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He goes into a state of rapture at a newsstand, looking at the magazine covers. He sees a magazine (Mademoiselle) displaying articles on clothing, beauty, health, and love, aimed especially at women and with Brooke Shields’s face on the cover. He remembers how, as a boy, he had only had fashion magazines to masturbate to. He buys it. He leafs through it. He feels a foggy twinge of arousal. He goes into the first bar he finds. He sits at the bar. He orders a whiskey. He pays up. He takes a drink. He leafs through the magazine. A woman with very red lips hides her face behind a veil, to promote Revlon lipsticks. A well-known TV actress, with a bottle of Max Factor perfume in her hand, says: “Part of the art of being a woman is knowing when not to be too much of a lady.” There is a striped bathing suit, with a tutu, from Saks Fifth Avenue. He finds the model absolutely beautiful. Cacharel, on the facing page, announces a perfume called Anaïs Anaïs (a reference to Anaïs Nin?). On a motorcycle rides a young man in a black jacket and a young woman in a slip, also black, both wearing Carrera glasses. A girl is jogging in Max Factor WaterProof. Dexatrim shows a photograph of Melody Mahoney of Warren (Indiana), who lost 105 pounds in thirty-six weeks by taking one Dexatrim capsule a day. There is also an interview with Michael Caine: “the man women love to love.” Another ad for a bathing suit with tutu, by Lakeside. Angie Dickinson reports that California avocadoes have only seventeen calories a slice (“If you take into account,” it says in one corner of the ad, “that there are sixteen slices to a medium-sized avocado.”) The headline for Sambuca Romana says, “If they try to tell you that Sambuca Romana is an after-dinner drink, tell them you weren’t born yesterday. You just look that way.” Chimère says: “Chimère perfume: From a distance, it’s discreet and elegant; from close up, it’s out of this world.” The page is split between two shots. On top, a woman at an office desk is surrounded by three men. Underneath, she’s embracing one man. (One of the three from the picture on the top? A new one?) He has another drink of whiskey. He heads toward the bathroom.
There is an article on how to stop biting your nails. A girl wrapped in a pink towel says, “I never felt like this until I tried Caress.” Caress is a soap. Many pages on how to sunbathe. A long article titled “The Elegant Art of Flirting.” A report on dressing in ecological colors. Two girls look out at him from an article titled “Love in the Afternoon,” which begins: “Don’t wait for the sun to set to put on a sexy dress. We have a series of new designs for you that can be worn all day long. .” He unzips his pants and begins to fondle himself. What if he were to fall in love with one of those models with almond eyes who look out at him from the ads? Searching for them and finding out whether they were as seductive in the flesh as they are on paper would be a struggle. . Even to have thought of falling in love with them makes him smile. And yet, he has fallen in love a few times: many years ago. . Has he really been in love, though, or is it an illusion he half-remembers that doesn’t jibe with the dictionary definition of the word? It occurs to him that it must be an arduous task to write a dictionary, to have a precise knowledge of all sentiments and to define them, to know exactly what it is to fall in love, what passion is, where the line between good and evil and between pleasure and perversion falls, or between abundant, numerous, plethoric, overflowing, considerable. .
He is thinking all of this as he stares at the tiles, the pictures in the magazine long forgotten. He is profoundly bored. He lets go. His erection goes limp and disappears at once. He leaves the magazine on top of the paper towel dispenser, goes back out to the bar, drinks up the third gulp of whiskey, and opens the door to the street.
In the subway, the guy sitting across from him is so odious that he wishes him dead. But he soon cools off. Wishing him dead is too much of an exertion. He looks away from the man and realizes that if he had to describe him without looking he would no longer remember him. This pleases him. When he looks back at him (the flabby face, the fish eyes, the pencil mustache, the idiotic smile. .), he no longer hates him. He is entirely indifferent to him.
He gets home. Helena is pulling dead leaves off the plants. She tells him they’re dying for lack of air and light. If he would only keep them upstairs, in the studio, they’d be better off. But since he refuses. . She doesn’t understand why Heribert has this phobia about plants. In any case, they’ll have to move soon, Helena says, and if they decide to leave the city, she’ll make sure to find a place with a nice garden and a deck. She also says they’ll have to buy another car, because the one they have now won’t do for commuting back and forth to the city every day.
Helena has decided that she needs to disconnect a little from work. She’s always running around, tying up loose ends, dashing from one meeting to the next. . By the way, she’s met a very interesting young artist, whom she’d like him to meet. Helena has seen what he does, and she thinks it’s very exciting. This artist would like to talk with Heribert; she imagines he wants advice. But he seems shy, so she suggests that Heribert be the one to call him the following day, before he takes the car in to the repair shop, which Heribert emphatically refuses to do, saying that since he hasn’t used it lately, it’s not up to him to take it into the shop.
Helena observes that not only is this affirmation true but it constitutes clear proof that, in fact, Heribert does nothing all day long: he never leaves the house because he has no obligations beyond painting. He could take it into the shop, she goes on, before he starts painting, and this point reminds her that she hasn’t asked him how his work has gone that day, nor if he’s got a lot done. Her questions go unanswered because Heribert isn’t listening: he needs all his powers of concentration to recall that the last time he used the car was about a month and a half ago, when he and Helena went for dinner at Sardi’s (and the dinner was lousy), and that when they left, he stained the upholstery with the cognac that spilled from the glass he had taken from the restaurant, hidden in the pocket of his raincoat, before they got mugged while making out in a park. He still has a box of matches from that dinner at Sardi’s. He looks for it on the bookshelves. He finds it on a high shelf between a ceramic vase he never liked and a book of cocktail recipes. He looks at it, wondering how many matches there are in a matchbox. It seems evident to him that matchboxes must contain a fixed number of matches. How many, though? Is it, let’s say, an exact number, which coincides with some attractive multiple of ten, like fifty or a hundred? Or is it some less elegant multiple of ten, say, sixty or eighty? He considers it inconceivable for the chosen number to be something fussy along the lines of, say, seventy-eight. Of course no one would ordinarily think of counting them, even though, the way things are, you never could tell. What if they cheated and, instead of a hundred matches (if the number of matches meant to fill each box is, indeed, one hundred), they only pack ninety-nine? That would be a gold mine, thanks to the millions of innocent people in the world who buy boxes of matches every day without counting how many there are. And how do they fill the boxes? The image of an endless conveyor belt moving matches along and letting them fall one by one into each box makes him laugh. And how do you make a wooden match? How about a wax match? Suddenly he’s very interested in learning how they do it. He remembers a Warner Brothers cartoon he saw on television as a child in which toothpicks were manufactured by cutting down a tree, taking it to the lumberyard, and stripping it of all its excess wood until all that is left is a toothpick, which ends up in a box. Then, they cut down another tree. .