Owen had never had, at the adolescent moment when it would have been useful to his growth, a male friend with whom sex in its mysteries could have been, however ignorantly, discussed. Now, twenty-five years late, Vanessa was that frank friend. She answered, after reflection, “It didn’t do terrifically much for me, the few times I tried it. It felt like the wrong way. But that was not unexciting, I suppose. The wrong way as the right way.”

He was roused. She knew more than he; he could still catch up. “Let me do it to you, then.”

“O.K.,” she said. “Just to get it off your list. If I do it to you first.”

“With what?” he asked, fearfully.

“My tongue?” Vanessa suggested. “Then a finger, wearing a surgical glove. Then—we’ll see.”

“This is getting to be,” Owen had to admit, “a rather repulsive conversation.”

“Yet, dearest, look at how hard you are! You’re so hard you’re bending backwards, staring into your own navel.”

“Suck me,” he begged.

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Her serious mouth made a pouting little moue, as Phyllis used to. “First let’s think what you can do for me.”

Her cunt, those livid wrinkles looking like lava folds, had become his to contemplate, to finger, opening the petals to their peony-pink inner side and bringing his mouth to breathe on the clitoris, to tongue that gleaming wet nub. Don’t touch it. Don’t tell me what to touch. Between her legs her plaster-pale body took on color and gave up its stately evenness of tone. Her stern face softened as she sat on the edge of the bed and toyed with his hair, the boyishly soft brown hair into which gray was being sifted one strand at a time. Then as if in sudden surfeit she flung herself back on the motel bed, with a violence that jolted into his head an image of what she saw—through the cloudy small window above their bed a glimpse of green leaves flung upside down as in a hurricane. She rested her thighs one on each of his shoulders, her eyes shut against the daylight to be alone with her sensations as Owen knelt there at her service, laboring in his own trance of mounting attention. Vanessa eventually released a throaty grunt and in a spasm clamped his head between her thighs as Elsie had once done; his hot face felt then so imbued with her juices that for twenty-four hours he tried to avoid coming close to Phyllis, even for their courtesy good-night peck. No amount of soap or aftershave quite quenched the smell of one woman in another’s nostrils.