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kick out of introducing a new friend to my old friends. I had never yet turned someone I loved on to Callahan’s, simply because in the last dozen years I hadn’t come to love anyone that I hadn’t met in Callahan’s, but I expected it to be at least twice as nice-and I already knew that I loved Mary. I was beginning to be in love with her (if you get the distinction), the first time I’d been in love since I killed my family, and the prospect of introducing a lover to Mike and the gang sounded heavenly. Just a sliver of a thought, this, that resonated every time the faint sound of a familiar laugh reached me, a warm certainty that there could have been no finer place to fall in love, and to make love for the first time, than where I was.
    God, she was a sweet pillowy armful! I’ve had a few of the bony women everyone else claims to like: nothing to squeeze, nothing to admire, I had to be careful with my weight, I was afraid to let go for fear I might bruise something, and even so my pubic bone got sore. A woman like Mary, now: you can roll around on a woman like that. You can let yourself go, secure in the awareness that the system is roomy and cushioned, and you can explore forever without running out of things to see and appreciate, and you find, time after time, so often that I’m tempted to say always, that passion and compassion and sensuality each double for every pound above so-called “optimum weight.” Take your skinny women and stick them up the same receptacle with hard beds and cold showers and red-line exercise and “natural” food and all the other things everyone earnestly pursues in the belief that pleasure and pain are nature’s diabolical attempts to trick us, that the less you enjoy a thing the better it must be for you; take ‘em and stick ‘em, and give me something a man can enjoy!
    Our lovemaking was about as good as a first time can be. It was not the telepathic experience it could become with practice and study, of course-pethaps even less so than a simple sporting event might have been. I spent most of my time in my own head, startled by the unexpected magnitude of my own need, and~then bemused by the discovery that hers was even greater. Phe~ii~enčy vs. tenderness ratio definitely tilted to the left, and there seemed to be some question as to who was raping whom. It got pretty athletic in spots. (Doubtless noisy as well, though I’m sure the rain blanketed most of it.) Most of the information that we passed back and forth came directly from the spinal column or just a little bit higher up.
    But tenderness was in there too, and caring, and sharing, and something oddly like nostalgia, and so all in all it was about as nice a last time as you could have asked for, -too. Our afterglow-durations synched, which is always nice, and we picked little roofing-pebbles from each other’s backs, for all -the world like monkeys hunting lice. In the process we magically dried out again. It turned out that we both smoked the same brand of cigarette, but when we took two from the pack, Finn’s magic selectively failed and they soaked through. We wasted two more before giving up, then I cautiously experimented and learned that a joint was immune. Opinionated man, Finn-but maybe he knows something. We dressed while we toked, and when we were dressed we started drifting over toward the stairwell.
    I stopped. “Mary, let’s not go down yet. Once we do it’ll be wall-to-wall introductions and smiles and drinks and toasts. I want you to meet my friends-but I haven’t-had a chance to get to know you yet.”
    “As the old joke goes, it’s been the equivalent of a formal introduction.”
    “You know what I mean. I don’t know where you live or where you grew up or what you want to do with your life or how many husbands you have-hell, I don’t know your last name!”
    “I don’t know yours.”
    “My point exactly. The inmates downstairs, lovable and extraordinary though they be, will keep-let’s