Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates by Tom Robbins Page A

by the irrefutable sweetness of his smile, a
smile that possessed the capacity to dazzle even when held in check to hide
chipped teeth, which it usually was. (Since every time he had them fixed, it
seemed his teeth just got abused again, he had made a vow to abstain from
further dental work until his forty-fifth birthday.) So, perhaps dangerous is not quite the right word for his countenance. Maybe disconcerting or conflicted or unpredictable would be more accurate—although for some drab souls, unpredictable and dangerous are synonymous. At any rate, women did not find his
appearance unintriguing, and when the muscular gringo stepped—jaunty, yet
somehow dignified—through the door in his white suit and guarded smile, two or
three bamboo-colored curls snailing out from under his Panama hat, there was a
sudden quickening of more than one female pulse.
    Over the next ninety minutes,
Switters danced with an assortment of women, local and foreign, but by midnight —the hour when myth’s black cat pounces on time’s
mechanical mouse—one in particular was in orbit around him. Her name was
Gloria, she was Peruvian, and she was drinking too much too fast. Saucy and
petite, Gloria wore her short hair in bangs, similar, in fact, to Hector; and
her eyes were like chocolate-dipped cherry bombs with their fuses lit. In her
mid-twenties, she was a tad old for his specialized taste, but when she pressed
her pelvis against his during the slow dances, when she poked holes in his
breath with a vodka-heated tongue, his body forgot about Suzy, and beer by
beer, his mind followed suit.
    He was experiencing a growing
appetite for Gloriapussy, and he figured that her alcohol consumption was not
dimming his prospects. Indeed, she had become so disheveled, wild-eyed, and
flushed that she would have looked more at home in a tangle of sweat-soaked
bedsheets than there on the crowded dance floor. Nevertheless, he was surprised
when she whispered wetly in his ear, “I desire you to chew my nipples.”
    Dancing away from her, he executed a
twirl. When they came face-to-face again she said rather loudly and with a
giggle, “I desire you to eat my breasts.”
    Chew? Eat? Perhaps it was a
language problem. Perhaps Gloria meant lick or suck or nibble —oral
activities in which he might have been a willing participant—but lacked the
English for it. “You have a festive manner of speaking,” he said, borrowing a
line from Hector, and led her back to their table.
    Hector sat across from them, an
urbanized, dyed-blond Indian girl on his lap. He seemed alert and under
control. Langley would approve. Switters felt the urge to talk shop
with him, to impart, perhaps, Switters’s somewhat novel notion that the CIA was
on the verge of evolving into a kind of autonomous secret society (a larger,
better funded, better organized version of the C.R.A.F.T. Club), a reverse
hierarchy whose fundamental function was to work behind the scenes to distract
the powerful and covertly thwart their ambitions so that intelligence (true
intelligence, which is always in the service of serenity, beauty, novelty, and
mirth) might actually flourish in the world, and some shard of humanity’s
primal innocence be preserved. Alas, the music was too loud, and Gloria was
tugging at his sleeve.
    “Yes, dear?”
    “I desire you to fuck me in the culo .”
    At first he thought she said
“cooler,” and he had a vision of them entwined on the frosty, bloodstained
cement of one of those refrigerated lockers, with waxy yellow and red sides of
beef swinging from iron hooks all around them, their exhalations condensing the
instant they panted or sighed so that they kissed through a mutually generated
cloud and could not see each other’s faces.
    “I desire you to fill up my ass,” she
elaborated.
    Well, he thought, that’s South America for you.
    “With premium or regular?” he asked.
    As Gloria giggled uncomprehendingly,
he rose on an impulse, retrieved his hat, and gave