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dear sweet—makes me brush my gums with peroxide.”
    “Well, goodbye to all that. You don’t do it so famously if the truth be told.”
    “Not so famously as your little girls?”
    “Not nearly as well as five I could name.”
    The mottling came back to her neck and shoulders. A powerful odor of rot and musk and something much more violent came fromher. It was like the scent of the carnivore in a zoo. This last odor was fearful—it had the breath of burning rubber.
    “Isn’t that odd?” asked Deborah. “I haven’t heard a word of complaint from any new beau.”
    From the day of our separation she had admitted to no lover. Not until this moment. A sharp sad pain, almost pleasurable, thrust into me. It was replaced immediately by a fine horror.
    “How many do you have?” I asked.
    “At the moment, pet, just three.”
    “And you …” But I couldn’t ask it.
    “Yes, darling. Every last little thing. I can’t tell you how shocked they were when I began. One of them said: ‘Where did you ever learn to root about like that? Didn’t know such things went on outside a Mexican whorehouse.’ ”
    “Shut your fucking mouth,” I said.
    “Lately I’ve had the most famous practice.”
    I struck her open-handed across the face. I had meant—some last calm intention of my mind had meant—to make it no more than a slap, but my body was speaking faster than my brain, and the blow caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed. She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged. Her head struck me in the stomach (setting off a flash in that forest of nerves) and then she drove one powerful knee at my groin (she fought like a prep-school bully) and missing that, she reached with both hands, tried to find my root and mangle me.
    That blew it out. I struck her a blow on the back of the neck, a dead cold chop which dropped her to a knee, and then hooked an arm about her head and put a pressure on her throat. She was strong, I had always known she was strong, but now her strength was huge. For a moment I did not know if I could hold her down, she had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air, which in that position is exceptional strength evenfor a wrestler. For ten or twenty seconds she strained in balance, and then her strength began to pass, it passed over to me, and I felt my arm tightening about her neck. My eyes were closed. I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort.
    One of her hands fluttered up to my shoulder and tapped it gently. Like a gladiator admitting defeat. I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there, some quiver of jeweled cities shining in the glow of a tropical dusk, and I thrust against the door once more and hardly felt her hand leave my shoulder, I was driving now with force against that door: spasms began to open in me, and my mind cried out then, “Hold back! you’re going too far, hold back!” I could feel a series of orders whip like tracers of light from my head to my arm, I was ready to obey, I was trying to stop, but pulse packed behind pulse in a pressure up to thunderhead; some black-biled lust, some desire to go ahead not unlike the instant one comes in a woman against her cry that she is without protection came bursting with rage from out of me and my mind exploded in a fireworks of rockets, stars, and hurtling embers, the arm about her neck leaped against the whisper I could still feel murmuring in her throat, and
crack
I choked her harder, and
crack
I choked her again, and
crack
I gave her payment—never halt now—and
crack
the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea, a bleak string of salts. I was