Op. 27
POST-ATOMIC INTEGRITIES
Long Prose
Copyright © 2013 John O'Loughlin
__________________
CONTENTS
1. Chapter One: An Unexpected Visit
2. Chapter Two: A Birthday Treat
3. Chapter Three: A Change of Mind
4. Chapter Four: A Paradoxical Relationship
5. Chapter Five: A Particular Bias
_______________
CHAPTER ONE: AN UNEXPECTED VISIT
It was an
evening just like any other for me, an evening during which I would continue to
remain in my solitary room with a book on my lap and wax earplugs in both ears,
the better to concentrate on what I was reading. The neighbours above and below would
doubtless continue to make disagreeable noises in their respective flats, but I
wouldn't be unduly disturbed by them.
Only someone loudly knocking at my door would have caused me to put my
book to one side. But, apart from the
landlord, no-one ever knocked at my door, least of all loudly, so I had little
to fear in that respect. Tonight,
however, was to prove an exception. The
clock had hardly reached eight-thirty when I was startled out of my book by the
unexpected - the sound of a person boldly seeking admittance to my room!
For a moment I wondered whether I oughtn't
to ignore it, pretend I wasn't in or hadn't heard anything. But no sooner had I dispatched this negative
thought than a positive one took its place.
Supposing the knock was connected with
Standing there before me in the dimly-lit corridor
that led from the stairs to my first-floor apartment was a young woman of
average height and chest-length, wavy-golden hair. I had scarcely recognized this much when I
heard: "Joe?"
"Yes," I replied, with a
simultaneous though possibly gratuitous nod.
And then, as if in echo, I said: "
The young woman smiled in confirmation and
I knew at once that my wish had been granted.
Delighted, I stood back to usher her inside and then, with the
self-consciousness of one who has just admitted an attractive female to his
room and knows it, I gently closed the door behind her. "So you actually got my letter this
time," I remarked, turning around to face my surprise visitor. It hadn't been the first letter to her, but
it was evidently the first to have had a positive effect.
"That was a letter I just couldn't
ignore," she said.
"Yes, it was rather special," I
opined.
"And long, too!" she declared, as
though to point out that the length and the specialness
were two entirely different things.
"Quite the longest hand-written letter I've ever received."
I smiled in a sort of proudly apologetic
way. "I had intended to type it,
but thought such a procedure would have detracted from its romantic import and
rendered it too ... impersonal."
"Indeed," I responded, and then
succumbed to a brief pause, which gave me time to note the light-blue colour of
her eyes and the fawn colour of the raincoat she was wearing. "Allow me to take your mack," I added, manoeuvring myself into a position
behind her from which I could help her out of it. She seemed grateful to be relieved of the
garment and I carried it across to my single wardrobe, where a metallic hanger
was duly procured for it.
Having deposited her raincoat on the
door-handle of the said wardrobe, I once more turned to face her and noticed
that she was wearing clothes according to the colour-pattern I had specified in
the letter as being most appropriate for a visit to my room - namely the green,
white, and gold (or pale orange) of the Irish tricolour. Shyness prevented me from taking a long, hard
look at her, but I could see that she was wearing a white blouse, a
gently-flounced gold miniskirt, and a pair of dark-green stockings, with
matching open-front shoes. The colour
combination couldn't have been more apposite, especially as, like me, she, too,
was Southern Irish. "I see you've
conformed to my patriotic suggestion," I remarked, pointing a brisk finger
at each item of visible clothing in turn.
"I couldn't very well refuse to,"
she responded, her pale face gently suffused by an invigorating blush. "Naturally, I don't normally dress in
such a blatantly republican fashion."
"I particularly like your
miniskirt," I confessed. For I
couldn't help noticing that it exposed more of her thighs than it hid, and that
they weren't skinny but, on the contrary, pleasantly firm and fleshy without,
however, being conspicuously fat. They
were the kind of thighs one doesn't see too often but can be mighty impressed
by when one does - firm all the way up, rather than delicate and tapering.
"You like minis?" she asked.
I smiled defensively, then replied:
"Some of them, though it often depends more on the woman who's wearing
them than on the skirt as such. But I do
like the flounce in yours though, which grants it an agreeably loose quality, a
sort of buoyancy and suggestibility. And
the material is nice, too - very smooth and semi-transparent. I saw two women like you on Saturday, by the
way. Thought at first one of them might
have been you."
"I was in
"Ah, well, they were attractive all
the same," I remarked.
"Tell me about them."
I offered her a soft seat in the room's
only armchair and then took myself to the bed which, being made, I sat down
on. So, obligingly, I proceeded:
"The first one I happened to see as I was on my way back from the library
late that morning. The weather being so
warm and bright, she was wearing a light-green flounced minidress
and had bare legs, which were enticingly firm and very sexy. I was trailing behind her in the high street
for a number of yards, intermittently staring at her legs with that feeling of
guilty self-consciousness which usually afflicts me in such a situation. She automatically reminded me of you,
especially with her wavy-golden hair.
But when a sudden stiff breeze briefly caught the rim of her minidress, I was granted the unexpected bonus of a glance
at what she was wearing underneath - namely, a pair of frilly-white panties on
a highly seductive rump!"
Smiling, I continued: "She must have
sensed that someone was admiringly trailing after her, for she stopped in front
of an estate agents just a few yards farther
along. I ought really to have stopped
beside her but, shy or vain fool that I am, I continued on my way, noting en passant
that her nose was slightly retroussé, like
yours. By the time she got moving again,
I was already too far ahead of her to turn back and was waiting to cross the
road by the local clock-tower, headed for home.
She turned up an adjacent side-street before I could cross the road,
however, and we exchanged glances from about six yards. The rest of the morning and much of the
afternoon I spent regretting that I hadn't attempted to pick her up."
"Well, the other one I also saw on my
way back from the library, which I normally visit twice on a Saturday, but that
was at about four in the afternoon and I had to walk virtually the entire
length of the high street before I came upon her, standing in front of the
advertisement-board outside the local newsagents and evidently reading various
of the adverts on it. I saw her red
miniskirt from quite a distance and it had an effect on me analogous to that of
a bullfighter's cape on a bull, or so I supposed. It was very conspicuous, but I didn't think,
with my short-sightedness partly to blame, that the woman wearing it would be
particularly attractive, since such blatantly conspicuous colours are usually
worn by the more sluttish types.
However, when I got to within a few yards of her, what a surprise I
got! Not only wavy-golden hair like yours, but the most delightful-looking pair of
firm, fleshy legs as could be imagined.
And, as if to set them off, her waist, arms, and shoulders were slender
and narrow, such as one only finds, as a rule, on women of exceptional
quality. Ah, such a delightful
contrast! Even more delightful than that
between her gently-flounced cotton miniskirt and the tight-fitting nylon blouse
she was wearing!"
"But, presumably, you didn't attempt
to chat her up?"
"Alas! as she
was standing beside a man and a woman, I thought she must be connected with
them in some way - possibly as a friend or even a daughter. Nevertheless I was intending to go into the
newsagents anyway, for I had decided to buy a Penthouse
in accordance with a regrettably long-standing habit of mine to
acquire some better kind of men's magazine on a Saturday afternoon, when the
sex-starved blues are beginning to catch-up with me. Anyway, angling towards the door of the shop,
I must have attracted her attention slightly, since she gave me a quick glance
as I drew close to her, prior to disappearing inside. The Penthouse under my arm, I duly
retreated to the street, only to discover that she was already some twenty
yards along the pavement from the direction in which I had just come, and was
about to cross the road. She evidently
wasn't connected with the couple I noticed earlier, because they were still
standing in front of the advertisement-board - the woman, I now noticed, with a
notepad and biro in her hands. However,
feeling compromised by the magazine under my arm, I turned in the opposite
direction ... towards
"Did you ever?" asked
"Up until my twenty-third or
twenty-fourth year," I blushingly confessed. For I could hardly add that the reason I
subsequently stopped wanking was because the orgasm
had become less keen, as Gide would say, and the
temptation correspondingly less intense.
"But nowadays," I quickly added, as though to allay suspicions
to the contrary, "I only look at the erotic stimuli to be found in such
magazines. However, getting back to that
young woman in the red miniskirt, I spent the rest of the afternoon and most of
the evening regretting that she wasn't mine.
You can't imagine how sorry celibacy and solitude can make me feel
sometimes, especially as they've dogged my steps for so many years now."
"Poor Joe!" sighed Carmel, who
had got to her feet and, walking across to me, now placed a commiserating hand
on my left shoulder.
"Do you think you'll be able to
straighten me out after all these solitary, celibate, poverty-stricken
years?" I painfully asked her.
"I'll certainly do my best," she
replied in a husky tone-of-voice.
The scent of her sweet perfume had a
slightly aphrodisiac effect on me and, without raising myself
from the bed, I slipped a hand up her legs, bringing its palm to rest against
the flesh of her outer thigh a moment.
"Aren't you going to kiss me
first?" she teasingly asked.
"If you insist," I jokingly
responded and, although I would have preferred to stay where I was, with her
thighs in such invitingly close proximity to my hands, I got to my feet and,
drawing her into my arms, placed a somewhat tentative kiss on her half-smiling
lips. I hadn't kissed a woman in over
ten years, and so it can hardly be wondered at if the experience was a little
unnerving and unrewarding initially, since I was in dire need of practice. Yet despite my initial self-consciousness, I
soon managed to apply my lips to hers with greater firmness, as the first few
exploratory forays into the kissing domain were supplanted by the inception of
mounting confidence and an intimation of sensual pleasure such as I had completely forgotten the
existence of during the agony of my solitary years in north London. And, to my relief, I discovered that my
mounting confidence was accompanied by a relaxation on her part, which caused
her to close her eyes the better to concentrate on my kissing and the pleasure
she was evidently deriving from it. As
if by instinct, I transferred one of my hands to the back of her head in order
to press her lips more firmly against my own.
She responded by relaxing still further, and I was able to drive my
tongue between the gap which now opened-up between
them - a procedure she particularly seemed to like. For by thrusting it backwards and forwards
between her slightly-parted lips, I was mimicking the coital relationship of
penis to vagina which I knew she was expecting me to establish in due
course. And yet, whilst I behaved thus,
another part of me was curiously detached from my actions, inducing me to
imagine how the situation would look to an observer situated at our side,
especially to one who was on his knees and noting the indirect effects of my
kissing and caressing on Carmel's ample legs, now that her attention was
absorbed in the mouth and the rest of her body had become a kind of impersonal
entity, functioning, as it were, by remote control. Had she gone weak-kneed, this other part of
my mind caused me to wonder, and if so, was she on the verge of dampening or
even wetting her panties? I couldn't
answer that, for now I was withdrawing my tongue from its probing role in order
to speak with it. She opened her eyes
with a start, as though from a pleasant dream, and I said: "Darling
Carmel, I've waited so long for this ... that I can't express my gratitude
enough, now that you're actually here with me."
She smiled in flattered response to this
rather pathetic admission on my part, and then replied: "Just do what you want to."
Oh, I had so many things I wanted to do
that I didn't know where to begin or, rather, how to continue. The kissing was fine but ... caressing was
important, too! And then there were her
breasts; I needed to see them and was eager to unbutton her blouse. They were small but firm, nestled ever so
sedately, it seemed to me, in a half-sized white bra that appeared to possess a
special erotic appeal of its own.
Indeed, so harmonious an impression did the combination of breasts and
bra make on me ... that I hesitated to free the one from the other. But I gently kissed first the left and then
the right breast, which connoted, in my imagination, with some kind of
delicious fruit - possibly a peach or a large plum. I sank to my knees, overwhelmed by the luxury
of her body, and bent forwards to kiss each of her stockinged
insteps, gripping her ankles in the process and conscious of the rim of her
gold miniskirt brushing against the crown of my head, as I again
straightened-up to contemplate her lovely legs.
In silent wonder, with forceful pulsations of heart, I slid both my
hands up the length of her dark-stockinged legs,
lifting her skirt back in order to expose the entirety of her thighs to my avid
gaze and discover more about her. Ah,
what physical beauty I then beheld, as my vision encompassed a pair of golden
suspenders stretching from her stocking tops via a pair of
delicately-embroidered white-nylon panties to the partly-obscured
suspender-belt above! I held her skirt
aloft like a canopy and smacked a kiss on each of her thighs, reserving an
especially-protracted one for that central patch of her panties behind which a
dense mound of pubic hair would be leading a separate little vegetable-like
existence of its own. Ah, how beautiful was
this woman! She was to become my woman,
and I wanted her to learn exactly what that meant this very evening, between
now and the time when we temporarily abandoned our sexual adventure, some hours
hence!
"Carmel," I said, well-nigh
staggering to my feet, "I'm going to teach you just what ten years of
enforced celibacy in this vast city can do for inflaming a man's ardour when he
eventually acquires the woman of his dreams.
I'm going to fuck every last drop of cunt
juice out of your wet little hole this evening and, by god, by the time we're
finished you'll know what it means to be intimate with me!"
"Joe!" cried Carmel in a tone of
delighted surprise, and, without another word, she swooned to the floor, where
she lay prostrate with one arm up across her brow and one leg drawn up to a
position just short of her rump. The
other arm was flat-out by her side, as was the other leg. She had become exquisitely erotic all of a
sudden, and I couldn't prevent myself from taking a voyeuristic pleasure in her
exposed white panties. Now she was like 'Chastity'
of Penthouse, whose lovely form I had seen subjected to a similar
erotic posture, following a swoon of fright at the hands of various hairy
monsters. My Ideal had swooned from
desire and appeared even more ravishing than 'Chastity', though a similar type
of woman - the only type for whom I had ever really cared. I got down on my knees before her parted legs
and, gripping her damp panties between finger and thumb, began to ease them
from her capacious crotch. There was
only one sensible way to bring her back to full consciousness, and I knew
exactly how to go about it. In a little
while she would be moaning from ecstasy, whilst I whispered besotted
endearments into her vulnerable ears!
CHAPTER TWO: A BIRTHDAY TREAT
There was a
concession involved with
At first
I immediately recognized
Meanwhile my relationship with
"Now I understand why you didn't want
to marry me," said
"I simply wanted to remain free,"
I replied, keeping my eyes on the present I was wrapping in the most
eye-catching green-and-silver-striped paper.
"I've always tended to regard myself, perhaps somewhat
exaggeratedly, if not oversimplistically, as a
free-electron equivalent and you, my long-term companion, as a quasi-electron
equivalent. I had no desire to form an
atomic integrity in the strictly bourgeois, marital sense."
"And now that Julia has come of
age?" asked
"I intend to take her virginity,"
I frankly declared. "But
artificially, in accordance with my status as a more civilized type of human
being." I looked up from the
carefully-wrapped parcel and caught a glint of what I took to be complicity in
"You were always a bigamist at
heart," she opined, and I responded with but a faint grunt. For I would never have
taken her as my woman, had I not known about her young daughter at the time.
When Julia's birthday finally arrived, I
was as excited by it as if it were my own sixteenth birthday. For I had looked forward to
it for several years, and was only too eager to establish my domestic life
along new lines. I had, however,
instructed Carmel to inform Julia of my intentions shortly before the latter's
birthday, so it wasn't altogether with surprise that she received a special
kiss on the cheek and a warm smile from me, as we sat down to table in the
evening to celebrate, by way of a private party, Julia's coming of age. My darling companion was also quite excited
by what lay in store for her daughter, and had resigned herself
to temporarily taking a secondary role in my affections.
Before I proceed to describe what followed,
let me inform the reader that, by now, Julia was a most beautiful young lady
whose physique, during the course of the past year, had filled-out to something
approaching womanly proportions. Not
only did she take after her mother in matters of facial appearance, with
exactly the same kind of wavy-golden hair hanging loosely down her chest, but
she even surpassed Carmel in some matters, not least of all the size of her
breasts, which were just a shade larger.
And, of course, her legs and rump were by no means devoid of physical
allure, but, on the contrary, could only be described as potentially highly
seductive.... Having bathed and perfumed herself, she had specifically dressed
in light, semi-transparent attire for this occasion, which, in any case,
happened to coincide with a warm summer's evening, and was about as
ravishing-looking as such a beautiful young lady, caught-up in the first flush
of youth, can ever be. With her mother
seated at one end of the table - still, at thirty-five, a very attractive woman
- and Julia at the opposite end, I felt pretty smug in my central position between
them.
The meal was, on the whole, a highly
agreeable one and, after a few drinks (Julia having her first taste of wine),
we retired to the sitting room where the special parcel I had personally
prepared for the birthday girl lay waiting to be opened. She stared at it with an ironic smile on her
lips for what seemed like a long time, and then set about freeing its contents
from the eye-catching wrapper. I was
trembling with excitement as much as she and feared, for a moment,
that I might have wrapped it too tightly.
"Go on!" urged
"Oh, Uncle Joe!" she
exclaimed. "How could
you?" She had of course expected
some such present, so was partly acting for my - as well as her own -
benefit. There could be no doubt that
"Well, then, are you ready for the
initiation ceremony?" I asked, and, as Julia made no verbal objection I
took it she was. So the three of us
proceeded up the stairs towards Julia's bedroom, which Carmel had specially
arranged for the ceremony by placing a couple of thick cotton sheets on top of
the bed, sheets which would absorb any blood-letting that the artificial
deflowering of our virgin might provoke.
The room itself was sweetly perfumed and spotlessly clean and, as soon
as we were all three comfortably ensconced, I dutifully requested Julia to hand
me the vibrator and prepare herself for the
revolutionary experience ahead. This she
did by removing her slender white panties and kneeling astride the bed with her
light dress hitched up over her waist -
"You may feel a little pain
initially," I warned her, "but don't worry; you'll be alright in just
a minute or two!" As I gave voice
to this palpable understatement, I noticed that
CHAPTER THREE: A CHANGE OF MIND
I often
went about town with my two women and would take especial pleasure in having
them sit either side of me, whether in public or private. In public, people would sometimes stare
curiously or even disapprovingly at me and remark to themselves that I was a
bigamist. But, in private, I was
completely free from what other people thought and able to behave as I liked,
or almost so. For
there were of course limitations as to what I could permit myself to do with
Julia when her mother was around, and even when she wasn't. Mostly the three of us would just sit
together of an evening, after I had finished my day's literary toil, and talk
or watch television. But sex was never
wholly absent from the proceedings, since, with a female on either side of me,
it was in the order of things for me to caressingly roam a hand over certain
parts of their respective persons.
Initially, for a number of months after I
had 'taken' Julia's virginity artificially, my sexual relations with her
continued to be artificial. If we were
all three seated on the big settee in front of the television, and both the
women were leaning against me with their legs drawn-up across my thighs and
their respective rumps facing outwards, as was often the case, my hands would
never behave in exactly the same fashion towards Julia as towards her
mother. With Carmel, for instance, the
hand nearest to her would perhaps delve under her blouse in order to caress the
smooth skin of her back or, assuming I could get it up her skirt, push a way
through the legs of her panties with a view to stimulating her clit. With Julia, however, the hand dedicated to
caressing her would never venture beneath clothing to the actual flesh, but would
invariably remain segregated from it, even if I had delved under her skirt or
dress and come into contact with her panties.
In that event, I would simply caress her crotch or a part of her rump
through their material, which acted as a kind of artificial shield for
her. I must have been inhibited,
initially, by the long-standing stepfather/stepdaughter-like relationship that
had existed between us, even though she was far from being my stepdaughter in
reality, or indeed in practice. I
obviously didn't want to compromise myself, especially with
But a hot-blooded young woman can't be kept
at bay for ever, nor be satisfied by artificial stimuli alone, and I soon
realized that Julia was becoming more demanding of me as her sexual feelings
deepened. Carmel realized it too, and
one day, when, for once, the two of us were completely alone together, she
said: "Joe, my daughter will require more than the indirect caresses you
casually bestow upon her, if you wish to retain her sexual respect. There are, I'm sure, quite a number of young
men who have carnal designs on her and who would be prepared to provide her
with more substantial satisfactions in your stead. You can't expect her to remain a kind of
sexual accessory to you for life. So
either enlarge your carnal relations with her or ... break them off
altogether!"
These words sounded slightly sinister to
me. For I knew exactly
what
I nodded in agreement and said: "Then
I shall have to do it with the aid of that mechanical copulator
recently invented by an acquaintance of mine.
By depositing a quantity of my sperm in the device, I'll be able to make
her pregnant indirectly and, as it were, artificially - without recourse to
physical contact."
"Do you seriously suppose she'll be
satisfied to have you indirectly making love to her through that mechanical
contraption?"
"She'll damned well have to be!"
I sternly replied. "For
I can't bring myself to actually have sex with her - I who am at least
twenty-five years her fucking senior!"
At that moment, Julia strode into the room
and we felt obliged to terminate our heated conversation. Nor did we take it up again until some months
later, by which time, however, my attitude had distinctly changed, partly
because of Julia's refusal, in the meantime, to be party to my former
plans. Rebelling against my
artificiality, she had threatened to desert me if I persisted in my intentions
and, as I couldn't bear the prospect of being left with just the one woman, I
gave-in to her and resignedly set about the task of making her pregnant through
conventional means. It transpired,
however, that I was unable to do so. For I had become well-nigh impotent, over the years, without
realizing it, since contraceptives had always come between me and the
possibility of
I smiled my satisfaction at her about-face
and assured her that, come what may, I would never desert her, even though,
through moral compunction, I couldn't ever marry her. A free-electron equivalent I intended to remain,
even with two quasi-electron equivalents dogging my steps and, seemingly, just
waiting for me to trip up!
CHAPTER FOUR: A PARADOXICAL RELATIONSHIP
One day
I blankly stared back at her a moment, as though
I hadn't understood her request, and then somewhat shamefacedly confessed:
"There weren't any."
"You're kidding me!" she
exclaimed. "Didn't you once tell me
that you'd been hopelessly in love with a girl called Cami?"
I blushed in recollection of the fact and
shamefully admitted its truth. "But
that was unrequited love," I continued.
"There had never been any physical contact with women before you
came into my life."
She smiled in a sort of deferential way,
and asked: "What, exactly, was this Cami
like?"
"Rather beautiful," I
replied. "For, like you, she had
wavy hair, blue eyes, a slender figure, sexy legs, and, well, one of the most
seductive-looking rumps I'd ever seen on any woman. A rump in a million - most eye-catchingly provocative!
Physical beauty is a golden mean, you know. One must be slender, but not too
slender. One must have flesh in the
right places, but not too much flesh.
Ah, how delicate is that dividing line between the prosaic and the
merely attractive upon which true beauty walks!
Yes, she was indeed a beautiful woman."
Carmel seemed moved,
possibly with envy, for her next question was: "And were you more deeply
in love with this arse-biased seductress than you subsequently became with
me?"
I was courageous enough to be frank and
admitted as much. "But that was
largely because I was a youth when I knew her and had become a mature man of
thirty by the time I received a visit from you," I added. "It makes all the difference, you
know. Youth is emotional, maturity intellectual. I could never have loved you as I loved that
girl. Nor anyone else, for that
matter."
"How
flattering!"
"You shouldn't imagine that it
reflects poorly on you," I retorted, a trifle piqued. "Age brings reason, quietens passion. It's better that way. Though while you're a
youth you would never believe it.
Then I'd gladly have sacrificed my freedom for her, become a
bound-electron equivalent in marital fidelity to my proton love. I'd most certainly have proposed to her, had
not my passion been unrequited. Her
sex-appeal was too strong to be ignored; it was as much as I could do to
restrain myself from raping her on a number of occasions. But I had to be content with fantasies in the
long-run, imagining what I'd do to her if ever she consented to my
advances."
"A thing, however, she evidently
didn't do,"
"She came damn near it once or
twice," I averred, feeling a degree of pride in spite of the humiliations
which such recollections ordinarily caused me.
"Had she not been going out with someone else at the time ..."
"Unlucky you!"
"Particularly where she was
concerned," I admitted. "There
was nothing I wouldn't do to her or get her to do for me."
"Such as?"
"Oh ..." I hesitated to answer,
caught between the hook of shyness and the bait of vanity. It would have been impossible to reveal
everything, given the number of fantasies involved, so I settled for some of
the more memorable things, replying: "I would lift her up off her feet,
turn her upside down, so that her legs were spread-eagled in mid-air, and then
plunge my scent-crazed nose into her naked fanny, which, at that juncture,
would be wide open like a flower. Or I
would pull her legs back over her chest and squat down on them, forcing her
arse up in the air and exposing her crack to my avid tongue. Or I would get her to pick something up off
the floor while keeping her legs straight when she had a short skirt on, and
take special pleasure in what this revealed to me. Or I would make her kneel down in front of me
with her skirt hitched right up and her suspenders on display while she held my
cock between outstretched fingers and whispered gentle endearments to it. Or I would get her to dress-up in her most
dignified fashion, with dark-blue stockings, a grey skirt, white blouse, etc.,
and then make love to her fully clothed and standing up.... Oh, there was no
end to the things we'd do!"
"Quite so," I regrettably
admitted. "Instead of being an
accomplished lover, I became an introverted voyeur - a psychic spectator at the
self-imposed spectacles I would nightly put on, in my imagination, for the
benefit of me alone. I was lucky not to
have succumbed to a cerebral haemorrhage on occasion, so much sex-appeal did
that girl's image possess for me!"
There was a faintly-mocking look, mingled
with an element of sympathy, in my companion's large eyes. "Tell me, when did you
first come to realize that you were a bigamist at heart?" she asked.
The question baffled me at first, since I
had never known myself to be one, not having married even one woman in the
past. But
Carmel was visibly flattered by this
eulogy, despite having heard variations on it before. "I must have been mad!" she
jokingly declared. "However, now
that I know a little more about your past, perhaps the sexual fondness you've
recently acquired for Julia is intelligible within the framework of a reverse
transition you're undergoing ... from the mature to the youthful or, rather,
immature again, as from the bloated head to the undernourished heart."
"A metaphorical overstatement, dear
lady, since I'm by no means in love with Julia," I assured her. "On the contrary, the girl's damned-well
in love with me, and that is why she's on the road to pregnancy right now. I don't requite her love, but I do give her
physical pleasure. I was unrequited
myself as a youth, in every sense of the word.
Now you can't tell me that she's in exactly the same position!"
"To a degree," I conceded. "But if you came to me in the spirit,
she exists for me in the flesh. Neither
of you is my real wife, for I am not and never shall be married. You, dear
"No.
Although young Julia puts more demands on me these days than you
do," I averred. "She it is who
requires palpable sex at least once a week, whereas you're usually content to
manage with less. But, on the whole, I
have less sex with the pair of you than most married men have with their one
wife. That's as much a credit to your
spiritual precocity as to my physical restraint. Instead of degenerating into a lecher, I
remain relatively chaste, even though I cohabit with two quasi-supermen who
look like women but function, more often than not, as men."
"So you're not a bigamist after
all,"
I resolutely shook my head and said:
"Of course not! My life is too
spiritual to permit me such a morally reprehensible liberty as to be married to
two women simultaneously and to have regular sex with them both. Liberty, however, is scarcely the word. For one would be shackled to two proton
equivalents in an atomic integrity doubly hard to break out of. I, remember, aspire
towards electron freedom, which is why I could never marry you. Besides, you're a liberated woman for whom
marriage would be equally out-of-the-question.
One can't imagine two men getting married, at least not as a rule,
because two electron equivalents, even when they're fond of each other, don't
form an atomic integrity. Well, neither
is it right that a superman, a liberated man, so to speak, should marry a
quasi-superman, or liberated woman, since a free-electron equivalent and a
quasi-electron equivalent don't form an atomic integrity either. To marry you would be to discriminate against
you as a woman, and that's something I absolutely refuse to do, since
you've adequately proved to me, on a number of occasions, that you're capable
of behaving like a man - not least of all when you dedicate yourself to writing
a new book. No, and I wouldn't wish to
discriminate against Julia either, young as she is. No daughter of yours deserves the traditional
role of woman thrust upon her! She was
destined, with her fine intellect, for a quasi-electron status, and I therefore
regard her as a liberated woman, to be treated as a kind of equal. We may live together as spiritual companions,
but we shall never get married. Is that
clear?"
"Were you a woman and not a
quasi-superman, I'd have reason to consider you ill-qualified to judge in such
matters," I averred, somewhat sententiously. "But since you speak as a quasi-electron
equivalent, I'm obliged to take your opinion seriously, even though you'll
never know what it means to have the intellect of a free-electron
equivalent."
CHAPTER FIVE: A PARTICULAR BIAS
Another day
I blushed faintly in involuntary
confirmation of
"I mean that, even as quasi-supermen,
they retain something of a woman's point of view, and so speak more for their
own interim sex than for men as a whole," I replied. "To revert briefly to conventional
terminology, one might say that, consciously or unconsciously, an authoress
generally writes more for other women than for men, which is why her writings
can become tedious or irrelevant to a man.
Moreover, she usually writes on her own level, which, at best, isn't
that of a superman but of a quasi-superman, a mind appertaining to a female
body which, although to some extent intellectualized, still falls short of
being truly intellectual. Now there's no
reason why such a person shouldn't write books, since, as a quasi-electron
equivalent, she cannot be discriminated against as a woman. Yet there's still a good reason, founded upon
dissimilar intellectual capacities, why a genuine superman should prefer not to
read those books, but concentrate, instead, on the most intelligent writings
being produced by fellow-supermen. I
received adequate confirmation of that fact some time ago."
"Strange you didn't tell me about
it,"
In truth, I would have preferred to let the
matter drop there and then, but, since
"Indeed," I confirmed,
"because I can't refrain from equating them with a certain primitivity, which involves too great an emphasis on nature
and the natural, as befitting a less civilized age. No, I couldn't share Dame Vera's respect for
the ancient wisdoms, and neither could I share her opinion that man must get
back to God, from whom, by some mysterious process, he had fallen, along with
the rest of Creation. This 'fall',
corresponding to Old Testament theology, is defined by her as involution, which
reflects a concession to materialist criteria, whereas the return to God, and
thus to the realm of the purest atoms, involves evolution, during which time or
process the individual puts the good of the community above self-interest on
the material plane, and so behaves like a true Son of God by living according
to the highest natural principles in loyalty to the spirit. Life may therefore be interpreted, in Dame
Vera's logic, as proceeding from God to man, and from man back to God again,
which would correspond, using the letters of the alphabet, to a development
from 'A' to, say, 'M', with a gradual struggle back to 'A' again."
"Whereas you, by contrast, regard it
as proceeding from 'A' to 'Z', or from a diabolic alpha absolute to a divine
omega absolute?"
"Absolutely," I rejoined. "But in Vera Alder's limited logic there's
no place for the Holy Spirit, and consequently things are required to proceed
back to the Father, which, to say the least, I can only regard as a most
unsatisfactory state-of-affairs! Now the
fact that she thinks otherwise is partly attributable, I believe, to her basic
mental constitution as an upper-class woman, for whom the Alpha is apt to
appear more of an ally than an enemy, and who is prepared, in consequence, to
adopt a much more euphemistic, optimistic, and complacent view of cosmic energy
than ever a man like me could! She,
however, is the kind of thinker who is accepted in
I had got quite worked-up with righteous
indignation by now, and might have succumbed to a tirade of abuse against false
prophets and diabolical muddleheads ... had not
Carmel interrupted me to ask: "But wasn't there any aspect of her book you
liked?"
Halted in mid-flight, as it were, I was
obliged to take my bearings and scan my memory for an answer. "Yes, there was actually," I at
length replied. "For I enjoyed her
prose style quite a lot, which reminded me of the lush, rather quirky style of
John Cowper Powys, who would qualify on a number of grounds, not least of all
his bias for nature and the natural life generally, for recognition as a
kindred spirit - perhaps the nearest thing to a male equivalent that Dame Vera
could ever hope to find. However, I also
seem to recall that her advocacy of fruit-eating made a positive impression on
me, since I subsequently made more room for fruit in my diet, thereby hoping to
improve the quality of my mental atoms, so to speak! Yet I'm fully aware that a partiality for
fruit in its natural state is a bourgeois or alpha-stemming tendency, and that
the more civilized people, even when they aren't particularly conscious of
being such, tend to prefer fruit at an artificial remove from the raw - namely
in the form of various kinds of fruit pies and/or yoghurts."
Carmel nodded affirmatively, recalling to mind the occasion when I had told her that it was a
bourgeois shortcoming to regard doctored or artistically-shaped food, such as
one encountered in burger bars and fast-food joints generally, as
'plastic'. Considered from an
evolutionary point-of-view, only that food which had been severed, so to speak,
from its natural roots through artificial shaping was worthy of being equated
with a higher order of civilization.
Thus chips or, to give them their American name, fries, when shaped in such
a delicate and intricate fashion as was generally the custom in burger bars
reflected an evolutionary progression beyond roast potatoes, which still
resembled potatoes in their naturalistic appearance. Those who ordinarily preferred chips and/or
fries to roast potatoes were more civilized in their gastronomical
tastes. Doubtless the same applied to
those who ordinarily preferred apple pies, carefully wrapped and boxed, to raw
applies. It was the difference, to put
it crudely, between the city dweller, with his daily exposure to artificial influences,
and the suburban or rural dweller, who lived closer to
nature. The
difference, in other words, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Tough luck if you shied away from this fact,
like Count Dracula from the Cross! I
suspected that Dame Vera preferred apples and roast or boiled potatoes to apple
pies or chips, and said as much to
"Not that I'm particularly partial to
such food myself," I continued.
"But, then, long and painful confinement in the metropolis did have
the effect of obliging me to regard most aspects of urban life from an
objective rather than a narrowly subjective point-of-view. Thus in theory I betrayed
or, if you prefer, transcended my class origins, without, however, becoming too
much of a proletarian in practice.
I always longed for the day when I'd be able to move out of
"I'm glad you decided to return to
them with me," said
"Yes," I agreed. "But once one has attained to the Truth,
no matter how painfully or against one's deepest wishes, one can't very well
refute it thereafter. That's why,
despite my admiration for certain aspects of Vera Alder's book, I was unable to
subscribe to its central arguments.
Believe me, there are quite a number of bourgeois intellectuals who
would profit from a lengthy spell in the city!
As a rule, they live according to their suburban or rural lights,
without realizing just how dim such lights can really be! One would have to live a long while in the
city to acquire an inkling of the distinction between those lower, bourgeois
lights and these higher, proletarian ones.
And live there, I might add, as a superman rather than as a
quasi-superman with a fundamentally feminine psyche. I wouldn't want to discriminate between men
and women,
Carmel smiled but said nothing,
and I concluded that our discussion was at an end.
