“Are you cold?”
“No.”
He set about the only work for which he’d lately had ambition. Spread out before the horizon of her rib cage, sloping into the valley of her navel and up to a grove of wiry curls too close to be in focus, were the mobile white plains of her belly. Her hands, to either side, gripped the bed as she regulated contact with his tongue. He was amazed by his body’s reserves of energy; it spoke to the primacy of reproductive function to an organism. No matter how he’d lashed his brain cells with cigarettes, they’d been too spent to pull weight in his final pages on Scipio Africanus, and yet here were the muscles of his neck and tongue, indefatigable, soldiering forward on the promise of a reward accruing not even to them but to his penis. His neck postponed its aching, his temples their pounding with champagne, his eyes the resumption of their burning, until he could obey the deeper animal imperative and release its boiling madness.
She gave a sharp cry. For a moment, rocked by its own galvanism, her body seemed to dismember itself. He lingered to push his tongue as far into her as it would reach, to taste what his penis couldn’t, and then moved up to look into her eyes. They were beady, the darkest of browns; her smile was lopsided, as if he’d broken it. He put a pillow under her butt, the way she liked it, and pulled his pants halfway down. It bordered on miraculous how completely her little person accommodated him. He lowered his full weight onto her and lay still, trying to etch into his memory the feel of total penetration. He wondered how many months or years it would be before he next felt it with someone.
“Are you all right?” she said.
“Yeah. Just pausing.”
“You know what I was imagining? That we were together in Paris. That we got caught in a thunderstorm and went back to our hotel room soaking wet. I was imagining you making me come while the rain came down harder and harder on the boulevards.”
Even the word come could not overcome the turnoff of picturing them in Paris. The four of them standing in line to get inside the Louvre. Becky tall and clean and radiantly good-natured, his mother studying a guidebook and making some wry comment about it—he hated to imagine Sharon in that picture. He hated to imagine himself, condemned every morning to lie in a heavily fucked-upon French bed where everything was hot and red and sleep-depriving, with crusted semen on the sheets, condemned to wishing he could be wherever Becky was instead, maybe downstairs in a breakfast room with fresh napkins and baguettes, she and their mother having some lively conversation that he would have liked to be a part of. Becky he never regretted being near, because nearness was all he wanted from his sister. When he pictured himself and Sharon entering that Parisian breakfast room, stinking of après-sex cigarettes, their eyes red and puffy-lidded, the glowing image of Becky receded and faded like an angel’s. Even in the real world, he was losing her—had been losing her ever since the night in September when Sharon had taken off her bathrobe. The more Sharon was in the picture, the less Becky could be. His penis was deflating.
“Oh, baby,” Sharon said. “You must be so tired.”
He nodded, glad to let her think that.
“I have an idea, though,” she said. “I was thinking we could both come back here right after Christmas. Do you want to do that? We could spend all day reading ahead for classes and be together every night. I don’t want you to feel like you’re falling behind with your work because of me.”
He’d burned through all his glucose. The imperative had dwindled to nothing.
“But that’s not the thing I wanted to tell you.” She repositioned herself to look into his eyes. “Can I tell you something important? I’ve been wanting to say it for weeks now.”
He waited with dull dread.
“I’m in love with you,” she said. “Am I allowed to say that?”
It was exactly as he’d feared.
“I am so in love with you, baby.”
It was exactly as he’d feared, but somehow the effect was the opposite of what he might have expected. A wave of masculine well-being was sweeping through his body. The knowledge that he fully possessed this person, the thrill of that conquest, and something more savage, the sudden enhancement of his capacity to inflict pain on her: it was hitting him like a full-bore shot of testosterone. The imperative stormed back to life, and he unthinkingly obeyed it, with a thrust. It was astonishing how different it felt to be inside a woman he’d caused to fall in love with him, how comprehensively his genital nerves now felt connected to her. It was almost as if, until this moment, he’d never had sex. He gave another thrust. The pleasure was outrageous.