The lesson Owen learned from Vanessa was a surprising one: masculine women give great sex. It was perhaps no accident that it had been the tomboy Doris Shanahan who had let him look up the leg of her shorts. Sex is more up front, so to speak, with them. They go at it straight out, pouncing on orgasms like a hawk on a baby quail. Though Vanessa rarely (unlike giddy Faye, unlike dimpled Alissa) smiled during the process, she often laughed, gruffly, her low husky laugh. In her customary thick-fabricked, wide-shouldered clothes, her ass and chest both looked flat, minimal; undressed, she showed charms enough. Her body, neither fat nor bony, had below her brown face the eggshell smoothness of a plaster cast, an even tone that neither her dusty-red nipples or chestnut-brown pubic hair markedly interrupted. She brought to sex a certain serious playfulness; like a man, she was willing to consider the event basically physical, a meal of sorts, and, like a good cook, was conscious of the need for variety. In a graceful, short-nailed hand she would hold his erection as if it were the stem of an oversize wineglass, her extended little finger resting ticklishly in his curly hair at its base, and study it, the blue-veined stalk and empurpled glans, from inches away, pondering what to do with it. Like a good craftsman she thought about the task while away from the workbench, so she could greet him, at their next tryst, with a fresh idea: “I thought today you could come between my breasts, if you’d bring me off with your mouth first.”

“What a divine agenda, Vanessa. But shouldn’t I be inside you at some point?”

“Where inside me, dearest? There are choices.”

“Oh, God, don’t drive me crazy with choices. Just rape me, can’t you?”

The feminine side he had suppressed when Buddy Rourke rejected his fancy Monopoly arrangement was coming back to him under Vanessa’s tutelage. She said, “That’s one of the beauties of being a man—you can’t be. You can be aroused against your will, but you can’t be raped without your prick’s consent.” Vanessa was a considerable connoisseuse of the advantages of being a man, and frequently mentioned them.

“Except,” Owen pointed out, “by the back entrance.”

“Oh. That.” She thought a moment. When she thought, her eyes, the amber of a lioness’s, darkened a shade, as had Alissa’s abraded-looking blue irises when making love. Vanessa didn’t afford him Alissa’s feeling of an infinitely soft, furry, moist socket to hide himself in, a safe dirty place where a terrible tension was resolved, but she could briskly arrange a buffet of other treats. “Would that turn you on?” Her voice had roughened in her throat.

“I don’t think so,” he said, and his own voice sounded high and fragile in his ears. “How about you?”