266
NORMA MEACOCK
I returned to the question in bed the following morning as the
sun smote his vermilion cross-hatched neck. "My love," I murmured,
and he slewed round like a gold sea-beast. "Mmmrn?" he asked. "It
would mean embracing fully and with passion whatever experiences
chanced to arrive for one." "Or rejecting them altogether," he said.
"But sometimes they are quite inescapable," I argued. "Take Brom–
bergen-Brombert as an example. Consider every circumstance,
his
temperament and my own, the lateness of the hour, the distance of
the door, the proximity of the bed, my female weakness,
his
male
strength, and the fact that he is my landlord. I was pulled by hawsers
ineluctably toward the very event." "Pah!" he said. "You repel
me. When do you begin to be responsible for what you do?" "Why,
now," I answered. "Here. With you. In this. I act with my own
assent." Such a declaration moved us both. We pressed our wann
bellies together and lay in silence. Any reversion to the subject of
bad faith would have seemed a noisy intrusion. We rose and
dressed. His shirtsleeve was darned. I wished I'd darned it. His
underpants were dirty. I wished I could bury my nose in them. I
hadn't the rights of a dog and was too inexperienced to reveal my
fantasies. I watered the ivy and considered how much I had still
to learn.
He was unable to stay a second night and I wasn't likely to see
him again for at least a month. He would be deaf to even the direst
need. The thought of parting lowered our spirits. I sat on the bed.
He leafed through the books. I was silent waiting for something
important to say. My mind was a blank. I looked hard at disparate
objects: the angle between the chair leg and its shadow, the ellipse,
horizontally divided, of grease-stained wall and dado, formed inside
a coil of rusty, metal flex leading from gas tap to gas fire. Minutes
passed. Urgently I wanted to know
if
I were free to go to bed with
other men.
It
didn't seem the time to ask. "My love," I ventured,
"let me make out a defense for bad faith in certain circumstances."
He smiled encouragingly.
"Let me posit," I said, "a woman of great curiosity, with an
almost limitless thirst for experience, whose encounters with men
however diverse, philosophical, political, literary, et cetera, end
always with their putting on the heat in an effort to get her into
bed. Because unknown to them - and what business is it of theirs
