588
SUSAN SONTAG
at his wife. He presses his moist face into her long blonde hair. "I love you," he
gasps. "Have you any idea how much I love you?"
They lie interlaced on the living room couch; the children are asleep. In
the bath-house a band of male pupils, under Utterson's direction, have
finished spreading their bodies with a special clay imported from Turkey that
removes all hair and leaves the skin elastic and soft. Naked except for the towels
around their hips, they file into the steam room. Loving is getting fat, Jekyll
thinks. And loving is getting very, very thin.
Jekyll feels the energy leaking out of him. Then this is love, too. This slow
but unremitting leakage, this sensation of lying with veins open in a bathtub
filled with warm water. He gets up and dries off. Meanwhile Utterson whips
one of his older pupils across the buttocks with his damp towel and breaks into
volleys of laughter as the grey-haired flabby man stumbles backward with the
unexpected pain. "That's what you've never learned," shouts Utterson boister–
ously. "How to play'" The bewildered man, of a generally trusting nature,
hovers in the steamy corner, not sure whether he's about to laugh or to cry.
"Don't be so serious!" Utterson yells, brandishing the towel above his bald
dome like a cowboy's lasso. "Play!" Jekyll fidgets, then sits down again on the
edge of the couch. As he unbuttons his wife's blouse with one hand, he would
like to grab hold of that towel with the other hand, pull with all his might, and
send Utterson sprawling face down onto the warm planks.
Lying down, heart's ease, body's home, floating, sleeping, touching, slId–
ing, climbing. The darkness, the dazzle. Warm smells, worn sheets. But it
doesn't last.
In bed with his wife, Jekyll is seized by a fervid absence of mind. Needless
to say, it is signalled by an absence of body. His wife, at first bemused by the
failing rhythm of his embraces, adapts herself and for a few moments it goes
well this way, too. She clasps him tightly, gratefully. But Jekyll doesn't seem to
understand, and slows down even further. Now his wife is disheartened.
Sighing, she whispers his name, then pulls his earlobes. "Where are you,
darling?"
Utterson is straining over his nightly push-ups by the side of his enormous
bed. For a man of his age and bulk, who eats and drinks as immoderately as he
does, he's in better shape than he ought
to
be, asJekyll has often noticed.Jekyll
cannot imagine who lies in the freshly-made bed, waiting for Utterson.
"Darling' "
Jekyll, diffident now, smiles. "I thought I heard something," he whispers.
"The baby?"
"No. In my head. Doesn't matter." He goes on smiling. .
"But it does."
