«Then why do you treat me the way you do?
Why do you always make love to me? Why don’t you leave me alone?»
«I’m not making love to you,» I answered. «It’s not love, it’s passion. That’s not a crime, is it? For God’s sake, let’s not start that all over again. I’m going to treat you the way you want to be treated— to-day. I won’t touch you again.»
«I don’t ask that. I don’t say you shouldn’t touch me. But it’s the way you do it… you don’t show any respect for me… for my person. That’s what I dislike. I know you don’t love me any more, but you can behave decently towards me, even if you don’t care any more. I’m not the prude you pretend I am. I have feelings too… maybe deeper, stronger than yours. I can find some one else to replace you, don’t think that I can’t. I just want a little time…»
She was munching her sandwich half-heartedly. Suddenly there was a gleam in her eye. She put on a coy, roguish expression.
«I could get married to-morrow, if I wanted to,» she continued. «You never thought that, did you? I’ve had three proposals already, as a matter of fact. The last one was from…» and here she mentioned the lawyer’s name.
«Him?» I said, unable to repress a disdainful smile.
«Yes, him,» she said. «And he’s not what you think he is. I like him very much.»
«Well, that explains things. Now I know why he’s taken such a passionate interest in the case.»
I knew she didn’t care for him, this Rocambolesque, any more than she cared for the doctor who explored her vagina with a rubber finger. She didn’t care for anybody really; all she wanted was peace, surcease from pain. She wanted a lap to sit on in the dark, a prick to enter her mysteriously, a babble of words to drown her unmentionable desires. Lawyer what’s-his-name would do of course. Why not? He would be as faithful as a fountain pen, as discreet as a rat trap, as provident as an insurance policy. He was a walking briefcase with pigeon holes in his belfry; he was a salamander with a heart of pastrami. He was shocked, was he, to learn that I had brought another woman to my own home? Shocked to learn that I had left the used condoms on the edge of the sink? Shocked that I had stayed for breakfast with my paramour? A snail is shocked when a drop of rain hits its shell. A general is shocked when he learns that his garrison has been massacred in his absence. God himself is shocked doubtless when He sees how revoltingly stupid and insensitive the human beast really is. But I doubt if angels are ever shocked—not even by the presence of the insane.
I was trying to give her the dialectics of the moral dynamism. I twisted my tongue in the endeavour to make her understand the marriage of the animal and the divine. She understood about as well as a layman understands when you explain the fourth dimension. She talked about delicacy and respect, as if they were pieces of angel cake. Sex was an animal locked up in a zoo which one visited now and then in order to study evolution.
Towards evening we rode back to the city, the last stretch in the elevated train, the child asleep in my arms. Mamma and Papa returning from the picnic grounds. Below, the city spread out with senseless geometrical rigidity, an evil dream rearing itself architecturally. A dream from which it is impossible to awaken. Mr. and Mrs. Megalopolitan with their offspring. Hobbled and fettered. Suspended in the sky like so much venison. A pair of every kind hanging by the hocks. At one end of the line starvation; at the other end bankruptcy. Between stations the pawnbroker, with three golden balls to signify the triune God of birth, buggery and blight. Happy days. A fog rolling in from Rockaway. Nature folding up like a dead leaf—at Mineola. Every now and then the doors open and shut: fresh batches of meat for the slaughter-house. Little scraps of conversation, like the twittering of titmice. Who would think that the chubby little youngster beside you will in ten of fifteen years be shitting his brains out with fright on a foreign field? All day long you make innocent little gadgets; at night you sit in a dark hall and watch phantoms move across a silver screen. Maybe the realest moments you know are when you sit alone in the toilet and make caca. That doesn’t cost anything or commit you in any way. Not like eating or fucking, or making works of art. You leave the toilet and you step into the big shit-house. Whatever you touch is shitty. Even when it’s wrapped in cellophane the smell is there. Caca! The philosopher’s stone of the industrial age. Death and transfiguration—into shit! The department store life—with filmy silks on one counter and bombs on the other counter. No matter what interpretation you put on it, every thought, every deed, is cash registered. You’re fucked from the moment you draw your first breath. One grand international business machine corporation. Logistics, as they say.
Mamma and Papa are now as peaceful as blut-wurst. Not an ounce of fight left in them. How glorious to spend a day in the open, with the worms and other creatures of God. What a delightful entr’acte! Life glides by like a dream. If you were to cut the bodies open while still warm you would find nothing resembling this idyll. If you were to scrape the bodies out and fill them with stones they would sink to the bottom of the sea, like dead ducks.
It begins to rain. It pours. Hail-stones big as bob-o’-links bounce from the pavement. The city looks like an ant pile smeared with salvarsan. The sewers rise and disgorge their vomit. The sky is as sullen and lurid as the bottom of a test tube.
I feel murderously gay all of a sudden. I hope to Christ it will rain like this for forty days and nights. I’d like to see the city swimming in its own shit; I’d like to see mannikins floating into the river and cash registers ground under the wheels of trucks; I’d like to see the insane pouring out of the asylums with cleavers and hacking right and left. The water cure! Like they gave it to the Filipinos in ’98! But where is our Aguinaldo? Where is the rat who can breast the flood with a machete between his lips?
I bring them home in a cab, deposit them safely just as a bolt of lightning strikes the steeple of the bloody Catholic church on the corner. The broken bells make a hell of a din as they hit the pavement. Inside the church a plaster Virgin is smashed to smithereens. The priest is so taken by surprise that he hasn’t time to button up his pants. His balls swell up like rocks.
Melanie flutters about like a demented albatross. «Dry your things!» she wails. A grand undressing, with gasps and shrieks and objurgations. I get into Maude’s dressing sack, the one with the maribou feathers. Look like a fairy about to give an impersonation of Loulou Hurluburlu. All flub and foozle now. I’m getting a hard-on, «a personal hard-on», if you know what I mean.
Maude is upstairs putting the child to bed. I walk around in my bare feet, the dressing sack wide open. A lovely feeling. Melanie peeks in, just to see if I’m all right. She’s walking around in her drawers with the parrot perched on her wrist. Afraid of the lightning she is. I’m talking to her with my hands folded over my prick. Could be a scene out of the «Wizard of Oz» by Memling. Time: dreiviertel takt. Now and then the lightning strikes afresh. It leaves the taste of burning rubber in the mouth.
I’m standing in front of the big mirror admiring my quivering cock when Maude trips in. She’s as frisky as a hare and all decked out in tulle and mousseline. She seems not at all frightened by what she sees in the mirror. She comes over and stands beside me. «Open it up!» I urge. «Are you hungry?» she says, undoing herself leisurely. I turn her around and press her to me. She raises a leg to let me get it in. We look at each other in the mirror. She’s fascinated. I pull the wrap up over her ass so that she can have a better look. I lift her up and she twines her legs around me. «Yes, do it,» she begs. «Fuck me! Fuck me!» Suddenly she untwines her legs, unhitches. She grabs the big arm chair and turns it around, resting her hands on the back of it. Her ass is stuck out invitingly. She doesn’t wait for me to put it in—she grabs it and places it herself, watching all the time through the mirror. I push it back and forth slowly, holding my skirts up like a bedraggled hussy. She likes to see it coming out— how far will it come before it falls out. She reaches under with one hand and plays with my balls. She’s completely unleashed now, as brazen as a pot. I withdraw as far as I can without letting it slip out and she rolls her ass
