The Juliette Society(48)

Now we’re inside, I realize I have no idea where we are and there’s no way of knowing, because it’s dark outside and all the windows are shuttered. It feels like we’re on the set of a movie. All of reality is focused and contained within this house.

There are large tables stacked with so much luxury food it looks like a Roman banquet. Magnums of Veuve Cliquot in ice buckets. Silver rolltop servers overflowing with Beluga caviar. Huge platters of seafood – oysters, mussels and prawns – planted in ice like flowerbeds. Terrines of foie gras. And these people are so blasé about their wealth that no one seems to be eating it. Stoic-looking butlers in tuxedos and black eye masks pass in and out of the assembled guests serving champagne.

It’s as if somebody has unlocked a door for me that’s always been closed, a door to a place I never knew existed and invited me to come inside with them. And why wouldn’t I want to take a look, to experience that? What life is like in the forbidden zone?

Right now, it doesn’t feel like an orgy. It’s all rather genteel and polite. It feels like a bourgeois cocktail party. And I look over at Anna as if to say, really? Is this what we came all the way out here for? Is this the best that Bundy can come up with? And at the same time, I’m kind of impressed because these guys are in another league entirely. And completely out of his. Way out.

Which is why we’re here, me and Anna, and Bundy and his ludicrous body art are not – because he’d only stand out like a sore thumb – but he has provided the girls. And Anna, she moves between all these worlds with grace and ease. Her sexuality gives her an access-all-areas pass and I’m her plus one.

I’d say Dickie’s in his sixties, minimum, possibly older, but he’s at an age where the numbers cease to matter and are even harder to predict. Dickie has a shock of swept-back grey-white hair and a body like a sack of potatoes, lumpy and uneven and weighted toward the bottom. He’s wearing a Zorro mask and a white satin shoulder cape with red piping, the kind priests wear. Other than that, Dickie is, for want of a better term, defrocked. He looks less like a member of the clergy, more like a retiree superhero with nudist tendencies. Captain Concrete.

Dickie’s sitting talking to me, expounding on the mechanics of cement with his legs crossed. His cock and balls hang listlessly over his thigh, looking about as bored as I feel.

Freddie’s a lot younger, young enough to be Dickie’s son, and he seems to be wearing the cassock that goes with Dickie’s cape; as if they went halves on the costume rental and flipped a coin to see who got what.

As Dickie talks, I’m overcome by an ineffable sadness, but I’m trying my best to hide it. I’m trying to seem interested and maintain a conversation. But I’ve never called anyone Dickie in my life and I’m not about to start. So I call him Richard instead.

I say, ‘Richard —’

‘Dickie,’ he says, cutting me off for the third or fourth time, ‘call me Dickie.’ And for the third or fourth time, I pretend like I haven’t heard.

‘OK, Richard,’ I say, ‘so give it to me again, what are the advantages of using high slump and shrinkage-reduced concrete?’

I’m taking in just enough lingo to be able to fake it, throwing something back to make him think I’m listening.

Now I’ve shown a smidgen of interest, and it almost kind of sounds like I know what I’m talking about, Dickie takes it as a go-ahead to really let rip. I zone out.

On the wall behind Dickie there are a series of framed reproductions of scratchy, primitive drawings of men and women fucking in various configurations. I recognize them immediately as the drawings from a book Brigitte Bardot is flicking through in Godard’s Contempt, the book that the vulgar American producer has given her screenwriter husband in order to help him sex up a script by German director Fritz Lang that’s all arty Greek myth with zero box office potential. He’s given Bardot’s screenwriter husband a book of Ancient Roman pornographic art to jerk off to in the hope that it will bleed into his writing and give this producer enough bang for his buck to put asses on seats. And the pictures, that are in that book and on these walls, were created for a specific purpose, as a kind of instructional sex manual and erotic stimulant for the patrons of a brothel in Pompeii, which was where they were found. And I’m guessing they’re here for the same purpose too.

Dickie’s talking and the only words I register are ‘discharge’, ‘vibrators’ and ‘staining’. I lose track of whether he’s still talking cement or just talking dirty to me, but I figure that if ready-mix concrete gets Dickie hard, he’s probably a man who’s easily pleased. I’m just not the right person to do his pleasing.