Chapter 8

1.
Smugly, he showed her his pinga, as it was indelicately called in his youth. He was sitting on the bed in the Hotel Splendour and leaning back in the shadows, while she was standing by the bathroom door. And just looking at her fine naked body, damp with sweat and happiness, made his big thing all hard again.
That thing burning in the light of the window was thick and dark as a tree branch. In those days, it sprouted like a vine from between his legs, carried aloft by a powerful vein that precisely divided his body, and flourished upwards like the spreading top branches of a tree, or, he once thought while looking at a map of the United States, like the course of the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

"Come over here," he told her.

On that night, as on many other nights, he pulled up the tangled sheets so that she could join him on the bed again. And soon Vanna Vane was grinding her damp bottom against his chest, belly, and mouth and strands of her dyed blond hair came slipping down between their lips as they kissed.
Then she mounted him and rocked back and forth until things got all twisted and hot inside and both their hearts burst (pounding like conga drums) and they fell back exhausted, resting until they were ready for more, their lovemaking going around and around in the Mambo King's head, like the melody of a song of love.

***

2. Ethan Canin, We Are Nighttime Travelers

I do not say anything. Instead I roll in the bed, reach across, and touch her, and because she is surprised she turns to me. When I kiss her the lips are dry, cracking against mine, unfamiliar as the ocean floor. But then the lips give.
They part. I am inside her mouth, and there, still hidden from the world, as if ruin had forgotten a part, it is wet— Lord! I have the feeling of a miracle. Her tongue comes forward. I do not know myself then, what man I am, who I lie with in embrace.
I can barely remember her beauty. She touches my chest and I bite lightly on her lip, spread moisture to her cheek and then kiss there. She makes something like a sigh. "Frank," she says. "Frank." We are lost now in seas and deserts. My hand finds her fingers and grips them, bone and tendon, fragile things.

***

3. Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gate. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She's refilled each day with fresh tides of longing.

***

4. Peter Carey, The Tax Inspector

He touched her on the forehead between her eyes and ran his finger down the line of her nose. "I'll make love to you 100 percent safe."

She had never imagined you could say those words and still feel tender, but now she was lying on her side and he was lying on his and he had those clear blue Catchprice eyes and such sweet crease marks around his eyes.

"Is there 100 percent?" she asked.

"Is this safe?"

"Hmm?"

"Does this feel safe?"

"Jack, don't."

"Don't worry. I'll keep my word. Is this safe?"

"Of course."

She let him undress her and caress her swollen body. God, she thought— this is how people die.

"Is this beautiful to you?" "Oh yes," he said. "You glisten.…"

She began to kiss him, to kiss his chest, to nuzzle her face among
the soft apple-sweet hairs, discovering as she did so a hunger for the scents and textures of male skin.

"Get the condom," she heard herself say.

"You sure?"

"Mmm."

"I've got it."

"I'm crazy," she said.

***

5. Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy

At fourteen I had discovered that a tongue had no real taste. I was sucking the tongue of a boy named Tanner, and I was sucking his tongue because I liked the way his fingers looked on the keys of the piano as he played it, and I had liked the way he looked from the back as he walked across the pasture, and also, when I was close to him, I liked the way behind his ears smelled.

Those three things had led to my standing in his sister's room (she was my best friend), my back pressed against the closed door, sucking his tongue.
Someone should have told me that there were other things to seek out in a tongue than the flavor of it, for then I would not have been standing there sucking on poor Tanner's tongue as if it were an old Frozen Joy with all its flavor run out and nothing left but the ice.
As I was sucking away, I was thinking, Taste is not the thing to seek out in a tongue; how it makes you feel— that is the thing. I used to like to eat boiled cow's tongue served in a sauce of lemon juice, onions, cucumbers, and pepper; but cow's tongue has no real taste either. It was the sauce that made the cow's tongue so delicious to eat.

***

6. Mary Gordon, Spending
He put his head between my legs, nuzzling at first. His beard was a little rough on the insides of my thighs. Then with his lips, then his tongue, he struck fire. I had to cry out in astonishment, in gratitude at being touched in that right place.

Somehow, it alwaysmakes me grateful when a man finds the right place, maybe because when I was young so many of them kept finding the wrong place, or a series of wrong places, or no place at all. That strange feeling: gratitude and hunger.
My hunger was being teased. It also felt like a punishment. I kept thinking of the word "thrum," a cross between a throb and hum.
I saw a flame trying to catch; I heard it, there was something I was after, something I was trying to achieve, and there was always the danger that I'd miss it, I wouldn't find it, or get hold of it. The terrible moment when you're afraid you won't, you'll lose it, it won't work, you won't work, it is unworkable and you are very, very desperate.
At the same time, you want to stay in this place of desperation … at the same time, you're saying to yourself, you're almost there, you're almost there, you can't possibly lose it now, keep on, keep on a bit longer, you are nearly there, I know it, don't give up, you cannot lose it. Then suddenly you're there.