Chapter 17

<p><br/>"Their hands grip the carpet hairs. Look at the initial swell of a bicep, that bump after the dip of the inner elbow.<br/><br/>When they switch, they're laughing now. Everyone's drunk. No one has come yet. They kiss in between switching, and their hands move all over, into inner thigh, rounded curve of the ass, sweaty necks. I feel the tide fading from my feet. They look up — come with us, come join us, they say, but I'm over here, I say, for today — and they are at once disappointed and also we all know the rhythm has been set as is. <br/>Tight calves and legs lifting. Brown curls and blond knees. When they're kissing again, I could stare for hours. Men love to watch two women kiss, but how I love to watch two men. So clear in their focus. The amazing space created for me when there is nothing demanded or seen."<br/><br/>***<br/><br/>2. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatjie<br/><br/><br/>"On Hassanein Bey's lawn—the grand old man of the 1923 expedition—she walked over with the government aid Roundell and shook my hand, asked him to get her a drink, turned back to me and said, "I want you to ravish me." Roundell returned. It was as if she had handed me a knife. Within a month I was her lover. In that room over the souk, north of the street of parrots.<br/><br/>I sank to my knees in the mosaic-tiled hall, my face in the curtain of her gown, the salt taste of these fingers in her mouth. We were a strange statue, the two of us, before we began to unlock our hunger. Her fingers scratching agains the sand in my thinning hair. Cairo and all her deserts around us.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Was it my desire for her youth, for her thin adept boyishness? Her gardens were the gardens I spoke of when I spoke to you of gardens.<br/><br/>There was that small indentation at her throat we called the Bosphorus. I would dive from her shoulder into the Bosphorus. Rest my eye there. I would kneel while she looked down on my quizzical as if I were a planetary stranger.<br/> She of the quizzical look. Her cool hand suddenly against my neck on a Cairo bus. Taking a closed taxi and our quick-hand love between the Khedive Ismail Bridge and the Tipperary Club. Or the sun through her fingernails on the third-floor lobby at the museum when her hand covered my face."<br/><br/>***<br/>3. Spring in Fialta, Vladimir Nabokov<br/>Nabokov's famous cut, from the characters ("our sudden draft") to the muslin curtain getting "sucked in," leaves you free to imagine all the juicy details. <br/><br/><br/><br/>"And another year or two later, I was in Paris on business; and one morning on the landing of a hotel, where I had been looking up a film actor fellow, there she was again, clad in a gray tailored suit, waiting for the elevator to take her down, a key dangling from her fingers. 'Ferdinand has gone fencing,' she said conversationally;<br/> her eyes rested on the lower part of my face as if she were lip reading, and after a moment of reflection (her amatory comprehension was matchless), she turned and rapidly swaying on slender ankles led me along the sea-blue carpeted passage.<br/> A chair at the door of her room supported a tray with the remains of breakfast—a honey-stained knife, crumbs on the gray porcelain; but the room had already been done, and because of our sudden draft a wave of muslin embroidered with white dahlias got sucked in, <br/>with a shudder and a knock, between the responsive halves of the French window, and only when the door had been locked did they let go of that curtain with something like a blissful sigh; and a little later I stepped out on the diminutive cast-iron balcony beyond to inhale a combined smell of dry maple leaves... <br/><br/>***<br/>4. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller<br/><br/><br/>"At night when I look at Boris' goatee lying on the pillow I get hysterical. O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long.<br/> I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent. <br/>Your Sylvester is a little jealous now? He feels something, does he? He feels the remnants of my big prick. I have set the shores a little wider. I have ironed out the wrinkles. After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards. <br/>You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum. You can shit arpeggios if you like, or string a zither across your navel. I am fucking you, Tania, so that you'll stay fucked. And if you are afraid of being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately. I will tear off a few hairs from your cunt and paste them on Boris' chin. I will bite into your clitoris and spit out two franc pieces…"</p>