Lying in Bed Read Online Free Page B

true, as Steiner says, that the ineffable lies beyond the frontiers of the word, I have always encouraged her to tell me about them. I might inform her, in our ongoing discussion about the Bell family, from whom she seems to like to pretend she is descended now that I have told her about them, that Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, wrote to her husband, Clive Bell, that Virginia “gets no pleasure from the act.” “Oh, how would they know that?” asks Clara, flying ingenuously into the scholar’s web. “Because,” I say, “Virginia herself wrote to a friend of hers: ‘I find the climax immensely exaggerated.’ And what about you, my dear?” I slyly suggest. Why am I so interested in this subject? Perhaps because it seems one thing about my wife that must remain forever mysterious, far more than the facts of her past that I might plumb merely through a reading of her diary, which I wholly expect to take place on my deathbed so I may go to my grave enlightened about the one human being I care to understand. But how ever might I enter that storm that breaks upon the fragile ambit of my being? I am there when it happens, of course, but that’s like saying one is present at the birth of a star. No one can tell me about this but her. No one can translate this explosion of knowledge and transcendence of self.
    In a good marriage, it is impossible to separate sex from conversation. Dicacity, as much as venery, marks our evenings. No topic for us is interdicted, though neither tells the other all we know. We share a healthy respect for the dangers of depletion and the potential vacuity of the future.Nothing must diminish the ardor with which we live with one another. Familiarity must breed not some great contempt but, however paradoxically, renewal. I do not want Emerson’s complacent “friendship in possession.” I want the passion of pursuit; which is not, I trust, too much to ask when the woman I love seems forever beyond my grasp. Nothing must silence the song that is our marriage.
    Another apt metaphor, that, since music has become, apart from Clara and after the betrayal of language, my life. I have found that sex and music are the only surviving divertissements into which I can dive through the crust of self, in which I can drown, and from which I can emerge inviolate.
    I have even, this past day, and to replace the conversation I would otherwise have had with Clara, planned the music that will carry me through this evening until her return. And I have programmed it within the ten-disc magazine of my compact-disc player to bring me to that very “edge of desperation” in the realm of sound that my hunger will bring me in the realm of food and the absence of my wife in the realm of desire. And just as the arrival of the Chinese delivery boy will rescue me from my first-world version of starvation, so will the arrival home of Clara rescue me from the disemboguement of mind that such music might bring and from the longing in my body that her absence will inspire.
    Of course, technology being what it is in this benevolently convenient age of ours, I have at hand two devices that will protect me from going over the edge should I begin to lose control: a telephone to summon my food and a remote-control instrument to reprogram or stop my music. But there is nothing here with which I might touch my wife tonight. She is beyond my reach. In matters oflove, we remain as primitive as the first human beings, whose primogenial words, according to Otto Jespersen, were sounds of courtship, “something between the nightly love-lyrics of puss upon the tiles and the melodious love-songs of the nightingale.” So was language born. Is it any wonder we cry out in the darkness?
    Just before Clara left this evening, I played Celtic guitar music. And when she was gone, I did something I had never done before: I danced with only the feel of her in my arms. Then I lay