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the difference between the bedroom and the wet dream. Here, then, one final pair
of quotes, on the theme of how power and control shift under the most intense and
intimate pressures:
1)
I was dealing, it seemed, with some kind of masochist, or bully,
or combination. . . . To me belonged, as big as a thumb held up
to the eye, her pallid moistened body with its thousand jiggles
and many membranous apertures. . . . I love the passive position,
the silken heavy sway above me of pendulous breasts, the tent of
female hair formed when her Olmec face lowered majestically
to mine, the earnest and increasingly self-absorbed grind of an
ass too big for my hands. Being our second time, it took longer,
giving me ample opportunity to keep moaning her name., Ann.
Ann! God, Ann. Oh Ann, Ann. Annnn’‘the, n’s, the, a. She took it
in stride by now, making no comment; she had slept with enough
men to know we’re all, one way or another, kinky.
2)
She unzipped his pants., Stop, he said., Wait. . . . This was not
what he had in mind, but to refuse would make him seem somehow
less virile than she. Queasily, he stripped off her clothes
and put their bodies in a viable position. He fastened his teeth
on her breast and bit her. . . . He could tell that she was trying to
like being bitten, but that she did not. He gnawed her breast. She
screamed sharply. They screwed. They broke apart and regarded
each other warily. . . . He realized what had been disturbing him
about her. With other women whom he had been with in similar
situations, he had experienced a relaxing sense of emptiness
within them that had made it easy for him to get inside them
and, once there, smear himself all over their innermost territory
until it was no longer theirs but his. His wife did not have this
empty quality, yet the gracious way in which she emptied herself
for him made her submission, as far as it went, all the more
poignant. This exasperating girl, on the other hand, contained
a tangible somethingness that she not only refused to expunge,
but that seemed to willfully expand itself so that he banged into
it with every attempt to invade her
.
No one will be fooled this time. The author of the first passage is inarguably a
man, since women rarely think of the female body in terms of its, many membranous
apertures. And few women, I imagine, define, kinky widely enough to include
a male taking the bottom position and engaging in some spontaneous, if not exactly
erotic, verbalization. The second passage goes a bit further. A breast is bitten, it’s
not clear who is calling the shots, and the male character has a truly nasty moment
of realization about the nature of sex. This realization so closely resembles female
paranoia about male sexuality that we may suspect the writer is a woman. But that
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