For it soon became clear that no mere woman could satisfy him—not Vernon. His activities moved into an entirely new sphere of intensity and abstraction. Now, when the velvet curtain shot skywards, Vernon might be astride a black stallion on a marmoreal dune, his narrow eyes fixed on the caravan of defenseless Arab women straggling along beneath him; then he dug in his spurs and thundered down on them, swords twirling in either hand. Or else Vernon climbed from a wriggling human swamp of tangled naked bodies, playfully batting away the hands that clutched at him, until he was tugged down once again into the thudding mass of membrane and heat. He visited strange planets where women were metal, were flowers, were gas. Soon he became a cumulus cloud, a tidal wave, the East Wind, the boiling Earth’s core, the air itself, wheeling round a terrified globe as whole tribes, races, ecologies fled and scattered under the continent-wide shadow of his approach.
It was after about a month of this new brand of skylarking that things began to go rather seriously awry.
The first hint of disaster came with sporadic attacks of ejaculatio praecox. Vernon would settle down for a leisurely session, would just be casting and scripting the cosmic drama about to be unfolded before him—and would look down to find his thoughts had been messily and pleasurelessly anticipated by the roguish weapon in his hands. It began to happen more frequently, sometimes quite out of the blue: Vernon wouldn’t even notice until he saw the boyish, tell-tale stains on his pants last thing at night. (Amazingly, and rather hurtfully too, his wife didn’t seem to detect any real difference. But he was making love to her only every ten or eleven days by that time.) Vernon made a creditable attempt to laugh the whole thing off, and, sure enough, after a while the trouble cleared itself up. What followed, however, was far worse.
To begin with, at any rate, Vernon blamed himself. He was so relieved, and so childishly delighted, by his newly recovered prowess that he teased out his “sessions” to unendurable, unprecedented lengths. Perhaps that wasn’t wise… What was certain was that he overdid it. Within a week, and quite against his will, Vernon’s “sessions” were taking between thirty and forty-five minutes; within two weeks, up to an hour and a half. It wrecked his schedules: all the lightning strikes, all the silky raids, that used to punctuate his life were reduced to dour campaigns which Vernon could never truly win. “Vernon, are you ill?” his wife would say outside the bathroom door. “It’s nearly tea-time.” Vernon—slumped on the lavatory seat, panting with exhaustion—looked up wildly, his eyes startled, shrunken. He coughed until he found his voice. “I’ll be straight out,” he managed to say, climbing heavily to his feet.
Nothing Vernon could summon would deliver him. Massed, maddened, cartwheeling women—some of molten pewter and fifty feet tall, others indigo and no bigger than fountain pens—hollered at him from the four corners of the universe. No help. He gathered all the innocents and subjected them to atrocities of unimaginable proportions, committing a million murders enriched with infamous tortures. He still drew a blank. Vernon, all neutronium, a supernova, a black sun, consumed the Earth and her sisters in his dying fire, bullocking through the cosmos, ejaculating the Milky Way. That didn’t work either. He was obliged to fake orgasms with his wife (rather skillfully, it seemed: she didn’t say anything about it). His testicles developed a mighty migraine, whose slow throbs all day timed his heartbeat with mounting frequency and power, until at night Vernon’s face was a sweating parcel of lard and his hands shimmered deliriously as he juggled the aspirins to his lips.
Then the ultimate catastrophe occurred. Paradoxically, it was heralded by a single, joyous, uncovenanted climax—again out of the blue, on a bus, one lunchtime. Throughout the afternoon at the office Vernon chuckled and gloated, convinced that finally all his troubles were at an end. It wasn’t so. After a week of ceaseless experiment and scrutiny Vernon had to face the truth. The thing was dead. He was impotent.
“Oh my God,” he thought, “I always knew something like this would happen to me sometime.” In one sense Vernon accepted the latest reverse with grim stoicism (by now the thought of his old ways filled him with the greatest disgust); in another sense, and with terror, he felt like a man suspended between two states: one is reality, perhaps, the other an unspeakable dream. And then when day comes he awakes with a moan of relief; but reality has gone and the nightmare has replaced it: the nightmare was really there all the time. Vernon looked at the house where they had lived for so long now, the five rooms through which his calm wife moved on her calm tracks, and he saw it all slipping away from him forever, all his peace, all the fever and the safety. And for what, for what?
“Perhaps it would be better if I just told her about the whole thing and made a clean breast of it,” he thought wretchedly. “It wouldn’t be easy, God knows, but in time she might learn to trust me again. And I really am finished with all that other nonsense. God, when I…” But then he saw his wife’s face—capable, straightforward, confident—and the scar of dawning realization as he stammered out his shame. No, he could never tell her, he could never do that to her, no, not to her. She was sure to find out soon enough anyway. How could a man conceal that he had lost what made him a man? He considered suicide, but—“But I just haven’t got the guts,” he told himself. He would have to wait, to wait and melt in his dread.
A month passed without his wife saying anything. This had always been a make-or-break, last-ditch deadline for Vernon, and he now approached the coming confrontation as a matter of nightly crisis. All day long he rehearsed his excuses. To kick off with Vernon complained of a headache, on the next night of a stomach upset. For the following two nights he stayed up virtually until dawn—“preparing the annual figures,” he said. On the fifth night he simulated a long coughing fit, on the sixth a powerful fever. But on the seventh night he just helplessly lay there, sadly waiting. Thirty minutes passed, side by side. Vernon prayed for her sleep and for his death.
“Vernon?” she asked.
“Mm-hm?” he managed to say—God, what a croak it was.
“Do you want to talk about this?”
Vernon didn’t say anything. He lay there, melting, dying. More minutes passed. Then he felt her hand on his thigh.
Quite a long time later, and in the posture of a cowboy on the back of a bucking steer, Vernon ejaculated all over his wife’s face. During the course of the preceding two and a half hours he had done to his wife everything he could possibly think of, to such an extent that he was candidly astonished that she was still alive. They subsided, mumbling soundlessly, and slept in each other’s arms.