Intercourse
Intercourse does with sex what Severance did with beheadings. Instead of the fall of the blade or the axe (or the closing of the elevator doors), in Intercourse the act of sexual intimacy provides the prompt for people's internal monologues. These 100 short stories comprise the inner streams of consciousness of 50 couples (most of them famous) while making love. Carefully researched and wildly entertaining, Butler gets into the minds of people across history, from King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, to Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln, to Richard and Pat Nixon.
In the first two books of his acclaimed Christopher Marlowe Cobb series, The Hot Country and The Star of Istanbul, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler captured the hearts of historical crime fiction fans with the artfulness of his World War I settings and his charismatic leading man, a Chicago journalist recruited by American intelligence.
PRAISE FOR THE EMPIRE OF NIGHT
‘Mr. Butler does a terrific job of depicting both the journalist’s facility for teasing information from his subjects and the spy’s incessant fear of being discovered. There’s something almost magical about the way the author re-creates this 1915 milieu...’ - The Wall Street Journal
PRAISE FOR THE STAR OF ISTANBUL
‘Zestful, thrilling . . . a ripping good yarn’ — Wall Street Journal
‘An outstanding work of historical fiction’ — Huntington News
‘The Star of Istanbul has it all: history galore, exotic foreign settings, a world-weary yet engaging protagonist, villains in abundance and a romance worthy of Bogart and Bergman’ — BookPage
‘Double and triple crosses merge like lanes in a traffic roundabout, and . . . the novel commingles character-driven historical fiction with melodrama and swashbuckling action. Somehow . . . it all works; on one level, Butler is playing with genre conventions in an almost mad-scientist manner, but at the same time, he holds the reader transfixed, like a kid at a Saturday matinee’ — Booklist (starred review)
‘Butler impresses with his exceptional attention to historical detail, particularly aboard the Lusitania’ — Publishers Weekly
‘Butler is an excellent observer of interior psychological detail . . . and his fine description of the Lusitania’s demise shows he can write action-packed scenes as well. . . . It’s a pleasure to watch Cobb clear away layer upon layer of scheming and disguises to expose some ugly truths about humanity’ — Kirkus Reviews
‘While The Star of Istanbul meets the genre requirements for action and plotting, the precision and lyricism of Butler’s language, his incisive observations, his psychologically complex characters, and his understanding of the past lift this novel well into a genre of its own’ — Arts Fuse
‘Butler’s grasp of history is excellent. . . . You will enjoy every new twist and turn in this spy game’ — Arab Voice
‘[Butler’s] description of the aftermath of the attack on the Lusitania will leave you with your heart in your mouth. . . Yet another remarkable work from an author who continues, at this advanced stage of his career, to surpass himself’ — Bookreporter
‘Butler’s description of the sinking of the Lusitania is exceptional . . . In Cobb, Butler has created an appealing hero’ — Readers Unbound
‘An exciting thriller with plenty of action, romance, and danger. . . Fans of historical spy fiction will enjoy this fast-paced journey through a world at war’ —Library Journal
PRAISE FOR THE HOT COUNTRY
‘The Hot Country draws on many elements of the traditional adventure yarn, including disguises, fist fights and foot races, double agents and alluring young women who may be honey traps or spies... though in prose that has been written with serious attention... this first report makes you want to read on into the war correspondent’s second edition.’ - Guardian
‘combines a fast-moving plot with characters of a complexity that is not always found in such fiction’ - Sunday Times
‘a genuine and exhilarating success’ - Times Literary Supplement
‘a historical thriller of admirable depth and intelligence’ - BBC History Magazine
‘Exciting story...The Hot Country is a thinking person's historical thriller, the kind of exotic adventure that, in better days, would have been filmed by Sam Peckinpah’ - Washington Post
‘high-spirited adventure.... great writing’ - New York Times
‘Literate, funny, action-packed, vivid, and intriguing’ -Historical Novel Society
‘A fine stylist, Butler renders the time and place in perfect detail’ -Publishers Weekly
‘Butler writes thrilling battle scenes, cracking dialogue and evocative description, and the plot of The Hot Country keeps twisting to the very end’ -Tampa Bay Times
‘Pancho Villa, fiery senoritas, and Germans up to no good – Butler is having fun in The Hot Country and readers will too. An intelligent entertainment with colourful history’ -Joseph Canon
‘a spirited and beautifully told tale of adventure and intrigue in the grand old style, rich in both insight and atmosphere. Going off to war with Kit Cobb is as bracing and fun as it used to be in George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman books, or in Perez-Reverte's Captain Alatriste novels. And the best part is that there are more to come. Saddle up’
- Dan Fesperman, Hammett award-winning author of The Double Game
Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of sixteen novels, six story collections and a book on the creative process, From Where You Dream. A recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, he also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. In 2013 he won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.
robertolenbutler.com
INTERCOURSE
stories
Robert Olen Butler
NO EXIT PRESS
for my son, JOSHUA,
with my love and admiration
—What were you thinking?
—When?
—During.
—During.
—Yes. Not what goes where. Thinking deep down.
—About you.
—Liar.
—So what were you thinking?
—About you.
ADAM
7, first man
EVE
7, first woman, his wife
on a patch of earth cleared of thorns and thistles, a little east of Eden, the first day after the new moon of the fourth month of the eighth year after Creation
ADAM
the dust of the ground rises around us as we move and clench and thrash, and the Creator’s vast dark face fades and the woman grows slick and the dust turns to mud, and in the distance to the west I hear the trees stirring from a sweet breeze, but here the air is still, save for our breath, we are a great wind now ourselves, the two of us, we are rushing across the face of the earth and all that we left behind was good, but behold, naked is good too, and I named the animals one by one, the Creator brought them and I named them, and again I have some naming to do—of these parts of her I am seeing as if for the first time—but that will have to wait, I am a running river now and the names I already named will have to do: her two young fawns, her clam, her ass, which I ride
EVE
I was happy but to tangle the holding parts and the walking parts and lie here quietly in the clean space he has made for us, but he is pawing and fondling and crying out and whimpering and perhaps that is good too, like when he took the apple from me, he was quiet then and he is boisterous now but it is the sa
me: I offer and he takes, and I had nothing to give the Creator and all that He gave was for the man, and a shadow fell on the path and something was there and it came forth hissing prettily and he said You’re not stupid and he was right and what he gave was sweet in me, but this man is not, he is flailing around and proud of his own little snake
ZEUS, IN THE FORM OF A SWAN
982, King of the Gods
LEDA
20, Queen of Sparta
in an inner courtyard in the palace, Sparta, 1215 BC
ZEUS THE SWAN
the swan was a mistake, these creatures who mate with just one, for now that I have her before me I am compelled to explain, though all I have are whoopings and trumpetings and undulant dippings of the head: I am married to my own sister—by Fate, by necessity, you understand—and she has her hair piled high on her head in a polos and she never lets it down and she is murderously jealous and worse, she goes every year to the spring at Kanathos and renews her virginity and I have to start all over again—anyone who desires a virgin is a fool—and you have to understand, my father hated me, he hated all his children, he ate them up at birth, swallowed them whole, and only because my mother gave a swaddled rock in my place did I escape their fate, and growing up I often thought it would have been better just to be eaten, for I spent all my young life dangling from a rope from a tree so that I was neither on the earth nor in the sky nor in the sea and thus invisible to the old man, but it has made the dangling part of my body the most treasured center of my being, you see, and so here I am, the king of the gods, making a fool of myself as a bird just to get under your gown
LEDA
I knew who you were as soon as you flapped down from the moonlit sky and started whooping and trumpeting while my husband snored away inside the palace after emptying himself in me as if I were a fat temple sheep, and now it’s you, with your wings quivering and your neck snaking around: if you wanted me so badly why is your breath reeking of barley, you had to turn yourself into a swan, fine, but you have such a passion for me that on your way you had to take time to land in a field somewhere and play the swan eating the crops, and as soon as you’re done here you’ll be off scudding around on the river with some swan bitch dipping your heads deep under the dark water together sucking at weeds while I’m left with this lesser king and eggs to lay
HELEN
25, Queen of Sparta, wife of Menelaus
PARIS
22, Prince of Troy
in a villa on the island of Cranae in the Laconian Gulf, 1194 BC
PARIS
Cassandra pulled at her hair and proclaimed the fire I will bring to Troy along with my Helen, and at last she is right, my sister the seer, I burned at the first sight of Helen and now I am a raging tall-flamed pine fire at her touch and it will never stop, this hot billowing in me, even as she lies beneath me placid and cool as the snows of Mount Gargarus and her head falls back languidly to the side and her arm rises and her hand curls outward, the long fingers flaring as if to clutch some invisible thing, and I might as well not even be here, for her eyes are the blue of the Aegean and swimming deep inside them, far out of sight, are her goddess thoughts, perhaps of her father Zeus, who waits for her immortal body that one day will lie languidly upon a couch on Olympus when she will belong to the gods, but for now, in spite of her distraction, she is mine
HELEN
he is older, my Menelaus, his arms are strong and he is a king, but too strong, but too much a king: what of the beauty of my face and my neck and my hands and my breasts and my thighs, what of all the heroes of Greece who came to woo me and I chose a man with strong arms who was soon to be a king, but then his vast shadow passed over my face, my body, and I vanished and he would not stand aside, and then a prince came, a young man who chose a gift from between three vying goddesses and he declined the power of a great warrior and he declined the wealth of kings and he chose instead the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, me, who for nine years has lived in a shadow, and so the prince and I have come down from his ship on this island, the spray of salt from the sea still on our eyelids, our lips, our throats, and we have rushed to a private chamber with cicadas singing outside our window and we taste the salt on each other and he is beautiful in face and neck and hands and chest and thighs, but not as beautiful as me
HELEN
35, Princess of Troy
MENELAUS
42, King of Sparta
on board his ship in the Aegean Sea, after retrieving her at the end of the Trojan War, 1184 BC
MENELAUS
this is familiar, after a decade, this is too familiar, I should have just let her go, I should have spared the lives of so many of our warriors, but these are the bodies we men have been given to live in, these are the gods’ gifts of sword and shield and knife and fist and teeth and the gifts of strategy and cunning and the gift of bravery to stand before the ferocity of your own imminent death and fight, and so if it had not been for this woman who is beneath me once again that we fought and died, it would have been for something else, in some other place, against some other foe, who, in their own warrior hearts, would have cared as little as we about the reason: it is what we do
HELEN
the gift from the gods rolled heavily in amongst us, towering in the center of our city, a vast horse of pine with a beautiful head, nostrils flared, its mane erect, its flanks glittering with torchlight, and I understand that long before, Paris had become a fool and a coward, shooting arrows from the parapets and pawing at me in our own bed each night as if it were the first time while the heroes of Troy died beyond the walls using their swords, and I understand that my face is still beautiful, even this many years later, even night before last, even lit in the mirror by Troy in flames outside my bedroom window, and I understand the gods gave me the gift of my beauty and the gods gave Paris the gift of the most beautiful woman in the world, but deep within these gifts our own destruction crouched, biding its time
MARY MAGDALENE
24, prostitute
TIBERIUS AURELIUS GAVROS
22, Roman soldier
beneath a fig tree just outside Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee, AD 28
MARY
from a distance, from the shade of a tree where I stood watching him beside the well, he seemed important, the men around him seemed to wish to shrink near him, make themselves very small, they were eager for him to speak, and I thought to wait to find him alone and perhaps he would provide the pieces of money I need, which this Roman provides now instead, but that was another woman thinking those things, the same woman beneath this man now—she does not understand fully yet—even as some other woman, thinking these new thoughts, hovers a ways apart, up in the branches of this fig tree, looking off toward the town where I feel him waiting, for at the well his eyes turned to me, away from the men, I could see his eyes clearly, even from a distance, and they knew me
TIBERIUS
now that I have killed a man, now that I have at last killed a man—a man who was crying against Rome and waving a knife in this barren place of dust and weeds and houses of crude basalt blocks stuffed with mud—now that the rest of my life has truly begun with the quickness of my hand on my gladius, its blade going in softly, easily, finding a spot between his ribs, now that I tremble inside cursing my birth to a father who is a centurion and has created me for this, now that I tremble for what my hands can so easily do, I touch this body beneath me with these same hands and beg them remember this moment when they feel hungry for gentleness, and I wish to thank her, thank her generosity: though I pay her, it is not enough for what she gives me
CLEOPATRA VII
28, Queen of Egypt
MARCUS ANTONIUS
42, general and member of Rome’s ruling triumvirate
on her royal barge in the River Cydnus at Tarsus, AD 41
MARCUS
the sound of flutes and harps and lyres and, in their pausing, the sound of water lapping at the barge and I am an ambitious m
an and I am a man of battle and my head always has sounds on its horizon—the clanging of swords and the grunting of men and even, to an ear attuned to it, the sucking sound of sword in flesh, and this sound is the same, inside me and out: that soft sucking sound, now beneath me, my mansword and the flesh of a queen, but these other sounds are in me, as well, of the music and of the river in this floating world, where she waited for me tonight amidst a thousand torches, beneath a golden canopy, the queen reclining on her couch draped in an azure peplos fallen off her shoulder to bare her breasts, her hair braided all about her head, she was the very vision of Venus, opening wide for Marcus Antonius, and I am an ambitious man and I can overcome Octavian and rule Rome and perhaps I will, but what higher ambition is there than to fuck a goddess and I might well choose to float on her river forever in peace
CLEOPATRA
how simple it was, how nakedly alluring, me rolled into a carpet like the womb and I rolled out with no sounding of trumpets, no scuffle of subjects going prostrate, and with no perfumes or jewels or silks upon me but I rolled in a thin swaddling of linen as a newborn child onto the floor and the great Julius Caesar rose in surprise from his chair and my breasts had gone bare and my loins as well and I very slowly covered them and spun and folded my legs under me and I lifted my face to him and it began, and Caesar touched me quite gently—unlike this stone-fingered Antonius—and he gave me my throne over my brother, whom he had drowned in the Nile, and my sister, whom he had pursued into exiled refuge in the temple at Ephesus, and he took me to his Rome where he exalted me, and then he died on my behalf on the steps of the Forum, and now with riches and pomp and music it begins again, and though this one touches me roughly, it will do, and the first thing I will ask of him is that he kill my sister
Intercourse Page 1
