Lying in Bed Read Online Free Page A

and an unwillingness to open fully their tiny, belligerent slits of eyes.
    But am I hungry?
    Not yet.
    Even when I get hungry, I want to get hungrier still.After all, I ceased being an ascetic priest when I married Clara. And if the most radical form of the ascetic ideal demands a desire even to stop desiring, a will to terminate willing, then I want to overthrow that ideal tonight. I want to let all my senses drift through the entire cavalcade of desire until I am stretched to the very edge of desperation, and only then to fulfill them. I want for myself what Steiner names that “particular effect of musical resolution—unreconciled energy inside repose.” I want to become orectic without, as it were, becoming erect.
    What could be less like marriage? Marriage replaces desperation, at least of one kind, with a fulfillment so regular that it threatens to become undeviating.
    That is why I am grateful for this evening alone. I can let myself go, without having to go anywhere. I need not even leave this bed.
    But I shall miss eating with Clara. We almost always have dinner together. It is not a ritual, our dinner, because there is nothing ceremonial about it. We might eat an elaborate dinner at home or a simple dinner out or an elaborate dinner out or a simple dinner at home. Regardless, it is at this time of day, when she has finished her work and I have finished mine, that we have come together, as darkness has slipped its hand into the glove of the day. It has been the time of our greatest sharing and consideration of one another, with the single exception of those later times, deeper in the night, upon this bed, on which, not in which, I lie.
    I shall also miss talking with Clara. Discussion has always been an important part of our dining. Our whole marriage has been, I suppose, like Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s honeymoon, when, as she described it, “We talked incessantly for seven weeks and became chronicallynomadic and monogamic,” though for Clara and me our wandering has been limited predominantly to the landscape of our bodies.
    Whether we eat out or in, we talk to one another. Nothing (unless it was the image of separate beds) repelled me more about the idea of marriage than my fear of silence within it. I knew too well the lure of silence to the person alone and had given in to it myself quite dramatically. But to imagine silence within a partnership of woman and man was to imagine a living death.
    Who among us, when young, has not had our vision of the future poisoned by seeing a man and a woman with the fabric at their knees touching beneath a restaurant table and not a word exchanged between them once the menu’s lifted like a script from their desolate hands?
    I have often thought that the real reason people have children is not to redeem all that is past but to give themselves something to talk about or, if they have forgotten completely how to talk to one another, at least someone to talk to, a child held captive by the power of the language of loss.
    Clara and I have always talked to one another. When I have been able to take my eyes from her eyes, as I was speaking, or from the wet haze of her lips, when she was speaking, I have seen other couples, silent, watching us as we spoke. I could almost see their ears bending toward us like wintery plants toward the sun. Our intimacy, in the privacy of our conversation, which sometimes unfolds in a kind of rutting stichomythia, could fill a room. And I knew that those people looking at us talk and trying to hear our words were imagining our sex life. They could see us locked together in the dioecious discourse of the flesh.
    And what did we talk about? The menu, naturally. Whatto eat. What to drink. And shall we share. The prospect of children. Music. Literature. Sex. I was always after something. I was always willing to be taught. There is, for example, nothing about her that is more mysterious to me than her orgasms. And while it may be