Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Vox (1992)

  I could hear their sticky little rollers moving over that wall, ssshp, ssshp, ssshp , and they were having an idle conversation about the chick they saw on the lake that weekend riding in the back of an inboard motorboat in a pair of overalls with no top, so her tits flopped around behind the fasteners on the top flap, and then they made reference to the time on one job when one of them evidently quote ‘ate out’ the woman whose house they were painting and then she jerked him off onto a cracked slate hearthstone because she was paranoid about hurting the finish on the antique pine floors, and again I called out, as nicely as I could, ‘Guys, please, make sure you’re painting the right colors!’ and this time, instead of answering, one of them simply took his little roller and got it very heavy with the semi-gloss Paper Lantern and touched it to the right side, you know, the … cheek, of my ass, and then I could feel him rolling a stripe of paint right down my leg, over my calf, right down to my Achilles tendon, and then rolling right back up again. Like the seam of a pre-war stocking, except wide. Then he worked the roller a little on the tray, loading it up again, and he started on my other asscheek, and went very deliberately down and up again. At first he pressed quite lightly, so I could just barely feel the sodden fluff touching my skin on my upper thigh, and the roller barely rolled, but then as he traveled down he pressed harder, and some of the paint was squeezed from the roller and dripped down my leg ahead of it. It was so surprisingly warm. They’d had the paint cans in the back of their truck, which was parked in the sun. When the roller traveled over the backs of each of my knees it felt very very nice. I felt myself arching myself up slightly, like a cat who’s being stroked. Meanwhile the third painter, who was in the room that my head and my upper self were in, was still blithely painting away, with his back to me, so at least part of the job was moving steadily forward. And I expected that the two of them in the hall would now get back to work. But instead I felt a pair of hands on each leg, and I was lifted for a moment, and a paint can was slid under each of my feet. This was not a particularly comfortable position.

• From Vox (1992)

  72 men in the garden being able to see my breasts stuffed flat against the foggy mirror. Once I even brought in some lip gloss after my swim and spent a long time putting lip gloss around my nipples and soaping it off. " "God, car washes must have driven you wild." "Car washes. I did like that one part at the end, where the felt flappers drag over you, but no, not really—it was very rare that my family took the car to the car wash. Almost never. Oh, but I do remember one thing I used to imagine—I imagined that I shared a ride back home from college with someone I didn't know, and we get caught in a terrible tropical monsoon of some kind, and his windshield wipers don't work, and so I have to go out on the hood of the car and take off my top and kneel there and hold on to the antenna and kind of sop my breasts over the windshield just so he can drive. Actually, that wasn't something I thought of very much, that was just a one-shot deal." "There are strong evolutionary pressures on fantasies, aren't there?" he said. "If it doesn't work, and if it doesn't metamorphose itself into something that does work, it doesn't survive." "Yeah, even in the buildup to one orgasm, it's a kind of bake-off. You think: two cocks, each one poking from under one of my armpits, sperm squirting from them? Yes or no. No. I'm a geometry teacher measuring boys' penis length? Yes or no. No. Am I a nurse at a fertility clinic and my job is to strip for clients who have difficulty

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  When she awakened, she was lying on an iron bed in a shabby room. A man was asleep beside her. She was naked, and he too, but half-covered by the sheet. She recognized the body which had crushed her the night before in the Bois. It was the body of an athlete, big, brown, muscular. The head was handsome, strong, with wild hair. As she looked at him admiringly, he opened his eyes and smiled. “I could not let you go back with the others, I might never have seen you again,” he said. “How did you get me here?” “I stole you.” “Where are we?” “In a very poor hotel, where I live.” “Then you’re not . . .” “I’m not a friend of the others, if that is what you mean. I am simply a workman. One night, bicycling back from my work, I saw one of your partouzes. I got undressed and joined it. The women seemed to enjoy me. I was not discovered. When I had made love to them, I stole away. Last night I was passing by again and I heard the voices. I found you being kissed by that man, and I carried you off. Now I brought you here. It may make trouble for you, but I could not give you up. You’re a real woman, the others are feeble compared to you. You’ve got fire.” “I have to leave,” said Linda. “But I want your promise that you will come back.” He sat up and looked at her. His physical beauty gave him a grandeur, and she vibrated at his nearness. He began to kiss her and she felt languid again. She put her hand on his hard penis. The joys of the night before were still running through her body. She let him take her again almost as if to make sure that she had not dreamed. No, this man who could make his penis burn through her whole body and kiss her as if it were to be the last kiss, this man was real. And so Linda returned to him. It was the place where she felt most alive. But after a year she lost him. He fell in love with another woman and married her. Linda had become so accustomed to him that now everyone else seemed too delicate, too refined, too pale, feeble. Among the men she knew, there was none with that savage strength and fervor of her lost lover. She searched for him again and again, in small bars, in the lost places of Paris. She met prizefighters, circus stars, athletes. With each she tried to find the same embraces. But they failed to arouse her.

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  Pierre’s double would turn over on his side, and Kay would hold her breath. If he awakened, he would find her with her hands in a strange position. Then suddenly, as if he had guessed her wishes, he would place his hand between her legs and leave it there, so that she could not move. The presence of his hand aroused her more than ever. Then she would close her eyes again and try to imagine that his hand was moving. To create a sufficiently vivid image for herself, she would begin to contract and open her vagina, rhythmically, until she felt the orgasm. PIERRE HAD nothing to fear from the Elena he knew and had so delicately circumnavigated. But there was an Elena he did not know, the virile Elena. Although she did not wear short hair or a man’s suit, ride a horse, smoke cigars or frequent the bars where such women congregate, there was a spiritually masculine Elena, dormant in her for the moment. In all but matters of love, Pierre was helpless. He could not nail a nail to a wall, hang up a picture, repair a book, discuss technical matters of any kind. He lived in terror of servants, concierges, plumbers. He could not make a decision, sign a contract of any sort; he did not know what he wanted. Elena’s energies rushed into these lacunas. Her mind became the more fecund. She bought the books and newspapers, incited activity, made decisions. Pierre permitted this. It suited his nonchalance. She gained in audacity. She felt protective towards him. As soon as the sexual aggression was over, he reclined like a pasha and let her rule. He did not observe another Elena emerging, affirming new contours, habits, a new personality. Elena had discovered that women were drawn to her. She was invited by Kay to meet Leila, a well-known nightclub singer, a woman of dubious sex. They went to Leila’s house. She was lying in bed. The room was heavily charged with the perfume of narcissus, and Leila rested against the headboard in a languid, intoxicated way. Elena thought she was recovering from a night of drinking, but this was Leila’s natural pose. And from this languid body came a man’s voice. Then the violet eyes fixed themselves on Elena, appraising her with masculine deliberateness.

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  He stretched himself on the floor. She crouched over his face and held her dress so that it fell and covered his head. With his two hands he held her buttocks like a fruit and passed his tongue between the mounts over and over again. Now he also stroked her clitoris, which made Bijou move forwards and backwards. His tongue felt every response, every contraction. As she crouched over him, she saw his erect penis vibrate with each gasp of pleasure he uttered. There was a knock on the door. Bijou rose quickly, startled, with her lips still wet from the kisses and her hair undone. The clairvoyant answered quietly however: “I am not ready yet.” And then turned and smiled at her. She smiled back. He dressed himself quickly. Soon everything was outwardly in order. They agreed to meet again. Bijou wanted to bring her friends Leila and Elena. Would he like it? He begged her to do this. He said, “Most of the women who come here do not tempt me. They are not beautiful. But you—come whenever you want to. I’ll dance for you.” His dance for the three women took place one evening when all the clients were gone. He stripped himself, showing his gleaming golden-brown body. To his waist he tied a fake penis modeled like his own and the same color. He said, “This is a dance from my own country. We do this for the women on feast days.” In the dimly lit room, where the light shone like a small fire over his skin, he began to move his belly, making the penis wave in a most suggestive way. He jerked his body as if he were entering a woman and simulated the spasms of a man caught in the varied tonalities of an orgasm. One, two, three. The final spasm was wild, like that of a man giving up his life in the act of sex. The three women watched. At first only the fake penis dominated, but then the real one, in the heat of the dance, began to compete in length and weight. Now they both moved in rhythm with his gestures. He closed his eyes as though he had no need of the women. The effect on Bijou was powerful. She took her dress off. She began to dance around him temptingly. But he merely touched her now and then with the tip of his sex, wherever he encountered her, and continued to turn and jerk his body in space like a savage dancing against an invisible body. The teasing affected Elena, too, and she slipped her dress off and kneeled near them, just to be in the orbit of their sexual dance. She suddenly wanted to be taken until she bled, by this big, strong, firm penis dangled in front of her, as he performed a male danse du ventre, with its tantalizing motions.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  33 IF HER GOAL was to prove to herself that it was over, that they both wanted to end it, she got her chance two days after she settled in with Lamb and Abby, when Bru came looking for her at the Dynamo office, a cramped space on the second floor of a ratty building on Beach Road. She was alone in the office, taking inventory in the supply closet, when he called, “Hello ... anybody home?” Please, God ... help me live through this. Help me to be strong. “Hey,” he said, finding her as still and lifeless as one of the vacuum cleaners. He held out a bunch of peonies. She took them, her hands shaking. She was afraid to look at him, afraid if she did she’d lose it. “Hey ...” he said again, tilting up her chin. She tried to focus on the wall clock over his shoulder —4:15 P.M. He waved his hand in front of her face. “Victoria?” Okay. She could do this. She’d keep it light, as if it meant nothing, as if he meant nothing. “What happened to your nose?” she asked. She could see he’d had an accident. A Band-Aid covered the bridge of his nose, but it only made him more attractive, giving his face a mysterious, slightly dangerous look. “Hockey,” he said. She nodded, reached up, touched it. A mistake. His arms went around her. “Missed you,” he whispered. “Missed you so much.” She was all over him in the truck, tugging at his shirt, undoing the zipper of his jeans. She’d never felt this kind of lust. He pulled off the road and fell onto her, pushing her panties aside, his jeans around his knees. Her head banged against the door as he pumped her but she barely noticed. The peonies crushing beneath her released their fragrance. She would never smell peonies again without reliving this

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  William Everett Hunton was one of the first handsome homosexuals I’d ever met, a small, neatly made little guy who would flounce and languish around me but turn gravely masculine around the other law students. Even though he was hoping to reform himself and was quite optimistic about a cure, at least for a while he had been gay, and could still be considered at least a transitional case. Annie and I would sit around his room in the law quad and listen to his adventures, presented as evidence of his depravity but with a suggestion that his scarlet sins, at least, had been mink-lined. We were alone, he and I, for a moment. He was shaving and dressing and I watched him as a child might, as though I myself didn’t perform these same rites every morning (or in the case of shaving, every third morning). When I told him in which Midwestern city I’d been born, he laughed and said, “But that’s where my patron lives, the real Everett Hunton.” “Come again?” William widened his blue eyes, smiled, and came over and sat on my lap. “Oh, look, I’ve gotten foam on your neck,” and he brushed it away. He swiveled in my lap, linked his hands behind my neck, and leaned back to look at me. With one more wiggle of his bottom he whispered, “I was wondering if I could get a rise out of you.” He stood and pretended to be a matron slowly raising a lorgnette to her eye to inspect the degree and angle of the damage she’d done. “I can’t tell if you pack a big basket or not.” “What do you mean exactly?” “You’re not that naive.” He went back to his sink and mirror. “God, but do I feel like a tarnished angel around you.” He turned and held up a warning finger. “Equal emphasis on tarnished and angel.” “You are angelic, William, a naughty angel,” I said, surprising myself with my low tone, which was the vocal counterpart to a lazy pat on a chorus girl’s fanny. William instantly responded with a shiver. “You think so? Oh, I was telling you about my ‘patron.’ He’d die if he heard me using that word; he tells everyone we’re cousins, though that’s just as dangerous—with these really old families the cousins are all present and accounted for.” He clapped his hand over his mouth. “No, I must change the subject. So, tell me, Ducky, are you hung or not?” He slapped himself, looked at his reflection, and hissed, “You slut, I didn’t say that.” “Do I have a big penis? Oh, I suppose it’s just average.” “Suppose? Darling, a real man might get away with vagueness about that one vital statistic, but it’s not as though you haven’t done major comparison shopping.” He laughed as an actress might, tossing his head back to emphasize his long neck.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  In the locker room the man smiled at me again, not in the usual furtive way (seductive, hostile, afraid) but just as though we were already friends. He had wonderful green eyes and an engaging smile, although one tooth was a delicate biscuit brown. His shoulders reflected the overhead light. When he turned I could see that his buttocks registered in sinewy detail every motion he made; they weren’t piled high like stiff mounds of whipped cream, the way teenage boys’ butts looked. No, his hips were narrow and fluent. No one else was around in the locker room, although two or three voices boomed from the pool. The smell of chlorine was giving me a headache. We started talking, and everything I said made him nod and smile. I thought he might be laughing at me. What puzzled me was why someone so handsome would show an interest in me. As he dressed, I could see he had beautiful clothes, and that intimidated me, too. He invited me to come to his apartment for a cup of tea. It was already dark out. A cold wind was blowing steadily, sifting snow. The afternoon had been warm enough to melt the snow on the sidewalk, but now it had frozen white as milk glass. I felt a small secret pride in being with someone so handsome. His carefully combed hair froze stiff. His salient cheekbones shone and caught the passing lights. The intimacy between us seemed as sudden and transitionless as in a dream. When we reached a dark side street, he put my mittenless hand in his pocket and held it without saying anything. His apartment was big and underfurnished, as though a flood had scattered the contents of a single room over several. He sat me on a straight-back chair stranded in the middle of a carpetless wood floor, but when he stepped back and saw me marooned there he laughed and invited me into his bedroom. His name, he said, was Fred. His window cast a yellow trapezoid on the pure blue snow outside. The wind had traced in snow the black bark of the tree below. A soft tango was playing on the radio. He switched off the light. The snow looked fluffier, almost as though it had risen slightly. We sprawled side by side, athwart the bed, fully dressed, our wet shoes on the floor, staring at the ceiling. Fred’s voice and the tango explored the folds of my brain like a deadly parasite, whose progress can’t be detected except after it slowly starts to unsnap higher functions. In the center of the ceiling a pressed metal rosette had lost detail under each new layer of paint. Fred’s voice made my ear glow, or was it the cold? He told me that he’d just been released from a mental hospital.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Tex introduced us. The man’s first name was Lester and the last something Russian that ended in “iak.” He wore horn-rims that he kept taking off as he spoke or examined a book, as though they served no function other than rhetorical. He wore a shaggy coat as a metonym for the hair I felt certain must cover his entire body. He had the bulging forehead, shaggy brows, and strong jaw of Beethoven in the hand-size, chalky busts that my childhood piano teacher, Herr Pogner, doled out to students as prizes. And now Tex had proposed this New York Beethoven as a prize for me, someone I’d be allowed to service later as he reclined on the anonymous hotel bed, his thoughts winging back to the East Coast a full day before his heavier body. Surely this man had no need of me. Surely Beethoven was entirely self-reliant. At that time I had a horrible brush cut my father had chosen for me, neither long enough to comb nor short enough to be marine-sexy, and I wore not ivy-league horn-rims but thick black glasses that girls said made me look “intellectual,” a dubious compliment in the 1950s. Although Tex had assured me only the other day that New Yorkers prized intelligence, I wasn’t sure mine could be counted on. It didn’t feel like a thing in our very thinglike world, a world where identity began with the choice of massive automobile (my mother was a “gay divorcee” as could be seen from her powder-blue Buick convertible with its upholstery outlined in red piping; my father was “no-comment” rich in his midnight-blue Cadillac). I asked the man what he thought of the Kierkegaard boom. He mouthed the word boom and picked up another book. I was left standing there. But then, despite or maybe because of the rebuff, it became more and more important to me that he be aware of me, realize that I was “feeling gay tonight.” I kept standing next to him, like a horse whose bridle has been dropped. I picked up a book and turned the pages without seeing them. I inched closer to him and let my shoulder brush his. He stood there taking it, until suddenly he looked up, frowned, put the book back, and moved away. For the next hour I kept inching close to Lester while maintaining a space between our shoulders or stationing myself in the next aisle face-to-face with him over bookshelves. If he caught my glittering eye he’d smile the pained smile reserved for possibly crazy people. I guess Lester must have been waiting for Tex to close shop. When I desired someone, especially a stranger, I poured myself into him (“Don’t stare,” my mother would tell me). Not that I found Lester so handsome; it was just that he was a chance, some sort of chance.

• From Vox (1992)

  The glass was cold. I wanted to press my breasts against the mirror, but it was too high for that, but I imagined myself pressing my breasts against this little mirror, so first squeezing them together and then pressing them against the mirror, and I’d just seen something on TV about one-way mirrors, so I thought of men in the garden being able to see my breasts stuffed flat against the foggy mirror. Once I even brought in some lip gloss after my swim and spent a long time putting lip gloss around my nipples and soaping it off.” “God, car washes must have driven you wild.” “Car washes. I did like that one part at the end, where the felt flappers drag over you, but no, not really—it was! very rare that my family took the car to the car wash. Almost never. Oh, but I do remember one thing I used to imagine—I imagined that I shared a ride back home from college with someone I didn’t know, and we get caught in a terrible tropical monsoon of some kind, and his windshield wipers don’t work, and so I have to go out on the hood of the car and take off my top and kneel there and hold on to the antenna and kind of sop my breasts over the windshield just so he can drive. Actually, that wasn’t something I thought of very much, that was just a one-shot deal.” “There are strong evolutionary pressures on fantasies, aren’t there?” he said. “If it doesn’t work, and if it doesn’t metamorphose itself into something that does work, it doesn’t survive.” “Yeah, even in the buildup to one orgasm, it’s a kind of bake-off. You think: two cocks, each one poking from under one of my armpits, sperm squirting from them? Yes or no. No. I’m a geometry teacher measuring boys’ penis length? Yes or no. No. Am I a nurse at a fertility clinic and my job is to strip for clients who have difficulty coming and then suck their cocks and let their sperm drip from my tongue into a test tube? No. I’m in a dressing room and some native-Hawaiian security guard is watching me try on blue jeans over the video monitor? Ooh, maybe yes. In fact it’s kind of like getting dressed for a party, and being unsure of what to wear right up to the last minute, and frantically trying on one image after another like clothes, not knowing which combination looks really good , and it’s getting later and later, ancj then finally you pull out this wonderful dress, with some rich pattern, and you slip it on, and ah, you can come.” “Jesus. But what about if you’re reading and the images are not under your control? Say maybe with a Book Mate thing holding the book open?” “Hah hah!

• From Vox (1992)

  38 slower-moving, but no friction, and in a luminous tube. As I went along these pairs of hands would enter the tube a little ahead of me, waving around blindly, looking for something to feel, and then my feet would brush under them, and they would try to grasp my ankles, but their fingers were dripping with oil, and as I moved forward they slid up my legs, holding me quite hard, but without friction because of the oil, and then they pressed down as my stomach went under them, and then they sort of turned to encounter my breasts, the two thumbs were almost touching, and they slid very slowly over my breasts, pushing them up, and believe me, in this fantasy I had very large heavy breasts, it took a long time for the hands to slide over them." "Wow! What did old Pamela say when you told her that?" "I finished describing it, and I asked her if she had thoughts like that and she said 'No!' in quite a shocked voice. She said, 'No! Tell me another. ' You think maybe my tube was what turned her into a lesbian?" "Well, it certainly would have turned me into a les bian. But now—can you clarify one thing for me? Do you right now have the light on or off in the room you're in, the combination living room dining room?" "I have it on. It's a table lamp. I could turn it off if you'd like." "Perhaps that, perhaps that would ..." "Listen." There was a click.

• From Vox (1992)

  But this time she didn’t have it in her teeth, it was loose over her, so her movements began to pull it down. I watched the fringe say good-bye to her throat, and begin to travel slowly over her bunched-up sweater, and over the bunched-up bra under that, and then the individual fringe things fanned out and conformed to her breasts and slipped off them. The slow descent finally stopped at the waist of her skirt. I was a little hesitant to watch her directly now; I watched her more out of the corner of my eye: I saw her squeeze one nipple with a finger-do-the-walking kind of movement, and then her hand moved to the other breast. This was her left hand. And no oohs and ahs, everything quiet, just breathing, sometimes her mouth open slightly, sometimes closed. Once she pressed her lips together and bit them. Certain signs also made me think that at times she was biting the insides of both her cheeks. I could tell now exactly how her legs were positioned—they were somewhat apart, the blanket drooped between them, and the back of her hand was making the blanket move freely—but that wasn’t the thing that got me. What got me was, her whole arm was now visible, her whole right arm, and the fringe intersected with it just at the wrist, which was arched, reaching down, circling, and the thing was that I could see her long beautiful forearm tendon pulling and pulling, controlling her fingers. I just kept watching this. Then the scene ended; I pulled my hand out of my pants, Emily crossed her arms over her breasts. She whistled a little, mock casually. Three wet fingers rested on her arm. We waited. More filler. The heroine goes into an office with two men we haven’t seen before, both in business clothes. They think she is charging them with cheating her in the payment for the counterfeit money. She says something like ‘Gentlemen, I’m talking about my own needs.’ And suddenly two men with ties on are standing on either side of her, and she’s sitting in a straight-back chair wearing white stockings, and she’s sucking one and then the other. Emily whispered, ‘ That’s it,’ and her hands both now slid under the fringe. And then she whispered, ‘Do you want some blanket?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ so she held on to her half so that it didn’t slide off her any more and I pulled some of it over me, so we were both covered from the waist down. I undid my belt and pants and pushed off my clothes.

• From Vox (1992)

  96 the spinning blades in it, the blades that look like the underside of mushrooms? The black plane's going very fast and I'm going very fast in the opposite direction and we intersect, and I fly right through one of those jet engines, and I exit as this long fog of blood. I'm miles long, and, because it's so cold, I'm crystalline. Very long arms, you'll be pleased to hear. And then I recondense in bed, sshhp, as my short warm self. It must have some thing to do with my estrogen level. But that's what tele phone travel would be like out there, I think. What am I saying, that's what it is like." "Ooh, I love you, you tell me everything." "I do seem to, don't I? It's very unlike me." "It is?" he said. "God, I'm a compulsive confessor. But it's rare for me to cast my bread on the waters and have it return tenfold like this." "Tell me the rest of what happened with your friend Emily." "Why? No, no, it'll make me seem like too much of a type." "You are a type," she said. "You're right, I am." "Don't feel bad about it—I am too. I just want to know what you're like when you're physically holding a woman. As opposed to calling up catalogs and strangers named Klein and that sort of thing, worthwhile pursuits though they may be. What did you and Emily end up doing?"

• From Vox (1992)

  88 "Right, no spontaneous human combustion yet." "Right. Eee, that feels pretty good." "I can hear your strumming in your voice, you nasty boy." "Nastybation. I don't want to come, though. I'm going to stop." "Prudent." "Funny," he said. "When I was going fast, I pictured something that I've pictured for years and yet never no ticed. I pictured doing an impossible thing—I thought that if I got too close to coming, I could somehow angle my leg and contort it so that I caught hold of my cock in my bent knee and squeezed it like a nut in a nutcracker until it stopped wanting to come." "You're a strange case," she said. "It was fun getting imperious with you for a moment, though." "Hah! Frightening, too. There are different rules on the telephone. You want to know what I actually thought of when you asked me to quote 'talk' to you about my cock? After the thrill and the terror had passed?" "What?" "This time I had a crush on a woman at work," he said. "She had beautiful long arms, of which she was very proud. I don't think she had a single dress with full sleeves. She had a hopeless thing for a man named Lee, who was a smugly flirtatious married guy, whom I per sonally disliked intensely. This woman knew I had a crush on her, in fact I used to send her a memo with a

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  And then you lean against the wall and, enduring seconds that pulse in your ear, stretch out your hand toward the crotch of the man beside you. Your action triggers vitality all around you. In a second this raw country boy at the urinal with the rosy forearms and red knuckles, the sickle of a vein superimposed on the hammer of his hand, has turned toward the room, brandishing a big red penis. An instant later everyone has converged on him, the men in the stalls emerge, one is kissing him, the second licking his testicles, a third man the penis, and another is standing beside him, arm around his waist, as though to lend him courage and companionship. The businessman with the expensive briefcase has planted his face between the farmboy’s buttocks in total disregard of his expensive trousers, which are getting damp and dirty on the floor, wet with backed-up sewage. He’s lapping and lapping; I can see his eyes drifting peacefully from side to side, dreamily independent of the suckling action. Then the man sucking the cock comes up for air and you take his place, fitting yourself around a tumescence still warm and tasting of the other guy’s spit. You look up as someone else unbuttons the country boy’s shirt, revealing a hairless chest marbled by blue veins and decorated like a piece of wedding cake with two candle sockets in pink frosting—the erect nipples. Now everyone is at work on him at once, breath in his ear, lips on his lips, mouths on his balls, cock, and ass, that arm around his waist, as though he really is a bride and this the last-minute flurry of seamstresses fitting him into his gown. When he comes, he lets out a cry. His body stiffens and he leans back. You swallow gratefully the surprisingly meager but sweet semen, and the boy’s ecstasy sets off his bridal attendants, who shoot and shout in a chorus around him. The drunk is still snoring. In two seconds you’ve buttoned up, wrapped your raincoat around you, and rushed out into the flood of passengers flowing up the stairs and rivuleting into the night. Your hair is rumpled, your face flushed, and your hand still smells of the country boy. At the subway entrance you catch sight of the businessman just behind you. Without thinking, you glance at his trousers, not too bad, he looks at your wet knees the same moment, and you and he exchange the tiniest smile of wintry complicity.

• From Vox (1992)

  147 call, the reality of it was that the men were so irritating, either passive, wanting me to entertain them, or full of what-are-your-measurements questions, and so I was si lent for a while, and then I heard your voice and liked it." "Thank you. Yours is nice, too, you know. Very smooth." "Thanks. I just had it waxed yesterday. Shall we, do you think, should we perhaps come soon?" "Yes. You're absolutely right. Are you naked?" "Wait a sec. Yes, I am now officially naked, except for the bra." "Are your legs apart?" "My toes are holding on to the edge of the coffee table." "Is your right hand touching your clitoris?" "How impertinent! But yes, the answer is yes. My clitoris is in fact squeezed between my two index fingers, left and right, which are on either side of it. " "All right. You do whatever you want with those index fingers, and I'll tell you about a kind of sensing device that I own. What it does, it doesn't eavesdrop, it doesn't pick up sounds, it simply senses the presence nearby of any intelligent strumming woman. It looks like an an tique pocket watch, it's gold, with a cover, but when you open it, instead of the dial, there is this mysterious fluid, this very special fluid in there that glows in sev eral colors when the right conditions are met, for reasons

• From Vox (1992)

  I read one story in some men’s magazine once, years ago, in the first person, written by a woman, or probably not, but written at least with the pretense that a woman was telling the story, about a sixteen-year-old girl who goes swimming in a neighbor’s pool and of course her frans are still somewhat new and unfamiliar to her, and she’d forgotten that her top from last year was flimsy and inadequate to the demands that were made on it, and presto it comes off after she’s swum a lap, and she’s so embarrassed and apologetic, but Mr. Grunthole reassures her that she needn’t be ashamed, he doesn’t mind if she swims without her top, and so on and so on, and even though it was a totally conventional and undistinguished story, the fact that it was written in the voice of this girl, so I could peep in on her mixed feelings when her top came off, did give me a huge … an unexpectedly large return on my investment. I guess insofar as verbal pornography records thoughts rather than exclusively images, or at least surrounds all images with thoughts, or something, it can be the hottest medium of all. Telepathy on a budget. But still honestly I need the images. For instance of you there in the shower. I mean, when you come are your legs slightly apart?” “Yes.” “And do you have one of those legendary Water Pik shower-massage showerheads?” “I do, but I don’t use it with any of the special settings. It was installed already when I moved in. It’s useful for cleaning the tub. But when I’m—I don’t hold it or put it between my legs or anything, I just treat it as a regular showerhead. What I do is …” “Yes?” “When I start to come?” “Yes?” “Yes?” “I open my mouth and let it fill with water. The feeling of the water overflowing my mouth … You there?” “ Don’t stop talking.” “But that’s all,” she said. “You were in the shower, yesterday night, and the water was coursing onto your face and falling down from one part of you to another, like balls in a pinball machine, and your eyes were closed. What was in your mind? Oh I’d like to …” “Excuse me? You’re murmuring.” “I said I’d like to clk, ” he said. “What?” “Sorry, I occasionally have a problem with involuntary swallowing. I said I’d like to … put my hands on your thighs, very high up, and hold them apart and cover your whole mound with my mouth and just breathe on you, through the fabric of your underpants.” “Ooch.” “Are your legs apart right now?” “They’re crossed at the ankle on the coffee table.” “That will have to do,” he said. “Tell me what was in your mind in the shower last night.” “I honestly don’t think I remember.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  And without further prelude, he sank to his knees shoving his brown thighs and white groin under the partition, and I also knelt to feast on his erection, inhaling the clean smell of soap, my hands exploring the lichee-size testicles, then traveling up smooth skin. I’d dreamed about this moment so long that now I wanted to freeze the frame. In my anthropology class I was learning that although man had started off as an animal subject to natural selection, he had soon begun to evolve in a direction determined purely by culture. Human beings stood upright to free their hands, they needed their hands to hold tools, the tool-and-weapon-wielding parts of their brains developed to accommodate their newly prehensile grasp, language was enabled by tool-wielding—but now, if culture were yanked out from under us, we’d be destroyed, like one of those cartoon cats who scamper off a branch and tread thin air until sudden awareness makes them plummet. Here, under my gaze, was this creature half-natural but half-invented by himself. The tan line suggested poolside swimsuit, frosted glass, sunglasses—everything as symbolic as the life pictured by advertisements. But the hickory-hard straining of this cock upward spelled animal—a straight line of ascent inflating slightly as the balls rose and tightened for blast-off, a thrust that propelled life upward. The cleanness, however, the feathery lightness of the blond hairs, the neatness of the circumcision were all preppy, while the heavy hamstrings (and now the jets of semen filling my mouth) were primate. For an instant I stayed attached to him, though here I was on a dirty tile floor on hands and knees before a stranger I’d seen only from the waist down but whom I remember to this day because he’d presented himself so fearlessly, because his body, at least the half of it I knew, seemed ideal, and because his desire was so strong it was as expressive as words or deeds, the things that normally define individuals. Then he was gone. His exit was so hasty I couldn’t see him, just a flash of blond hair and white shirt collar through the narrow vertical slit of my sentry box. I waited patiently for someone else.

• From Vox (1992)

  “So the problem then is that only a little sliver of the tip of my cock was going to make it in range of the footprint of a normal eight-and-a-half-by-eleven copy. There were ways I could straddle the machine, but this just seemed ludicrous. Finally I made a seventy-percent reduction copy of my dick, because the highest reduction setting used the whole area of the glass that my dick could reach, and so I captured something vaguely obscene-looking, even if the total overall scale was reduced. It looked like a little Quonset hut, halfway up the right side of the page. I wrote 70% REDUCTION on the copy. But obviously my plan to strum off hastily and then make the second copy had to be abandoned, because my dick wouldn’t even begin to reach over the plastic strip between me and where the glass started when it was soft. But by now I was crazed with the idea of doing something for this woman that retained some shred of playfulness to it, so she could think to herself, All in fun, all in fun, and yet which conveyed the full force of the idea that I had been alone in that office that weekend with a huge erection, thinking of her. How do I give her that sense? Actually come onto the asterisk memo? That seemed crude. Do you think that would have crossed the line?” “I think, yeah.”

• From Vox (1992)

  Finally I made a seventy-percent reduction copy of my dick, because the highest reduction setting used the whole area of the glass that my dick could reach, and so I captured something vaguely obscene-looking, even if the total overall scale was reduced. It looked like a little Quonset hut, halfway up the right side of the page. I wrote 70% REDUCTION on the copy. But obviously my plan to strum off hastily and then make the second copy had to be abandoned, because my dick wouldn’t even begin to reach over the plastic strip between me and where the glass started when it was soft. But by now I was crazed with the idea of doing something for this woman that retained some shred of playfulness to it, so she could think to herself, All in fun, all in fun, and yet which conveyed the full force of the idea that I had been alone in that office that weekend with a huge erection, thinking of her. How do I give her that sense? Actually come onto the asterisk memo? That seemed crude. Do you think that would have crossed the line?” “I think, yeah.” “I thought so. So instead what I did was—you remember making outlines of your hands in kindergarten? You held your hand still on the page and you traced around each finger, and all the little contours of your finger joints were captured, and you would go around a few times, and each time the pencil was at a slightly different angle, so you got this aura of your hand, that was so much more accurate than you could ever draw, and all you had to do was put in the fingernails and the little wrinkles on the backs of your fingers and you really had something? Once this girl traced my hand and I traced hers at the same time—I went very slowly, which triggered her ticklishness, and she laughed hard every time my pencil made it to the place between two of her fingers, but she was brave, she stayed put. Her name was Martha. I’m pleased to have remembered that! A teacher showed us how to make a turkey, using two hands superimposed. But that wasn’t interesting, that was just a trick.