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hands up and down my stomach until I feel something intricate within break and begin to spill out in small, shocking waves, “Walter, you don’t have to be this way if you don’t want to. There’s so much pain in you; we should try to cleanse the pain rather than make you hurt. You don’t have to hurt, Walter,” she says and comes against me. I can feel the wetness of her box as she flexes and unflexes her legs. Momentarily limp, there is nothing that I can do but hold her, look at the walls, look at the window, look at the outlines of the city as I listen to the creak of the hotel elevator and wonder how many scenes have been enacted in this very bed, scenes that to be sure, all of the participants felt to be consequential, and now many of those participants dead, locked in ashes, facing the sky, all passions resolved in the simple cloak of renunciation and mystery.

XIII
    The most popular feature of our newspaper and its competitors is the “personals” section, five or six pages of classified material at the end of the issue in which a diverse group of individuals and corporations advertise services or make pleas for companions. Most of the acts or goods solicited are obscene, of course, but a network of euphemism has grown up around the suggestions over the past decade and since the newspaper itself emphasizes that it takes no position on its advertisers and no responsibility for outcome, we stand well within the law of obscenity on this point.
    The ads, for all their seeming diversity, break into two groups: there are corporations which (under several different names) advertise sexual goods and satisfactions, masturbation machines, dildoes, creams to retard orgasm, life-size inflatable female dolls to take into the shower and so on … and then there are individuals (almost always male) who conceive of sexual connection as a more random, less systematized kind of affair; they call for companions of various inclinations and advertise their own qualifications which usually have to do with the size of genitalia although the question of emotional sensitivity is not to be overlooked. The ads come in steadily, a mournful stream of mail, checks for advance payment enclosed, across my desk, and replies to the mail come in as well to the box numbers which our newspaper maintains at an additional charge to facilitate communication between interests. The mail to the box numbers seldom equals in volume the number of original ads, and there are whole strings of advertisements (usually taken by single men in search of afternoon female companionship) which never receive any replies whatsoever, filling me with a kind of vagrant sadness. It seems to me that for an individual, the act of placing an ad is in itself such a difficult admission that our advertisers are entitled to all the help they can get. Of course this may be projecting a trifle; I cannot conceive of placing such an ad myself at any stage of my life although it is true that I found Virginia herself through an open call for employees published in the classified section of the newspaper. In this way, I was sure that I would find someone preselected, so to speak, for the job.
    As I occasionally do, I opened a letter at random the other morning and found that it was an advertisement requested by a young man in search of a homosexual partner. (Homosexuals in the columns of this newspaper seem to severely outnumber heterosexuals although the paper itself is purely heterosexual; I do not know exactly what to make of this. Are our homosexual readers settling for second best in their choice of reading material or in their selection of a sexual partner? This might be worth working out at length at some time in the future although I hardly have the time to come to grips with abstractions.) The text of the advertisement read:
Young man, 29, slim build, well-hung, is a member of the rear-guard. Seeks similar partner for fun and games, possible longer-lasting relationship.