interstices, so to speak, of this tapestry of noise I heard two people in the next room making whoopee—the old man’s archaic term for fornication. Soft sighs, the noise of a thumping bed, a cry of slippery unclothed pleasure. My God, I thought, thrashing about, would I forever be a mere solitary listener of lovemaking—never, never a partaker? Racked with misery, I recalled how my first knowledge of Sophie and Nathan had come like this: Stingo, the hapless eavesdropper. As if he had become an accomplice to the suffering provided me by the couple beyond the wall, my father rolled over with a sudden grunt and fell momentarily quiet, allowing my ears access to each nuance of that bliss. It was sculpted sound, incredibly close, almost tactile—oh, honeyhoneyhoney, the woman breathed—and a rhythmic liquid slurping (which my imagination amplified like a loudspeaker) drove me to glue one ear against the wall. I marveled at the grave colloquy: he asked if he was big enough, then if she had “climaxed.” She said she didn’t know. Worries, worries. Then there was a sudden silence (a shift, I imagined, of formation) and the peeping prism of my mind tried out Evelyn Keyes and Robert Stack in a breathless soixante-neuf, though I soon gave up the fantasy as logic forced me to repopulate my mise en scene with characters far more likely to be clients of the McAlpin—two horny dance instructors, Mr. and Mrs. Universe, a pair of insatiable honeymooners from Chattanooga, and the like; the pornographic pageant which I let unfold in my mind became alternately a cauldron and an immolation. (Impossible for me to imagine then—nor would I have believed it had the millennium been foretold to me—that in a matter of scant decades the steamy cinema bazaars on the avenue below would allow me, for five dollars, freely and without anxiety to view sex like the conquistadores beheld the New World: glistening coralpink vulvas as lofty as the portals of the Carlsbad Caverns; pubic hair like luxuriant groves of Spanish moss; ejaculating priapic engines the size of sequoias; jumbo-sized dreamy-faced wet-lipped young Pocahontases in all conceivable and meticulously detailed attitudes of suck and fuck.)
I dreamed of darling dirty-mouthed Leslie Lapidus. The humiliation of my barren time with her had forced me these last weeks to blot out her memory. But now, conjuring her up in the “female superior” perch recommended by those two famous family love consultants (Drs. Van de Velde and Marie Stopes) I had clandestinely studied at home a few years before, I let Leslie romp astride me until I was smothered by her breasts, half drowned in the dark torrent of her hair. Her words in my ear—words importunate, unfake now—were exaltingly obscene and satisfying. Ever since puberty my sessions of autoerotism, although fairly inventive, had in general been conducted with the firm hand of Protestant moderation; this night, though, my longing was like a stampede and I was virtually trampled beneath it. Oh Lord, how my balls hurt as I synthesized stormy lovemaking not only with Leslie but with the two other enchantresses who had claimed my passion. These were, of course, Maria Hunt and Sophie. Thinking of all three, I realized that one was a Southern WASP, one a Sarah Lawrence Jewess, and the last a Polack—a gathering distinguished not only by its diversity but for the sense that all three were dead. No, not truly dead (only one, luscious Maria Hunt, had gone to her Maker), but in effect extinguished, defunct, kaput, so far as each of them concerned my life.
Could it be, I wondered in my nutty fantasia, that this craving was so intolerably inflamed by the knowledge that all three of these lost china dolls had slipped through my fingers out of some tragic failing or deficiency of my own? Or that indeed their very final inaccessibility—the realization that they were all gone forever—was an actual cause of this inferno of lust? My wrist ached. I was stunned by my own promiscuity, and its recklessness. I envisioned a quick switch of partners. So somehow Leslie was transformed into Maria