Intimacy Read Free

of someone, she says; an undertaker, as it turns out. My furious friend replies that it isn’t her body he has come for. He soon learns that at his age he cares far more than formerly whom he spends his time with. Whathe wanted then he doesn’t want now. He notices also that people become eccentric as they get older, and that there is a lot of them to take in.
    ‘Shall I go back to my wife?’ he asks.
    ‘Try it,’ I say, the expert speaking.
    But she regards him suspiciously, wondering why his hair has turned aubergine and whether he has had his name engraved on a bracelet to make him identifiable after an accident. She has realized that life is possible without him.

The boys have fallen asleep
    The boys have fallen asleep. I carry them upstairs, one by one. They lie side by side under vivid duvets. I am about to kiss them when I notice their eyes are open. I dread a second wind. I am a liberal parent, afraid of my occasional rages. I always regret any superfluous restraint. I wouldn’t want them to fear me; I wouldn’t want them to fear anyone. I don’t want to break or discourage anything in them. Occasionally, though, I do want them to believe I am in charge. Soon they are leaping from bed to bed. When they make for the door, since I am too tired to grab them, I am forced to put on my ‘cross’ voice. Their reluctance to go to sleep I don’t understand. Formonths the highlight of my day has been the anticipation of unconsciousness. At least they regret the passing of each day, as do I, in a different way. Tonight we want the same thing, my boys and I: more life.
    ‘If you lie still I will read to you,’ I say.
    They regard me suspiciously, but I find a book, and make a place between them. They stretch out across me, occasionally kicking one another.
    It is a cruel story, as most children’s stories are, and it involves a woodcutter, as most children’s stories do. But inevitably it concerns a conventional family from which the father has not fled. The boys know the story so well they can tell when I skip a bit or attempt to make something up. When they stop asking questions I put the book down, creep out of the room and switch off the light. Then I return to find their faces in the covers, and kiss them. Outside I listen for their breathing. If only I could stand here all night. Then I hear them whispering to one another and giggling.
    Old wives; old story.

From the beginning 
    From the beginning, starting with the girls at school, and the teachers in particular, I have looked at women in shops, on the street, in the bus, at parties,and wondered what it would be like to be with them, and what pleasures we might kindle. At school I would toss my pencil under the teacher’s desk in order to crawl underneath and examine her legs. The desultory nature of the education system enabled me to develop an enthusiastic interest in girls’ skirts – in the material and texture, and in whether they were billowy, loose or tight, and in which places. Skirts, like theatre curtains later, quickened my curiosity. I wanted to know what was under them. There was waiting, but there was possibility. The skirt was a transitional object; both a thing in itself and a means of getting somewhere else. This became my paradigm of important knowledge. The world is a skirt I want to lift up.
    Later, I imagined that with each woman I could start afresh. There was no past. I could be a different person, if not a new one, for a time. Also I used women to protect me from other people. Wherever I might be, if I were huddled up with a whispering woman who wanted me, I could keep the world outside my skin. I could stop wanting other women. At the same time I liked to keep my options open; desiring other women kept me from the exposure and susceptibilityof loving just the one. There are perils in deep knowledge.
    Unsurprisingly, Susan is the one woman, apart from Mother, with whom I can do practically nothing. But now, when I am