate and ate and ate. My heart was banging. I tried to push his head away, but his scalp was too well-oiled and my hands kept slipping off. He was good at it. I began to moan. I tried to sit up, but he pushed
