“I don’t doubt it for a minute, Jimmy. And it doesn’t surprise me that you’ve been depressed. I suppose somewhere down the line you must have realized all the things you fought so hard for were meaningless.”
I could have bitten off my tongue. I sounded like a bitter, middle-aged man. It occurred to me that might just be what I was.
Jimmy shook his head. “You sad fuck, Chuck.” He smiled bitterly, and repeated himself. “You sad fuck, Chuck. It even rhymes.” He tried another shot and failed again. This time he scowled and put down the cue on the felt baize. “You resent me because I’ve gone for something. I even had to fight for my terrific wife. She didn’t just fucking materialize, okay! You think she wanted me when we first met? I’m sixteen years older than her. I’m a workaholic and I’m not good at saying fun things at breakfast. Archie means everything to me. She’s the most valuable thing I’ve got.”
“She’s not a thing. And you don’t own her.”
“Don’t I know it,” said Jimmy, crossing the room and slumping into an aquamarine leather armchair. His telephone made a bleeping sound, and he checked a message before looking up with a distracted expression. “I often wake up before dawn, then lie there thinking about the things missing in my life. Take a guy like you, Chuck, you’re broke and haven’t got a hell of a lot going on, but I’d rather be in your shoes than mine. You know why? Because you seem basically content to be a sad bastard. I’d shoot myself if I had to wake up in the morning and be you.”
I poured myself a drink and tried to mask my irritation with the self-satisfied prick. All I could do was hit him back with all the sarcasm I had.
“I don’t know if you have a terrific wife, Jimmy, I haven’t seen enough of her. All I know is she has a fondness for modern sculpture.”
“Oh I think you’ve seen enough. She’s the sort of woman you’d kill for.”
There was a long silence. I decided to play it straight. “So that’s what you do? You touch a sculpture, and she imagines you’re touching her body?”
“The sculpture is just an aid. She doesn’t imagine it. She actually feels it. With intensity.”
“I didn’t mean to spy on you.”
“Don’t fret, man. We knew you were there all along.”
“You did?”
“Sure. We’re kind of high on this thing, we’ve invented a new way of having sex. We want to tell the world, it could be our greatest achievement.”
“What would Billy Graham make of you, I wonder?”
“He’d hate us. We’d put him out of a job.”
“He’d find a way of damning you. Adultery is in the mind, that’s what he’d say.”
“And he’d be right.”
“Jimmy, do you never just feel like getting between your wife’s legs and fucking her normally?”
“No way. Not at all,” he said, his eyes full of waspish sincerity. “More importantly, Archie wouldn’t like it. She doesn’t like penetration.”
“That’s what she tells you?”
“We fucked on our wedding night and after that maybe a half-dozen times. Sometimes I wonder if she finds my cock uncomfortable? I pack a bit of a punch, you know.”
He moved up to the window, where he stood looking out into the sunlit glare, listening to the thudding tennis balls from a court at the back of the house. Archie, in white ankle-socks and a short white skirt, was fiercely hitting ground-strokes to an opponent hidden behind a juniper hedge. As she slid across the clay court, throwing up palls of ochre dust, I lost myself in her physical presence—her swinging hair, eager grunts, and bronzed smooth legs, lithe as Chris Evert’s at her early-career best—and reminded myself I hadn’t slept with a woman for eighteen months.
I grew aware of Jimmy blinking self-consciously at me. In a forlorn voice, he said, “Chuck, are you attracted to my wife?”
Attraction to me conjures up a horseshoe magnet covered in iron filings. Not a pair of lovers joined at the hip. “Christ, Jimmy, what’s the matter with you? Of course I’m not!”
“But you find her attractive?”
“Okay, yes, she’s attractive, I can’t lie about that, but you must have known that when you married her. Or did you think no one would ever look at her again because she was married?”
“No, but she’s very animal, and it hurts when—”
“Has it ever occurred to you that what you need is to have a child?”
He stared at me, startled, disturbed. “I’m not sure that would be such a good idea. We’re very busy. It’s a lot of responsibility.” He stopped and fidgeted. “Is that what you’d do if you were married to my wife? Have a child with her?”
“Jimmy! What’s happened to you? Yes, I would have a child with her. You’ve got money, just get yourself a Philippino nanny, enjoy your marriage! Because yes, you have a lovely wife and if you’re not careful you’re going to lose her. I mean what woman would be satisfied with this?”
This time it was Jimmy’s turn to be incredulous. He threw out his arms and laughed. “Come on, what’s wrong with this? We have everything.”
“Your wife’s not happy, okay? She’s a beautiful woman full of life and energy. And very bright too. She’s got a sexual neurosis of some kind, and you should get some therapeutic help. And then have a child.”
“That’s what you think? Interesting.” He nodded. “Because we have this problem. I mean I have a problem.”
“Yes?”
“I think she’s looking for an affair.”
“And that surprises you?” I waited a good minute, then blurted out: “Jimmy, I have to say this is totally insane. I mean, what the hell are you getting involved with, this whole mental sex thing? Isn’t it just some stupid idea you cooked up because things weren’t working between you?”
“Sigmund Freud said successful creative people sublimate their physical urges.”
“Yes, but Freud was insane.”
“So is everyone, Chuck. So is everyone.”
He stood there for a moment, clutching his head as if he were afraid it was going to fly away. I regretted my hard words to him. “It’ll be okay, Jimmy. Don’t worry.”
“Chuck, it’s good to have you here. Sincerely.”
He blinked his watery eyes at me, and I understood this was the moment when I had to put my hand on his shoulder and give it a little shake while making a sort of intense grimace of affection.
He hugged me and apologized for giving me a hard time, assuring me that he didn’t mean it like that. He was just stressed, there was too much to do at the office and it looked like he had to go to China tomorrow.
“China!”
“Yeah, you’ve heard of China, right? Biggest bullshit factory in the world. You get paid in cash but you’ve got to pull it out of people’s asses.”
“So what’ll I do then?” I said. “I can’t just stay here with Archie, I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”
“Why not?” he said without enthusiasm. “Stay, relax, enjoy the servants and the house and the pools and terraces. I’ll go and fucking work like I always do. I mean someone’s got to pay for all this shit. Yeah. Just one thing, Chuck. One thing, okay, and I’m not asking a lot here. If she comes to you and wants you to go to bed with her just tell her no. Tell her you’re my friend and she’s got to respect that.”
His anxious eyes pored over me, and I wished I’d stayed in London where nothing ever happened.
VI
After he’d gone, I stayed there in the window for a while, magnetized by the shining white figure in the garden. Then I opened the door to the wooden decking outside and walked down the teak steps to the path. Like a wraith drawn by a power greater than itself, I felt myself moving towards the tennis court, where Archie grew aware of me.
“Hello there, Chuck!” she called out. “You play tennis?”
I stopped by the wire netting. “No. I don’t like games.”
“Oh, you should get into them.” She smashed a forehand down the line. “Me and Jimmy are crazy about games.”
“I noticed.”
Waving to her opponent, a short, hairy-legged Sard who turned out to be the gardener, she came up to me, wiping the sweat from her face. “Jimmy’s going away.”
“He told me.”
“And so I was thinking if you can keep your wits about it, we could have an affair.”
I was flummoxed, absolutely flummoxed. It was like she’d suggested we should watch some television, or go for a walk together. “An affair? And what would Jimmy have to say about that?”
“Jimmy’s got to grow up!” said Archie. “Anyway, it’s up to you. I’ve made you an offer, and you can either decline or accept. Just think of it as a great chance to get some exercise.” She smiled.
I shook my head like a frowning schoolmaster. “You know I came out here to relax. I came thinking that Jimmy had settled down with a woman he loved.”
“He does love me. I’m not sure I love him so very much but at least I’m not leaving him. Not yet anyway.”
“You two are a fucking recipe for divorce.”
“If you don’t want to do it, that’s fair enough. You seem a sensible bloke, Chuck, and I like that.” She grabbed the wire-netting fence with both hands. “I expect you’re probably the kind of man who doesn’t like a straight offer, but I don’t have very much time. So just tell me if you want me or not.”
I looked at her and I did want her, although it was all fairly abstract. “Yes. Not very fair to Jimmy, though, is it?”
“Oh it’s very fair. I’ll tell you more about it later. Maybe.”
She waited for my answer, and finally I nodded. “Okay, if that’s what you want.”
“Good. You’re sure?”
“I’m not sure. I can’t be sure until this whole thing’s played itself out, but I’m saying okay for now.”
Her eyes were still consoling. Now those eyes seemed to say: relax, take me, do what you want.
“Don’t make such a big thing of it. It’s really not. You don’t have to marry me or anything.”
“Maybe for you it’s something very normal. Maybe you do this stuff all the time. You know when I first met you I thought you seemed a straightforward woman with a good mind. I was a bit confused, though—do you mind my saying that?—about you and Jimmy. What you were doing with him.”
“You have a pretty low opinion of your friend, don’t you?”
“I suppose so.”
“And of me as well?” She loomed over me when she said that, the sun catching the shine of her black hair.
“I don’t have a low opinion of you at all.”
“Thanks.” She stuck her finger through the netting and wiggled it at me. “So you want to go ahead with this thing?”
“I told you yes. Just stop talking about it like some sort of project. But I’m not getting involved in this whole mental sex thing. I make love normally, so don’t bring some damned sculpture to bed, because I’ll walk out. This is all a bit of a mind-fuck, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“Chuck, get out of the taboo, get inside the emotion. Okay?”
Christ, this woman had spent too long in America! I stared at her, then tried to control my disquiet. “When do you want to start?”
“Tomorrow. We’ll have a light supper at about six, then we’ll rest for a half hour and meet here on the terrace afterwards. One other thing, Chuck. Try to remember that I will be working through a number of different sexual attitudes.”
“How do you mean, attitudes?”
“You’ll see. I won’t be myself. Not quite.”
“Like a role-play thing? Will you come in wearing black leather and thigh-length boots?”
“Would you like me to?”
“No. Not at all. Just wear the red dress you wore last night.”
VII
The next day, after we’d eaten and Jimmy had left and said his despondent farewells, I almost sighed with delight when I saw her. She’d conspired to look exactly as she did the first night I saw her. Women understand these things. Her hair was up, revealing that soft arching neck with the soft earlobes pierced by gold rings. Even the tiny piercings excited me, the way they broke through the soft rotunda of flesh. Her lips were slightly tensed—sexual excitement or just plain nervousness?
“So. Here you are. In your entirety,” I said.
“Not quite,” she said. “Remember, flesh is a veil. Come over here, sit down. Take a closer look at me.”
I sat down beside her. No longer forbidden fruit, she now seemed a woman like any other. Certainly beautiful, but otherwise perfectly ordinary. When she leaned back and smiled invitingly at me, I felt coerced by the situation. She noticed immediately.
“You preferred me when I was not available?” she said.
“Oh, infinitely.”
We sat in silence. Then she shook her head. “You see. Words are such a turn-off.”
After that we kissed for a while. To be frank, I found her slimy tongue rather repellent, the way it insistently pumped in and out of my mouth. She maintained this for about ten minutes, then put her hand on my crotch.
“Archie. This is not working for me,” I said.
She gave me a murderous look, slid down on the floor, unzipped me and parted my legs, then fellated me until it became necessary for me to issue a little cautionary note, which she ignored, keeping her eyes firmly drilled into mine throughout the whole ghastly experience.
She rolled onto the sofa, sighed with relief and rested her head in my lap. “That was the first part,” she said. “I can file that away now. For later use.”
I was still hyperventilating. “Mental sex?”
“Correct.” She looked at me. “I may never need to suck cock again for as long as I live.”
I smiled, finding myself a little more at ease with her, and the situation. “What would Jimmy have to say about that?”
“Oh let’s not talk about him.”
After a few minutes she started peeling off her clothes. She was every bit as exquisite as I had thought. Her dun skin was velvety, and down below, her dark hair had been carefully shaved to reveal a dusky, sensitized ridge.
Before long she was straddling me, revolving her powerful haunches and grinding herself against me. Surprisingly, I revived instantly. I felt her pubic bone, her sharpness against my crotch, as we contracted and pulsed together.
I was a man of forty-four, but never in my whole life had I had such a powerful erotic experience. Yet however hard I worked, Archie never seemed quite satisfied. She would roll onto her back, parting her legs as if to cool the super-heated gates to her musk-scented kingdom.
At one point when I was brazen enough to suggest we might take a coffee-break, maybe with a few biscuits or a leg of lamb or something, she grinned at me and said, “Fine, but first I could go for another go.”