Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [35]
Then the ultimate catastrophe occurred. Paradoxically, it was heralded by a single, joyous, uncovenanted climax—again out of the blue, on a bus, one lunchtime. Throughout the afternoon at the office Vernon chuckled and gloated, convinced that finally all his troubles were at an end. It wasn’t so. After a week of ceaseless experiment and scrutiny Vernon had to face the truth. The thing was dead. He was impotent.
“Oh my God,” he thought, “I always knew something like this would happen to me sometime.” In one sense Vernon accepted the latest reverse with grim stoicism (by now the thought of his old ways filled him with the greatest disgust); in another sense, and with terror, he felt like a man suspended between two states: one is reality, perhaps, the other an unspeakable dream. And then when day comes he awakes with a moan of relief; but reality has gone and the nightmare has replaced it: the nightmare was really there all the time. Vernon looked at the house where they had lived for so long now, the five rooms through which his calm wife moved on her calm tracks, and he saw it all slipping away from him forever, all his peace, all the fever and the safety. And for what, for what?
“Perhaps it would be better if I just told her about the whole thing and made a clean breast of it,” he thought wretchedly. “It wouldn’t be easy, God knows, but in time she might learn to trust me again. And I really am finished with all that other nonsense. God, when I …” But then he saw his wife’s face—capable, straightforward, confident—and the scar of dawning realization as he stammered out his shame. No, he could never tell her, he could never do that to her, no, not to her. She was sure to find out soon enough anyway. How could a man conceal that he had lost what made him a man? He considered suicide, but—“But I just haven’t got the guts,” he told himself. He would have to wait, to wait and melt in his dread.
A month passed without his wife saying anything. This had always been a make-or-break, last-ditch deadline for Vernon, and he now approached the coming confrontation as a matter of nightly crisis. All day long he rehearsed his excuses. To kick off with Vernon complained of a headache, on the next night of a stomach upset. For the following two nights he stayed up virtually until dawn—“preparing the annual figures,” he said. On the fifth night he simulated a long coughing fit, on the sixth a powerful fever. But on the seventh night he just helplessly lay there, sadly waiting. Thirty minutes passed, side by side. Vernon prayed for her sleep and for his death.
“Vernon?” she asked.
“Mm-hm?” he managed to say—God, what a croak it was.
“Do you want to talk about this?”
Vernon didn’t say anything. He lay there, melting, dying. More minutes passed. Then he felt her hand on his thigh.
Quite a long time later, and in the posture of a cowboy on the back of a bucking steer, Vernon ejaculated all over his wife’s face. During the course of the preceding two and a half hours he had done to his wife everything he could possibly think of, to such an extent that he was candidly astonished that she was still alive. They subsided, mumbling soundlessly, and slept in each other’s arms.
Vernon woke up before his wife did. It took him thirty-five minutes to get out of bed, so keen was he to accomplish this feat without waking her. He made breakfast in his dressing gown, training every cell of his concentration on the small, sacramental tasks. Every time his mind veered back to the