Sophie's Choice - William Styron [326]
And then there were all those famous positions. Not the twenty-eight outlined in the handbooks, but certainly, in addition to the standard one, three or four or five. At some point Sophie, returning from the bathroom where she kept the liquor, switched on the light, and we fucked in a glow of soft copper; I was delighted to find that the “female superior” posture was every bit as pleasurable as Dr. Ellis had claimed, not so much for its anatomical advantages (though those too were fine, I thought as from below I cupped Sophie’s breasts in my hands or, alternately, squeezed and stroked her bottom) as for the view it afforded me of that wide-boned Slavic face brooding over me, her eyes closed and her expression so beautifully tender and drowned and abandoned in her passion that I had to avert my gaze. “I can’t stop coming,” I heard her murmur, and I knew she meant it. We lay quietly together for a while, side by side, but soon without a word Sophie presented herself in such a way as to fulfill all my past fantasies in utter apotheosis. Taking her from behind while she knelt, thrusting into the cleft between those smooth white globes, I suddenly clenched my eyes shut and, I remember, thought in a weird seizure of cognition of the necessity of redefining “joy,” “fulfillment,” “ecstasy,” even “God.” Several times we stopped long enough for Sophie to drink, and for her to pour whiskey and water down my own gullet. The booze, far from numbing me, heightened the images as well as the sensations of what then bloomed into phantasmagoria... Her voice in my ear, the incomprehensible words in Polish nonetheless understood, urging me on as if in a race, urging me to some ever-receding finish line. Fucking for some reason on the gritty bone-hard floor, the reason unclear, dim, stupid—why, for Christ’s sake?—then abruptly dawning: to view, as on a pornographic screen, our pale white entwined bodies splashing back from the lusterless mirror on the bathroom door. A kind of furious obsessed wordlessness finally—no Polish, no English, no language, only breath. Soixante-neuf (recommended by the doctor), where after smothering for minute after minute in her moist mossy cunt’s undulant swamp, I came at last in Sophie’s mouth, came in a spasm of such delayed, prolonged, exquisite intensity that I verged on a scream, or a prayer, and my vision went blank, and I gratefully perished. Sleep then—a sleep that was beyond mere sleep. Cold-cocked. Etherized. Dead.
I woke up with