Fighting the image of the leotarded teenaged ΤWAT. And all the other CUNTS with their TITS and their ASSES that a man might want to FUCK, fighting it although the room was very dark and much was allowed in the dark.
“Oh, I’m so unhappy about this!” Enid quietly wailed.
Worst was the image of the little girl curled up inside her, a girl not much larger than a large bug but already a witness to such harm. Witness to a tautly engorged little brain that dipped in and out beyond the cervix and then, with a quick double spasm that could hardly be considered adequate warning, spat thick alkaline webs of spunk into her private room. Not even born and already drenched in sticky knowledge.
Alfred lay catching his breath and repenting his defiling of the baby. A last child was a last opportunity to learn from one’s mistakes and make corrections, and he resolved to seize this opportunity. From the day she was born he would treat her more gently than he’d treated Gary or Chipper. Relax the law for her, indulge her outright, even, and never once force her to sit at the table after everyone was gone.
But he’d squirted such filth on her when she was helpless. She’d witnessed such scenes of marriage, and so of course, when she was older, she betrayed him.
What made correction possible also doomed it.
The sensitive probe that had given him readings at the top end of the red zone now read zero. He pulled away and squared his shoulders to his wife. Under the spell of the sexual instinct (as Arthur Schopenhauer called it) he’d lost sight of how cruelly soon he had to shave and catch the train, but now the instinct was discharged and consciousness of the remaining night’s brevity weighed on his chest like #140 rail stock, and Enid had begun to cry again, as wives did when the hour was psychotically late and tampering with the alarm clock was not an option. Years ago, when they were first married, she’d sometimes cried in the wee hours, but then Alfred had felt such gratitude for the pleasure he’d stolen and the stabbing she’d endured that he never failed to ask why she was crying.
Tonight, notably, he felt neither gratitude nor the remotest obligation to quiz her. He felt sleepy.
Why did wives choose night to cry in? Crying at night was all very well if you didn’t have to catch a train to work in four hours and if you hadn’t, moments ago, committed a defilement in pursuit of a satisfaction whose importance now entirely escaped you.
Maybe it took all this — ten nights of wakefulness in bad motels followed by an evening on the emotional roller coaster and finally the run-outside-and-put-a-bullet-through-the-roof-of-your-mouth sucking and mewling noises of a wife trying to cry herself to sleep at two in the goddamned morning — to open his eyes to the fact that (a) sleep was a woman and (b) hers were comforts that he was under no obligation to refuse.
For a man who all his life had fought off extracurricular napping like any other unwholesome delight, the discovery was life-altering — no less momentous in its way than his discovery, hours earlier, of electrical anisotropism in a gel of networked ferroacetates. More than thirty years would pass before the discovery in the basement bore financial fruit; the discovery in the bedroom made existence chez Lambert more bearable immediately.
A Pax Somnis is descended on the household. Alfred’s new lover soothed whatever beast was left in him. How much easier than raging or sulking he found it to simply close his eyes. Soon everybody understood that he had an invisible mistress whom he entertained in the family room on Saturday afternoon when his work week at the Midpac ended, a mistress he took along with him on every business trip and fell into the arms of in beds that no longer seemed uncomfortable in motel rooms that no longer seemed so noisy, a mistress he never failed to visit in the course of an evening’s paperwork, a mistress with whom he shared a travel pillow after lunch on family summer trips while Enid lurchingly piloted the car and the kids in the back seat hushed. Sleep was the ideally work-compatible girl he ought to have married in the first place. Perfectly submissive, infinitely forgiving, and so respectable you could take her to church and the symphony and the St. Jude Repertory Theater. She never kept him awake with her tears. She demanded nothing and in return for nothing gave him everything he needed to do a long day’s work. There was no mess in their affair, no romantic osculation, no leakages or secretions, no shame. He could cheat on Enid in Enid’s own bed without giving her a shred of legally admissible proof, and as long as he kept the affair private to the extent of not dozing at dinner parties Enid tolerated it, as sensible wives had always done, and so it was an infidelity for which as the decades passed there never seemed to come a reckoning …
“Psst! Asshole!”
With a jolt Alfred awakened to the tremor and slow pitching of the Gunnar Myrdal. Someone else was in the stateroom?
“Asshole!”
“Who’s there?” he asked half in challenge, half in fear.
Thin Scandinavian blankets fell away as he sat up and peered into the semidarkness, straining to hear past the boundaries of his self. The partially deaf know like cellmates the frequencies at which their heads ring. His oldest companion was a contralto like a pipe organ’s middle A, a clarion blare vaguely localized in his left ear. He’d known this tone, at growing volumes, for thirty years; it was such a fixture that it seemed it should outlive him. It had the pristine meaninglessness of eternal or infinite things. Was as real as a heartbeat but corresponded to no real thing outside him. Was a sound that nothing made.
Underneath it the fainter and more fugitive tones were active. Cirrus-like clusterings of very high frequencies off in deep stratosphere behind his ears. Meandering notes of almost ghostly faintness, as from a remote calliope. A jangly set of mid-range tones that waxed and waned like crickets in the center of his skull. A low, almost rumbling drone like a dilution of a diesel engine’s blanket alldeafeningness, a sound he’d never quite believed was real — i.e., unreal — until he’d retired from the Midpac and lost touch with locomotives. These were the sounds his brain both created and listened to, was friendly with.
Outside of himself he could hear the psh, psh of two hands gently swinging on their hinges in the sheets.
And the mysterious rush of water all around him, in the Gunnar Myrdal’s secret capillaries.
And someone snickering down in the dubious space below the horizon of the bedding.
And the alarm clock pinching off each tick. It was three in the morning and his mistress had abandoned him. Now, when he needed her comforts more than ever, she went off whoring with younger sleepers. For thirty years she’d obliged him, spread her arms and opened her legs every night at ten-fifteen. She’d been the nook he sought, the womb. He could still find her in the afternoon or early evening, but not in a bed at night. As soon as he lay down he groped in the sheets and sometimes for a few hours found some bony extremity of hers to clutch. But reliably at one or two or three she vanished beyond any pretending that she still belonged to him.
He peered fearfully across the rust-orange carpeting to the Nordic blond wood lines of Enid’s bed. Enid appeared to be dead.
The rushing water in the million pipes.
And the tremor, he had a guess about this tremor. That it came from the engines, that when you built a luxury cruise ship you damped or masked every sound the engines made, one after another, right down to the lowest audible frequency and even lower, but you couldn’t go all the way to zero. You were left with this subaudible two-hertz shaking, the irreducible remainder and reminder of a silence imposed on something powerful.
A small animal, a mouse, scurried in the layered shadows at the foot of Enid’s bed. For a moment it seemed to Alfred that the whole floor consisted of scurrying corpuscles. Then the mice resolved themselves into a single more forward mouse, horrible mouse, squishable pellets of excreta, habits of gnawing, heedless peeings—