Our hero opens his eyes and becomes himself again —that is to say, the man known herein as myself, who refuses to believe what his mind tells him. They are probably having a long talk, I say to myself, drawing a curtain over the pleasant substitution. She wouldn't think of letting a greasy, sweaty incubus like that touch her. He probably tried to kiss her but she knows how to take care of herself all right. Wonder if Maude's still awake? Feeling horny myself. Walking towards the house I open my fly and let my pecker out. Maude's cunt. She can certainly fuck when she's a mind to. Get her half asleep, her blinders off. Just lay there quiet like, snuggle up spoon fashion. I put the key in the lock and shove the iron gate. Cold iron against a quivering prick. Must sneak up on her, slip it to her while she's dreaming. I slip quietly upstairs and shuffle out of my clothes. I can hear her turning over, getting ready in her sleep to turn her warm ass on me. I slide gently into bed and cup myself around her. She's pretending to be out, dead to the world. Not too fast or she'll wake up. Must do it in my sleep like or she'll be insulted. I've got the tip of it in the loose hairs. She's lying terribly still. She wants it, the bitch, but she won't let on. All right, play dead dog! I move her a little, just a wee bit. She responds like a water-soaked log. She's going to lie heavy like that and pretend she's asleep. Yes, I've got it half in. I have to move her around like a hoist, but she's movable and everything's smoothly oiled. It's wonderful to fuck your own wife as if she were a dead horse. You know every ripple in the silken lining; you can take your time and think about anything you like. The body is hers but the cunt's yours. The cunt and the prick, they're married, by crikey, no matter if the bodies are going different ways. In the morning the two bodies will face each other and make small change; they will act as if they were independent, as if the penis and the other thing were only to make water with. Being sound asleep she doesn't mind how I joggle her. I've got one of those dumb, senseless hard-ons, like my prick was just a rubber hose and no nozzle to it. With the tips of my fingers I can move her at will. I shoot a load into her and leave it in, the thick rubber hose, I mean. She's opening and closing like a flower. It's agony, but the right kind of agony. Flower says: Stay there, sonny boy! Flower talks like a drunken sponge. Flower says: I do take this piece of meat to cherish until I wake. And what says the body, the independent hoist moving on ball-bearings? Body is wounded and humiliated. Body lost its name and address temporarily. Body would like to cut prick off and keep it like a kangaroo, forever. Maude is not this body lying ass skyward, the helpless victim of a rubber hose. Maude, if the author were God and not her husband, sees herself standing prissily on a green lawn, holding a beautiful red parasol. There are beautiful gray doves pecking at her shoes. These lovely doves, as she thinks them to be, are saying in their koochkoo way, what a gracious, bountiful creature you are. They make white shit all the while, but being doves sent from heaven above, the white part is only angel cake and shit is a bad word which man invented when he put on clothes and civilized himself. If she should squint her eye while saying benediction over God's little pigeons she would see a shameless hussy offering a naked man the hind part of her body, just like a cow or a mare in the field. She doesn't want to think of this woman, especially in such a disgraceful posture. She tries to keep the green grass around her and the parasol open. How lovely to stand naked in the pure sunlight conversing with an imaginary friend! Maude is talking very elegantly now, as if dressed all in white and the church bells tolling: she is in her own private corner of the universe, a nun-like creature telling off the Psalms in Moon. She stoops to stroke the head of a dove, so soft and feathery, so warm with love, a piece of blood wrapped in velvet. The sun is shining brilliantly and now, oh how good it is, it is warming her cool hinder parts. Like a merciful angel she spreads her legs apart: the dove flutters between her legs, the wings brush lightly against the marble arch. The little dove is fluttering madly; she must squeeze his soft little head between her legs. Still Sunday and not a soul in this corner of the universe. Maude is talking to Maude. She is saying that if a bull came along and mounted her she would not budge an inch. It feels good, doesn't it, Maude, she whispers to herself. It feels so good. Why don't I come here every day and stand this way? Really, Maude, this is wonderful. You take off all your clothes and stand in the grass; you bend over to feed the pigeons and the bull climbs up over the hill and puts his terrible long thing inside you. Oh God, but it's terribly good to have it this way. The clean green grass, the smell of his warm hide, that long, smooth thing he moves in and out—O God, I want him to fuck me like he would a cow. O God, I want to fuck and fuck and fuck...

4

The following evening my old friend Stanley drops in to see me. Maude detests Stanley, and with good reason, because every time he looks her way he blows her down with a silent curse. His look says very clearly—«If I had that bitch in my place I'd take the axe to her and hew her down.» Stanley is full of submerged hatreds. He looks as gaunt and wiry now as he did when he came out of the cavalry at Fort Oglethorpe years ago. What he's looking for is something to murder. He'd murder me, his best friend, if he could get away with it. He's foul on the world, green all the way back to the bile with accumulated hatred and vengeance. What he comes around for is to make sure that I am not making any progress, that I'm sinking deeper and deeper. « You'll never get anywhere,» he says. «You're like me— you're weak, you have no ambition.» We have one ambition in common, which we make light of: to write. There was more hope for us fifteen years ago, when we were writing letters to one another. Fort Oglethorpe was a good place for Stanley; it made him a drunkard, a gambler, a thief. It made his letters interesting. They were never about the army life but about exotic, romantic writers whom he tried to imitate when he wrote. Stanley should never have come back North; he should have gotten off the train at Chickamauga, wrapped himself in tobacco leaves and cowdung, and taken himself a squaw. Instead he came back North to the funeral parlor, found himself a fat Polish wench with fertile ovaries, saddled himself with a brood of little Poles, and tried in vain to write standing up over the kitchen tubs. Stanley rarely talked about anything in the present; he preferred to spin incredible yarns about the men he loved and admired in the army.

Stanley had all the bad traits of the Poles. He was vain, vitriolic, violent, generous in a false way, romantic as a brokendown hack, loyal as a fool and deeply treacherous to boot. Above all, he was simply corroded with envy and jealousy.

There is one thing I like about the Poles—their language. Polish, when it is spoken by intelligent people, puts me in ecstasy. The sound of the language evokes strange images in which there is always a greensward of fine spiked grass in which hornets and snakes play a great part. I remember days long back when Stanley would invite me to visit his relatives; he used to make me carry a roll of music because he wanted to show me off to these rich relatives. I remember this atmosphere well because in the presence of these smooth-tongued, overly polite, pretentious and thoroughly false Poles I always felt miserably uncomfortable. But when they spoke to one another, sometimes in French, sometimes in Polish, I sat back and watched them fascinatedly. They made strange Polish grimaces, altogether unlike our relatives who were stupid barbarians at bottom. The Poles were like standing snakes fitted up with collars of hornets. I never knew what they were talking about but it always seemed to me as if they were politely assassinating some one. They were all fitted up with sabres and broad-swords which they held in their teeth or brandished fiercely in a thundering charge. They never swerved from the path but rode rough-shod over women and children, spiking them with long pikes beribboned with blood-red pennants. All this, of course, in the drawing-room over a glass of strong tea, the men in butter-colored gloves, the women dangling their silly lorgnettes. The women were always ravishingly beautiful, the blonde houri type garnered centuries ago during the Crusades. They hissed their long polychromatic words through tiny, sensual mouths whose lips were soft as geraniums. These furious sorties with adders and rose petals made an intoxicating sort of music, a steel-stringed zithery slipper-gibber which could also register anomalous sounds like sobs and falling jets of water.