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Chapter Three

“YOUR POOR MOTHER,” Lola would remark like a lament throughout the month she stayed with me. Her voice trying to sound shocked but managing only to well up with detached amazement and then vaporize into a mist of nostalgia from the days when Rudolph Valentino’s flaring nostrils in The Sheik, when the flashcard said “Must I be valet as well as lover?” were enough to make her come.

“Every time he said that to her, his nostrils would catch – and I would have to go relieve myself. Both physically and manually . . . I was so involved with that man.”

So it was a lot better than whatever was in New Jersey. And I was a virgin when my parents returned, more or less, but not by the next weekend.

“Spit,” Ophelia concluded, “that’s the whole trick to giving head. Just spit.” She had already showed me how to keep the grip light enough to keep the outer skin moving over the inner part. And she’d showed me how to do it so I didn’t have to count on my mouth except for spit . . . and by Saturday afternoon Claude said it worked.

“That’s fantastic!” he said.

“Oh, it’s just spit,” I said.

“No,” he said, “no really, that is fan-fucking-tastic!”

“Thank you,” I said.

Spit was my specialty. Spit I could understand. Spit was so easy.