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By Root 12442 0

managed to forget Auschwitz. By ten o’clock she was again quite befuddled and unsteady of gait—as was I, for that matter, with an unconscionable amount of beer stowed away—and so we took a taxi back to the hotel. She was already drowsing against my shoulder by the time we reached the stained marble steps and tobacco-fragrant lobby of the Hotel Congress, and she clung with weary heaviness to my waist as we rode the elevator up to the room. Onto the sway-back bed she flung herself wordlessly, without removing her clothes, and was instantaneously asleep. I put a blanket over her, and after stripping to my skivvy drawers, lay down beside her and fell asleep myself like one bludgeoned. At least for a time. Then came dreams. The church bell sounding intermittently through my slumber was not entirely unmusical, but it had a clangorous, hollow, Protestant ring, as if fashioned of low-pitched alloys; demonically, in the midst of my turbulent erotic visions, it tolled with the voice of sin. The Reverend Entwistle, drugged with Budweiser and in bed with a woman not his wife, was basically ill-at-ease in this illicit ambience, even while asleep. DARK DOOM! DARK DOOM! pealed the wretched bell.

Indeed, I’m sure it was both my residual Calvinism and my clerical disguise—also that damnable church bell—which helped cause me to falter so badly when Sophie woke me. This must have been around two in the morning. It should have been that moment in my life when literally, as the saying goes, all my dreams came true, for in the half-light I realized both by feel and evidence of my sleep-blurred eyes that Sophie was naked, that she was tenderly licking the recesses of my ear, and that she was groping for my cock. Was I asleep or awake? If all this were not puzzlingly sweet enough—the simulacrum of a dream—the dream melted instantly away at the sound of her whisper: “Oh... now, Stingo darling, I want to fuck.” Then I felt her tugging off my underpants.

I began to kiss Sophie like a man dying of thirst and she returned my kisses, groaning, but this is all we did (or all I could do, despite her gently expert, tickling manipulation) for many minutes. It would be misleading to emphasize my malfunction, either its duration or its effect on me, although such was its completeness that I recall resolving to commit suicide if it did not soon correct itself. Yet there it remained in her fingers, a limp worm. She slid down over the surface of my belly and began to suck me. I remember once how, in the abandonment of her confession regarding Nathan, she fondly spoke of him calling her “the world’s most elegant cocksucker.” He may have been right; I will never forget how eagerly and how naturally she moved to demonstrate to me her appetite and her devotion, planting her knees firmly between my legs like the fine craftswoman she was, then bending down and taking into her mouth my no longer quite so shrunken little comrade, bringing it swelling and jumping up by such a joyfully adroit, heedlessly noisy blend of labial and lingual rhythms that I could feel the whole slippery-sweet union of mouth and rigid prick like an electric charge running from my scalp to the tips of my toes. “Oh, Stingo,” she gasped, pausing once for breath, “don’t come yet, darling.” Fat chance. I would lie there and let her suck me until my hair grew thin and gray.

The varieties of sexual experience are, I suppose, so multifarious that it is an exaggeration to say that Sophie and I did that night everything it is possible to do. But I’ll swear we came close, and one thing forever imprinted on my brain was our mutual inexhaustibility. I was inexhaustible because I was twenty-two, and a virgin, and was clasping in my arms at last the goddess of my unending fantasies. Sophie’s lust was as boundless as my own, I’m sure, but for more complex reasons; it had to do, of course, with her good raw natural animal passion, but it was also both a plunge into carnal oblivion and a flight from memory and grief. More than that, I now see, it was a frantic and orgiastic attempt to beat back death. But