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By Root 12547 0

this ghastly dialogue to its termination. She was of course supposed to compliment me more floridly—“gigantic,” “une merveille,” even “big” would do, almost anything but “sweet”—and perhaps it was only my glum silence after this which impelled her to begin to stroke and pump me with a zest that mingled the adroitness of a courtesan and a milkmaid. It was exquisite; I listened to her sigh in rapid breaths, I sighed too, and when she whispered, “Turn over on your back, Stingo darling,” there flashed through my mind the scenes of insatiable oral love with Nathan she had so frankly described. But it was too much, too much to bear—all this divine, accomplished friction and (My God, I thought, she called me “darling”) the sudden command to join her in paradise: with a bleat of dismay like that of a ram being slaughtered I felt my eyelids slam shut and I let loose the floodgates in a pulsing torrent. Then I died. Certainly in the grief of that moment she was not supposed to giggle, but she did.

Minutes later, however, sensing my despair, she said, “Don’t let it make you sad. Stingo. That happens sometimes, I know.” I lay crumpled like a wet paper bag, my eyes tightly shut, quite unable to contemplate the depths of my failure. Ejaculatio praecox (Psychology 4B at Duke University). A squad of evil imps yammered the phrase derisively in the black pit of my despair. I felt I would never again open my eyes to the world—a mud-imprisoned mollusk, lowliest creature in the sea.

I heard her giggle again, peered upward. “Look, Stingo,” she was saying in front of my disbelieving gaze, “it’s good for the complexion.” And I watched while the crazy Polack took a gulp of whiskey straight from the bottle and with her other hand—the one which had wrought upon me such mixed mortification and pleasure—gently massaged into the skin of her face my hapless exudate.

“Nathan always said that come is filled with these very wonderful vitamins,” she said. For some reason my eyes fixed themselves on her tattoo; it seemed profoundly incongruous at this moment. “Don’t look so tragique, Stingo. It’s not the end of the world, it happens to all men sometimes, especially when they are young. Par example, in Warsaw when Jozef and me first try to make love he done the same thing, exactly the same thing. He was a virgin too.”

“How did you know I was a virgin?” I said with a wretched sigh.

“Oh, I can tell, Stingo. I knew that you had no success with that Leslie girl, you were just making up stories when you said you have gone to bed with her. Poor Stingo—Oh, to be honest, Stingo, I did not really know. I just guessed. But I was right, no?”

“Yes,” I groaned. “Pure as the driven snow.”

“Jozef was so much like you in many ways—honest, direct, with this quality that make him like a little boy in a certain fashion. It is hard to describe. Maybe that’s why I like you so much, Stingo, because you remind me quite a bit of Jozef. I maybe would have married him if he had not been killed by the Nazis. You know, none of us could ever find out who it was who betrayed him after he killed Irena. It was a total mystery, but somebody must have told. We used to go on picnics like this together. It was very difficult during the war—so little food—but once or twice we went out into the country in the summer and spread a blanket this way...”

This was astounding. After the steamy sexuality of only moments before, after this encounter—despite fumbling and failure, the single most cataclysmic and soul-stirring event of its kind that I bad ever experienced—she was rattling on in reminiscence like someone plunged into a daydream, seemingly no more touched by our prodigious intimacy than if we had done a two-step together innocently on a dance floor. Was part of this due to some perverse effect of the booze? She had gotten a little glassy-eyed by now and was running off at the mouth like a tobacco auctioneer. Whatever the cause, her sudden insouciance gave me acute distress. Here she was, unconcernedly smearing my frenzied spermatozoa across her cheeks as if she were using Pond’s cold