Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

Bull's tongue was dried out and glued to the floor of his mouth.  He was very well insured for the first time in his thirty-something years.  

Margoulies was making small observations, aloud but ostensibly to himself, about Bull's leg.  This was the way Margoulies liked to proceed...[what] he called 'putting it in the right context.'

And then, suddenly, silence.  

Oh God, thought Bull, I hope it's nothing serious.  Although another craven little part of him secretly hoped that it was serious enough.   

Bull lay still and waited and waited, holding himself in readiness for the doctor's pronouncement.  Bull began to experience acute anxiety as he felt Margoulies's hands toy with his upper left thigh, moving slowly, palping the flesh with careful, detached fingers.  Bull could conceive of nothing more embarrassing than an involuntary erection - especially if a man, such as Margoulies, was touching him. 

He stared fixedly at the way the plaster had been teased up into little fronds on the wall.   

Bull's cunt lacked pubic hair, apart from a thickening and tufty teasing of Bull's leg hair.  And the cunt appeared in the pit of Bull's knee.  Margoulies of course had seen the vagina.  He felt faint, breathed deeply, but within seconds he steadied himself, and that was a relief, within the body as a whole.

As he did this, Bull had to cant himself up, on to the curve of his buttocks, coincidentally adopting the same posture as he had when he first became aware of the vagina.  Bull felt his leg as a soft, shrinking, and vulnerable thing with specific firm, yet calm, movements. 

The muscle at the top of Bull's calf was clearly bifurcated underneath the skin to allow space for the entrance to the vagina, whilst the kneepit itself bulged out to house the projection of the mons, and the clitoris that already peaked from its edge.

Margoulies loomed in the periphery of Bull's vision, decisions that reflected the justness of this particular phenomenon coming to his attention and his alone.

It was a fear of intrusion into himself, rather than of expansion into the World's gaze.  This dread was something different.  His hands fell away from Bull's leg.

Retain control.