Tanglewood Entanglements

Maybe I'd be there two. Mei Fan had coaxed me to come to L.A. and let it all hang out. It was all hanging out.

* * * *

"The movie is doing really well," Mei Fan said. We were in her living room, drinking martinis and waiting for Gordon Chen to join us to go to dinner. We could hear him upstairs, attending to business—or, rather, we could hear the pool boy getting a taste of Gordon's specialties.

"So I understand," I said. I knew what movie she was talking about. I don't know what she'd done behind the scenes. but a movie called The Mysterious Edward Teng had come out before Christmas. It covered his escape from Communist China to Taiwan and his rise in the musical world to symphony conductor. It also briefly touched on his murder at Tanglewood in 2013. I'd seen the movie, of course. Nothing in it squared with what I knew about Edward Teng. But then there was so much about Edward Teng that I didn't know—and so much more that Mei Fan wouldn't want the public to know about Edward Teng. The movie certainly had sanitized the scene of the circumstances of his death, other than the film ending with a clothed male body floating face down in a swimming pool with a slick of blood radiating out from it. Even that was off, though, from what I knew. Edward had been naked when they found him in the pool at Munch Cottage.

One of the titillating aspects of the movie, which had aided the box office, was that Mei Fan, Teng's wife, had managed to use veto power to the movie's content in the form of being listed as both a producer and consultant. More titillating was that she insisted on taking on the role of herself in the movie. I had to admit she'd done a creditable job of that, though. She was, after all, a movie actress. Another interesting element, for me, at least, was that Gordon Chen played Edward Teng.

"In that vein," Mei Fan said, "Tanglewood is doing a tribute concert to Edward this July."

"Are they?"

"Yes, and that's part of why I invited you to come out the L.A. and sing a duet with Gordon in a TV program."

"Really?" I said. I had no idea what she was getting at. I still hadn't decided whether Gordon was living with her here in her L.A. home—or just how close their relationship was. Gordon was a good actor, but I had no idea how he had landed the role of Edward in the movie. Mei Fan's insistence, perhaps? There was no question that they were fucking. They had been fucking the night Edward died—I saw them. I'd managed to discover too that Gordon had fucked Rachel that night before going upstairs with Mei Fan. He'd come across the two having a bit of a go at each other in the Steinberg Cottage living room, he'd cut in and gotten them separated. Mei Fan had watched him fuck Rachel on the sofa and then he'd taken Mei Fan to a bedroom upstairs and fucked her there. I resented it when I found that Rachel was fucking everyone but her brother. But then I'd been fucking everyone, including her brother.

Rachel and I parted soon after the summer of 2013. I didn't know where she was now nor did I care what she was doing. I knew she was singing in regional opera companies. I saw her name go by from time to time. I wasn't doing much better myself. I doubted that Rachel thought of me anymore either.

"They want to do the same concert at Tanglewood that Edward conducted the night before he died. It's set for Saturday, July 27th—exactly six years after the original concert. They want you to sing the 'Pearl Fisher Duet'."

"And Jacob?" I asked. That was significant to whether I had any interest in doing that, although any appearance at Tanglewood was a feather in one's cap, but I hadn't seen Jacob or talked to him since Tanglewood 2013, and I never hoped to. That duet was emotional and sensual. I didn't know if I could get through it with Jacob again. I didn't know how I would react or whether I could even get through the duet without breaking down.

"Jacob will be conducting. Edward can't. He was Jacob's mentor and Jacob is almost exclusively conducting now. So, they want the original baritone signed for the concert to sing the duet."

"Gordon?"

"Of course, Gordon. Speaking of which, he should be here by now. Dinner will be getting cold. Could you go check on him?"

I found Gordon in his bedroom. He had the pool boy under him and he was strapping him and fucking him. The pool boy seemed to be having a good time. Later that night I was put in the pool boy's position, and I had a good time too.

I agreed to sing with Gordon at Tanglewood on July 27th.

* * * *

July 2019

After I'd kissed Mei Fan at the July 26th Teng Memorial Concert after-dress rehearsal party at the Leinsdorf Cottage on the Tanglewood grounds and let her transfer the pink pill she was offering in the kiss, everything was pretty much a blur and swirl for I don't know how long. I was already on edge and skittish. Rachel was at Tanglewood too, singing in another concert on another day, but she'd come to the dress rehearsal and had brought her girlfriend with her, a young, voluptuous black woman named Julia. Luckily, I hadn't seen them in the audience until after Gordon Chen and I had sung the "Pearl Fishers Duet."

The duet had gone as beautifully as it ever had done before when I sang it. I knew it had gone well, because Jacob Schwartzman, who was conducting and who had sung the duet with me here six years previously, seemed a little piqued after we'd sung, like maybe he thought Gordon and I had done better than he and I had done—and Jacob and I had sung it divinely. We'd sung it sensually and had wound up in each other's arms and Jacob inside me and me inside him.

There was little question that singing the duet together this time had the same effect on Gordon and me. In fact, when the after-rehearsal party had developed at Leinsdorf Cottage, where Gordon and I and Mei Fan were being housed, even while the others, the musicians and support staff were gathering, Gordon lured me out in the garden and fucked me, standing up, me with my back to the wall and my knees hooked on his hips, against the back wall of a garden shed.

Inside, the music was loud, the conversation louder, and the crowd too large for the public rooms. But the liquor was flowing and the drugs were being passed around, and, in a swirl, I was talking and laughing with everyone, including, after the pink pill, Rachel and her girlfriend.

The crowd thinned a bit after an hour, some leaving through the gardens, a few to the bedrooms upstairs. Jacob was there at the start, but he seemed out of sorts and stiff and didn't stay long. I thought at one point I was talking to Chuck Brown, the lighting technician I'd been roughly covered by six years earlier—I'd seen him at work during the dress rehearsal, so he still worked here—but by then my head was spinning and I couldn't tell reality from fantasy. I knew when I'd seen him at the rehearsal, something had stirred within me—a longing for what I once had had. But then, I'd gotten the same feeling when I encountered Jacob. I even felt something when I'd seen Rachel after all this time. I didn't begrudge her her girlfriend, who was quite hot.

* * * *

We were on the bed in Mei Fan's room at the Liensdorf Cottage. The party was still going on on the first floor. Gordon and I were sitting side-by-side at the foot of the bed, naked, kissing, and fondling each other. Mei Fan, Rachel, and Rachel's girlfriend, Julia, were on the bed behind us, writhing, taking care of each other. I was still woozy from the pink pill, the liquor, and the exhilaration of the glorious singing of the "Pearl fisher Duet" with Gordon. I think I'd already fucked all three women—Mei Fan, Rachel, and Julia—and that Gordon had done so as well, before Gordon and I started working on each other, but I'd lost context.

Gordon moved me to my back, with my head arched over the edge, giving him a good angle to slide his cock inside my throat well enough for me to deep throat him, which I felt took forever, while I stroked my own cock. The women paid no heed to us. Gordon was showing great stamina not to come in my throat, and I was becoming afraid he might rupture my voice box, a career-ending event for an opera singer. I almost panicked at the realization that, if Gordon wanted to end my career, he could do so here, now, in a way that I couldn't publicly charge him with.

But he eventually pulled out of me, turned me, and pressed me down to the floor, on my knees, between his spread thighs. I took his cock in my mouth again, and he leaned over me, running his hands down my back and then one hand farther, his fingers going into my crack and then inside me. He wasn't deep-throating me now. He wanted me to worship the cock with my lips and teeth, which I did. He had a very nice cock. We worked each other for several minutes while the women writhed behind Gordon, squealing and moaning. I was moaning too.

"Turn on the floor, go on your hands and knees, show me your hole," Gordon growled.

I did so, moving my hands back to my buttocks, grasping them and spreading them.

"Very nice; open; well used," Gordon said and then he came off the bed, crouched over me, mounted my ass, penetrated me, and started to pump.

I zoned out. When I was swirling back into the scene, Rachel was under me on the bed and I was fucking her in the missionary position. I knew it was wrong, that I shouldn't be doing this with Rachel anymore, but it felt so good, so right. Julia was crouched beside us. She and Rachel were kissing. Gordon was on top of Mei Fan above us on the bed. Then I was fucking Julia in a doggy and squeezing her breasts.

I heard a shriek of laughter from downstairs and then another. The effect was to snap me out of my stupor enough for me to withdraw from the bed, reach down to snatch up an undergarment—which later proved to be Julia's lacy panties—and stagger out of the room, down the back stairs, and out into the gathering darkness of early night.

* * * *

I was walking, almost at a half-jog pace, along the paths linking the guest cottages, all of them named after past musical directors of Tanglewood. I had no idea where I was going, but the night air and the isolation from the party in the Liensdorf Cottage was helping to clear my head. When I was exhausted, I entered the yard of one of the cottages and walked around to the terrace at the back. I stood at the edge of a swimming pool for several minutes, watching the breeze ripple the water and the moonlight reflect off the rippling.

I was on the terrace of the Munch Cottage, where it had happened six years ago tonight—that would be "tonight" because it was already after midnight, into July 27th now. This was where Edward Teng had been stabbed and left floating in the pool.

I sensed I wasn't alone. I turned and from the light coming through the French doors into the cottage living room I saw that Jacob Schwartzman was sitting in a wrought iron patio chair. He had a glass of liquor in his hand. The bottle and another glass were on the flagstone of the terrace beside his chair. He was wearing a blue silk robe, loosely draped at his sides and nothing else. His body was still magnificent after all these years. He gave me a wan smile and gestured for me to sit in the patio chair next to him. I did. He poured liquor from the bottle into the spare glass and handed it to me. It was scotch—very smooth scotch.

We sat for some time, in the dark, watching the moonlight play on the water in the swimming pool, before either of us spoke. When one of us did, it was Jacob, and only the one statement and it came out almost in a sob. "You and Gordon were magnificent in the 'Pearl Fisher' this evening."

I knew how wrenching it was for him to admit that, and I didn't attempt an answer. I felt that it was true, and if I'd said so, he'd be crushed to the point of not being able to direct us in the performance the next afternoon.

I turned my face to him and leaned in a bit. Either he would reciprocate or he wouldn't. He did. He leaned into me as well, and we kissed, tenderly and then greedily. When we came out of the kiss, I slipped out of my chair, went down on my knees between his thighs, and took his cock in my mouth. Jacob leaned back in his chair and moaned while I sucked him erect. It was the second time that evening that I deep-throated a man, both of whom were hung.

I offered no resistance when he lifted me up to my feet with hands under my pits, rose himself, turned me toward a glass-topped patio table. He bent me over the table on my belly, and I felt the lace panties being slipped down my legs. He didn't ask why I was wearing women's lace panties. He gripped one of my hips with one hand and used the other to place the bulb of his erection on the rim of my hole. Moaning lightly, I opened my stance, anticipating the invasion—wanting the penetration. Wanting it from Jacob.

"Jacob? Where are you, honey? Come to bed. You've got a busy day tomorrow." The voice, a woman's voice, had come from somewhere inside the cottage. Not too close, I hoped.

I felt Jacob slipping away from me. And not just physically in the moment.

"Victoria. My wife," I heard him murmur, and then I was alone on the terrace, bent over a glass-topped patio table, naked and panting lightly, thinking of what had been, what wasn't, and probably what never would be hereafter.

A tool belt landed on the thick glass of the table next to where my cheek was resting. A calloused hand pressed down on my lower back. Nothing more than that was needed to hold me in place, captive, while I felt a hard cock rubbing against my upper thighs, moving into place. My eyes went wide open. Right in front of them, attached to the tool belt was a sheathed knife. My thoughts zoomed back to this night six years earlier, this cottage, this pool, Edward's stabbed body floating in the swimming pool. The knife that killed him never found.

I had no time to think further on that at the surface, although it remained there, at the base of my thinking. A thick, hard cock was assaulting me, forcing its way in, and, from memory, my passage walls were giving way to it, welcoming it in, stretching for it, starting a rippling effect, undulating over the hard shaft, making love to it as it made love to me.

Chuck Brown—half Chinese Chuck Brown, for I knew in an instant from the touch of him and from his earthy, manly, musky scent that it was the lighting technician Chuck Brown who had taken me by storm six years previously—was quickly bringing me under his control. He held my wrists together behind my back with one strong hand. The fingers of the other hand were run into the hair on the back of my head, gripping the hair painfully, pulling my head up toward his chest and off the surface of the table, even more painfully. And he was inside me, thick, deep, pistoning. Pounding, pounding, pounding. Giving no mercy. Fucking me hard. I was in heaven. No one made me feel more alive while he was fucking me than Chuck Brown did.

I was being very vocal, thinking nothing of whether those inside the house could hear us, although the air conditioner condenser against the wall on the other side of the table was going, filtering out a good bit of the sound. Still, the hand pulling my hair back, changed position. He was gripping my chin, pulling my head back into the hollow of his chest. His thumb pressed in between my lips and into my mouth, and my cries changed to sucking noises as I concentrated on his thumb and he concentrating on thrusting, thrusting, thrusting.

Releasing the tight hold on me, he growled in my ear, "Let's take this to the pool. Swim with me."

"Noooo, please," I whimpered, my eyes focused on the tool belt and the sheathed knife.

But he wasn't listening. He lifted me up in his arms and hustled me over to the side of the pool and descended the shelved steps down into the shallow end. I struggled a bit, but ineffectually. He was too strong, too big, too determined for me.

He had left the tool belt, with the knife, on the patio table.

Standing in the pool, he put me back on his cock, me sitting on his crouched thighs, facing him, hooking my knees on his hips, reclining my torso back into the supporting water, letting my arms dangle, uselessly, at my side. He supported me with his arms encasing my lower back, and, making waves radiate from us in the pool, resumed his pumping of my channel. Every fiber of my focus was fighting to concentrate on the thick, long cock filling and working my passage, although thoughts flitted back to the tool belt on the patio table and the sheathed knife.

He fucked me to a mutual ejaculation and then moved his arms up my back and, still inside me, pulled me into his chest, kissing up my body as he did so, paying particular attention to my nipples and my throat before possessing my mouth.

As we were cooling down—or recovering for the next round, I didn't know which—he murmured, "You were terrific in the duet this evening. You'll knock them out in the performance tomorrow."

"Thank you," I answered. "I didn't know you still worked here."

"You had good chemistry with that Chinese baritone. Is he fucking you?"

"Yes, but nothing steady," I answered.

"Be careful of him. He's still working with the Communists. You were as good with him tonight as you were with Jacob Schwartzman six years ago."

"Yes," I said, but I knew it came out sadly. I blessed Chuck for not pursuing the point.

"I saw you at the party afterward. It was like you didn't even know me."

"Sorry. I thought it was you, but I was high. Nothing I took purposely."

"I gathered that. I've been watching that Mei Fan—another agent of the Communists. I followed you here. Why did you come here?"

"I had to go somewhere. I didn't realize I was coming here. I just know I can't go back to the Liensdorf Cottage. That's where they are . . . I don't want to—"

"You have a performance tomorrow."

"Yes, I know. But I can't go back to Liensdorf. I don't know—"

"You could come home with me. I have a house in Lenox."

We kissed. And then he showed me that we weren't finished that night. He moved us to the side of the pool at the shallow end, laid me down on my back on the terracing by the pool, raised my ankles to his shoulders, and, once more engorged, fucked me again, grasping my throat in his strong hand, showing me how breath-control play during sex could heighten the arousal.

He was rough with me.

At one point, he murmured, "Sorry, with you I just can't—"

"Do it. Don't ask permission," I interjected. "Take whatever you want. Take it all."

The taking was total. He took me to heaven.

* * * *

The performances the next day, once in the afternoon and once at in the evening, went as well as could be expected. The spark wasn't there with Gordon Chen that it had been during the dress rehearsal, but the performance was more than competent and was received well. It was received particularly well by the conductor, Jacob Schwartzman, from the podium, who doubtlessly keyed into the lowering of the atmosphere of sensuality and arousal for each in the duet since the dress rehearsal, and I'm sure he thought that his encounter with me the previous night at Munch Cottage was the reason. I didn't think it was over with Jacob. I thought we'd find ourselves alone and in heat for each other again sometime. The real reason, though, was that the lighting technician, Chuck Brown, was standing in the wings at the concert, watching me as I was glancing, when I could, at him during the duet.

I went home with Chuck, to his house in Lenox, that night immediately after the last performance of the Edward Teng Memorial Concert, and each night after that for a long time. I changed the base of my periodic concert singing career to Lenox and took a part-time job with the Tanglewood staff as well.

I was still living with Chuck Brown when I saw in the news that Mei Fan had been arrested in Los Angeles for spying for Mainland China. The murder of her husband, Edward Teng, was mentioned by the media, but she wasn't linked herself to the murder in these reports. Nevertheless, I always wondered. Gordon Chen dropped out of sight not long after we sang the "Pearl Fishers Duet" at Tanglewood in July 2019. He surely was singing somewhere, but I made no effort to find out where.