His height was the only average thing about him. Not only was he a superstud but he was also intelligent, undemandingly honest, and beautiful — not just handsome, beautiful. His hair was dark and his skin olive-colored. In a long wig, he could have been a most sensual-looking girl.
And not only his face was beautiful; he had gorgeous hands and elegant feet. A great dark delicate beauty, endowed to boot with ten beautiful inches of phallus.
He wore a Brooks Brothers suit of dark gray herringbone tweed, a button-down shirt of pale blue cotton, and a soft-colored paisley tie. On his shoulders was a navy blue cashmere overcoat. He carried a black Gucci briefcase.
The girl who accompanied him was wearing a street-length, red fox coat and black leather boots. Under the coat was a smart black suede shirtwaist dress. She had one of those faces that looked as if it came from California and had gone to school at Smith or Wellesley — pretty, with the right nose, cheekbones, and chin, and big innocent blue eyes. She had long, straight, very blond hair and wore almost no makeup. She needed no jewelry.
Richard Ram introduced her to Rashid as Mary Littlelamb. She put down the oversized Louis Vuitton shoulder bag she carried and took off her coat. Rashid, of course, did not give his name. Johns never did, unless it was John. This couple would never know about Rashid and Tana Dabra, unless they read the gossip columns. They knew only that they had come to service two clients.
Mary sat down while the two men settled the matter of money and the sexual menu. Richard understood at once that it was to be a no-holds-barred session. Rashid picked up Tana Dabra’s sable coat which had been lying over the back of a chair and started for the bedroom where she was waiting, having told them to come in when they were ready.
Tana Dabra and Rashid showered together. She went to the dressing table in the bathroom and made herself up. Wanting to please Rashid, she draped herself in some of the jewels he had bought her and snapped the Adam ruby around her neck. With nothing more to cover her nakedness she walked into the bedroom. He took the dressing gown trailing from her hand and held out her sable coat for her. She laughed and slipped her arms through the sleeves. Together, he in his silk robe and nothing else, she naked under her sable coat, they lay down side by side on the chaise longue and waited for Richard and Mary to appear.
Mary was astonishing. Tall and very fair-skinned, in contrast to her classic preppy look she had the most extraordinary and erotically full, curvaceous body. Mary Littlelamb was clever, she knew well how to make herself look availably debauched, utterly ready to be used. Around her long, slim neck she wore a tight choker of black enamel chain. In the center of it was a ring, and suspended from the ring was a pair of long black enamel chains that hung down between her breasts to her ankles. They jangled as she walked into the room.
Her long but shapely arms and legs seemed to accentuate her breasts which were large and firm, and though heavy as if bursting with milk, tilted upward and were wide apart. Her nipples, large and long and fat, and stiff and open as if begging to be sucked, were colored with a pale pink ointment that made them shine like satin. She had an extremely narrow waist, a flat stomach, but was wide in the hips and the bottom. Around each of her ankles was a chain made like the one around her neck. She walked on long, slim, bare feet. There was more tinkling of chains because she had, high up on her thighs, close to her groin, another black enamel chain that dug into her flesh. Because she had been shaved smoothly the slit between her legs was clearly visible. It gashed her voluptuous mound which shone as satiny pink as her nipples did. She smelled of fresh-cut freesias.
First she went to Tana Dabra and gave her the innocent smile of a child, then she bent over and kissed her on one cheek and then the other. Seductively she opened Tana Dabra’s fur coat and looked her over. Then it was Rashid’s turn. She took him by the hand. He stood up and she opened his sash and removed his robe. She kissed him, and he reacted at once, returning her kiss hungrily while he draped the chains around her breasts.
It was then that Richard Ram came into the room. Gorgeous, beautiful, all-macho man. Naked except for a wide leather belt with a huge gold-sculptured buckle which added to the effect of the fearsomely thick, flaccid penis reaching so low on his thigh that Tana Dabra’s heart beat a little faster.
Around each of his wrists were buckled wide leather
bands with gold studs. Masses of black curly hair on his groin and chest emphasized the animal quality of his body, an odd contrast to his almost delicate face. In his right hand gripped an ivory-handled whip. He smiled seductively at the other three in the room.
Richard took Tana Dabra by the hands and had her stand, removing her sable coat by using the handle of the whip to edge it off her shoulders. It fell and draped over the chaise behind her. Richard Ram’s eyes seemed to eat right into her body. He placed his hands on her waist and pulled her close to him. He held her that way and she felt him rising between her thighs as he kissed her on her forehead, then on her cheek, then on her breast …
When they had been fully satisfied, Rashid and Tana Dabra left their private world behind them and went down to the bar. New York’s cocktail hour is like every city’s cocktail hour. In bars like this all over the city, people were fortifying themselves with alcohol and bonhomie. Wives, husbands, lovers, mistresses, acquaintances, tricks, and friends. It was the transitional hour from the business of the day to the business — or pleasures — of the night. The restoration hour, the revitalizing hour when the adrenaline of the day, all used up, was replaced by the dry martini, with a twist of lemon and the Manhattan with its slice of orange and red cherry. The hour Rashid chose to parade, like so many others in the city, in the smart bars along the Upper East Side. It was another mild wonder of New York City life he was introducing to Tana Dabra.
The room buzzed with chic-looking people drinking the right drink at the right hour, before going to the right place with the right people. The atmosphere was thick with success, money, cachet, and amusement. This kind of place set you up and on your way for the evening. Tana Dabra and Rashid were enjoying it immensely.
“What shall we drink?”
“I want something wicked.”
“Haven’t you been wicked enough for today?”
“With a ringmaster like you, I want to get the night off to a wicked start.”
“All right then, what’s your idea of wicked liquid? No, don’t tell me, I can guess …. you want a margarita.”
“Right.”
Halfway through their margaritas, they settled back comfortably to eye the people in the bar.
Smart, chic, knowing and doing all the right things is how they appeared as a group. Then they sorted out the different species. There were the ultraslim, almost frail, exquisitely bejeweled millionaire widows from Chicago and San Francisco, Dallas and Palm Beach, in for winter shopping and the New York social circuit. Each invariably had an escort, usually the old homosexual friend. Perhaps the smooth antique dealer/advisor, directing her funds to assure her culture, prestige, and status, and himself money. Unless, of course, it was the shockingly young whizz-kid museum director hustling for a wing for his museum. Or the so very sensitive escort, the beautiful, aging ballet master, needing funds for the current ethnic group he was working with in his spare time.
Then there were the pretty-boy escorts, once called gigolos, mostly homosexual — but with an occasional bisexual who played it straight — who waited on and amused the rich dowagers. Svelte, cultured young men who were vastly entertaining and mad about both new and old money. They escorted these lonely ladies starved for masculine attention, fawned over them, pampered them, were slipped money under the table by them, and were kept most discreetly in cashmere sweaters and gold cuff links with large sapphires.
Tana Dabra giggled and, bending forward across the table, she whispered to Rashid, “And to think, I thought you were one of those, and I was a younger version of them.” She raised an eyebrow in the direction of a table not far away. “I don’t know what madness made me think that was all I was fit to have in my life.” Then her attention went back to watching.
In this room one could see the so-called lucky ones. Those who still had their rich husbands, though even older than themselves, more wrinkled, and frailer. These sat like pairs of wooden dummies, nothing exchanged between
them except another drink offered or politely accepted. The more well-preserved husbands’ eyes roved about the room. They were condescending and charming to their wives while their drinks enhanced their fantasies of what they would do to one, or several, of the delectable younger women they saw.
Men were there without their wives. Older, rich, secure, attractive, some with beautiful girls who were gratifyingly younger than they were. These men with age in their faces, and uncertainty in their limbs, still had youth in their eyes.
Those in the bar who had not reached their dotage seemed to be one of two types. Old New England Ivy Leaguers, all well-dressed, well-schooled, well-heeled, and cultured, some with beautiful young wives on their arms, others with luscious girls; and distinguished foreigners — an ambassador and his wife from South America, an Italian industrialist with a chic French actress, an Englishman wearing a monocle and his school tie, three poker-faced Arabs impeccably dressed, surveying all the women while trying to put a Southern governor in their pockets, and a cluster of Japanese with their exquisite mistresses.
What stood out among them in the room were the couples that sat by themselves emanating some sort of peace and contentment. The occasional couple who were attractive rather than beautiful, and quietly interesting. They seemed to exude a kind of loving togetherness without the label of relationship. Yes, the ones who stood out in the room were the ones who were still without labels to identify them. Labeless people might score high in the bar this evening. They were rare, but present. There were always one or two couples like that.
Tana Dabra was laughing at Rashid. He was amusing her by picking out various people in the bar and making up stories about them. He etched out a life for them in diluted acid and made his little vignettes seem possible, believable.
He had just finished one about an upper-crust dowager type and her consort when the waiter arrived with their third round of margaritas. Tana Dabra, well on her way to being tipsy, picked up her glass and clinked it to Rashid’s.
“To you, Rashid. How can I ever say thank you enough
for Paris, and Dominica, and New York, and for today? For all the things you keep adding to my life. Where do we go from here?”
“To the altar.”
“You make it sound like a sacrifice.”
“It is, for some, the ultimate sacrifice. And I am beginning to think that’s the way you see it. You’re not going to die, you know. I am not going to take you like some vestal virgin to the block to have your throat slit and your blood drawn to appease some pagan god. I am going to marry you, and our lives will be rich and full as they have been these past many days. I warn you, Tana Dabra, I am going to stop asking, and I might even do something drastic.”
She began to laugh, too happy and sated with his seduction to take him seriously. “That sounds thrilling. Like what?”
“I’ll kidnap you. Run off with you and keep you locked up in a wooden palace in Turkey, where no one will ever find you. Until you come to your senses and marry me.”
She asked for another drink in between spurts of laughter.
“Oh, I suppose you think me too civilized to do such a thing. What a surprise I have for you! No, I’ve changed my mind. Before I would lock you up in my wooden palace, I would take you to a marvelous place, Oda-Lala it’s called, for a month. Yes, I would lock you up in Oda-Lala’s, a house created for nothing but lovemaking and sexual bliss. And
not
allow you to participate. I’ll torture you with celibacy until you set the day for our wedding.”
Then they both began to laugh, and Rashid suddenly realized it was not a bad idea at all — in fact it was a very good idea.
Rashid woke Tana Dabra with a cup of strong Fortnum & Mason Royal Blend tea at six in the morning. One of her great assets as far as Rashid was concerned was that she was a morning person: Once awake, she was alert and invariably ready to move in on her day. One of the many things
they had in common. He attributed her sharpness in the morning to having been on the run in Ethiopia.
She sat up in bed drinking her tea. He kissed her naked shoulder and then said, “I have two questions for you, and I want you to answer them with absolute honesty. And then promise me to remember your answer, no matter what happens between us after that. Okay?”
This was something new of Rashid. She smiled and then said, “Okay.”
“Do you love me enough to forgive me anything? And, please, my dear, think well before you answer. And the other question is: Are you courageous enough to follow the dictates of your heart, no matter what?”
Tana Dabra looked away from Rashid, lowered her eyes, and sipped her tea. She took her time in answering, and when she did she raised her eyes and looked into his. “Yes would have to be my answer to both.”
Rashid was quite overcome. It was more than he had hoped for. He covered his emotions well enough, removed the cup from her hands, and placed it on the table next to the bed. Then he raised her hands to his lips and kissed their fingers.
They were dressed and at the heliport by seven-fifteen, where they were surprised by a photographer and reporter, both of whom Rashid knew well. They started off with that well-worn line, “Rumor has it, Rashid …”
Rashid cut in and said, “Rumor is right this time, I have asked her, and she still hasn’t said yes, and I will keep asking until she does. Now, one picture and we must be off. I have promised Tana Dabra a day at the beach.”
The gossip columnist and her photographer pressed no further. They had a scoop, and a photograph of the world’s newest, most sought-after glamorous couple. They shot the picture of Tana Dabra dressed in a jumpsuit of fine amber-colored cashmere and a waist-length, sleeveless chinchilla jacket, her hair tucked under a tightly wrapped turban of black silk; and Rashid in a pair of worn jeans, black-leather cowboy boots and a black leather Armani jacket.