When his voice did appear Keith was, retrospectively, most impressed by its performance. It did not gurgle or whimper, neither did it jump octaves or turn into a corky burp of adrenalin — all things Keith couldn't have blamed it for doing. In fact, it sounded urbane, detached, almost bored.
"Well, you know, Skip, I haven't really got strong views on the subject, although of course I try to be tolerant about that
kind of thing."
"Mm-hm. You like getting head?" ". Sorry?”
"Head. Getting blown. Getting sucked off."
"Oh! Well, not mad about it. But again of course it's all part of the basic. Yes, I'm for it, on the whole."
"Mm-hm. You like to be fucked?"
". Well, as I say, it's not one of the things one customarily. but you naturally try to keep an open. "
"Mm-hm." Skip swayed languidly on his haunches. "Mm-hm."
"Look— Skip— I don't want to seem abrupt but do you think we could finish this chat another time?"
"Pardon me?"
"Another time. I am on the toilet here."
"Sure you are," Skip said reassuringly. But then he rolled his eyes so that his pupils disappeared upward, revealing two sacs of glistening blood at the base of either socket. "Oh, sure, man. Another time."
17: some bush
"I must say, Roxeanne," Celia observed briskly, "you have got the most marvelous breasts."
"But they're so awfully big," said Roxeanne. "I think Diana's are so pretty? Really the perfect size."
At this Diana curled her lip slightly, as if to suggest that she had heard that line before. Celia resumed, "Yes, Diana's are pretty too. But yours are so enormous and so marvelously. solid. Look at mine. Yours seem to point upwards. They don't sag in the least."
Roxeanne shrugged, corroborating this. "Well," she said happily. "Hey, Quentin, is it cool if I take off my pants?"
As the afternoon sun had intensified, had seemed indeed to bear down on them with an invidious strength, Diana and Roxeanne had spent a lot of time — Diana shrewdly, Roxeanne vaguely — wondering which of them would be the first to remove her top. In almost any other company Diana would have had few reservations about taking the lead: her breasts, as Celia had pointed out, may not have been large but they were pretty; they covered a fetchingly disproportionate area
of her chest, were smoothly rounded, and rose to neat orange nipples which were soon tinted and hardened by the wind's: gentle ministry. Diana was, nevertheless, banking on Roxe-anne's being a good deal more punctured than they looked under her smock and had even assumed that she must, in the nature of things, be wearing a quarter or half-brassiere beneath it. As it was — having both muttered something about wanting to get a tan — the girls bared their treasures simultaneously. Except Marvell, who gazed on with complacence, and Giles, who was apparently unconscious, the fearsome glory of Roxeanne's breasts filled everyone present with utter consternation. They seemed to shoot upward out of her collar-bones (forming a ledge off which, had it occurred to her to do so, she could have not inconveniently dined), U-turned over symmetrical cupcake nipples, and repaired to the commodious launching pad of her rib cage without marking this junction by so much as a crease. Diana had looked at the vast tenement then back at her own diminutive cups with scarcely concealed incredulity, and only on the appearance of Celia's breasts — depressing items that flatly splayed in the direction of her armpits — did she begin to regain her equanimity.
"I beg your pardon, Roxeanne," said Quentin, "I didn't quite catch that."
"If I take off my pants?"
"Ah, a common ambiguity when colonials are of the company. Now, do you refer to your trousers or to your panties? Which?"
"How about both?"
Quentin glanced at his wife. "Well, old Oofie is in Kuwait, so far as I know. As long as you don't mind the odd wayfarer or rustic?" He laughed, holding out his hands. "By all means."
Laughing also, Roxeanne said, "They're very welcome," lay back, hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her jeans and eased her seemingly infinite legs out of them. Her (anyway otiose) panties followed. "Okay," she concluded, "no smart-ass remarks about natural redheads."
"Certainly not," said Quentin sincerely.
Diana stared hard at Andy as he rolled over, propped his
head up on his palms for a few seconds, his face perhaps six
inches from Roxeanne's alabaster midriff, and reassumed his original position. "Christ," he mused softly. "Some bush.”
18: OH NO
Oh no, surely they can't all be at it already, can they?
Whitehead posed this question to himself while emerging from the thicket and beginning to make his way up the incline toward the picnickers, all by now in varying stages of deshabille. From his vantage, the sections of bare, mottled flesh lost their outlines in the dusty summer air; as he traipsed toward them their bodies seemed to shimmer and merge, to resolve and separate, to flow together and then to cease. Twenty yards away, quite suddenly, they regained their distinctness, becoming again immobile and discreet. Whitehead slowed with relief.
Then — more — he came to a halt, still unnoticed by the eight further up the slope, and sank, without emphasis and without any sense of irony, to his knees, a tubby supplicant of the warming wind. The keen anxiety he always felt on approaching any group of people now quietly allied itself to a deeper, more settled foreboding. Keith had once, when tran-quilized, told a friendly dietician that he hadn't minded discovering that he was small, fat, and ugly half as much as he had minded discovering that he would always be those things, that all of it could never change now. Would it ever — just a bit? Although Whitehead didn't consider himself a highly sexed person — his masturbatory career, for instance, he had come to regard as an increasingly disturbing and ghostly adventure — he felt it highly likely that if he failed to have a definite sexual experience this weekend he would make some sort of attempt to kill himself. It was not release he craved, far less pleasure, merely a token withdrawal of the insult of ugliness. Little Keith picked up a blade of grass and twirled it in his fingers. The action returned blood and self-consciousness to his features, steadying him somewhat. He smiled furtively as he recalled the incident with Skip. Christ. There really wasn't anything people wouldn't do any more. Being, so far as he could ascertain, a heterosexual, Whitehead had found the approach dramatically unsexy, but it was quite flattering all the same, and it went to show that a lot was in the air. The weekend would, in any case, be unlike any other.
On rejoining his friends Keith's anticipations were strengthened and elaborated. If he looked to his right, he : 6l
could see — for what they were worth — the breasts of the square-faced girl called Celia, wife to the gorgeous Villiers; if he turned to his left he could admire Diana Parry's dinky navel and compact stomach; practically under his nose was a square foot of tawny pubic hair. Keith didn't dare look at anything, of course. He had never had so much sex in his life. But as the newly returned Skip smilingly caught his eye, a whole range of sexual possibilities couldn't help opening itself up for little Keith Whitehead.
And, both less and more straightforwardly, a whole range of them opens itself up for us, too. We could — let's see — we could have Diana take his hand and shoo him off to the woods, have Celia lean over and tenderly unbuckle his thin plastic belt, have Roxeanne shinny beneath him there and then. Of course, we can bring this about any time we like— but Keith can't, oh no.