From Paris to Bangkok

Chapter 2 in the novel The Erotic Writers Festival

"He finds himself with his mouth open, trying to remember the rest of the sentence. He sits down on the ground and begins to eat the mango."

-- from Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

My lover lives just outside Paris, Ontario, on the road to London, in a region known as New Sweden and -- oddly, perfectly, strangely, enough -- the last person who lived on her piece of property called it Bangkok.

We did not know it was called Bangkok, in the beginning. We did not know it had a name. It was a little place on the edge of a forest in the hills outside of Toronto. Bangkok seemed like an unlikely place for that little part of Canada, but, we discovered, the name described that place perfectly.

There was no Asian community in the area, except in Toronto, but there was a new Thai restaurant in the closest little town. Their pad Thai noodles and chicken in coconut sauce were terrific -- hot, spicy, sweet, all at the same time (just like my lover). I liked their menu because it had an item called Vegetarian Vegetables. Apparently, something was lost in translation. My lover said some of the dishes seemed authentically Thai and some of them were really Canadian versions of Oriental dishes.She liked a lot of them and was quite happy such an exotic restaurant had opened nearby. I liked phoning in an order to take-out, driving into town to get it, and eating it at my lover's place, in front of the fire, on a cold winter evening or in the springtime, which was a long time in coming.

They always said the same thing: "It will be ready in ten minutes."

No matter what you ordered, on the phone or in person, for take out or to eat in, it was always ready in ten minutes.

The restaurant was just a cubicle in a strip mall, beside a suntanning place, next door to a general store run by a Korean family, across a small parking lot from a McDonald's.That Mickey Dee's didn't get much traffic, it seemed, but there were always a few cars parked in front of the Thai place.

It had blown up photographs of the Thai countryside on the walls as decoration and a shrine to a Thai goddess with oranges added to it. Sometimes the oranges were fresh and sometimes it looked as though they had been there for a few days.

I asked my lover about that, as she had been to Thailand several times and knew a lot about Hindu gods and goddesses. All I knew was that Bali was part of the Republic of Indonesia, was south of the equator in the Indian Ocean.

S. pointed to one of the pictures on the wall and said, "That's Gunung Agung,"The Majestic Mountain", revered as the navel of the universe, the stepping stone of the gods and the goddesses when they descend from heaven."

I asked her which of the gods or goddesses were given the oranges in the little restaurant we were in. "Is it Shiva or Shakti?" I wanted to know.

She said it was probably Ganeesha, but it didn't really matter because, she said, "All Hindu gods and goddesses are the same god or divine energy, nameless and without form, really ...."

I loved my lover's brain. It turned me on that she knew so much about so many things. I told her so and she said, as usual, "I don't know much. I just have a magpie mind -- holding on to shiny bits and pieces of things I find."

She seems very Canadian, sometimes -- the way she deflects compliments and keeps her ego small despite the fact she is beautiful, brainy, gifted in so many ways, so talented .... Religion, cooking, restaurants, and lovemaking were all on the long list of things she knew a great deal about.

While we were waiting ten minutes for our coconut chicken, pad Thai, and vegetarian vegetables, we talked about politics and history. I turned the conversation towards my favourite subject: sex.

"It seemed to me," I said to her, "that this part of the world, with Paris right beside Bangkok, on the way to London, not far from Toronto, is the sexiest interpretation of that old Canadian dream of multi-culturalism, the ideal version of the grand vision of Canada's most idealistic prime minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, back in the Sixties, who said, "the government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation".

She said, "Your liberal, lusty, fun-loving, adventurous, PM, seemed so gay, but he dated Barbara Streisand, and he was married to a hot woman who hung out with The Rolling Stones .... He saw this country as a place that could put together the best of all sorts of places around the world, didn't he."

"Yes," I said. "I wonder if he ever even knew about Bangkok, near Paris, in New Sweden, on the way to London, Ontario. He would have loved it."

She said, "Nova Scotia is one thing, New Brunswick and Newfoundland are something else, British Colombia is a hot hybrid on the left or west coast, but the Swedish, Parisian, part of Ontario, with its flavours from the Far East and the swinging heart of the West, is an amazing amalgamation of influences that flies in the face of the old, conservative, uptight, anally-retentive, Ontario, with all its old scarcity issues."

We talked about Paris, Ontario, for awhile. "I like it because it's not too far from Toronto, which has a population four million and is still growing fast, with lots of immigrants from around the world, including the largest community of Tibetans outside of Tibet, for instance," my lover said.

The Dali Lama had recently been to Toronto and got a lot of publicity for Tibetans.

"And Toronto is the home of the CN Tower, the tallest freestanding structure in the world, right beside the SkyDome, the big stadium with the retractable roof. Some see Toronto, with its impressive communication tower, as the throat chakra of the world" I added. "Others see the world's tallest freestanding phallic symbol beside the big yoni as a symbol of a different kind of communication."

That's when our food came.

My lover and I had a little miscommunication, last week, about our intentions for the next weekend. I had a sore throat from a dry cough and my feet hurt after playing soccer. Every step I took was painful and every couple of hours I coughed so hard I thought I would choke to death. Aside from that, I felt quite ecstatic. My lover had a lot of things to do on the weekend, including work and some family obligations for a big get-together. When we talked about getting together on the weekend, we played a little game we called "The Gift Of The Magi" and wound up giving each other just the right present at the wrong time. We decided we would not get together for the first time on a Friday night in the nine months of our amazing relationship.

When Friday night rolled around, I thought I was getting messages from the universe that I was going in the wrong direction. My plans for Friday and Saturday kept falling apart. Three different groups of people canceled plans with me.It reminded me of the old saying about the universe giving us three roses and then a Mack truck. In fact, I pray for this, asking the universe to send me gentle messages instead of the kind that can't be ignored. The belief is that if you ignore the subtle messages, you'll get hit with a big one. I took the changes in my plans with other people to mean I should be heading down south to see my lover. I was still wondering what the sore foot and the cough were all about.

I took a little risk and gave in to my desire to jump in the car and head down south to see my lover on Friday night. Instead of planning and packing, I just jumped in my car and headed south. It seemed like the right thing to do, when I got into my little car; it felt right and the route was like an electro-magnet or my car knew the way all on its own.I didn't feel as though I was driving through the late spring landscape, I felt as though I was just going with the flow, like a drop of water in a river in freshet.

It was the end of April but it looked like the end of autumn, up north, as it had snowed, recently, and the cold weather so late in the year was holding off spring like an old-fashioned virgin holding off a hot lover. The further south I drove, crossing the natural borders marking the difference between Northern Ontario and southern Ontario, the more it seemed as though I was driving into springtime as the landscape got greener and greener. Fields looked green but the leaves on the trees had not popped out, yet. I contemplated the late spring instead of focusing on my fears of showing up unexpectedly.

I am not a droppy-inny sort of guy. People don't drop in on me and I don't drop in on other people, and I like it that way.Entering into a friendship with me means adopting that social contract. Maybe I was trying to ignore another little fear I had left over from another relationship in the past, which fell apart the first time we skipped a weekend together.

I phoned my lover from a nearby town and asked her how she was doing, how things were going, and reminded her that she had said something about being happy if we got together even though she was so busy.

"Yes!" she said, "but you said you had some things you had to do and you haven't been feeling so hot ...."

"I'm in Paris," I blurted out.

She laughed heartily and happily and said, "Well then hurry over to Bangkok, lover! I'll be so happy to see you!"

That was a relief, I thought, and an affirmation from the universe that following my instincts and intuition this time had been correct.

"Phew!" I said to myself, after hanging up the phone.

I found some Stargazer lilies in a couple of colours that seemed particularly fragrant and full, a copy of a new Blaze Harlequin with a sexy title, and, instead of candy for my lover, the traditional present, I got some cold drugs for myself -- cough medicine with echinaceae and throat lozenges with herbal remedies.

My lover had an amazing present waiting for me. She had told me a bit about it, earlier in the week, mentioning she had noticed a little sex shop in a place she passed all the time. "I did a u-turn on the highway, cut into traffic, and headed back there," she said, "because it seemed strange I had never noticed this place before."

She spent a long time in the boutique, looking at everything, and picked up two things, she said, before she had to leave because she was feeling so horny.

What a lover, I said to myself. Imagine a beautiful, brainy, woman who feels and says things like that. I must be the luckiest man on the planet.

I tried to get her to tell me what she got but wanted it to be a surprise. Out of the blue I guessed the first one and she was so surprised she admitted I got it right.

"A vibrating butt plug?" I said.

"Yes!" she said. "How did you guess?"

I told her I had been looking at them but hadn't found one that seemed just right.

The vibrating butt plug she found seemed perfect.It was see-through, so when I inserted it into her vibrating butt, I could see the beautiful gap between the gorgeous globes of her derriere.

"What's the other one?" I asked her. "What else did you get?'

She wouldn't tell me. "I want it to be a surprise for you," she said.

"Do you like surprises?" I asked her.

We talked about that for a bit and decided we could both handle certain types of surprises.

When we got together, she surprised me by giving me a little shopping bag full of presents. I gave her the flowers, in two bunches, and she quickly transformed them into a beautiful floral display, placing them in a tall, clear, rectangular vase which had a lid with holes to separate the flowers. She trimmed the stems so all the flowers were different heights in the display. It looked like the work of a florist, I told her.

The bag she gave me definitely came from a sex boutique. On the front and the back, printed in full colour on paper so glossy it looked wet, was a photograph of a woman who looked a lot like my lover, shot from behind, showing her butt in a thong, her hands behind her back at the tops of her thighs, above thigh-high stick up stockings with lace at the top and netting running down the legs, and some sort of bustier that tied at the back, made of black leather, like the thong which was visible all the way down the crack of her butt and over the pad of her yoni.

It looked a lot like my lover, if she was wearing a leather or latex corselette with a matching thong and posing for a camera. It reminded me she had been a lingerie model, in her twenties, and could stilll be modeling garments like this.

"You see what I have to look at when we're making love and I'm behind you?" I said to my lover, to make her laugh. "You're so gorgeous," I said. "And so hot! I love it! I love you!"

Attached to the sexy bag was a little card showing the same picture in miniature, on the front and the back. Inside, my lover had written:

"For my lover. I'm so glad I learned to "take you there!" More! Deeper! I love you madly! xo"

Her note alluded to a conversation we had the first time we experimented with anal intercourse. She had kneeled on my bed, giving me her beautiful backside, but her butt was too tight, in that position, for me to slide my vajra inside. We tried. She said, "I'd like to learn how to take you in there!"

I flipped her over, onto her back, lifted her legs up so her ankles rested on my shoulder, massaged her clitoris with a thumb while sliding my vajra into her yoni for a few minutes, and then unceremoniously withdrew from her yoni and slid my vajra deep into that little entrance hole below her yoni and perineum.

"Oh!" was all she said.

The see-through butt plug was described as an ultra clear unisex toy with a powerful multispeed bullet placed inside. It was made in china, used two AA batteries (not included), and came with a warning about avoiding injury or aggravation of pre-existing conditions. "This device should not be used on swollen or inflamed areas or skin lacerations", it said on the package. It showed full colour, glossy, photos of naked woman and a naked man. The woman had her face framed by her hands and a bare breast exposed. Her eyes were wide open and she had a look of surprise. The man had a muscular mid-section and some hair on his chest but did not look gay. He had a square jaw and expression on his face suggesting deep satisfaction that was not light.

My lover had another card in the gift bag and it had a picture of a smiling or ecstatic Buddha, a big smile on his face and his arms thrown up, in the air, and inside was printed just one word: YES! in big yellow letters angling up.

She wrote me a long note inside the card that described how we met, unpacking our Buddhas at an erotic writers convention, and how I had asked her a lot of questions like "are you married?", "are you dating?", "Do you want to have dinner?" and "Can I light my candle from your candle?", "Would you like to go swimming?" and "Can you stay and talk for a few minutes after everybody else has gone?" as well as "Can I kiss you?", "Can I enter your yoni with my vajra?" and she said yes, yes, yes to all of that.

She wrote: "My heart, mind, body, and should are still saying Yes! to you in every day ecstasy".

And then she said "thank you".

"Oh, Baby!" I said. "What an incredible card! You're amazing! What a lover!"

There were two other pressies in the gorgeous gift bag, not just one, as advertised by my lover. One was a book called Sex Toy Tricks, promising more than 125 ways to accessorize good sex. It had some good tips, like using baby wipes to clean sex toys, and some wild ideas like using a vibrator on your cheek when your lover's vajra is in your mouth. On the back cover, there was a quote from Playboy magazine and a blurb that said, "How to get the most out of vibrators, dildos, anal beads, and butt plugs ...." It was by the publisher of a book called The Ethical Slut: A Guide To Infinite Sexual Possibilities and A Hand In The Bush: The Fine Art Of Vaginal Fisting.

The other present was something unexpected and unheard of, by me, and my lover seemed a little nervous about how I would respond to it. "Another lover might be too insecure to handle it," she said.

It was called The Ultimate Triple Stimulator from Swedish Erotica -- the multi-speed vibrator, flexible dong, and cock ring. It was called the triple stimulater because it had something for the clitoris, something for the vajra, and some something for the butt. It has a vibrating bullet for penis and clitoral stimulation, a flexible cock ring for penile stimulation and erection support, and a flexible jelly dong for anal or vaginal stimulation that could be shaped to fit your imagination, it said on the box.

There was a drawing of a guy wearing the thing, his erection poking through the pink cock ring, the second vajra hanging below his own.

It said it was for couples who yearned for multiple stimulation to the vajra, clitoris, yoni and anus.

"Soft and comfortable, the Triple Stimulater hugs the base of the penis, helping maintain an erection, and the bullet vibrates to stimulate the penis and the clitoris or anus (depending on choice of position)", it said on the box. "The 6 inch probe is super-flexible, adhering to any configuration. So, put this baby on and hit a triple!" The baseball reference seemed superfluous and neither Swedish nor Chinese.

On the side of the box, there was a series of four illustrations of the six inch dong's flexibility, bent so it curved up, down, up and down, and straight forward.

Like a little kid on Christmas morning, I wanted to play with the toys right away. My lover was way ahead of me. She whipped down her blue jeans, pulled off the little blue thong she had been wearing, pulled her white t-shirt over her head, and revealed her breasts in a beautiful white bra. She whipped the bra off, too, so she was kneeling nakedly in front of me in a matter of minutes, tugging at my blue jeans, trying to undo my belt and the fly of my blue jeans.

I tried to stick my vajra, quickly erecting, into the round pink hole of the triple stimulator, but my lover said she was afraid it would be too small and tight so she got me some lubrication. "Thoughtful Lover!" I said as she took my vajra deep into her throat.

Sliding the soft but firm cock ring over the head of my vajra and down the shaft felt a lot like ringing my girlfriend's doorbell and I told her about it, which made her get even hotter than she already was.She touched my shoulders with her fingertips, lightly pushing me back on the chair I had been sitting on, and she sat on me, sliding my vajra inside her hot, wet, yoni and adjusting the vibrating bullet so it was massaging her clit. The second vajra stabbed between the cheeks of her derriere, into the air, so she stood up, adjusted it so it entered her butt, and sat down again.

A second later, her eyes popped open as wide as I had ever seen them, and she smiled like the guy in the illustration for the vibrating butt plug.

"I want you on the floor!" she said, sounding a bit like a dominatrix.

She apologized right away. "I mean, I'd like to be on top of you, somehow, maybe, if you were on the couch or a cushion on the floor ...."

"Don't worry, Baby," I said. "If you want a floor show, I'm your man."

I scrambled down from the chair to the floor and held out my arms to my heated lover. She took my hands and eased herself down so she was sitting on top of me, then freed her hands to place my vajra, the butt plug, and the vibrating egg exactly where she wanted them.

She came quickly and we proceeded to experiment with the new toys for the next two or three hours. I lost track of the time and the number of times she came. She orgasmed again and again with the triple stimulater strapped on me, taking turns being on the top and the bottom, to balance our male and female energies, in the Taoist manner, but not stopping to do any of the breathing exercises or meditations we wanted to practice from the world of Tantric Zen Buddhism.And then she offered to use the new toy on me.