Absolutely unironically, Dad, she held my 69-year-old penis in her hand — the penultimate time that instrument shall ever be thus held — as she urged the above.
No sex? Why then, we’d sleep. Wouldn’t be the first time! She winked, Dad; used the bathroom; soon returned in one of my old cotton shirts; voiced her gratification that we weren’t air-conditioned, she much preferred the old-fashioned electric fan; bid me good night.
Our Author’s proclivities notwithstanding, my life’s recycling has not been slavishly mechanical. There was no Polly Lake to fart on PLF Day, 11 R. My previous Dark Night occurred in the Dorset Hotel, not the Todds Point cottage, and my impotence then was as sustained as my despair. A rather worse thing happened now. Under the glass of my desk here in the Dorset is a 69th-birthday card given me last March by Polly: a reproduction of a 1921 advertisement for Arrow shirts. Against a beige background are painted, in the handsome style of such advertisements in that period, a young couple in the cockpit of a sailboat. The vessel itself is invisible but for the highly varnished coaming over which the seated young woman negligently rests her elbows (and against which her companion stands facing her) and the attractively molded tiller on which he leans. Her auburn hair is piled Gibson-girl fashion and bound with a saffron scarf; she wears a beige middy blouse, sleeves rolled above her forearms; she fingers the end of its black neckerchief and smiles at something off their starboard quarter. He regards it too, benignly but more reservedly (her lips are parted; his are not, but his dark hair is, on the left); his black-belted trousers and (Arrow) shirt match her blouse, except for his starched white collar and green figured necktie, and like hers his sleeves are neatly rolled to the elbow. If the craft is under way, it is gently running before the wind, which lifts the forepart of his tie toward her face; but considering the hard angle of the tiller against which he casually leans, I judge it more probable that they’re in a slip (not moored or anchored, given the aft breeze): no sheets, spars, or sails can be seen — neither can any dock lines — and it is unlikely he’d be looking so placidly astern, with neither helmsman nor crew minding any sheets, while coming about. Quite possibly of course the artist was no sailor, or chose not to clutter his illustration with lines, blocks, and cleats, just as he chose not to paint in a background or, for that matter, a deck and topsides. The couple are the thing (particularly, to be sure, their shirts), and he has got them right: they are young, privileged, well-bred and — dressed, easy in the world, sunny, beautiful. They are Jane Mack and Todd Andrews once upon a time.
It is, by the way, a fairly erotic advertisement, Dad: “Jane” wears no bra, and the spread of her elbows thrusts her breasts at me under the middy; the slip of her fingers down that scarf is inches from my trouser fly, plainly pouched in her direction; our legs, out of sight beneath the rounded coaming, must surely be touching, if not intertwined. No wonder the knobbed tiller thrusts up at her from behind me at just hip-height and must be put hard over; no wonder even my necktie will not stay down! It is after all an Arrow shirt, and she its willing target. But there is no vulgar urgency. We have everything, including time; we mildly look away, perhaps at Harrison returning noisily down the dock with extra ice.
Polly sent me that card unmeaningly, I believe, beyond the obvious evocation of my sailing habits. But it was on the date of its receipt, a month after Harrison’s funeral, that Jane stopped by the office and, in a sense, commenced my recycling: indeed, our Author did not scruple to have me literally considering Polly’s card when Jane came in! Now (I mean then, this fateful Friday, out at the cottage) her reappearance from the bathroom in my old tan shirt — with, yes, a contrasting white collar, made fashionable again by the last Roaring Twenties revival — her unbelievably youthful figure even more attractive half-clothed than naked, put me irresistibly in mind of that card. Impotence might have been easier, more soporific: a fit end to a misfired evening, to be slept off. Instead, “Oh, changed his mind, did he?” she said when she noticed me, and briskly lay back, parted her lips, and steered me into her (there’s the final fingering). Half-erect, I ejaculated instantly; tried to keep going for her sake, but slipped out and couldn’t reenter. Anyhow, she wasn’t interested in an orgasm. Her eyes were closed, no doubt from fatigue, it had been a long day; she half smiled, whispered nighty-night, rolled over, and quickly fell asleep.
She slept busily as a child till morning, sometimes snoring. Not so I, on whom now, in the dark, 12 R came blackly down. As unbearably as in 1937—oh, more so, there were 32 more years of it — my emptiness, my unconnection, my grotesqueness came meticulously home, Then, though, I had thought Life devoid of meaning: luxurious, vain projection! Now it was my life, merely — how the boy in that sunny advertisement had misspent his mortal time. The world was what it was, and unbearable. Already by 1921 the first installment of Armageddon was astern. Farther aft lay, for example, the Napoleonic catastrophe, the genocide of native Americans, the wars of religion, the unimaginable great plagues — horror after horror, like dreadful buoys marking a channel to nowhere. Too much! The cottage creaked; the world rolled on, to no purpose. I was old, spent, silly. I was done with.
Towards first light I dozed enough to have a limpid, shattering dream. I was perhaps thirty, leaving “home” for “the office” on a luminous May morning, dressed in the manner of National Geographic advertisements of the time. There was the new electric refrigerator with coils on top; there were the glass quarts of unhomogenized milk on the steps. My black La Salle waited at the curb; my young wife Jane, still in her robe, held our son Drew, two years old at most, rosy and slumbrous in his blue Dr. Dentons. She wanted him to wave good-bye to me, but he was too drowsy: his fingers were in his mouth; his other arm lay loosely behind her neck; he laid his cheek against hers. I kissed them both: Drew smelled of milk and toast; Jane of soap and sleep. The light, the air, were unspeakably tender.
“Bye-bye to Daddy, now. Bye-bye? Bye-bye.”
I awoke a truly old man: shaky, achey, fuddled. Did not at first know where I was, why, with whom. Then I knew, and groaned aloud without intending to. The sound roused Jane, fresh and ready though puffy-faced from her hard sleep. She was shocked: told me I looked like death warmed over; wondered whether I was ill. I could scarcely manage breakfast for shaking; slopped my coffee, cut myself shaving, could barely tie my tie. Head hurt; heart fluttered.
“You must’ve had a bad night!” Jane cried, uncertainly breezy. I started up the car to take us to town and realized I couldn’t drive; Jane had to chauffeur me to the Dorset and call John from there. Marian the desk clerk was visibly startled too: both women urged me to call a doctor and forget about the commencement program that afternoon. I declared a nap was all I needed.
Good-bye then, Jane said. She’d be out of town again for a while. I’d better take care of myself; sleeping pill, maybe. Good-bye, then.
I got up the 28 steps to my room as toilsomely as Captain Osborn Jones used to, lay down fully clothed, and slept till noon. Not a whole lot better. My head was woozy; my face in the mirror astonished me. I looked exhumed; Jane must have felt she was delivering an ancient derelict to the flophouse. I redressed and took a cab out to Redmans Neck to join the foundation trustees on the platform. Drew was missing; everyone else was there, and they all Noticed, asked me jokingly had I been ill. I don’t know what I replied.