her first meeting with Lou, in which that quality of her personality was most sharply underlined.
She had gone to his apartment, caught up in the slight sense of degradation involved. She was going to take her clothes off, lie on her back, and let a complete stranger fuck her as he wanted. And she would enjoy it, not only the sensations, but the experience of giving herself like a whore. “I wonder what it is inside me,” she thought, “that gives me pleasure in this kind of scene? Or is it that I am in touch with something that exists in all women and only I have the honesty to admit it?” It was a far cry from her teenage years when sex was considered a function of what was called love; a girl was supposed to like a boy before she let him touch her. It took many years before she understood that liking him was synonymous with wanting him to touch her. And that was the thing about Lou. She actually liked him, from the first moment she saw him, and wanted him to touch her. He was almost fifty, heavy-set, with thick features, but his physical appearance was not important.
He mixed very strong martinis, and made a great show of the splendors of his apartment. She was impressed with his obvious wealth—by the opulent Moorish furniture, by the expensive rugs, by the nine rooms and balcony which overlooked Central Park. The entire place was wired like a single electrical gadget, with stereos, radios, videotape recorders, vibrating beds, and even a movie projector. To her chagrin, as he took her coat and had her sit on his seventeen-foot kangaroo-hide couch, her knees wobbled and she felt that unmistakable quickening between her thighs which told her that her cunt was beginning to secrete.
He brought out a pile of manuscripts and while they worked their way through a third drink apiece, he talked about his concept of pornography. “It is a valid function,” he said. “Sex is at the core of the human condition. After all, what are we but the result of a meeting of cock and cunt? Sex is our origin, and our continuing fascination with it is perfectly understandable. I publish over three hundred books a year. There must be thousands of titles coming out yearly in this country alone. And considering that there are a very limited number of things that can be done with the human body, and that most sex books are a repetition of the same behavior, it is amazing that millions of people keep buying them and reading them. It proves conclusively that sex is the most important of our involvements, and pornography is perhaps the most vital of all the arts. Of course, given the nature of our civilization, it is considered the lowest.”
She ran her eyes over one of the manuscripts. It was titled Sentimental Swinger, and she opened it at random. “Marcia knew that she had lost him,” it read, “her own sweet Jim. As he pressed his cock between the undulating cheeks of the other woman’s ass, he closed his eyes and moaned, and Marcia knew that he no longer cared who it was that gave him so much pleasure. ‘Is this how it all ends?’ she asked herself, ‘the so-called sexual freedom, the experimentation? Wasn’t it better when a man and woman had sex because they loved each other, and not because they were hungry for excitement?’ But even as she watched the thoughts go through her mind, one of the men at the orgy they had come to had moved up behind her and was running his finger up and down the crack of her cunt, teasing the outer lips, pushing slightly into the moist center. And as her heart broke, her thighs moved; as her dream of romance faded, her scream of lust welled in her throat. Fuck me,’ she moaned, ‘you big-cocked stranger who doesn’t even want to know my name. Shove your hard prick up my cunt and make me come like crazy.’ He pushed her to the ground. ‘First suck it,’ he said. And then with tears in her eyes, listening to her husband’s groans of passion, she curled her tongue to lick the underbelly of