Tropic of Cancer - Miller, Henry [44]
"But it's raining, Joe."
"I know, but what the hell! I've got to have my consititutional. I've got to wash the dirt out of my belly." When he says this I have the impression that the whole world is wrapped up there inside his belly, and that it's rotting there.
As he's putting on his things he falls back again into a semi-comatose state. He stands there with one arm in his coat sleeve and his hat on assways and he begins to dream aloud – about the Riviera, about the sun, about lazing one's life away. "All I ask of life," he says, "is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt." As he mumbles this meditatively he looks at me with the softest, the most insidious smile. "Do you like that smile?" he says. And then disgustedly – "Jesus, if I could only find some rich cunt to smile at that way!"
"Only a rich cunt can save me now," he says with an air of utmost weariness. "One gets tired of chasing after new cunts all the time. It gets mechanical. The trouble is, you see, I can't fall in love. I'm too much of an egoist. Women only help me to dream, that's all. It's a vice, like drink or opium. I've got to have a new one every day; if I don't I get morbid. I think too much. Sometimes I'm amazed at myself, how quick I pull it off – and how little it really means. I do it automatically like. Sometimes I'm not thinking about a woman at all, but suddenly I notice a woman looking at me and then, bango! it starts all over again. Before I know what I'm doing I've got her up to the room. I don't even remember what I say to them. I bring them up to the room, give them a pat on the ass, and before I know what it's all about it's over. It's like a dream… Do you know what I mean?"
He hasn't much use for the French girls. Can't stand them. "Either they want money or they want you to marry them. At bottom they're all whores. I'd rather wrestle with a virgin," he says. "They give you a little illusion. They put up a fight at least." Just the same, as we glance over the terrasse there is hardly a whore in sight whom he hasn't fucked at some time or other. Standing at the bar he points them out to me, one by one, goes over them anatomically, describes their good points and their bad. "They're all frigid," he says. And then begins to mold his hands, thinking of the nice, juicy virgins who are just dying for it.
In the midst of his reveries he suddenly arrests himself, and grabbing my arm excitedly, he points to a whale of a woman who is just lowering herself into a seat. "There's my Danish cunt," he grunts. "See that ass? Danish. How that woman loves it! She just begs me for it. Come over here… look at her now, from the side. Look at that ass, will you? It's enormous. I tell you, when she climbs over me I can hardly get my arms around it. It blots out the whole world. She makes me feel like a little bug crawling inside her. I don't know why I fall for her – I suppose it's that ass. It's so incongruous like. And the creases in it! You can't forget an ass like that. It's a fact… a solid fact. The others, they may bore you, or they may give you a moment's illusion, but this one – with her ass! – zowie, you can't obliterate her… it's like going to bed with a monument on top of you."
The Danish cunt seems to have electrified him. He's lost all his sluggishness now. His eyes are popping out of his head. And of course one thing reminds him of another. He wants to get out of the fucking hotel because the noise bothers him. He wants to write a book too so as to have something to occupy his mind. But then the goddamned job stands in the way. "It takes it out of you, that fucking job! I don't want to write about Montparnasse… I want to write my.life, my thoughts. I want to get the dirt out of my belly… Listen, get that one over there! I had her a long time ago. She used to be down near Les Halles. A funny bitch. She lay on the edge of the bed and pulled