Sexual Pensées

Despondent after two nights of degradation in a brothel in Milan, he was consoled by another patron. "Do not despair, " said the man. "This is the first step on the road back to God." He did not believe this for a moment-- but decided it was as good a place to start as any.

In his youth it had taken him some time to locate, much less comprehend, the function of the clitoris. A bit of finesse along these lines would have saved him-not to speak of the women in his life-a great deal of inconvenience.

His first wife left him for another man. His second for a woman. He considered this to be progress.

Only once had he been able to ejaculate repeatedly over the course of an evening. Hed met the woman at a crowded bistro. She stumbled--he ran to assist her. They returned to his flat and made love, again and again, throughout the night. No sooner had he come than he would be erect again. How was this possible? Was it her eyes, which were a striking color of blue? Her lean model's body? Or his awareness that she was scheduled to leave for Italy in the morning? And that it was unlikely he would ever see her again?

Remarks that had been made to him--over the course of a lifetime--that continued to burn in his brain: "If you need someone to sleep with you, call me, any hour of the day or night. " "Of course I'd like to fuck. What else is there to do?" "You poor darling, you haven't had your morning blow job."

Only once had she won substantially at blackjack. It was early evening. She sat alone in a San Juan casino, playing three hands to amuse herself. She could tell the dealer admired her; in the most subtle manner, he indicated when it was wise for her to draw, when it was not. In a brief period of time, she won a great deal of money. But when her lover appeared, the dealer's face fell, and she felt that she had betrayed him. Not, of course, to the extent of returning the money.

The size of his penis had never concerned him. It was bigger than his business partner's. That was enough.

Overheard at a hotel bar in Miami Beach: "I can understand him sleeping with my wife--but my mother?"

She excused herself to take a call from her lover, a utility infielder for a major league baseball team. Had the man been in the starting line-up, he might, respectfully, have gotten to his feet and lit a cigarette. As it was, he continued, snobbishly, to lick her vagina.

A friend complained that although he asked an escort service to send only blue-eyed blondes to his apartment, they repeatedly ignored his instructions. Instead they dispatched a series of tall black transvestites. When asked if he sent them back, he refused to comment.

She was seated beside a socialite who was said to be a descendant of the early settlers at Plymouth Rock. "What do you do in life?" he asked. As a lark, she replied, "I'm a retired porno star." He turned away frostily and said no more to her throughout the dinner. But as she got up from the table, he asked if she was involved with anyone at the moment.

Though she knew better--and there was evidence to the contrary--she continued to believe that she could seduce the occasional gay man who attracted her.

She was one of the first applicants for a job as a waitress in a new Manhattan restaurant. In order to be hired, she was told, she would have to give oral sex to the owner. She declined--and was disturbed by the experience. Even more so when she noted how quickly the restaurant had become fully staffed.

She'd had a brief affair with a professor. Each night she would arrive at his flat, fully dressed for dinner. After a civilized interval, she would cross the room in silence, lift her skirt, straddle him--and he would enter her. Only in this manner did they make love. But it was enough.

It was her feeling that men from the South were more ebullient and demonstrative about sex. "Great God in heaven and hallelujah," she recalled a man from Mississippi crying out, "you are removing your panties."

The model he dated took pride in being well-read, a rarity, she claimed, in her profession. Nonetheless, he began to take notice of other models who worked for the agency. "You wouldn't like them," she said. "They're all stupid. They do nothing but lie around and have their legs waxed." It was one of the great mistakes of his life that he believed her.

She could not derive pleasure from the sex scenes in a novel (no matter how skillfully rendered) if the author's dust jacket photograph did not appeal to her.

After they had spent the night in her apartment--making love--they spoke about buying a house and spending their lives together. They would be inseparable. They were quiet for a moment. She asked then if she could hold his supply of cocaine until their next meeting. He refused, feeling that such an arrangement was too great a commitment.

She decided not to hire a Hollywood agent whose proposal had been as follows: "Let me represent you and I'll spread your name across this town like manure."

He presented his theory to a woman he had just met in a cocktail lounge. "Sex is simply one more arena of behavior. What happens between a man and a woman in bed proceeds naturally with what's come before. There are no surprises." The woman looked at him in astonishment. Everything that had ever happened to her in bed had come as a surprise.

At Morton's restaurant in Los Angeles she had lunch with a director whose recent film had been a box office disappointment. After drinks, he sat back expansively and formed a circle with his arms, as if to describe a tree trunk. "I feel," he said, "as if my cock is this big." She wondered how big his cock would have felt if his film had been successful.

After they had known each other for a year, she began silently-during sexual intercourse-to compose Academy Award acceptance speeches. She took this as a sign that their affair was losing its intensity.

They were leaving her small apartment in Manhattan when he suddenly became crazed by the look of her. For the first time in their affair, he tore off her clothing and penetrated her anally. Thinking he had violated her, he was appalled by his behavior. Unperturbed, she had pulled up her blue jeans and said, "Thanks. I needed that." At that moment he predicted--correctly as it turned out--that she would become a major force in Hollywood.

He was dogged in his pursuit of women--and frustrated that he could not bring the same intensity to his tennis game.

The starlet told her agent she refused to do full-frontal nudity. "However," she added, "my tush is negotiable."

She extricated herself from a tight situation (a producer had cornered her in his Beverly Hills hotel suite) by warning him that she had been trained by the Mossad. "My 'kill time,'" she said, "has been certified at eight seconds." Upon hearing this, he backed off and asked if she would like to have some dinner.

In Malibu one summer, he thought he had found the ultimate starlet: yellow hair, green eyes, freckles, all of it. But when she asked him to post bond for her teenage brothers who were under indictment for armed robbery, he decided to end their brief affair.

She had some difficulty with the actor Paul Newman's response to an interviewer's question about marital infidelity. "Why eat hamburger when you've got steak at home?" Undeniably, the sentiment was commendable. But wasn't it unfair to those who prefer hamburger?

Nothing infuriated Mario Puzo more than people who sought counseling for sex addiction. "They should get down on their knees and thank God they have such an affliction."

He found it off-putting when she referred to her vagina as a "knish."

As a young bachelor in New York, he was treated by a dental hygienist who also provided him with a full social agenda--arranging dates for him with her many attractive girlfriends. But it was the hygienist herself, with her fresh smile and magical hands, who interested him--and she was unavailable.

On a busy street in Manhattan, he noticed a film star he knew slightly, soliciting women as they left a popular department store. This surprised him. The man was known to have had affairs with some of the most beautiful women in the world--and presumably could have had his pick of others. "The way I look at it," the star explained, "if I can score one out of eight, I'm ahead of the game.

She was familiar with the observation of philosophers: Consummation of the sex act is not half so pleasurable as the lustful anticipation of it. But her experience did not bear this out.