He failed, Owen saw in retrospect, to use her compliance, her spells of tranced utter slavery, to the hilt. Though both confessed to being nervous, needy masturbators, they never masturbated for each other, though it would have been easy, it seemed to him in the darkness behind his eyelids, as he lay beside Phyllis missing Alissa. But in actuality their genitals, when the opportunity was there and the love-flush was hot upon their skins, seemed made to be hidden, as it were, one by the other, their warmth and wetness merged.

Though innocent herself, a few years over thirty and never having cuckolded Ian before, Alissa tried to ease Owen away from the certain strangeness he felt in inhabiting a body at all. Once, in a flash of shyness soon after becoming her lover, kneeling between her spread legs, he put his hands over his flaming erection, and she said, slightly offended and gently directive, “Don’t hide yourself, Owen.” “Yourself”—this sore-looking blue-veined thing was himself. These hair-adorned nether parts, closely fitted into the sites of urination and defecation, were seats of being, ugly and odorous in external contemplation but in sensation exquisite. This high value was altogether inward and had to be taken by others on faith. The daze of sexual excitement bestowed this faith but then left Owen uncertain as to why—the question he had asked himself behind the playground shed—women put up with it. So much risk, so much potential for disgrace and abasement. Abasement was part of the bliss, perhaps: being lowered like a bucket into the black well of biology while knowing that the rope was still attached, the daylight of society waiting above.

He could have talked her, he imagined when it was too late, into swallowing his semen. He could have coaxed her, too, into letting him kiss her between the legs until she came. Elsie had allowed this, that last summer, when both were angry because their love was coming to nothing. So he gave her a treat for a virgin. Hitched forward on the car seat with her skirt around her waist, she came with a snap, an unmistakable inner percussion. His back and shoulders ached from bowing his face into her lap, there on the bench seat of her father’s Chrysler. He liked it, being in touch with her another way from watching her face and hearing her voice. Alissa said she had never come that way and never would. He should have insisted. She would have remembered him for it. But sexual events easy to stage in the privacy of his skull encountered obstacles in reality, limits in the psychology of the other.