Title: Like People in History
Place: London
Publisher: Abacus
Date: 1996
Description: 512p, 20cm, paperback
ISBN: 0349108382
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Author: Felice Picano Title: Like People in History Place: London Publisher: Abacus Date: 1996 Description: 512p, 20cm, paperback ISBN: 0349108382 |
The title (borrowed from another author) appealed to me, as did the idea of reading "the gay Gone With the Wind" despite having so far failed to read the straight one.
I still couldn't believe he was here with me, next to me. Still couldn't believe he'd been with me nearly a week, or that he was so astonishingly good-looking. In fact, every time I looked at him, I kept finding new aspects of his beauty. The creaminess of his skin on the high insides of his arms. The massive, almost tumorous, solidity of his biceps. The extraordinary soaring architecture of his shoulder blades seen from behind. The seemingly Chinese delicacy and porcelain hardness of his clavicle. The tornado swirls of dark-coloured hair around his navel, and their vectors south into a hurricane of pubic bush, then north and thinner, reduced to a virtual pencil line pointing towards each perfect areola surrounding a nipple atop his breastbone. The auricular curlicues of modestly fuzzed cartilage that composed his ears. The slight dimple at the end of his nose that could only be noticed close up, and which made it seem so much more defined from far away. The astonishing definition of his upper lip, almost a line, and its cherrylike coloring, as though someone had applied lipstick in embryo and it had never rubbed off. The near-agate mosaic of his eyes, corneas mostly a silver-gray, but speckled lighter, a star-burst pattern at the center in paler gray, ice green, turquoise, sienna, amethyst, even lemon yellow. From the tiny perfect knob under his knee that connected the two long muscles running beneath his thigh down into the one that ran below his calf, to the neatly feathered tiny V's of hair that made up his sideburns, I'd never before encountered such an idealization of form, or, more impressively, such a lavish extravagance of detail! As though once he'd been shaped, his Creator had been so surprised, so pleased with the result, He'd come back again and again, dotingly, to touch up his Work.
(p. 222)