Mayor Cass Tamburlaine was stretched out asleep on a huge turquoise divan running along the east side of his baronial office at City Hall. It was four-thirty on a Thursday afternoon. His long-term and long-suffering mistress, Joy Pommery, sat behind his desk, leafing disconsolately through a pile of less-than-current issues of Canadian Business, Toronto Life, Condo Life, The Economist, Penthouse, Car and Driver, Motor Trend, Lowrider, and Zoomer. She sighed heavily and put down a particularly cloying issue of Condo Life.
“Condom Living,” she thought to herself. “Living Safe.”
His Worship stirred.
“Joy?”
“Yes?” she answered him, her gaze fixed on a seagull gliding with an almost wearying grace past the office windows.
“What time is it?”
“After four.”
“What are you doing?”
“Looking at old magazines,” she told him. “Why don’t you have at least a couple that are up to date?”
“People take them,” Cass told her crossly, heaving himself into an upright position and adjusting his tie.
“Nice tie,” said Joy.
Cass looked down.
“You like it? It has race horses on it.”
“I know, I gave it to you.”
“Did you? Well, I do like it. I wear it a lot.”
“All the time, as far as I can tell,” said Joy.
Cass looked down again at the tie lying snugly on the epic curvature of his belly.
“It has Russian dressing on it,” she told him.
“It does?”
“I think that’s what it is. Incontrovertible evidence of your recently have ingested a Reuben sandwich.”
“You can hardly find a good one anymore!”
“And so when you do,” sighed Joy, “you sort of hang onto it a bit, is that right?”
Cass scowled.
“I don’t know how you can nap in the middle of the afternoon,” she added.
“Being Mayor of Toronto is an exhausting job,” said Cass irritably. “I need my rest.”
“You certainly seem to” said Joy. “I wonder,” she grinned, “if a photo of you slumbering on the office couch would be worth anything to the tireless workers in the media?”
Cass laughed.
“Not as much as a photo with you lying here beside me! Sex is way more sensational than sloth!”
“Or the appearance of sex,” added Joy, dyspeptically.
“The suggestion of it,” said Cass.
“The remembrance of it,” said Joy wistfully.
“Oh I remember it,” grinned Cass.
“Well, I scarcely do,’ said Joy. “As a matter of fact, that’s something I meant to talk to you about.”
“Aww c’mon,” said Cass, stretching languidly and heavily, like a fat lion, “You can’t talk about sex. Nobody can.”
“Well we ought to try.”
“Why?”
“Because we don’t have any anymore,” said Joy.
“And whose fault is that?” Cass asked her.
“Yours,” she replied.
************************************************
Just eight or ten blocks west of City Hall, Michael Moskos and May Tan were trying slowly and carefully to rouse themselves from a heavy afternoon nap—which had overtaken them both immediately following a particularly intense and wondrously protracted bout of lovemaking.
Michael woke first. He lay there, studying the Le Corbusier lithograph hanging over his head. Corb’s mighty Modulor Man figure stared back at him. It seemed to Michael, in his post-tryst fogginess, that it bore an almost sweet expression of male complicity and sensual admiration. “Well done, my boy,” it seemed to say. Michael felt like winking back at it.
May stirred. The duvet into which she had snuggled just before sleep had fallen away, leaving her naked to the waist. Her long, glistening black hair lapped over her shoulders and around her breasts like a dark mountain stream rippling its way pointedly to the plain below.
“Hi, Beauty,” said Michael. “Your Modulor Man and I have just been having an amiable chat, and he wishes to compliment you on your stupefying loveliness and to point out in particular that he thinks you have the prettiest breasts since Venus de Milo.”
The old lecher!” laughed May. “And here I thought he was mostly just a logo. I’m going to have to drape something over him from now on while I’m getting undressed!”
“Or dressed,” added Michael, placing us hand meaningfully on her belly. “Lust never sleeps, y’know.”
May yawned broadly and thoroughly, like a cat.
“But we did. I always sleep deeply after you.”
“Give me a second or two to decide if that’s a compliment or a complaint!” said Michael
She squeezed his arm and lightly bit his ear.
“A compliment,” she said.
