Sexual issues aside, their married life went on as normal. They began to take evening walks. Day after day, whatever the weather he would talk to his wife intimately about this and that. This special time they spent as a married couple made her happy. And every night he insisted on taking her into his arms before they went to sleep.
But one night, while her husband was holding her close, he said he wanted to bring her to orgasm.
At first she refused.
He explained he wanted to do it with his hand.
She still refused.
Since sexual relations were now impossible, he said, his impotence would become unbearable unless he could find a way to give his wife satisfaction. At the very mention of the word‘impotence’ his face fell. Was his sorrow genuine, she wondered? And if so, was it because he really was impotent, or because he was unable to have intimate relations with someone else who might help him to perform? But she was afraid he would become suspicious if she questioned him.
She pleaded with him, saying that she did not want to in case he tired himself out. He seemed to be using his impotence as a form of blackmail.
In the end, she decided to let him have his way.
Do you have any idea what it feels like for a woman? A little dark, a little cold, a little sad. It feels as if you are looking on from a great distance. You are acutely aware of how everything gradually builds to a climax. The pleasure it gives is more direct than normal sexual intercourse, admittedly, but it is a short cut to a pleasure that is ice cold, compressed like a computer chip.
The wife told her husband it was a kind of rape. She said she felt like a prostitute, or rather, as if she was at an orgy with someone she knew cared nothing for her.
He adopted a new position every time. She remembered reading in a magazine that there were so many different positions you could try a new one every day of the year and still have more to try.
One day she understood this unconventional arrangement was keeping their relationship going. She couldn’t help smiling to herself. If there was another sexual partner there would be no need for him to continue pleasuring himself, and he wouldn’t keep pleasuring his wife unless he loved her. Her only regret was they would never have children.
Her husband’s health became a constant worry. She had no idea what she would do without him — a sure sign of her love — so she decided to start preparing him tonics. At his age he ought to be taking supplements of all kinds. Whenever she heard about a good one, his wife would go out and buy it. As soon as a new product came on to the market, she had to have it. All her heart and soul were devoted to finding and preparing her husband tonics. She had never put much faith in any of them before, but now she understood why these concoctions commanded such a high price. It was almost as if a drug would be useless if it was too easy to buy.
‘Give me your most expensive preparations,’ she would say.
‘I don’t care how much it costs. I have money!’
In the end, she bought her husband a kidney.
Are you sure about this?
You can shut the book now.
Do you choose to read on?
The Hint
1
I had just lost my job. Again. I don’t know why I kept losing jobs, I could never figure it out. I worked hard, I did whatever I was asked. I was a solid, reliable office toiler. One time the boss asked me to clean the sliding doors. I rubbed and rubbed until I thought I’d done a good job, but as soon as the boss stepped up to the door and it opened, a smear appeared on the glass and I lost my job. That time they told me to clean the door again, so I rubbed and rubbed the glass, and rubbed some more. When I stepped up to it to check, the door whooshed open, the glass all bright and shiny. But I lost the job anyway.
‘It’s not that you’re no good,’ said the boss.
It wasn’t that I was no good, and it had nothing to do with the whole door incident. It’s just that the world was one big lottery and it was completely random whether you won or lost — or so it seemed to me.
That day I went home, put my head down and slept. I slept right through until the next morning. I slept until I was woken by a banging on the bedroom door. It was my mum. I still lived with my parents, or rather, in their house, worst luck.
As soon as they realised I was still in bed and had lost my job they panicked.
‘Get out of bed! Get out of bed!’ shouted my dad, like he was worried I had died in the night or something. As if getting up would help me find another job. The chances of winning the lottery keep on going down, but the less hope there is of taking the jackpot the keener people are to win it.
‘You’re almost 30, whatever are you going to do?’ my parents cried.
I was really only 25. This was all a fuss about nothing.
‘OK, OK, I’ll go and rob a bank.’
That shut them up. They were law-abiding people, respectable workers all their lives. When I did politics at school, they told us the proletariat was the heroic working class, but my parents weren’t like that. Their kind of proletariat didn’t own anything but they were so law-abiding they would never go and steal even if they were starving — real thieves are never actually short of food. That was the way my parents brought me up. I was never bad — the worst I ever did was watch bad people doing bad things and have a good laugh. So everybody pitied me at school. When we left, everybody took photos of all their friends, and wrote them cards and invited them to parties. But no one came near me.
I yawned, scratched my crotch and crawled out of bed.
Then the gang from middle school turned up.
They roared up on motorbikes, wearing army fatigues and revving their engines. Our elderly neighbours clasped their hands to their chests in terror — we didn’t see many motorbikes round where I lived. The riders didn’t care, just took off their helmets and tossed back their hair. After we graduated, everyone got themselves a high-flying job — everyone except me, that is. I carried on living in the run-down area where I’d always lived. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough, but how had the rest of them got so smart? They all had motorbikes. If you gave me one for free, I couldn’t even pay for a number plate.
‘We’d starve if we only had our wages to live on,’ they used to scoff.
Anyway, they’d come to invite me to a reunion dinner — a chance for the successful ones to show off to the ones who weren’t successful.
‘I’m too busy … ’ I said. I stopped myself before I could add: ‘I’ve got to go to work.’
‘Just tell us when we can pick you up and we’ll go together,’ they said.
‘Why am I such a big deal all of a sudden?’
‘It’s not because of you, it’s her.’
She used to sit at the table in front of me in class and turn around to borrow my rubber. She was nothing much to look at, very skinny, but her arms were long and white and every time she borrowed my rubber, her arm bent at the elbow like it was a clamp. I started longing for that clamp — I wanted to put my rubber somewhere within its reach. Eventually I bought a special rubber with a nice smell. I thought she’d like it. But then one day the teacher spotted us and called the pair of us up to the front — the whole class burst out laughing.
The gang told me she was going to marry a wealthy man and my heart gave a thump.
‘He drives a Lexus. Apparently, he’s in real estate,’ someone said.