The Americans who weren’t just abstract leaseholders were mercenaries and AWOL factotums left over from the war.
There was that joke about what a man needs to survive: food, shelter, papaya and strange papaya. In a world where papaya isn’t a fruit but the damp, warm syncline between a woman’s thighs.
The silence growing vertiginous, my body’s surface like a black cloth absorbs his angry baffled look.
I nodded, feeling unexpectedly protective of Baby, this silly girl I’d created, so earnest and fey. OK …
the sweet, woody smell of it mingled with that of his drugstore-brand dandruff shampoo and the Italian soap he used to hand-wash his lingerie, plus an underlying scrim of a thirty-seven-year-old dude—chopped garlic and decay
