"Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size."
We are the Fugitall Cabal — three men (Tomas, Henri M., Henri P.) and two women (Claire, Isabella) of widely different tastes. But one fucked-up philosophy: "The sexual parts are fiends, sacrificing everything to that aching point of contact. Society and simple decency keep trying to remind us of everything else — the rest of the body, the whole person, with its soul and intellect and estimable socioeconomic constituents — but in the truth of the night our dismembering needs arise and ... revolt us with our revealed nature." John Updike, "ii. The Dollhouse," TOWARD THE END OF TIME (1997). Gnaw, not really: "He gnawed the rectitude of his life." James Joyce, "A Painful Case," DUBLINERS (1914).