Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [33]
Vernon now looked for solace in the pages of great literature. Quality, he told himself, was what he was after—quality, quality. Here was where the high-class girls hung out. Using the fiction and poetry shelves in the depleted local library, Vernon got down to work. After quick flings with Emily, Griselda, and Criseyde, and a strapping weekend with the Good Wife of Bath, Vernon cruised straight on to Shakespeare and the delightfully wide-eyed starlets of the romantic comedies. He romped giggling with Viola over the Illyrian hills, slept in a glade in Arden with the willowy Rosalind, bathed nude with Miranda in a turquoise lagoon. In a single disdainful morning he splashed his way through all four of the tragic heroines: cold Cordelia (this was a bit of a frost, actually), bittersweet Ophelia (again rather constricted, though he quite liked her dirty talk), the snake-eyed Lady M. (Vernon had had to watch himself there), and, best of all, that sizzling sorceress Desdemona (Othello had her number all right. She stank of sex). Following some arduous, unhygienic yet relatively brief dalliance with Restoration drama, Vernon soldiered on through the prudent matrons of the Great Tradition. As a rule, the more sedate and respectable the girls, the nastier and more complicated were the things Vernon found himself wanting to do to them (with lapsed hussies like Maria Bertram, Becky Sharp, or Lady Dedlock, Vernon was in, out, and away, darting half-dressed over the rooftops). Pamela had her points, but Clarissa was the one who turned out to be the true cot-artist of the oeuvre; Sophia Western was good fun all right, but the pious Amelia it was who yodeled for the humbling high points in Vernon’s sweltering repertoire. Again he had no very serious complaints about his one-night stands with the likes of Elizabeth Bennett and Dorothea Brooke; it was adult, sanitary stuff, based on a clear understanding of his desires and his needs; they knew that such men will take what they want; they knew that they would wake the next morning and Vernon would be gone. Give him a Fanny Price, though, or better, much better, a Little Nell, and Vernon would march into the bedroom rolling up his sleeves; and Nell and Fan would soon be ruing the day they’d ever been born. Did they mind the horrible things he did to them? Mind? When he prepared to leave the next morning, solemnly buckling his belt before the tall window—how they howled!
The possibilities seemed endless. Other literatures dozed expectantly in their dormitories. The sleeping lion of Tolstoy—Anna, Natasha, Masha, and the rest. American fiction—those girls would show even Vernon a trick or two. The sneaky Gauls—Vernon had a hunch that he and Madame Bovary, for instance, were going to get along just fine …
One puzzled weekend, however, Vernon encountered the writings of D. H. Lawrence. Snapping The Rainbow shut on Sunday night, Vernon realized at once that this particular avenue of possibility—sprawling as it was, with its intricate trees and their beautiful diseases, and that distant prospect where sandy mountains loomed—had come to an abrupt and unanswerable end. He never knew women behaved like that … Vernon felt obscure relief and even a pang of theoretical desire when his wife bustled in last thing, bearing the tea tray before her.
Vernon was now, on average, sleeping with his wife 1.15 times a week. Less than single-figure lovemaking was obviously going to be some sort of crunch, and Vernon was making himself vigilant for whatever form the crisis might take. She hadn’t, thank God, said anything about it, yet. Brooding one afternoon soon after the Lawrence debacle, Vernon suddenly thought of something that