Esther said: But you've got to stop fucking around!
and he hung his head and said: I can't help it.
and she said: You don't mean that you have AIDS?
and he said: I don't think so, but I'll probably keep on until I get it.
The cool white girl's body had turned away from him, sleeping in his hotel bed, shoulders drawn up like frail bony wings, swellings of breath at her delicious salty armpits (her neck and face smelled like soap) — the Virgin sleeping, too, on a leather thong around her neck (the white girl had said that whenever she fucked, the Virgin turned her back, huddling sadly into the medallion), dark hair on the pillow, thick dark hair between her legs, richer and fleecier and more odorous than the Asian girls'. Something about the way her eyes were closed made the vision-crevices wider and more massive, the darkness within glistening like her eyeball. She'd only let him do her once. But all night she stroked him tenderly. He hugged her, kissed the needlemarks on her veins. In the morning she jerked him off. He lay secure and triumphant against her with the wordless animal happiness which defeated past and future, a new lover to his credit; an hour after he'd left her, he called her on the phone and she said to him: sweetheart.
Instantaneously the disease of love broke out again with all its hideous purpuric spots.
He tried to remember everything about her, everything she'd said and done to him.
Do you want to meet me at the hotel? he'd said.
That would be cool, she'd said.
Do you want to come up?
I don't mind.
Do you want to stay over?
I don't mind.
Do you want to do it?
I don't mind.
When they were done she'd laughed proudly and said: Don't I have a tight cunt?
When she was giving him the hand job she'd said: See how he dances!
In the studio, when he was supposed to be working, he sat thinking about her strange little breasts that he could easily cup in half a palm. She'd always wanted to be a boy, she'd said.
Then suddenly he remembered his new wife and something had imploded so that it was almost impossible to see her when he recalled her; with great effort he dragged out of darkness the rainbow hem of her gauzy dress as she sat enfluffed and red-belted just under the breasts with one hand in her lap, fingers curled against her cheek, her cheekbone very sharp as she sat spilling hair-darkness down the back of her chair in Phnom Penh, her eyebrows plucked into inverted Vs.
He felt cold, and he was trembling. He felt that he was going somewhere now, doing something that the necessity of his being nudged him toward (no matter that he must pass through vine-hairs hanging and curling between the knees of roots), so that was good and right, but what was it? It was something secret and spiritual that he could hardly understand yet; he knew only that it must be good; it was the way that he must go.
He remembered a passage he'd read in the memoirs of that German pilot, Hanna Reitsch: The object was to learn, by repeatedly carrying them out in imagination, how to make the correct movements to control the plane absolutely automatically and without thinking, like a form of reflex action, in order to tide over the dangerous moment when the pilot is uncertain or afraid or for any other reason incapable of swift and lucid thought.