Velocity

When her mother dies in a car wreck, Ellis Lowell suspends boyfriend and career back in the Big Apple. And spends that familiar long, hot summer with her father, a cop, and her forbidden new lover, Jesse, a pill-popping half-Cherokee who drives a Harley like a bat out of hell, hangs out with Hell's Angels and makes love with such torrid, above-the-earth perfection that McCloy's many sex scenes may set a new standard for Manhattan daydreams: "Hearing you groan to consciousness, feeling an arm, thick as my thigh, reaching to encircle me, pull me on top, you were like waking to a cannibal, your eyes brilliant with lawlessness, like an animal, insatiable and healthy, overcome with hunger first thing in the morning, not like the boys I'd known who needed to rise and pee, to make coffee and brush their teeth. . . . I can't describe the pleasure it gave me, how willingly I was taken, or how contagious that hunger was, how it filled me with the need to live, with an urgency to stay alive!" Everything about this odd little gem of a story is wonderful. We never know what we are capable of, none of us do, when we are faced with isolation, pain, and loss.