…a bright yellow Eberhard pencil with a point as sharp as a spear, the eraser as pink and softly resilient as a nipple.

Linda rolls over on her side, too, her robe slipping off her lower breast. Art is aroused by it, but not crazily so—somewhere in telling his story, he’s figured out that sex is a foregone conclusion, and now they’re just getting through some nice foreplay. He smiles down at her nipple, which is brown as a bar of Belgian chocolate, aureole the size of a round of individual cheese and nipple itself a surprisingly chunky square of crinkled flesh. She follows his eyes and smiles at him, then puts his hand over her breast, covers it with hers.

There is, for example, a performance of Czech mimes or Thai dancers at the theather where I go with my wife and a friend, and I know that once the show starts I am going to find it all marvelous. I am entertained, deeply moved; the dialogues or the dancers' motions seem like supernatural visions to me. I applaud wildly, and sometimes the tears well up in my eyes or I laugh until I have to pee; in any event, I am glad to be alive and to have had this opportunity to go to the theater or to the movies or to an exhibition, anywhere extraordinary people make or show things never before imagined, where they invent a place of revelation or communication, something that washes away the moments when nothing is happening, nothing but what always happens.

So I am overwhelmed, I am so delighted that at the intermission I rise up enthusiastically and continue to applaud at length, and I tell my wife that the mimes are a marvel and that the scene where the fisherman casts out his line and hauls in a phosphorescent fish half the height of the stage is absolutely fantastic.

He put the nip into nipple with sharp well-cared-for teeth.