“So next time bring a joint and we might make music.” She winked and strutted off.

She would be wonderful if she talked like Audrey Hepburn, he thought. Not that he would have kicked her out of the sack for eating crackers.

Chapter 5

When he got home he lay down on the bed, frazzled by the sun, and had a reverie about his first art conquest in New York twenty years before:

She took off her bathrobe. Nothing unusual he thought. She sat on the couch beside him and he slumped until his head rested against her knee. She owned the same bullfight poster that he had tacked to his wall but that didn’t depress him. Like minds. She somehow smelled pink. She gently lifted the beret from his head and parted her legs a bit so that his face nestled between her knees.

“You’re just another crazy artist.”

“You might say that.”

“I always wanted to be a bohemian but I guess I just didn’t have the guts.”

He peered at her pubis and navel, thinking oddly of the word guts. She obviously had them, verging, as she did, a little over the line of plumpness but not unpleasantly.

“I guess I figured it was my destiny. I mean art.”

She parted her legs even further so that it was with a certain strain that he supported his head, a burdensome size eight.

“I guess we’re beating around the bush,” she said. “What’s your favorite thing sexwise?”

“I like it all.” He sat up and began taking off his shirt.

“You might say I’m orally directed. Give and take. You know?”

“I think I catch on.”

He did an awkward little dance removing his shoes, pants and underpants. She lunged forward, yanking at his part as if to start an outboard motor. If only the great Gauguin could see him now. She seemed to take aim with her head, engulfing his penis with a single thrust of her mouth. This was not the collegiate nibbling expedition that he was accustomed to. This was New York. This was Greenwich Village. She drew him down on the couch, an implacable chewing magnet, throwing a graceful thigh over his head. He made a slight attempt to slow her down when the pounding seemed as though it might seriously bruise his lips.

During a lull they dressed and went out to an Italian restaurant around the corner from Bleecker. It had a redolent charm, consisting of red-and-white checked tablecloths, candles in old Chianti bottles, and oddly, he thought, the same Manolete bullfight poster. They were flushed and hungry and he thought it witty of her when she clicked his glass.

“Wine is the food of love.”

He looked into her hazel eyes as deeply as he could. In a way, he thought, she was a Valkyrie.

“I never knew love could be like that.”