His chin, wet and unshaven, slipped against her throat. He remembered how she had sucked his thumb before and, taking a curious dare, opened his fingers and thrust three into her mouth.
The realization, from her movement (her breaths were loud, long, and wet beside him, the underside of her tongue between his knuckles hot), that it was what she had wanted, made him, perhaps forty seconds after her, come.
He lay on her, shuddered; she squeezed his shoulders.
After a while, she practically woke him with: “Get off. You’re heavy.”
He lifted his chin. “Don’t you…like to be held afterwards?”
“Yes.” She laughed. “You’re still heavy.”
“Oh,” and he rolled—taking her with him.
She squealed; the squeal became laughter as she ended up on top of him. Her face shook against his, still laughing. It was like something she was chewing very fast. He smiled.
“You’re not heavy,” he said, and remembered her saying she was four or eight pounds overweight; it certainly wasn’t with fat.
In the circle of his arms, she snuggled down; one hand stayed loose at his neck.
The contours of the ground were clear beneath his buttocks, back, and legs. And there was a pebble (or something, under the blanket?) under his shoulder (or was it a prism on his chain)…there…
“You all right?”
“Mmm-hm.” He got it into a depression in the ground; so it didn’t bother him. “I’m fine.”
He was drifting off, when she slid to his side, knees lapped with his shins, head sliding to his shoulder. She moved one hand on his belly beneath the chain. Her breath tickled the hair at the top of his chest. She said: “It’s the kind of question you lose friends for…But I’m curious: Who do you like better in bed, Tak or me?”
He opened his eyes, looked down at what would be the top of her head; her hair brushed his face. He laughed into it, shortly and sharply: “Tak’s been telling tales?”
“Back at the bar,” she said, “while you were in the john.” Actually, she sounded sleepy. “I thought he was joking. Then you said you’d been there in the morning.”
“Mmmm.” He nodded. “What did he say?”
“That you were cooperative. But basically a cold fish.”
“Oh.” He was surprised and felt his eyebrows, and his lower lip, rise. “What do you think?”
She snuggled, a movement that went from her cheek in his armpit (he moved his arm around her), down through her chest (he could feel one breast slide on his chest; one was pressed between them so tightly he wondered if it wasn’t uncomfortable for her), to her hips (his cock rose between his thighs and fell against his belly), to her knees (he clamped his together around hers) to her feet (he pushed his big toe between two of hers: and she held it). “Intense…” she said, pensively “But I like that.”
He put his other arm around her. “I like you better,” and decided that he did. Suddenly he raised his head from the blanket, looked down at her again: “Hey…Do you have any birth-control stuff?”
She began to laugh, softly at first, her face turned into his shoulder, then out full, rolling away from him to her back, laughing in the dark.
“What’s so funny?” He felt the length where she’d been as cold now as it had been warm.
“Yes. I have taken care of the birth-control…‘stuff,’ as you put it.” Her laughter went on, as light as leaf tipping leaf. “It’s just your asking,” she told him at last, “sounds so gallant. Like manners from another age and epoch. I’m not used to it.”
“Oh,” he said, still not quite sure he understood. And, anyway, he felt himself drifting again.
He wasn’t sure if he actually slept, but came awake later with her arm moving sleepily against his; aroused, he turned to her, and at his movement, she pulled herself half on top of him: She had been lying there, already excited.
They made love again; and fell into sleep like stones—till one or the other of them moved; and once more they woke, clinging.
So they made love once more; then talked—about love, about moons (“You can’t see them at all now,” she whispered. “Isn’t that strange?”), about madness—and then made love again.
And slept again.
And woke.
And made love.
And slept.
III House of the Ax
BEGINNING IN THIS TONE is, for us, a little odd, but such news stands out, to your editor’s mind, as the impressive occurrence in our eccentric history. Ernest Newboy, the most notable English-language poet to emerge from Oceania, was born in Auckland in 1916. Sent to school in England, at twenty-one (he tells us) he came back to New Zealand and Australia to teach for six years, then returned to Europe to work and travel.
Mr. Newboy has been three times short-listed for the Nobel Prize, which, if he receives it, will make him one in a line of outstanding figures in the twin fields of diplomacy and letters which includes Asturias, St-John Perse, and Seferis. As a citizen of a comparatively neutral country, he has been visiting the United States at an invitation to sit on the United Nations Cultural Committee which has just adjourned.
Ernest Newboy is also the author of a handful of short stories and novellas, collected and published under the title Stones (Vintage Paperback, 387 pp., $2.95), including the often anthologized long story, “The Monument,” a disturbing and symbolic tale of the psychological and spiritual dissolution of a disaffected Australian intellectual who comes to live in a war-ravaged German town. Mr. Newboy has told us that, though his popular reputation rests on that slim volume of incisive fiction (your editor’s evaluation), he considers them essentially experiments of the three years following the close of the War when he passed through a period of disillusionment with his first literary commitment, poetry. If nothing else, the popularity of Stones and “The Monument” turned attention to the three volumes of poems published in the thirties and forties, brought together in Collected Poetry 1950 (available in Great Britain from Faber and Faber). To repeat something of a catch-phrase that has been echoed by various critics: While writers about him caught the despair of the period surrounding the War, Newboy, more than any other, fixed it in such light that one can lucidly see in it the genesis of so much of the current crisis. From his early twenties, through today, Newboy has produced occasional, literary, and philosophical essays to fill several volumes. They are characterized by a precise and courageous vision. In 1969 he published the book-length poem Pilgrimage, abstruse, surreal, often surprisingly humorous, and, for all its apparent irreverence, a profoundly religious work. After several more volumes of essays, in 1975 the comparatively brief collection of shorter poems written in the thirty-odd years since the War, Rictus, appeared.
A quiet, retiring, scholarly man, Newboy has traveled for most of his life through Europe, North Africa, and the East. His work is studded with images from the Maori and the many cultures he has been exposed to and explored, with his particular personal insight.
Newboy arrived in Bellona yesterday morning and is indefinite about the length of his stay. His comment to us when asked about his visit was, after a reticent smile: “Well, a week ago I wasn’t intending to come here at all. But I suppose I’m happy I did.”
We are honored that a man with such achievement in English letters and a figure of such world admiration should…
“What are you doing?” she mumbled, turning from his side.
“Reading the paper.” Grass creased his elbows. He had wiggled free of the blanket as far as his hips.
“Did it come out yet?” She raised her head in a haze of slept-in hair. “It isn’t that late…?”
“Yesterday’s.”
She dropped her head back. “That’s the trouble with sleeping out. You can’t do it past five o’clock in the morning.”
“I bet it’s eight.” He spread the wrinkled page bottom.
“What—” opened her eyes and squinted—“you reading about?”