Sophie's Choice - William Styron [222]
...Even with his crazy whispered rhyme repeated again and again—“Don’t be a teaser, Irma Griese”—even with his hand remorselessly twisting her hair as if from its roots, even with his other hand at her shoulder clamped down with sickening pain and force, even with the pervasive sense he transmits, lying there, shuddering, of a man far over the brink and prowling his own demented underworld—even with the feverish fright engulfing her she cannot help but feel the old delectable pleasure as she sucks him. And sucks and sucks and sucks. And endlessly loving sucks. Her fingers claw the loamy earth of the wooded hillside upon which he lies underneath her, she feels the dirt impacting itself beneath her fingernails. The ground is damp and chill, she smells woodsmoke, and through her eyelids’ translucency is filtered the incredible radiance of the foliage afire. And she sucks and sucks. Beneath her knees fragments of shale gouge and hurt, but she makes no move to ease the pain. “Oh Jesus Christ, oh fuck, suck me Irma, suck the Jew-boy.” She cups his firm balls in her palm, strokes the delicate spiderweb hair. As always she envisions within the hollow of her mouth the slippery surface of a marble palmtree, the soft spongy head, its fronds swelling and blossoming in the darkness of her brain. “This relationship, this unique thing we have, this ecstatic symbiosis,” she remembers, “could only result from the meeting of a large stiff lonely Semitic schlong, which has been successfully circumvented by an army of terrified Jewish princesses, and a set of beautiful Slavic mandibles starved for fellatio.” And she thinks even now in her discomfort, in her fear: Yes, yes, he even gave me that, laughing, he took away that guilt anyway when he said how absurd it was for me to feel shame about longing so madly to suck a cock, it wasn’t my fault that my husband was frigid and didn’t want me to and my lover in Warsaw wouldn’t suggest it and I couldn’t begin the thing—I was merely, he said, the victim of two thousand years of anti-sucking Judeo-Christian conditioning. That lousy myth, he said, that only faggots love sucking. Suck me, he always said, enjoy, enjoy! So even now with the cloud of fear around her, while he taunts her and abuses her—even now her pleasure is not mere mild enjoyment but the perennially re-created bliss, and chill waves shiver down her back as she sucks and sucks and sucks. She is not even surprised that the more he torments her scalp, the more he goads her with the detested “Irma,” the more gluttonous becomes her lust to swallow up his prick, and when she ceases, just for an instant, and panting raises her head and gasps “Oh God, I love sucking you,” the words are uttered with the same uncomplicated and spontaneous ardor as before. She opens her eyes, glimpses his tortured face, resumes blindly, realizing now that his voice has become a shout which begins to echo from the flanks of the rock-strewn hill. “Suck me, you Fascist pig, Irma Griese Jew-burning cunt!” The delicious marble palmtree, the slippery trunk swelling and expanding, tells her that he is on the edge of coming, tells her to relax so as to accept the pulsing flood, the seawater