The iguanodon’s high pulpy heart jerked and seemed to split; the brontosaurus was coming up the path.
Her husband, the diplodocus, was with her. They moved together, rhythmic twins, buoyed by the hollow assurance of the huge. She paused to tear with her lips a clump of feathery leaves from an overhanging paleocycas. From her deliberate grace the iguanodon received the impression that she knew he was watching her. Indeed, she had long guessed his love, as had her husband; the two saurischians entered his party with the languid confidence of the specially cherished. Even as the iguanodon gritted his teeth in assumption of an ironical stance, her bulk, her gorgeous size, enraptured him, swelling to fill the massive ache he carried when she was not there. She rolled outward across his senses—the dawn-pale underparts, the reticulate skin, the vast bluish muscles whose management required a second brain at the base of her spine.
Her husband, though even longer, was more slenderly built, and perhaps weighed less than twenty-five tons. His very manner was attenuated and tabescent. He had recently abandoned a conventional career in finance to enter an Episcopalian seminary. This regression—as the iguanodon felt it—seemed to make his wife more prominent, less supported, more accessible.
How splendid she was! For all the lavish solidity of her hips and legs, the modelling of her little flat diapsid skull was exquisite. Her facial essence appeared to narrow, along the diagrammatic points of her auricles and eyes and nostrils, toward a single point, located in the air, of impermutable refinement and calm. This irreducible point was, he realized, in some sense her mind: the focus of the minimal interest she brought to play upon the inchoate and edible green world flowing all about her, buoying her, bathing her. The iguanodon felt himself as an upright speckled stain in this world. He felt himself, under her distant dim smile, to be impossibly ugly: his mouth a sardonic chasm, his throat a pulsing curtain of scaly folds, his body a blotched bulb. His feet were heavy and horny and three-toed and his thumbs—strange adaptation!—were erect rigidities of pointed bone. Wounded by her presence, he savagely turned on her husband.
(illustration credit 21.3)
“Comment va le bon Dieu?”
“Ah?” The diplodocus was maddeningly good-humored. Seconds elapsed as stimuli and reactions travelled back and forth across his length.
The iguanodon insisted. “How are things in the supernatural?”
“The supernatural? I don’t think that category exists in the new theology.”
“N’est-ce pas? What does exist in the new theology?”
“Love. Immanence as opposed to transcendence. Works as opposed to faith.”
“Work? I had thought you had quit work.”
“That’s an unkind way of putting it. I prefer to think that I’ve changed employers.”
The iguanodon felt in the other’s politeness a detestable aristocracy, the unappealable oppression of superior size. He said gnashingly, “The Void pays wages?”
“Ah?”
“You mean there’s a living in nonsense? I said nonsense. Dead, fetid nonsense.”
“Call it that if it makes it easier for you. Myself, I’m not a fast learner. Intellectual humility came rather natural to me. In the seminary, for the first time in my li