CHAPTER FOUR: A PARADOXICAL RELATIONSHIP

One day Carmel said to me: "Tell me about the previous women in your life."

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!" Carmel objected.

"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," Carmel deduced, almost maliciously.

"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!" Carmel disdainfully interjected. "You must have become something of a prize fantasist after awhile."

"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!"

Carmel smilingly shook her head, as though to emphasize ironic perplexity. "Yet, in reality, you did none of those things," she jeered, "since Cami remained no more than a fantasy in your life."

"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 obviously alluding to my dual allegiance to Julia and herself, which I suppose approximated, in her imagination, to a kind of bigamy. Sublimated bigamy ... would be nearer the mark, since I still had no intention of marrying anyone. So I replied: "I was never literally a bigamist, though you're right to assume that I had a fondness for two women simultaneously at one time - long before Julia came of age. The first was of course Cami, whom I've just told you about. But sometime after I fell in love with her, she introduced me to a close friend of hers by name of Margaret, and it wasn't long before this friend began to acquire some of the affection which had formerly been reserved for Cami alone. There must have come a time, therefore, when my feelings towards them were about equal, though I never ceased to love Cami. She retained a compelling sex-appeal, whereas Margaret's appeal, though not entirely devoid of sex, was primarily cultural. Divided between these two women, I was in transition between youth and maturity, the heart and the head. When you entered my life, however, I was no longer in transition but wholly dedicated to the head. That's why I was prompted to attempt seducing you through those letters I wrote, though I never expected any of them, not even the long one, to succeed, in spite of my prowess as a writer. Your visit that evening came as quite a surprise to me, since I feared a letter inadequate to sway you over to my side. Had you been less civilized, you'd almost certainly have required something more concrete and practical of me. But you were evidently a mature woman of exceptional spiritual accomplishment. Also a brave woman, I should add. Few others would have entrusted themselves to a virtual stranger, a person they hadn't seen in years, as you did. Vanity alone would have precluded it."

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!"

Carmel had to agree with me there, but couldn't help remarking, all the same, that Julia's position was akin to a second wife cohabiting with the first.

"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 Carmel, are simply a girlfriend, and Julia's the same. When you came to me, you'd already fulfilled yourself as a mother, having a little daughter to your name. I saw no reason to make you pregnant again and, I'm relieved to say, you didn't oblige me to ... largely because you considered one child enough for a modern, liberated woman like yourself, who had spiritual and intellectual interests to bear in mind. Now Julia is on the way to her first pregnancy, which, in all probability, will also be her last, since she, too, must conform to the Zeitgeist and behave as a liberated woman - a quasi-electron equivalent rather than a proton equivalent. And to the extent that both of you are unmarried quasi-electron equivalents, you're in effect quasi-supermen rather than simply women, and cohabit with me in a liberated context. I have no desire to marry a quasi-superman, but I don't object to such a person living with me if she avoids putting too many demands on me."

Carmel blushed faintly and softly asked: "Do we?"

"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," Carmel observed, in what seemed to me like a slightly disappointed tone-of-voice.

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?"

Carmel nodded her head in resigned confirmation. "I sometimes think that, despite your sins of omission and commission, you're potentially, if not actually, the greatest philosophical genius of the age," she respectfully opined.

"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."