“So you were the sort of woman who makes things like that senso.”
“For him, yes, I was.”
“He was repulsive.”
“He was hypnotic. I see that now.”
“He must have been, to make you do degrading things like—”
“Is it more degrading to do them, or to need their help?”
Her face tightened and he regretted saying it. She said bitterly, “I’m not the one who needs help, remember. And no wonder—you’re not really what everyone’s thought, are you?”
He ignored her tone. “I’ve done well enough. You had no complaints at the beginning, as I remember.”
She sat silently. The taxi whistled through dimly lit streets. “You’ve betrayed me.”
“It all happened long before I met you.”
“If I’d known you were so, so unbalanced as—”
“It was a decision I made. I had to.”
“For what? That man must have—”
“He—” Robert stopped himself. “I loved him.”
“What became of him, then?”
“He went away. Left me.”
“I’m not surprised. Any woman who would—” She shuddered, and conflicting emotions flickered across her face.
The taxi drew up to the hotel. Beggars came limping out of the shadows, calling. Robert brushed them away. The two walked to their room without a word. Their footsteps echoed hollowly in the old tile corridors. Inside, he took off his coat and noticed that his heart was pounding.
She turned to him decisively. “I want to, to know what it was like. Why you—”
He cut her off with, “The process was crude then. Manuel had left me. I thought then that he had fallen out of love with me, but looking back, feeling that tonight—”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he had just gotten tired of me.”
“But something made you …”
“Yes. It’s all gotten so distant now, I can’t he sure of what I felt. It’s as though there’s a fog between me and that senso.”
“You didn’t recognize it until …?”
“No, I didn’t. I went through two years of drugs, depression, therapy, tap-ins. I forgot so much. The strains on my body—”
“I still don’t—maybe that man, he was so oily, he must have done things to you, to make you want to change—”
Robert shook his head. He turned abruptly and went into the bathroom. He stayed there a long time, taking a shower and letting the hot water wash away the evening and turn his skin pink. He looked down at himself and thought of what the years had done to the muscles and skin. This body felt heavy, bulky, and oddly like a machine. He wondered what it would have been like if that dimly remembered girl had not …
When he returned to the bedroom the lights were out.
He went to the bed slowly, uncertain, and heard the crisp rustle of sheets.
“Come here,” she said.
She reached for him. “You … you have been a good man to me.” A tentative touch. “I suppose I can’t … blame you for a past you had … erased, even before we …”
He kissed her. She murmured, “You were weaker then, you know. I thought it was just being young, inexperienced. But you got strong, in the years afterward. I was surprised, I remember.”
He saw where she was headed and said, “Because of you.”
And it was true. She was starting to realize that it was she, and the glorious first years of their marriage, that had made him truly into a man. And this realization was pulling her free of her confused swirl of emotions.
She tried the things she had done so many times before. To his surprise there was some response. The deep feelings of the senso had perhaps reached into him and found some reservoir.
A moist heat grew rapidly in her and he went along, making the old moves he knew would do the job. She quickened further. Some part of him kept up a lukewarm interest, enough to make the performance convincing. She gasped, and gasped again. Something in tonight had made her swirl of emotions condense into this act, some titillation had come out of the senso and the shock. Now she responded to him as if he were some exotic thing.
Robert suddenly remembered Manuel. God, I hope he’s dead now. It would be better if the possibility of him was gone from life forever. The therapy had smothered and blotted out Manuel. The therapists had been very sure that was for the best.
Helen moved energetically under him, trying to provoke a passion he could no longer feel. Christ, he thought. He felt a new empathy for her, for what help she would find in this.
Suddenly he sensed himself above the tangled bodies that labored in the bed. He saw the passion from a high but not disparaging perspective, a double vision of himself. It was like the multiple layers of sensation one had in the senso, the sense of being several people at once. But stranger, and deeper.
