All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [194]
The fact that the adjustment was so perfect merely meant that in the end, with the deep-seated instinct for self preservation, I was consorting with common whores. I was at that time on the evening edition, and finished my stint about two in the afternoon. After a couple of drinks and a late lunch in a speak-easy, then a couple more drinks and a game of billiards at the press club, I might call on one of my friends. Then at dinner, if I managed to get home to dinner, and in the evening I would study Lois with a clinical detachment and a sense of mystic regeneration. It even got so that almost at will I could produce an optical illusion. I could look at Lois in a certain way and find that she seemed to be withdrawing steadily, the whole room elongating with her, until it would be as though I were staring at her through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. By this practice I gained great spiritual refreshment. I finally grew so adept at it that I could hear her voice, if it was one of her vituperative and not sullen evenings, as though it were coming from a great distance and were not, as a matter of fact, even addressed to me.
Then came the final phase, the phase of the Great Sleep. Immediately after dinner every evening, I went to bed and slept soundly, with the sweet feeling of ever falling toward the center of delicious blackness, until the last possible moment the next morning. Sometimes I did not even wait for dinner and the pleasure of observing Lois. I would just go to bed. I remember that this became almost a habit in the late spring. I would come in from my afternoon’s occupation and draw the shade in the bedroom and go to bed, with the mild light oozing in from around the shade and birds twittering and caroling in the trees of the little park next the apartment building and children calling musically from the playground in the park. Going to bed in the late spring afternoon or just at the beginning of twilight, with those sounds in your ears, gives you a wonderful sense of peace, a peace which must resemble the peace of old age after a well-spent life.
But of course there was Lois. Sometimes she would come into my bedroom–by this time I had moved into the guest room for my serious sleeping–and sit on the edge of the bed and give me long descriptions of myself, rather monotonous descriptions, as a matter of fact, for Lois had little gift of phrase and had to fall back on the three or four classic terms. Sometimes she would beat me with her clenched fists. She had a feeble, female way of using her little white fists. I could sleep through the descriptions, and almost through the beating of the clenched fists on my side or back. Sometimes she would cry and give vent to a great deal of self-pity. Once or twice she even snuggled into bed with me. Sometimes she would open the door to my room and turn up the phonograph in the living room until the joint shook. But no soap. I could sleep through anything, or just about.
Then the morning came when I open my eyes and felt the finger of Fate upon me; I knew the time had come. I got up and packed my suitcase and walked out the door and didn’t come back. To the slick apartment and to Lois who was beautiful and to whom I was so perfectly adjusted.
I never saw her again, but I know what she looks like now when cocktails, bonbons, late hours, and nearly forty years have done their work on the peach bloom of cheeks, the pearly, ripe but vigorous bosom, the supple midriff, the brooding, black, velvety-liquid eyes, the bee-stung lips, the luxurious thighs. She sit on a divan somewhere, held more or less in shape by the vigor of a masseuse and the bands of lastex which secretly sheathe her like a mummy, but bloated with the entire universe she has ingurgitated with a long delicious sigh. An now with a hand on which the pointed nails are as