The Pleasure Quartet Read online

  He slid inside her.

  With ease.

  Comfortable weekend sex.

  Predictable. Pleasant. Silent.

  He was hard, but tender and attuned to April’s inner rhythms, riding her with care and energy, expertly surfing across the inner waves of her lust, ever trying to match his movements to the currents of their respective desires, equalising the ebb and flow and intensity of the hidden seas that controlled their sexuality.

  Soon, April was beginning to gasp and he knew she was close to coming and he accelerated his thrusts.

  ‘Jeeezussss . . .’

  Her triumphant cry punctured the room’s peace.

  Noah closed his eyes, now fixed on releasing his own pleasure. She was one of the few women he had known who came easily. There was no challenge in it.

  A thought intruded in his mind as he kept on burying himself inside her pliant softness: the next time they fucked, he wanted to play loud music as an accompaniment. Whoever had said that you shouldn’t mix work and pleasure?

  He had met April just a few months after he arrived in the city. The now ex-girlfriend he had initially followed from London to New York, Bridget, had quickly failed in her attempt to conquer the Big Apple, and had soon come to the conclusion that she didn’t have it in her to navigate the course. Bridget had enjoyed a modicum of success on the university and club circuit back in England as a folk singer with a dusky voice and clever phrasing, but on Bleecker Street, she was just one of a handful of moderately talented singers and, despite a few gigs at Kenny’s Castaways and The Bitter End, she did not get enough favourable reviews or repeat bookings.

  He’d been freelancing for a handful of music magazines, which was how they’d met. He’d championed Bridget with a positive review, in a successful attempt to bed her, and with a laptop reckoned he could work from anywhere, so following her to Manhattan had not been too much of a dilemma.

  When a discouraged Bridget summarily gave up on her dream and decided to return to the UK to complete her law studies, Noah had opted to stay put. He’d always loved the excitement of New York and, half-American by birth, he didn’t need to worry about obtaining a work visa. Thanks to a book advance he had pocketed to write a warts and all biography of a popular boy band with whose manager he had been to university, he had found himself an affordable rental in Brooklyn where the rock scene was burgeoning.

  Within half a year, he had been offered an A&R job by a mainstream record company with a brief to nurture further local bands. He had a good ear, a distinctive taste for the original, and a British no-bullshit attitude which quickly made him popular with the musicians with whom he had to work and seduce into the corporate fold without any of them feeling they were compromising their ideals and principles in the process. Unlike other record business types, he would not pretend to be their friend and was careful not to interfere too openly with their music, opting for gentle hints and subtle production recommendations once he had managed to get the bands into the studios, an attitude they and their often inexperienced and wary managers appreciated.

  Noah had found a life he enjoyed. Although not essentially creative himself, he was nevertheless involved in the creation of powerful music. It was the best of all possible worlds and yet something was missing. Sex, women.

  A string of harmless one-night stands around the networks of clubs and venues he now haunted for his job had proved unfulfilling, and then he met April.

  A photo session had been set up for one of his groups, a trip hop trio from Philadelphia, whose female singer’s deep, sensual tones always managed to move him inside from the moment she began to sing, although her everyday non-performing voice was a bit strident and oh so American. She was part of a long-standing couple with the bass player in the group, but despite that, the temptation to get to know her more had, against Noah’s best judgement, skirted his thoughts more than once.

  The record company’s art department had signed up a fairly well-known fashion photographer whose studio was on the Lower East Side and Noah had agreed to meet up with the guys there after the shoot, to pick up some test recordings of a couple of new songs they were working on. He was waiting in the studio’s anteroom for the session to end. Leafing through a fashion magazine left open on a low glass table, he was smiling at the incongruous thought that he could just as well have been sitting in a dentist’s waiting room when a young woman, a blonde with short hair, walked through, a pile of cellophane-wrapped clothes on hangers looped over her arm.

  Their eyes met.

  She noticed the ironic smile on his lips.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ she asked him.

  ‘Not you, I assure you. Just something that was passing through my mind before you entered.’

  ‘You’re English.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  She smiled back at him.

  By then he’d been in America long enough to recognise her own accent was also not local. He took a guess.

  ‘You’re Canadian?’

  She nodded and laid out her cumbersome bundle of clothes onto a nearby sofa.

  ‘I’m April.’

  ‘Noah.’

  ‘Are you waiting for Hutch, or are you one of his assistants?’

  ‘Neither. He’s finishing a shoot.’ He indicated the door that separated the waiting room from the loft studio where the work was taking place. ‘I’m with the group, musicians being shot. The band.’

  ‘Their manager? Minder? You don’t look like the rock type.’

  Noah appreciated her attitude. And he wasn’t ashamed to admit it, her looks, too. She had a quality of self-assurance that appealed to him greatly, as if she knew what she wanted and nothing would change her aim or direction.

  ‘Is there a typical rock type?’

  ‘I don’t know. You look normal . . .’ Her sentence halted in full flow, as if she thought she had said something wrong, was maybe insulting him. She lowered her eyes.

  ‘I don’t mind in the slightest being normal,’ Noah countered. ‘Feel no need to conform to popular expectations.’

  ‘It’s not what I meant,’ April said. ‘I expressed myself badly. I do that sometimes.’

  ‘It’s fine. What about you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘What brings you here, April? Do you work for a dry cleaner, maybe?’

  She laughed. ‘No.’

  He laughed along with her.

  ‘So what’s all the clothes about?’

  ‘They’re for a fashion shoot tomorrow. I brought them ahead of time. I work for a magazine.’ She looked down at the one he had dropped back on the glass table. ‘Actually, the same one you were reading.’

  ‘How fortuitous.’

  ‘Wow, big words!’ Her eyes were a pale shade of green and he couldn’t help but stare at them. Not that the rest of April didn’t call for much closer attention, but you could only admire a woman one step at a time, he reckoned. His attention was drawn to a thin, almost invisible line, a scar, he realised, that partly bisected one of her eyebrows. A terribly minor imperfection that made her seem less plastic, he felt. He liked the girl. A lot.

  ‘No one’s perfect. Even more so with a British university education.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘And what about Canada? Where do you come from?’

  ‘Vancouver.’

  ‘Never been,’ Noah said, ‘but got close. I was visiting Seattle a couple of years ago, and was tempted to hire a car and drive up. Never got round to it, though.’

  ‘You should have. Gastown is a gas.’

  ‘Would you have been there, or already in New York?’

  ‘If I’d known you were coming, maybe I would have stayed on . . .’

  He enjoyed the way she could playfully sustain a conversation, spar with him, tease, seduce him already.

  Right then, the studio door opened and the band poured out, all in an ebullient mood, still high from the photo shoot.

  Noah and April exchanged phone numbers.

&nbs
p; She’d arrived in the city at almost the same time he had, they later discovered, leaving a small local publishing house where she’d found a placement following art school studies, and now worked in Manhattan as a production assistant for a mid-level magazine group. She wasn’t actually involved with the fashion department, and the errand at the photographer Hutch Lea’s studio, had been a favour she was doing for a colleague whose child was down with flu. Normally, she wouldn’t ever have set foot there. Her job was assisting the art department to complete their layouts in readiness for the printers.

  Noah pondered at length where to invite her for a first date and how long to wait until he actually called her and suggested they meet. He had the intuition she wouldn’t be impressed merely being a ‘plus one’ on a guest list, however prestigious the gig was, and actually suggested they visit the Metropolitan, where a new exhibition transferred from London’s Royal Academy was enjoying rave reviews and tickets were at a premium, but available to him against musical favours. He chose right.

  They were lovers within a week.

  Noah knew his feelings on the subject were profoundly irrational, but soon after April moved in with him, she took the decision to grow her hair longer, and even though all their individual and common friends loved her new look, he felt cheated; as if acquiring a new partner he had been given a wrong bill of goods.

  Thus were seeds sown.

  Outwardly, things were just fine. They seldom argued, the sex was good if at times predictable, they looked good together and enjoyed each other’s company, and New York was vibrant. What could go wrong?

  April was untidy, relished in the chaos of mess, her clothes scattered across their bedroom or further afield if Noah indulged her, while he was meticulous and precise, overorganised apart from the piles of cassettes and CDs that spilled over from his desk into even the kitchen, which he always blamed on the nature of his work and which she never reproached him for or used as an excuse for her own state of domestic wildness. She even approved of the way he dressed, conservative and unimaginative and somewhat repetitive in combinations of black, blue and grey, whereas she generously mined every colour of the rainbow and, miraculously, wore them equally well, avoiding clashes, gaudiness or fantasies of outmoded psychedelia.

  ‘Are all Canadian women like you?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘So easy to live with?’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Would you want me to be more complicated?’

  ‘Like a messed-up maiden with a tenebrous past in a Victorian novel?’

  ‘Or any period you can think of . . .’

  He wanted to answer in the affirmative, hint that there was too much brightness, normalcy even, about her, but Noah knew she wouldn’t understand. He pecked her on the cheek. They lay together in bed. She was reading a magazine; she seldom read books – another mild if occasional bone of contention – and he was halfway through a compelling thriller while listening to a series of remixes one of the bands he was overseeing had sent along that day following a week of arduous recordings with a local producer Noah had suggested. There was no improvement in their sound. The material, the songs were great, but the textures were still wrong. Although not a musician himself – he couldn’t read music, let alone play either piano or guitar or any instrument whatsoever – his intuition had always served him well even if on occasions like this he couldn’t properly express the way forward with just the excuse of emotional intelligence. It sometimes proved frustrating. His mind half on the book he was holding in his left hand catching the light from the bedside table, and half on the music and wandering through its melodic meanders in an attempt to blindly create new aural paths that would lift it to another level, Noah didn’t realise that his right hand had disappeared under the covers and that he was distractedly stroking himself. They both always slept naked.

  Her voice reached him, like a dream emerging from a cloud just as Noah simultaneously felt her fingers pinch his left forearm hard. He pulled the earphones off.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ she complained.

  He had no clue what she was on about.

  His eyes must have betrayed his incomprehension.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your hands are all over your cock . . .’

  He looked down. She was right. He was playing with himself, his fingers moving between his cock and his balls. He was only half hard, the contact between hand and genitals barely there, no more than a pleasant feather’s touch.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ He withdrew his fingers.

  A veil of annoyance passed across April’s eyes.

  ‘How could you?’

  ‘It just happened. I didn’t realise. Doesn’t mean anything.’

  Didn’t she ever unconsciously touch herself? Surely everyone did.

  ‘I feel . . . offended . . .’ She was visibly struggling for the right word. ‘Insulted . . .’ she continued.

  ‘You shouldn’t.’ Noah tried to reassure her. ‘It means nothing. Really.’

  ‘Don’t I please you enough?’ Her lips downturned, her face child-like in sulk.

  ‘You do, truly.’ He set the book down and his hand brushed her cheek.

  April shrugged him off with a look of disgust.

  ‘You’ve just been playing with your cock with that hand . . .’

  ‘It was the other hand,’ he retorted.

  She turned away from him.

  In silence, she switched off her own reading light and pulled her side of the quilt over her shoulders, ignoring him. Noah did likewise, settling with his back to her, their arses cheek to cheek. He knew that by morning the cloud would have passed and the subject be unlikely to be mentioned again.

  But he couldn’t sleep, his thoughts now focused on her earlier question. It bounced around in his mind: ‘Don’t I please you enough?’ Round and round it went.

  And every time the answer came back positive.

  Making him angry with himself in the process.

  Maybe he wasn’t cut out for a simple, unassuming state of happiness, of domesticity. He was aware of the fact that in crowds, at parties, functions or elsewhere, he was always looking over his shoulder for others, for new conversation, for distractions. Ever trying to escape boring company, hoping for something better on the other side of the room, in another room, elsewhere. It was the same with women. The thrill was in the chase, the initial exploration, the early days of passion and sexual intemperance and excess.

  He wanted more.

  But didn’t know what that might consist of. Could he have recognised it even if it presented itself?

  He thought of April, by his side, her body warm and soft, almost perfect, the velvet heat when he moved inside her, the faint night smell of her breath, the musky fragrance of her cunt, the way she breathed when they fucked, haltingly, gasping for air as if she was hanging on to a cliff and was playing a game and unsure whether she wished to let go or not.

  But she never let go, did she?

  Sometimes he dreamed of more.

  Of waking in the small hours of morning, his mind still shrouded with fog, to feel her silken lips wrapped around his cock, sucking him slowly, engineering his rise, conducting the blood arousal like an orchestra conductor. Swallowing him whole and literally. Not a thing she would ever willingly do, he knew.

  He evoked the pale orb of her arse cheeks when he moved inside her as she kneeled on all fours and allowed him to thrust away and he couldn’t help but wonder how tight her other hole would be. On a couple of occasions, he had been tempted to move just that vital inch or so and try to penetrate her anally but she had always made it clear it was not on the menu. Not that he had a particular fetish for anal sex, although he had enjoyed the few times women had allowed him to practise or suggest the supposedly twisted art, but there was a dirtiness, a taboo about the act that drew him strongly towards the idea of it.

  April was normal.

  And nigh perfect.
r />   And transparent.

  And boring.

  She fucked because that’s what girlfriends did with boyfriends. Women did with men. He didn’t even know if she enjoyed it. She came so easily, he often wondered if she faked her orgasms. She expected him to take her, to enter her, to possess her, seemed to believe that her sex was a gift he (or other men) would be grateful for, an offering, but she seldom initiated the act. Had it not been a healthy exercise, a sanitary flexing of their body hydraulics, he reckoned she would have been totally indifferent to the act. Seen it as just another function, like eating, running or conversation.

  More.

  He wanted more.

  He dreamed of a dark sexual power that would move him like music did, like magic.

  Shortly after, for her job, April had to fly off for a few days to the magazine printer’s plant in Illinois to overlook a new production process. Her trip had been planned for some time, and had nothing to do with that awkward evening. Noah found himself alone in Manhattan for a series of nights and, although he would never have admitted so to her, he felt a sense of relief and a quiet sense of excitement. Opportunities? The chance to reconsider their relationship? His thoughts were still vague on the subject.

  He’d detoured past Electric Ladyland studios to pick up the masters for some new material by a West Coast middle-of-the-road balladeer who had been signed to the label long before he had become involved, and walking out into the midday sun had decided he had no wish to continue to his office on Perry Street. His company hours were flexible and, anyway, he could always be contacted on his mobile. He was in no rush to listen to the recordings. He knew they would be bland but efficient, tailored for the radio market, every beat in place, superficial but perfect for the dance floor.