Alissa, too, was a frustrated artist—at least, she made love to Owen as if each time had to be a masterpiece. In his little locked room at the factory, or the motel or hotel room they once in a while managed to find the time for, or her own bedroom with its sagging low pre-1750 ceiling on the few occasions when Ian was safely away in the city peddling his wares and the children were safely in school, she gave herself to fucking as if to save her soul. And sucking—his prick in her mouth, she would go into a trance, repetitively nodding like one of those drinking birds you fitted to the edge of a water glass. She was oral: sitting impaled on his lap while his tongue played with her nipples, she would put two fingers into her mouth and, eyes shut, begin an inner ascent. Coming was not easy for Alissa; she was an artist in that conditions had to be just right and her concentration undiluted, his parts—tongue, prick, fingers—distributed just as she wanted them. Owen felt like a translator who had to be present so that Alissa could communicate with herself. But, unlike smiling, light-loined Faye, she came unambiguously, with an increasingly rapid succession of high-pitched gasps capped, at a summit both lovers had almost despaired of reaching, by a sharply lower-pitched whimper, as if she had been struck, while the hand of hers not half in her mouth beat on Owen’s back like a panicked wing. He was proud that, after a few early misfires bred of guilt and fear, he could go the route with her, holding up his side of it. Her body as he grew to know it had a curious way of emanating heat where she wanted to be touched, so that his hands and mouth went there of their own. He had slowly, timidly realized that, while sitting on his prick having her nipples teased, she wanted his finger in her anus, deep in it at her climax. He became an enabler, an abettor, joined with Alissa in sweet trespasses, crossing a line drawn by their Protestant ancestors, who never wholly shed their Bible-black clothes and made their love in lightless log cabins.