IV How is home felt?

The Levy home stood among the pines on a small rise overlooking the gray waters of Bay St. Louis.  The exterior was an example of elegant rusticity; the interior was a successful attempt at keeping the rusting out entirely, a permanently seventy-five-degree womb connected to the year-round air-conditioning unit by an umbilicus of vents and pipes that silently filled the rooms with filtered and reconstituted Gulf of Mexico breezes and exhaled the the Leveys' carbon dioxide and cigarette smoke and ennui.  The central machinery of the great life-giving unit throbbed somewhere in the acoustically tiled bowls of the home, like a Red Cross instructor giving cadence in an artificial respiration class, "In comes the good air, out goes the bad air, in comes the good air."

The home was as sensually comfortable as the human womb supposedly is.  Every chair sank several inches at the lightest touch, foam and down surrendering abjectly to any pressure.  The tufts of the acrylic nylon carpets tickled the ankles of anyone kind enough to walk on them.  Beside the bar what looked like a radio dial would, upon being turned, make the lighting throughout the house as mellow or as bright as the mood demanded.  Located through the house within easy walking distance of one another were contour chiars, a massage table, and a motorized exceising board whose many sections prodded the body with a motion that was at lonce gentle yet suggestive.  Levy's Lodge- that was what the sign at the coast road said- was a Xanadu of the senses; within its insulated walls there was something that could gratify anything