250
PHILIP
L.
GREENE
ground, so we seek love, not in sex, but in the movies, 'sex's blessed
surrogate' he said. Maybe if 1 make it with Lil again I'll get job
satisfaction too. Does that make sense?"
1 said that it did, but I wondered why he didn't comment on
Lil's sleeping in my bed. 1 asked him. "Well," he said, "you're no
real threat the way Larry Jonas is. 1 haven't been able to satisfy Lil,
so you may be my blessed surrogate."
"But she fell asleep," 1 said, thinking how nice it would have
been to take her in her sleep.
A few days later Ben told me that he and Lil were going to try
again and invited me to dinner to celebrate the reconciliation. When
1 arrived Lil was on the floor in leotards, practicing a leg-raising
exercise she learned from Marsha. The "Ode to Joy" was storming
out of the record player. Ben was whistling in the bathroom. "I've
got a part-time job as a dental assistant,"
Lil
said, as she kept
exercising, and then, jumping up, she whispered, "we have decided
to try for a baby."
Ben walked in wiping
his
face with a towel and boomed, ."Say,
did
Lil
tell you that we decided to
try
for a baby."
Lil
flashed an
angry look at him. He went on. "I looked around me, at all the people
1 know in the Village, and nobody has a family. Maybe they think
it's a concession to middle-class attitudes, but it occurred to me that
barrenness extirpates life. Listen to the Beethoven.
It
sings out the
triumph of life, but without the child-bearing function man is dera'–
cinated, absolutely deracinated. Have a drink."
Lil
looked at him, the light going out of her eyes. "Why must
you always intellectualize everything. 1 want a baby because it
will
be the fruit of me, mine, yours, ours. Don't feelings have a place
anywhere?"
"Of course they do. That's what 1 was trying to say. There must
be a return to feeling and away from the highbrow dissection of
everything. 1 can't even read
Dissent
any more. Doesn't Murray say
in his book that the existential moment is truly realized
in
the
coital act?"
"Good God, Murray is forty-five years old, Lisa is
his
third wife,
and do you see any kids around the house?"
"What do you know." Ben gulped his drink. "Murray can't
have babies, for goodness sake."
"I don't believe it."
