He likes to gaze at slim, smooth legs in tight shorts ... he is disturbed by the feelings that the legs of these boys, blank and perfect and inexpressive, create in him. What is there that can be done with legs beyond devouring them with one's eyes? ... Of all the secrets that set him apart, this may in the end be the worst. Among all these boys he is the only one in whom this dark erotic current runs; among all this innocence and normality, he is the only one who desires.
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...increasing systemic capacity for charge, pulsation and pleasure -Julie Henderson, The lover within
Embodiment and erotics
The wind blew higher and higher and Mr Wellington, who'd taken in sail, was holding close to it. We gripped the gunwales and leaned back out over the cold, running waves, the water brushing, then soaking the backs of our shirts. The sun solemnly withdrew into its tent of cloud, disappointed with the world. By the slightest turn of my head I could change the moan of the wind into a whistle. There we were, just a father and his teenage son and the son's friend out for a sail, but in my mind, at least, the story was less simple. For I found in this Mr Wellington a version of myself so transformed by will and practice as to be not easily recognizable, but familiar nonetheless. He had never been handsome, I was certain, and his lack of romantic appeal shaded his responses to his glamorous son, the muted, wary adoration as well as the less than frank envy.
I'd begun to shiver. The day was turning darker and had blown all the birds out of the sky and half the boats back to harbor. I was huddling, hugging myself down in the hull, wet back to the wind. Mr Wellington was letting out sail the tock-tock-tock of the winch releasing the mainsheet and he was looking at me, holding his judgment in reserve. Between us, these two tight minds, flew the great sail and Tom haunting it as he leaned back into it, pushing it, pushing until we came around, he ducked and the boom swung overhead and stopped with a shocking thud. Here was this boy, laughing and blonded by the sun and smooth-skinned, his whole body straining up as he reached to cleat something so that his T-shirt parted company with his dirty, sagging jeans and we the father and I could see Tom's muscles like forked lightning on his taut stomach; here was this boy so handsome and free and well liked and here were we flanking him, looking up at him, at the torso flowering out of the humble calyx of his jeans.
It seemed to me then that beauty is the highest good, the one thing we all want to be or have, or, failing that, destroy, and that all the world's virtues are nothing but the world's spleen and deceit. The ugly, the old, the rich and the accomplished speak of invisible virtues of character and wisdom and power and skill because they lack the visible ones, that ridiculous down under the lower lip that can't decide to be a beard, those prehensile bare feet racing down the sleek deck, big hands too heavy for slender arms, the sweep of lashes over faded lapis-lazuli eyes, lips deep red, the windblown hair intricate as Velàzquez's rendering of lace.
He was a ratty boy. He hated to shave and would let his peach fuzz go for a week or even two at a time; it grew in in clumps, full on the chin, sparse along the jaw, patchy beside the deep wicks of his mouth. His chamois-cloth shirts were all missing buttons. The gaps they left were filled in with glimpses of dingy undershirt. His jockey shorts had holes in them. Around one leg a broken elastic had popped out of the cotton seam and dangled against his thigh like a grey noodle. Since he wore a single pair of shorts for days on end the front pouch would soon be stained with yellow. He got up too late to shower before school; he'd run a hand through his fine hair but could never tame that high spume of a cowlick that tossed and bobbed above him, absurdly, gallantly.
His rattiness wore a jaunty air that redeemed everything. Faded, baggy jeans, Indian moccasins he'd owned so long the soft leather tops had taken on the shape of his toes, sunglasses repaireed with Band-Aids, an ancient purple shirt bleached and aged to a dusty plum, a letter jacket with white leather sleeves and on the back white lettering against a dark blue field these were the accoutrements of a princely pauper, a paupered prince.
We walked beside the lake at night, a spring night. As we walked we rolled gently into each other, so that our shoulders touched with every other step. A coolness scudded in off the lake and we kept our hands in our pockets. As usual he was talking too loud and in his characteristic way, a sustained tenor uh as he collected his thoughts, then a chuckle and a rapid, throw-away sentence that came almost as an anticlimax. Since Tom was the most popular boy at school, many guys had imitated his halting, then rushing way of talking (as well as his grungy clothes and haphazard grooming). But I never wanted to be Tom. I wanted Tom to be Tom for me. I wanted him to hold his reedy, sinewy, scruffy maleness in trust for us both.
- Edmund White A boy's own story 1982 Vintage, pp.118-19, 123-4
Gillian Perholt looked at the djinn on her bed. The evening had come, whilst they sat there, telling each other stories. A kind of light played over his green-gold skin, and a kind of glitter, like the glitter from the Byzantine mosaics, where a stone here or there will be set at a slight angle to catch the light. His plumes rose and fell as though they were breathing, silver and crimson, chrysantemum-bronze and lemon, sapphire-blue and emerald. There was an edge of sulphur to his scent, and sandalwood, she thought, and something bitter myrrh, she wondered, having never smelt myrrh, but remembering the king in the Christmas carol.
The outside of his thighs were greener and the insides softer and more golden. He had pulled down his tunic, not entirely adequately: she could see his sex coiled like a folded snake and stirring.
"I wish," said Dr. Perholt to the djinn, "I wish you would love me."
"You honour me," said the djinn, "and maybe you have wasted your wish, for it may well be that love would have happened anyway, since we are together, and sharing our life stories, as lovers do."
"You give and you bind," said the djinn, "like all lovers. You give yourself, which is brave, and which I think you have never done before and I find you eminently lovable. Come."
And without moving a muscle Dr. Peholt found herself naked on the bed, in the arms of the djinn.
Of their love-making she retained a memory at once precise, mapped on to every nerve-ending, and indescribable. There was, in any case, no one to whom she could have wished to describe the love-makiing of a djinn. All love-making is shape-shifting the male expands like a tree, like a pillar, the female has intimations of infinity in the spaces which narrow inside her, but the djinn could prolong everything, both in space and in time, so that Gillian seemed to swim across his body forever like a dolphin in an endless green sea, so that she became arching tunnels under mountains, through which he pierced and rushed, or caverns in which he lay curled like dragons. He could become a concentrated point of delight at the pleasure-points of her arched and delighted body; he could travel her like some wonderful butterfly, brushing her here and there with a hot, dry, almost burning kiss, and then become again a folding landscape in which she rested and was lost, lost herself for him to find her again, holdng her in the palm of his great hand, contracting himself with a sigh and holding her breast to breast, belly to belly, male to female. His sweat was like a smoke and he murmured like a cloud of bees in many languages she felt her skin was on fire and was not consumed, and tried once to tell him about Marvell's lovers who had not "world enough and time" but could only murmur one couplet in the green cave of his ear. "My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires and more slow." Which the djinn smilingly repeated, using the rhythm for a particularly delectable movement of his body.
- AS Byatt, The djinn in the nightingale's eye