It may be that after all this time, and after all that has happened, I do not remember that first time as it really was. Perhaps I remember it as it should have been; we do that sometimes, all of us. Whatever I've added, if I've added anything, was the right touch; the memory is perfect:

Midmorning, late spring in the Catskills and the mist burning away, but still there an underwater-green with the rich new greenness of the spring-struck trees radiating through it. A broken old stone fence, green-grey, and at the corner of the two roads, he sat naked. He alone in all that green was red, was reds: fine hair down to his earlobes copper-orange, slab-sided cheeks picking a ripe-peach-red out of the bars of sun, gold-red on the down of his chest and lower belly. He was sitting absolutely boneless, comfortably round-shouldered, and with his chin gone to bed on his collarbones.

And—maybe this is the part I've added, but it remembers like a real memory, and I'd like to think it happened that way—around his head flew a circle of white moths, turned pale, pale apple-green in that light and amazing against that hair. I stopped the car. I don't think it was because he was naked.

Because I couldn't help myself, I called to him, “Hey!”

He raised his head, swiftly but not startled, and opened his eyes; then, as part of a flowing sequence without stopping anywhere, he placed his hands on the stones and lifted himself and vaulted down, landing lightly and already walking. Walking, his body moved forward as if on tracks, not bobbing up and down the way most of the rest of us do. If his shoulders had been the least bit wider they would have been too wide; if his body were by a finger's breadth flatter it would have been too flat. He made no attempt to cover his nakedness and he wasn't displaying it, either; it just didn't matter to him. The moths whisked away in the wood as he stepped out in the road.

Then: his eyes. Think back now; in all the talk, in everything you have read or heard about Godbody, has anyone ever used a color-word for Godbody's eyes? Someone with hair that color is called a redhead, but redheads don't have red hair; it's orange or russet or brown-gold, and you just can't say that this man had red eyes and be right. Cinamon, maybe, but that's too brown. Sherry is too yellow, ruby is too red. His eyes were a rich color, that's all you can say, and warm.

At last I looked at her; I took her elbows and looked down into her face, her dear face. Liza is one of those women who is the envy and despair of all the other women her age; she always, always would look younger than she was and younger than all of them. It wasn't only the small, slender, firm body and the smooth skin and clear eyes; it was the way she carried herself, the way, when she moved or spoke, she released energy rather than stoking it up and eking it out like the rest of us. She kept her masses of blue-fired black hair rolled and folded up into a gleaming dark helmet and her eyes were not green, as they seemed to be, but an illuminated blue full of so many flecks of gold that they seemed to be green.

She was trying to say something: “Dan, I don't know what you're thinking. If you think I was, if you think he—let me go. Let me go!” or some such. I kissed, I corked up her words and her breath with my mouth. Her eyes, so huge and close, were big enough for me and a dozen like me to tumble into and drown; I tumbled, I drowned.

With a deep and quiet joy I recognized the beginnings of my own climax, and here again it was new, new. For usually it was rush upward toward the final explosion, with perhaps a split-second pause of almost unbearable sensitivity before the ejaculation—and that was a short series of electric thumps and a complete fall from whatever heights to the ever-present here-and-now. Thinking of the way it used to be, a phrase occurs to me: “I never left home.” But now…

Now I rode no rockets to a quick burst of color and a cinder-fall. They say that when a three-hundred-foot tidal wave struck somewhere in the Pacific, fishermen eleven miles were unaware of its passage, so gently and massively were they raised and let down. This is the way I was carried up to a height I had never before known; it was that all-but-unbearable point of sensitivity that I had flicked past so many times before; but this time I rested there forever, while time stopped. It was from this altitude that my joybursts were launched—not the abrupt sequence of little gouts of relief, but long sibilant syllables arcing up and out into a universe I had never known existed. Four, five of them, another, and then an interminable rest on that summit, and then one more, and then the last.

I had always been silent before; now, I shouted.

[…]

Then the great wave let me down, let me down peacefully and easily into the presence of my wife and my world and a sunshowered here and now.

She cried out, and here was Dan Currier, professional (obsessional) consoler: a cry was to be heeded, the affliction of pain was to be stopped and existing pain consoled. This is everything I was and everything I meant to be. But now at my first great delving lunge, miraculously made swift and easy, she cried out, and I withdrew almost all the way and lunged again so deep and so hard that it bruised my pubic bone against hers, and again she cried out, louder. Of course there was pain, that shattering drive of flesh into flesh and bone against bone, and my great weight on her and my big arms locked around her so that the cry was forced out as shockingly as it was driven out by whatever was moving her. How, then she could take in enough air to do what she did I can not explain, but she cried out again and again, each cry like a plucked string, sharply appearing and fading, four, five … seven of them, diminishing. And with each cry, that incredible gripping inside, but harder, stronger than I had ever known it, so much so that I could realize, now, that I had not felt those earlier ones, but merely sensed them.

She was silent at last, and drenched with sweat from head to foot. I took my weight off her, raising myself on my elbows and placing my hands on the sides of her face and locking my gaze with hers. In hers I saw only a great wonder—no fear, no pain—and in this and in the strange slack slightly swollen new shape of her lips, such love as I have never known.

I began to move slowly, deeply inside her, and then, like a slow-motion reenactment of that first great drive, withdrew almost all the way and pressed inward again, right to the root. Each time I penetrated to that depth her eyes almost closed, but not quite—not enough to sever the cable of withness that had been woven between her eyes and mine. We had never done this in the light before; we had never seen each other experiencing it; I think that in a deeply important way we had never seen each other.

She went with me willingly, bewildered, until she found herself at the foot of the stairs, and then she held back—not much at all, but even that little made something explode inside me. I picked her up like a doll and sprang up the stairs two at a time and crossed the upstairs hall as if my feet, somehow, weren't touching the floor; but we were at the top of an arc, having been thrown by some huge force. The bed was a blaze of gold from the tops of the two wide windows and a floodlight of sun; there was nothing on it but the bottom sheet, and I dropped her, or threw her down. She bounced, she screamed; I took her wrist and hauled her up sitting and broke the two top buttons off the soft denim jacket, then got hold of the hem and snapped it off over the head. She wore nothing under it, which was a vast surprise to me; I hadn't known, one way or the other—how could I? I punched her shoulder with the heel of my hand and down she went on her back; I snapped her waistband as if it had been a single thread and snatched her skirt off. Her sandals had disappeared somewhere along the way, and she lay naked in that glory of light. I had seen her naked before, of course, but I had never let myself look at her, really look, and as I got out of my clothes—it seemed to take forever, but it couldn't have been long, for I tore my shirt and ripped the zipper in my trousers halfway down; one of my socks, I found later, was still in its shoe!—I held her pinned down to the bed in the circle of my vision with her eyes tied to mine in the center of it. I was breathing deeply but not rapidly at all—strange, that—while her breath came and went like a pulse, making and losing shadows between her ribs and the superb taut hollows at the sides of her belly. And as I held her so, where she lay with her arms crossed over her breasts and her hips half-turned, one knee drawn up to conceal herself, something from me—a demand which was not anger, but still was like a fury—reached out invisible hands and pulled those arms down and away from her breasts, dropped the small strong hands curled to the sheet, rolled back the hips, straightened that leg. The sunlight (you take pictures in your mind at certain moments) slanted down through the hair on the mound between her legs and tinted the skin under it, making the clear cream-color radiate up—a wonder. It was all a wonder, even in the violence and speed of the act itself, frozen forever in the mind, ready to be retrieved forever after, spellbinding, breathtaking.