Affectionately,
Kate
Dear Kate,
Well, Rites of Seduction is not a story I advertise too widely. You can understand why, can’t you?
Sometimes I write things that I know are going to shock, even repulse people but I can’t help it. It’s part of me. You have a story you wish to tell, emotions you want to put across, feelings that call for a scream rather than a whisper, and it pours out because it’s the thing to do, the way it is.
I write this, thinking of you in distant Seattle, half a world apart, excited in a million familiar ways because I realize I’ve established some form of connection with you, and I don’t know where it’s taking me.
All around, London is switching the sun off as summer nears its natural end, stronger grey winds building up, drizzly shards of rain cooling the temperature so that all the pretty unattainable women no longer display generous acres of flesh, bare backs, tan lines like necklaces above their shoulders, nipples almost bursting through their thin T-shirts, legs with no end peering out from the shortest of skirts or dresses. Enough. I obsess too easily. Control.
Imagine the newspaper headline:
LONDON BOOKSELLER GOES ON SEX CRIME SPREE
The owner of a specialist bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road was arrested today after making passes at every woman under the age of sixty that entered his shop. He says ‘I just couldn’t help it. They were all too pretty.’
You wouldn’t forgive me, would you, Kate?
Confused,
Maxim
P.S. A waste of a letter really, this. Maybe you should ignore it altogether. I seem to have rambled on in a most silly fashion.
Dear Maxim,
Maybe you should come to Seattle. After all, the World Mystery Convention is taking place here next year. Should you need an excuse? I want to meet you, and no, I don’t know what will happen when we meet. I feel I know you so well already. Something about you scares me a little, but I’m ready, more than I will ever be. Yes, I too invent newspaper stories:
MAD SEATTLE WOMAN SLAYS BRITISH AUTHOR
A Kirkland librarian who had been corresponding for some time with a British author was discovered yesterday by a neighbour in a catatonic state. The body of English bookseller and writer Maxim Jakubowski, 48, was found in her bedroom. He had been sexually mutilated.
Katherine Macher, 28, when interrogated later, after recovering from her state of shock, confessed ‘his sexual demands were too bizarre’.
A Seattle Times reporter later contacted mystery critic Marvin Lachman about the deceased, ‘His crime stories were so violent they were like the literary equivalent of a snuff movie’.
Seriously, though, it’d be great if you could visit (I’d defrost the fridge beforehand to avoid temptation!).
Some time back, you recommended James Crumley to me, but I never did get around to him. Here’s a cutting (a real one) from our local paper; he’s reading at the Elliott Bay Bookshop next month. Do you know Crumley personally?
Yours,
Kate
Dear Kate,
Yes, I did meet Crumley some years back at a crime festival in the French Alps. He’s a terrific guy, drinks mightily, a bit like a Hemingway of the crime world. A rather frantic life, so The Mexican Tree Duck is his first novel in a decade. A genuine event. You must attend the reading, and if you have the opportunity give Jim my best regards.
Sexually mutilated? Tell me more. Morbid, moi? Not at all. Well, in London we’re used to that sort of thing, you know. After all, Jack the Ripper, shrouded in his Dickensian fog, was the first modern serial killer of note. In the shop, we also sell a lot of true crime books, not by personal choice I assure you, but there are bills to pay. The interesting thing is that so many of the more gruesome volumes, those with all the gory details about the killings and mutilations inflicted on women by psychos (mostly American) are bought by women. And don’t ask me why. I don’t think I wish to know.
By the way, I want a photograph of you. My imagination is running out.
Yours, stoically impatient.
Maxim
Dear Maxim,
Here you are.
Is this what you expected? Is this what you want?
Kate
Dear Kate,
So this is you.
I don’t know what I truly expected. Really.
Yes. You.
Allow me to imagine the shape of your body under the long skirt of many colours that you are wearing (is that Seattle in the background, or Portland?), daringly guess the pallor of your breasts, the feel of your skin under my fingers skipping a gentle light fandango, how your body would feel naked against mine, flesh pressed against flesh, the smell of your skin, my tongue tasting you, the ineffable sensation of entering you for the first time.
I read in a book the other day that it rains in Seattle nine days out of ten.
Oh, how your wet cascading hair falls over your shoulders. A mental movie against the screen of my mind, raging images of bodies aflame as the storm invades my teacup of a brain and heart. Soft, invisible to the eye, blonde down in the small of your back. A dark beauty spot just below the lower curve of your right buttock. A brown mole where your small breasts take birth. Not opulent is the way you describe them.
If you were right now in London, we would be having an affair. Sneaking into cheap hotels, hunting for lies and excuses to the deception. Stealing brief evenings, weekends in search of always more forbidden joy. Would the sex be good? Impossible to say. Feverish, sweaty, shockingly intimate.
Come to think of it, there must also be a London of lovers. A London most of us know little about. A city where the geography is human as well as physical, where I should discover bars which are quiet and discreet, and I could take your hand in mine, without acquaintances spying. Where there are dark streets where I might slip my hand under your shirt and caress your shadowy nipples to hardness, alleys where our crotches might rub against each other with impunity.
Strange how the vision, the topology of a city can change according to circumstances, like a parallel world that exists contiguous to the one we know as normal, invisible but so close. In this one I sell books and write you foolish letters where I reveal the worst of my hidden self, in the other London, we fuck wondrously, mingle juices and sweat in unknown beds and awake blearily in the grey morning with my cock still embedded in you, a familiar geometry of desire and lazy friction binding our bodies together in adulterous ardour (you are married, aren’t you? Somehow I guess you must be, and of course you know I am too).
Kate, sweet sweet Kate, what are we to do?
With much affection.
Maxim
Dear Maxim,
We meet in London. Certainly it must be London, the dark London of my imagination, the one from all the books full of fog and dread, the city of a thousand chimneys and unending parks where all policemen are polite like in a novel by Agatha Christie, where all the freaks fix you with mad, staring eyes like in the Factory books of Derek Raymond.
So we come together at last.
Six o’clock in a private club in Soho. We order drinks, make small talk and barely hear each other over the din of the regulars. Drinks over, you suggest we eat. We find a nearby Indian restaurant. The food is truly delicious. Then, a million things still unsaid, we move on to a pub. I imagine it’s in a basement. Clumsily, we try to explain our feelings, how we arrived at this crazy situation. Fleetingly you touch my thigh through the fabric of my dress. I buy the next round. What I don’t say is that you’re not quite the man I expected. Your hair is flecked with grey, you readily admit you’re slightly overweight. You’re probably thinking, she never said she was so tall, and your eyes can’t keep away from the small brown mole there at the onset of her cleavage.