Chapter 11

1.

The length of her body is the simple answer to what I am missing. It's an odd sensation to have something in your arms and to still be yearning for it and you lie there and feel the yearning subside slowly as the actual woman rises along your neck, chest, legs. We are drifting against each other now.
Sex is the raft, but sleep is the ocean and the waves are coming up.… I run my hands along her bare back and down across her ribs and feel the two dimples in her hip, and my only thought is the same thought I've had a thousand times: I don't remember this—
I don't remember this at all. Katie sits up and places her warm legs on each side of me, her breasts falling forward in the motion, and as she lifts herself ever so slightly in a way that is the exact synonym for losing my breath, we see something.

***

2. Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

The homely and erotic patterns of marriage are not easily discarded. They knelt face to face in the center of the bed undressing each other slowly. "You're so thin," said Julie. "You're going to waste away."
She ran her hands along the pole of his collarbone, down the bars of his rib cage, and then, gratified by his excitement, held him tight in both hands and bent down to reclaim him with a long kiss. He too felt proprietorial tenderness once she was naked.
He registered the changes, the slight thickening at the waist, the large breasts a little smaller. From living alone, he thought, as he closed his mouth around the nipple of one and pressed the other against his cheek.
The novelty of seeing and feeling a familiar naked
body was such that for some minutes they could do little more than hold each other at arm's length and say, "Well…" and "Here we are again…" A wild jokiness hung in the air, a suppressed hilarity that threatened to obliterate desire.…
He wondered, as he had many times before, how anything so good and simple could be permitted, how they were allowed to get away with it, how the world could have taken this experience into account for so long and still be the way it was.
Not governments or publicity firms or research departments, but biology, existence, matter itself had dreamed this up for its own pleasure and perpetuity, and this was exactly what you were meant to do, it wanted you to like it.

***

3. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

In his room, I stripped naked in one minute flat and lay on the bed.

"Pretty desperate, aren't you?" he asked.

"Yes."

"For God's sake, why? We have plenty of time."

"How long?"

"As long as you want it," he said, ambiguously.

If he left me, in short, it would be my fault. Psychoanalysts are like that. Never fuck a psychoanalyst is my advice to all you young things out there. Anyway, it was no good. Or not much. He was only at half-mast and he thrashed around wildly inside me hoping I wouldn't notice.
I wound up with a tiny ripple of an orgasm and a very sore cunt. But somehow I was pleased. I'll be able to get free of him now, I thought; he isn't a good lay. I'll be able to forget him.

"What are you thinking?" he asked.

"That I've been well and truly fucked." I remembered having used the same phrase with Bennett once, when it was much more true.

"You're a liar and a hypocrite. What do you want to lie for? I know I haven't fucked you properly. I can do much better than that."

I was caught up short by his candor. "OK," I confessed glumly, "you haven't fucked me properly. I admit it."

***

4. Elizabeth Benedict, Slow Dancing

In his hotel room he used his hands to hold her head, moved it with deliberate but tempered force— far more than a suggestion— from a spot on his neck to his chest to himself. He kept his hands pressed firmly to her ears, then played with strands of her hair.
He moved her head then away from himself so that he could feel her breasts there, between her breasts, and he pressed them close around it, which no one had ever.…
It was weird having it pushed into her face, pushed against her, as casually as if it were a finger. He was so sure of himself. So cock-centered. The phrase had never occurred to her before that moment, when it was locked between her breasts.
When he was inside of her later, she felt the same taut, sure strength in his hips as they pressed into her, forcing her to press back.… With his hips he pulled her along to the edge of sensation and then let her pull back ever so gently, and back and forth and back and forth.
She felt as if she were getting ready for a dive, jumping up and down on the end of the diving board to get a feel for the springs. Tighter than she had expected. Though she offered no resistance and came right before he did.
When they caught their breath and pulled the covers back up, Stephen kissed her on the cheek, a quick good-night kiss, and rolled over and slept by himself.

***

5. Glenn Savan, White Palace

Nora entered the living room naked, a bad idea with guests in the house, and from the weave of her walk he could see how drunk she was. She got into bed beside him and turned unceremoniously upon her back. Max wasn't sure if this contained a sexual invitation or not.
Such complex passivity on her part was unknown to him— except for those times when he started things rolling by applying his mouth to her.
This he began to do, swiftly losing himself in the flowery complexities of her labia, until her thighs tightened in refusal and she sat up, taking his face between her hands. "Just fuck me," she said.

She lay back down and waited.

"Right now?"

"Yes." She waited stoically, like a good Victorian wife. She felt abnormally tight as he entered her. And then there was a further surprise; she was silent.
He thought this might be in deference to Bob and Judy down the hall, but that didn't explain what her eyes were doing open, or why the look in them was so liquid and beseeching.

"Max," she said, just as he was starting to come apart against his climax. "Max, I have to tell you…"

"What?" he managed to say.
"I just wish…"

"What?"

"I just wish we could have a baby."

For an irrational moment he wished it too. And then he spurted his useless seed.
***