What He's Poised to Do

The sight of these half-human monsters huddling together beneath the vaulting archways of the station—if the founding architect only knew the ill use to which his wondrous creation would one day be put—sickened me at first, then angered me, and then, finally, struck me stone dumb. What can you say about a species that is so susceptible to the blackening effects of a city, other than that it is weak to the point of rot? It was left to Lily to remark upon the place, once we had boarded the train and were safely on our way. “Beastly,” she said, letting the single word hang like the man’s maimed hand. After a short pause, I took up her thought. “Oh, Lily,” I said, “I am so happy to be traveling with you into the country. It is in a rural setting that a man’s soul—or a woman’s, for that matter—can truly flower. And so I will lavish my attentions on the petals of those flowers.” Whether I said this in so many words or said fewer and imagined the rest does not matter. We were so close at that moment that speech and thought were one and the same. You, too, have experienced this closeness with me, wife, so you will be able to imagine. Lily and I were brought together by our idea of our union, which seems like either a paradox or a tautology but is in fact both. I took Lily’s hand, which was so warm with desire that it seemed to heat the air around us, and pressed it to my breast, and we listened to the click and the clack of the train on the rails and at length fell into faultless sleep.

Time passed. The sun stretched out the shadows of trees, which lay across the tracks like bridges. We crossed under one of those bridges and then the train shuddered to a stop. We were in the village where Mrs. Pritchard lived and where, more important, her house stood amid woods, meadows, and even a little stream that wound through those woods and meadows. I had retained nearly every detail from Mrs. Pritchard’s letter; that fine old woman, though her shaky script betrayed her age, had an appreciation of the power of description that rivaled my own. Lily went out ahead of me, carrying our luggage—we had managed to get most of our clothes in a single hard wheel case, although there were two other small bags that held my books and journals—and I followed. From behind I could read the sentence of her figure (particularly that which lay within parentheses). My mouth began to water. I felt a tremor in my thumb and index finger. Should I feel shame for that reaction? A man’s hunger for a woman is part of nature, wife. In my time with you, I frequently saw the disclosed forms of other women. There is no point in apologizing for this. It was one of the imperfections of our union. I have forgiven you for your part in it, and I know that you will extend me the same courtesy. Since I have been with Lily, I have seen only one other woman in her natural state, and she was seventeen, and as such represented a false promise of fullness and flexibility. Her name was Mona, and she was my student in a course I had designed that sought to communicate the intimate link between poetry and nature. She was a good student, Mona, and she came by one afternoon to discuss the heartlessness of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” The topic undid us so completely that we had found ourselves, quite by accident, in my apartment, where I first checked to make sure that Lily was not present and then did my level best to direct the conversation toward those “orbs of light and shade” and those “wild and wandering cries” and away from the inevitable. I was not the teacher I hoped to be, though, because when I paused midway through what I thought was a rather convincing discourse, I saw Mona on the bed and her clothing in a heap on the ground beside it. Her hands were rounded in a kind of cage at the tops of her thighs. She opened the cage.

“These bags are heavy,” Lily said, shattering my reverie.

“Are they?” I said.

“They are.” She set them down. A less trained observer might have read the expression in her eyes as an appeal to me to relieve her of her burden, but I knew it for what it was—a reminder of what would occur later that afternoon, when we had snugged the bags in the corner of our new home. The suitcase that was now at Lily’s feet contained all we would need for the afternoon’s activities, including a hand mirror, a length of rope, and a razor that would prevent her from sinking into a barbarian state, especially about the legs and hips.

“It makes no difference to me,” I said, answering her unasked question. “Dry or with a bit of shaving powder, entirely or in part. You decide.”