'Conrad, what do you mean?'
'I'm simply saying that if you, once upon a time, hadn't suddenly decided to drop me, none of this misery would have happened to either of us. We'd still be happily married to each other.'
His face had suddenly taken on a queer sharp look.
'Drop you?'
'It was quite a shock, Anna.'
'Oh dear,' she said, 'but everybody drops everybody else at that age, don't they?'
'I wouldn't know,' Conrad said.
'You're not cross with me still, are you, for doing that?'
'Cross!' he said. 'Good God, Anna! Cross is what children get when they lose a toy! I lost a wife!'
She stared at him, speechless.
'Tell me,' he went on, 'didn't you have any idea how I felt at the time?'
'But Conrad, we were so young.'
'It destroyed me, Anna. It just about destroyed me.'
'But how...'
'How what?'
'How, if it meant so much, could you turn right around and get engaged to somebody else a few weeks later?'
'Have you never heard of the rebound?' he asked.
She nodded, gazing at him in dismay.
'I was wildly in love with you, Anna.'
She didn't answer.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'That was a silly outburst. Please forgive me.'
There was a long silence.
Conrad was leaning back in his chair, studying her from a distance. She took another cigarette from the pack, and lit it. Then she blew out the match and placed it carefully in the ashtray. When she glanced up again, he was still watching her. There was an intent, far look in his eyes.
'What are you thinking about?' she asked.
He didn't answer.
'Conrad,' she said, 'do you still hate me for doing what I did?'
'Hate you?'
'Yes, hate me. I have a queer feeling that you do. I'm sure you do, even after all these years.'
'Anna,' he said.
'Yes, Conrad?'
He hitched his chair closer to the table, and leaned forward. 'Did it ever cross your mind...'
He stopped.
She waited.
He was looking so intensely earnest all of a sudden that she leaned forward herself.
'Did what cross my mind?' she asked.
'The fact that you and I... that both of us... have a bit of unfinished business.'
She stared at him.
He looked back at her, his eyes as bright as two stars. 'Don't be shocked,' he said, 'please.'
'Shocked?'
'You look as though I'd just asked you to jump out of the window with me.'
The room was full of people now, and it was very noisy. It was like being at a cocktail party. You had to shout to be heard.
Conrad's eyes waited on her, impatient, eager.
'I'd like another martini,' she said.
'Must you?'
'Yes,' she said, 'I must.'
In her whole life, she had been made love to by only one man - her husband, Ed.
And it had always been wonderful.
Three thousand times?
She thought more. Probably a good deal more. Who counts?
Assuming, though, for the sake of argument, that the exact figure (for there has to be an exact figure) was three thousand, six hundred and eighty...
... and knowing that every single time it happened it was an act of pure, passionate, authentic love-making between the same man and the same woman...
... then how in heaven's name could an entirely new man, an unloved stranger, hope to come in suddenly on the three thousand, six hundred and eighty-first time and be even halfway acceptable?
He'd be a trespasser.
All the memories would come rushing back. She would be lying there suffocated by memories.
She had raised this very point with Dr Jacobs during one of her sessions a few months back, and old Jacobs had said, 'There will be no nonsense about memories, my dear Mrs Cooper. I wish you would forget that. Only the present will exist.'
'But how do I get there?' she had said. 'How can I summon up enough nerve suddenly to go upstairs to a bedroom and take off my clothes in front of a new man, a stranger, in cold blood?...'
'Cold blood!' he had cried. 'Good God, woman, it'll be boiling hot!' And later he had said, 'Do at any rate try to believe me, Mrs Cooper, when I tell you that any woman who has been deprived of sexual congress after more than twenty years of practice - of uncommonly frequent practice in your case, if I understand you correctly - any woman in those circumstances is going to suffer continually from severe psychological disturbances until the routine is re-established. You are feeling a lot better, I know that, but it is my duty to inform you that you are by no means back to normal...'
To Conrad, Anna said, 'This isn't by any chance a therapeutic suggestion, is it?'
'A what?'
'A therapeutic suggestion.'
'What in the world do you mean?'
'It sounds exactly like a plot hatched up by my Dr Jacobs.'
'Look,' he said, and now he leaned right across the table and touched her left hand with the tip of one finger. 'When I knew you before, I was too damn young and nervous to make that sort of a proposition, much as I wanted to. I didn't think there was any particular hurry then, anyway. I figured we had a whole lifetime before us. I wasn't to know you were going to drop me.'
Her martini arrived. Anna picked it up and began to drink it fast. She knew exactly what it was going to do to her. It was going to make her float. A third martini always did that. Give her a third martini and within seconds her body would become completely weightless and she would go floating around the room like a wisp of hydrogen gas.
She sat there holding the glass with both hands as though it were a sacrament. She took another gulp. There was not much of it left now. Over the rim of her glass she could see Conrad watching her with disapproval as she drank. She smiled at him radiantly.
'You're not against the use of anaesthetics when you operate, are you?' she asked.
'Please, Anna, don't talk like that.'
'I am beginning to float,' she said.
'So I see,' he answered. 'Why don't you stop there?'
'What did you say?'
'I said, why don't you stop?'
'Do you want me to tell you why?'
'No,' he said. He made a little forward movement with his hands as though he were going to take her glass away from her, so she quickly put it to her lips and tipped it high, holding it there for a few seconds to allow the last drop to run out. When she looked at Conrad again, he was placing a ten-dollar bill on the waiter's tray, and the waiter was saying. 'Thank you, sir. Thank you indeed,' and the next thing she knew she was floating out of the room and across the lobby of the hotel with Conrad's hand cupped lightly under one of her elbows, steering her toward the elevators. They floated up to the twenty-second floor, and then along the corridor to the door of her bedroom. She fished the key out of her purse and unlocked the door and floated inside. Conrad followed, closing the door behind him. Then very suddenly, he grabbed hold of her and folded her up in his enormous arms and started kissing her with great gusto.
She let him do it.
He kissed her all over her mouth and cheeks and neck, taking deep breaths in between the kisses. She kept her eyes open, watching him in a queer detached sort of way, and the view she got reminded her vaguely of the blurry close-up view of a dentist's face when he is working on an upper back tooth.
Then all of a sudden, Conrad put his tongue into one of her ears. The effect of this upon her was electric. It was as though a live two-hundred-volt plug had been pushed into an empty socket, and all the lights came on and the bones began to melt and the hot molten sap went running down into her limbs and she exploded into a frenzy. It was the kind of marvellous, wanton, reckless, flaming frenzy that Ed used to provoke in her so very often in the olden days by just a touch of the hand here and there. She flung her arms arou
nd Conrad's neck and started kissing him back with far more gusto than he had ever kissed her, and although he looked at first as though he thought she were going to swallow him alive, he soon recovered his balance.
Anna hadn't the faintest idea how long they stood there embracing and kissing with such violence, but it must have been for quite a while. She felt such happiness, such... such confidence again at last, such sudden overwhelming confidence in herself that she wanted to tear off her clothes and do a wild dance for Conrad in the middle of the room. But she did no such foolish thing. Instead, she simply floated away to the edge of the bed and sat down to catch her breath. Conrad quickly sat down beside her. She leaned her head against his chest and sat there glowing all over while he gently stroked her hair. Then she undid one button of his shirt and slid her hand inside and laid it against his chest. Through the ribs, she could feel the beating of his heart.
'What do I see here?' Conrad said.
'What do you see where, my darling?'
'On your scalp. You want to watch this, Anna.'
'You watch it for me, dearest.'
'Seriously,' he said, 'you know what this looks like? It looks like a tiny touch of androgenic alopecia.'
'Good.'
'No, it is not good. It's actually an inflammation of the hair follicles, and it causes baldness. It's quite common on women in their later years.'
'Oh, shut up, Conrad,' she said, kissing him on the side of the neck. 'I have the most gorgeous hair.'
She sat up and pulled off his jacket. Then she undid his tie and threw it across the room.
'There's a little hook on the back of my dress,' she said. 'Undo it, please.'
Conrad unhooked the hook, then unzipped the zipper and helped her to get out of the dress. She had on a rather nice pale-blue slip. Conrad was wearing an ordinary white shirt, as doctors do, but it was now open at the neck, and this suited him. His neck had a little ridge of sinewy muscle running up vertically on either side, and when he turned his head the muscle moved under the skin. It was the most beautiful neck Anna had ever seen.
'Let's do this very very slowly,' she said. 'Let's drive ourselves crazy with anticipation.'
His eyes rested a moment on her face, then travelled away, all the way down the length of her body, and she saw him smile.
'Shall we be very stylish and dissipated, Conrad, and order a bottle of champagne? I can ask room service to bring it up, and you can hide in the bathroom when they come in.'
'No,' he said. 'You've had enough to drink already. Stand up, please.'
The tone of his voice caused her to stand up at once.
'Come here,' he said.
She went close to him. He was still sitting on the bed, and now, without getting up, he reached forward and began to take off the rest of her clothes. He did this slowly and deliberately. His face had become suddenly rather pale.
'Oh, darling,' she said, 'how marvellous! You've got that famous thing! A real thick clump of hair growing out of each of your ears! You know what that means, don't you? It's the absolutely positive sign of enormous virility!' She bent down and kissed him on the ear. He went on taking off her clothes - the bra, the shoes, the girdle, the pants, and finally the stockings, all of which he dropped in a heap on the floor. The moment he had peeled off her last stocking and dropped it, he turned away. He turned right away from her as though she didn't exist, and now he began to undress himself.
It was rather odd to be standing so close to him in nothing but her own skin and him not even giving her a second look. But perhaps men did these things. Ed might have been an exception. How could she know? Conrad took off his white shirt first, and after folding it very carefully, he stood up and carried it to a chair and laid it on one of the arms. He did the same with his undershirt. Then he sat down again on the edge of the bed and started removing his shoes. Anna remained quite still, watching him. His sudden change of mood, his silence, his curious intensity, were making her a bit afraid. But they were also exciting her. There was a stealth, almost a menace in his movements, as though he were some splendid animal treading softly toward the kill. A leopard.
She became hypnotized watching him. She was watching his fingers, the surgeon's fingers, as they untied and loosened the laces of the left shoe, easing it off the foot, and placing it neatly half under the bed. The right shoe came next. Then the left sock and the right sock, both of them being folded together and laid with the utmost precision across the toes of the shoes. Finally the fingers moved up to the top of the trousers, where they undid one button and then began to manipulate the zipper. The trousers, when taken off, were folded along the creases, then carried over to the chair. The underpants followed.
Conrad, now naked, walked slowly back to the edge of the bed, and sat. Then at last, he turned his head and noticed her. She stood waiting... and trembling. He looked her slowly up and down. Then abruptly, he shot out a hand and took her by the wrist, and with a sharp pull he had her sprawled across the bed.
The relief was enormous. Anna flung her arms around him and held on to him tightly, oh so tightly, for fear that he might go away. She was in mortal fear that he might go away and not come back. And there they lay, she holding on to him as though he were the only thing left in the world to hold on to, and he, strangely quiet, watchful, intent, slowly disentangling himself and beginning to touch her now in a number of different places with those fingers of his, those expert surgeon's fingers. And once again she flew into a frenzy.
The things he did to her during the next few moments were terrible and exquisite. He was, she knew, merely getting her ready, preparing her, or as they say in the hospital, prepping her for the operation itself, but oh God, she had never known or experienced anything even remotely like this. And it was all exceedingly quick, for in what seemed to her no more than a few seconds, she had reached that excruciating point of no return where the whole room becomes compressed into a single tiny blinding speck of light that is going to explode and tear one to pieces at the slightest extra touch. At this stage, in a swift rapacious parabola, Conrad swung his body on top of her for the final act.
And now Anna felt her passion being drawn out of her as if a long live nerve were being drawn slowly out of her body, a long live thread of electric fire, and she cried out to Conrad to go on and on and on, and as she did so, in the middle of it all, somewhere above her, she heard another voice, and this other voice grew louder and louder, more and more insistent, demanding to be heard:
'I said are you wearing something?' the voice wanted to know.
'Oh darling, what is it?'
'I keep asking you, are you wearing something?'
'Who, me?'
'There's an obstruction here. You must be wearing a diaphragm or some other appliance.'
'Of course not, darling. Everything's wonderful. Oh, do be quiet.'
'Everything is not wonderful, Anna.'
Like a picture on a screen, the room swam back into focus. In the foreground was Conrad's face. It was suspended above her, on naked shoulders. The eyes were looking directly into hers. The mouth was still talking.
'If you're going to use a device, then for heaven's sake learn to introduce it in the proper manner. There is nothing so aggravating as careless positioning. The diaphragm has to be placed right back against the cervix.'
'But I'm not wearing anything!'
'You're not? Well, there's still an obstruction.'
Not only the room but the whole world as well seemed slowly to be sliding away from under her now.
'I feel sick,' she said.
'You what?'
'I feel sick.'
'Don't be childish, Anna.'
'Conrad, I'd like you to go, please. Go now.'
'What on earth are you talking about?'
'Go away from me, Conrad!'
'That's ridiculous, Anna. Okay, I'm sorry I spoke. Forget it.'
'Go away!' she cried. 'Go away! Go away! Go away!'
She tried to push him away from
her, but he was huge and strong and he had her pinned.
'Calm yourself,' he said. 'Relax. You can't suddenly change your mind like this, in the middle of everything. And for heaven's sake, don't start weeping.'
'Leave me alone, Conrad, I beg you.'
He seemed to be gripping her with everything he had, arms and elbows, hands and fingers, thighs and knees, ankles and feet. He was like a toad the way he gripped her. He was exactly like an enormous clinging toad, gripping and grasping and refusing to let go. She had seen a toad once doing precisely this. It was copulating with a frog on a stone beside a stream, and there it sat, motionless, repulsive, with an evil yellow gleam in its eye, gripping the frog with its two powerful front paws and refusing to let go...
'Now stop struggling, Anna. You're acting like a hysterical child. For God's sake, woman, what's eating you?'
'You're hurting me!' she cried.
'Hurting you?'
'It's hurting me terribly!'
She told him this only to get him away.
'You know why it's hurting?' he said.
'Conrad! Please!'
'Now wait a minute, Anna. Allow me to explain...'
'No!' she cried. 'I've had enough explaining!'
'My dear woman...'
'No!' She was struggling desperately to free herself, but he still had her pinned.
'The reason it hurts,' he went on, 'is that you are not manufacturing any fluid. The mucosa is virtually dry...'
'Stop!'
'The actual name is senile atrophic vaginitis. It comes with age, Anna. That's why it's called senile vaginitis. There's not much one can do...'
At that point, she started to scream. The screams were not very loud, but they were screams nevertheless, terrible, agonized stricken screams, and after listening to them for a few seconds, Conrad, in a single graceful movement, suddenly rolled away from her and pushed her to one side with both hands. He pushed her with such force that she fell on to the floor.
She climbed slowly to her feet, and as she staggered into the bathroom, she was crying 'Ed!... Ed!... Ed!...' in a queer supplicating voice. The door shut.
Conrad lay very still listening to the sounds that came from behind the door. At first, he heard only the sobbing of the woman, but a few seconds later, above the sobbing, he heard the sharp metallic click of a cupboard being opened. Instantly, he sat up and vaulted off the bed and began to dress himself with great speed. His clothes, so neatly folded, lay ready at hand, and it took him no more than a couple of minutes to put them on. When that was done, he crossed to the mirror and wiped the lipstick off his face with a handkerchief. He took a comb from his pocket and ran it through his fine black hair. He walked once round the bed to see if he had forgotten anything, and then, carefully, like a man who is tiptoeing from a room where a child is sleeping, he moved out into the corridor, closing the door softly behind him.