So what happened when Livia took those Bad, Bad Chocolate Tarts out for a Bad, Bad Test Run? Well, you can probably guess. But much more fun to read about it. Which you can do in a hot minute if you choose to consume Slice IX of our serialized novella, The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known as A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen). I must advise against trying this recipe at home, and certainly against taking your creations out to the neighborhood bar, but if you do these things, Bad, Bad Lovers, which you might, given who you are, the rest of us want to hear alllllllll about it. Live-stream, maybe? And if you missed the prep-cook phases of this culinary masterpiece, you can go back to the very beginning by clicking right here.
NB, for what follows: The story transpires in the ’90s. You could still smoke in bars then. References, likewise, are made to ‘personal ads’. For those of you who only know Tinder, or (god help us) E-Harmony, these were saner, better times. Trust me.
~
The Consequences of Chocolate Tarts
On the first night, Livia dressed in clothing chosen, after a lengthy process of deliberation, from the hall closet. She took a cab downtown. It was just after ten. She seated herself at the bar of a stylish Soho venue for cocktails; she ordered a martini. The bar was steel, the stools were steel, and there were lights behind the shelves (also steel) where the bottles were kept. It looked like a stage set. Livia smoked.
After half an hour or so, she felt a presence at her right. She half-turned. It was a man. A beautiful man. A tall, slim, beautiful man with longish, dark-brown hair, unstyled, the way she liked it. The hair fell across his thinnish face, into his dark eyes. There were creases around the eyes; the man was probably around forty. That was fine with Livia, she had no time for the inexperience of youth. The man’s face was squared off by a strong jaw. There were harsh lines beside the mouth where dimples would appear if he smiled, which he had not yet done, at least not for Livia.
Neither had his eyes met hers; they were fixed instead on her legs. As well they might be. Livia had fantastic legs. Most of the time they were hidden beneath the rough denim of her black jeans, the delicate ankles encased in the black boots, the beautiful feet unseen beneath a daunting and very protective camouflage of black leather.
But that night Livia was wearing black silk stockings. Real silk. Clothes for sex, Wanda had said. Livia now possessed an entire closet full of clothes for sex. The stockings were so sheer you barely saw them. They made subtle black shadows along the contours of the fantastic legs, around the knee, where the legs were crossed, over the pronounced dips and hollows of calf-into-ankle. Livia was wearing black patent-leather sandals with very high and very pointed heels.
The nails on her feet were painted red, and she was wearing a two-piece black suit with a very short skirt. She had forgotten the designer’s name, but the suit had been expensive. Under the suit (the man’s name was Benjamin. She had a few surprises for Benjamin) was a corset and garter-belt set. Livia was wearing makeup, but she was not wearing panties.
Convincing Benjamin to eat a chocolate tart was child’s play. When Livia produced the midnight blue rice-paper package, explaining that she was a chef and that she had been particularly pleased with the way the tarts had turned out (these were for a friend, but no matter, he could have one), Benjamin enthusiastically changed his order from scotch to a pricey Sauterne.
“Dessert wine for dessert,” he quipped. He had very white teeth.
Benjamin was an actor. Livia took this into account in her assessment of the moans of pleasure Benjamin produced as the silky-smooth chocolate slid down his throat. Even allowing a large margin for exaggeration (Livia was familiar with actors; she had only to think of Bretton), it seemed as though her soul was sufficiently dissimilar to Benjamin’s for copulation to be advisable. Livia felt desire, and was pleased to note that desire’s effects were confined to the regions below her waist. Livia smiled guilelessly, sweetly, and turned her blue gaze toward Benjamin’s forefinger, with its clean, square nail, as he noisily licked a smear of chocolate from its tip. This one was definitely safe.
~
Success
Very early on the first morning following the first night, Livia climbed the stairs to her apartment and unlocked the door just as the sun was beginning to invade her kitchen. She had a café con leche in her hand and she was elated. The black silk stockings were ruined (Benjamin hadn’t wanted her to take them off–as a matter of fact, the only clothing she had removed was the suit). There had been no talk of exchanging phone numbers, no lips pressed to the forbidden spot at the base of her throat, and no regrets as she’d closed the door on the thunderous sounds of Benjamin’s snores half an hour earlier.
Livia had allowed herself a cab home in celebration of the chocolate tarts’ success. She removed the suit, the corset, the stockings, the garter belt. Lingerie into the bathroom sink, foaming bubbles of Woolite. Shoes into the hall closet, suit into the pile for dry cleaning, Livia into the shower.
~
Some Consequences, As Usual, Are Unforeseen
The only problem with the chocolate tarts was that they were addictive. To Livia. Following the evening of their maiden voyage, she hardly slept for an entire month. The Dominican owner of the coffee shop on her corner received almost daily visits from Livia at five, six, seven. Livia dressed in her clothes for sex. He had taken to looking at her in a suggestive, knowing way, his dark eyes resting openly on her lips, her throat, shoulders, legs.
Her work and her social life were suffering from the chocolate tarts; one day she caught herself up short as she was about to add a tablespoon of flour directly to a just-thickening Alfredo sauce. Something had to be done.
At six o’clock on a Wednesday morning, the third since the feeding of Benjamin, Livia’s kitchen was still somnolent under the timid grey shadows that visit this world only briefly each morning, softening the edges of things and making them sweet, poignant (even the most familiar of objects–a kitchen table, a shelf whose contents one has memorized). The apartment slept in absolute, hushed silence. Ophelia, too, above the kitchen table, seemed to sleep, her young chest rising and falling in time to her sleep-breathing with motions so tiny Livia couldn’t see them.
Having returned home some twenty minutes earlier, she’d just finished a religious performance of the ritual which Wanda had dictated must follow the consequences of the chocolate tarts. The black velvet cocktail dress with the scandalous slit up the side had become a small pile of liquid folds, with lights and shadows whose varied tones would, with the added depths lent them by the gray morning shadows, have delighted any lover of chiaroscuro.
When Livia had set out from her apartment the night before, just after ten, that dress had covered a cherry-red silk half-corset-and panties set. The back of the corset laced up–real eyelets sewn together by a red satin ribbon. The man–Livia, who hadn’t slept more than four consecutive hours for over a week, was, at that particular moment, having difficulty remembering his name–hadn’t quite known what to do with himself when he had seen the corset. Livia had informed him of exactly what he should do.
Sitting at her kitchen table in her clean underwear (her own underwear, not the underwear for sex), sipping her café con leche–her second; she needed to be awake so that she could think clearly–Livia decided that the problem was the manner in which she was going about obtaining tasters for the chocolate tarts. The procedure was not particularly efficient; a lot of time, in fact, was wasted. The baking, the getting dressed. The taxi ride downtown (she’d soon learned not to ride the subway while dressed in her clothes for sex), the choosing of a bar (she was careful not to choose the same one too often). Not to mention waiting for the man, once she’d identified him to approach her.
This, in fact, was a particularly thorny problem. The “rapprochement.” Because some men were shy, they couldn’t believe that Livia was really looking at them. Once, it had taken a man two hours to get up the nerve to ask if he could buy her a drink. Then another hour of desultory conversation, at the end of which both Livia and the man were sloppily drunk.
The man had asked for her phone number–maybe she would like to go out on a date sometime. In response to this, Livia had placed her hand suggestively on his thigh as she offered him the chocolate tart. The man’s face had turned bright red. He’d paid for his drink and left the bar.
But at least, with that particular specimen, conversation had been possible. Some men’s conversations were so distressingly inane that, despite their beauty, they just didn’t seem worth the waste of a chocolate tart. Frustrated, she would change bars, and the selection process, and then the waiting, would begin all over again. Sometimes it was three o’clock before the midnight-blue rice paper package was even opened. And then there were the nights when Livia went to the trouble of dressing, of paying a cab driver to take her to Soho (which also entailed a tip), of buying herself a martini (yet more tips, one per drink), only to find her chosen venue, and the next, and the next, devoid of even the most remote possibilities for chocolate-tart consumption.
Halfway through her third café con leche on that Wednesday morning, Livia had hit upon the idea of a personal ad. Her hands were trembling; perhaps this was due to lack of sleep, perhaps to the amount of coffee she had consumed on an otherwise empty stomach, or perhaps the tremor was to be attributed to her elation over the certain success of her idea. The wording of the ad was terribly important, as was that of the message callers would hear when they dialed one’s box number. But Livia was equal to the task: she had learned from the mistakes of others.
One of Livia’s friends had placed a personal ad the previous summer, with disastrous results. Lara, dazzlingly blonde and one inch over six feet tall, was a former photographer’s model with a Ph.D. in biochemistry. The unfortunate Lara often had difficulties in the field of romance because, it seemed, she intimidated most men. At the time she placed the ad, she had not had a date for two years and three months. But when she complained of her loneliness no one ever believed her. Wanda and Livia were Lara’s only friends.
Women she met or worked with were afraid to invite her to parties because, they reasoned, once their boyfriends, husbands, or prospects, got a look at Lara, they might as well forget it. And they would never, ever be caught dead going out for drinks with her–it would be, opined one of Lara’s co-workers with a Catholic upbringing she had never quite shaken, like going to confession with Mother Teresa. The lovely biochemist, though, could have reassured her: more often than not, once she opened her mouth, male predators headed for the hills.
At her wit’s end, Lara had decided to place an ad. Certain that her impressive qualifications would not fail to draw a large response from equally frustrated men, Lara had been so intent on accurately describing herself that she’d failed to be specific in her requirements for a suitable partner. The response to her ad had, indeed, been overwhelming, but Lara had actually confessed to bribing a cook, on one occasion, to let her out the kitchen door of a restaurant. The cook had then tried to kiss her, upon which Lara had speared the top of his foot, in its soft shoe, with the heel of her stiletto, and fled into the night.
At the end of an entire summer of unsatisfactory first (and last) dates, Lara had reconsidered her ad and changed the wording. She was harshly specific, in her voice-mail greeting, about what she would and would not brook in the way of physical and intellectual shortcomings.
The results of Lara’s second ad had been much more pleasing; Livia would follow her example. She would even place the words “attached o.k.” at the end of her cryptic solicitation for masculine company, thus doubling (perhaps even tripling) her possible selection of chocolate tart tasters.
~
Success, Again
In general, the ad had proved an admirable solution to the problem. Now, when she chose her clothes for the evening from the hall closet, Livia was virtually assured of her efforts being worthwhile. The chocolate tart tastings could be scheduled in advance, and activities leading up to the consumption of the delicacies (as well as their consequences) could be begun at a decent hour, thus assuring Livia of the requisite number of hours of sleep.
Only once had the proffering of a chocolate tart resulted in a narrow escape from the treacherous consequences of similar souls. Livia, to tell the truth, had not been surprised by the rapidity with which the man–a composer–spat the barely-chewed contents of his mouth discreetly into a napkin. When she’d first glimpsed him, from the door of the bar, she had already felt the prickly warm sensation between her thighs. She had also been alarmed by desire’s insidious climbing, after the first drink and half an hour of electricity, up into the regions above her waist, dangerously close to her heart.
The man, after spitting the bite of chocolate tart into a napkin, reached for his glass of water and gulped its contents (with consequences against which Livia might have warned him; she, however, had been intent upon executing her own escape). The man had immediately excused himself to the restroom and Livia had fled–the man could pay the bar tab when he finished his business–only resuming normal breathing once she was safely in a cab. She raised a tentative hand to her neck; the pulse point in the hollow at the base of her throat was throbbing painfully.
When she’d later recounted the near-miss to Wanda, her friend had responded, as she fired up both their cigarettes, using her personalized lighter adorned with her initials and two skulls, “¡Bien hecho, niña!”
~
More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.
Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…
Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.
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