“You don’t think much of yourself, do you?”

“Once the basketball stopped, I suppose not. My mother by the way told me I should let Janice screw herself and leave town.”

“What’d you say to that?”

“I said I couldn’t.”

“You’re a creep.”

Her lack of underpants and his sense that she has already been used today, and his sense of this unique summer, this summer of the moon, slipping away forever, lead him to ask, blushing for the second time this afternoon, “You wouldn’t want to make love, would you?”

“Fuck or suck?”

“Whichever. Fuck.” For he has come to feel that she gives him the end of her with teeth in it as a way of keeping the other for some man not yet arrived, some man more real to her than himself.

“What about Nelson?” she asks.

“He’s off with Janice, she may keep him for supper. He’s no threat. But maybe you’re too tired. From all that George Washington.”

Jill stands and pulls her slip to her shoulder and holds it there, a crumpled bag containing her head, her young body all there below, pale as a candlestick, the breasts hardened drippings. “Fuck me,” she says coolly, tossing her slip toward the kitchen, and, when under him and striving, continues, “Harry, I want you to fuck all the shit out of me, all the shit and dreariness of this shit-dreary world, hurt me, clean me out, I want you to be all of my insides, sweetheart, right up to my throat, yes, oh yes, bigger, more, shoot it all out of me, sweet oh sweet sweet creep.” Her eyes dilate in surprise. Their green is just a rim, around pupils whose pure black is muddied with his shadow. “You’ve gotten little.”

It is true: all her talk, her wild wanting it, have scared him down to nothing. She is too wet; something has enlarged her. And the waxen solidity of her young body, her buttocks spheres too perfect, feels alien to him: he grasps her across a distance clouded with Mom’s dry warm bones and Janice’s dark curves, Janice’s ribs crescent above where the waist dipped. He senses winds playing through Jill’s nerve-ends, feels her moved by something beyond him, of which he is only a shadow, a shadow of white, his chest a radiant shield crushing her. She disengages herself and kneels to tongue his belly. They play with each other in a fog. The furniture dims around them. They are on the scratchy carpet, the television screen a mother-planet above them. Her hair is in his mouth. Her ass is two humps under his eyes. She tries to come against his face but his tongue isn’t that strong. She rubs her clitoris against his chin upside down until he hurts. Elsewhere she is nibbling him. He feels gutted, silly, limp. At last he asks her to drag her breasts, the tough little tips, across his genitals, that lie cradled at the join of his legs. In this way he arouses himself, and attempts to satisfy her, and does, though by the time she trembles and comes they are crying over secrets far at their backs, in opposite directions, moonchild and earthman. “I love you,” he says, and the fact that he doesn’t makes it true. She is sitting on him, still working like some angry mechanic who, having made a difficult fit, keeps testing it.