By now my head is lodged dourly between her shoulder and the pillow – no flair, no finessing, just cock to the grindstone. Two times two is four. Three times two, moreover, is six. Stop kissing her mouth, work on ears. Let me come. Stop all movement and kiss her meditatively, in slow motion, so that she differentiates it and realizes what is happening: here I am kissing you. Ninety per cent withdrawal, prod her clitoris with my male reproductive organ, feel her contract, smile potently in the half-light. Withdraw to irreducible helmet depth feel her muscles clench and arms tighten pleadingly on my back withdraw till almost out – then – wait – boof. She goes stiff then floppy. Pound like an engine, go dog go. Hand on stomach between shuffling webs of pubic hair, take pressure off, pull legs up too sexy slacken calm down. Fast for three strokes then slow for three then fast. Slow and good, then quick and nasty, then slow and good. Suddenly she shouts, lifts and widens her legs, calls from the end of the world, hands knead my buttocks don’t do that. Two thirteens twenty-six, three thirteens forty-nine, thirteen twenty-sixes forty-two. (As regards the physical aspect, by the way, this is all utterly intolerable.) Industrial accidents, pimples, bee-keeping, pus crapping Tampax exams … Pick a poet – Because I do not hope to turn the mermaids round from the back singing because I do not hope to keep your hands off me I do not think bloody sheets that they will sing because there can’t be anything left I do not hope to turn the pain the pain. Body strung out on a giant whip, the buckled praying mantis soon to be eaten. I grow old I grow old shall I feel her fingernails hear her neigh give me strength O my people affirm before the world no more and deny between the socks not long for the garden where end loves all ten more five more the bathroom in the garden the garden in the desert of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed. (I come now, a token sperm in the rubber nozzle; but that’s hardly the point.) Tossed along with the strength of ten men, every second lucid agony, grating thrusts, the crunch of genitals. Then I surfed helplessly on the wave of her climax, pounded and tugged at as it broke by a thousand alien currents. And she came under my dead body.
Rachel’s eyes were streaming. She smiled a shamed, apologetic smile. I tried to say something but had breath enough only to mouth it. She saw, though, in the half-light. ‘Oh. I love you, too,’ she said.
I feel steadier now. Perhaps The Rachel Papers aren’t in such a mess after all. With some interleaving of Conquests and Techniques: A Synthesis, and an index… ? When I’m twenty this will be a thing of the past. The teenage boy is entitled to a certain amount of disorder, and, anyway, I’ll mellow tomorrow.
‘Something particularly revolting gone wrong ?’
‘Jesus,’ said Mr Alistair Dyson, fanning his face with my dental card. ‘What did your mother eat when she was having you? Custard and sugar cubes?’
‘Bananas and ice-cream ?’ I joined in.
‘No.’ He lit a cigarette. There’s calcium in ice-cream.’
That bad, eh?’
I knew my dentist quite well. I knew him quite well because I had been coming down from Oxford about six times a year since I was ten so that he could put in and take out all the lousy braces and plates and other crap with which he tried to tame my mouth. Alistair was one of the youngest cosmetic denticians in the Wimpole Street area you know. (At his surgery he had the newest and most awesome equipment, including the retractable white space-ship sofa-chair which had now moulded itself to the contours of my body.) I liked him; he made me laugh. I respected him, too, for being (I imagined) the only British dentist to have exploited the choric, demonic-artificer aspect of the modern dentist, so popular in recent American fiction. Accordingly he poked all his least hideous women patients. But he was pushing thirty-five now.