August Is a Wicked Month by Edna O’Brien Read Free Book Online Page B

the attic rooms around? He drew her up by the hand and opened her zip, at snail’s pace, and then looked at her in her half-slip. She stood there with the middle of her body death-white – a body that had never faced sunshine in its life – the ridiculous crescent of pink on her chest and two patches of pink on her thighs where the sun had hit them when she pulled her dress above her knees. He drew back the white cotton bedspread and the one worn blanket underneath, and the top sheet. He rolled them back together and left the roll like a bolster at the end of the bed. Over the bottom sheet he spread a large bath towel. He did it thoroughly so that no inch of sheet was uncovered; she thought of the Englishwoman and why she sent him towels and she knew she could never lie down with him and make love.
    ‘Come on,’ he said, waiting for her to take off the frilled pants that she’d bought along with all the other honeymoon clothes.
    He tried to help her with this and she knew that she had to say something to stop him.
    ‘I think I’m going to bleed,’ she said. The only thing that came to her lips.
    ‘Bleed?’ he said, not understanding.
    ‘Blood,’ she said, very clearly, and he frowned and said he did not like that very much.
    ‘I do not like it very much either,’ she said. He looked at her now with alarm, in case she might do the room an injury. He began to take the towel off the bed and fold it very carefully, first in two, then in four, then he put it on the towel rack near the wash-basin.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
    ‘Too bat,’ he said and suddenly he got very industrious and took up a small notebook and asked her to spell the ugly word she had used. She wrote it down for him and thought if her husband ever needed evidence of her infidelity there was a half-naked, shivering picture of her on film and a word in her handwriting in his home-made phrase book. She said it was a verb and the infinitive was ‘to bleed.’
    ‘You are educated,’ he said, surprised.
    ‘I know about words,’ she said, stepping into her dress, relieved, safe again.
    ‘And this,’ he asked, pointing to where her nipple lay, flat, under the flowered dress.
    ‘Nipple.’
    ‘Hot word,’ he said. It took her a minute to understand that he wanted not ordinary words, but erotic ones for wooing Englishwomen.
    ‘Just nipple,’ she said.
    ‘And you are a frigid woman,’ he said, flicking the pages to F, where he could enter this new, unwelcome word. He was not as slow as she’d thought him to be. Then he lowered his hand between his legs and asked the juice words for there. He did not touch her any more, but kept looking suspiciously as if she were about to sully the place. When she sat down again – she did not feel nervous now – he rushed over with a plastic beach cushion and had her stand up so that he could put it under her.
    ‘These region,’ he said, pointing to her but not actually touching.
    ‘Male or female?’ she said, a little injured now.
    ‘The both.’
    ‘Well there’s a vagina,’ she said.
    ‘Vagina no gud,’ he said. He already knew that word. He wanted love words and pet words that would send Englishwomen rearing to the skies of abandon.
    ‘Cunt, I suppose,’ she said. He flicked the pages back and wrote it under C. He wrote each word, carefully, in block letters.
    ‘Though it can also be derogatory,’ she said, ‘if applied to a man.’ He looked at her suspiciously as if she were making a fool of him.
    ‘Cunt is all right for a woman,’ she said.
    ‘A woman is a cunt?’ he said.
    ‘A woman is a cunt,’ she said. What did it matter if he ran into trouble. He deserved a few setbacks. She felt a fool, first for having come, then for having feigned bleeding, and now for not knowing a whole dictionary of love words so that he could stock up towels and other gifts for when he retired.
    ‘May I have another drink?’ she said, holding the glass out. He filled it quarter-ways and then began