Chapter 5

1. Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

They were sitting on the floor leaning into the corner of the room, her mouth on his nipple, her hand moving his dick slowly. An intricate science, his whole body imprisoned there, a ship in a bottle. I'm going to come. Come in my mouth. Moving forward, his fingers pulling back her hair like torn silk, he ejaculated, disappearing into her.

She crooked her finger, motioning, and he bent down and put his mouth on hers. He took it, the white character, and they passed it back and forth between them till it no longer existed, till they didn't know who had him like a lost planet somewhere in the body.

***

2. Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

I washed her with slow, careful gestures, first letting her squat in the tub, then asking her to stand up: I still have in my ears the sound of the dripping water, and the impression that the copper of the tub had a consistency not different from Lila's flesh, which was smooth, solid, calm.

I had a confusion of feelings and thoughts: embrace her, weep with her, kiss her, pull her hair, laugh, pretend to sexual experience and instruct her in a learned voice, distancing her with words just at the moment of greatest closeness.

But in the end there was only the hostile thought that I was washing her, from her hair to the soles of her feet, early in the morning, just so that Stefano could sully her in the course of the night. I imagined her naked as she was at that moment, entwined with her husband, in the bed in the new house, while the train clattered under their windows and his violent flesh entered her with a sharp blow, like the cork pushed by the palm into the neck of a wine bottle.

And it suddenly seemed to me that the only remedy against the pain I was feeling, that I would feel, was to find a corner secluded enough so that Antonio could do to me, at the same time, the exact same thing.

***

3. Madeleine D'Engle, A House Like a Lotus

'Hush,' he said, 'hush. Yes, it has to be given.' And he kissed my eyelids again, then my lips, the way he did when he cut the motor on the boat when we'd been together. And the kiss continued on past the point where he usually broke off. Then, slowly, he pulled away.

I groped for him, as though I were blind. 'Renny, please, please—' My lips touched his.

And he was kissing me again, and slipping the shorty nightgown over my head. His strong and gentle hands began to stroke me, his hands, his lips, his tongue.

Gentle. Not frightening. Knowing what he was doing. I felt my nipples rise, and it startled me.

'Shhh,' Renny whispered. 'Shhh, it's all right, don't worry, just relax and listen to your body.'

He was slow, rhythmic, gentle, moving down my body, down …

and I was nothing but my body

there was a sharp brief pain

brief

and then a sweet spasm went through me

and I seemed to rise into the air

no more pain

just the sweetness

the incredible

oh, the

and then Renny, panting

I pressed him hard against me.

***

4. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Ammu, naked now, crouched over Velutha, her mouth on his. He drew her hair around them like a tent. Like her children did when they wanted to exclude the outside world. She slid further down, introducing herself to the rest of him.

His neck. His nipples. His chocolate brown stomach. She sipped the last of the river from the hollow of his navel. She pressed the heat of his erection against her eyelids. She tasted him, salty, in her mouth. He sat up and drew her back to him.

She felt his belly tighten under her, hard as a board. She felt her wetness slipping on his skin. He took her nipple in his mouth and cradled her other breast in his calloused palm. Velvet gloved in sandpaper.

***

5. Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

So that was our love affair. Wordless, blinkered, a nighttime thing, a dream thing. There were reasons on my side for this as well. Whatever it was that I was was best revealed slowly, in flattering light.

Which meant not much light at all. Besides, that's the way it goes in adolescence. You try things out in the dark. You get drunk or stoned and extemporize. Think back to your backseats, your pup tents, your beach bonfire parties.

Did you ever find yourself, without admitting it, tangled up with your best friend? Or in a dorm room bed with two people instead of one, while Bach played on the chintzy stereo, orchestrating the fugue? It's a kind of fugue state, anyway, early sex. Before the routine sets in, or the love. Back when the groping is largely anonymous. Sandbox sex. It starts in the teens and lasts until twenty or twenty-one. It's all about learning to share. It's about sharing your toys.

Sometimes when I climbed on top of the Object she would almost wake up. She would move to accommodate me, spreading her legs or throwing an arm around my back. She swam up to the surface of consciousness before diving again. Her eyelids fluttered. A responsiveness entered her body, a flex of abdomen in rhythm with mine, her head thrown back to offer up her throat. I waited for more.

I wanted her to acknowledge what we were doing, but I was scared, too. So the sleek dolphin rose, leapt through the ring of my legs, and disappeared again, leaving me bobbing, trying to keep my balance. Everything was wet down there. From me or her I didn't know. I laid my head on her chest beneath the bunched-up T-shirt.

Her underarms smelled like overripe fruit. The hair there was very sparse. "You luck," I would have said, back in our daytime life. "You don't even have to shave." But the nighttime Calliope only stroked the hair, or tasted it. One night, as I was doing this and other things, I noticed a shadow on the wall. I thought it was a moth.

But, looking closer, I saw that it was the Object's hand, raised behind my head. Her hand was completely awake. It clenched and unclenched, siphoning all the ecstasy from her body into its secret flowerings.

What the Object and I did together was played out under these loose rules. We weren't too scrupulous about the details. What pressed on our attention was that it was happening, sex was happening. That was the great fact. How it happened exactly, what went where, was secondary. Plus, we didn't have much to compare it to. Nothing but our night in the shack with Rex and Jerome.

As far as the crocus was concerned, it wasn't so much a piece of me as something we discovered and enjoyed together. Dr. Luce will tell you that female monkeys exhibit mounting behavior when administered male hormones.

They seize, they thrust. Not me. Or at least not at first. The blooming of the crocus was an impersonal phenomenon. It was a kind of hook that fastened us together, more a stimulant to the Object's outer parts than a penetration of her inner. But, apparently, effective enough. Because after the first few nights, she was eager for it.

Eager, that is, while ostensibly remaining unconscious. As I hugged her, as we languorously shifted and knotted, the Object's attitudes of insensibility included favorable positioning. Nothing was made ready or caressed. Nothing was aimed. But practice brought about a fluid gymnastics to our sleep couplings.

The Object's eyes remained closed throughout; her head was often turned slightly away. She moved under me as a sleeping girl might while being ravished by an incubus. She was like somebody having a dirty dream, confusing her pillow for a lover.

Sometimes, before or afterward, I switched on the bedside lamp. I pulled her T-shirt up as far as it would go and slid her underpants down below her knees. And then I lay there, letting my eyes have their fill.

What else compares? Gold filings shifted around the magnet of her navel. Her ribs were as thin as candy canes. The spread of her hips, so different from mine, looked like a bowl offering up red fruit. And then there was my favorite spot, the place where her ribcage softened into breast, the smooth, white dune there.

I turned the light off. I pressed against the Object. I took the backs of her thighs in my hands, adjusting her legs around my waist.

I reached under her. I brought her up to me. And then my body, like a cathedral, broke out into ringing. The hunchback in the belfry had jumped and was swinging madly on the rope.