Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 96
Considering the fact that the cock is the most critical link in our
chain of survival, the variety of shapes, colors, sizes, characteristics,
dispositions and responses found in this rudimentary tool are
much greater than those shown by any other organ of the body.
They were black, white, red, yellow, lavender, brown, warty,
wrinkled, comely and silken, and they seemed, like any crowd of
men on a street at closing time, to represent youth, age, victory,
disaster, laughter and tears. There were the frenzied and
compulsive pumpers, the long-timers who caressed themselves for
half an hour, there were the groaners and the ones who sighed,
and most of the men, when their trigger was pulled and the
fusillade began, would shake, buck, catch their breath and make
weeping sounds, sounds of grief, of joy, and sometimes death
rattles. There was some rightness in having the images of the lovers
around them opaque. They were universal, they were phantoms,
and any skin sores, or signs of cruelty, ugliness, stupidity or
beauty, could not be seen. Farragut went here regularly after Jody
was gone.
When Farragut arced or pumped his rocks into the trough he
endured no true sadness—mostly some slight disenchantment at
having spilled his energy onto iron. Walking away from the
trough, he felt that he had missed the train, the plane, the boat. He
had missed it. He experienced some marked physical relief or
improvement: the shots cleared his brain. Shame and remorse had
nothing to do with what he felt, walking away from the trough.
What he felt, what he saw, was the utter poverty of erotic
reasonableness. That was how he missed the target and the target
was the mysteriousness of the bonded spirit and the flesh. He
knew it well. Fitness and beauty had a rim. Fitness and beauty had
a dimension, had a floor, even as the oceans have a floor, and he
had committed a trespass. It was not unforgivable—a venal
trespass—but he was reproached by the majesty of the realm. It
was majestic; even in prison he knew the world to be majestic. He
had taken a pebble out of his shoe in the middle of mass. He