Thief of Dreams by John Yount

figurines to make room for it—took her breasts in his hands, and kissed her. For her part, she moaned, opened her mouth, and cupped his crotch in both her hands.
    He felt his zipper come down, and she began to speak against his mouth. “I want to give my Tallywhacker a kiss,” she told him.
    One way or another it was an old joke to him, but not to her. According to Paris Pergola, he had the only authentic “Tallywhacker” she’d ever met.
    â€œAnd it is my Tallywhacker,” she said against his lips, “and I don’t want to hear nothing about any Abraham Lincoln.”
    Then he was in her mouth and she was doing those incredible things with her tongue. “Holy God,” he whispered.
    Later, in the bathroom, he discovered lipstick on his fly, and he dampened a washcloth, dabbed it against a bar of soap, and tried to scrub the front of his trousers clean. He couldn’t quite tell if he’d been successful; certainly his fly was damp, wrinkled, and disreputable-looking, but he wasn’t so sure it wasn’t still a faint pink in the bargain. Like having lipstick on his mouth, having it on his fly never seemed to bother Paris one whit. Outrageous as it was, it seemed to please her. She often giggled about it as though it were some sort of ad she’d taken out. A warning to other women that he was already, by God, thoroughly spoken for? A sign to other men of the sort of lover she could be, perhaps an incentive to provoke them to try and beat Edward Tally’s time with her? Whatever, she would blush and giggle to see her lipstick on his fly, but she was never scandalized by it. If he wanted to clean himself up, she never pouted, but she never helped either.
    Scrubbing on his fly, he felt his dark mood returning. He washed his hands and his face and found one of her most recent decorating touches when he flipped up the toilet seat to urinate. There was a bright turquoise cover on the lid made of terry cloth, which, when he raised it, revealed two can-can dancers doing a very high kick, as well as the legend In France They Say WEE WEE . He stared at it and realized he didn’t understand, even in the tiniest and most remote way, the sort of person who would buy such a thing. Her apartment was full of stuffed animals in an assortment of vivid colors and covered in some sort of sleazy fur that seemed to float about in the air and get up his nose like cat fur, so that he sometimes plucked his nose and snorted to get rid of it. There were Kewpie dolls everywhere and a vase by her bed, which contained, not flowers, but painted birds hung from sticks such as one might win tossing rings at a carnival. He stared at the toilet seat cover and began to shake his head. “I’ve gone crazy,” he told himself in a small, tight voice, that nevertheless broke, “totally, fucking crazy!”
    At the zoo a nervous sweat misted his armpits and rolled occasionally down his ribs, but she was happy. She dropped dimes into slender green machines and received pellets of food to feed the animals; and oohing and aahing over each exhibit and pressing his arm to her side, she dragged him from llamas to antelope, monkeys to baboons. One big male with a multicolored ass reminded him at once of the stuffed animals perched on her dressers and snuggled on her bed and reminded him, as well, of himself, although he wasn’t sure just why. But at last he began to take a pleasure in her happiness and forgot that a zoo was the last place he would have chosen to spend his one day off a week.
    They had dinner in a small French restaurant she knew, and never having been in such a place before, he let her order for him. He was impressed, and although he could have eaten three times as much food as he was given, he thought it the most delicious he’d ever tasted.
    â€œHow did you ever learn to handle yourself in a place like this?” he asked her. She worked the desk of a small hotel,