264
NORMA MEACOCK
I'd've felt mean, somehow, if I'd turned him away. I had no
sword to divide us and could hardly ask him to put on his trousers
back to front and thus accoutred come to bed. But he kept his
promise to the letter and, saving the last favor, entered merrily for
a couple of hours into the spirit of the thing. The words that pass
through the female head as the male beside her rubs away for
dear life at some insensible fold to the right, left, fore or aft of her
clitoris, the sentences, the paragraphs. "You're a passionate woman,"
he panted. "I knew I could rouse you. Are you coming? Tell me
when you're coming darling. That thrills me." (Rubbing furiously.)
"You're big as an egg and dripping with juice." Big indeed if I
were big as his imagination! I stuck it out, recited to myself what
fragments of poetry I knew and then breathed noisily: "I'm coming,
uh, uh, uh. Ooooh darling." And he shot his bolt straight into my
navel.
I was inert most of the time with distaste. He'd scarcely left
the house when I was drawing the teeth of the experience in my
sixpenny notebook. And I sent an account so heavily veiled to
Jockey that he hadn't the faintest idea what I was talking about.
My dear dear love
[I
wrote], I don't mind that there is so
little certainty but it can be harrowing to have certainties
shifting, to be in the middle of a quicksand. It's not merely
that I have illusions (which, I may say, I come through) but
that I am quite unable to determine what is illusion and
what isn't, to decide whether one can ever know, whether
there is a difference, whether it matters.
Once I thought how is it possible for me to blame? How is it
possible for me to feel anger? I have practiced this remove.
And now I am filled with revulsion as coiled and powerful
as a snake. Inarticulate cries break from me very far within.
I feel a simple need for absolution, a consciousness of being
soiled, a knowledge that sin, as traditionally defined, exists.
And I perceive that there is no absolution unless time itself
may be counted.
To rely on the customary view, to say that I am violated,
insulted, have known someone dead, is to have an interpreta–
tion. But it's an interpretation only of one's emotional re–
sponse. And yet, not so. No; the interpretation falls down be–
cause it does not adequately cover the other participant and
I
)
