I can't fall in love. That's probably what holds my marriage together. If I didn't have this wife, I would have another. It's lots of trouble to leave. I don't like to be alone. Red Parker needs a wife and ought to marry one fast before I have to fire him. I guess there's really not much more one can do easily with a human dick than what we have been doing. Everything else stinks or hurts. So much of the quality of response seems a matter of chance. In the army, I would rent my girls by the hour and go three-and-a-half times in those sixty minutes — I got bargains leasing them that way — that final half time signaling a valorous raising of my standard as I made ready to ride off. I'd win applause, even from blondes from Bologna, for my virile performances and for my good looks and lean, firm, sun-tanned body. I used to be lean, and hungry. I had appetites. I used to have a full head of hair. I had strong teeth. I once had tonsils. We scarcely need them at all. I know I've had wet dreams that were more delicious and satisfying than anything I've experienced at complicated orgies I've attended in London, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, and much less trouble. My wife would like me to take her along on business trips to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans. She thinks I get laid there. I usually do; I feel the country, the company, and society expect me to. I usually don't enjoy it. I enjoy the local newspapers more. I remember wondering when I was finally able to do it the first time, even as I was doing it, if that's all there was to it. There was more, I learned the second time, and still is, there is enough to launch me into unrestrainable fervors all over again — even now I'll rape my wife, only my wife, force her at times when she doesn't want to and I feel I have to have it from her at once; but there's no sublime relationship, no reciprocal contact; like a mad chemist, I knew I was carrying the whole magical process and potential along with me like a pair of bubbling retorts inside my head and my vesicles. If my balls ever exploded, I knew it would not be because of a female; the mixtures inside me would have made up their own independent mind to detonate. They would not consult even me. Bang! They would decide to go. They do look queer to me still, hairier than me, many of them. Some look like Van Dykes, and these I'm tempted to tug. Others have sideburns and shock me a moment like card number eight on the Rorschach test again. I was struck speechless when that damned color shock card appeared. I was stupefied. Others vegetate profusely with more rotund and corpulent growths of wiry foliage and look like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, or Joseph Conrad. They affect me too. I sometimes want to quail. Will my wife turn white? She'll have to. So will I. We have adenoids and vesicles and never get to see them while they're alive. I think a good ear-nose-and-throat man today doesn't dirty his fingers much with them either. His skill lies in popping his head into the hospital room afterward to tell us everything went well — that's all he does and leaves the whole gory, grisly, repelling procedure to his Oriental anesthetist and ambitious apprentices. Why should he be disgusted? By now I'm used to the way my wife looks.

"How was New Orleans?"

"Dull."

"You should have brought me along."

"There was nothing to do."

"I'd have given you things to do. You know how hot I get in a place like that. What'd you bring me back?"

"Clap."

"Good."

My wife is usually much better for me than most. Only Penny does it with a consistent, keen, unbearable beauty every single time and has me begging her helplessly to stop, my eyes blind and my mouth glutting incoherently with babbles, giggles, gasps, and spasms. Penny knows where to hit and strikes like an eagle. She knows exactly how much longer it's safe to go on after I feel positively I will die in pieces if she continues at all. And I'm glad she goes on. Penny makes it dance like an angel and sprint like a whippet every single time. I comprehend then why owners and whole cultures have worshiped it. It's an ironic master-servant association: I am the master; she serves me by reducing me to a writhing, pleading blob of chaotic, giggling blackness and a single burning nerve that cuts like a blade. I think I whimper with hilarity. I'm not sure what noises I make as I wait for my vision to recover and my power to speak to reassemble. I would not want anybody else in the world to see me that way, in the collapsed state of what is called ecstasy. I would not want to be photographed. She gives me scotch and makes hot coffee for me afterward. Penny has a hazel muff, with no scraggly hairs migrating and never any surprises or disappointments. I do not phone her much anymore), motorists driving at high speed swerve out of their way deliberately to kill nutrias dazed by their headlights standing hypnotized in the service lanes at the sides of the highway. In the morning, there are too many furry, dead bodies to count lying along the road from Hammond into New Orleans. Seen quickly from certain angles they look like cozy muffs. Seen from others, they look like crushed wild animals with bloody beaks and talons. During the morning, I suppose, local fur trappers arrive in pickup trucks to remove the bodies for their valuable pelts. This is called hunting. (Other people, I think, might veer away to avoid killing an animal, even a sleeping frog.)

(Man is a carnivore, a swift, accurate, rapacious hunter, and he ought never try to compete with the electric vibrator. It tires you out, and there isn't a chance of winning. Ask a girl who owns one.)

Green was right about Jane too.

I have stopped flirting with Jane (what would I do with her afterward?) and started flirting platonically with Laura, Arthur Baron's secretary (which makes a much better impression). Laura is older and unhappily married. She is highly regarded by everyone but her husband, who is three years younger than she and perhaps homosexual, and my attentions are clearly friendly and humanitarian (although she does have a thick ass I think now and then I might like to toss over onto my lap and paddle bare with stinging, tingling noises. It's good I don't try, for I forget how heavy she'd be, and I would risk a hernia or slipped spinal disk. If I did that once to someone, I might want to do it always — and then I would be a pervert. Girls would talk about me unfavorably to their friends. I think I feel that way too about stuttering. I think I may want to stutter. What a liberating release it might be from the lifelong, rigorous discipline of speaking correctly. I'd feel tongue-tied and free. I might spank and stutter at the same time. I feel I might never want to stop once I started and would let my tongue wobble as it wanted to for the rest of my life and never have to say anything intelligible to anyone again. I would lose my job. I would lose my wife and friends. I don't have close friends anymore. I have friends, but I don't feel close to them. Some feel close to me. Red Parker is my friend, and I don't feel close to him). I really don't know how I would have disposed of Jane after taking her to bed with me in Red Parker's apartment early one evening probably after cocktails. She's only twenty-four. I can't imagine what in the world I would want to talk to her about once we no longer had to talk about going to bed. She's probably too young to understand there'd be nothing personal in the enmity and disgust I'd feel toward her afterward and in my never wanting to see or speak to her again. That's happened to me before. She'd probably conclude it had something to do with her. I'd have her lovely blue eyes fastened upon me in wondering, repentant apology. I could not say to her outright — I like her too much for:

"Nothing — nothing — nothing, dammit. You didn't do anything wrong. It has nothing at all to do with you. You aren't important enough to affect me. Don't you see?"