How long could this go on? Had she ever orgasmed in her life?

The giblets were only palatable if you were horny and liked the person, he now had learned.

What was happening to him was, he observed, actually worse than any punishment he was going to get from Gynnie, if he told her, which he would; he’d have to. He saw now that there would be no good way to do it. He felt as if he’d been singled out for some kind of crystalline moral instruction. He tried to zone out; he pictured lying on a beach in Rio, reading a magazine, eating the same ripe plum over and over. He looked at his watch. In fifteen more minutes he would quit. He began rewriting this time of his existence into the untrue negative: “I never befriended Nora Garleck outside of work. I am not lying here now.”

Am I in hell? he thought, awhile later. She rode against his nose, getting closer. She launched her pelvis many inches into the air, and then down, then up again, like an old Greco-Roman wrestler trying to earn a fighter’s wage, to keep from being pinned. Gynnie was on the beach in Rio with Rich as he ate his plum again and again, and she looked gorgeous in her bikini—as always, an epiphany. Rich actually began to picture Gynnie helping him escape: She urged him to finish eating the plum so they could go swim—it didn’t make any sense, but he thought of her beside him in those moments, and it did save him. Of course, in reality, she didn’t know where he was, and if and when she did find out she would dump him and never speak to or look at him ever again.

“ARRRGHH!” Nora yelled. What made her yelling so awful was not any fear that a passing stroller might hear her or come onto the site—though during the last few moments Rich had begun hoping that a crazy person would break in and beat them to death with the spade beside Nora’s writhing head. What made her yelling awful was the sound—a lonely yell, from a woman who didn’t have boyfriends, who would have to be satisfied with this degraded scene for months, who didn’t have to worry about what Rich thought of her, because she knew he wouldn’t be calling ever again except with a catastrophic problem about the renovation. At the end she crammed his head into her with the fearsome power of a combat-ready United States Marine feeding on adrenaline, her body like a vise, yelled, “RRAAGGHH,” like a butcher in a poker game, like a buckshot gorilla, and he felt like crying. He could’ve thrown up at any time, lying there in the dirt; and to think he’d done this in the name of love, in the name of freedom, of a last fling.