He turns restlessly in his bed, contemplating the sleeping pills he always keeps with him. A light comes on in the room opposite, and for a moment Karl’s bedroom becomes a shadow play of mysterious shapes. He sits up on one elbow, peering across. Just visible in the window op
posite he can see the Australian getting ready for bed. She stands for a second, her face pushed into the light, just in her bra and pants. She has a good body, he thinks, with legs that remind him of someone’s. Not Katherine’s, he notes with spite. The light goes off and she is lost in the shadows. Karl watches the spectres on the wall for five minutes then falls asleep. The kind of sleep where all conscious thought goes reeling backward and is sucked into a black vortex into which one discards mortality thankfully. Mr Pope swims thus, dreaming of being tied to a piano stool by gigantic locks of red hair that wrap themselves around him like the blind tentacles of an octopus. For some inexplicable reason the only way he can begin to free himself is through humming, in perfect key, the full score of the concerto he is to play for the island’s President. The louder he hums the more the tentacles shrivel up like flaccid penises, shrinking away from him across a bizarre parquet floor. Gradually, he realizes that the humming isn’t coming from him, but from outside. Outside the dream, louder and louder it grows until it becomes a kind of roaring.
He woke abruptly, a wave of nausea flooding up through the sleep. The sound was still there, a throaty scream audible through the opposite wall that Karl recognized as the sound of a woman being made violent love to. He turned away from the wall and wrapped a pillow around his head.
It didn’t make any difference. The cry was followed by a moan and then a loud growl. Karl switched on the bedroom lamp. The electric clock glowed three A.M. He was furious, he had a concert at two the next afternoon and he was always up for practice at six. He couldn’t function on too little sleep. A thud against the wall and then a low groan. It sounded like great sex. Suddenly it felt like everything was conspiring against him, as if the whole world was out there fornicating, while he lay withering in his bed, forgotten, ignored, his last good years going to waste.
Next door the woman starts to moan in a low, husky tone, deep in her throat. She sounds beautiful and black. There is a rasping sound just audible behind her whimpering. She is obviously in intense pleasure. Resigned, Karl lies back onto the bed. The man was evidently going down on her. Probably fantastic with his tongue, no doubt a totally instinctive man who is able to orchestrate the small strokes, the quick bites and gentle sucking perfectly. He must be, Karl reflected mournfully, I’ve never been able to get that kind of sound from a woman. Her breathing intensifies, now so phenomenonally loud it seems to push out the walls of the bedroom and make them pulsate. She must be huge, he thinks, nearly six foot, with wonderfully large breasts. There’s something about excess that has always appealed to Karl’s satiated taste buds. When you’re with a woman like that, he thinks, it’s like you are surrounded by cunt. There is no ambiguity, just sex in all its viscous glory. A sudden scream that is almost a roar makes the hair on his arms stand up. That’s not a multiple orgasm, that’s a mega one. Why didn’t Katherine ever make much sound? Too English, perhaps. But then why was she so loud in the concert hall? Maybe she was faking it the whole time? Maybe that’s why she was driven to taking a new lover? I should be able to make a woman cry like that, God knows I’ve had enough practice. Forty years to be precise.
There’s another shout, followed by a series of bumps as if the man is dragging the woman over to the bed, reducing Karl to further despair. How many orgasms can a woman achieve in one night? Frankly, the occasional experience he’d had with a woman capable of multiple orgasms had left him bored and cantankerous as he waited for her to finish. Maybe he just hadn’t ever cared enough, been in love enough, to really consider the woman’s needs? And now, at the one time in his life when he was sure that it was love, he’d destroyed it through negligence. And judging from the sounds coming from next door, incompetent and inadequate lovemaking.
It was his generation, he reflected dourly. He’d had no role models, and he was too old for the sexual revolution. Fear of pregnancy and, in his case, fear of God, meant that men were completely impaired. His early sexual experiences were a series of clumsy disasters that had left both him and the girls involved sore, raw and disappointed. It wasn’t until he was twenty-four that he enjoyed sex without feeling guilty.
Next door the woman came again in a series of low-pitched grunts. Maestoso. Perhaps if he waited outside the door tomorrow morning he could corner her lover and get some advice from him? Karl had respect for technique, and considered craftsmen in any field to be masters in their own right. He wasn’t above taking lessons.
Lessons. The image of the coachload of English schoolgirls he’d seen earlier appears in his mind. He could have a lesson taught to him by some voluptuous teacher in front of all those young girls. He begins to stiffen. He notes with a certain amount of returning confidence that perhaps he hasn’t really shrunk with age. And it is thus that Mr. Pope finds himself in the middle of a fantasy involving ten schoolgirls, a thirty-year-old blonde, several leather straps and an old wooden desk.
There he is, waiting outside a large door from the primary school of his youth. The corridor smells of disinfectant and sawdust. Whenever someone accidentally pisses themselves in the classroom that’s what the teachers put down on the floor. Why it would feature in an erotic fantasy Karl isn’t sure, but there it is, taking him right back to the early fifties. He sits on a low bench wearing nothing but shoes and socks. He knows he has done something naughty and any minute now he is going to be called into the classroom. The groan of the woman next door distorts and shapes itself into the sound of his nickname as a child: Popee! Popee! He stands and realizes that he has a huge erection. There is no way of hiding it. He tries to push it down with his hands, but up it bounces. Gloriously ashamed, he enters the classroom.
The ten schoolgirls are all bent over their books in serious study. None of them looks up as the teacher, a curvaceous blonde in a very tight leather tunic of her own, ushers him across to stand in front of the desk.
“Now girls, time for your biology class.”
Ten pairs of eyes look up at him, all staring at his cock. “Lesson one is how to extract as much pleasure from the male organ as is humanly possible.”
He hates the stilted way all his characters sound in his fantasies, but blames it on the formality of having English as a second language. The teacher touches the end of his penis with a long wooden cane. It quivers in response. He looks down in embarrassment.
“There are many ways of enjoying the penis: in the vagina, in the mouth, stroked gently across the skin. It is a blunt instrument of torture, a tool of pleasure, one aspect of your lover’s sexuality and his reproductive organ.” She strokes him very gently. A glistening drop of dew appears at the end. “Now, I want you to line up and feel for yourself.” She taps the desk authoritatively with her cane. He jumps up on it like a little boy, lying down flat. She spreads his legs and raises his arms above his head, pulling tightly so that he can feel the blood rise to the surface of his skin. She then ties him down to the desk. All the giggling girls, pretty in their first budding of breasts, their legs long and slender, line up in a neat queue in front of the desk. The first, a tall, pale brunette, steps forward nervously. The teacher takes her hand firmly and places it on his penis. Karl groans, the girl’s hesitancy and fear excites him greatly. Outside of the fantasy, the woman next door lets out another huge moan, sending the floorboards vibrating. Slowly, the brunette, her face an exclamation of surprise at the softness of this ugly thing, begins to stroke the velvety head of the monster.
“You can lick it, it won’t bite.” Shyly, she lowers her head. Karl looks down at the girl’s face. Eyes closed, she sticks out her tongue and runs it along the whole length of his throbbing organ. She looks up at the other girls all staring expectantly at her.
“It tastes sweet!” she exclaims. Immediately, the other girls crowd around the desk, running their hands across his skin, burying their soft faces into his shoulders, his hips, his belly. He pulls against his leather restraints. He wants to touch them, to thrust his hands up their short skirts, their starched blouses; instead he is reduced to being their object, their sex slave.
The teacher scolds one of them. She turns the girl around and pulls up her skirt, revealing old-fashioned garter belt and stockings (a relic from Karl’s adolescence that he mourned the passing of for many years). The young brunette whimpers as the teacher pushes the others away from his torso and spreads the young girl’s buttocks, lowering her onto him so that she is sitting astride his penis with her back to him. Ahhh! The tightness, the juiciness of her as she slowly slides over him. She groans (or is it him? Or the woman next door?). He interrupts the fantasy and mentally plays the concluding three stanzas of Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 9 to stop himself from coming. A small paperweight rolls off the side table and crashes to the floor as the woman is slammed against the wall next door. Karl closes his eyes and returns to the classroom. Leaning backward the young girl lies down on him, her whimpers turning to moans of pleasure as the teacher starts manipulating her clitoris. Looking down her body and across her breasts, he can just make out the teacher’s head as she pulls the girl’s lips apart and begins to suck at her as he thrusts into the young girl’s tight cunt. All the other girls watch, eyes wide, some of them touching themselves or caressing their girlfriends. Almost collectively, they mount his toes, his fingers, one lowering herself over his face, until his whole perspective is reduced to the sharp smells and soft stickiness of young flesh as it slides across all of his protrusions, nose, cock, fingers, toes. A blinding tightness builds up in the back of his head, rolling as it gathers momentum, drawing pleasure from every pore in his body, fingers of white light drawing up from his anus, his balls, the pit of his stomach. With a shout he comes, ejaculating all over his fingers and the sheets.
Somewhere in the redbrick corridors of the fantasy he can hear the school bell ringing. End of lesson. The ringing gets louder and loude
r, and as consciousness floods back, becomes the shouting and roaring of the woman next door. She seems to be finally climaxing with the most extraordinary orgasm he’s ever heard. Balls aching, cock shriveling, he is jolted back to reality. An impending and now overwhelming sense of inadequacy overtakes him. He feels pathetic, an old man wanking over the prosaic fantasy of schoolgirls. He, Karl Pope, world-famous maestro, reduced to this. He would never be a lover like the man next door. He would never be able to take a woman to those kinds of heights. And Katherine would always turn to the younger man. Never again would he lie curled against her body after hearing that little whimper, the tender clutching at his cock—Katherine’s orgasm. The scent of her, familiar, comforting, his and only his. Once upon a time.
He wipes himself with the sheet and gets up. Outside dawn is just visible. Already, the birds have started a frenetic chorus of activity. He glances across at the Australian’s window. To his annoyance, he sees the concierge, slim and extremely majestic in his muscularity, climb out of her bed as she catches him with her naked arms, pressing him against her breasts. They look beautiful together, and so vibrant in their youth. Coffee and cream.
Karl notices the weight of his belly slapping against the top of his thighs as he walks into the bathroom. For a moment he contemplates suicide, then the voice of his agent saying “Brilliant career choice, couldn’t have happened at a better moment, record sales are phenomenal, pity about the obituary…” comes into his mind. Fuck them. They can all go to hell. For a moment he feels better, until he steps on the scale.
Down in the breakfast room he orders fat-reduced yogurt and fruit, rejecting his usual black coffee and croissants. A waiter brings him copies of The Times, the Guardian and the Observer. He postpones the moment of turning the pages and facing what he knows will be the vitriol of the critics, one of them still scarred by a night back in the mid-sixties, when Karl, a younger and more passionate man, had punched him out in a bar in Convent Garden after a particularly malicious assassination of his work. It had taken many lunches and free tickets from his agent to seduce the bastard back into any objectivity.
Karl flicks a grape off the table. He feels terrible. His eyes ache from too little sleep, and the edge of fear still gnaws at his intestines. He badly wants to talk to Katherine. She was always so good the next day, smoothing his fears with a dismissal. “Eunuchs at an orgy, that’s all that critics are,” she’d say, pointing out his massive popular appeal and record sales for the last ten years. Perhaps he should ring her. Forgive me, darling, all is forgiven. Come back. But he couldn’t—he had lost face and that was unforgivable. The schoolgirls filed into the breakfast room, neat, with their school uniforms pressed crisp. As they walked past he tried smiling at an exceptionally beautiful girl, a vivacious brunette, but she was too busy glancing shyly at a handsome black youth serving at the buffet. It was no good. He would have to resign himself to approaching old age and auction off what remained of his sexuality. A middle-aged woman sitting alone at a table opposite him glanced across and smiled at him. He averted his eyes, looking down at the papers, and said a quiet prayer to himself as he turned to the arts pages.
The Observer was direct and to the point: MAESTRO UPSTAGED—MARITAL GYMNASTICS MORE ENTERTAINING THAN THE MUSIC. Normally a supporter of his career, the critic, a rather frigid-looking blonde, had run a litany of all of his previous marriages and infamous liaisons, drawing parallels with his career. She insinuated that his renowned virility might be linked with his musical energy and flair, suggesting that perhaps the extreme behavior of his wife—fifteen years his junior, the newspaper noted wryly—could be connected to his own flaccid performance onstage. She also noted that the echoing screams of the climaxing couple had added greatly to the flagging power of the brass section. The Times was no better: POPE POOPED AND DUPED. That critic too found the concert lacking in tempo and clarity, suggesting that Mr. Pope might be more than a little heavy-handed with the strings—but then what could you expect from an Eastern European sentimentalist. Further and much-needed entertainment was provided by Mr. Pope’s young wife, the celebrated illustrator Katherine Pope née Handsworth. Her agility and stage presence suggested a potential career in the performing arts…Karl could read no further. As he put down the paper he noticed that his hands were trembling. This time he felt truly suicidal. He was ruined, and the one area he had always had extreme confidence in, his sexual prowess, was now undermined and destroyed by the cries of that damn woman. There was nowhere to turn. The middle-aged woman smiled at him again. He’d been recognized. Taking his indifference as a cue, she got up and hurried across the room.
“Mr. Pope, I love your music, you’re my favorite interpreter of Mozart. That concert in Prague, I can’t remember the piece now, well, it was absolutely wonderful.”
He turned to her. “How many orgasms can you achieve in one night?” The woman looked at him blankly. “Last night in this hotel the woman next door must have come thirty, forty times. Now that’s virtuosity for you. Against that I am nothing. Finished. You understand?” Before she had a chance to respond to his outburst, he left.
At the desk the concierge is humming to himself. Some rap song about racial equality, Karl notes, no sense of style. There is a certain smugness about him, the air of the conqueror, the recently laid, that irritates Karl greatly. “Any messages for me?” The concierge smiles brightly at him. In his paranoia, Karl’s convinced he detects a gleam of pity in his eyes.
“No, sorry, man. Expecting something from the wife, yes?”
“My agent actually,” Karl replies curtly. If there’s one thing he abhors, it’s being pitied.