His second year in Lawrence Owen was fucking a black girl. He already had a girlfriend, but fidelity was a formality to be observed in public. Everything was permitted in private. There was a stigma attached to interracial dating, and above all to interracial sex, however much everyone pretended there wasn't. There weren't many people bold enough to carry it off, and only because they were making a statement of contempt for the conventions. Owen believed in honoring the conventions, and that meant that any cheating, and especially any miscegenation, had to be hidden.

He loved having the secret, though. He felt hip. But that wasn't the reason for seeing her: she had skin unlike any white woman he'd ever touched. She was in a category by herself, there was no way to describe it; her skin was so soft, it was as if she didn't have pores. Skin so flawlessly frictionless it was beyond anything he'd imagined. He would have run his hands over her for hours, but she hated it; she thought it was weird, and she always made him stop. So he had to make the foreplay last a long time. Then she didn't care how much he touched her. After they came, he'd stop touching her. He was especially careful not to run his hands over her.

He had no idea why she was fucking him. Maybe she got off on the idea of having a white society boy in secret. Maybe her motives were the same as his, the pleasure of the illicit. She had a boyfriend, a revolutionary, almost as black as she was. He spent most of his time planning trips to the Bay Area, then taking the trips. He was going to flunk out soon if he kept this up, and the idea pleased Owen, who wouldn't have to fit his time with Cheryl around her boyfriend's schedule.

The night of the incident he went to a party and she was there. He was surprised, because they didn't have any friends in common. She said that Claude had just left, and wouldn't be back until Sunday night. A big political conference in St. Louis. She was grinning.

"Baby," she said, and grabbed his elbow. "Let's play house for a couple of days."

Her head was cocked to the side and she was wearing mirrored sunglasses, although the party was indoors. She was probably tripping again. Sometimes when she was really wasted she would call him and they'd meet and have sex in his car, or anywhere convenient. Sometimes they drove out to the country and fucked in the middle of a field - wheat, corn, whatever. The sex was weird when she was tripping, but at least she didn't care how much he touched her skin. She enjoyed it.

"Come here," she said, and pulled him toward the door. She laughed loudly. "You're ashamed of me, aren't you? Come on." She took his hand and led him out of the house.

At the little bungalow where she lived with Claude they got naked and got in bed and smoked a joint. Owen lay on his right side and put his leg on top of hers and admired the contrast between their skin colors. She was as dark as anyone he'd ever seen. He noticed from far off that he had an erection, but although he saw it, he scarcely felt it. He was split in half. His mind watched his body like a movie.

"On your back," she said. "I'm horny. That Claude has been worthless lately. You get all three holes. I eat you. Then you eat me. Then you fuck me in the ass, for dessert."

"Yes, ma'am," he said. "You're the boss."

She licked his cock like an ice-cream cone and he started coming back to the sensations he should have been feeling all along. The cock quivered.

"Look at that," she said, pushing the sunglasses up onto her forehead. "Isn't that pretty, all red and pink and purple like that? It's just so Goddamned cute. You can see the veins. All those different colors. This is like, whadda they call it?, Neapolitan? Claude's is just chocolate. It always looks like it was buried in my ass. Same color as my shit."

She let the shades drop over her eyes again. She popped her mouth over the glans and moved her head slowly down. She had on the sunglasses, and her boots, but nothing else, and the sight of her was making his cock painfully hard. Her lips rolled in as they moved down, his cock disappearing into her mouth, and then her lips rolled out as her mouth moved up and his cock reappeared. He groaned and closed his eyes. If he kept watching, he was going to come too fast.

After a while she stopped for no apparent reason and took off the shades and looked at the wall behind him, mumbling something about ancient Egypt. Now he knew she was tripping; her pupils were enormous. She sat back on her heels and stared at the wall. She'd forgotten him. Her breasts were large; they sagged out to the sides. His erection remained, but he lost interest. There was plenty of time.

He rolled another joint, crumbling some hash into it, and they smoked it. Killer dope. His head was totally - what? He couldn't finish a thought. Or start one. All thoughts simultaneous. Simultaneous. Great word. Unformed. Incipient. What else? There were a lot of others, too, all bumping together, out of reach. Out of sight. Where was the dictionary? The word was in there somewhere, unreachable among all the others, but at least it wasn't - dissolved? no, what was the right word? lost? - the way it was in his brain.

He was very, very hungry. The refrigerator was very, very far away. When he rolled sideways and put his feet on the floor, it took a long time, and he wondered how his body managed the trick, how the parts of his body coordinated what they did together at the right times and with the right amounts of effort. Who was working the marionette? He was only the audience. His legs were long and rubbery, but they went on automatic. Now it was time to send the vehicle to the kitchen. In a moment he was there, surprised. He hadn't noticed himself cross the intervening space. He stared at the refrigerator, its marvelous smoothness, the highlights reflected from its perfect white. When he opened the freezer door, it did its little trick - the light switch stayed stuck for an eyeblink, then popped out with an audible click. The interior light came on like an announcement written in Sanskrit, illuminating all the different foods. They looked as unintelligible as the light. Encrypted. Describing themselves in characters he didn't recognize - Tibetan, Burmese, Nordic runes? They weren't really there, they were just implied, but he could write them down if he tried. If he imagined them. He wished he could understand what they were trying to tell him, but he didn't know the alphabets, or the vocabulary. Everything was unintelligible, but he didn't mind. The food was a set of advertisements for itself, richly and meaninglessly hilarious.

He took out a container of frozen strawberries. He couldn't figure out how to open it. It was one of those oval cardboard containers. Finally he cut the top off with a knife and dumped the strawberries in a bowl and took them back to the bedroom. Cheryl was asleep. He dumped the bowl on her snatch. She woke with a scream. She saw what he'd done, and said, "Eat them. Eat me. Both." He smeared the juice on her and licked it off. He put the strawberries in her vagina and sucked them back out, one after another. Hot pussy, cold strawberries. Cheryl moaned and grabbed his hair. She was tearing it out at the roots, but it wasn't painful, it was happening to someone else's head. In a while he stopped eating the strawberries and concentrated on eating her pussy. After she came, she rolled over to the edge of the bed and sighed, her arm hanging off the edge. He ate the rest of the strawberries from the bed with his hand. His fingers were sticky with juice. His face was sticky with strawberries and Cheryl, like some sort of soda fountain concoction: "I'll have a black and red". The taste of the strawberries and Cheryl's pussy was weird. He pulled a pubic hair out of his teeth. Maybe he could talk her into shaving her cunt; then he could get a really good look at it. The sheets were a mess. The carpet next to the bed was spotted red. Cheryl was asleep again. Her mouth was open. He stood with his penis an inch from her mouth and masturbated. When he came, he watched the cum as it hit her mouth and nose. Some of it went in her mouth. She woke up and saw his penis in front of her eyes, dripping, and brushed her hand against her lips and felt his semen. She spit.

"Come here." She beckoned, smiling. When he leaned down, she punched him in the eye. "You're a freak," she said.

He laughed and got back in bed. She fell asleep again. Fun and games. There was always tomorrow morning. He looked forward to some Technicolor dreams in the meantime. His last thought before falling asleep was to hope she hadn't given him a black eye. Probably not. It was a weak punch because the angle was bad.