The Electrical Experience Read Free

conversation, as up to the date people they believed and practised family planning through birth ‘control’. His wife was also a practising Anglican. He was, well, put him down as one who served his fellow man, a business man, and a Rotarian.
    To have a family plan went with having a life plan. Nothing could be accomplished without a Blueprint.
    Together, of course, with initiative and capital.
    They had two well-spaced children and intended having one more to bring the number to ‘three’. ‘Three’ seemed to him to be a manageable and modern number, although they had both themselves come from large families. His wife had been fitted with a diaphragm by a city physician, but she asked that he also wear a condom ‘just in case’, and he did. He himself was a precautionary man, although it was true that all business did involve risk-taking. He had never said this to Thelma, but he felt that somehow the time when they were trying for a child, as it were, was made somehow tingling for them, because on these occasions they did not use, of course, any—precaution. He supposed it was because then, as it were, his ‘skin’ touched her flesh, the flesh, that is, inside her.
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    George McDowell cleared a tickle from his mental throat.
    They were, certainly, the times most vividly recalled. Inter course, he realised in maturity, was not everything it was cracked up to be. They had not let it become a ‘complex’. His wife, he sometimes thought, was herself not a highly sexed woman, and although he became quite aroused at times, he was not overly preoccupied, he hoped. He had exercised self-control, as harsh as it was on her, in regard to the police man’s widow. He observed that the limitations and restrictions onthe matter of sexual indulgence, placed by Thelma in their marriage, sometimes aroused her unwillingness, he had perhaps that sort of personality which was, which savoured, well, the restraint she imposed, the limitations on when, and her refusals. And now and then, though rarely, he imposed himself on her, and the silent, wordless, impositions he enjoyed too. It had to do, he speculated, with the basic economic principle of scarcity. Though really, this aspect of their lives he did not truly understand and did not ponder over much and which was not to say, either, that they did not conduct their married life correctly .
    She insisted that the condom be flushed down the lavatory immediately after, and that he wash.
    She did not, quite properly, want the girls finding them around the place or to step out in the morning to be confronted by it.
    He badly wanted a son.
    â€˜I think we should have, that it is really time for us to consider having, another child if you still want for us to have a third.’
    She said it as they prepared for bed. He was brushing his teeth with Kolynos dental cream and going over in his mind a masonic catechism he needed to know for Tuesday’s Lodge. He did not know why he kept it up. He continued brushing, knowing what she meant and feeling in his pubic region that instant stirring. He smiled boyishly at her but she did not smile. Perhaps the toothpaste around his mouth, and he removed the smile, changed his voice to a proper tone, and said, yes,he would like another child to bring it up to ‘three’, spitting into the white porcelain basin.
    He went to bed without his pyjama trousers and without precaution.
    After, because of germ life, they usually washed, she first, and he second, but because they were trying for a child she did not douche. When he returned from washing, she said to him, ‘People will think I’m awfully old to be having another child.’
    â€˜You’re older than customary, I suppose.’
    â€˜Forty is really quite old. To be having a child.’
    â€˜We’ve always said we’d have three,’ he said firmly, referring to their plan.
    â€˜After this birth I think I should