He’d plunged into her virtually without resistance. When her weight settled back against his pubic bone, she shuddered along the length of her body. He took hold of her hips and began to thrust into her by flexing and unflexing his knees, gently rocking in the confined space. Almost no other motion was possible.

“This won’t be good for you,” he said.

“Rub me,” she whispered, pulling his right hand from her hip and guiding it to the rip she’d made in her hose.

As his fingers slipped between her thighs, Tom received one of the most profound shocks of his life. Viola’s pubic hair was softer than any he’d ever felt. Even after years of giving pelvic exams to Negro women, he’d unconsciously assumed that their pubic hair was coarser than a white woman’s. With Viola, at least, the opposite was true. He was still pondering this when he discovered her swollen clitoris. She jerked as though he’d shocked her, then flung her head to the right and bit his upper arm as though only this could keep her quiet.

In the claustrophobic darkroom, they developed a slow but effective rhythm, a primitive, serpentine dance, slowly building toward ecstasy. Tom felt as though they were suspended in water, intertwined like nether creatures fulfilling some ritual that had sustained their species for millions of years. The experience transcended anything he’d ever felt with a woman. Apart from his wife, Tom’s sexual experience was limited to two prostitutes in Japan during the war. But even so, he sensed that if he’d coupled with a dozen gifted courtesans, this experience would surpass them all. There was no color in the darkroom—and barely any form, it seemed—yet his senses had never felt more alive to every stimulus. The enforced silence of their coupling drove them deeper inward, until only the oceanic pounding of blood in his ears competed with the electrical hum of the developing machine against the wall. Deprived of light and visual cues, his inner ear became confused, and the sense of being in water gave way to something still more surreal. He felt as though they were making love on some distant planet that dwarfed the earth, their bodies twenty times as dense as normal, his penis harder than it had ever been, her breasts as resilient and hard-tipped as those of a woman who’d lived in this environment all her life.