I didn't succeed in reassuring myself but returned very awkwardly that morning to my hotel — retreated to my hole, ashamed to even look at Jenny. You know, masculine pride. There is nothing more painful than wounded masculine pride. A prick that won't stand up or one that's too small are devastating discoveries for a man. Even a small child's first discovery of the existence of death doesn't compare in horror. I was crushed. My prick wouldn't stand up! And I have to say that no sensible references to bestial fucks with Rena or other beings of the female sex more remote in time could reassure me, although they did help to salve the wound a bit.

An old man was riding up on the elevator with me, and I glanced at him and shuddered. His ear was a bloody abscess covered with scabs, and there were ulcers on his cheek too. His nose was half rotted away. Why on earth do they let such creatures walk around on the streets and in hotels? I wondered. And then I had a sudden ironic thought: His probably stands up every time like a stick. I even broke out laughing at my own black humor.

I didn't call Jenny for two days. She called me herself.

"Come over, I have a surprise for you," she said to me in her usual voice, or even, I thought, in a slightly mischievous one. I went. Another wouldn't have, but I always go, even if disgrace awaits me. I'm brave, or maybe stupid, but I go.

A surprise. The surprise turned out to be a questionnaire from Dr. Krishna consisting, if you can imagine it, of about three hundred questions; I'm not exaggerating. The Indian quack wanted to know everything about his patient, the better to devise his Indian-Gypsy tricks later on. After you'd already forgotten what you'd written down on the questionnaire, he would suddenly but gently announce, looking into your soul with his piercing eyes, "Well, sir, your mother's uncle was an alcoholic or your grandmother on your father's side was insane…" Despite the shitty state of my affairs, I had a good laugh while reading the questionnaire, as did Jenny, although she still declared in a severe tone of voice that we would start filling out the questionnaire the very first thing next morning.

There wasn't any food in the house from Jenny's point of view, and so we went to a restaurant. From my point of view, the refrigerator was full, and it would have been possible to live for a good several weeks on the food that was there. But I didn't argue with her. Hers was the consciousness of an American girl, mine that of a foreign writer struggling with poverty.

In the restaurant, Jenny suddenly started feeling bad and complained about a pain in her back, and we returned home immediately. Aware of my own guilt, I offered my unfucked girlfriend a massage by way of compensation, and we went up to her room, I in terror, to tell you the truth.

By morning Jenny had forgotten all about the questionnaire, as had I, because by then I had fucked her, three times at least. "What's happened to you, Edward?" she asked happily on her way to the shower mat morning. Nothing; I had simply gotten beyond my usual tangle of feelings.

She sang happily in the shower, and I listened to her voice while lolling on the bed like a kind of lazy person, one leg hanging over the side, and reckoned up my feelings. The reckoning wasn't very comforting. I suddenly realized distinctly and clearly for the first time that I didn't love Jenny (I don't love Jenny), and that I never would.

I wanted very much to fall in love, wanted it, I realized, more than anything. I liked Jenny, but she didn't even suit me physically. She didn't know how to fuck, and would just lie there like a big unhappy dummy, a female animal waiting for sperm to be deposited in her. There are men, no doubt, who like specimens of that kind and find them exciting, but I unfortunately do not. She was patently a mama, and I even felt something a little like shame in fucking her, as if I were fucking my own mother. Maybe she was my mother in my last incarnation?

Although I had fucked her a rather long time all three times, I don't think she had an orgasm even once. Licking her cunt would have been no problem for me of course, and she would probably have come if I had, but if you're going to lick a cunt, you at least have to feel like it, but with her I didn't. Even though I have more than once in my life risked licking the cunts of prostitutes.

Jenny wasn't the least erotic. She was a healthy animal, healthy despite her continual indispositions and complaints about a pain in her back, or in her stomach, or in her "vagina," as she would say. But if Martha must bear children and bake bread, they will go to Mary Magdalene to fornicate.

Thus I lay and drowsily mused. Jenny came out of the shower. "Lazy boy!" she said in the lisping voice she had probably used with children when she was a governess and a babysitter. "It's time to stop idling and get up. I'm going down to the kitchen now to make us some coffee and an excellent breakfast. Do you like bacon and pancakes with maple syrup? I'll make bacon and pancakes with maple syrup and you get up and take a shower."

Jenny was obviously in a good mood. Later on I became convinced that the knowledge she was "making love" was more important to her than any pleasure she got from the act itself. How nice! I'm doing it. I'm making love just like all the other girls! she probably thought. Her God, and she had gone to Catholic school, no doubt encouraged her to feel that way. Well, it doesn't matter if I don't enjoy it; Edward does.

I was sure she would later tell her girlfriends in detail how her new boyfriend had fucked her three times, and how afterward "we drank coffee and had delicious whole wheat pancakes with an extra cup of barley flour; the pancakes turned out really well. And maple syrup… It's hard to get real maple syrup now, but Nancy brought some from Connecticut. She got it herself — you know, they make holes in the bark." Jenny was fond of all the pleasant little details.

I'm not making fun of her; I still respect Jenny, and there aren't many people that I do. But, good Lord, she was such a little Martha that she would regularly bake her own bread! Various kinds: unleavened, sweet, raisin, and even with zucchini or whatever else she could think of. Incredible homemade bread that even Steven would proudly serve his guests now and then. She ground the flour from grain herself; that tells you something, doesn't it? In a real flour mill given to her by her friend Isabelle.

We had breakfast on the roof, where we had taken a small folding table, and we sat across from each other and drank coffee out of red ceramic cups and poured maple syrup over our pancakes. Then Jenny brought a cassette player up to the roof and a cold bottle of champagne, and we took our places in lounge chairs, drank the champagne in the blazing sunshine, and listened to music.

The tape was called "After the Ball," the name of one of the songs included on it. They were old popular songs: "I've Got Rings on My Fingers," "Good Bye, My Lady Love," and "Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?"

Those melodies both then and now evoke in me a kind of festive melancholy. Perhaps because they really are about our lives in this world — my life and Jenny's and the lives of other people who lived before us — about our private little stories and tragic mistakes, our whims and our passions. The song "After the Ball" tells how at a ball «he» mistook her brother for her lover, and so foolishly lost his happiness, and how «she» soon caught cold and died. "After the Ball." I'm writing this too after the ball.