Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous.

                                                                          I

"The only way he could possess her was in the most [     ] position of copulation: he reclining on cushions: she sitting in the fauteuil of his flesh with her back to him. The procedure--a few bounces over very small humps--meant nothing to her[.] She looked at the snow-scape on the footboard of the bed--at the [curtains]; and he holding her in front of him like a child being given a sleighride down a

                                                                          II
short slope by a kind stranger, he saw her back, her hip[s] between his hands.
     Like toads or tortoise neither saw each other's faces.
See animaux " (197, 199). 


"Jill through the succession of nights adjusts ... to hers. Small curdled puddles ... appear on her skin, and though easily wiped away leave in his imagination a mark like an acid-burn on her shoulders, her throat, the small of her back; he has the vision of her entire slender fair flexible body being eventually covered with these invisible burns, like a napalmed child in the newspapers. And he, on his side, attempting with hands or mouth to reciprocate, is politely dissuaded, pushed away, reassured she has already come, serving him, or merely asked for the mute pressure of a thigh between hers and, after some few minutes during which he can detect no spasm of relief, thanked.
...
Though he doesn't pursue this guilt he has startled from her, that night he does make her take him squarely, ... she offers her mouth and ...so tight it sears. She is frightened when he doesn't lose his hardness; he makes her sit up on him and pulls her easily torn satin hips down, the pelvis bones starved, and she sucks in breath sharply and out of pained astonishment pitched like delight utters ... He tried to picture it. A rosy-black floor in her somewhere, never knows where he is, in among kidneys, intestines, liver. His fair silver girl with flesh-colored hair and cloudy innards floats upon him, stings him, sucks him up like a cloud, falls, forgives him. Love of her, surprising him, coats him with distaste and confusion, so that he quickly sleeps, only his first dreams jostled when she gets from bed to go wash, check on Nelson, talk to God, take a pill, whatever else she needs to do to fill the wound where his seared ... was. How sad, how strange. We make companions our of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation" (157-164).