“I wasn’t.”

“Would you like to?”

He doubted that she was intentionally making a pun on the word ball, but there was no doubting her meaning. He looked at her, this girl who would be fat by thirty. She was dark and attractive, as Liz Madera was dark and attractive. But she was not beautiful like Liz. She was Liz Madera unlit by mind, unshaped by spirit.

“Yes,” Hook said. “I think I’d like that.”

She leaned toward him. “Forty?”

He nodded.

“That’s regular. Normal.”

Hook did not know the nomenclature here, but he assumed it was the same as in St. Louis. “Half-and-half?” he said, feeling, as always, diminished by the utterance, irredeemably degraded.

She smiled happily. “That’s normal.”

Later, in the crepuscular light of his room, Hook lay on his back in bed watching her perform the first “half” of her task, the way her lush black hair, loosened, draped over his belly much as Liz Madera’s had on the rock at the beach. And his eye traced the long and lovely line of her back and waist and hips, finally her buttocks, beautiful as no other thing to him, his favorite pounds of flesh, as they were to Voltaire, he reflected, recalling the great Frenchman’s hilarious letters to his niece and how in them he was forever “pressing” kisses on her “ravishing round bottom.” And Hook figured he would press a few himself this night, for the girl did reach him physically; he felt as big as a corner post. But he was cold in his heart. He was a voyeur to his own act.

Yet this same coldness gave him a high fine endurance, so that when he mounted her finally he deliberately stayed with her until she began to come alive under him and he could feel her whore’s surprise at it, at being reached, and wanting it then, wanting to come, and finally he was able to stay with her all the way, not letting himself go until he could feel her going over first, and then raging after her, driving like some wild desperate kid trying to break an ultimate tape. Why he had waited, pacing himself, he was not sure. He felt no love for the girl, and certainly it was not something she had expected. Yet for some reason he had felt that his pleasure was dependent on hers, hers a condition of his. And hers evidently had been keen enough, for afterwards she offered to stay the night if he would let her, and said she would do him again if he wanted it later, and that it would be a “freebie.” Hook had expected to be alone, had wanted to be alone to think, but the girl was so warm and decent, not at all the embittered hustler yet, that he did not want to put her down. And anyway it had been so long since he had slept with another human being through all the hours of a night that he said yes finally, yes he would like her to stay.