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By Root 1320 0

the end of the street, the porch light shining on a molded plastic tricycle, a stack of three-hour colored-flame sawdust and wax logs. Denise was doing her homework in the kitchen, keeping an eye on Wilder, who had wandered downstairs to sit on the floor and stare through the oven window. Silence in the halls, shadows on the sloping lawn. We closed the door and disrobed. The bed was a mess. Magazines, curtain rods, a child’s sooty sock. Babette hummed something from a Broadway show, putting the rods in a corner. We embraced, fell sideways to the bed in a controlled way, then repositioned ourselves, bathing in each other’s flesh, trying to kick the sheets off our ankles. Her body had a number of long hollows, places the hand might stop to solve in the dark, tempo-slowing places.

We believed something lived in the basement.

“What do you want to do?” she said.

“Whatever you want to do.”

“I want to do whatever’s best for you.”

“What’s best for me is to please you,” I said.

“I want to make you happy, Jack.”

“I’m happy when I’m pleasing you.”

“I just want to do what you want to do.”

“I want to do whatever’s best for you.”

“But you please me by letting me please you,” she said.

“As the male partner I think it’s my responsibility to please.”

“I’m not sure whether that’s a sensitive caring statement or a sexist remark.”

“Is it wrong for the man to be considerate toward his partner?”

“I’m your partner when we play tennis, which we ought to start doing again, by the way. Otherwise I’m your wife. Do you want me to read to you?”

“First-rate.”

“I know you like me to read sexy stuff.”

“I thought you liked it too.”

“Isn’t it basically the person being read to who derives the benefit and the satisfaction? When I read to Old Man Treadwell, it’s not because I find those tabloids stimulating.”

“Treadwell’s blind, I’m not. I thought you liked to read erotic passages.”

“If it pleases you, then I like to do it.”

“But it has to please you too, Baba. Otherwise how would I feel?”

“It pleases me that you enjoy my reading.”

“I get the feeling a burden is being shifted back and forth. The burden of being the one who is pleased.”

“I want to read, Jack. Honestly.”

“Are you totally and completely sure? Because if you’re not, we absolutely won’t.”

Someone turned on the TV set at the end of the hall, and a woman’s voice said: “If it breaks easily into pieces, it is called shale. When wet, it smells like clay.”

We listened to the gently plummeting stream of nighttime traffic.

I said, “Pick your century. Do you want to read about Etruscan slave girls, Georgian rakes? I think we have some literature on flagellation brothels. What about the Middle Ages? We have incubi and succubi. Nuns galore.”

“Whatever’s best for you.”

“I want you to choose. It’s sexier that way.”

“One person chooses, the other reads. Don’t we want a balance, a sort of give-and-take? Isn’t that what makes it sexy?”

“A tautness, a suspense. First-rate. I will choose.”

“I will read,” she said. “But I don’t want you to choose anything that has men inside women, quote-quote, or men entering women. ‘I entered her.’ ‘He entered me.’ We’re not lobbies or elevators. ‘I wanted him inside me,’ as if he could crawl completely in, sign the register, sleep, eat, so forth. Can we agree on that? I don’t care what these people do as long as they don’t enter or get entered.”

“Agreed.”

“ ‘I entered her and began to thrust.’ ”

“I’m in total agreement,” I said.

“ ‘Enter me, enter me, yes, yes.’ ”

“Silly usage, absolutely.”

“ ‘Insert yourself, Rex. I want you inside me, entering hard, entering deep, yes, now, oh.’ ”

I began to feel an erection stirring. How stupid and out of context. Babette laughed at her own lines. The TV said: “Until Florida surgeons attached an artificial flipper.”

Babette and I tell each other everything. I have told everything, such as it was at the time, to each of my wives. There is more to tell, of course, as marriages accumulate. But when I say I believe in complete disclosure I don’t mean it cheaply, as anecdotal sport or shallow revelation.