Of transformations…. I remember vividly the first night we passed at Dr. Onirifick’s place. We had taken a shower together, shuddering at the sight of the myriads of roaches which infested the bathroom. We got into bed beneath the eiderdown quilt. We had had an ecstatic fuck in this strange public room filled with bizarre objects. We were drawn very-close together that night. I had separated from my wife and she had separated from her parents. We hardly knew why we had accepted to live in this outlandish house; in our proper senses neither of us would have dreamed of choosing such a setting. But we were not in our right senses. We were feverish to begin a new life, and we felt guilty, both of us, for the crimes we had committed in order to embark on the great adventure. Mona felt it more than I, in the beginning. She felt that she had been responsible for the break. It was the child which I had left behind, not my wife, whom she felt sorry for. It preyed on her mind. With it was the fear, no doubt, that I would wake up one day and realize that I had made a mistake. She struggled to make herself indispensable, to love me with such devotion, such complete self-sacrifice, that the past would be annihilated. She didn’t do it deliberately. She wasn’t even aware of what she was doing. But she clung to me desperately, so desperately that when I think of it now the tears come to my eyes. Because it was unnecessary: I needed her even more than she needed me.
And so, as we were falling off to sleep that night, as she rolled over to turn her back on me, the cover slipped off and I became aware, from the animal-like crouch she had assumed, of the massive quality of her back. I ran my two hands over her flesh, caressed her back as one would caress the flanks of a lioness. It was curious that I had never been aware of her superb back. We had slept together many times and we had fallen asleep in all sorts of postures, but I had noticed nothing. Now, in this huge bed which seemed to float in the wan light of the big room, her back became engraved in my memory. I had no definite thoughts about it—just vague pleasure sensations of the strength and the vitality that was in her. One who could support the world on her back! I didn’t formulate anything so definite as that, but it was there, the thought, in some vague, obscure region of my consciousness. In my finger-tips more likely.
Under the shower I had teased her about her tummy, which was growing rather generous, and I realized at once that she was extremely sensitive about her figure. But I was not critical of her opulent flesh—I was delighted to discover it. It carried a promise, I thought. And then, under my very eyes, this body which had been so generously endowed began to shrink. The inner torture was beginning to take its toll. At the same time the fire that was in her began to burn more brightly. Her flesh was consumed by the passion that ravaged her. Her strong, columnar neck, the part of her body which I most admired, grew slenderer and slenderer, until the head seemed like a giant peony swaying on its fragile stem.
«You’re not ill?» I would ask, alarmed by this swift transformation.
«Of course not!» she would say. «I’m reducing.» «But you’re carrying it too far, Mona.» «I was like this as a girl,» she would answer. «It’s natural for me to be thin.»
«But I don’t want you to grow thin. I don’t want you to change. Look at your neck—do you want to have a scrawny neck?»
«My neck isn’t scrawny,» she would say, jumping up to look at herself in the mirror.
«I didn’t say it was, Mona… but it may get that way if you keep on in this reckless fashion.»
«Please Val, don’t talk about it. You don’t understand…»
«Mona, don’t talk that way. I’m not criticizing you. I only want to protect you.»
«You don’t like me this way… is that it?» «Mona, I like you any way. I love you. I adore you. But please be reasonable. I’m afraid you’re going to fade away, evaporate in thin air. I don’t want you to get ill…»
«Don’t be silly, Val. I never felt better in my life.»
«By the way,» she added, «are you going to see the little one this Saturday?» She would never mention either my wife or the child by name. Also, she preferred to think that I was visiting only the child on these weekly expeditions to Brooklyn.
I said I thought I would go… why, was there any reason not to?
«No, no!» she said, jerking her head strangely and turning away to look for something in the bureau drawer.
I stood behind her, as she was leaning over, and clasped my arms around her waist.
«Mona, tell me something… Does it hurt you very much when I go over there? Tell me honestly. Because if it does, I’ll stop going. It has to come to an end some day anyway.»
«You know I don’t want you to stop. Have I ever said anything against it?»
«No-o-o,» I said, lowering my head and gazing intently at the carpet. «No-o-o, you never say anything. But sometimes I wish you would…»
«Why do you say that?» she cried sharply. She looked almost indignant. «Haven’t you a right to gee your own daughter? I would do it, if I were in your place.» She paused a moment and then, unable to control herself, she blurted out: «I would never have left her if she had been mine. I wouldn’t have given her up, not for anything!»
«Mona! What are you saying. What does this mean?»
«Just that. I don’t know how you can do it. I’m not worth such a sacrifice. Nobody is.»
«Let’s drop it,» I said. «We’re going to say things we don’t mean. I tell you, I don’t regret anything. It was no sacrifice, understand that. I wanted you and I got you. I’m happy. I could forget everybody if it were necessary. You’re the whole world to me, and you know it.»
I seized her and pulled her to me. A tear rolled down her cheek.
«Listen, Val, I don’t ask you to give up anything, but…»
«But what?»
«Couldn’t you meet me once in a while at night when I quit work?»
«At two in the morning?»
«I know… it is an ungodly hour…. but I feel terribly lonely when I leave the dance hall. Especially after dancing with all those men, all those stupid, horrible creatures who mean nothing to me. I come home and you’re asleep. What have I got?»
«Don’t say that, please. Yes, of course I’ll meet you—now and then.»
«Couldn’t you take a nap after dinner and…»
«Sure I could. Why didn’t you tell me sooner? It was selfish of me not to think of that.»
«You’re not selfish, Val.»
«I am too… Listen, supposing I ride down with you this evening? I’ll come back, take a snooze, and meet you at closing time.»
«You’re sure it won’t be too tiring?»
«No, Mona, it’ll be wonderful.»
On the way home, however, I began to realize what it would mean to arrange my hours thus. At two o’clock we would catch a bite somewhere. An hour’s ride on the elevated. In bed Mona would chat a while before going to sleep. It would be almost five o’clock by that time and by seven I would have to be up again ready for work.
I got into the habit of changing my clothes every evening, in preparation for the rendezvous at the dance hall. Not that I went every evening—no, but I went as often as possible. Changing into old clothes—a khaki shirt, a pair of moccasins, sporting one of the canes which Mona had filched from Carruthers—my romantic self asserted itself. I led two lives: one at the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company and another with Mona. Sometimes Florrie joined us at the restaurant. She had found a new lover, a German doctor who, from all accounts, must have possessed an enormous tool. He was the only man who could satisfy her, that she made clear. This frail-looking creature with a typical Irish mug, the Broadway type par excellence, who would have suspected that between her legs there was a gash big enough to hide a sledge hammer—or that she liked women as well as men? She liked anything that had to do with sex. The gash was now rooted in her mind. It kept spreading and spreading until there was no room, in mind or gash, for anything but a superhuman prick.
One evening, after I had taken Mona to work, I started wandering through the side streets. I thought perhaps I would go to a cinema and meet Mona after the performance. As I passed a doorway I heard someone call my name. I turned round and in the hallway, as though hiding from some one, stood Florrie and Hannah Bell. We went across the street to have a drink. The girls acted nervous and fidgety. They said they would have to leave in a few minutes—they were just having a drink to be sociable. I had never been alone with them before and they were uneasy, as if afraid of revealing things I ought not to know. Quite innocently I took Florrie’s hand which was lying in her lap and squeezed it, to reassure her—of what I don’t know. To my
