He sat up and pinched his arm. Remember this pinch, he commanded himself, squeezing. Remember the date and the hour and the exact pain, and on the anniversary of the pinch a year from now, five years, ten, fifteen, think about it. Try to remember to remember it on your deathbed.
He released his flesh, and instantly the pain thinned out, was absorbed, halved, quartered, sixteenthed. He couldn’t have taken up exactly the same flesh in his fingers again. It was as if he had thrown a stone into a lake. In seconds he could no longer identify the precise spot where it had gone down.
“Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.” Who said that?
If he had difficulty remembering, he had none at all imagining. On about the third day he began to fantasize. He thought much about girls and women and kept himself exhausted by yielding to every sexual impulse, building the foundations of his lust always on real women — girls who had worked for him, his buyers’ wives, customers to whom he had given his personal attention. Sometimes, however, at the moment of climax, he swiftly substituted some film goddess, or girl seen on television, or a record sleeve, or a billboard, or some girl never seen, some college woman from books and imagination.
He became almost animally potent, yet remained somehow in control, cool enough to build his fantasies carefully, starting again if he made a mistake, constructing what he said to her, what she said to him. It was a more careful wooing than any he had ever done in his life, and he saw himself in a new light, gallant, charming. He held off climax and teased himself with manufactured complexities, sudden jealousies — seeing himself deep in love, smitten till it cost him. Together, he and his girl friend worried about new places they could go, and later, what they were to do about their affair, how the children were to be told, how it was to be broken to the husband, to Lilly. It was marvelous. All that disturbed him were those occasions when his carefully managed, highly organized affairs were interrupted by random, spontaneous introductions of new women — the movie star, the imaginary TV singer — as unplanned and unprovided for as a freak in nature. At these times all his cool will would be suddenly broken and as he came he groaned the erotic words, invoking flesh almost violently, spraying his sperm, fucking completely. Cunt, he thought, oh pussy, oh tits and oh, oh, ass!
But even taking into account these aberrant moments, robbed of the gentle consummation he had planned, he realized that he had never had so active nor so satisfactory a sex life.
It’s a goddamned love nest in here.
He was illimitably free to plunder and profane. In his unvisited cell, with all the privacy he could want and all the time in the world, he had enough for the first time in his life. Oddly, however, it was through just these fantasies that his real past was finally evoked. Why, he remembered suddenly, it’s exactly the way he had lain beside Lilly!
He could see himself — himself and Lilly — the two big people huddled in their corner of the bed. They should have had a king-size bed. Feldman had asked for one, but Lilly had said they didn’t make king-size in French Provincial, that it would look ridiculous. “But they had all the kings,” Feldman said.
“That doesn’t matter,” Lilly said.
Feldman thought bitterly of the small kings, the teensy-weensy, itsy-bitsy kings of France.
And twin beds would somehow have strengthened the appearance of their consanguinity. He didn’t even ask for twin beds. He thought of Dagwood and Blondie, of the husband and wife on “The Donna Reed Show,” of Lucy and Desi, and all the conjugal Thompsons and Richardsons and Wilsons and Morgans in America in their twin beds, in their rooms within rooms — each with his own table, his own bedlamp, his own electric blanket; each with his own slippers beneath the bed, the polished toes just sticking out, like the badly concealed feet of lovers in farces. Such things bespoke order, reason, calm. Paradoxically, they bespoke a sort of detached tenderness for the mate that Feldman had never felt. Twin beds were out. (But they did say that love was more exciting in a twin bed. Feldman wondered. It raised penumbral questions like what happened at sea when in the mixed company of a life raft somebody had to go to the bathroom. How did two unmarried archeologists, holed up in a cave, hiding from savages, take a crap? The shipwrecked and the archeologists and the coed Yugoslav guerrilla fighters, they were the ones who had the fun. Policemen raiding wild parties, firemen rescuing ladies in their nightgowns from burning buildings, they did.)
So they lay together in the regular double bed, Feldman pulling back his knee when it brushed Lilly’s thigh, creating a space between them, imagining the space a distance, making that distance into a journey he would never willingly take. She could have been in Europe, in Asia, in craters on the moon. And wild. Wild! As unfaithful to Lilly right there beside him as some philanderer at a convention across the country.
He waited until she slept. It was easy to tell. She was a deep breather. (She breathes for six people, he thought.) Then, silkenly sheathed, luxurious in his mandarin’s pajamas, he would begin his fantasies. (Feldman picked out his pajamas like a pajama scientist. No millionaire, no playboy, no bedroom sybarite has pajamas like mine, Feldman thought.) If Lilly happened to snore at one of these moments, he experienced the most intense irritation. If she snored a second time, he poked her, jabbed her with rigid, extended fingers in some soft part of her soft body. “Close your mouth,” he’d hiss. “Get over on your own side.” And in her sleep she’d obey. (Lilly listened in her sleep. Sometimes he’d give her pointless commands and watch with interest their clumsy, torpid execution. It was like playing a great fat musical instrument, some giant bellows thing.)
He never permitted himself the luxury of an orgasm, gradually abandoning, as sleep encroached, his carefully arranged trysts, his logical seductions, losing his place, forgetting to touch himself, until finally his erection waned like an unstoked fire.
And Lilly never knew, (Pure kindness on his part, for in truth he didn’t give a damn what she thought.) If she had ever discovered his teen-age games he would have laughed in her face at her disgust, since it was her fault anyway. Because she was unbeautiful. Because her body harbored a traitor to love which pushed up bumps, jellied her flesh, dilated the veins on the backs of her legs. She was wrapped in her skin like a bad package. Everywhere there were excrescences, tumescences, body hair, cold pale scar tissue the blood never warmed, black-and-blue marks which arose from no ever-identified origin. She gets them from drying herself with a towel, Feldman thought, from dressing, from sitting in drafts.
Because Lilly was unbeautiful. Unbeautiful. And because she didn’t care. She accepted every blemish — they’re benign, she reasoned, they’re all benign; she was benign — forgiving herself. Because she had no vanity. None at all. (No. One. A-line dresses to conceal her big hips. And he didn’t mind big hips. He liked big hips.) What he hated was the strange combination in Lilly of fragility and a peasant heart. When she visited her parents in the East she would sit up for two nights in the coach. Or she took a bus. “I don’t mind buses,” she said. She didn’t mind buses, but the air conditioning gave her a sore throat. She didn’t mind a sore throat. He took her to expensive restaurants. She ordered liver. Thick steaks gave her heartburn, she said. Thick steaks did. A play came to town. Feldman bought seats in the orchestra; she preferred the balcony. Sitting close gave her headache, she said. Feldman wished she were beside him now. He would give her one in the back with his fingers. Unbeautiful Lilly!