Richard Kostelanetz

Sex in life was never as ecstatic as sex in her imagination; the men in her bed were never as spectacular as those in her dreams. She pitched her bathing-suited crotch forward in a way that suggested it would soon be penetrated by a penis that had not been there before. She wanted him to know that when he spoke about sex, he was incomprehensible; but when he spoke about God, everything he said. was perfectly clear. He never dared go outside without affixing his codpiece. A single woman in her late thirties, she now sought the casual sexual experiences she had avoided twenty years before. He realized that, even though most men thought her homely, she must rank among the sexist, most seducible women in history. Penetrated from behind for the first time, he screamed a continuous scream whose tone changed from agony to pleasure. She preferred that he spill his seed where she could later collect it. Curious he was about the color and quality of her underwear. Familiar with human bodies, both in detail and as wholes, ever since her days in medical school, she took particular pleasure in fingering female breasts. She slept with me not because she liked men but because she felt obliged to prove to herself that, in fact, she was not lesbian. Once they saw two hippos making love, they felt less self-conscious of their own obesity. He relished the summer's heat for stimulating his virility but abhorred the humidity for making sex so messy. As twins they were each other's best friends. He vibrated like a pneumatic drill. She made life-sized nude sculptures of every man she had ever loved. She frequently said "pubic" for "public." He appeared more confident about love than sex, about recipes than eating and about enterprise than profit. He claimed to have seduced more of the world's most beautiful women than any other man in history. His press agent said he died of a heart attack; everyone else knew that he had, in fact, committed suicide. As she stood on the cliff, overlooking the city, she remembered everything that had happened to her there--the canvases she painted, the stories she wrote, the food she ate, the lovers she had, the people she had met and argued with; from that vantage point, all of her past became suddenly present. Her aliases were so perfect, her "cover" so complete, that no one would ever identify her as an agent of a foreign power.

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