’ 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 gush of palmtree milk, and in that instant of hovering expectancy, as always, she feels her eyes brim over with stinging inexplicable tears...
...“I’m floating down easy,” she heard him murmur in the bedroom after a long silence. “I thought I was going to really crash. I thought I was going to crash hard. But I’ve been coming down easy. Thank God, I found the barbies.” He paused. “We had trouble finding them, didn’t we, the barbies?”
“Yes,” she replied. She was very sleepy now. Outside, it was nearly dark and the blazing leaves had become lusterless, fading into the smoky gun-metal autumnal sky. The light in the bedroom was flickering out. Sophie stirred next to Nathan, gazed at the wall where the New England grandmother from another century, trapped in an amber ectoplasmic halo, gazed back beneath her kerchief with an expression both benign and perplexed. Sophie thought drowsily: The photographer has just said keep still for a whole minute. She yawned, drowsed for a moment, yawned again.
“Where did we finally find them?” Nathan said.
“In the glove compartment of the car,” she said. “You put them there this morning, then forgot you put them there. The little bottle of Nembutals.”
“Christ, how awful. I was really out of it. I was in space. Outer space. Gone!” With a sudden rustle of bedclothes he heaved himself about and groped for her. “Oh, Sophie—Jesus Christ, I love you!” He wrapped an arm around her and with a heavy squeeze drew her toward him; simultaneously, on an outpouring of breath, she screamed. It was not a loud scream she heard herself give, but the pain was stabbingly severe, real, and it was a small, real scream. “Nathan!”...
...But not screaming when the point of the polished leather shoe strikes hard between two of her ribs, draws back, strikes again in the same place, driving the breath from her lungs and causing a white blossom of pain to swell beneath her breast.)