The lamps have been dimmed but they are also draped with gossamer silken scarves, black and red and gold to complement her costume. Thick candles in the same colors flicker in brass holders everywhere around the room, and scrolled brass pots of incense smolder on the coffee table. The door to the bedroom is open just a crack. Red light suffuses the wedge and spills like blood onto the living room carpet. The music swells. It is Rimsky-Korsakov, and she is his birthday Scheherazade, here to tell him rapturous tales of perfumed ecstasy.
“Do you like it?” she asks.
“Very much.”
“Give me your glasses. I’m going to blindfold you.”
She takes his glasses, steps behind him, loops over his head a black silk strip of fabric — a scarf, a piece of lingerie? He cannot tell because he is instantly sightless. With his eyes closed, and the blindfold knotted at the back of his head, what had earlier been merely semidarkness now assumes the magnitude of utter blackness.
“Give me your hand,” she says.
He feels her hand taking his, her ringed fingers closing gently around his. He cannot recall her ever wearing a ring before.
“Can you see anything?” she asks.
“No,” he says.
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
Not a suggestion of light filters around the blindfold. She leads him in absolute darkness around obstacles he knows are there, the coffee table in front of the couch, an ottoman, remembered pieces of furniture she avoids as she guides him across the room to what he surmises is the bedroom door now spilling unseen red light. He hears the door swinging gently open before them. She leads him into the room.
“Stand right here,” she says.
There is the smell of incense burning here, too.
He hears the door closing behind him.
The sound of Scheherazade is gone.
There is only silence now.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” she whispers. “Keep your hands at your sides, I don’t want you to touch me.”
He feels her moving closer to him, leaning into him. Her lips find his. She kisses him openmouthed, her tongue searching. In the dark, her mouth is wet and demanding, her lips thick with lust. He feels himself responding at once. She removes her mouth from his instantly, takes a quick step back. Her voice whispers out of the darkness again.
“Did you like that?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like me to kiss you again?”
“Yes.”
“Bet you’d like to touch me, too, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, but you can’t.”
Her voice retreats. Her lips suddenly find his again. Her hand glides lightly over the front of his trousers, lingers there, begins stroking him through the fabric while her tongue insistently probes. He feels his zipper being lowered. She slides her lips from his, and steps back again, out of reach.
“What would you like me to do?” she whispers. “Say.”
“Whatever you want to do.”
“Kiss you again?”
“Yes.”
“Oh yes. Take that thing out of your pants?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I’ll bet.”
He waits in the expectant dark. There is movement. She is kneeling before him, her hands seeking, and suddenly he is free, and her mouth claims him, wet and determined. Each time he tries to touch her face, her hair, she pulls away, only to return inexorably a moment later. And then, as if sensing he is dangerously close, she vanishes entirely. Her voice floats from somewhere out of the darkness.
“Did you like that?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like more?”
“Yes.”
“Of course,” she says and her voice fades, and all at once she is upon him again, ravenously drawing him into her mouth. His hands reach for her face, but she quickly moves away from his touch, and he hears her voice hanging disembodied someplace, “No, baby, not yet,” and in the silence that follows, there is only the rustle of silk and the faint metallic clink of bracelets and chains and the mixed aroma of incense and a thousand perfumes. He stands waiting, trembling. Where is she?
“Would you like me to take off the blindfold now?” she whispers.
“Yes.”
“Maybe I will. Let you see what I’m doing to you.”
“Yes.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I would.”
“I’ll bet you would,” she says, and steps behind him.
He feels her fingers at the back of his head, struggling with the knot. The black silk falls free. He opens his eyes.
“This is Gloria,” Kate says.
Gloria is black and Gloria is long and supple and Gloria has sloe eyes and a voluptuous mouth and Gloria is wearing nothing but high-heeled shoes and a gold chain that is wrapped around her waist several times.
“Happy birthday,” she says, and smiles.
“She’s your present,” Kate says.
He remembers all at once the soft thick lips that possessed him while he was blindfolded. A red lamp is burning on the bedside table. It tints the room red. It tints Gloria’s full-breasted body red. It tints Kate’s nipples red in the open red vest.
“Did you enjoy it?” she asks.
David is trembling again.
“Say.”
“Yes,” he says. “I enjoyed it.”
“Then come to me, baby,” Gloria says, and extends her hands to him.
He takes them.
In the hallucinatory movie that plays that night — for surely this is a waking dream, this scene can’t really be unreeling here in Kate’s bedroom on Kate’s familiar bed — he learns that the long-legged black woman with the sloe eyes and voluptuous mouth is a dancer like Kate...
“We met during Les Miz...”
...although this is the first time they’ve ever done anything like this together.
“Right, Gloria?”
“Umm,” Gloria murmurs, her mouth tirelessly working, Kate simultaneously smothering David’s lips with kisses and whispering words of encouragement to her dear old friend.
This is surely a film he saw on Times Square, a film he is starring in on Times Square, for without question he is the leading man in this vehicle titled 
, the object of all this rampant, sweaty passion here on Kate’s bed in Kate’s room, where now Gloria’s lips are on his, claiming his mouth again, tongue flicking his tongue while Kate’s own tongue teases and tempts below, refusing to let go of him, the red light beside the bed casting tall dark shadows on the ceiling and walls.
Gloria swings one long leg over his face, and lowers herself onto him. Amazingly, he accepts her without hesitation, this woman he has met for the first time tonight, albeit intimately, this passionate creature with whom he is now starring in a multimillion-dollar production titled 
while below Kate is starring in her own intensely intimate and private film tentatively titled 
, ad-libbing lines the screenwriter never wrote but which the director, herself, likes to encourage among her actors and actresses. David and Gloria, the only other performers in this double feature — or perhaps triple feature, it is difficult to know who is in charge here anymore — seem to have had their earlier speaking roles reduced to a series of sighs, cries, moans and groans while Kate, speaking directly from either the heart or the id, keeps murmuring an incessant litany of cocks and cunts and gutter fucking, and then suddenly abandons both improvisational dialogue and glistening anticipatory flute to slide up onto the pillows, roll over on her back, and open herself wide to Gloria, red light washing with a redder glow her crisp pubic hair and pink interior. Long naked legs spread, she says “Do me now, Glo,” which gentle suggestion Gloria obeys with amazing alacrity, demonstrating a versatility that had not been immediately apparent in the rushes.