An hour and a half later, beer and chips jockeying for equal blame for my incipient diarrhea, I drifted out of the dingy cavern, and I swam on a heady song that was yet to be composed. I clutched her memory in my fist. I exulted with the knowledge that she had my phone number, a bomb in her hands. As I spun my bike out of the park, her Honda City crunched to a halt ahead of me. I'm not ashamed to admit I left my bike there and lurched myself into her car through an open invitation.
She didn't need my number after all, because we went back to her baroque bungalow on the outskirts of town and made rabid love on satin sheets splashed with luminescent paintings of dinosaurs making love.
As she straddled me for the fourth time that night, her eyes still hazed, I looked to her ceiling, and in the process looked into her. And as I came with short, poky rasps of breath, eyes clenched shut, I could still see the mural above us, a classical depiction of pre-coitus where Zeus leered and loomed over Aphrodite with a cue stick between his legs. Aphrodite, with Mona Lisa's smug, expectant smile, looking ravished and satisfied.
Am I to be crucified for learning too fast, Suzanne? With her as entourage, watching me play every day, it wasn't difficult to put a new spin on things. I polished my timing, practiced every variant of poke and jab, nudge and thrust, with infinite patience and beauty behind me. Through a post-coital fog, I sharpened my skill and lent spring to a sagging step. I learned to breathe into my shots and watch the balls go in, and her gaze shifted, almost imperceptibly.
