TAMARA

I sometimes reel in shock at how quickly time passes. It is now 2024 and I am now 62. I think, however, that I am a young 62, I work out five times a week, I run, I have sex from time to time with a lovely older man. He is gentle and tender, which I like, I need gentleness. The days when I liked a man to be rough with me, to grab my wrists and hold me down as he fucked me, hard, brutal, not even waiting for me to become wet, driving a hard cock into a cunt that is not quite ready for him, so that the abrasion hurts. But with a hurt that I like. I wanted to suffer.

Those days have gone. Gone too are the days when I made love to women. My last lover is now my best friend but the sexual spark between us has gone. I think now that it had started to go when I went to the exhibition in 2004. It was there, at the Royal Academy, that I pledged myself to the woman I have worshipped ever since, a woman I never knew, a woman who died when I was just 18, a woman who demands my devotion, a woman who will refuse me nothing if I give her everything. That woman is Tamara de Lempicka.

I try to imagine myself as Rafaella, the girl she picked up off the street, seduced, and preserved in paint, as she writhed in the exquisite agony of waiting. I wanted this too. Most nights I held Tamara before me, used my vibrator to bring myself to the edge, before denying myself, turning the light out, and moaning with self-imposed…