The Breast Read Online Free PDF

wasn’t even that I would no longer be myself—I would no longer be anyone. I would have become craving flesh and nothing more.
    So, with Dr. Klinger’s assistance, I set about to extinguish—and if not to extinguish, at least (in Klinger’s favorite word) to tolerate —the desire to insert my nipple into somebody’s vagina. But with all my will power—and, like my mother’s, it can be considerable when I marshal my forces—I was helpless once that bath began. Finally it was decided that nipple and areola should be sprayed with a mild anesthetic before Miss Clark started preparing me to meet the day. And this in fact did sufficiently reduce sensation so as to give me the upper hand in the battle against these impractical urges—a battle I won, however, only when the doctors decided, with my consent, to change my nurse.
    That did the trick. Inserting my nipple into either the mouth or the anus of Mr. Brooks, the new male nurse, is something I just can’t imagine with anything like the excitement I would imagine my nipple in Claire, or even in Miss Clark, though I realize that the conjunction of male mouth and female nipple can hardly be described as a homosexual act. But such is the power of my past and its taboos, and the power over my imagination of women and their apertures, that I am able now—temporarily anesthetized and in the hands of a man—to receive my morning ablutions like any other invalid, more or less.
    And there is still Claire, angelic imperturbable Claire, to “make love” to me, with her mouth if not with her vagina. And isn’t that sufficient? Isn’t that incredible enough? Of course I dream of MORE, dream of it all day long—but what good is MORE to me anyway, when there is no orgasmic conclusion to my excitement, but only this sustained sense of imminent ejaculation in which I writhe from the first second to the last? Actually I have come by now to settle for less rather than MORE. I think I had better if I don’t want Claire to come to see herself as nothing but the female machine summoned each evening to service a preposterous organism that once was David Kepesh. Surely the less time she spends at my nipple, the greater my chances of remaining something other to her (and to myself) than that nipple. Consequently, it is only for half of her hour-long visits that we now engage in sex—the rest of the time we spend in conversation. If I can, I should like to cut the sex play by half yet again. If the excitement is always at the same pitch, neither increasing nor decreasing in intensity once it’s begun, what’s the difference if I experience it for fifteen rather than thirty minutes? What’s the difference if it is for only one minute?
    Mind you, I am not yet equal to such renunciation, nor am I convinced that it is desirable even from Claire’s point of view. But it is something, I tell you, simply to entertain the idea after the torment I have known. Even now there are still moments, infrequent but searing, when I have all I can do not to cry out while her lips are rhythmically palpating my nipple, “Fuck on it, Ovington! With your cunt!” But I don’t, I don’t. If Claire were of a mind to, she would have made the suggestion herself already. After all, she is still only a fourth-grade teacher at the Bank Street School, a girl brought up in Schenectady, New York, a Phi Beta Kappa at Cornell. No sense causing her to consider too carefully the grotesqueries she has already, miraculously, declared herself willing to participate in with the likes of me.
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    SOMETIME BETWEEN the first and the second of the two major “crises” I have survived so far here in the hospital—if hospital it is—I was visited by Arthur Schonbrunn, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook, and someone I have known since Palo Alto, when he was the young hot-shot Stanford professor and I was there