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The waiter left before I could change the order. “Merissa … Really,” I protested.

“Oh, come on, Norman. I won’t bite you. Unless you want me to.”

So there we were, sitting in comfortable chairs at a small table within reach of a large bed. I know I should have quaffed my coffee, grabbed a piece of the aged goat cheese, stood up, given her a peck on the cheek, and left. But her booted leg had entwined itself with mine and we were both a little drunk and …

“Norman,” she said, “it’s your move.”

“Stalemate,” I muttered weakly.

She laughed. “No stale … mates allowed.”

Laughter under these circumstances can be hazardous, easing as it does the tricky mechanism of complicity. And we all know that it is incumbent upon the gentleman to make the final advance, if only because the female of the species needs to be vouchsafed a scintilla of reticence, however blatant her role in the seduction.

I will not burden the reader with the details of our initial kisses and caresses, our tidy, provocative divestment, our progression into the sublimities of carnal bliss. Too often attempts to render the felicities of sexual congress result in a “copulation of clichés,” as the author of Pale Fire so succinctly put it. On the other hand, one should eschew obfuscating polysyllabic latinates such as concupiscent erubescent tumescence and the like. Not that wordplay and foreplay are mutually exclusive.

Happily, I can report no erectile dysfunction on this occasion. Indeed, I was seized by an avidity that made me feel like the butt of that hoary old joke: What happens when you give Viagra to a lawyer? His whole body enlarges. I exaggerate, perhaps because I felt exaggerated in every fiber of my being, and, like many beings, mine is quite fibrous.

In all seriousness, and sex needs be taken seriously even as the mounting tension and the giddiness of license make one smirk inwardly … In all seriousness, sex might well be the most palpable if not the ultimate indulgence in earthly beauty. In this spirit, Merissa would not have the lights dimmed, and nor should she have, given the visual feast she knew herself to be. At the risk of being unchivalrous, I would like to paint if only with words such details as Merissa’s finely sculpted clavicles, her darkly prominent aureoles, which were ever so slightly pebbled and pink-brown against the creamy swell of her breasts, her shapely legs, and her remarkably well-toned nether cheeks. But also the fan of her rich hair, her smiling mischievous eyes, her perfect nose and lush mouth. As one Amis or another has remarked, the most beautiful part of a naked woman is her face, the Duc d’Orleans notwithstanding. (Delacroix’s oil of the Duc d’Orleans displaying his unclothed mistress to the Duc de Bourgogne has the former veiling the upper part of her body.)

Among other things, Merissa provided me with a whole new appreciation of the adjectival phrase clean-shaven. Her depilated state was such as to vitiate, nay, razor to the roots, the synecdochic and metaphorical links between what I describe and the eponymous small felid. Indeed, her cloven, glabrous quiddity achieved nothing less than a second order of nudity, one that had me on my knees indulging in what an eminent poet has been amused to call the oral tradition. But even then, though tongue-tied and up to my nostrils in pungent lubricity, immersed in the pleasure of giving pleasure, I thought of the young Augustine and his prayer — Oh Lord, grant me chastity. But not just yet.

In returning the favor with enthusiasm and practiced competence, Merissa persuaded me that the vulgar compound for one who fellates should be used as an endearment rather than as an epithet. Especially, as in my case, if that one is a woman.

It was perhaps inevitable that we should experience cell phone interruptus. Yet the movements necessary for Merissa to turn the damn thing off — a torsal twist and a reaching of lovely arm — presented to me her whole dorsal splendor and made me think sex was, among many things, a cleaving of symmetry. This brief relapse to the