“ ‘God, you’ve got some vocabulary,’ she answered. ‘Or maybe it’s just your delivery. It’s meant that you should come to me. I’m Ophelia always, floating in the flowery stream. I need your rushing poetry. Can you drive if I unzip your pants!’

“ ‘No, don’t do that. We’ll have a wreck. I think all this is a hallucination.’

“ ‘No, it’s not. Did you bring any condoms?’

“ ‘God, no,’ I said. We had reached Canal Street. I knew where the LaFrenière Cottages were. Lynelle and I had eaten three times in their tasty little French bistro. ‘Mona, Mona, Mona,’ I said. ‘We have to get condoms! Where?’

“ ‘No, we don’t,’ she said. ‘I have tons of them in my purse.’ ”

CHAPTER 24

24

“THE LAFRENIERE COTTAGES WERE nestled around a central brick courtyard crowded with the de rigueur palmetto and banana trees, and in the center of the courtyard was a wishing well that may once have served some purpose. Now it was merely decorative, and people had taken to pitching all manner of change into it.

“Mona handled our check-in as if it were nothing, even telling me to put away my money, the bill would go to her family.

“When I protested she whispered, ‘Show your strength when we get in bed.’

“And off we went, into the little flag-paved cottage, to do just that, in a modern pewter ironwork bed with an enchanting canopy of metal leaves and grapes, and a light breezy fabric wound loosely around its four corners.

“As soon as the door was latched we both stripped off our clothes with the utter abandon of beasts, and when I beheld her naked, when I saw the pinkness of her nipples and the little blaze of red hair between her legs, I went appropriately crazy.

“It was Mona who helped me on with the condom and Mona who had the presence of mind to pull down the covers, so that we didn’t stain them, and finally they wound up on the floor as we went at it like little jungle animals.

“Whatever was going on with my life, I figured, I had fulfilled one of my wildest dreams, no matter that it was newborn, it was wild and from the heart and I would never never forget it. I would never forget Mona’s face as she blushed with the spasm that sent me into the final explosion of pure nirvana.

“When it was over we lay together, embraced, warm, contented and kissing each other playfully and gently.

“ ‘Oh, thank God,’ she whispered into my ear. She helped me with the soiled condom. She went for the towel to clean me off. She kissed me again and she said, ‘I wanted to put my mouth on it. Come, let me wash you in the bathroom and then I’ll do it.’

“I protested gallantly. I required no such sacrificial adoration!