Cocksure by Mordecai Richler Page B

Mortimer had entered a pub to find the men linked round Rapani, who was reading aloud from a paperback that had just been published:
He reached down with both hands and grabbed the front of her dress. The fabric came away with a rasping, tearing sound. He put his hands inside her brassiere and pulled her breasts up and out. She stared at him, a fear growing deep in her eyes as once more he stood over her. Slowly he lowered himself onto her breasts until he was sitting facing her.
He looked down at her and laughed. “Now, tell me. Examine it carefully. See, am I not the biggest man you ever saw?”
Despite his weight she managed to nod.
    Donnelly clacked his tongue approvingly.
    “Not bad,” Wzcedak said.
    Gregory pulled his lower lip. “It’s Harold Robbins. I recognize the style. With that man, the words leap off the page.”
    “Wait, wait,” Rapani said, turning to another page. “Here’s something even better.”
“You’re an animal.”
Dax grinned. “It isn’t that. What do you expect when you’re standing there naked?”
She stared at him for a moment, then squashed her cigarette in a plate and dropped to her knees beside the bed. Tenderly she touched him. “Quelle armure magnifique,” she whispered. “So quick, so strong. Already he is too large for both my hands to hold.”
She –
    “Not bloody likely,” Taylor said, aggrieved.
    “You think Rapani’s making it up?” Gregory asked.
    Taylor stared coldly at Rapani over the rim of his beer glass.
    “But he couldn’t. Rapani’s no writer,” Wzcedak said.
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Finish the passage.”
    “It says here, she says, quote: ‘Already he is too large for both my hands to hold.’ ”
She buried her face against him. He felt the warmth of the tiny edges of her tongue tingling his flesh. He crushed her head against him.
    “Unquote.” Rapani looked up to notice for the first time that Mortimer was standing on the edge of the group. “Oh,” he said.
    Embarrassed, Mortimer raised his glass to Rapani. Rapani slammed the paperback shut. “Good evening, Mr. Griffin,” he said.
    It had been like that every time. Simply because Mortimer was always courteous and occasionally carried a furled umbrella, his entry into the pub, like a prissy schoolmaster’s into an unruly classroom, had been inhibiting to the regulars. If, for instance, Gregory was relating one of his endless run of dirty stories or Wzcedak, the taxi driver, was slowly unwinding another tale of an astonishingly obscene happening in his taxi, this being the rule with his fares rather than the exception, then they both clamped shut as soon as Mortimer stepped up to the bar, as if even talk of sex would embarrass him. Griffin, the signal for propriety.
    This is not to say the regulars at The Eight Bells were not exceedingly nice to Mortimer, indeed they were, but they also were insultingly correct, as if – in their crafty woggish way – they could sense he didn’t have a big one.
    Then one day Joyce phoned him at the office, her manner uncharacteristically flirtatious, and asked him to be sure and pick up a tube of vaginal jelly at the chemist’s before coming home. The promise of sex, even with Joyce again, was exhilarating, though it did mean he would have to wait while she went into the bathroom to hold her diaphragm up to the light to check against any rubber fatigue since last time. Afterwards she would insist that he bathe. The sheets would be changed. All the same, it might be fun.
    Mortimer went to Rapani’s, two doors down from The Eight Bells. The old man wasn’t happy to see him. Taking him by the arm, he led Mortimer away from his biggest display counter, the one which featured roll upon roll of striptease films, as if even a glimpse of these small boxes might corrupt Mortimer. Hastily getting into his apothecary’s white jacket, straightening his tie as he stood pointedly under his framed graduation certificate, the unshaven Rapani rubbed his hands and