'Take it out.'

'I want it. Stop crying, Kate. I want it.'

'Don't move, you f*cking sadist.'

'I'll be gentle.'

'It's too late.'

'You loved it.'

Silence.

'I. Don't. Love. It.'

'You will.'"

In a dry croak, I begged Cheryl to read me the sports page of the New York Post. "please, my sweet. Just five minutes of Maury Allen on Dr. J..."

She glared at me with the eyes of one who had never known pain but would like to. She smiled.

"Chapter Twenty-Five...'Tonight is the first time we've gone to sleep in a bed we've not made love in... My militant feminist friends might say, if you want him, why don't you reach over and take his c*ck in your mouth. The dilemma is I want sex all the time...'"

One more sentence and I knew I was finished. I had to create a diversion to facilitate my escape from the Honeymoon Hotel. I was desperate. Thousands of question marks, tiny little things, filled out into a cloud over my head. The cloud grew darker and darker until it produced a rumble and then a flash. I had it! A clever ruse to get her out of the room while I practiced my six-story leap into a waiting convertible. In a few short hours I'd be home, where my only thoughts of sex came when my mother boiled zucchini.

This was it...I only hoped it would work. Little droplets of perspiration broke out on my forehead, ran down my neck and made it to the outside. Did I try to stop them? Nah. That's the kind of guy I am. I opened my mouth to yell out. "Telephone!"

She got up to answer but it was dead. "Another one of your tricks, eh?" she cried. "One more stunt like that and I put on 'Holly Near's Greatest Hits Volume Two.' Or maybe you'd like Helen Reddy's 'I Am Norman?"'

"Maybe it was the doorbell?" I suggested gamely.

"Doorbell, doorbell?" Her eyes began rolling around in her head like drunken slugs. It wasn't a pretty scene I can tell you.

"You Know," I warned her, "it might be the Vice Squad."

"The Vice Squad! You answer the door. Quick, before they come up through the sewer." With trembling hands she unlocked my manacles. "Go! Ouvre-le!" She stood wringing her knees until she had squeezed them dry. "Go!"

In short, it was the milkman. He was a strapping fellow with two quarts regular, four skim and a pint of buttermilk. In the ensuing tumble they made a gallon of egg nog and two ice cream bricks. Another result of the wrangle was a fine little boy who was born speaking high-school French. For respectability's sake Cheryl has always tried to claim that I was in some way responsible for little Andre's occurrence, but I know this to be a falsehood. For one thing, no one in my family has ever been interested in picking up empties on Mondays and Thursdays. Besides that, I've been saving it, you know, until I get married. If I didn't, who would want me?