The Abyss of Human Illusion Read Free Page A

as well as three shirts, nicely selecting those fresh from the Chinese laundry.
    His wife remarked, that first night, with an almost brilliant sincerity, that it was really good to have the place to themselves again. She was, of course, pregnant.

— XIII —
    H is doctor, surprisingly, not his dentist, is doing something profoundly invasive in his mouth. She’s sliced open his gum, and is scraping and ripping and picking, with a sharp metal instrument, at tooth and bone. He doesn’t feel any pain, but a remote, muffled discomfort, and a dull, insistent pressure has taken over his right eye and temple.
    He realizes that he has, quite helplessly and without volition, gently closed his jaw on her fingers, and she tells him so, but his attempts to open his mouth are unsuccessful. She looks at him and smiles, but the smile is one of patronization, of domination, the same smile that she wears when he lies on her examination table and she palpates and fingers his abdomen, scrotum, and penis for signs of disease or possible malignancy. His concern, at these times, is that he will get an erection and embarrass himself and her.
    He looks up at her smile and nods his head, then opens his mouth. Blood slides down his numb chin and onto the paper bib he wears over a plastic apron. She nods in turn and removes her skirt, then recommences her attack on the infection in his gum, her lower abdomen and thighs pressed against his shoulder. Perhaps she will mount him, carefully and silently, when she finishes the procedure. He hopes so, for he is thoroughly aroused.

— XIV —
    W hen his wife of thirty-four years died, he married, soon after, a beautiful aspiring actress who was, in the best tradition of the deathless cliché, half his age. He had met her five years earlier at a party in West Hollywood at a time when there had been “a lot of interest” in filming one of his books on which an option had been taken by an “edgy young producer.” The “project” had, of course, come to nothing. The young actress grew bored with the marriage, discovering, after a year or so, that writers are, by and large, even more boring than their books; and so she left him to go back to Hollywood, where she worked in a few cinematic grotesqueries, occasional episodes of divers TV series, and a commercial or two: she made a living.
    He is now almost seventy, and shows no signs of illness, lethargy, decrepitude, or depression. He turns out a novel every other year, and while they are no better than his earlier books, they are certainly no worse. Since he was famous for a charmingly mediocre novel published at the age of twenty-eight, he is still famous for his charming mediocrities, all of which serve to recall his first, to the delight of reviewers. And so honors and awards come to him at the rate of one a year. His is a life often held up to young students of “creative writing” by their “widely published” instructors, as the sort of life to which it behooves them to aspire, a life that wearily smiles, so to speak, at the notion of art, which it pronounces “art.” He is, so it is said, on the short list for the Nobel Prize, and who is more deserving?

— XV —
    T he man was sexually and emotionally attracted to young mothers and had spent his adult life pursuing and, when he could, seducing them; he’d left a lot of wreckage behind. He met a woman, the mother of two boys, seven and five, a woman who was the wife of a casual friend. They “ran off together,” as they used to say, leaving the two boys with their father, who was, not surprisingly, angry, bewildered, and, for the moment, heartbroken. The new couple soon had a child of their own, but the fact that the young woman was now the mother of her seducer’s child ruined everything for him, and he left one day in their old Ford station wagon, a sun-faded lime-green monster that might well have served as a sad counter for their dead amour.
    He took $147.34, all the money that was in