Lying in Bed Read Online Free

hitching of people rather than a coalescing of their beings. Concinnity is our goal in life precisely as it must be for the rhetorician in his discourse, that logic and harmony out of whose enactment come tranquility and beauty.
    Our sex itself is redemptive. And if a child issues forth from it, as I hope a child will, that child shall redeem not only all that is past but also all that is to come.
    Though I know for certain that I have had no children and that Clara has had no children, I have no idea how many men she might have had a child with, except that there were many. I have more than once asked her to tell me in detail about her past, but she has demurred. “Iwouldn’t want you to get the wrong impression of me,” she has answered on more than one occasion. And once I responded, “What you don’t understand is that there could be no wrong impression of you for me. There is nothing you might have done that could turn me against you. And I want to know everything. Down to the last detail.” But still she refused. “You’ll just have to imagine it,” she said, because she knows me so well as to know that I do imagine it. Vividly. “If you won’t tell me, then I’ll just have to read your diaries,” I threatened. “Oh, please,” she scoffed.
    I have found myself longing to know everything about her. You cannot love someone until you love her whole life—every moment, every passion, every cry of pleasure or pain in the aphotic, inaccessible night of the past. The great injustice of love is that it arrives encumbered with unimaginable loss. I have never understood those people who say they would rather not know. You might as well marry some piece of statuary in a graveyard, cold, dead, and silent, from whom the very abrasions of lust have faded. Or is that not what most husbands and wives become to one another, while still alive?
    Not we. I shall not let that happen. If marriage is a gradual opening up of one mate to the other, then surely all the secrets of the past will be revealed.
    I do not know what thrills me more: knowing that there are secrets or knowing that I must someday learn those secrets.
    At the moment I am balanced between the two. My imagination feeds me equally well from Column A or Column B.
    I T IS AN apt metaphor, for I am planning to order in Chinesefood this very evening. I can even now picture myself lifting the chopsticks to my mouth, surrounding with my lips a dumpling or more likely some culinary general’s chicken, sucking a sesame-pasted noodle through them like a child whose manners are in suspension because he thinks no one is looking at him.
    However, the metaphor does break down in its specifics. In our neighborhood, where we live among the artists and their dealers and their austere watering holes, there are no surviving Cantonese or Mandarin restaurants where you can actually order from Column A or Column B, as we used to when I was a child and my parents would summon their driver and we would travel from Park Avenue to the wild West Side of Manhattan as if it were another civilization and sit down in a booth in what my father called a Chinks establishment and create a dinner for ourselves by ordering, literally, from Column A or Column B, “expense be damned,” as my father would say with a smirk, the whole meal costing so little in fact that he always made it a point to leave a tip that was larger than the tab itself, though it perpetually annoyed him that even this extreme munificence never got him recognized the next time we would show up at the same restaurant on our culinary excursions to what he called Immigrant Alley or Junkies’ Junction—Broadway in the Nineties—and he would excuse this discourtesy, which he would never experience from an East Side maître d’, by telling me and my mother that Oriental people had destroyed their memories through opium, interbreeding, collectivization,