A sexual transaction was a psychological transaction—one must feel the other, however ideally submissive, has a psychology, a mind registering events somewhat in parallel. Otherwise we are stuck with the sordid pathos of the inflatable female bodies, with usable mouths and vaginas, advertised in the back pages of Hustler. There must be a who, not a thing—another consciousness. With otherness a political dimension enters the psychological. He could relax into Alissa’s blowing him because she had breasts; his joy in a sensation another male could equally well have administered was sanctioned by her vagina, that rosy badge of her authority to service the male. And she, she needed to arrange him strictly, tongue and prick and hands, like a child arranging pillows and stuffed animals around her before she could go to sleep. Her dull blue eyes when she was making love, and a minute after, became as bright and dark as wet ink. Then they faded back, as she allowed him to untangle their arrangement so he perched by her knees and she reposed, like Manet’s Olympia, semi-reclined the length of the three cushions of his Naugahyde sofa in his E-O aerie. Her breasts, minutes ago tipped with erectile sensitivity, sank against her chest. He lit a cigarette, a Parliament, for her, and they searched their heads for things to talk about.

That was the problem: what do you do with the bodies afterwards? A man and a woman like-minded enough, with physiologies and sexual educations roughly matched, agree to meet and use each other for an hour; then what? After the melodramatic disaster of his breakup with Faye, Owen was determined not to fall in love next time, for everybody’s sake. Alissa seemed to accept this emotional prophylaxis, as fitting her own situation. She was loyal to Ian if not faithful, and he to Phyllis. Yet it was a strain; Alissa was so lovable, so much wantonly his in their cozy crimes, his body cried out to possess her forever.

He even felt cozy enough to ask her his question: “Why do women fuck?”

She laughed, her cigarette smoke coughed away before the inhale. “Why do men?”

“It’s obvious. Women are so beautiful.”

“And not men?”

“Not. As far as I can see.”

“How unflattering to me, Owen. I thought I had loved that idea out of you. You’re gorgeous.”

“Oh, you, sure; you make me feel good about myself. But you could do that by flirting at a cocktail party.”

“Well,” she said, “screw you.”

“You know what I mean,” he insisted. “You get this thing poked into you and have the risk of making a baby or if you’re a hooker or the girlfriend of somebody primitive of getting killed. Every day in the paper you read about some poor girl killed because she fucked some simple-minded guy who couldn’t let go.”