Banville, The Feminine, And the Scenes of Eros (John Banville) (Critical Essay‪)‬

... on the surface, that's where there's depth. (1) I fell into a dream. There was a room, cool, marble, tiled, as in a Roman villa ... a low table bearing unguents in porphyry pots and coloured glass phials ... On the couch, of which I was permitted only a three-quarters view, a woman was lying back, young, ample, impossibly pale skinned, her naked arms lifted and hiding her face in abandonment and shame. Beside her sat a turbaned negress, naked also, a mountainous figure with polished melony thighs and big hard gleaming breasts and broad pink palms. The middle finger and thumb of her right hand were plunged to the knuckle and ball in the two holes of the woman's wantonly offered lap. I noted the angry-pink frilling of the vagina, dainty as the volutes of a cat's ear, and the taut oiled tea-coloured cincture of the anus. The slave turned her head and looked at me over her shoulder with a broad, jaunty grin and for my benefit joggled her mistress's gaping flesh, and the woman shuddered and made a mewling sound. In succubus sleep my face formed a rictus, and as the little seizure took me I arched my back and pressed the back of my head into the pillow and then went still and lay like that for a long moment, like a dead dictator lying in state sunk to his ears in the plush. (2)